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31 March, 2011

Krugman, Academic Freedom and Phony Whining

Tibor Machan

In his column of March 28, 2011, Paul Krugman whines a good deal about how Republicans in Wisconsin are targeting scholars who may not like their opposition to public service union profligacy. No doubt, in these battles all sides can go overboard but let’s just face it, the Left has been dominant in higher education for decades on end, which is why, perhaps, I am not a professor at Princeton University while Dr. Krugman is, and why my columns and blogs are mostly marginalized and his appear on the pages of The New York Times. (But enough of sour grapes!)

First, opposing public service unions does not amount to opposing organized labor, certainly not of the kind that would take place in a free market where competition affords the opportunity to seek out firms not hit by union action. Public union members work for monopolies and there is no option but to do business with them all. That’s a major difference and cause of most of the problems faced in Wisconsin and elsewhere vis-a-vis public employees.

Another point to keep in mind is that Wisconsin’s and other states’ universities are tax funded and citizens who have to foot their cost cannot walk away and go elsewhere to buy their higher education from an alternative institution, not unless they are willing to be charged twice.

Furthermore, college professors, like college students, enjoy academic freedom, not the full protection of the rights secured via the Fist Amendment to the US Constitution. University policy, in part dictated by public officials at the state level, trumps academic freedom (which is mainly a tradition or custom, not a legal guarantee). Politicians, who take themselves to be in charge of–or, euphemistically put, “responsible for”–higher education policy, have the legal authority to butt in anytime they can convince themselves that it is a matter of the public interest to do so. And that task is a very easy one for politicians and bureaucrats, don’t kid yourself.

So when Wisconsin’s politicians scrutinize public university employees, including professors, in the public interest, there is no legal argument that can be made against this. They are ultimately in charge, something they would not be if they dealt with private educational institutions (which, more like churches, largely enjoy constitutional protection from such meddlers).

None of this should come as a surprise to Paul Krugman, an old hand in the education industry. (His professed shock with Wisconsin’s politicians is just about as authentic as was the shock of the police captain at the end of the movie Casablanca with the illegal gambling that had been going at Ricks!) Once you are near the centers of power, such as state and federal capitols, you will use whatever legal or near legal means you can deploy to hang on to your clout and to gain more and more of it.

Your opponents will, of course, always holler “foul” as you make your moves but this is certainly just a ruse. No one should be fooled that Republicans and Democrats or any other mainstream political bunch do not try every trick in the book to undermine those on the other side.

Dr. Krugman himself is simply playing the game–charge your opponents with ill will and corruption even while you are guilty of these as well. Maybe he thinks no one can figure this out, him being such a well positioned public intellectual. Fact is, however, that Krugman is simply trying to keep and gain power for his team. It has nothing to do with overarching principles, not, especially, when you recall, also, that Dr, Krugman is a fierce defender of pragmatism and opposes all ideologies, including the ideology of remaining true to the principles of proper public conduct. Only amateurs would be bothered with that!

We live in a dog-eat-dog political arena and very few people have the backbone to remain above the fray. By now anyone who reads his stuff should know that Dr. Krugman isn’t one of them.

SOURCE




Landmark win for assault case teacher: British police to pay £1,000 for arrest over pupil's claim

A teacher falsely accused of assaulting a pupil has won a landmark High Court ruling against the police for unlawful arrest. Mark Richardson was held in a police cell after an 11-year-old boy claimed the 39-year-old had punched him in the throat.

The heavy-handed police action came weeks after the alleged offence and after the boy’s parents said they did not wish to pursue the matter.

Furthermore the school said it would handle the matter internally and Mr Richardson, who voluntarily went to a police station to speak to officers, was adamant the claim was false.

The media studies teacher of Blue Coat Comprehensive, Walsall, West Midlands, said the boy ‘walked into his outstretched hand’. He was later released and no charges were brought against him.

On Tuesday High Court judge Mrs Justice Slade found his arrest was unlawful and awarded him £1,000 damages.

Mr Richardson, a father-of-one and step-father of three, claimed the police action was a stain on his character and had damaged his promotion chances.

It is the first ruling of its kind involving a falsely accused teacher and has been hailed as a significant turning point for the profession.

And it comes as figures show that just 5 per cent of all allegations made to police about teachers result in action. Since 1991 some 2953 allegations have been made to the police. Of these just 170 have resulted in a caution or conviction.

Chris Keates, of teacher’s union the NASUWT, said she would now be writing to the Education Secretary and the Home Secretary to seek changes to national procedures. She said: ‘This is a landmark decision for teachers and others who are vulnerable to allegations made by children and young people. ‘New guidance for police is needed urgently to prevent these needless arrests that wreck innocent people’s careers.’

Mr Richardson, of Walsall, was suspended at the time of the allegation in December 2009 but has since been reinstated at the Church of England school.

A police spokesman said: ‘Following the court ruling West Midlands Police will launch an internal investigation into this matter to review the circumstances of the arrest and handling of the case. ‘Until this is completed it would be inappropriate to comment on today’s ruling or the case in question.’

Mr Richardson also wanted the police to be forced to destroy DNA samples, fingerprints and photographs taken from him during the arrest and to remove or amend his arrest entry on the Police National Computer.

The judge declined these requests, leaving any alteration of police records to West Midlands Police.

SOURCE






Another "safe" Australian school

A 14-year-old boy was stabbed at Southport State High yesterday after he and a fellow Year 10 student were sent to the principal's office for fighting. Students claimed the boys were involved in a violent lunchtime brawl in a classroom and later heard screams as one allegedly stabbed the other in the stomach in the administration building.

The victim suffered damage to an internal organ but is expected to make a full recovery after surgery at Gold Coast Hospital.

Police arrested his alleged attacker near the school and seized a knife which it is believed he took to school. He was last night charged with unlawful wounding. The Courier-Mail understands police are working on the theory the incident was not gang related but may have been linked to alleged bullying.

A male student said he saw one boy "smashed against a bubbler" and thrown into a wall in the lead-up to the stabbing.

Gold Coast police inspector Geoff Palmer said yesterday he was unaware of any gang problems at Southport High but detectives from the Child Protection Investigation Unit were investigating.

Insp Palmer said the stabbing followed an "altercation" between two 14-year-old students. "There were no other children in danger and the school was not placed in a lockdown," he said. Insp Palmer appealed for any student witnesses to come forward.

Latest Education Queensland figures show 303 Southport High students were suspended in 2009, up from 160 in 2006.

In September 2009, a Southport High student was charged with assault occasioning bodily harm after allegedly bashing a fellow student. The victim allegedly needed plastic surgery after the attack, which happened just days before a Southport State School pupil, aged six, was found with a knife in his bag.

Yesterday's stabbing was the latest in a series of knife incidents at Queensland schools in recent years.

The Queensland Teachers Union last year warned that teachers and principals had to be more vigilant about knives in schools.

SOURCE



30 March, 2011

LA: School now says girl can wear prom tux

Dubious legal advice

A Terrebonne Parish girl will be allowed to wear a tuxedo to her senior prom after all.

Nason Authement, parish secondary education supervisor, says an exception to the policy that boys must wear tuxes or suits and girls must wear dresses or gowns will be made for 19-year-old Monique Verdin. .

Authement says the policy is based on long-held tradition, but will probably be changed now that attorneys have said it would not hold up in court.

The ACLU of Louisiana says schools barring girls in tuxes or boys in dresses, or barring same-sex dates, are in violation of the law. The Courier reported Monday that the civil liberties group distributed an open letter with that information Friday to high school principals throughout the state.

The prom is Saturday.

SOURCE






Education Spending Won't Create Jobs

Contrary to President Obama's political rhetoric, more taxpayer spending to send more students to college will not reduce unemployment or improve the economy. It's just Obama's way of finagling the unemployment statistics by listing young people as students instead of as unemployed.

A report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland confirmed that when it comes to long-term unemployment, the length of unemployment is unrelated to education level. Although employment is higher for people with more years of education, the duration of unemployment is the same for all education levels.

A new phrase is now commonly included in job ads for all kinds of positions: "must be currently employed." Charts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show remarkably parallel lines for the duration of unemployment of Americans age 25 and older who have less than a high school diploma, only a high school diploma, some college or a college degree.

The Obama administration continues to propagate the falsehood that solving the unemployment problem requires "more investments in education." Investment is a favorite liberal code word for more spending and higher taxes.

As globalization spread and was touted by the elites as the wave of the future, conventional wisdom was that only blue-collar manufacturing jobs would be sent overseas, while college grads were safe. That assumption is now obsolete, as computers and telecommunications have made it possible to offshore the jobs of college-educated employees.

I thought it was a tossup as to which was the greatest education scandal: the $2 trillion taxpayers poured into public schools that failed the twin goals of improving student achievement and closing the gap between higher-income and lower-income students OR the colossal debt students accumulate to pay exorbitant college tuition prices. But the Chronicle of Higher Education reported a third scandal under the headline, "The Great College-Degree Scam."

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) found that approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 now work in relatively low-skilled jobs that need only a high school diploma or less. The actual count is 17.4 million college grads working in occupations that the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies as not requiring college, such as cashier, waiter, waitress or bartender.

Facts do not deter the Obama administration from playing the false tune that more federal education spending is the key to more jobs. White House domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes reprised this myth with a stream of buzzwords: Education is the "key to winning the future," we need to "improve educational outcomes" so we can "win in the global marketplace," and we must "out-educate the world" and put "greater emphasis on critical thinking and collaborative problem-solving," and grab "our generation's 'Sputnik moment.'"

Vice President Joe Biden joined in this campaign by launching his "College Completion Tool Kit" -- a bunch of expensive suggestions to increase the number of college graduates by 50 percent. He wants to shift the focus from high school completion to college completion and, of course, do more to subsidize the latter.

Biden was the lead speaker at "The First Annual Building a Grad Nation Summit" held in Washington in March, to be followed by a similar summit held by each governor. The plan sets forth vague goals such as developing an action plan, using data to drive decision-making, accelerating learning and re-labeling "remedial" courses in college as "developmental."

Of course, Biden's plan calls for extravagant taxpayer handouts such as the First in the World initiative to support "innovative practices" and College Completion Incentive Grants to reward states for undertaking "reforms." That's on top of money already committed by the Obama administration, such as $40 billion more in Pell grants, a 90 percent increase in tax incentives through the American Opportunity Tax Credit, making it easier for students to get grants and loans, and forgiving the college debt of students who promise 10 years of public service.

Why should taxpayers be forced to continue unaffordable deficit spending to send more kids to college when the evidence shows that our economy is not offering enough jobs for college graduates now?

The biggest issue today is the need to rebuild an economy that offers the three-fourths of Americans without a college degree jobs that pay enough to buy a home and support a wife raising their own children. Somehow we lost that kind of a society through a combination of feminism, unilateral divorce, illegal and legal immigration, and the steady drumbeat of free-trade elitists telling us that globalism makes it our duty to compete with foreigners willing to work for as little as 30 cents an hour with no benefits.

The party that has the best solution to the jobs issue will win in 2012. More years of taxpayer-funded schooling are not the answer.

SOURCE





Education with a human face

The critique of government schools below has much merit but the alternative suggested is very narrow. A wholly private school system would include schools that practiced a substantial amount of discipline and teacher direction. Most existing private schools do so now

Illuminated by the light of his PowerPoint slide, the Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction proclaimed yet another "victory on the Malabar Front." Test scores were up. Was it the PSAE? PLAN? ACT? SAT?, ISAT? I do not remember. What did it matter? My mind wandered. I imagined myself in Moscow circa 1930.

At the Ministry of Plate Glass Production, the commissar was crowing of our success in meeting the quota from the Five Year Plan. We produced X tons of glass far exceeding production from the previous year. All applauded vigorously. Of course to meet our quota, we had to make the panes of glass so thick and heavy that you could barely see through them, but what did it matter? No one dared bring it up. Of course, the following year, complaints about quality led the Politburo to issue a new standard. Henceforth, plate glass quotas would be set not in metric tons but in square meters. This required an entirely new approach, but we at the ministry accepted the challenge. We would now manufacture very thin, fragile panes of glass that maximized area rather than weight. These new panes would shatter in the slightest breeze, but again, what did it matter?

Our education commissars set similar arbitrary and shifting benchmarks. A Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind, and now Race to the Top demand that test scores rise, and rise they shall. How could they do otherwise? No one really has any idea whether the scores actually mean anything, so what does it matter? And even if the pressure we put on children to perform causes them harm, well, this is simply the price that must be paid.

In the final analysis, students are only so much raw material. Often, students come out of school with good grades and high test scores but without a real education or an independent sense of direction. The most capable students often become what former Nazi Minister Albert Speer described as technically-skilled barbarians. They are fit to perform a particular task assigned to them and little else. As for the least capable, they are like the window panes coming out of the Soviet glass factory, either fragile and easily broken or dense and maladapted.

Beyond its crude and ill-considered central planning, the world of public schooling resembles the Soviet Union in other ways. The nation’s schools form an educational gulag archipelago. As in Stalin’s gulags, students are constantly monitored and their movement severely restricted. Students are ordered about and subject to the arbitrary authority of teachers and administrators. Permission is required even to go to the bathroom, and even this is often withheld. Unauthorized travel in the hallways will be met with a stern demand to show travel papers (i.e. a hall pass), and once in the classroom, students are told what to do, when to do it and how to do it. Speaking with fellow inmates is generally not permitted unless the conversation is authorized and relates to the mandated task, and unauthorized communication with the outside world via cell phone will result in immediate confiscation of the device with additional punishment to follow. As with any prison, fear and shame are the primary means of control and bullying and dishonesty often the only means of survival.

There is, of course, the outward appearance of democracy and due process. Schools hold elections for student government, but often the administration permits only prescreened candidates to run for office. The powers of these student councils are limited to a few trivial matters, and even these decisions are subject to veto. To provide the illusion of due process, many schools create what are called teen courts. Students that make up a teen court are hand-picked by the administration for their political reliability and work under the supervision of a dean. The court does not determine guilt or innocence but merely punishes. To get a hearing before the court, the accused must first confess. If the accused does not confess, he faces immediate and usually more severe punishment from the dean. Even Stalin would have been impressed with this arrangement.

Like our schools, the Soviet Union wasted enormous amounts of manpower and other economic resources in a blind rush to meet arbitrary quotas. As failure was not an option, the quotas were almost always met, but their achievement served political rather than economic, social or spiritual ends. Outward appearances and raw numbers were often impressive but always misleading. Behind the façade and the numbers were shoddy goods and poor service provided to an oppressed and increasingly cynical and demoralized people. It all came to a bad end.

If our schools and indeed our entire nation are not to come to a similar bad end, radical change will be necessary. First, we must reconsider what reform should look like. Public school perestroika advocated by many of today’s so-called reformers will never work. The taxpayer-funded vouchers and charter school schemes now being proposed with so much fanfare lead down the same dead end road Gorbachev led the Soviet Union down.

So long as government money is involved, schools will continue to serve political rather than student interests. Real reform must start with getting government completely out of the business of education. Second, we must reconsider what education should look like. Professional pedagogues assume they know what a child should know and when they should know it. They do not. I would not be so arrogant to suggest that I do, but I would suggest that each child knows.

A child’s natural curiosity about the world leads him on an endless journey of exploration. From their very first breath, babies relentlessly explore and make sense of their world. They teach themselves to walk and to talk without any teaching, testing or grading. Why not simply allow children to continue into adulthood on that same self-determined path? This, after all, is how children were educated for tens of thousands of years, and this changed only during the last one hundred and fifty years. A child has little chance of finding and developing his true talents and passion if not given the freedom to do so.

Finally, we need to reconsider what schools should look like. Once we reject educational Stalinism and throw off the shackles of state control, we can create schools that provide young people the resources they need without restricting their freedom to make best use of them. We can relieve the pressure and stop the grading and testing, and end the rigid adherence to irrelevant and outmoded curriculum standards. Most important, we can begin trusting our children and treating them with the respect they deserve. As Goethe once said, "Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help then to become what they are capable of being." Unschooling parents and most homeschooling parents get it as do the parents who send their children to one of the several dozen Sudbury Schools around the nation. (My daughter will attend this one next year.)

Sadly, for the present, only a tiny minority of young people get this kind of libertarian-style education. Most students, teachers, and parents continue to live behind the educational iron curtain. Most people have grown accustomed to conventional schooling’s absurdities and oppression and now consider them the norm. Changing this will not be easy.

Libertarian education reformers must be like the 19th century abolitionists. In opposing slavery, the abolitionists had the courage to boldly swim against the tide of popular opinion. They did not compromise or equivocate or trim their sails. They endured ridicule and even persecution, but they soldiered on confident in the truth of their ideas. Those of us committed to bringing liberty even to our children in the classroom must have similar courage. We must take risks and endure the skepticism of fellow parents, teachers, friends, relatives, and perhaps even of some of our children unaccustomed to the responsibility that comes with freedom. If we can expand the range of freedom even down to our youngest citizens, there may yet be hope for the future. Why must we do this? Because it really does matter.

SOURCE



29 March, 2011

Teacher seniority rules, job security threatened amid budget cuts

Public school teachers are facing the biggest challenge to their job security in more than half a century as politicians target seniority rules that make the last hired the first fired when jobs are cut.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican; Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat; and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent, are among officials pushing for changes in laws in coming months to let them fire underperforming teachers.

As budget cuts threaten the jobs of thousands of school employees, officials are demanding the right to keep the most talented, even if they are the least experienced. The proposed changes may undercut the power of teachers’ unions. They intensify the debate on how to judge instructor effectiveness as US students lag behind international peers. As officials cut education budgets, they should focus on what is best for children, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.

“Layoffs based only on seniority don’t help kids,’’ Duncan said. “We have to minimize the negative impact on students.’’

In 14 states, including New York, California, and New Jersey, districts can consider only seniority when dismissing teachers, and they are home to 40 percent of public school instructors, according to a report by the New Teacher Project, a New York organization founded in 1997 by Michelle Rhee, Washington’s former schools chancellor.

Even as states cut billions from their budgets, federal officials and executives from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke are lamenting the damage caused by education reductions.

In New York, Bloomberg is pushing the Legislature to pass a law eliminating the “last-in, first-out’’ policy, saying that as many as 4,666, or 6 percent, of the city’s teachers may be fired. In New Jersey, Christie proposed eliminating seniority rules for teachers at a town hall meeting Sept. 28. And in California, a Senate bill was introduced Feb. 15 that would replace seniority with a system based on several factors including student performance.

Superintendents contend that seniority rules force them to retain incompetent teachers instead of young talent.

Eliminating last-in, first-out rules won’t mean dramatic improvements, said David Abbott, executive director of the Cleveland-based George Gund Foundation, which supports education initiatives. Education needs innovation, he said.

“There’s too much emphasis placed on that issue as a silver bullet,’’ Abbott said. “We say, ‘If we can just get rid of this work rule, of this industrial workforce mentality, that will solve our problem.’ No, it won’t.’’

SOURCE





Class conflict: Gainful Employment Proposal Penalizes At-Risk Student Populations and Hurts the Economy

Career colleges—also known as for-profit, proprietary or private sector colleges—provide an important avenue to post-secondary education and upward mobility for at-risk nontraditional student populations. The career college sector is also the country’s best hope, through its efficiency and innovation, to substantially expanding Americans’ access to the higher education that enables individuals to pursue the fastest growing and emerging occupations.

The career colleges sector is now under harsh scrutiny by Washington. The U.S. Department Education has decided that rapid growth in enrollment, rising student debt levels, and a relatively high level of default rates has created a need for new rules around “gainful employment” for graduates from career colleges. The Department’s proposed rules are not only unnecessary, they are certain to cause harm.

For decades, the Higher Education Act has required that career colleges and training programs prepare students for gainful employment in recognized occupations in order for students to qualify for federal financial aid (Title IV programs). This condition has not applied to the other channels of post-secondary education—nonprofit and public institutions. The Department is authorized by Congress to set rules on federal financial aid for education. Historically, it has never attempted to define gainful employment, but now proposes doing so in order to evaluate and sanction private sector colleges using a three-part test based on student debt-to-income levels and loan repayment rates.

The proposed gainful employment regulations were published in July 2010, but final regulations were pushed out to March or April 2011 by a flood of public comment and lobbying. The delayed rules have led to a heated debate, which has been characterized by a surfeit of confusing, frequently contradictory “report cards” on career colleges. Critics of for-profits schools have used inflammatory rhetoric, going so far as to compare career colleges with the much-maligned subprime loan industry.

The Department justifies its proposal on the grounds that, while career colleges now account for 10 percent of the nation’s post-secondary enrollment, they account for a disproportionate 23 percent of federal loan dollars and 44 percent of federal student loan defaults. However, as this paper makes clear, the Department’s case for the rule is fundamentally fl awed. Commonly drawn comparisons between career colleges and traditional schools are less meaningful than many suggest, because of the significant demographic differences in the student populations, programmatic variances, and major disparities in taxpayer subsidies between the distinct institutional sectors.

SOURCE




Countryside walks should be mandatory for British schoolchildren?

There could be something in this. Most kids would love it and things would be learned that you cannot get from a book

Kate Humble, the BBC wildlife presenter, wants visits to the countryside to be mandatory for schoolchildren and is to take the matter up with the Education Secretary. The Springwatch presenter, who will return to BBC Two next week with Lambing Live, said getting children excited about the countryside was vital for ensuring that it would be protected in the future.

She also dismissed the idea that urban children would be slow to embrace rural pursuits. “It should be obligatory for every schoolchild to experience the countryside,” said Humble. “There’s a fantastic RSPB reserve on the edge of Newport. I took a bunch of kids pond-dipping there recently. At first, they were all saying, ‘Whatever…’ But then one of them caught a stickleback, and such was the excitement, you’d have thought she had landed a 50lb salmon!

“Children are the future. If you give them access to the countryside, they’ll protect it. I’m going to be at [education secretary] Michael Gove about this – and I’m counting on you for help!”

Speaking to Radio Times, Humble said that the countryside is “great for your brain and great for your soul and great for your bum”.

Humble’s comments about the national curriculum echo the Rural Manifesto of the campaign group the Countryside Alliance, which calls for outdoor education to be a compulsory subject, as well as suggesting that fishing can successfully rehabilitate young offenders and calling for rural activities to be made accessible for disadvantaged children.

Jill Grieve, from the Countryside Alliance, said: “Kate is absolutely right. Getting outdoor education onto the National Curriculum is one of The Countryside Alliance Foundation’s main aims. We are in a farcical situation where many youngsters are so disconnected from the countryside and their food that they think that milk comes from Tesco and meat comes from a plastic wrapper. They also have no incentive to care about what happens to the countryside in the coming years. Given the opportunity to get out there and find out about nature children thrive – they love it and it also gives them confidence. We are certainly standing shoulder to shoulder with Kate on this issue – for education, conservation and good muddy fun, outdoor education is a must.”

The Countryside Alliance quotes statistics showing that fewer than 10 per cent of 7 to 11 year-olds spend time playing in places such as woodlands and heaths, and that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) show a 40 per cent improvement in their symptoms when taking part in activities in green spaces.

SOURCE



28 March, 2011

An email from Florida:

I am unfortunately situated in sunny Florida where my wife teaches at a local elementary school. I have a Ph.D in science education and spend much time defending conservative causes.

However, I am really depressed over the coming "perfect storm" in education here in Florida because new governor Rick Scott is a fool with no understanding of education. He has M. Rhee in tow and plans to duplicate her DC antics here.

However, teachers will become hunted game even worse because parents will be empowered to decide the fate of teachers. It is the ultimate in stupidity and will demoralize teachers even as budget cuts reduce their pay.

John, charter schools are a shell game with no significant improvements. The move to empower parents -just as illiterate Hispanics come to dominate many communities- will throw education into chaos. The political battles will be endless.

I once contributed to a book on school reform. I defended American education against the legions of liberalism and their "quest for freedom."

They weakened education via parental power, softer curricula, and focus on "the gap." Multicultural education is a scam of large proportions. Standards descend even as Obama pushes Race for the Top.

A donor gave a lot of money to my school district, one willing to destroy teaching to pay young teachers brainwashed in liberalism to miraculously transform blacks and Hispanics into scholars. It isn't going to happen.

Maybe things are better in your neck of the woods, but all hell is breaking out here in Florida.




Iowa School says "white supremacists" are the terrorist threat. Ignores Islam

Clearly racist

Plans for an anti-terror drill on Saturday in western Iowa that would have involved fictional school shootings by white supremacists have been canceled because of threats received by the Treynor public schools, Pottawattamie County officials said today.

“During the last 24 hours, the Treynor school system has received threats to their employees and buildings due to the planned “active shooter” exercise, " county officials said in a statement. “After consultation with the Treynor School District and the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office, we have jointly decided to cancel the exercise due to these threats which we must consider viable. The Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Department is now actively investigating the threats.”

County Sheriff Jeff Danker said he sent three deputies to the Treynor schools today as a precautionary measure, but the school day was completed without any problems.

Members of so-called patriot groups opposed to illegal immigration had strongly objected to the plans for the exercise, which would have been held at the Treynor High School. Their complaints focused on a fictional scenario for the drill based on young white supremacists shooting dozens of people amid rising tensions involving racial minorities and illegal immigrants who moved into the area.

Patriot group leaders complained the exercise was intended to portray people who legally possess guns and who fight illegal immigration as extremists.

County officials said in their statement they found it “astounding” that people claiming to be patriots would be opposed to emergency response agencies drilling to be prepared for any threat. They said the use of the fictional scenario was included only to meet U.S. Department of Homeland security requirements to qualify for federal grant funds.

“In no way has our office or any other response agencies favored a political view or issue. Our only intent was to prepare for a worst-case scenario to build our capacity for such an event and to test any gaps in our response system,” county officials said.

Jeff Theulen, coordinator of the Pottawattamie County Emergency Management Agency, said, “I apologize to the true patriots who have endured profane-laced telephone calls, threats, and generally had their operations disrupted over this event."

Kevin Elwood, superintendent of Treynor Community Schools, said the school system received about 100 emails from throughout the nation, as well as some angry phone calls, including one particularly disturbing call that was left as a voicemail message.

"They basically indicated that if we went through with this type of a drill that potentially that type of an incident could become a reality in our school district," Elwood said. The recording was provided to the sheriff's office for investigation, he added.

Sheriff Danker said investigators believe the call to the school came from outside of Iowa and Nebraska, and they are trying track it to find the person responsible for the threat. He added he has doubts about the threat's credibility, but he sent deputies to protect the Treynor school's entrances today because he didn't want to take any chances.

Craig Halverson of Griswold, national director of the Minuteman Patriots, one of the groups which had objected to the drill, said he is skeptical that any threats were actually made. He said he suspects county officials are citing threats as an excuse to drop the exercise because of the controversy that had developed over the plans.

News stories about the drill have received national attention via the Internet the past two days, and the controversy swirling around the exercise has been a hot topic on some conservative radio talk shows.

Halverson said the Minuteman Patriots are law-abiding people and the organization doesn’t condone people making threats. He said said his organization had no plans to conduct a protest in Treynor on Saturday because the drill was planned on school property and children would be participating.

“We are God-fearing people who believe in the sovereignty of our country and the Constitution,” Halverson said. “If somebody in my organization is making threats, I don’t want them in my organization. We are not lawbreakers and we follow the law of our country.”

Robert Ussery of Des Moines, state director of the Iowa Minutemen activist group, said he also doubted whether threats were actually made against the Treynor public schools. He contends government officials were pursuing a political agenda in support of amnesty for illegal immigrants when they developed the fictional scenario. The cancellation of the event supports that agenda, he added.

"What they are basically saying is, "See. We are right. We had to cancel it because of these people." It would be very, very stupid to make threats like that. People are upset, but I don't believe they would do that," Ussery said.

SOURCE





Fury at British equality watchdog after it calls for teachers to ask 11-year-olds if they are gay

Children as young as 11 could soon be asked about their sexuality without their parents’ consent, it emerged yesterday. Teachers, nurses and youth workers are being urged to set up pilot studies aimed at monitoring adolescent sexual orientation for the first time.

A report commissioned by the Government’s equalities watchdog found that it was ‘practically and ethically’ possible to interview young children about their sexuality. Controversially, it says parental consent, while ‘considered good practice’, is not a legal necessity.

The report for the much-criticised Equality and Human Rights Commission recommends that children should be asked if they are gay from the age of 11. A record should be kept of those unsure or ‘questioning’ their sexuality.

It says monitoring sexual orientation among youngsters could help to prevent them from becoming victims of discrimination, and claims that ‘some young people begin to question their sexual orientation as early as age eight and may begin to identify as LGB (lesbian, gay, bisexual) from early adolescence’.

The report has provoked outrage. Graham Stuart, Tory chairman of the Commons education select committee, said the plans were ‘invasive, sinister and threatening’. He added: ‘School should be a place of safety, not a place where pupils are picked over for the purpose of some quango; and many children won’t understand what they are talking about.’

The report – Researching and Monitoring Adolescence and Sexual Orientation: Asking the Right Questions, at the Right Time – says it is ‘critical’ to track children’s sexuality to ‘shed light on the complexities of young people’s developing sexual orientation and how this may disadvantage them’.

It tell researchers not to dismiss gay feelings of interviewees as ‘a passing phase’.

Some youngsters, it says, may use categories such as ‘questioning’, ‘queer’, ‘pansexual’, ‘genderqueer’, ‘asexual’, ‘pan-romantic’ and even ‘trisexual’.

Last night, a commission spokesman said: ‘This is independent research produced to help the commission form its policy direction.’

SOURCE



27 March, 2011

Gov. Walker's legislation has teaching Unions caving already

Apparently Gov. Scott Walker knew exactly what he was doing. Before he signed the bill limiting collective bargaining privileges, teachers unions throughout the state were slow to respond to calls for salary and benefit concessions.

They believed their members should be held harmless during a period of necessary cost-cutting. They didn't seem to care that Wisconsin schools were operating with multi-million dollar deficits that were forcing the layoffs of younger teachers and the cancellation of student programs.

Their only answer was to raise taxes at a time when few people could afford it. They didn’t want to sacrifice anything, despite the fact that schools spend about 80 percent of their budgets on labor costs.

But now, with Walker's legislation set to become law once it clears legal hurdles, the unions are suddenly coming to their senses. They are jumping at the chance to extend their collective bargaining agreements, in exchange for meaningful concessions that will help schools survive the financial crisis.

In Madison, the teachers union has suddenly agreed to a wage freeze and increases in health insurance and pension contributions. The concessions will save the district an estimated $15 million next year, which would almost make up for the expected cuts in state aid.

In Oshkosh, the union has agreed to a wage freeze, increased contributions toward benefits and a change in the employee insurance carrier, which will save the district more than $5 million per year.

In the Slinger district, the union has agreed to commit 5.8 percent of teacher pay to pension costs and increase contributions toward health care costs. The concessions will save the district about $1.3 million per year. What are the unions gaining by accepting concessions at the last possible minute? Plenty.

They are salvaging things like automatic annual salary increases for teachers, a generous number of paid sick and personal days off, reimbursement for unused sick days, salary and benefits for union officials who do not teach, retirement bonuses, overage pay for teachers with a few extra students, and many other items.

Those contractual perks would have gone by the wayside if local collective bargaining agreements had been allowed to expire. Under the new law, the unions will not have the power to negotiate for many of the items listed in current contracts.

So the unions will save some time-honored perks and schools will save a lot of money. This type of compromise would not have occurred without pressure from Gov. Walker and his supporters in the legislature.

Perhaps the governor knew exactly what he was doing by creating a crisis and forcing the unions to face financial reality. Nothing else seemed to be working and schools were drowning in deficits.

Ironically, the loss of collective bargaining privileges would not have been necessary if the unions would have come to their senses months ago and started offering meaningful concessions. They lost most of their privileges by remaining stubborn for too long.

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The compassionate teacher is the ideal

In his inaugural address, President Bush observed that “no insignificant person was ever born”: the specially valuable function of a good teacher is to perceive, in each student, his unique significance.

This work of doing justice to people, impossible in a crowd, is not easy even in a classroom. Though experience helps, compassion is the real origin of that insight that lets a teacher see through the superficial masks that young people so often wear, and to understand their deeper problems and possibilities. The German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann argued that only “love—for a person or an object—can reveal the true nature of anything,” an observation especially true of that most complicated and mysterious of objects, the human soul.

“My experience,” the poet Coleridge said, “tells me that little is taught or communicated by contest or dispute, but everything by sympathy and love.” Educators whose teaching is an extension of their powers of sympathy—think of Charles “Chips” Chipping in James Hilton’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips—develop the most remarkable qualities of perception. The reason is obvious: Shakespeare has one of his characters reflect on the folly of taking love out of learning, for love “adds a precious seeing to the eye.”

In the same spirit, Dickens dramatized the compassion of the true teacher in the character of Marton, the benevolent schoolmaster in The Old Curiosity Shop. Like Hugo’s bishop of Digne, Marton is the soul of charity; and he has awakened in little Harry, his “favourite scholar,” a love of learning and of “poring over books.”

Yet Harry’s reciprocated affection for his teacher perplexes Marton. “How did he ever become so fond of me?” the schoolmaster asks, modestly oblivious to the miracle he has performed in an English village. “That I should love him is no wonder, but that he should love me—” The reader understands what Marton himself does not: it is what Dickens calls Marton’s “compassion” that has made Harry love him and desire to please and emulate him—one of learning’s most powerful spurs. Harry ends by calling his teacher his “dear kind friend.” “I hope I always was,” Marton replies. “I meant to be, God knows.”

Marton’s compassion, Dickens shows, has enabled him to perceive, in the young people with whom he works, the “panting spirit” inside their “fragile form.” “I love these little people,” Dickens has the narrator of The Old Curiosity Shop declare, “and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.”

It is because education seeks to nurture that “panting spirit” that compassion is so crucial to its enterprise. Education involves more than equipping a child with mechanical skills, filling him with useful information, and teaching him how to reason. Good teacher’s also try to awaken a child to the world’s possibilities—and his own. They nourish his moral imagination, his human sympathy, his understanding of himself as a citizen in a community.

The philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose father had famously educated him on strictly utilitarian principles, knew from bitter experience how defective an education only in skills, unilluminated by compassion, can be. James Mill’s machine-like efficiency as a teacher made his son into a prodigy of scholarship—he began Greek at three—but it left him unfinished as a human being.

As a young man, Mill published brilliant essays upholding the progressive political ideals his father had inculcated in him; but he had not learned how to cultivate the “material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made.” He was, he said, like a “stock or a stone,” able to turn out quantities of prose for the Westminster Review but unacquainted with what he later called the “culture of the feelings.”

The result was predictable: after completing his home schooling, Mill suffered a nervous breakdown—a “habitual depression,” a “grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,” he called it, quoting Coleridge. The “whole foundation on which my life was constructed,” he wrote, “fell down.” He recounted how, after much travail, he came “to adopt a theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted.” The scholar educated on severely utilitarian principles now ranked “among the prime necessities of human well-being” what he called the “internal culture of the individual.”

My own first memory of the kind of education I am trying to describe, an education inspired by love and compassion, is inseparable from my early consciousness of a world beyond the mechanical and utilitarian. My second-grade teacher encouraged me to memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Of course I was incapable of understanding much of it at the age of seven, but I soon discovered that adults were stirred by the words.

At Gettysburg, Lincoln went beyond Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to give the most profound account we have of the ends of American life. The Declaration, for all its power as a civic touchstone, is of the eighteenth century in its depiction of men as machine-like assemblages of “inalienable rights.” The weakness of the classical liberalism that the Declaration expresses lies in what Lionel Trilling called its “denial of the emotions and the imagination,” its “mechanical” conception of “the nature of the mind.” Lincoln insists that the mind is more than a package of reason and passion: it possesses depths that the Enlightened philosophers never fathomed.

In urging me to learn the Gettysburg Address by heart, my teacher introduced me to the most cogent refutation we have of the idea that the American is merely a Yankee—rational Economic Man, a shrewd getter and spender, a Mill-like calculating machine. On this battlefield, Lincoln says, Americans offered up their lives out of love for ideals that transcended their material aspirations. These ideals sanctify their deaths: they “consecrate” and “hallow” the land where they fell.

Though my second-grade self could understand none of this, I was conscious at the time, in some inarticulate way (however improbable it may seem), of the growth within me of an ideal self—the person whom the second-grader, trying to memorize the Gettysburg Address, wanted to become, and believed that he could become. And, though I wouldn’t understand this until much later, it was the beginning of my civic education, as well.

Even in the best of all possible worlds, not every teacher will live up to this compassionate ideal, sparking each student’s intellectual, moral, and imaginative development. Not every school will be a community bound together by fellow-feeling. But compared with many private schools, whether secular or religious, today’s public education system—like so many creations of the liberal, bureaucratic state—smothers the embers of compassion under an encompassing blanket of pity.

Today’s progressive-ed pedagogy, with its focus on pupils’ self-esteem, shrinks from giving students the constant challenge they need to move on to a new level of mastery and insight. The dumbing-down of the curriculum, the unwillingness to make kids learn a body of knowledge and develop basic skills through drill, the easy tests and lack of consequences for leaving homework undone—all conspire to keep kids’ horizons low, instead of expanding them.

In inner-city public schools, especially, teachers tend to view their students with undiluted welfare-state pity, seeing them as unable to meet high, or even ordinary, standards. The result is the normalizing of social promotion and the multicultural assertion that the student’s own world is sufficient for him, that his education need not constantly challenge him with worldviews and ways of life higher and better than the limited world into which he was born—since how could he ever become the person fit to enter such a higher realm?

A teacher prompted by compassion rather than pity would say to a struggling kid: “You are not living up to your potential. You are frivolously wasting the gifts God gave you. You’ve got talent. Show it.” Compassion awakens a spirit of emulation; pity does not, for pity is afraid to judge, even where judgment is essential to growth. Nowhere is the secret contempt that underlies all forms of pity more evident than in this failure of teachers to hold their students to their own private standards or to try to excite in them a yearning to excel and transcend.

In their hearts, these teachers lack the very foundation of compassion: the ability to see their pupils as fellow creatures exactly like themselves. Denying that these young people can possibly live up to a higher idea of themselves, the teachers acquiesce in what President Bush has called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Yet it is difficult for teachers to do better under their demoralizing working conditions. Caught between the it’s-not-my-job work rules of the teachers’ unions and the picayune regulations of the central bureaucracy, they find themselves imprisoned in a mechanical system organized like an industrial factory.

Anyone who has been put to cookie-cutter work on such a model knows how difficult it is to feel, in such conditions, that he possesses a soul and a destiny; only by a tremendous effort of will can such a person retain, in this situation, anything more than a faint idea that the human raw material he is charged with processing also has its unique human potential. A teacher’s contract requires him to teach for x hours a day; at the end of the xth hour his students become someone else’s problem. The merit of teachers who do manage to see behind their students’ apathetic masks goes unrewarded: teachers’ unions oppose merit pay and defend a perverse set of incentives that encourage not compassion but timeserving.

That mindset results in a community far different from one where compassion can work its nurturing transformations, and, were there any lingering possibility of creating such a community, the rights revolution that has swept over the public schools in the last several decades has vaporized it. The rights that students have been discovered to possess include everything from the right to due process before being suspended from school for misconduct to the right to wear a baseball cap during the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to the right to play on the boys’ baseball team, even if one is not a boy. Earlier this year, a federal district judge decided who had the “right” to be the valedictorian in a New Jersey high school.

To view schoolchildren as rights-bearing citizens before they have reached the moral and civic maturity the schools are supposed to foster is to lose sight of education’s purpose. Where students can sue their teachers, there can be no spirit of order and community, no flourishing of fellow-feeling. A teacher cannot be expected to act confidently to make the classroom an orderly place, a little platoon of learning, when he knows that even a minor infraction on his part of the numerous rules that now govern every facet of school life may render him personally liable. Nor will a teacher who is straining every spiritual muscle to maintain authority in the face of his unruly students be able to see through the cocky pose to the struggling, uncertain soul.

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More control over admissions for British schools as council lotteries face axe

Schools could get significant new powers over how they admit pupils in reforms to be proposed by ministers within days. The Sunday Telegraph understands that the current system which allows local authorities to stage lotteries to determine which children are given places at oversubscribed schools is to be stopped.

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, plans instead to let only individual schools stage lotteries if they are oversubscribed - a move which would hand them greater power at the expense of councils.

Lotteries staged by local authorities have been criticised because they can force children to travel miles every day after being turned down by a first-choice local school. They were introduced four years ago under Labour in an attempt to break the middle-class hold on the most sought-after places. Many families paid premiums of tens of thousands of pounds to buy homes in the catchment areas of successful schools, leading to claims of selection by wealth.

If only individual schools could hold lotteries it is thought there would be fewer overall.

Those that did, however, would effectively become their own admissions authorities - allowing critics to claim that ministers were allowing "back door selection" of pupils, particularly if schools were allowed to determine exactly how the lotteries should operate.

Earlier this month around 540,000 pupils who applied for secondary school places in September were informed where they would be going - with early figures suggesting around 17 per cent did not get into their first choice. The lowest percentage of pupils getting into their top-choice school is thought to be 60 per cent in the London borough of Westminster. At the other end of the scale the comparative figure for Leicestershire was 98 per cent.

Grammar schools are allowed to select on ability but other secondaries are not - except for some "specialist" schools with subject which can "prioritise" up to a tenth of their intake on aptitude for music, sport or other skills.

Admissions policies vary between schools and areas, although the closeness of a child's home, and whether they have a sibling already at the school, are usually key factors.

At least 30 councils in England, mainly in well populated urban areas, are understood to use lotteries - with more than 100,000 pupils applying in areas where their school admissions could effectively be decided "by a roll of the dice".

A DfE spokesman said: "Ministers are clear they want a simpler and fairer admissions code. We will announce more details shortly."

Overall, Mr Gove is determined to allow individual schools much more freedom and lessen the grip on the state school system currently exerted by local authorities.

His Education Bill unveiled earlier this year gives ministers more powers to intervene in failing schools, narrows the focus of Ofsted inspections and hands teachers extra powers to search pupils for "disruptive" items".

Meanwhile, ministers are to spend an extra £70million helping children from poorer families stay on in education. A new fund of £180million will soften the blow of the abolition of Educational Maintenance Allowances which are worth up to £30 a week for 16, 17 and 18-year-olds.Originally £111million was earmarked for the fund but Liberal Democrat ministers, led by Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, squeezed extra cash out of the Treasury. The measure was expected to be in last week's Budget - but dropped out at the last moment.

Most of the new budget will be distributed to colleges to award, at their discretion, to students from less privileged backgrounds.

SOURCE



26 March, 2011

TN: House approves longer tenure waiting period

The state House of Representatives approved Gov. Bill Haslam's plan to lengthen the waiting period for teacher tenure by two years and to create a procedure for taking away tenure for low-performing teachers.

The House voted 65-32 in favor of Haslam's reforms, setting aside Democrats' argument that lawmakers should hold off reforms until new evaluation standards for teachers are finalized.

A state task force has been working on those standards for about a year and is scheduled to deliver them this summer. "This (Tenure) is something that has been broken for a long time," said state Rep. Bill Dunn, R-Knoxville, who presented the bill.

The state Senate has already approved the reforms, which would make teachers wait five years to qualify for tenure and require that they rate in the top two of five categories for two years in a row before receiving tenure.

Teachers could lose their tenure if they later rate in the bottom two categories for two consecutive years.

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The empty rhetoric of school “reform”

It’s getting really hard to look at the distorted rhetoric of today’s debate about public schools and NOT see it in the same whorish light as other political discussions of the day. Just as we’re being stoked with down-is-up claims that tax cuts balance government budgets and giving more money to rich people creates jobs, much of what we hear in the conversation about our nation’s schools reflects the same sort of pretzeled logic where words are turned on their heads and factual evidence is thrown to the wind.

“A set of stock phrases, sound bites, and buzzwords has come to dominate the public discourse on education,” Sean Cavanagh recently observed in the professional trade newspaper Education Week. And although all involved in the debate about our nation’s schools purport to be pushing what’s best for “the children,” it’s hard to believe – after disassembling all the verbiage being thrown around – that something much more cynical isn’t afoot.

Take the term “reform,” for instance. As Cavanagh explains, the word is “summoned reflexively, it often seems, by elected officials and advocates who speak a shared, accepted language.”

And those who consider themselves to be the “reformers,” tend to portray themselves as battling a “status quo” that is often identified with teachers’ unions or just “the education establishment.” “The rhetoric,” Cavanagh explains, “tends to divide the world in two: between those who favor ‘reform’ and those who don't.”

“References to ‘reform’ and ‘status quo’ fill policy papers churned out by advocacy groups and opinion pieces from newspaper editorial boards,” Cavanagh elaborates, “as well as the remarks of forceful and charismatic advocates, such as former District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee.”

Arrayed under the reformist banner is an agreed-upon policy agenda that tends to include expanding charter schools, evaluating schools and teachers based on high-stakes test scores, standardizing curriculum, recruiting nontraditional teachers, and sanctioning and closing schools that don’t meet specific performance benchmarks.

But what’s immediately puzzling about this self-proclaimed “reform” movement is that the policies it seeks to enforce have been, since the last time Federal education policy was revised, the law of the land. And they have been for the past ten years since the passage of that legislation, known as No Child Left Behind.

Furthermore, this nation’s leaders, arguably the most powerful people in the world, in the cockpits of control in Washington DC and state capitals and legislatures – from President Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to state governors such as Chris Christie and Scott Walker – have donned this mantle of being “reformists” battling the “establishment.”

And topping it all off, one of the richest men in the world as well as an array of extremely wealthy foundations have also taken up the brave “reform” cause. So rather than being an "anti-establishment" crowd, reformists, for all intent and purpose, seem to be the establishment.

And who is the “Goliath” that these upstart “Davids” want to take on? It appears to be a bunch of little people who happen to disagree with them. And they appear to have some good reasons.

Many of the ideas that are on the reformists agenda – ideas that have been the law of the land for a decade at least – don’t seem to be panning out too well. As veteran education journalist Ron Wolk recently commented, all these “years of unprecedented effort and enormous expenditures has not improved student performance, reduced the dropout rate, or closed the achievement gap.”

Charter schools, for instance, don’t appear to do any better – and in fact may do worse – than public schools in increasing student achievement. Paying teachers more money if they happen to increase student test scores may actually hurt student achievement. And teachers who come from alternative pathways to the classroom don’t seem to stay around for very long

People at the levers of power in DC and elsewhere continue to maintain that “reforms” are going to take more time. But people who have their ears closest to the ground are skeptical. Although it’s widely reported that classroom teachers are less than pleased with the testing and targets enforced not only in NCLB but also the Obama-Duncan Blueprint, school board members as well don’t share the interests of the “reformists.” In fact, a recent survey of the local officials elected to direct our community schools found very little enthusiasm for the most popular top-down mandates.

Forty percent of the school board members surveyed attached little or no importance to recruiting nontraditional teachers, and more than 50 percent felt that way about increasing within-district school choice. The report also found that 60 percent said the same about a year-round school calendar, and more than 80 percent put little stock in the creation of new charter schools to promote student achievement....

Nearly 90 percent of the school board members surveyed also said that student success needs to be broadened to include more factors than academic achievement.

And it’s not just teachers and school board members who are wondering whether “everything” that we claim to know about education reform is really wrong.

Last week’s first-ever International Summit on Teaching, convened in New York City, got the attention of Linda Darling-Hammond and many others because it “showed perhaps more clearly than ever that the United States has been pursuing an approach to teaching almost diametrically opposed to that pursued by the highest-achieving nations.”

As Darling-Hammond observed, in nations such as Finland and Singapore, that lead the world in international comparisons of student achievement, there is “no teacher-bashing, no discussion of removing collective bargaining rights, no proposals for reducing preparation for teaching, no discussion of closing schools or firing bad teachers, and no proposals for ranking teachers based on their students’ test scores.”

Echoing this very theme – that current education policies in the US are horribly out of step with countries that lead the world in achievement – a new study released this week enumerated (pdf) the best educational practices from around the world, only one of which – high standards – appears on the national agenda coming from DC.

The most glaring difference was on the issue of how our country treats educators. While our country seems preoccupied with how we can pay them less, leading countries expend “substantial amounts of time and money to nurture and develop the talents and leadership abilities of teachers and principals”. Nevertheless, despite all the evidence otherwise, the reformist agenda for educational policy rolls along unquestioned in the media.

But whether or not you agree with the message of school reform, it’s time to hold these messengers to higher standards. Anyone who cares about public schools or who attempts to report on them needs to make these powerful proponents of questionable policies come out from behind the empty rhetoric of school reform. Anyone making pronouncements on education that prove to be based on questionable claims needs to be questioned about their real intentions. And “being for the kids” doesn’t count.

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Curriculum for British pre-schoolers cut back

A controversial “nappy [diaper] curriculum” for under-fives will be radically overhauled after a Government review concluded almost half of children were starting school lacking basic social and language skills.

The compulsory Early Years Foundation Stage – that requires children to hit a series of 117 targets – will be dramatically stripped back amid fears it promotes a “tick-box” culture in nurseries and pre-schools.

In a damning indictment of one of Labour’s flagship education reforms, a report will say that teachers and childminders are currently spending too much time filling in forms instead of improving children’s early development.

According to figures, some 44 per cent of pupils in England currently start compulsory education without the basic social, communication and language skills needed to make a success of school.

Almost four-in-10 boys and a fifth of girls are unable to hold a pencil or write legible letters by the age of five, while almost half of all children struggle to concentrate or pay attention.

Next week’s review – led by Dame Clare Tickell, chief executive of the charity Action for Children – will call for a dramatic reduction in the number of targets children are expected to meet following claims they prevent toddlers from developing naturally. Under-fives could be measured against just 17 criteria compared with the existing 117.

Childminders, nurseries and playschools will no longer be forced to rate children on their ability to dress independently, manage personal hygiene, use modern technology and understand other cultures, it is expected to say.

Staff will be asked to focus on a small number of core subjects, such as improving children’s speaking and listening skills, basic literacy and promoting social interaction.

Much of the existing paperwork early years teachers are forced to fill in will be axed and they will also be required to do more to identify children struggling the most early on, particularly those from poor backgrounds.

A Coalition source said: “We know that teachers and early years practitioners are spending too long ticking boxes and filling in forms. “This means that they don’t have enough time to focus on the basics a child needs to prepare them to learn effectively in the first year at school. Basics like being able to make friends, listen effectively and hold a pencil.

“The evidence is clear that children who are behind at five are much more likely to still be behind at the age of seven. “We need an early years framework that supports what parents already do with their children at home – playing and helping children develop, but also sets children up for the challenges they’ll face at school.”

The Early Years Foundation Stage has been a compulsory requirement for all nurseries, pre-schools and childminders since 2008.

Currently, children must hit a series of targets before they start full-time education. This includes counting up to 10, reciting the alphabet, writing their own name and simple words and forming sentences using basic punctuation.

It also covers personal development, requiring children to “dress and undress independently and manage their own personal hygiene”, as well as understanding that “people have different needs, views cultures and beliefs that need to be treated with respect”.

The curriculum has been criticised for pushing children too far at a young age, undermining the amount of time they spend playing.

Helen Clegg, head teacher of high-performing Shiremoor primary school, North Tyneside, told the Telegraph: “The EYFS has got completely out of hand and can have a negative effect on children. Teachers, particularly new teachers, spend too much time ticking boxes and assessing the children, rather than helping them learn.”

SOURCE



25 March, 2011

Phonics: British chidren to identify 'non-words' in new reading test

I at first thought that the use of non-words was absurd but I can now see the point. It reminds me of an amusing episode in my own childhood when I was in grade 2. The class was asked to close their books and recite the story we had been reading. I was the only one who could not. Much to the surprise of the other pupils, I was praised for that. I was the only one who had actually been reading. The others were memorizing. The non-words mentioned below would check on that -- JR

All children will be subjected to a reading test at the age of six, it was announced today, despite huge opposition from teachers. Ministers are pressing ahead with a trial of a new-style phonics test designed to identify pupils lagging behind after a year of compulsory education.

Children in English state schools will be asked to read a list of 40 words as part of an informal assessment administered by teachers. The test will include a number of made-up words such as “koob” or “zort” in a move designed to ensure pupils can decode unfamiliar words using phonics – the system that breaks down words into individual sounds.

But the move has been criticised by the UK Literacy Association who claim non-words will leave children confused. Almost two thirds of respondents to an official Government consultation also opposed the decision.

Unions have criticised the tests, insisting the focus on phonics will straightjacket teachers and prevent them employing different methods to improve reading standards.

But ministers insisted they would press on with the assessments after a small-scale trial in 16 primary schools. A larger pilot project will be introduced in 300 schools this summer before a national roll-out in 2012.

Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister, said: “Learning to read is a fundamental part of a child’s education. “The new check will ensure that children who need extra help are given the support they need to enable them to enjoy a lifetime’s love of reading.” He added: “Almost all pupils and teachers in the pre-trialling thought the test materials were appropriate.

“The 270 pupils involved did not find the non-words confusing, and so the phonics check will contain some non-words. They are already used in many schools and are the fairest way to assess phonic decoding. “Non-words show which children have the knowledge to read any new word, rather than pupils who have already developed a wide vocabulary or a good sight memory.”

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Huge new layer of bureaucracy prompted by errors in Virginia school textbooks

And guess who will be paying for it? Those who buy the textbooks. This will just jack up their price. Dumb

The Board of Education today withdrew its approval of the first editions of two elementary history textbooks published by Five Ponds Press. The books, “Our Virginia: Past and Present,” a grade-4 Virginia studies text, and “Our America to 1865,” a grade-5 United States history book, were found by a panel of historians last fall to include significant factual errors.

The board also approved a revised textbook review and adoption process that requires publishers to provide documentation that their textbooks have been reviewed by qualified experts for factual accuracy before they are submitted to the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) for review and the board for inclusion on the list of state-approved textbooks.

The revised process, which was proposed last month by Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia I. Wright, requires publishers to submit with every book a list of authors and their qualifications and provide proof that at least three experts in the subject matter vouch for the text’s accuracy.

The new process also requires publishers to submit a corrective action plan to VDOE within 30 days if errors in a book are found. Once the corrective action plan is approved by the superintendent of public instruction – or by the board in cases of significant errors – publishers would implement the plan at their own expense.

The Board of Education also directed, in the event that Five Ponds Press submits corrected second editions of “Our Virginia: Past and Present” and “Our America to 1865” for review and approval, that the revised books be considered under the new state approval process.

The two Five Ponds books — along with grades K-3 history and social science textbooks from the Connecticut-based publisher — were originally approved by the board in March 2010. A review of the publisher’s K-3 books requested by the board in January also identified errors.

“The errors in these books do not rise to the level of those found in the fourth-grade and fifth-grade textbooks,” said Wright. “I am confident that the process approved by the board today will ensure that the inaccuracies are addressed promptly by the publisher and that students in schools using these books continue to receive accurate instruction.”

Regarding the K-3 books, the board accepted a recommendation from Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia I. Wright that Five Ponds Press be required to submit a corrective action plan to address the errors.

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Education Spending Has a Simple Solution

Phyllis Schlafly

As the new Republican House majority wrestles with ways to cut our unsustainable budget deficit, Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet. On March 14, he said, "We cannot cut education."
But why not? If we are going to cut programs that are proven to have failed to achieve their goals, federal spending on education should be at the top of the list.

Federal spending on public schools (which is only a small percentage of their school budgets) was given specific goals in the 2002 law called "No Child Left Behind," the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It required states to set targets to have all students proficient in reading and math by 2014, to meet an annual benchmark of progress toward this goal and in particular to demonstrate a closing or narrowing of the gap between higher-income and minority students.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan threw a cannonball into the education debate this month by admitting that 82 percent of public schools could be labeled "failing" under No Child Left Behind specifications. His solution is to stop calling them "failing," extend the target date for student proficiency to 2020 and, of course, to appropriate more money to failed programs.

For years, education spokesmen have opined that kids should be able to read by the fourth grade. Good for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who is now calling for the reading goal to be third grade -- and this goal is also being advocated by the Indiana and New Mexico governors.

Obama wants to put more money into the notoriously useless program called Head Start, and he increased its annual funding in 2009 by nearly $3 billion. U.S. taxpayers have given Head Start $166 billion of taxpayers' money since 1965 despite many studies proving that it was mostly wasted, did not give poor kids a head start and any gains made while kids were in Head Start disappeared within a couple of years.

Since conservatives famously lost the battle to prevent federal spending on local public schools (which they view as unconstitutional) a half century ago, Congress has year after year increased appropriations. In recent years, Congress identified two primary purposes: to raise student achievement and to narrow the gap between high- and low-income students and between minority and white students.

We the federal taxpayers have spent roughly $2 trillion on these efforts since 1965. It's reasonable to ask, did we get our money's worth?

If we look at the class that graduated from the public schools in 2009, we find that we spent over $151,000 per student to bring him from the first to the 12th grade. That's nearly three times as much as we spent on the graduating class of 1970.

Despite that massive spending, overall achievement has stagnated or declined. The gaps between minority and white students are unchanged in science and only slightly narrowed in reading and math.

We have precious little to show for the $2 trillion in federal education spending over the past half-century, and Andrew J. Coulson of CATO has the charts to prove it. It now costs three times as much to provide essentially the same education as we provided in 1970.

Even this bad news fails to give the big picture because, as productivity was falling in public schools, it was rising everywhere else. Nearly all the products and services most of us buy have gotten better, more affordable or both over the past two generations.

The fact that there is no education improvement even while spending has skyrocketed is a disaster unparalleled in any other field. In addition to the waste, this gigantic spending slowed our economic growth by taxing trillions of dollars out of the productive sector of the economy and squandering it on worthless programs.

Knowing that learning to read is fundamental to education, the public-school lobby is yelping about proposed cuts in grants for literacy programs. Yes, literacy should be job number one, but after all these years why do we have to go to the unnecessary expense of passing out money to find a good reading program?

Children should be taught to read in the first grade by an authentic phonics system in which they learn the sounds and syllables of the English language and how to put them together to read words of more than one syllable. There is nothing expensive or mysterious about this basic task.

Instead of wasting more federal money on grant-writers and grant-readers, tell local districts to award a bonus to first-grade teachers based on how many kids they actually teach to read. Let the teacher select the phonics system she thinks will help her win the bonus.

SOURCE



24 March, 2011

Rigor Please

Mike Adams

For some time, I have made a habit of asking students their major (and minor) immediately after they ask me a silly question. This is necessary because I teach two basic studies courses per semester – both populated by students from across the spectrum of academic disciplines. I have found (consistently) that nearly all inane questions and comments come from students in just a handful of academic majors.

In the past, I’ve gotten myself in hot water for suggesting that the African American Center, LGBTQIA Center, Women’s Center, and El Centro Hispano be shut down in order to ease our current state budget crisis. But, today, I propose that we go further by eliminating all academic majors and minors ending with the word “studies.”

This is not meant to be prejudicial – although, having little else to do, the Arrogant American Centers will try to make it so. Let it be known that I propose eliminating more than just Arrogant American and Hyphenated American Studies. I also want to do away with Communication Studies, Environmental Studies, Liberal Studies, Women’s Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies. And I want the cuts to be implemented across our sixteen-campus system.

The data I plan to use to support my proposal is not scientific. If it were, the proponents of the various “studies” programs would not understand it. So I rely principally on an unscientifically gathered collection of stupid questions I have recently heard from students in the Fill-in-the-Blank Studies era of higher education. These student comments demonstrate that their “studies” professors are truly making a difference in their lives and in the dominant “society”:

* At a local grill, the waitress, a UNCW “studies” major, asked "Would you like a sweet tea or a beer?" to which I responded "The latter." She then asked, "Which one is that?" I responded by asking her "Well, why don't you just guess? You have a fifty-fifty shot at getting it right." She responded by saying "I'm not in the mood to think."

* Just two days before an exam I gave my students a review session. I told them they could ask any question as long as they did not ask me what to “focus on.” I explained that asking what to “focus on” was the same as asking “What is going to be on the test?”

First question: “What should we focus on in chapter three?”

When I refused to answer, the response was “There’s just so much to read. Where is our study guide?” (For the record, study guides are most often found in classes ending with the word “studies.” That is why “studies” students so often demand them. It’s an addiction).

* Another student wrote to tell me she was going to be missing the next class. Her question was: “Will we be talking about anything important?” It’s a fair question. Few of the professors in her major talk about anything important.

My response: No response. I simply deleted the email.

* I walked into class the other day and told students to stop emailing me with questions that were already answered in the course syllabus – noting that since it was over one month into the class it was simply embarrassing for them to have not read the syllabus. I argued that taking a class without reading the course syllabus was like taking a job without reading the employment contract.

Later in the class a “studies” major asked “How many tests will we have this semester?” My response: “Read your syllabus.” (Note: She asked the same question during the next class meeting apparently having forgotten that she already asked the question).

* I recently asked this simple question of a product of one of our fine and academically rigorous “studies” programs: “Did you re-take the GRE? The answer: “No. I haven't re-took it yet.”

* Here’s another brilliant question from someone who should be majoring in Inappropriate Communication Studies: “We only have two minutes before class begins. Do I have enough time to go to the restroom?” My response: “I don’t know. I guess that depends on whether you plan to go #1 or #2.”

* Student: “Can we have a study guide for the next test?

Me: “What is your major?”

Student: “Communication Studies.”

Me: “Is this a Communication Studies class?”

Student: “No.”

Me: “Well, there’s your answer.”

* This question came from a student who ought to be majoring in Entitlement Studies: “Can I take the test earlier in the day - like around ten o’clock?”

My response: “Yes, I plan to offer thirty different administrations of the test – one for each of my students according to his or her personal needs.”

Student: “Are you serious?”

Me: “No.”

* A new Entitlement Studies major would be fitting for the “studies” student who asked this question: “Could you spell that guy’s name – the one who came up with the theory you just mentioned?”

My response: “Sure. R-O-B-E-R-T.”

Her response: “Could you spell his last name, too?”

My response: “Sure. R-E-A-D—Y-O-U-R—B-O-O-K.”

Her response: “Is his name going to be on the test?”

* And, finally, here’s a great question from a student who has been trained by the finest minds on the Fill-in-the-Blank Studies faculty: “What is a propensity?”

My response: “It is a habit, predisposition, or inclination. For example, people who choose majors or minors ending with the word ‘studies’ have a propensity to ask idiotic questions. But they do not have a propensity to use the dictionary.” (OK, I didn’t actually say that but I thought of it later and I can pretend I said it because it’s my column).

Of course, not all of the stupid questions I get are from students majoring or minoring in Something-or-Another Studies. But they do dominate the field of stupidity in a way that reflects poorly on their respective majors and the university. That is the reason why we need to take a Darwinian approach by getting rid of these departments and forcing these students to attempt to survive in a real academic discipline.

The university will have a better student body after the Fill-in-the-Blank Studies students have all flunked out. The patrons of the local grill will also have more dedicated waitresses. Freed from the rigors of college life the latter might eventually be moved to think. That is, if the mood should suddenly strike them.

SOURCE






Why Britain's maths teachers are among the worst in the world

Maths teachers in England are among the most poorly trained in the developed world, a report revealed yesterday. And it found that the average maths specialists in our secondary schools are inferior mathematicians to those teaching primary pupils in Japan.

The research saw England languishing second from the bottom of an international league table which included China, Russia and Hungary. Only the Czech Republic was ranked lower.

Not only are our teachers ill-qualified but many drop out of teaching within five years, which is the point at which they reach their potential in the classroom.

Maths teachers in English primary schools need only a C grade at GCSE in the subject, while many teaching at the same level in Japan have a maths degree. In England's secondary schools, a maths teacher must be educated to degree level in a maths-based subject.

The study tracked 200 trainee teachers in nine countries. As qualifications are not directly comparable, they were tested on their ability at maths with questions such as 'What is the value of 25 (or two to the power of five)'. The answer is 32.

Researchers said English youngsters 'lack mathematical progress compared to our economic competitors' and put this down, in part, to ill-qualified teachers.

They have called for staff to be barred from teaching maths in primary schools if they have less than a B grade in the subject at GCSE. And they want all secondary teachers to have a maths degree and to continue to study, while teaching, for a masters.

The report, by Plymouth University's Centre for Better Teaching, said: 'The lack of progress is not helped by having, in the primary sector, many teachers who are not as well qualified in mathematics as those in other countries, whilst in the secondary sector, we suffer from a very transient workforce.'

The Plymouth research follows a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development which found England had tumbled from eighth place in 2000, to 28th place last year in international league tables for maths.

Tony McAleavy, of the Plymouth centre, said: 'Teaching needs to become a respected profession in this country, on a par with the law and medicine, and then we will attract more able people.'

Professor Celia Hoyles, of the Institute of Education, said there was a need to 'find ways to improve primary maths teachers' competence and confidence in maths'.

An Education Department spokesman said the Government wanted to attract better quality maths graduates by offering a fast-track route and raising the bar for entry into training to a 2:2 degree to receive funding.

SOURCE





Australia: Student stabs teacher in class at Darwin School

This is where the Leftist hatred of discipline has got us

A RELIEF teacher was taken to hospital after a 14-year-old Darwin student allegedly stabbed him a number of times in front of his class. The 60-year-old Nightcliff Middle School teacher was taken to Royal Darwin Hospital about midday after a classroom altercation ended in the boy allegedly pulling a knife, the NT News said.

It is understood the relief teacher's name is Michael Bell, and that he was in his first week at the school. School management was tight-lipped - principal Sarah May refused to talk about it.

But the NT education union boss Matthew Cranitch is concerned and says it reflects an increase in behavioural problems across Northern Territory schools.

A number of Nightcliff Middle School sources said the student had heated words with Mr Bell during class, then went back to his desk and pulled the knife. Police said the boy punched Mr Bell in the face before stabbing him in the arm and once in the leg.

Sources said the boy had a history of "concerning" behaviour at Nightcliff Middle School.

One upset parent said the kid "lost the plot" in front of the class. "It all happened pretty much in front of their faces," she said. "The kid was attempting to stab the teacher in the stomach but got him in the arm instead." "It isn't the first incident that he's been involved in ... he's apparently smashed windows and thrown chairs around the room before."

It's understood Mr Bell received stitches for his wounds at hospital.

SOURCE



23 March, 2011

Washington Invents an Anti-Bullying Law

By Hans Bader (a former Education Department lawyer)

There’s no federal law against bullying or homophobia. So the Department of Education recently decided to invent one. On October 26, it sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to the nation’s school districts arguing that many forms of homophobia and bullying violate federal laws against sexual harassment and discrimination. But those laws only ban discrimination based on sex or race – not sexual orientation, or bullying in general.

The letter from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights twisted those laws, interpreting them so broadly as to cover not only bullying, but also a vast range of constitutionally protected speech, as well as conduct that the Supreme Court has held does not constitute harassment. In so doing, it menaced academic freedom and student privacy rights, and thumbed its nose at the federal courts.

The letter successfully left the false impression that federal law already bans bullying and anti-gay harassment. For example, a sympathetic news story reported that “the Department of Education issued guidance to all school officials in October 2010, reminding them that federal law requires schools to take action against bullying—including . . . sexual harassment of LGBT students.”

The letter was part of a high-profile Obama Administration campaign against bullying, that recently culminated in “a high-visibility conference on bullying prevention March 10, with the president and first lady” and the introduction by Administration allies of “several LGBT-inclusive bills designed to address bullying of students.”

But in reality, there is no federal ban on bullying, and no federal statute prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination. Bills banning anti-gay discrimination, such as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, have yet to pass Congress. Existing sexual harassment laws generally do not cover harassment aimed at gays based on their sexual orientation, as opposed to their gender – even if such harassment is sexual in nature.

As the Supreme Court emphasized in its 1998 Oncale decision, “workplace harassment” is not illegal sexual harassment “merely because the words used have sexual content”; instead, victims “must always prove that the conduct at issue was not merely tinged with offensive sexual connotations, but actually constituted discrimination ‘because of’” a victim’s “sex,” such that “members of one sex are” treated worse than “the other sex.” Thus, federal courts have usually dismissed sexual harassment lawsuits brought by gay employees over bullying and foul language, in cases like Higgins v. New Balance (1999).

Harassment is legally defined even more narrowly in schools than workplaces. In the workplace, harassment need only be severe or pervasive enough to create a hostile environment in order to be illegal. A single, severe physical act can occasionally be enough for a lawsuit.

But in the school context, harassment is defined more narrowly by the Supreme Court’s 1999 Davis decision: it must be “severe” and “pervasive”: to be illegal, sexual harassment must be "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it can be said to deprive the victims of access to the educational opportunities or benefits provided by the school since “schools are unlike the adult workplace” and “children may regularly interact in a manner that would be unacceptable among adults.” Moreover, the requirement of both severity and pervasiveness means that a lawsuit cannot be based solely on a “single instance” of “severe” peer harassment.

The Education Department’s letter, from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, flouts the Supreme Court’s harassment definition, claiming that “Harassment does not have to . . . involve repeated incidents” to be actionable, but rather need only be “severe, pervasive, or persistent” enough to detract from a student’s educational benefits or activities. The letter goes out of its way to emphasize that harassment includes speech, such as “graphic and written statements” and on the “Internet.”

The letter falsely implies that anti-gay harassment is generally discrimination based on sex. It cites as an example of illegal “gender-based harassment” a case in which “a gay high school student was called names (including anti-gay slurs and sexual comments) both to his face and on social networking sites.” This is exactly what most federal appeals courts have said does not constitute gender-based harassment. It is not clear whether this case is merely a hypothetical example, or – more disturbingly -- a finding by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in an actual case. The letter says that “each of these hypothetical examples contains elements taken from actual cases.”

If it actually found a school district guilty of harassment over this, then the Education Department has flagrantly disregarded court rulings, not just about what harassment is, but about how officials are supposed to respond to harassment.

Much more HERE




I Found My Thrill Blowing Up McGill

Mike Adams

The irony is never ending in higher education these days. College administrators are so steeped in the ideology of political correctness that they fail to miss an opportunity to help make their opponents’ argument for them. Such was the case after a Jihadist recently Tweeted death threats at a campus screening of Indoctrinate-U.

Students at McGill University in Montreal are outraged at the politically correct response of Morton J. Mendelson - the Deputy Provost of Student Life & Learning at McGill. And they should be outraged by his cowardice.

For those who aren’t aware, Indoctrinate-U. is a documentary by my old friend Evan Coyne Maloney. The film exposes the liberal bias and politically correct nature of universities. During its showing, a Muslim student in the audience produced a series of violent messages on Twitter. Here are some examples:

“I should have brought an M16.”

“I’m watching a Zionist/Conservative propaganda film at a secret Zionist convention, in case anyone’s confused.”

“This experience has hardened me into a soldier for freedom and truth. These savages will not rule me. They will not win.”

“My blood is boiling. I want to shoot everyone in this room.”

Ok f---k it, I’m going to destroy the Jew-WASP consortium.”

(Note to Media: I have screen shots of all of these Tweets if anyone is interested).

In typical Muslim Jihadist fashion, Haaris Khan, the author of the Jihadist Tweets is retreating from his statements. He has since apologized and said that his Tweets were “taken out of context.” He says he owns no weapons and has never fired a gun. He also said his sister-in-law is Jewish. He stopped short of saying that when he needs a good doctor he always looks for one with a Jewish name.

Earlier in the year, Haaris Khan published a bizarre opinion piece condemning a newly founded student newspaper with conservative leanings called the Prince Arthur Herald. Quite naturally, he published the condemnation in the traditionally liberal leaning McGill Daily. In the piece, he makes it clear that he supported the paper when it was initially proposed. But, then, after reading a few issues he withdrew that support because the paper had proven to be “pro-Israel.”

In the piece, he lectures the conservative paper saying “Being provocative is one thing – being thuggish is another.” He goes on to say that journalists need to “stick to principles of fairness, justice, responsibility, and prudence.”

Obviously, Kahn is an imprudent and irresponsible thug incapable of judging his own behavior objectively. How about the university administration’s capacity for objectivity? What kind of judgment do they make of Haaris Kahn after his violent anti-Semitic campus outburst? Judge for yourself after reading the response of Deputy Provost Mendelson:

“Given the article in this week’s Tribune and other media reports about a McGill student’s posts to Twitter that contained disturbing and threatening messages, I want to reassure the McGill community that the University takes such incidents extremely seriously.

In all such cases, we report the incident to Montreal police, who investigate and determine whether further action is needed. In addition, the University quickly refers the matter to the appropriate disciplinary officer, who determines if a student needs to be excluded from campus in order to protect others and who can also pursue disciplinary action. In addition, we have a threat-assessment team that reviews such cases in a timely fashion.

We are aware that some who learned of the messages were very concerned about their safety, and understandably so. We have tried to reassure them. There have been suggestions that the University should have issued a broader alert to the community about the messages. But we must avoid causing needless panic or delivering ‘false alarms’ that could lead to complacency in the event of real threats in the future.

McGill took a number of actions in this case, many of them behind the scenes – not simply to satisfy the demands of Quebec’s privacy law, but because we want some of our responses to remain confidential to shield them from the eyes of those who could cause harm.

Please rest assured: If the tweeted messages were deemed to pose a real threat, we would have taken very different action.

What we have ended up dealing with is a downside of social media – the ability of an individual to disseminate inappropriate or threatening messages to a global audience with the click of a mouse or a send button. All members of our community should be responsible in using the Internet and social media. There can be serious consequences for irresponsible use.

For information on McGill’s procedures about how to deal with violent, threatening or worrisome student behavior, please visit here.

At the end of the investigation, Mendelson said this to the Canadian media, “We have come to the conclusion that the messages don’t constitute a threat to the community”. No doubt, this tepid and disingenuous response was motivated by a desire to protect Muslims as a group from “unfair” stereotyping. In other words, the university wished to advance the view that these remarks were motivated by individual, not group, pathology. Ironically, they do so by treating Kahn as a member of a protected group, rather than an individual.

The conservatives and libertarians who sponsored the showing of Indoctrinate U. could not have choreographed this better. In the end, they have shown – on film and in reality – that liberal bias and political correctness rule the day in the postmodern era of higher education.

SOURCE






Bungling British education bureaucrats

Education bosses shamed as recruitment advert for MATHS teachers shows equation... with the WRONG answer

A TV advert to recruit teachers was ridiculed today after a 15-year-old schoolboy spotted that a maths question has the wrong answer. Chris Coombs, 15, noticed the mistake in the 30-second government-funded advert, which is regularly shown on Channel 4 and ITV.

The clip shows a teacher writing '(g2)7 = g?' on a whiteboard and later 'solving' it with the answer 'g2 x g7'. But the correct answer for the algebraic equation is g14 - or g2 x g2 x g2 x g2 x g2 x g2 x g2.

Year 10 pupil Chris, who attends the John Cabot Academy in Bristol, criticised the advert and called for it to be amended as soon as possible. He said: 'I was disappointed to notice that the mathematical calculation is inaccurate. 'The workings the teacher is writing on the interactive whiteboard would not answer the question correctly. 'I believe this should be amended as the advertisement in question is attempting to recruit potential teachers.

The Training and Development Agency for Schools created the advert using a real teacher and class. Several questions, pupil's discussions, workings and answers were filmed and cut together to give an overall impression of a class.

But producers claimed the scene shown is of the teacher deliberately demonstrating an incorrect answer. She later went on to explain the correct workings and answer, but this was not shown in the short clip, they claim.

Simon Nutt, from the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA), which made the advert, said: 'Our TV adverts use highly-qualified teachers with their real-life classes. 'We make every effort to capture the spirit of the lesson in the final footage but there are inevitably some scenes that have to be cut down or cut together which may mean we cannot show the full details of a question, answer or comment.'

Chris, who lives in Bristol with his mother Sue, father David and sister Laura, said the advert caught his eye because of his interest in maths. He said: 'I want to pursue a career in mathematics in one way or another - but not as a maths teacher.'

SOURCE



22 March, 2011

VA: Middle schoolers suspended for oregano possession

A harmless prank gets a vicious response from kid-haters

A few Virginia parents would probably like to know what local school administrators are smoking.

Seventh-grader Adam Grass and three other students at Hickory Middle School in Chesapeake, Va., were suspended last week after being caught with what teachers initially thought was a bag of marijuana but turned out to be a stash of oregano, The Virginian-Pilot reports.

Unfortunately for the disciplined boys, now facing expulsion, there isn't much of a difference between Italian herbs and Mary Jane, at least in the state's eyes. According to school board member Christie Craig, Virginia has a zero-tolerance policy against "imitation controlled substances."

Adam is a straight-A student and National Junior Honor Society candidate, achievements his father, Patrick Grass, doesn't want to see go up in smoke all because of a childhood prank. "I know times have changed, and you can't do [just] anything in schools anymore," Grass said. "But I think there needs to be a certain amount of common sense applied to their policies."

The elder Grass also explains that his son was merely holding onto the oregano for a friend, meaning he's really just an innocent spice trafficker. "So he was in possession of it for maybe 30 seconds," Grass said.

Seeking legal council, the Grass family turned to the Charlottesville-based Rutherford Institute, which specializes in defending people who believe their human rights and civil liberties have been violated.

The organization's president and founder, John Whitehead, calls the oregano bust yet another case of an overenforced zero-tolerance policy.

"If you're a good student and you have some oregano, they kick you out of school," said Whitehead, who sent a letter on Friday asking the school to reverse its decision. "And it means you can't go to the [college] you wanted to, because of oregano."

SOURCE






What's the Constitution? Don't bother asking 70% of Americans

Alarming number of U.S. citizens don't know basic facts about their own country. But if non-Hispanic whites only had been asked, the result could have been different

First Christina Aguilera forgot the words to the national anthem. Now it has emerged that 70 per cent of Americans do not know what the Constitution is, and six per cent don't even know when Independence Day falls.

Newsweek recently gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship test and found that their knowledge of the history and running of their own country was seriously lacking. Although the majority passed, more than a third - 38 per cent - failed, and some of the basic questions surrounding citizenship were answered incorrectly.

The U.S. citizenship test is administered to all immigrants applying for citizenship. It is comprised of 100 questions across five categories - American government, systems of government, rights and responsibilities, American history and integrated civics.

Newsweek found that there were huge discrepancies in the kinds of civic knowledge Americans collectively possess. A mark of 60 per cent was needed to pass.

The questions that Americans could not answer went from the more challenging - how many justices are in the Supreme Court? (63 per cent did not know) To the most basic - who is the Vice President of America? (29 per cent did not know)

SAMPLE QUESTIONS

Q. What happened at the Constitutional Convention?

A. The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution.

Q. Who did the United States fight in World War II?

A. Japan, Germany and Italy.

Q. What did Martin Luther King Jnr do?

A. Fought for civil rights and equality for all Americans.

Q. Circle Independence Day on the calendar.

A. July 4.

An alarming number of Americans did not know basic information about the Constitution, namely that it was the supreme law of the land, that it was set up at the Constitutional Convention and that the first ten amendments are known as the Bill of Rights.

Newsweek reported that civil ignorance is nothing new. Americans have been misunderstanding checks and balances and misidentifying their senators for as long as they have existed.

And their ignorance is only highlighted by the knowledge of their European peers. In March 2009, the European Journal of Communication asked citizens of Britain, Denmark, Finland and the U.S. to answer questions on international affairs.

Europe came out on top. Around three quarters of British, Finnish and Danish people could, for example, identify the Taliban but just over a half of Americans could, despite the fact they led the charge in Afghanistan.

Many blame it on the complexity of the U.S. political system. Michael Schudson, author of The Good Citizen, said: 'Nobody is competent to understand it all, which you realize every time you vote. You know you’re going to come up short, and that discourages you from learning more.'

Others blame it on economic inequality in the U.S. as the top 400 households have more money than the bottom 60 per cent combined.

NYU socioloist Dalton Conley told Newsweek: 'It’s like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike Denmark, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn’t even speak English.'

SOURCE





Children 'should read 50 books a year', says British education boss

I used to read 3 times that when I was a kid -- JR

Children as young as 11 should be expected to read 50 books a year as part of a national drive to improve literacy standards, according to Michael Gove.

The Education Secretary said pupils should complete the equivalent of almost a novel a week because the academic demands placed on English schoolchildren have been “too low for too long”.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, he said the vast majority of teenagers read just one or two books as part of their GCSEs, normally including John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Mr Gove said all schools should “raise the bar” by requiring pupils to read large numbers of whole books at the end of primary school and throughout secondary education.

It follows the publication of a report in December showing that reading standards among British teenagers had slumped from 17th to 25th in a major international league table.

His latest comments came after a tour of high-performing “charter schools” – state-funded institutions that are run free of Government interference – in the United States.

One primary in a hugely deprived area of Harlem, New York, set pupils a “50 book challenge” over the course of a year and children also competed to read all seven Harry Potter books in the quickest possible time.

The Infinity School is currently ranked higher than any other in the city, even though more than 80 per cent of its mainly African American and Hispanic pupils are from poor families eligible for free and reduced lunches. It is among almost 100 schools run by the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a charity established by two teachers in the mid-90s.

Speaking in the US, Mr Gove said: “KIPP have far higher expectations of their students than we have had. We, the Coalition Government, have attempted to raise the bar but, I think, haven’t been ambitious enough. “Recently, I asked to see what students were reading at GCSE and I discovered that something like 80 or 90 per cent were just reading one or two novels and overwhelmingly it was the case that it included Of Mice and Men.

“Here, kids at the end of primary school are being expected to read 50 books a year. I think we should, as a nation, be saying that our children should be reading 50 books a year, not just one or two for GCSE.”

A recently launched review of the National Curriculum is expected to specify the key authors children should study at each key stage of their education.

As an interim measure, Mr Gove said he wanted to ask leading children’s authors to set out the 50 books each child should learn. The results will then be posted on the Department for Education website, with schools urged to issue the 50 book challenge to pupils.

Mr Gove suggested that authors to be studied by pupils of all ages should include JK Rowling, CS Lewis, Philip Pullman, Kenneth Grahame, Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner and Ursula Le Guin.

He added: “One of the biggest problems in the English state education system is that only a minority can follow an academic education and that only a minority can go to university. Quite wrong. “Our expectations have been too low for too long.

“The aspiration for someone to read 50 books a year isn’t from a school in the poshest part of Manhattan where they are all going to have bound copies of CS Lewis, this is a school where 83 per cent of the kids are on the equivalent of free school meals, but they still expect them to read 50 books a year.”

SOURCE



21 March, 2011

10 Famous People Who Were Expelled From School

If you've got real talent and individual ambition, school might not be the best avenue to success for you. In fact, these businessmen, artists, scientists and actors were so bored with school that they were expelled, but they still made it to the top of their industries. We're not advocating that you talk back to your professors or party in the same reckless ways, but if you're discouraged by your classes, remember that misfits like you do have a place in the world.

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Though he died just before his 30th birthday, Percy Bysshe Shelley is still regarded as one of the most profound lyric and Romantic poets in literary history. Born to a privileged political family, Shelley attended Eton College, where he experimented with heretical and sometimes risque poetry. Shelley went to Oxford after Eton, but was expelled for his scandalous writing, particularly a pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism." Shelley refused to apologize for the pamphlet and was not allowed to return to school.

William Randolph Hearst: Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst was one of the most influential and successful men in the country in the late 19th and early 20th century, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives and starting the largest newspaper and magazine company in the entire world, and which still exists today, publishing notable titles such as the San Francisco Chronicle, Marie Claire, Esquire, Seventeen and Harper's Bazaar. Born to millionaires, Hearst attended Harvard but was expelled after gifting his professors with chamber pots that had their names painted on the inside.

Albert Einstein: Still considered one of the greatest thinkers and scientists in world history, Albert Einstein had a troubling school life. While he was successful in his early education, Einstein was expelled from high school for being rebellious, and was not accepted into Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology on his first try, and failed the entrance exam. After getting his high school diploma at a different school, Einstein returned to FIT and was admitted.

Salvador Dali: Always an individualist, artist Salvador Dali was expelled from the Academy of Art in Madrid, which he attended after high school. Disenchanted with many of his professors — who did not challenge Dali enough — Dali was expelled after "disturbing the peace" and criticizing one professor in particular. He said that none of his professors were even qualified to grade him on his exams, and Dali subsequently moved to Paris.

Richard Mellon Scaife: Another wealthy newspaper publisher who was expelled from school is Richard Mellon Scaife, who owns the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and frequently funds right-wing causes and campaigns. The influential businessman was kicked out of Yale for his rambunctious, drunken behavior at a party — he rolled a beer keg down some stairs and inadvertently broke another student's leg.

R. Buckminster Fuller: Scientist and author — Fuller published over 30 books — designed a car in 1933 that could go 120 miles an hour on half the gas of a standard car. He was expelled twice from Harvard for partying with a vaudeville troupe and then again for "irresponsibility and lack of interest." By his early 30s, he was bankrupt and turned to drinking after his daughter died, but was saved by a job designing the interior of his favorite cafe in New York City. He was paid in food.

Ted Turner: Media magnate Ted Turner was famously ridiculed by his father when he entered into college, choosing to major in Classics. His father wrote him, saying that he was so disappointed, he "almost puked." Turner was ultimately expelled from Brown for being caught in a dorm room with a girl, and he took over his father's billboard business after he committed suicide.

Humphrey Bogart: As one of the most iconic actors of all time, Humphrey Bogart is still the epitome of old Hollywood class and cool. But before The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and The African Queen, Bogart was a privileged young man who got kicked out of school and joined the Merchant Marine. He first attended Trinity School in New York City, and then Phillips Academy in Massachusetts to help him get into Yale. Bogart was expelled from Phillips, though, joined the Marines and ended up managing a stage company and performing in shows himself.

Cary Grant: Leading man Cary Grant started his career as a goofy but charming comedian in screwball comedies, but he ended up rivaling Bogart for the most debonair guy in Hollywood. Still a legend, Grant was a jokester in his school days, too, and was even expelled from the Fairfield Grammar School for climbing a wall into the girls' bathrooms with a friend. It was his second time to leave the school — earlier, he ran away to join a comedy troupe but his father dragged him back. After expulsion, he joined the troupe again, and was eventually chosen to go to America to perform on Broadway.

Robert Frost: American poet Robert Frost honored the New England countryside — and nature in general — in a modern, philosophical way that's widely accessible and appreciated. He started writing poetry as a young man and attended both Dartmouth and Harvard, though it's rumored that he was expelled from the former for giving a prank haircut to another boy. Supposedly he was kicked out as a zero-tolerance policy on hazing.

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British schools should be ranked by number of pupils getting degrees?

Schools could be ranked by the number of pupils gaining university degrees under Coalition plans to drive up education standards

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, published plans which would see many work-related qualifications scrapped in favour of a new system in which employers play a much greater role. New-style league tables are to be created showing how many children at each state secondary go on to graduate with an honours degree.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said the move would encourage schools to make pupils “university-ready” and ensure they are given decent advice to pick the correct courses.

The move comes as part of a wider overhaul of the way state schools in England are measured. It comes just weeks after an independent review claimed more than a quarter of children were currently pushed onto worthless college courses that add little or nothing to their long-term careers. According to figures, around a third of students at some universities also drop out of courses after less than year.

Mr Gove’s comments were made during a fact-finding visit to New York last week to tour high-performing “charter schools” – state funded institutions free of Government control. He praised one chain, the Harlem Children’s Zone, a community project that tracks children’s health, education and welfare from birth to their early 20s.

New York’s education department is considering adding pupils’ future university and employment data to its own “report card” issued to each school every year. “It has absolute merit,” said Mr Gove. “I know some people might say, how can I be held accountable for what happens in an institution over which I have no control?

“But, if you have educated someone to the age of 18 sufficiently well, and if you give them the right guidance so they make the right choices, then the chances are that they will find the right courses and succeed.”

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What planet is Dr. Hyphen on?

Self-defense is bad for you??? And the fact that the kid concerned is feeling the opposite of what Dr Hyphen predicts is no problem, apparently. It is Dr. Hyphen and his ilk who are the real problem. It is their sickly policies that encourage bullying

JUDGING from his face, you could not possibly guess at the trauma of these past eight years. He has a child's eyes; a broad smile, filled out by the gaps between his teeth.

But this is the same boy, 16, who last week retaliated as a schoolyard bully punched at his face; who hurled the smaller boy into the ground, and in doing so became an internet phenomenon. He had been picked on since year two, he said, but he had finally cracked.

The teasing was fairly basic: other children calling him "fatty", telling him to lose weight, tripping him, slapping at the back of his head. At one point, he was pelted with waterbombs. At another he was duct-taped to a pole. "They put duct tape over my eyes first, dropped me down and then duct-taped me to a pole."

At his worst, about a year ago, he said he contemplated suicide. "I just started putting myself down, putting myself down to that level. And then all the crap just kept on piling on."

Michael Carr-Gregg, an adolescent psychologist and founding member of the National Centre Against Bullying, called the interview reprehensible. "All this is going to do is put more focus on this kid. I can't see this as a positive - he'll just be further victimised and his life made more difficult," Dr Carr-Gregg, who is also the Queensland government's adviser on bullying, said. "Should this kid deteriorate and possibly harm himself, doesn't that sit squarely on the shoulders of Channel Nine?" [What a twit!]

The boy, who this website has chosen not to name, said the support he received online had made him feel "pretty good". He did not regret lashing out, even after being suspended. "All I wanted was it just to stop. So … I just did it."

His father thought similarly. "I don't condone the violence - it was a horrific thing to see, two boys fighting in a schoolyard and it ending like that. It is nothing to be proud of, but I'm glad that he stood up for himself."

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20 March, 2011

Wisconsin: Parents deserve real choices

Voucher school accountability, as the Editorial Board defines it, would result from these private schools being compelled to administer the same standardized tests that the government requires of its schools ("Fix the flaw first," March 8).

Given that testing drives curriculum, that means that the voucher schools should closely resemble the public schools in what they teach daily.

If parents wanted their children to be in state-homogenized schools, wouldn't they just settle for the nearest public school and its $13,229 per-child subsidy instead of clamoring for a $6,442 voucher enabling them to transfer to a private school even while realizing they might have to fork over extra money from their own pockets to fully cover tuition and fees?

The point of school choice is for parents to have actual choices other than the conventional government-issue model.

Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to remove the cap on voucher schools would strengthen accountability by making both public and private schools more attentive to the needs and wishes of parents, as opposed to bureaucrats.

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A small Latin revival in England

The Dragon is a private co-educational boarding and day school in Oxford with a long and prestigious history. As with many British private schools, Latin is taught there. Some of the pupils from the Dragon now help pupils from a taxpayer-funded church school to learn Latin too

Visit the after-school Latin club at SS Philip and James’s C of E primary school in Oxford, Phil and Jim for short, and the first thing that strikes you is how quiet it is. Not that there’s any shortage of teachers; in fact, there are four. It’s just that Mary, Alex, Nicholas and Will aren’t adults but Year 6 children from the Dragon School, an independent preparatory a short minibus ride away.

And, rare as it is even to find Latin on offer in a state primary (primus, first) school, it’s the fact that this club is run by children for children that makes it so unusual, especially given their ages. At just 10 and 11, the teachers are scarcely older than their pupils.

Latin, as any fool knows, isn’t a subject for the faint-hearted, what with its declensions and all that. But the free schools debate has put the language squarely back on the educational agenda (agenda, things which must be done).

The Oxford experiment, by putting the children in charge, has overturned every classics cliché in the book; but it’s worked. About 200 children from the two schools have been club students or teachers so far, and several Phil and Jim graduates (gradus, step) have gone on to excel in the subject at secondary school.

It isn’t a completely adult-free zone. Dragon teacher Peter Norton tops and tails the 50-minute sessions with games of Latin charades and bingo, both hugely popular, together with short films about life in Roman times.

But the in-depth coaching is all down to the Dragons and they take their duties very seriously. One girl even came up with her own teaching aid, a working balsa wood model of a Roman taxi meter, operated with marbles.

This afternoon, 11-year old Nicholas is helping Harry, 10, to find the Latin origin of some English words. Harry has already cracked “dominant” (dominus) and “nautical” (nauta) but is finding “exclamation” more of a puzzle. “Is it clamo?” he asks. “Maybe,” replies Nicholas cautiously, clearly primed not to give away too much.

The other three Dragons, small groups of children clustered around them, are poring over a crossword – English clues with Latin answers – before moving on to the subtleties of translating “Poeta dicit quis epistolam mittit?” and other similarly challenging sentences.

Alex, 11, leans right across the table in his eagerness to help nine-year-old Grace puzzle out the Latin for “they run”. “You know curro,” he says. “Take the 'o’ off, then put on the ending.”

Nearby, two more 10-year olds, Issy and Pema, are working with Mary, who is just a few months older. Issy solves her final clue. Beaming with pride, Mary draws a “well done” smiley face on the work. “I keep forgetting the double letters,” says Pema, sounding a tad doleful. “It’s a tricky one,” Mary consoles her, turning to help.

Originally the brainwave of a Phil and Jim teacher with a child at the Dragon, where Latin lessons begin in Year 5, the club has been going for over four years.

Both schools gain from working together. “The children from the Dragon are so enthusiastic,” says Irene Conway, Phil and Jim’s head teacher. “Our children welcome them into their school and let them take charge. There’s no jealousy or bad feeling.”

Perhaps that’s partly why the club is so popular with Dragon pupils. It is by invitation only and despite the huge range of after-school activities on offer, it’s widely seen as something rather special. “It’s fun because it’s different,” Will says.

Before they’re let loose on their students, the would-be teachers work on their classroom technique. Being good at Latin is a given. Perhaps more elusively, they also need a winning way with words.

Some are born to it. Others, say Peter Norton, take a little longer to find out what works. “They learn to communicate (munus, gift, so 'to share’) ideas – and to rephrase them if they don’t get through the first time.”

The hardest part, agree the Dragons, is knowing the answer but not blurting it out, instead mastering the teacher’s art of holding back and helping their pupils work it out for themselves.

But the effort is worth it. When children teach other children they can reach out to them in a way that no adult, however kindly and inspiring, can match. It can be far easier to believe that you can master a tricky point of grammar when somebody your own age is helping you. “You explain something as you would to a friend and if they don’t understand, they say,” Will says.

Not surprisingly, the young Dragon teachers are in growing demand. A second branch of the club has just started up at another local primary school. It’s enough to gladden the heart of anyone concerned about declining levels of classics teaching.

And when it comes to conclusive (cludere, to close) proof that being the same age, or size, as your students is no barrier to being a good Latin teacher, the clincher is the children’s relish for the subject. All want to carry on with it after they leave Phil and Jim. And if you ask what they’ve most enjoyed about the club, few are in any doubt. “Everything,” they answer.

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Parents asked to rate British schools

Parents will be able to direct inspectors to failing schools via a new website to be set up by the education watchdog. Positive or negative feedback from parents in response to a set of 10 multiple choice questions will help Ofsted decide which schools to inspect.

The new website, to be launched in September, will be linked to schools' homepages and could publish some of the feedback by showing parents' overall rates of satisfaction for individual schools.

Exact details on how the website will work have not been decided, but it is likely parents will be able to give feedback using only an email address as identification.

It comes as part of a new inspection framework that puts failing schools under greater scrutiny and aims to speed up the rate of improvement where it is needed. In contrast there will be no more routine inspections of outstanding schools, with inspectors only to be called in if serious concerns are raised.

The changes, aimed at gearing inspections towards the government's education policy, will be put forward in a consultation document to be launched on Monday.

Currently only four per cent of all secondary schools rated "outstanding" overall have been given the top grade in the teaching and learning category by inspectors. Under the new system inspectors will spend more time in classrooms and take closer note of young children's reading ability, while cutting back on the number of grades and judgements they make.

In particular the new inspections will focus on four key areas; pupils' achievement, the quality of teaching, the standard of leadership and management and pupils' behaviour and safety.

They will be tested in pilot inspections of 10 schools before the Easter break, with a wider trial to follow in May and June. The new framework will then be officially sent out to schools in September.

Christine Gilbert, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector, said it was "quite rare" to follow up on complaints from parents by launching an inspection, but said: "If they're telling us things that really worry us, even if our assessments are fine, we will go in and inspect."

She accepted there was "nothing to stop" schools asking parents to go online and give them a high rating, but added: "This is not a scientific model, it is an impressionistic picture ... it only helps us ask questions, it does not give us answers."

Chris Keates, general secretary of the Nasuwt teachers' union, said: "To hold schools to account on the basis of chat room and internet gossip trivialises public accountability and the work of schools. "Such a system would be open to abuse and manipulation and would therefore be an inappropriate and unreliable mechanism for triggering something as serious as inspection."

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19 March, 2011

Children must not have strongly-held Christian views in New Hampshire

The New Hampshire Supreme Court today affirmed a decision ordering a young girl into a public school system because her "vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to [her] counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view," but the justices denied their ruling had anything to do with religion.

"While the case has religious overtones, it is not about religion," claimed the opinion authored by Associate Justice Robert Lynn and joined by Chief Justice Linda Dalianis and Associate Justices James Duggan, Gary Hicks and Carol Conboy.

"We affirm the [lower court's] decision on the narrow basis that it represents a sustainable exercise of the trial court's discretion to determine the educational placement that is in daughter's best interests," the justices wrote.

Lawyers with the Alliance Defense Fund, who had argued in the case that the clear religious bias against Christianity expressed by a guardian ad litem and adopted by the court was reason to reverse the decision, said the justices ignored the evidence.

"Parents have a fundamental right to make educational choices for their children," said allied attorney John Anthony Simmons in a statement released by the organization. "Courts can settle disputes, but they cannot legitimately order a child into a government-run school on the basis that her religious views need to be mixed with other views.

"That's precisely what the lower court admitted it was doing," Simmons said. "The lower court held the Christian faith of this mother and daughter against them. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court ignored this issue and wrote this off as a 'parent versus parent' issue without recognizing the very real underlying threat to religious liberty."

The high court, while claiming religion did not play a role in the decision, cited statements from a court-chosen guardian ad litem who said, "My recommendations have been somewhat swayed by the way she – the way her religion causes [daughter] to shut out points of view and areas of consideration, and shut out the thinking about points of view," and that "the rigidity of her mom's religious beliefs and how that orders her thinking really causes me to believe that [daughter] would be best served by starting public school as soon as possible."

That's not about religion, the justices wrote. "We conclude that the GAL was expressing her concern about daughter's ability to mentally process, as well as appropriately communicate with others who have differing viewpoints."

The ruling noted the guardian ad litem appointed to consider the child's education recommended "that daughter attend a traditional school beginning in the winter of her fifth grade year."

The mother appealed, with help from ADF, because Marital Master Michael Garner had reasoned that the girl's "vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to [her] counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view."

Garner's beliefs were adopted by Judge Lucinda V. Sadler of the Family Division of the Judicial Court for the Belknap County in Laconia after testimony from a guardian ad litem that the child "appeared to reflect her mother's rigidity on questions of faith" and that the girl's interests "would be best served by exposure to a public school setting" and "different points of view at a time when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief ... in order to select, as a young adult, which of those systems will best suit her own needs"

The dispute arose as part of a modification of a parenting plan for the girl. The parents, Martin Kurowski and Brenda Kurowski, divorced in 1999 when their daughter was a newborn. The mother has homeschooled her daughter since first grade with texts that have met state standards.

In addition to homeschooling, the girl attended supplemental public school classes and also has been involved in a variety of extra-curricular sports activities, ADF reported.

According to court documents, the guardian ad litem earlier had told the mother, "If I want her in public school, she'll be in public school."

The documents also reveal that the guardian ad litem had an anti-Christian bias, telling the mother at one point she wouldn't even look at homeschool curriculum. "I don't want to hear it. It's all Christian-based," she said, documents show.

The high court simply adopted the philosophy of the GAL. "The GAL testified to a situation in which daughter became angry with her therapist when the therapist did not read certain religious materials provided by daughter and 'closed down in the [therapy] session,'" the judges explained. "The GAL testified that a public school environment would offer daughter opportunities to navigate experiences in both social and academic situations with others who have differing viewpoints."

Citing the religious testimony itself, the justices, who had written that the case was not about religion, said "the evidence concerning daughter's experiences in her home school and public school settings, along with the evidence demonstrating the impact of her religious convictions upon her interaction with others, including her father, provide an objective basis for the trial court's decision."

The high court, in affirming the trial court decision that the girl needed to be exposed to "perspectives" other than the Christian teaching she experienced at home, said the conclusion was sound.

"The trial court did not express a belief that daughter needed to be exposed to other religions that were contrary to or different from the beliefs of her parents," the justices said. "Instead, it considered the importance of daughter having the ability to openly communicate with others who have a different viewpoint."

"We reject mother's contention that the trial court expressed disapproval of her actions in encouraging daughter to share her religious views," said the justices.

But even they could not deny the mother's Christian teachings during her homeschooling efforts play a significant role.

"There is no doubt that mother's and child's religious convictions have been a pervasive part of the parties' school placement dispute," the judges wrote. "The trial court also remarked that daughter's strong adherence to religious convictions that align with her mother's beliefs likely was the effect of 'spend[ing] her school time with her mother.'"

Simmons earlier told WND the idea of a judge ordering a child into a public school for having a "vigorous" Christian faith is a "dangerous precedent."

"We maintain the [court] allowed itself to get into a religious debate between the parents. And they punished my client, the mother and her daughter," he said.

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Budget Woes Bring New Ideas to Detroit

States are beginning to connect the dots between necessary spending and needless spending. As they work to come up with sustainable budgets the status quo is no longer affordable.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker tackled his state’s budget problem by discontinuing collective bargaining rights for the state’s public union employees. His bill also requires that these employees start contributing to their own pensions and health-care coverage.

The whole nation was aware of the battle, Gov. Walker vs. public union employees, and many other states began jumping on the “it’s time to fix our budgets” bandwagon.

States like Michigan are taking it even a step further with the city of Detroit. Why not kill two birds with one stone? The city is in economic disarray and its public education system is failing. State leaders are finding a link between the cost of education and the need to cut back spending.

The solution: school choice.

The current plan in Detroit is to convert nearly a third of its public schools into privately run charter schools. These 41 schools under consideration enroll about 16,000 of the city’s 73,000 students and would operate as public school academies starting as soon as this fall.

Not only does this proposal have a good chance of improving student’s academic performance, it would also save the district millions of dollars and possibly prevent schools from closing in the city.

Michigan is already home to 250 charter schools serving more than 94,000 of its students. Academic success at these schools has so far been very favorable.

The Center for Education Reform states that Michigan students that attend charter schools have slightly higher proficiency rates than the 17 urban host districts from which they enrolled students. The data goes on to point out that in math, for example, “52 percent of African American students at charters scored proficient or advanced, while only 47.3 percent of non-charter students from the host districts achieved at this level.”

One of the most significant perks of charter schools are they give students and parents a choice.

“Charter schools give parents more options of where to send their child,” says Americans for Limited Government’s (ALG) Rick Manning. “Also, charter schools have more freedom from the many regulations of public schools. Charter schools allow students and teachers more authority to make decisions. Instead of being accountable to rules and regulations like public schools, charter schools are focused on the students and academic achievement and upholding their charter.”

Another big different between a charter and public school, most charter schools are not subject to a teachers union.

“About 95 percent of charter schools are non-union,” says Mike Antonucci, director of the Education Intelligence Agency (EIA). This causes a lot of opposition from teachers unions. “Unions lose members,” he says whenever a new charter schools opens. “Every teacher in a charter school means one less union member and unions want more money. This can put a dent in union’s bottom line.”

And this will be the battle Michigan will have to fight.

The Wall Street Journal reports, “In Detroit, teachers in the new charter schools wouldn’t be covered under the current union contract, according to officials. But Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, said any removal of teachers from the union’s current contract wouldn’t be legal under state law and ‘would not happen under my watch.’ ”

The plan for additional charter schools is currently left in the hands of the Detroit School Board, though Michigan state legislation is attempting to hand this authority over to the emergency financial managers in the state.

If Detroit is able to adopt this plan it is expected to save the district more than $99 million.

As a possible battle between Detroit’s teachers unions and the school district and possibly even the state gets underway, it is important to note that one reason this charter school plan is being closely evaluated is due to pension costs.

District spokesman Steve Wasko wrote in an email to the Wall Street Journal that pension costs were a major financial reason for the proposal.

Like Wisconsin, Michigan faces a similar battle with its public union employees. State budgets simply cannot support their pension systems.

If this proposal is not adopted and these schools in Detroit are not converted to charter schools it is likely they will close altogether in order to help eliminate the state’s deficit, costing teacher’s jobs and student’s educational opportunity.

Will unionized public teachers put the students first and be willing to forego their union membership and teach at a charter school, or will they fight tooth and nail like they did in Wisconsin and force these schools to close leaving students without a school or teacher?

The teachers should do what they were hired to do, and that is to teach and put the children first.

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Brighter pupils may soon be allowed to skip a year or two in Britain

"Accelerating" bright pupils was once a common way of helping them but the Left look on it as a wicked denial of that treasured but chimerical "equality"

Bright pupils could be allowed to ignore GCSEs and start studying for A-levels at 14. The Education Secretary Michael Gove wants schools to fast-track the cleverest students as soon as they are ready.

Until now, schools would have been at risk of dropping down league tables if their brightest pupils did not take GCSEs. But the tables may be changed to reflect how many pupils bypass GCSEs to start on A-levels.

A Department for Education source said England should think about copying Singapore, where some 20 per cent of pupils take A-levels early.

‘We are considering much greater freedom for schools to accelerate bright kids past GCSEs to do either A-levels or pre-Us [an alternative to A-levels] and introducing league table measures that capture that and reward schools for it, not penalise them,’ the source told the Times Educational Supplement.

‘We want a system that doesn’t disincentivise schools from doing what they think is in the best interests of the kid. ‘If, for example, you said a group of pupils in the top set in maths were going to skip GCSE and go straight to AS-level [the first year of A-levels], then we want to make it clear that they have done a great job. At the moment, they would all score zero.’

The Department for Education confirmed ministers were considering the idea. Under separate plans, pupils aged six are to be made to read in front of school inspectors, it has emerged.

The random tests are part of fresh measures to raise literacy standards in primary schools after they failed to improve under Labour. And secondary school children will be tested too, with on-the-spot spelling and comprehension tests.

England’s chief inspector Christine Gilbert revealed the measures, which could come in next year, as part of plans to streamline school inspections and focus them on struggling schools.

But Christine Blower, of the National Union of Teachers, said: ‘There is already enough accountability and assessment measures for reading and literacy.’

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18 March, 2011

TN: Homeschool students gain more access

With sports rules eased, testing could come next

Public school districts already are getting calls from families that home-school their children, hoping to get them spots on football, basketball and soccer teams.

A Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association ruling last year granted access to public and private school teams for home-schooled students beginning in August. It's an opportunity to compete in regional and state tournaments and be seen by college recruiters, an opportunity most of those students don't have now.

"This allows them to try out. There's no guarantees," Metro Nashville Schools' athletic coordinator Roosevelt Sanders said. "But if I'm a great athlete and want to shine, be out front, and if I follow the guidelines, most schools welcome kids who are academically, behaviorally and athletically sound. "

The association's ruling, plus a proposal in the state legislature to give parents who home-school more testing freedom, is a sign to many that Tennessee is opening doors for its children. While some parents prefer to educate their children one-on-one or offer religious and other specialized lessons, they still want access to public school offerings.

"Not all the questions have been answered, but the state is making progress," said Rutherford County pharmacist Beth Spivey, who home-schools her fourth-grader, Sophie. "It would open the door to be able to participate in sports programs. As a taxpayer, I feel like we should be able to participate."

TN stricter than others

School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado and other states let home-schoolers pop in for sports and extracurricular activities. That hasn't been the case in Middle Tennessee.

Tennessee parents who wish to teach their children at home register their intent to do so two ways, but only the first will permit those children to play on a public school team.

* They can tell their county school district, which requires them to report annual attendance and the curriculum they use, plus bring their children in for free Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program tests in fifth and seventh grades and end-of-course exams in ninth grade.

About 3,025 home-schoolers statewide — 5 percent of the total — are registered with public school districts. If they choose to play sports, they can try out for any team in their district, Sanders said.

* They can register with umbrella groups, usually church related, that handle student transcripts and diplomas while allowing freedom from standardized state tests. A February state report showed the three largest umbrella groups combined enrolled 16,000 home-schoolers.

Sumner County-based Aaron Academy, for instance, is an umbrella group for 3,500 home-schoolers.

"We don't have classrooms where they come," said David Longoria, principal for Aaron Academy. "Parents teach their children at home. We have a testing department, records department, registration and athletics."

Members can play on Aaron Academy's football, basketball, volleyball, golf, soccer and baseball teams. Participation has led to college scholarships, Longoria said.

But students registered through umbrella groups can't play on public school teams under the athletic association's ruling. They'll have to register through the public school districts and have their grades checked just like any public school student.

"They have to approve the classes the child is taking are moving toward graduation. Some parents don't want to do that," said Bernard Childress, executive director of the state's athletic association.

He said its legislative council — made up of state, school district, private school and other leaders — felt that sort of oversight would be difficult if home-schoolers weren't registered with local districts. Prospective athletes also would have to make it through tryouts and pay a $300 activity fee.

To play for private schools, home-schoolers would have to pay full private school tuition.

"Heads of schools felt if they were going to play, there was no way they can allow anyone to play before a full-tuition paying student," Childress said.

The ruling is an initial step to open the door for home-schoolers. As with any new ruling, the association will gauge interest and monitor whether changes should be made, he said.

Some don't like ruling

The requirements are off-putting for some home-school parents. "We will not be using the TSSAA ruling to allow our son to play for a public or private school," said Lynne Dyer, a parent from Mt. Juliet who home-schools.

Her son, a junior, plays for Middle Tennessee Fire, a Brentwood-based soccer team for home-schoolers. If students are good enough, recruiters will find them, she said.

Plus, staying off public school teams would help him avoid awkward situations, she said. "Our son would likely be a welcomed addition to a high school program in terms of his skill and attitude," she said. "I am not sure players and parents would feel the same way if he took another player's position."

Barriers may be lifted

State Sen. Mike Bell, R-Riceville, who home-schooled his three oldest children, proposed legislation this session that, if passed, could lift some of the barriers to registering with public school districts.

It would no longer require home-schoolers who register with districts to take state tests. They instead could take other nationally normed exams, such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills or Stanford achievement tests.

Right now, parents who home-school registered with public school districts must hold a bachelor's degree to teach high school subjects, but those who opt for umbrella home-school organizations aren't required to have one. Bell's proposal would drop the requirement for all.

"I know parents who have nothing but a high school education, and their children are on full academic scholarships in our state," he said.

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The University vs. The Hemiversity

From the truth in advertising divisions of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Education, consider this possible headline above.

Aren’t most universities today only teaching ‘half’ (hemi-) of the available knowledge out there from human history? Isn’t the goal of a true ‘uni’(all)versity to convey knowledge from all points of view to give a student a well-rounded understanding of the complex world around them?

Truthfully, can any institute of higher education in America today honestly say that they are ‘unbiased’ in any way, shape or fashion and they encourage the full consideration of the entire range of human thought from the liberal end of the political spectrum to the conservative end?

The famous Last Oration of Otter in ‘Animal House’ just popped into our head for some reason, because if American universities are not teaching universally:

'Then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do what you want to us, but we're not going to sit here.....and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!’ Indeed.

We have been struck for many years over the ‘uncivil discourse’ that has dominated America politics for the past 30 years, the past 20 being really bad and the past 10, well, ridiculously destructive and idiotic. We think it has something to do with the idealism of the now-aging Boomers and will abate once they start leaving the national stage, to put it delicately, which we will return to later.

We were invited to speak at a panel at a ‘hemi’versity recently and were struck by the stark admission that college campuses nowadays have next to zero intent or interest in being anything other than a ‘liberal’ place where only ‘liberal’ thoughts and observations are considered ‘appropriate’ and ‘acceptable’.

At least some of the people we spoke with were willing to admit it. It used to be that college presidents and administrators ‘denied such a thing ever occurred on our campus!’, especially those state taxpayer-supported ‘hemi’versities where most of the taxes and large donations come from wealthy conservative businesspeople.

We think college campuses have a role to play in restoring comity (not ‘comedy’) and civility to the public discourse and debate. And it will be once again by becoming a place of ‘universal’ thought and discussion where people can learn to agree to disagree in an agreeable manner, mainly by opening discussion of the full range of views out there.

Our contention is that unless people of different persuasions talk to each other on a regular basis, no progress or compromises are ever going to be made in the public arena. Why? Because if you 'hate' another person for their ‘extreme’ views but have never met them in person, it is next to impossible to ever come to some common solution…on anything.

Ever see a married couple try to reconcile their differences? They can’t do it without talking to each other, many times with a counselor in between.

A true ‘uni’versity could be such a ‘healing counselor’ for a nation torn apart by decades of debate and hate-filled speech on abortion, race relations, gay rights, property rights, illegal immigrants, unemployment, Iraq, the CIA and global warming.

And we need to come together and solve some very large problems like the budget deficit, Social Security, Medicare and tax policy right now, like tomorrow morning before it is truly ‘too late’ to solve them.

Here’s the really odd thing to us: Much of today’s thought that is considered to be ‘conservative’ actually has its roots in the ‘classical liberal’ thinking of the 17th and 18th century in Europe where freedom of the individual and liberty in all human activity began to take root after eons of chieftain and monarchial rule.

If a classical liberal free-range thinker such as David Ricardo or Adam Smith applied today to teach at a ‘Hemi’versity of (name your state)’, would they be considered a ‘crazy right-wing free-market supply-sider whackjob’ or would they be given tenure right there on the spot? We wonder.

Back to the Boomers: Read the great book, ‘Generations’ by Neil Howe and Bill Strauss, written in 1991. You X’ers and Y’ers and Millennials will learn that these two guys are the ones who coined your generations in such a manner first…so blame them if you weren’t named something great like ‘The Greatest Generation’. (you gotta earn that first though)

Neil used to come by the congressional office to discuss his theories of how generations actually have distinctive characteristics as a whole such as ‘idealistic’, ‘practical’ or ‘silent’.

Guess what the Boomers of the ‘free love’, ‘more drugs’, ‘Make Love, Not War’ generation of the ‘60s are? You got it…’idealistic’….just like the Transcendentalists of the pre-Civil War era who wanted to end slavery.

And guess what characteristic trait is both admirable and destructive to both generations at the same time? Their collective sense of ‘righteousness’….the conviction that ‘I am right!’ which means that ‘You are wrong!’.

And that leads to stalemate and a digging-in of heels on opposite sides. Sound familiar, like for the past 10 years?

‘Hemi-versities’ becoming ‘uni’versities again can help restore the sense of balance and practical politics to the national stage, especially as the Boomers die off, (oops! sorry but is it going to happen) and the more practical and solution-oriented X’ers take their rightful place in American politics.

We are actually more optimistic about the future because of this demographic change that is underway right now beneath your very nose.

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The proof that British exam results HAVE been inflated: OECD warns UK schools are out of step

Exam grades have been artificially inflated and billions of pounds in increased spending on education wasted, according to a damning international report. It is further confirmation of what many have long suspected: that relentlessly improving GCSE and A-level results have hidden a true picture of failure in our schools.

The report, from the highly respected Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, concludes that pupils’ actual performance remains ‘static’ and ‘uneven’.

The share of A-levels awarded at grade A has risen continually over the past 18 years and trebled since 1980, it says, but independent surveys of students’ cognitive skills ‘do not support this development’.

Most damagingly, the report concludes that despite Labour’s doubling of spending on education since 2000, children’s success remains ‘strongly related to parents’ income and background’.

The education budget soared from £35.8billion to £71billion under Labour. But Britain has plummeted down worldwide education rankings in the past decade, with nations such as Estonia and Poland overtaking us in reading, maths and science.

The study of Britain’s economic performance by the OECD, published yesterday, focused heavily on failings in our education system, which critics say leaves millions of children entering the workplace without the necessary skills to succeed.

Fuelling concerns that exams have increasingly been ‘dumbed down’ to give the illusion of progress, the report said: ‘Official test scores and grades in England show systematically and significantly better performance than international and independent tests.

‘The measures used by the Office for National Statistics... show significant increases in quality over time, while the measures based on cognitive tests not used for grading show declines or minimal improvements.’

The OECD added: ‘Despite sharply rising school spending per pupil during the last ten years, improvements in schooling outcomes have been limited in the United Kingdom.’

The OECD said there had been insufficient focus on disadvantaged students in educational spending - leading to ‘large disparities’ in pupils’ success. ‘Incomes and educational outcomes are unevenly distributed in the United Kingdom compared to many other OECD countries, and intergenerational social mobility is low,’ the report said.

‘Schooling outcomes in the United Kingdom are among the more unequal in the OECD area. This leaves many students from weaker socio–economic backgrounds with insufficient levels of competence, which hampers their chances in the labour market and higher education.’

Early years provision was also letting down many pupils, it concluded, adding: ‘Disadvantaged children seemed to perform worse in 2006 than in 2001, while the impact of parents’ income on six–year-olds’ cognitive and non–cognitive skills has if anything increased recently.’

The organisation also condemned a ‘confusing and rapidly changing array of often low-quality vocational programmes’ for 16 to 18-year-olds.

It backed the Coalition’s move to create a new network of ‘free schools’, run by charities, businesses or groups of parents and freed from state control, adding: ‘Increasing user choice would... induce stronger competition between schools which could provide better educational outcomes.’

Chancellor George Osborne yesterday said the OECD report provided emphatic justification for the Coalition’s education reforms. He promised new measures to boost social mobility by targeting help at disadvantaged children.

Education Secretary Michael Gove said: ‘The latest OECD report confirms that Labour’s spending on education didn’t secure the improvement it should have. But the good news is that the OECD backs the reforms we’re introducing. ‘It supports our plans to open new schools, increase choice, reform league tables and give more support to the poorest.’

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17 March, 2011

US Public Schools: Progressive Indoctrination Camps

Last week, my main point was that liberals couldn't care less about changing anything in public schools because they are producing exactly what liberals want. And that biased programming will deepen in the minds and hearts of America's young people unless we patriots stand up in every community, resist those progressive tides and demand alternatives.

There are ways to improve national academic imbalances. In Part 2 here, I give seven ways to counter that torrent of progressivism. Among the list of correctives that have been proved to work are the following:

1) Vocalize your opinions to local, state and federal representatives that government and unions need to have less of a role in running our children's education and more of a role in supporting parents' educational decisions for their children. Children belong to their parents, not to the government or unions. And parents must retain the right to personalize their children's education as they so wish.

2) Don't blindly accept a public school's or university's education plan based solely upon its name, past reputation or slick marketing. Confront the administration. Ask the hard questions of teachers and professors.

3) If you experience teachers or courses that create an intimidating atmosphere for expressing varied opinions, disparage alternative views, or advance one-sided political or social ideologies, report them to the administration or the school board. And if your concerns aren't heard, go to the district office. If the district doesn't listen, then take your complaints to other parents and the online community by posting blogs or sending mass e-mails. If our government isn't going to hold our academic institutions accountable, then its citizens must.

4) Encourage local schools and colleges to accept Students For Academic Freedom's "Academic Bill of Rights" and "The Student Bill of Rights," which are located online.

5) Consider starting a countercultural mission by teaching or assisting in a public school, college or university or even in the U.S. Department of Education. Whether or not you have a child in a public school, you still can be an active and vocal part of your school's board, PTA or equivalent. Volunteer to assist in any way that could balance the academic current.

6) And what if public schools don't improve or match the values and beliefs in our homes? Then we must remove our children from public schools and seek private alternatives, chartered schools, Christian schools or home schooling co-ops. Encourage older children to attend a private, conservative or Christian college or university, such as Liberty University or Patrick Henry College on the East Coast and Biola University, Azusa Pacific University, Pepperdine University, Westmont College or Bethany University on the West Coast. As I said last week, if you want to improve U.S. public education, support the competition.

7) Lastly, work to install a Bible curriculum into your public school district. Yes, it's legal, constitutional and being placed right now in thousands of schools across the country. A brand-new electronic version of the curriculum is available this week. The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools' curriculum has been voted into 572 school districts (2,086 high schools) in 38 states, from Alaska and California to Pennsylvania and Florida. Ninety-three percent of school boards that have been approached to date with the curriculum have voted to implement it because the course helps students understand the Bible's influence and impact on history, literature, our legal and educational systems, art, archaeology and other parts of civilization. In this elective class, students are required to read through their textbook -- the Bible.

For a contribution of any size, you will receive a starter package with a step-by-step guide, all legal data necessary to satisfy the questions of school board members, letters from school districts that have implemented it, the table of contents of the Bible curriculum, and other NCBCPS information.

Send to: National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, 2816-A. Battleground Ave., Box 313, Greensboro, NC 27408. Phone: 1-877-On-Bible or 336-272-3799. Fax: 336-272-7199. Website: http://www.BibleInSchools.net.

Thomas Jefferson was an enthusiastic advocate for public education and believed it was the key to preserving a republican government and society. Yet he was equally an ardent opponent against "any tyranny over the mind of man." Whether that dominance were sectarianism or secularism, conservatism or liberalism, Jefferson (and, I believe, our other Founders) would oppose and seek to correct today's disproportions in our nation's public schools.

If Jefferson supported reform in public education as a prerequisite for a lasting republican nation, would he not expect the same of us today?

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EDUCATION ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

Four current articles below

Anyone Who Says Violence Never Solved Anything....

Is such an abject idiot it is probably not even worth engaging in conversation with her. Seriously. Violence never solved anything? What solved the problem of Nazi Germany? Butterfly cakes and Darjeeling tea? When you are faced with evil, it is simply cowardly not to stand against it, even if standing against it sometimes means using your fists.

If someone was attacking my family, for example, I wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever it took to protect them. And if someone was attacking your family and you stood by and tried to negotiate while they were being beaten or worse, I would think you a miserable excuse for a human being.

So when I saw this video of an incident at Chifley College’s Dunheved Campus in western Sydney, gol darn if I wasn’t cheering at the end:



That is one bully who will hesitate to bully again.

When this was posted on Facebook and Youtube (and then removed), the vast majority of commenters supported and even celebrated the right of the boy who was attacked to defend himself. I think he showed admirable patience and restraint.

But guess what the authorities said? Police and bullying experts are concerned by the video’s publication on Facebook and the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the older boy’s retaliation against his attacker. “We don’t believe that violence is ever the answer,” Mr Dalgleish says. “We believe there are other ways that children can manage this.”

What a jerk.

Both the boys were suspended by school authorities.

What jerks.

The boy who was attacked had a right to defend himself. No one else was. No teacher was in sight.

That other young people agreed so strongly gives me hope that despite the best efforts of counsellors and social workers, a large part of this generation is refusing to be moulded into a bunch of lily livered nancies.

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Unrealistic school bullying policies

SCHOOLS are still using ineffective anti-bullying strategies and some aren't putting their policies into practice, experts warn, as the rate of bullying in Queensland playgrounds continues to climb.

Experts say schools need to be more effective not work harder. Research shows a campaign to encourage child "bystanders" to confront bullies is basically futile, the Courier-Mail reported.

The research, to be presented at a conference in Brisbane tomorrow by renowned bullying expert Professor Donna Cross, will reveal most children are too scared to confront peers who bully. But it also shows "bystanders" can make a crucial difference by supporting victims after the attack.

Prof Cross said it was "almost unrealistic" to ask children to confront bullies on behalf of victims. "Our data is showing that kids won't. They are afraid that they will be targeted (next)," she said.

"But they do say: 'You know what? I can go over to the person who has been victimised and invite them to join my group or get them to come with me.' "Extinguishing the audience will be a very powerful message to children that bully."

She said most schools trying hard to deal with bullying weren't concentrating on this approach and they needed more resources to help them deal with the issue. "They need time to assess their practices . . . and then address those issues, instead of saying: 'I need to do more.' Most schools have policies . . . but they sit on the shelf."

Queensland's state-appointed bullying expert, psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg, said bystanders were the main emphasis of his workshops in state schools. "The problem at the moment is we have the Genovese syndrome or bystander effect people don't want to get involved in conflict," he said.

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Blacks don't want to send their kids to school with the children of other blacks

I guess I can't blame them. But if blacks don't think much of black children, why should other people think differently?

RACIAL pressures have boiled over again in Dubbo with the Minister for Education, Verity Firth, restructuring the city's school system in a way critics argue will effectively create a separate campus for Aborigines.

The decision will partially reverse the last major reorganisation, in 1988, when the three high schools were amalgamated as Dubbo College, although retaining three campuses.

The South Dubbo campus, for years 7 to 9, will revert to a comprehensive school for years 7 to 12. Delroy campus, in West Dubbo, will continue to cater for years 7 to 9, and Dubbo College senior campus for years 10 to 12.

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The fact that the Delroy campus is in West Dubbo, which has a higher proportion of indigenous families, and will accordingly have a higher indigenous student population, has inflamed local sentiment.

West Dubbo is the site of the failed Gordon Estate, which had a high concentration of Aborigines but became racked with violence and antisocial behaviour.

There are far more non-indigenous families in West Dubbo, but with the creation of a comprehensive high school in South Dubbo, it is expected many non-indigenous families will send their children there.

Alca Simpson, a member of the local Aboriginal Education Consultative Group, said in a letter to the local paper, the Daily Liberal, that the government was implementing discriminatory policies of the past.

He said past policies had restricted "the self-determination of indigenous students in the public education system in Dubbo".

A meeting of a P&C Association at South Dubbo campus discussed the issue but Mr Simpson said teachers who supported the new system became instant association members and stacked the meeting.

"It is my opinion that this was never about student outcomes as far as the NSW Teachers Federation are concerned but only about teachers' wants and needs," Mr Simpson said.

He regarded it as "a planned move to attack the credibility of honest, hard-working parents and citizens because they chose to voice their opinion and their democratic right to write a letter".

"Why should teachers [union members] who have not shown any interest in attending meetings before last week now show such a big concern over their P&C committee?

"I would also make it public knowledge that the executive and members of the local AECG have … submitted a letter of complete no confidence in the minister's recommendations in regard to the restructuring of the existing Dubbo College Education model."

The acting president of the NSW Teachers Federation, Gary Zadkovich, said yesterday that claims that an apartheid system was being created in Dubbo were wrong.

There had been problems since the creation of the college system in Dubbo and Ms Firth had decided to give parents two options: a comprehensive high school or a college system. "There are concerns about the model proposed by the minister, in that it may lead to negative consequences. "The federation's policy is that we prefer to have stand-alone, years 7 to 12, comprehensive high schools," he said.

A spokeswoman for Ms Firth said the new structure would not result in racially segregated education in Dubbo.

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Australian universities giving undeserved grades to overseas students

There have been some notorious instances of this

Gigi Foster knows her disturbing research findings on international students won't make her many friends. In a university sector grown dependent on international fee revenue, it might not do much to progress her academic career either.

But the audience she wants to reach is not academe but the policy-makers. It's at this level where change could be driven to address the poor language and cultural skills she says are undermining their performance. "It is risky for me, but it is my duty to look at this," says Foster, a Harvard graduate who moved to Australia in 2003.

But she believes her research provides evidence that universities are too often turning a blind eye to the poor written and verbal English skills of many international students. She says her statistical analysis reveals that international students are being allowed to underperform and this is being camouflaged to an extent by grade inflation.

At the same time, these poor English skills weigh on the results of domestic students in the same tutorials. "I want Australian policy-makers to see what is actually happening," Foster says.

But she believes concerns over fee revenue, sensitivities over the potential for appearing "xenophobic" and political correctness are preventing the sector from confronting the issues.

Wary of the reaction her analysis is likely to generate, she says she put all her "econometric firepower" into trying to disprove the findings, but the effects wouldn't go away.

She says she is astounded that no one in the sector had previously sought to analyse the detailed student data available in universities. With the help of funding from the Australian Research Council, Foster analysed detailed data on 12,846 students made available by the business faculties of the University of South Australia and the University of Technology, Sydney, including enrolment and applications data from 2008 and 2009. The data covered student demographics, course and tutorial selection and marks.

Her main statistical findings are that international students from non-English-speaking backgrounds underperform domestic students based on mean marks by four points on a 100 grade scale. She interprets this to be a result of language and cultural barriers.

But she also found that the underperformance is less pronounced when there are proportionately more international students in the class. Effectively, international student marks are buoyed when there are large concentrations of such students, with the stunning finding that classes comprised entirely of international students would on average be 6.5 points higher than those courses comprised solely of domestic students.

She believes this may be evidence that international students are benefiting from markers "grading on the curve" to keep mark distributions similar across course offerings, but effectively they are lowering grading standards.

"The research provides evidence that international non-English-speaking background students effectively free ride on each other, ending up with higher marks than they would have otherwise obtained," she says.

She also found that for every 1 per cent increase in the number of international students from non-English-speaking backgrounds in tutorials, the marks of domestic students in the tutorials fell by 0.0134 points.

The key policy implication, she says, is that international students from non-English-speaking backgrounds should have extensive language and cultural training before starting higher education programs. "The sector is too cash-strapped, or thinks it is too cash-strapped, that it isn't willing to put the fees international students are paying towards that," Foster says.

But while her analysis, published as a preliminary working paper, may stack up statistically, other researchers say they are wary of the interpretations Foster is putting on the results.

University of Melbourne international education expert Simon Marginson and Melbourne Institute economist Ross Williams have not been convinced by some of her interpretations. They point out that international students benefit from being grouped together in that they co-operate more and feel less isolated. "All the research tells us that group co-operation between international students is the norm, especially among same culture internationals," Marginson says.

He says while the study is potentially important, it needs more explanation and wider analysis. Williams also is concerned that in interpreting her results, Foster may be exaggerating the importance of some of the statistical differences she found.

But for RMIT University higher education policy adviser Gavin Moodie, the research is important and Foster's interpretations are valid. "The size and the extent of the effect is much greater than I anticipated and it does seem to be a systemic problem," he says. "Now is the time for case study and individual interviews to be done to find out the particular problem and what to do about it."

Moodie points to the finding that the presence of domestic students from non-English-speaking backgrounds in tutorials had a positive influence on international students' marks, suggesting the issue may not simply be poor English skills but the result of cultural barriers.

Foster, who is also undergraduate co-ordinator at the University of NSW, believes her research will resonate with academics who are having to overlook the lack of English skills in assessing students. She says the most common request from students is for English language support, but there are not enough places available.

Business academic Tony English of Flinders University says he has long complained of what he claims is "soft" marking of international and domestic students with poor English skills, only to feel ostracised as a result. "If you raise these issues at a public forum, some people will behave towards you as if they have suddenly realised that you are carrying something like bird flu," English says.

He says academics are subject to implicit but unvoiced and unwritten pressure from management to overlook the lack of English skills of students. Furthermore, those failing large numbers of students risk having their teaching skills criticised, as well as being undermined by negative student feedback. As a result, too many academics are unwilling make a fuss because it could cost them a promotion and perhaps their job, especially if they are casuals.

As English writes in this week's HES, the combination of faculty grade distribution requirements and poor English skills means academics come under pressure if their failure rates are too high. "The whole system is designed to progress students who shouldn't be progressed," he says. "People are pretending this isn't happening and that degrees are what they always were. But I think it is fraudulent."

A former part-time adjunct lecturer in business at a large Sydney university who didn't wish to be named told the HES the lack of English skills of many of his international students appeared to make a mockery of the university's entry criteria based on test scores.

He says he never felt pressure to pass students but he found himself having to ignore their bad English and awarding marks on what he suspected students were trying to express. He says during his five years of teaching, he was shocked to find not once had a member of the faculty sat in on one of his courses to assess his teaching ability.

He notes that last year, out of a class of 110 students, more than 80 were international and, of these, 40 had such bad English that he felt it was compromising their performance. "It isn't international students who are a problem. It is those students who don't have enough English proficiency to be there in the first place who are the problem," he says.

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16 March, 2011

Fixing America's Education Problem

Some e-mail messages seem to float around the Internet forever. Most of them, especially the ones about Lindsay Lohan, low mortgage rates, or offshore pharmaceuticals, serve only to clutter up your inbasket. But every so often, a message appears with some valuable nuggets of information. One of these reappeared on my computer last week.

The message starts by listing America’s ten poorest cities, based on the percentage of people living below the poverty line. It then identifies what all ten cities have in common: They have all been run by Democrats for at least 25 years. (Is anyone surprised?) Some of these cities have never once elected a Republican Mayor in over a century! What it doesn’t say is that the school systems in these cities have been run by the Democrats for the same period – in most cases much longer.

The lesson here is that you cannot fix a problem until you come to grips with its source. Most of America has lived in denial about our public education system for at least 30 years. After all, every poll says that the public believes that Democrats are better at handling the issue of education. How can this delusion persist, when the school system in every major American city is a disaster, and every single one of them is run exclusively by a Democrat machine in cahoots with their union partners?

The professional Left was beside itself when America’s education ranking dropped in a study recently released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a reputable organization of 34 of the world’s most advanced countries. But when you read their columns warning of the coming Armageddon for America (nothing new from the left), not one commentary mentioned the fact that their compadres are the ones principally responsible for these problems.

After all, these are the people who gave us the self-esteem movement, English as a Second Language, grade inflation, social promotion, the elimination of Western Civ and the dummying down of education requirements and the curriculum in its entirety. One has to wonder what they thought would become of our educational system after all of these maneuvers.

Interestingly, Robert J. Samuelson, columnist for the Washington Post, pinpointed the problem by breaking it down into its components. The OECD study of 15-year-olds puts America right in the middle at 17th (out of 34), with an overall score of 500, just slightly above the average (493). Samuelson pointed out that while the average score for non-Hispanic whites in America is in the top ten (at 525) and that Asian-Americans actually place second in the world, the scores that brought down American averages were among blacks (441) and Hispanics (466). Only students in Shanghai, China outperformed Asian-Americans (although the study doesn’t state how the other billion or so Chinese fared).

The vast majority of America’s blacks and Hispanics are located in the large cities, and – again, no surprise here – these are the areas where the Democrats and their union friends have the greatest control. And yet, there is very little demand from the left to do anything about this. Of course, most of them are too busy car-pooling their children to private schools.

A recent documentary, "Waiting for Superman," awakened the left to how bad the problem has become. Oprah Winfrey saw the movie and did a show on it, as if she had never known there was a problem with inner-city schools. All of a sudden the left woke up to who actually created the problem – they did.

Before "Waiting for Superman," there was a 2010 documentary by Madeleine Sackler called "The Lottery." Her film covers some of the same territory as "Waiting for Superman," with some of the same principal characters. "The Lottery" focuses on four families, each of whom is attempting to get a child enrolled into a charter school in New York City. The film illustrates the desperation and despair of those who suffer under the yoke of the New York’s education establishment – a burden and a challenge no different than those faced by parents and children in every other major city in the nation. The test scores shown by the OECD study show the devastating effects of these bureaucracies on the children of America.

Eva Moskowitz runs the charter school that is the focus of "The Lottery." The film depicts her attempt to open a second school, along with the reprehensible reaction of the teachers union, which hired ACORN protesters to try and stop the second charter from being opened (ironically, at the location of a former NYC school which was shut down due to poor performance). The interaction between Moskowitz and the school board/city council members is riveting.

Families are staking everything on getting their kids into her schools because they know their childrens’ futures depend on it. And, yet, she is treated as a pariah by politicians whose first priority is to protect the unions.

Ultimately, when the lottery takes place, you experience the elation of the winners, but worse, you share the devastation of the losers. No child in America should be forced to have their future determined by picking their name out of a hat. That is what the public education system has done to these kids.

The responsibility lies in the hands of the education establishment, their union cronies, and, yes, the teachers who vote for and accept these unions and their leaders. They are all guilty of destroying the future of urban children throughout America. The question becomes how we tear down their structure.

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Oxford will shave off £1,000 from its £9,000 fees... but only if your parents earn less than £25,000

Students whose parents earn more than £25,000 will pay full fees of £9,000 at Oxford University, it has emerged. And up to £2,100 of this annual amount will fund the fees and living costs of poorer students.

Observers have branded the move a ‘clunky, clumsy and unfair’ attempt at social engineering and an assault on the squeezed middle classes. They also warn the low threshold for full fees will benefit divorced parents and even encourage couples to split before their child goes to university.

Oxford University is the latest to declare that it will charge up to £9,000 for students in 2012, after Cambridge, Exeter and Imperial College London. But it is the first to explain exactly how the figures will add up.

It also announced an array of fee waivers and bursaries for poor students – totalling £7million – designed to comply with the Coalition’s requirements for broadening access. These say that any university wishing to charge fees of more than £6,000 must sign a ‘fair access’ agreement with the Office for Fair Access setting out measures to recruit teenagers from impoverished backgrounds.

OFFA guidelines state universities must spend 15 to 30 per cent of each tuition fee above £6,000 on schemes to broaden access – around £900.

However, under Oxford’s proposals this percentage will represent up to 70 per cent of fees above £6,000, more than doubling the guideline maximum to £2,100.

Oxford will admit 3,150 undergraduates in 2012. Of these, 2,646 will come from households with incomes of more than £25,000.
What a degree will cost

They will contribute £7million every year to bursaries and fee waivers aimed at impoverished students. Just 504 of next year’s students will be charged less than £9,000. Their fees will be staggered in line with household income.

In addition, Oxford will give a raft of cash awards – ranging from £4,300 in the first year for those with a household income of less than £16,000, up to £1,000 for between £40,000 to £42,600.

There will be no concessions for any student whose parents earn more than £42,600.

Social mobility expert Peter Saunders, emeritus professor of sociology at Sussex University, criticised the measure, saying: ‘It’s brazen and overt social engineering and clearly a clunky and clumsy and unfair attempt to redistribute wealth from the lower middle to the bottom.

‘Fees are repayable when people earn above a threshold so parents’ earnings are irrelevant.’

He added that the policy ‘will actively encourage (parents to) split as it could halve their child’s university debts’.

However, Oxford University’s vice-chancellor, Professor Andrew Hamilton, insisted: ‘These proposals show the strength of our commitment to being accessible for all, and to attracting the very brightest students, whatever their circumstances.’

The university states that it costs an average of £16,000 a year to teach a student at Oxford – double the cost of other institutions, bar Cambridge.

SOURCE






Australia's proposed national school curriculum is full of Leftist indoctrination

by Kevin Donnelly

In the lead-up to the 2007 federal election, ALP leader Kevin Rudd staked the middle ground in education by advocating a conservative agenda, embracing a back-to-basics curriculum and a return to traditional subjects.

During her time as Education Minister Julia Gillard also defined herself as an education conservative and described the ALP’s national curriculum as exemplifying a return to academic standards and rigour.

In one speech Gillard described herself as “a passionate believer in the benefits of a rigorous study of traditional disciplines”, and in a second speech she boasted, “What we’re on about is making sure that the absolute basics of knowledge, absolute basics of education are taught right across the country.”

On replacing her as Minister for Education, Peter Garrett maintained the ALP line that education is a major priority and described the national curriculum as “world-class” and “vital to our goal of giving every child a great education”.

Has the ALP government delivered on its promise to develop a national curriculum that embraces the “traditional disciplines” and “the absolute basics of knowledge”? Based on the English, mathematics, history and science documents (dated December 8, 2010) the answer is “No”.

Instead of heralding a return to traditional learning, the proposed national curriculum represents a continuation of the type of substandard, politically correct approach to education that has bedevilled Australian schools over the last 30 to 40 years.

The more traditional approach to the curriculum, while acknowledging the importance of the learner and the fact that disciplines evolve over time, places subjects like history, mathematics, the sciences, the arts, music and languages and literature centre stage.

Matthew Arnold’s view that education should introduce students to the “best which has been thought and said” is often referred to in this context, as is Michael Oakeshott’s metaphor of education involving a conversation that is larger than the individual and that has been going on for hundreds of years.

This liberal view of education, while drawing on a range of cultures and traditions, is closely associated with the rise of Western civilisation and our Judeo-Christian heritage. In the same way that the nation’s legal and political systems and language and literature owe a great debt to and can only be understood in the context of this Western heritage, so to with education.

Instead of respecting and acknowledging this liberal view of education, the national curriculum gives primacy to three politically correct “cross-curriculum priorities” (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and sustainability) and seven “general capabilities” (including intercultural understanding, competence in information and communication technology, and critical and creative thinking).

Every subject in the national curriculum must incorporate the aforementioned perspectives and capabilities. As a result, the disciplines of knowledge are undervalued and distorted to make them conform to the ALP’s and the Left-intelligentsia’s preoccupation with Asia, indigenous Australians, and teaching so-called work-related generic skills.

Instead of Asia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, why not define the curriculum in terms of Australia’s Western heritage and Judeo-Christian tradition?

In relation to the seven capabilities (most of which are subject-specific and impossible to teach as abstracted skills) the case can also be put that it is more important that students commit themselves to the qualities and dispositions associated with a liberal education, such as civility, morality, objectivity, compassion, kindness, humility, creativity and truth-telling.

The history curriculum provides a clear example of this unwillingness to acknowledge the grand narrative associated with the rise of Western civilisation and the importance of Christianity. In one section the document asks students to act with “moral integrity” and to “work for the common good” but the curriculum writers refuse to acknowledge that such ethical values are culturally specific and can only be understood in Australia in the context of the Western tradition.

In an early draft of the history curriculum, while “Christian” appeared once, there was no mention of Christianity. While the most recent document refers to Christianity a number of times (and once to the Catholic Church) the focus is very much on diversity, difference and cultural relativism. When Christianity is mentioned it is usually in the context of other religions (Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam) and there is no attempt to detail the historical and cultural significance of Christianity.

When studying ancient Rome, for example, students are asked to consider the rise of the Roman empire and the spread of religious beliefs, but there is no mention of Christianity. In the study of Medieval Europe, Christianity is included, but the stated aims, that students should learn about “the dominance of the Catholic Church and the role of significant individuals such as Charlemagne”, “the Church’s power in terms of wealth and labour” and “the nature and power of the Church in this period”, indicate that students will be left with a less than favourable impression.

The decision by the curriculum writers to ignore the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) in favour of the politically correct alternatives, BCE (Before the Common Era), BP (Before Present) and CE (Common Era) further illustrates the extent to which Christianity is ignored and undervalued.

It should be noted that the most recent history document represents a slight improvement on earlier drafts. While the draft dated March 2010 made no mention of the Magna Carta, the Westminster system of government and concepts like the separation of powers, the most recent edition does when stating that Year 6 children should learn about “the Westminster system”, “constitutional monarchy” and “federalism”.

Unfortunately, though, instead of representing a balanced approach by recognising the debt Australia owes to its Anglo-Celtic heritage, it is clear that the curriculum writers are still committed to a view of history that uncritically promotes diversity and difference (code for multiculturalism) and that presents Australia as a nation of tribes.

The document’s treatment of migration provides a good example of this bias. Even though migration to Australia since the First Fleet has been primarily Anglo-Celtic and European in origin, teachers are told that students must be taught about “the long history of migration to Australia by people from Asia and appreciate the contributions made over time by Asian Australians to the development of Australia’s culture and society”.

Instead of praising the fact that Australia has welcomed so many immigrants from often hostile foreign shores and allowed them to live in peace and prosperity, the history document, when asking students to study migration, refers to “internment camps”, “assimilation policies” and “mandatory detention”.

Another example relates to slavery, where the history document is happy to refer to slavery during the Roman empire and to the European trans-Atlantic slave trade but, no mention is made of slavery under Islam. It is also no surprise that, when dealing with ideas and movements during the period 1750–1918, Year 9 students are only expected to study “progressive” ideas, with no mention of classical liberal philosophy or the type of conservative ideas associated with Edmund Burke.

SOURCE



15 March, 2011

Why Less School Earns Students More Money

If you want a good education and a pile of money, you do not need a college degree. At least, not if you’re an American. Modern-day higher education is failing students both in terms of life-long earning potential and overall educational quality. Today, I will explain why college degrees are becoming inconsequential and offer a set of possible solutions.

When your college funds are going to professors like sex toy demo guru, John Michael Bailey at Northwestern University, it’s probably a good time to look at what your investment is really getting you. The cost of college tuition is rising significantly faster than inflation and wages are not keeping up with inflation, reports The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, the average salary for college graduates dipped 1.7 percent from 2009 to 2010, says The New York Times.

More School, Less Pay, Fewer Jobs

Government policies such as high taxes and Clinton-era loose home-ownership policies led to the current economic downturn and have created a situation where a higher education yields higher debt and fewer high-paying job opportunities for college graduates.

Today, a plumber with a high school diploma can out-earn a teacher, an MBA-holder, and, even a doctor. This is due to factors like rising tuition and student housing costs, the greater number of pre-retirement years spent studying instead of making money, mounting student loan debt and the way the progressive income tax hits a doctor harder than a plumber who will spread his or her wealth over more years in the workforce, Boston University Professor Laurence Kotlikoff explains in Bloomberg.

Even before the government-induced economic downturn, U.S. entrepreneurs proved that a college degree is unessential to success. Consider billionaire college dropouts like Bill Gates, Ralph Lauren, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and Michael Dell. Or, look at Taylor Swift. The 21-year-old country pop artist didn’t need a college degree to earn $45 million and the title of 2010's 12th Most Powerful Celebrity from Forbes. Yes, Charlie Sheen didn’t go to college either, but let’s just assume that he’s an outlier.

When students graduate from college today, they have a hard time finding well-paying jobs in the private sector. After long searches, many college grads give up on landing a job in their preferred career paths. This month, The New York Times reported that young college grads are joining the public sector in droves. Young people are settling for government jobs, because, at the end of the day, they need to pay the bills.

In February, the President tried to motivate the business community to create jobs with a “neighborly” fruit cake. Unfortunately, businesses can’t magically create jobs from desserts. U.S. corporations have less buying power in the U.S. today due to the 35 percent corporate income tax rate. It is simply more profitable to do business abroad.

For example, by using completely legal income shifting strategies such as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich,” Google lowered its tax rate to just 2.4 percent and cut its taxes by $3.1 billion over the past three years. Less-educated or more business-friendly populations are increasingly taking "knowledge" jobs from the U.S. and the U.K., including teaching jobs, the Guardian reports.

More school, meager gains in knowledge

The quality of a college education is deteriorating while the price is going up. Studies prove that students show essentially no gains in learning during their first two years of college. College is so easy that most students can surf through college by spending 50 percent less time studying than previous generations and still achieve a 3.2 grade-point average.

Even Ivy League colleges are resting on their laurels and failing to live up to their reputation of greatness. “Many other university programs have caught up with them academically,” W. Kent Barnds, vice president of enrollment, communications and planning at Augustina College, told USA Today.

Potential Solutions

1. Eliminate anti-business policies. For example, slash the corporate income tax rate so that U.S. corporations will retain and create well-paying jobs in the U.S. that outweigh the costs of rising tuition and inflation.

2. Encourage innovation by making entrepreneurship culturally acceptable. Not everyone needs to go to college. Sure, Steve Jobs dropped out of college, but now we have iPads. Certain young people will excel by putting the $55,000 a year that they would have spent on tuition at a prestigious institution towards building a small business.

3. Reduce college bureaucracy. Is it necessary to have fluffy positions like the “Dean of Student Life” or the “Director of Campus Diversity?” Leave these roles to student volunteers in campus clubs and students will see the savings on their tuition bills.

What do you think? What are your ideas for preventing college degrees from becoming an unessential debt burdens on young Americans and their parents?

SOURCE







To America's hot-to-protest college students

Not sure about you, but I was absolutely thrilled last week when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed the legislation ending most collective bargaining rights for government worker unions. The more these government employee unions get slapped around by reality, the happier I am.

I want to talk about the college students we saw protesting in Wisconsin ... but first, let me remind you that this whole stink wasn’t really about collective bargaining rights. The real foreign object in the punch bowl for the unions and for Democrats was the end of dues check-off; the end of the union’s ability to have dues deducted from member’s paychecks rather than relying on the members to pay those dues voluntarily. Some surveys have shown that over 50% of government union members would stop paying their dues if they had to actually write their own checks. Some of these union members pay more than $1000 a year? Big money.

Think about this: When 50% of union members stop paying their dues this means a lot less money in the pot to pay union leaders. Not only that … it means much less money for union leaders to donate to political parties. Last year about 46% of union members in Wisconsin voted Republican, yet the government worker unions sent 93% of all union campaign contributions to Democrats. Maybe those union members might want to stop paying dues if the contributions are going to go to a political party they don’t support! This would certainly not be good news for Democrats … and now perhaps you have a clearer understanding of just why The Community Organizer sent his “Organizing for America” troops to Wisconsin to keep things in check!

OK … now for the college students. Surely you saw them at the protests last week. For the most part their more cogent moments were spent standing in the Wisconsin Capital waving their fists in the air and screaming “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Now you gotta love a bunch of college students yelling “shame.” The benefits of higher education on display. Shame? Just how much under-age drinking, bong hits and Gawd-knows-what-else went on in Madison the night before?

I’m here to help. I’m here to speak for you and to send a message to these college students -- with your permission of course. If you agree that I have spoken for you then just forward this column by email to a favorite college student of yours. You can also print this and send it by snail-mail. The USPS could use the cash. Here we go:

To America’s hot-to-protest college students:

With all due respect … would you please just …..

Sit down and shut the hell up!

Have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? It really ought to be one of the first things you study in college. Wikipedia has an entry for you to read if you want to actually learn something. Here’s your link! Dunning-Kruger is about illusory superiority … illusory because a person rates their ability much higher than it actually is. This would pretty much address your pompous positioning in Madison ... this idea that since you are now an actual college student you suddenly are imbued with some superior knowledge that other people – if they just realized how brilliant you are – should tap for the benefit of all mankind. You, and only you, had all the answers to the union vs. the taxpayers impasse in Wisconsin. Congratulations.

You really need to – like -- get a grip on your bad selves. You and the rest of your pampered protestor posse are, at best, three or four years away from your parent’s complete control. You’re still not on your own. Since leaving home you have like existed in the protected environment of a college campus where harsh punishment awaits the slightest utterance that might like hurt your feelings or cause “offense,” God forbid.

Tell you what: When you’ve like been away from your mommies for a while; when you’ve shown that you can handle the rigors of academia … and, most important, when you’ve actually like spent some time on your own like earning your own living, taking care of your own needs, filing out your own tax forms, and living free of the parental and academic umbilical cord … then maybe we’ll be willing to listen to something you have to say.

Until then, please like spare us the spectacle of your moronic moral exhibitionism. Simply put, you don’t have a clue. You know it, and we know it. We also know that your participation in these protests is seen by you as some sort of a like right of passage. Maybe you should try passing some classes instead of passing your ignorance off to the taxpayers who are shouldering the cost for a huge part of whatever education you will actually receive before the harsh, cold winds of reality hit you right in the face.

If you really want something to do … gather together the student body presidents from our country’s 100 largest universities and go over there and like fix Haiti. Do that and maybe we’ll listen. Till then … well, just go back and like read the bold print.

SOURCE





Poor students 'excluded' from race for top jobs in Britain

Students from poor backgrounds are being excluded from the “hour-glass” jobs market after being pushed into taking worthless qualifications at school, according to research published today. Thousands of young people are unable to compete for highly-skilled graduate positions after being “mis-sold” GCSEs and A-levels in practical subjects, it was claimed.

Elizabeth Truss, the Conservative MP for South West Norfolk, said Britain’s poor social mobility record would only improve if pupils from low-income families were given a “fighting chance” of qualifying for top jobs.

In a study for the CentreForum think-tank, she told of increased polarisation in the employment market. The number of positions in middle-ranking skilled trades or clerical jobs has dropped in recent years because of improved technology and a move towards automated manufacturing, the report said.

At the same time, more jobs have been created in highly-skilled or unskilled positions, creating an “hourglass economy” in Britain, it was claimed. Since the mid-90s, more than 1m extra people have been employed in professional occupations such as the law and medicine, while the number of skilled tradesmen has dropped by 300,000.

But the report – Academic Rigour and Social Mobility – said poor students were increasingly unprepared for the changing jobs market after being pushed into taking vocational qualifications such as media studies at school and college. It meant they were only eligible for unskilled employment opportunities.

The study said: “The middle of the job market is being squeezed and in order to secure the growing number of professional, managerial and technical jobs, applicants require respected formal qualifications. “Low income students who don’t receive the ‘Morse code’ emanating from employers and top universities have been ‘mis-sold’ low quality GCSE and A-levels and find themselves on the outside track.”

The comments follow the publication of guidance earlier this year by the Russell Group, which represents 20 leading universities. It that said pupils taking large numbers of "softer" options, such as media studies, art and design, photography and business studies, would have less chance of securing places than those taking traditional academic courses.

According to figures, students from private schools are one-and-a-half times more likely to study maths at A-level than those in state education. In addition, only four-in-10 pupils in state comprehensives study foreign languages at GCSE, while the subjects are compulsory in more than eight out of 10 private schools up to the age of 16.

Mrs Truss suggested that schools should be measured on how many “Russell Group ready” students they produce. They could be ranked based on the number gaining three academic A-levels, she suggested.

SOURCE



14 March, 2011

'Superman's' Frankenstein Comes To Life

Last year, even as education reformers all across the country were turning cartwheels in celebration of Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” I remained skeptical. I’ve been keeping tabs on the teacher unions for years, and understand how they work hand-in-glove with the Democratic Party. Since Guggenheim is a well-known liberal (who famously directed Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”), I was certain that “Superman” would tiptoe around the destructive influence Big Labor has on the education system.

Last fall, during some down time on a business trip to New York City, I finally gave in and bought a $13 ticket at a Times Square movie theater to watch "Waiting for 'Superman.'" I was pleasantly surprised.

I’d gone in expecting Guggenheim to make excuses for the state of public education. Instead, Guggenheim grabbed the whole thing by the throat and didn't let go.

He told stories of children who were victimized by a system that puts adults first. He told of union campaign contributions that go to politicians who, in turn, act as the teacher unions’ political puppets. He showed rowdy union rallies and rubber rooms and classrooms that were out of control.

I marveled that a mainstream (liberal) movie maker was exposing the sorry state of public education and the destructive nature of the well-heeled teacher unions.

Needless to say, Guggenheim’s film did not play well with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. They set up websites to attack his film. They dispatched high profile speakers around the country to fight back. And they cheered when Guggenheim was snubbed out of a nomination for another Oscar.

I have first-hand experience of how vicious the left’s attacks can get, so I can only imagine how they treated one of their own who had dared to step out of line.

Are these attacks the reason Guggenheim is starting to pull his punches?

In a recent conference call with film watchers, Guggenheim was asked his opinion of the goings-on in Wisconsin. Perhaps forgetting his film's content about union contracts and union priorities, he called collective bargaining an "essential principle." He even went so far as to say that he feared the "pendulum could swing too far the other way and employees could be treated the way they were in the industrial era."

Huh? The idea of a public employee in a sweat shop is laughable. This is nearly as ridiculous as the president of the Michigan Education Association recently saying it’s beginning to look like “the slave days.” If they don't like how they're being treated, they can go get a job in the private sector because things are *so* much better there.

I’m beginning to wonder if Guggenheim is just a naïve Hollywood filmmaker who thought he was doing a community service by pointing out the shortcomings of public education. Perhaps he didn’t realize that he was taking on the power base of the Democratic Party – that the toes he was stepping on are protected by steel toed boots.

“Superman” correctly identified collective bargaining as a serious problem in public education. That’s how schools get saddled with three hundred-page contracts that are chock full of provisions about salary schedules (which reward years of employment instead of effectiveness), lavish health insurance and pension benefits, sick day pay outs, paid time off to conduct union business. . . on and on it goes.

(In Michigan and Wisconsin, the teacher unions even have it written into their collectively-bargained teacher contract that the school district will buy health insurance from a company owned by the teacher union!)

Guggenheim was right to make unions the villains of his film. But now that he’s starting to backpedal about collective bargaining, he’s getting heat from the reform community. There’s a bit of a mutiny on the “Waiting for ‘Superman’” Facebook page. The comments are decidedly opposed to Guggenheim's view, with some supporters going so far as to say they'll no longer promote the film.

Perhaps they'll gravitate towards "Kids Aren't Cars," a film series that pulls no punches and shows the ugly impact collective bargaining has had on American public education.

While the cause of education reform has been around for decades, I believe it wasn't until this liberal's film came on the scene (along with the ugly state budgets) that the issue finally took center stage. Guggenheim's Frankenstein has come to life. He should be proud of that, but he’s starting to waver.

My advice for Guggenheim: re-watch your film and don't go wobbly on us now.

SOURCE






It's poor kids who are betrayed by Britain's State schools

By Katharine Birbalsingh

I’m talking with three black children at one of our top public schools. They are, from what I can see, the only black children there. They joined the school in September, two year 10s and one year 12. They have been given bursaries. They used to attend state schools in London. I know their schools. They are a mixture of good and excellent London state schools. I ask them what the main differences are between school in London and their new school.

“You’re learning all the time here. In London, you only learn in lesson time, and even then…”

I press them on this and it is clear that living on the premises and having lessons so much of the time makes a world of difference. That is something we simply cannot do in the state sector. So I find out more and ask them to compare lessons on their own.

In the end, each one says that what they learn in ONE lesson at this public school would take them three lessons in their good/excellent London state school. So their old classmates continue to learn ONE THIRD of what these lucky children are now learning regularly, thanks to their bursaries. I’m not surprised, but appearing astounded I ask them why.

“Behaviour.” One of the girls laughs in an embarrassed way, shaking her head. The other girl agrees. “Behaviour…the kids in London chat and mess about all of the time. But here they’re quiet and listen to the teacher.”

The boy however stays quiet as the girls tell me how the behaviour at this school is so good they cannot quite believe it. Finally the boy shakes his head. “I don’t think it’s because of the behaviour. Yes, that’s a problem. But it’s because in London, all they ever do is repeat the same things over and over. It’s boring.”

I raise my eyebrows. “You mean the teacher teaches you the same thing over and over again?”

The three of them nod. I look at the boy. “So why do you think your teachers in London do that?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because they think we’re stupid.” He pauses. “No, I think it’s because they’re trying to make everyone the same. They’re trying to get everyone in the class up to the same level.”

I know exactly what he means, of course. All three children have hit the nail on the head. The behaviour is bad. The exams don’t judge the kids on their knowledge (on the whole) and emphasise skills. Schools and teachers are under pressure to tick league table boxes. But if you keep teaching the same knowledge over and over, it’s easy and it pacifies the children. Skills get taught well enough to tick the C box. The behaviour remains bad but the boxes get ticked.

I look at the boy. “So what do your friends think about you being here?”

He smiles. “They think I’m lucky. They wish they could be me.”

You bet they do. These children have been given the chance of a lifetime. While it is true that not all of our children can go to public schools, why on earth is it not possible that during lesson time, we might teach our children three times as much as they are currently taught? Because of our prejudice against the poor, that’s why. These kids can’t do it, we say. They’re black. They’re poor. They live on a council estate. Teach them five academic subjects? Impossible! Get them interested in learning about Shakespeare? Impossible! Better to let them rot.

Am I wrong to want ALL of our children to have something similar to this public school?

SOURCE






Demand for a Catholic education has been growing in Wales

There are more than 2,300 Catholic schools in England and Wales, educating around 800,000 pupils and employing 40,000 teachers.

In fact, faith schools are enjoying a boom in many European countries and international research suggests their popularity is based on their ability to outperform secular schools.

Last year’s papal visit gave the Western world’s oldest institution a welcome boost and triggered a celebration of Catholic education in the UK.

Organisers hope a series of events taking place across the academic year will help promote the achievements of its schools.

Dr Martin Price, vice-chairman of the Archdiocese of Cardiff Schools Commission, said Catholic education is often misunderstood. “Our individual schools have a good profile in their communities, but the context in which they operate is less well-known,” he said. “Our schools are some of the most successful in Wales and are constantly at the forefront of Assembly Government strategies, whether on academic, well-being or ethical lines. They are non-selective and have a full range of social, ability and ethnic mix.”

Catholic schools make up around 5% of all those in Wales, with 15 secondary and 80 primary from Anglesey to Newport. Schools are voluntary-aided and receive the same revenue funding as any state school. Their day-to-day running is the same as any other maintained by the local authority, though the church, with contributions from the Catholic community, provides 15% funding for all capital projects.

Dr Price said that with the majority of Catholic schools oversubscribed, governors had to adhere to a strict oversubscription criteria. “Each Catholic school has its own admissions criteria and there are forms to fill in and register with the local authority,” he said. “Normally, we would look at Catholics local to the area first. Then we would look at children who are members of another Christian denomination and why they have chosen that particular school.”

Dr Price said that with a wider catchment area, there are varying numbers of Catholicism in school intake across Wales. But with Catholic pupils from the Philippines, Eastern Europe and India, schools are well-placed to cater for children of all faiths.

According to Dr Price, an influx of Catholic pupils from overseas has contributed to the rise in demand for its education provision. He said: “There was a point 10 years ago when our schools would have been predominantly white. That’s not the case now and immigration has played a part.

“People coming to this country don’t realise that our schools are free. In many parts of the world, Catholic education is independent from the state and parents have to pay.”

The performance of Catholic schools is traditionally very high, though the advent of a faith-based education is not to everyone’s liking. The National Secular Society opposes what it considers a “disproportionate influence of religion in our education system” and teaching unions have passed votes calling for faith schools to be abolished.

Dr Price vehemently opposed suggestions that Catholic schools “indoctrinate” their children. “It’s not about indoctrinating children in church doctrine. It’s about putting into practice moral judgements,” he said. “All schools will try and implicate moral values and it’s to do with ethos and trying to live out the faith. We explain the position the church takes on things.”

Religious education accounts for around 10% of lesson time and is part of the core curriculum in Catholic schools, with English, Welsh, maths and science. But a greater focus on RE by no means detracts from other subject areas. A study compiled by the Catholic Education Service showed that in every category assessed, Catholic schools achieved better results than the average for all state-funded institutions.

Inspectors judged 79% of Catholic secondary schools to be “good” or “outstanding” overall, compared to an average of 64% for all secondaries nationally. Among Catholic primaries, 79% were rated good or outstanding, higher than the average of 68% across the country.

Standards of classroom discipline and moral development among pupils were also far better in Catholic education, with fewer exclusions than in typical state schools.

Anne Robertson, diocesan director of schools in Cardiff, said: “We’re not perfect and have issues like everyone else, but the overall picture is quite good. “The Catholic Church is all about forgiveness and our schools try very hard to see how they can work with certain individuals. “It’s not just the academic standards but often the pastoral care that’s important. We see that as fundamental to what we’re trying to do.”

As co-ordinator of schools in the Cardiff Archdiocese, Ms Robert- son is charged with meeting demand for Catholic education in 10 local authorities, including Blae-nau Gwent and Monmouthshire. “To build a new secondary school would cost at least £20m and the Archdioceses would have to find around £3m of that. So we may need to consider other options such as expansion on existing sites.”

Looking to the future, the Catholic Church is hoping to build on the successful visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the UK and make policy makers in Cardiff Bay more aware of its work in the community. Dr Price said: “On a local level we’re very good, but from a national level we need to let [Education Minister] Leighton Andrews know we exist. “We need to be blowing our own trumpet that we’re doing things right and we want to influence Assembly thinking. “There’s a lack of understanding about what we do and that’s partly our fault because we haven’t told them,” he added.

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13 March, 2011

Can American universities keep the minority students they woo?

It doesn't sound like any fault of the university that the young lady below dropped out. Other minorities (e.g. Asians and Jews) manage despite being "different". During my long-gone schooldays in a small country town, I was VERY different because I took no interest in sport -- but I still did well at school. And I got real obloquy and none of the propping up that the young woman below received. It's crystal clear that innate ability is the real factor at work -- and that is essentially unchangeable

Lehigh University did a good job wooing Nezy Smith here. She was the sort of student colleges compete for these days – an African-American youngster raised by a single mom who took honors and AP classes but still found time for the yearbook and German club. A Lehigh admissions officer met her at her high school in Lebanon, Pa. then kept in touch for a year, urging her to visit the campus and helping her to fill out complex financial-aid forms.

“He was like my guardian angel, transitioning from high school to college,” Smith said.

She arrived at Lehigh in 2008, elated to experience college life. She dismissed cautions by some upperclassmen that as a minority student she might sometimes feel unwelcome on the 146-year-old campus – for instance, at parties in the hilltop fraternity houses. “No way,” she responded.

But a few months into her freshman year, it happened. She and a group of black friends waited in vain outside a frat house, she recalled, while a member waved others in. Despite doing well in her business and German courses, she felt uneasy being the only black face, at times, in the classroom.

By the next winter, she was gone, joining the roughly 25 to 40 percent of black and Hispanic students who start at Lehigh but don’t finish, depending on the year. The institution that had worked so hard to attract Smith hadn’t done such a good job of keeping her, spotlighting a problem seen at colleges nationwide.

Perhaps no one could have made Nezy Smith feel at home at Lehigh. Perhaps the school simply wasn’t the right fit for her.

Feeling snubbed at frat parties wasn’t the worst part. She would watch white students drive around campus in their cars and see the slender girls trek up and down the hill on which the campus sits. Her family couldn’t afford for her to have a car. And she had curves. “That’s when color came into play. I couldn’t accept the fact that I was black,”

Smith said, recalling how this grew into a full-blown identity crisis by the start of her sophomore year. “I started to not like myself because I wanted to be like other students.”

Nezy Smith took nearly a year off to “recover” before officially withdrawing from Lehigh in November 2009. This past fall she enrolled at Temple University in Philadelphia, where 17 percent of the student body is black. “There are a lot of people who look like me,” she said.

More HERE





Individual liberty cannot survive a republic of dunces

In an era noteworthy for Muslim terrorists plotting future 9/11s and nukes in the hands of fanatical nut jobs like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and North Korea's Kim Jong il, you might think there couldn't possibly be a more serious problem to ponder.

You would be wrong. Consider what happened recently when the Intercollegiate Studies Institute gave a 60-question civic literacy test to more than 28,000 college students:

"Less than half knew about federalism, judicial review, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and NATO. And this was a multiple-choice test, with the answers staring them right in the face," said political scientist Richard Bake, co-chairman of ISI's Civic Literacy Board.

"Ten percent thought that 'we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' came from the Communist Manifesto," Bake added during a recent interview with my Examiner colleague Barbara Hollingsworth.

Even the smart kids at Harvard failed the test, scoring on average 69, which is a D. Since the vast majority of the students tested are products of public schools, the results represent a comprehensive indictment of public education, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

These are the people who year after year graduate classes in which one of every four kids cannot read at even a basic level. If you can't read the Constitution, or the Declaration, or The Federalist Papers, you won't understand their essential concepts or why they represent so much wisdom.

When even our elite colleges and universities aren't teaching the next generation the basic concepts of the American republic like federalism or the difference between Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx, it ought to be obvious that American public education is failing American democracy.

Does anybody on America's college faculties remember or care that once liberty is lost, it is almost never regained?

As with so much else, James Madison captures in a wonderfully succinct couple of sentences the profoundly serious implications of raising a generation that is politically crippled by its gross civic ignorance. Madison wrote of the difference between Europe and America, saying: "In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example ... of charters of power granted by liberty."

If you don't grasp how Madison's simple equation makes all the difference in the world for the manner in which this country is governed, then you probably don't understand why liberals and conservatives disagree on just about everything that is fundamental to contemporary public policy.

Take health care. Liberals love the European welfare state, epitomized by Britain's National Health Service, aka a "single-payer system" or the "public option." That is why Obamacare erects hundreds of new bureaucratic agencies to regulate every detail of health care research, delivery and pricing.

That includes hiring thousands of new Internal Revenue Service agents to enforce the individual mandate federal District Judge Roger Vinson just declared unconstitutional. And those 1,040 waivers granted so far under Obamacare are the modern illustration of those European "charters of liberty ... granted by power."

For conservatives, the ideal health care reform is embodied in the Health Savings Account that puts the power of choice in the hands of individuals. That makes insurance providers compete to satisfy customers instead of government bureaucrats.

The bureaucrats are limited to enforcing contracts honestly made and assuring sufficient transparency of services and products to enable individuals to make informed choices. Or, as Madison would say, those with liberty grant a limited charter of power to government to do specific things and only those things.

But a generation that is not taught to recognize the irreconcilable differences represented by the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto, between Madison and Marx, the Federalist Papers and Rules for Radicals is doomed to be ruled, not to rule.

Individual liberty will not long survive in a republic of civic dunces.

SOURCE






History teaching in Britain fails to give pupils proper view of the past, says watchdog

Schoolchildren fail to grasp how events in history are linked because the subject is taught in “episodes”, an official report has warned. The Ofsted report said many primary and secondary pupils are being let down by a curriculum which does not give them a “chronological understanding” of the subject - instead concentrating on individual topics from ancient Egypt to post-war Britain.

The education watchdog also said that history teaching is being marginalised in state schools, while A-levels are not adequately preparing sixth-formers for more rigorous university courses.

The verdict will be seen as further damaging Labour’s legacy on education and add weight to calls for reform of the national curriculum, which is currently being reviewed by Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, with the help of Simon Schama, the historian and television presenter.

Pupils in a typical primary school will study the Romans and Celts, Ancient Egypt, Henry VIII and the Tudors, Victorian life, World War II, the Ancient Greeks, and Britain since 1948 between years three and six - but not what order they are in.

A “fundamental weakness” in primary schools was that some teachers “did not teach to establish a clear mental map of the past for pupils”. The report said: “Some pupils found it difficult to place the historical episodes they had studied within any coherent, long-term narrative. “They knew about particular events, characters and periods but did not have an overview. Their chronological understanding was often underdeveloped and so they found it difficult to link developments together.”

Christine Gilbert, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, said: “Pupils need to experience history as a coherent subject which develops their knowledge, thinking and understanding, especially their chronological understanding, and I hope the current review of the national curriculum will recognise the importance of this.”

In primary schools where history teaching was rated “satisfactory”, inspectors said there was “an unbalanced curriculum with too much attention paid to particular topics at the expense of others” and many teachers lacked specialist knowledge of the subject.

The report also criticised changes introduced by the previous government which allow schools to ditch history as a self-contained subject and instead incorporate it in a general humanities course alongside geography and arts subjects. “Where these developments had taken place, curriculum time for teaching had been reduced and history was becoming marginalised,” the inspectors said. “This resulted in significant gaps and encouraged an episodic understanding of the past.”

England is the only European country which does not teach compulsory history to the age of 15 or 16, with growing numbers of pupils now allowed to drop the subject at 13.

Ofsted stopped short of recommending that history should again be made compulsory at GCSE, but it did urge ministers to ensure pupils receive a “significant amount” of tuition in history to “at least the age of 14”.

Regarding history at secondary school level the report said: “One of the most serious concerns about poor provision was the tendency for teachers to try to cover too much content and 'spoon-feed’ students.” In some cases at Key Stage Three - for pupils aged 11 to 14 - some teachers gave only cursory checks to children’s work books so that “basic errors of spelling, grammar and punctuation were uncorrected”.

The inspectors found an over-dependence on text books at sixth form level, meaning students were unprepared for studying the subject at university.

And the report detailed falling numbers of schools offering history at GCSE. In 2010, 102 maintained secondary schools entered no students at all to sit GCSE history, compared with 77 schools the year before. In State schools, only 30 per cent of pupils took history at GCSE last year - and 20 per cent at academies - compared with half in the independent [private] sector.

The most able students are being let down, the report indicated. History teaching for the brightest was good or outstanding in only 16 of 32 schools analysed, with the rest only satisfactory, it said.

SOURCE



12 March, 2011

World's top 100 universities 2011: their reputations ranked by Times Higher Education

Harvard University ranks highest in the world according to the Times Higher Education for reputation in teaching and research.
The US boasts the most reputable universities in the world according to a new global reputation ranking out today.

The list published today by the Times Higher Education, is the first of its kind looking solely at the reputations of institutions for teaching and research. Harvard comes top closely followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) beating both Oxford and Cambridge universities.

The US dominates with seven universities in the top ten and a massive 45 in the total rankings. Taking 12 of the places in the top 100, the UK is second to the US with Cambridge university beating Oxford. Imperial College, University College London (UCL), London School of Economics and Edinburgh University also make the top 50.

The rankings based on a survey of 13,388 academics over 131 countries is the largest evaluation of academic reputation and is used partly used in indicators for compiling the well-known Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

The rankings also show Japan beating Canada, Australia and Germany with the flagship, University of Tokyo, at eighth place making it the only other nation apart from the US and UK to feature in the top ten.

With university fees rocketing and more applicants fighting for places, university reputation is set to be an even bigger focus for prospective students.

Phil Baty, editor of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, said: "In an ever more competitive global market for students, academics and university administrators a university's reputation for academic excellence is crucial."

More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)





Back to basics: British education boss sweeps aside 102 'woolly standards' teachers are expected to meet in bid to weed out the incompetent

TEACHING standards will be overhauled to remove incompetent teachers, Michael Gove said yesterday. In a scathing attack, the Education Secretary said the current skills required of teachers are ‘woolly, meaningless and fluffy’ concepts.

Of the 102 so-called standards, just two state the need for good ‘subject and curriculum knowledge’. Four focus on health and safety and three on a ‘commitment to co-operative learning’. Other immeasurable targets include ‘a creative and constructive approach towards innovation’.

Mr Gove, launching a review of teachers’ standards, said he would axe the myriad of current skills required and replace them with a small ‘rigorous’ core. Teachers who do not meet these standards will be axed. The move will make it far easier for heads to sack bad teachers. It will also make it harder to qualify, ensuring only the best enter the profession.

The radical move will be the first major overhaul of standards in more than two decades.

Speaking at the annual conference of the Association of School and College Leaders, Mr Gove said: ‘We need to make sure those already in the classroom are continuously improving. ‘Headteachers have told me in no uncertain terms that standards are ineffective, meaningless and muddy, fluffy concepts.’

Since few of the standards are measurable, it is hard for heads to sack poor teachers on the grounds that they have failed to meet them.

Mr Gove said a ‘simple and clear set of skills’ – of which there will be fewer than ten – will ensure teachers have a thorough knowledge of their subject, good literacy and numeracy and can crack down on bad behaviour. The new standards will be imposed in September 2012.

SOURCE






Australia: Funding is not the cause of indigenous educational failure

But better teaching would make a difference

MY School confirms that funding is not the cause of indigenous educational failure. Take two schools in very remote Australia, 20km apart: in 2009, the indigenous school received recurrent funding of almost $33,000 a student, while the mainstream school received about $21,000 for each student.

Despite the 50 per cent additional funding, the indigenous school's Year 5 National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy reading result (typical of all of its results) was a failure rate of 92 per cent. The nearby non-indigenous school had a failure rate of 12 per cent.

These rates are representative of the higher funding but dramatically lower literacy and numeracy performance of indigenous schools.

School size is also not the reason for educational failure. Many small non-indigenous schools perform well and some of the worst performing indigenous schools have large enrolments. For example a very remote indigenous school with more than 420 students (with recurrent funding of $25,600 a student) had reading failure rates of 96 per cent in Year 5 and 89 per cent in Year 7. In 2009, only one of their students completed senior secondary school; no student was awarded a senior secondary certificate.

More than 150 indigenous schools (with more than 80 per cent indigenous students) dominate the lowest literacy and numeracy results for Australia's 9500 schools.

They are mainly in the remote homelands and townships of NT, Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia. Few of the students in these schools achieve the minimum NAPLAN literacy and numeracy national standards.

They leave school early, unable to read, write or count, and without the other skills necessary to get a job. Few of those who stay on through Year 12 learn enough to be able to get a job or to go on to further education.

In some 40 NT homeland learning centres, with a total enrolment of about 1000 students, classes do not even have qualified teachers five days a week. Few of their students could read the NAPLAN questions, let alone pass the tests.

Their parents receive Commonwealth Assistance for Isolated Children payments as compensation for the Territory not providing a school for these children. The continuation of these pretend schools is shameful for Australia.

Some states are responding to poor NAPLAN results. The Queensland Department of Education is a partner in Noel Pearson's Cape York Partnership academies in Aurukun, Coen and Hope Vale. These academies implement rigorous "direct education" in the classroom. This is combined with after-school cultural, sporting and other "club" activities. The Cape York Family Responsibilities Commission is supporting these schools.

While it is too early to see the results in NAPLAN tests, the academies have achieved a remarkable rise in attendance in response to improved classroom teaching.

The Northern Territory Department of Education has the worst literacy and numeracy results in Australia. Yet it continues to protect its own schools by refusing to approve qualified independent schools. The Territory receives large amounts of additional commonwealth funding, which it spends on fashionable feel-good programs that have no effect in the classroom. Until it focuses on improved classroom teaching, including phonics, the gap between its indigenous schools and mainstream Australian education will continue to widen.

Indigenous attendance continues to be a difficult issue while sub-standard schools and poor teaching methods remain in place. In remote communities, the lack of role models and the absence of jobs lead to the view that education does not matter.

The absence of jobs and decent houses leads to high mobility that is a principal cause of low school attendance.

The commonwealth is trying to improve attendance by penalising welfare recipients whose children do not attend school, but the Territory's attendance rhetoric, blaming parents for not sending their children to school, is not matched by results.

The most important contributor to low attendance is the absence of good teaching. Where effective schools operate, attendance is high. Schools such as Coen on Cape York are achieving full attendance; independent Djarragun College in Queensland and independent indigenous schools in the Territory have consistently high attendance.

The many indigenous parents in remote Australia concerned about their children's education have known for years that their children are not learning to read, write and count or acquiring the other skills they need to get a job.

Their fears have now been confirmed by the revamped My School website, although few remote indigenous parents can read it. These parents - although they are themselves the victims of the absence of schooling - know that like indigenous health and housing, throwing taxpayers' money at indigenous education is not a substitute for reform.

Whatever costs and benefits the My School website has created for mainstream schools, for indigenous education My School data are critical to fixing schools in indigenous communities.

The absence of literacy, numeracy, humanities, social and natural sciences and other life skills that mainstream schools teach, are a key contributor to the dysfunction of remote communities. A meaningful job and decent housing are the right of every Australian. They are not achievable without a mainstream education.

SOURCE



11 March, 2011

A true horror story for any scholar

This story is from Australia but I am confident it is happening in other advanced countries too: University libraries are throwing out old books wholesale. This is quite simply a danger to knowledge. Soon we are only going to be allowed to know what our "betters" allow us to know. Hang on to your books! I know that I have some old books which I am going to ask my son to keep after I am gone

THE University of NSW is throwing away thousands of books and scholarly journals as part of a policy that critics say is turning its library into a Starbucks.

Academics say complete journal collections, valuable books and newspapers dating to the 19th century are being thrown out to clear space for cafe-style lounges.

The Herald has obtained an internal document listing thousands of titles due to be pulled from shelves. The 138-page "weeding" list includes encyclopaedias, dictionaries, books in foreign languages and texts on psychology, politics and morality.

The policy, which until recently required librarians to remove 50,000 volumes each year, does not allow the last Australian copy of any book to be discarded. But it has opened an ideological row about the function of modern libraries as more research material becomes accessible online.

Already, thousands of books have been dumped in skips in the library basement and staff in various disciplines say they have not been given the opportunity to salvage them.

"This is a scandal. It's outrageous on a whole number of different levels," said Peter Slezak, an associate professor in the school of history and philosophy. "Anyone that has anything to do with books is distressed at this. They are extremely good books."

The cleanout has so upset some that library staff have rescued books destined for the bin. One former library assistant said he had taken more than 200 books. "If the book's not borrowed in the last couple of years, they throw it out," he said. "Most libraries see their function as an archive but these guys see it almost like a video store. After you've had the book five years, why keep it?"

Most shocking, he said, was the disposal of a collection of newspapers from the 1850s and 1860s. "They're getting rid of books to make space for students to sit around, have lunch and plug their laptops in. Bizarrely, they've turned the library into a kind of a Starbucks," Professor Slezak said.

A university spokeswoman said that since August library policy no longer set a target for the number of books to cull. Superseded textbooks were hard to give away, some titles were moved into storage and libraries worldwide faced the same dilemma, she said.

"The library has an ongoing program to remove print journals where online archival access is provided. Our academic community prefers to use the online versions and they use them very heavily," she said.

Dr John Golder, a visiting research fellow in theatre, feared the digitisation of libraries would prevent students stumbling across new information. "A serendipitous discovery is impossible when the book isn't there," he said.

A professor in the school of history and philosophy, David Miller, understood libraries could not preserve everything but thought consultation could be improved. "There's something profoundly wrong, and symbolically wrong, about a university destroying books," he said. "Universities are in the business of passing on knowledge and books - no matter how the use of books is shrinking - still remain a very important symbol of knowledge."

SOURCE

Some letters on the issue below

There were many distressing stories in the newspapers this morning, but none so immediately depressing as the story on what my university is doing to our books ("Books get the shove as university students prefer to do research online", March 8).

It is 50 years almost to the day that Ray Bradbury published his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, an allegory about book-burning and the suppression of ideas. He meant it as a warning and I don't suppose he really expected it to become fact. He would be galled and appalled to learn that it has.

That this is happening in a "place of learning" makes it doubly significant.

The UNSW library is such a depressing place these days - there are entire floors where it is hard to find a book at all. The explanations offered by UNSW that people don't want these books and that nothing for which there is no electronic copy is junked are nonsense.

I recently went searching for a 19th-century Government Gazette (for which there was no electronic version) only to be told by a distressed librarian that they had been found in a skip in the basement, along with many other irreplaceable items. At their own expense, the librarians rescued these and sent them to a library where they would be appreciated - Dili in East Timor.

What is happening to the UNSW library is just one aspect of a dumbing down of the university in the name of competition - to change it from a collegiate place of learning to (in the Vice-Chancellor's words) an "education destination".

You don't get a very good education at a university without books.

Dr Geoff Lambert Prince of Wales clinical school, University of NSW, Sydney

UNSW's book "cull" is extremely short-sighted. Research does not follow a straight line; it thrives on the kind of serendipitous discoveries that databases make impossible. When I was at university (in this century), the books I stumbled across in the library amounted to a second education. At the very least those of us who love books would have appreciated a chance to salvage what we could.

Alan Miller Hornsby [My experience was similar -- JR]

There are two aspects to UNSW's policies that if more widely adopted will have an effect on libraries and their patrons. Libraries have always operated within a spirit of co-operation and this manifests itself in the inter-library loan. This means that when a patron wishes to borrow a book not held in a library but held by another library the patron's library can borrow that book from a library which holds it.

A spoiler within this practice has arrived in the form of e-books which have licensing restrictions. The New York Times reported in March that a large US publisher owned by Rupert Murdoch will sell e-books to libraries that can be borrowed a maximum of 26 times for each title purchased. The library holding that e-book can no longer lend it out after 26 times. Does this mean the library will have to keep purchasing copies of the same title?

Many libraries also are transferring subscriptions from the hard copy of scholarly journals to online versions. The licensing of these online subscriptions restricts distribution of copies of articles within those scholarly journals to third parties, i.e. other libraries via inter-library loan. Furthermore, if a library discontinues a subscription of an online scholarly journal it no longer has any holdings of that journal.

When you purchase a printed copy of a book or scholarly journal it is yours to keep forever. Librarians need to think long and hard about the implications of discarding the hard copy.

Wendy Cousins Balgownie

SOURCE






DOE: 82% of public schools may “fail” this year

In testimony to Congress Wednesday, US Education Secretary Arne Duncan made a startling claim: This year, up to 82 percent of public schools could "fail" the government's "No Child Left Behind" standards. "No Child Left Behind is broken and we need to fix it now," he said, according to a transcript provided by the Department of Education.

"This law has created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed," Duncan added. "We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible, and focused on the schools and students most at risk." Last year, just 32 percent of schools were failing the government's rigorous testing standards.

Duncan was speaking to the House Education and Work Force Committee.

The education policies, passed by the Bush administration in 2002, set a number of highly unrealistic deadlines and requirements, and tied school funding to achieving those goals.

Critics have argued the reforms changed schools from centers of learning to testing factories, increasingly irrelevant to students and communities. Increasingly, even Republicans have come to agree that the policies are largely broken.

"The Obama administration’s proposed blueprint for reforming No Child Left Behind recognizes and rewards high-poverty schools and districts that show improvement based on progress and growth," the Department of Education said, in an advisory.

"States and districts would have to identify and intervene in schools that persistently fail to close gaps. For schools making more modest gains, states and districts would have more flexibility to determine improvement and support options."

“Our proposal will offer schools and districts much more flexibility in addressing achievement gaps, but we will impose a much tighter definition of success,” Duncan said. “Simply stated, if schools boost overall proficiency but leave one subgroup behind — that is not good enough. They need a plan that ensures that every child is being served.”

SOURCE






Australia: Teachers still chasing the class-size snark

CLASS sizes would be reduced to just 20 students in Prep to Year 3 under a proposal put forward by teachers to help lift literacy and numeracy standards.

The Queensland Teachers Union has warned the Bligh Government it needs to commit to smaller class sizes if it is serious about lifting student outcomes.

But the proposal conflicts with a controversial paper last year which warned reducing class sizes does little to improve the quality of education for children.

The QTU has made the latest proposal to claw back class sizes in their paper Securing Queensland's Future: A Resourcing Agenda for State Schools. The paper, which outlines a 10-year resourcing plan for state schools, suggests Prep to Year 3 class size maximums be "progressively" reduced to 20 students over five years as one of a series of "suggested initiatives". Education Queensland (EQ) currently sets a maximum class size target of 25 pupils for Prep to Year 3 , although up to 30 have been reported in Prep classrooms since 2009.

Last year, more than 10,000 Prep to Year 3 students were taught in overcrowded state school classrooms. "If the Government is really serious about improving literacy and numeracy outcomes, it should commit to a program of class size reduction, particularly in Years P-3", the QTU paper states. "Qualified teachers working with smaller classes in the early years of schooling are an effective way to achieve better student outcomes."

It says intensive student support programs and ongoing teacher professional development would also be needed for the class size reductions to work.

The paper comes less than six months after a Grattan Institute report warning reducing class sizes did little to improve the quality of education. Grattan Institute school education program director Dr Ben Jensen argued money was better spent on improving teacher effectiveness.

But QTU president Steve Ryan said state schools which had reduced class sizes using National Partnership funding had shown the initiative worked.

EQ director-general Julie Grantham said the QTU which has submitted its paper to the Government, had not raised the issue in any of their stakeholder meetings. She said class sizes were structured to meet targets agreed to by the QTU.

SOURCE



10 March, 2011

GAO: Teacher training an education on government waste

By federal standards, comparatively little money is spent on training teachers, but the excessive duplication and overlapping programs in this sliver of the budget stands out in a new report on government waste as a testament to bureaucratic inefficiencies.

In fiscal year 2009, the federal government spent $4 billion on professional development for teachers. But a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office says the money was divided among 82 different programs spread through 10 different government agencies.

Within the Department of Education itself, eight different offices administer 60 programs for teacher retraining. The GAO report suggested that evaluating the success of each is nearly impossible, because of a myriad of different criteria and manpower required to examine them would be prohibitively expensive.

Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a frequent critic of intransigent bureaucracies, said these duplicative and fragmented programs are proof that the money devoted to such programs would be better funneled to individual states, and even school boards.

"There are hundreds of millions of Americans that grew up without a Department of Education. And certainly, an argument can be made that they're better educated than people that have been around since 1977, when that department was created," Schatz told Fox News.

The Department of Education is working to reduce the redundancy of these programs. In the agency's annual reauthorization proposal to Congress, the Obama administration has proposed combining 38 programs for training current teachers into 11. Critics admit that's a start, but that Congress must take the lead in reigning in such profligate overlap and confusion.

A central problem in seeking efficiencies in these programs for educators is that the effectiveness of teacher retraining programs is almost impossible to measure. Each of the scores of programs has different criteria for success. To measure it, would require yet a new layer of bureaucracy.

As the GAO report says, "It is more costly to administer many separate authorized federal programs, because each program has it’s own policies, applications, award competitions , reporting requirements and in some cases, federal evaluations."

SOURCE






Public Education: Progressive Indoctrination Camps

Why should liberals want to change the public educational system when it is turning out the product they have been striving for years to produce?

Check out these real news headlines from the past several weeks and months about the state of public education across the country:

--"U.S. teachers tell U.N. sex is a 'spectrum' -- advocate mandatory classes to free students from 'religion'"

--"Principal orders (Ten Commandments) yanked from school lockers"

--"Teens ask for more sex ed, greater condom availability"

--"University defines Christians as 'oppressors'"

--"Why Catholic Schools Score Better Than Public Schools"

--"Teachers take charge to save ailing public schools"

--"Texas Schools' Mandatory Arabic Classes Create Firestorm"

--"District taking money, but censoring Christians?"

--"No opting out of pro-gay school propaganda"

--"District pays up for slamming student's rosary"

--"Judge cites homeschoolers for violating U.N. mandate -- Police interrogate parents, confiscate their curriculum"

--"Some say schools giving Muslims special treatment"

On Dec. 27, 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote about his vision for the University of Virginia (chartered in 1819): "This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it."

But what should happen 200 years later when our public schools and universities avoid the testing of truths? Or suppress alternative opinions because they are unpopular or politically incorrect? Or no longer tolerate opinions now considered errors or obsolete by the elite? What happens when socio-political agendas or scientific paradigms dominate academic views to the exclusion of a minority's even being mentioned?

What happens when the political and public educational pendulum swings from concern for the tyranny of sectarianism in Jefferson's day to secularism in ours? What happens when U.S. public schools become progressive indoctrination camps?

Dr. Jim Nelson Black, founder and senior analyst of Sentinel Research Associates, wrote "Freefall of the American University," which is an excellent book. In it, he documents the clear biases pervading our public academic settings. Among that lopsidedness is the intentional training of students to disdain America, freely experiment sexually, forcefully defend issues such as abortion and homosexuality, and become cultural advocates for political correctness, relativism, globalization, green agendas and tolerance for all.

One of the primary ways these educative platforms are spread is by recruiting and retaining faculty members who reflect and teach them. For example, citing the polling firm Luntz Research, Black notes that 57 percent of faculty members in our most esteemed universities are Democrats (only 3 percent are Republican), and 64 percent identify themselves as liberal (only 6 percent conservative). Moreover, 71 percent of them disagree that "news coverage of political and social issues reflects a liberal bias in the news media." They also were asked, "Who has been the best president in the past 40 years?" The No. 1 answer was Bill Clinton. (Only 4 percent said Ronald Reagan.)

This is why it is no surprise that the two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, are the largest campaign contributors in the nation (giving more than the Teamsters, the National Rifle Association or any other organization) and that 90 percent of their contributions fund Democratic candidates. So do you think such funding is going to balance traditional and conservative values with liberal ones in public schools?

The impact of progressivism is being experienced by students across this land, hundreds of thousands of whom already have cried out with complaints of academic inequity. A sampling of the hundreds of student grievances from across the academic spectrum can be found on Students For Academic Freedom's website.

It is also no surprise that an average of 6,000 students every year are leaving the approximately 94,000 public schools in America. If the powers-to-be over our public schools, such as government and unions, continue to oppose conservative curricula and impose overarching liberal educational revisions and laws, public schools will continue to experience an exodus.

I fully realize there are some great conservative people on the staffs of many public schools and universities, but I know that virtually all of them would concur that a liberal bias in our academic curricula and system is overwhelmingly dominant and ubiquitous.

Is this present restrictive and one-sided educational environment that which Thomas Jefferson and other Founders intended for the future generations of America? Absolutely not! Rather than encourage freethinking, the U.S. academic system has turned Jefferson's plans for open education into our culture's system of indoctrination.

(In Part 2, I will give eight specific ways that you and I can fight progressivism in the U.S. public education system. And speaking of education, I'm encouraging readers of my culture warrior column to read my new weekly health and fitness column, "C-Force." This past week's edition is about conventional and alternative medicine, and I explain the amazing benefits of the Sierra Integrative Medical Center in Reno, Nev.)

SOURCE





British school inspectors report slide in standards at quarter of schools

Almost a quarter of schools are getting worse as tough new Government inspections expose falling standards, figures suggest. Data published by Ofsted showed 23 per cent of state schools visited over a four month period last year were given a lower overall grade than in previous inspections.

The figures suggest thousands of schools nationally may be coasting or going backwards despite billions of pounds spent by Labour attempting to turn around underperforming primaries and secondaries.

The disclosure comes just a week after the Coalition wrote to councils in England ordering them to come up with action plans designed to improve standards in local schools.

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said he would not “allow underperforming schools where children are not receiving the education they deserve to carry on, unreformed”.

Failing schools could be taken out of local authority control and converted into independent academies under the leadership of a new head teacher.

According to the latest figures, some 2,000 schools in England were inspected by Ofsted during the autumn term last year.

Under a new inspection regime, the watchdog has been ordered to focus more resources on weaker schools to root out underperformance, while leaving those deemed to be outstanding. The very top schools are only inspected if concerns are raised by parents or councils.

Despite attempts to improve standards of state education, figures show 23 per cent of schools inspected between September and December received a lower judgement than previously recorded, while almost half remained the same. Some 30 per cent improved. Currently, schools are rated on a four-point scale. In all, some seven per cent of schools inspected were ranked as inadequate, 37 per cent were satisfactory, 46 per cent were good and 10 per cent were outstanding.

Since September 2009, Ofsted inspections have focused more on pupils’ results combined with observing teachers in the classroom.

A Department for Education spokesman said: “Education standards in this country have stalled, with England slipping down the international league tables. “To drive up standards, we are stepping in to turn around underperforming schools and are creating more excellent schools run by teachers – not bureaucrats – through the academies and free schools programmes.

“We are also encouraging the brightest people into teaching, creating a rigorous new curriculum and giving heads back the power to instil good discipline.

“It is vital that all parents – not just the rich – are able to send their child to a good local school that is right for them.”

SOURCE



9 March, 2011

Head Start: Leftists impervious to decades of evidence showing its failure

Mona Charen

My friend E.J. Dionne Jr., a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, is a fine man with, I feel safe in asserting, a warm heart. But he betrays in a recent column a persistent failing of the left -- imperviousness to evidence.

Describing Speaker Boehner's tactics in the budget fights with Democrats, Dionne wrote:

"Begin with the outrageous $1.1 billion, 15 percent cut from Head Start, a program that offers preschool education to roughly 965,000 poor children. According to the Center for Law and Public Policy, this would knock 218,000 kids out of Head Start and force 16,000 classrooms to close. That is an excellent way to lose the future, as Obama ought to be saying. What could be a better use of public money than helping our poorest children early in life so they might achieve more in school, and later?"

Like most liberals, Dionne is enchanted with the idea of Head Start -- the romance of a government program that would provide care, nutrition, education, and skills to impoverished preschoolers in order to erase, to the degree possible, the handicaps poverty imposes. That was the idea in 1965, when Head Start was founded. Lyndon Johnson declared, upon signing the enabling bill that "Today, we reach out to five and half million children held behind their more fortunate schoolmates by the dragging anchor of poverty." Head Start, he promised, would be their "passport" out.

It would have been worth the $166 billion taxpayers have spent on the program since 1965 if a significant portion of Head Start alumni did improve their educational outcomes and escape poverty. But that did not happen.

As any number of studies have demonstrated over the years, the effects of Head Start are modest to nugatory. Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom chronicled the failure in "No Excuses." One study found that Head Start students were slightly more likely to be immunized than others -- a good thing of course, but a) not primarily what the program was sold as, and b) achievable far more cheaply through other programs like Medicaid. A 1969 study found that any gains participants displayed faded away in the early grades. By third grade, Head Start graduates were indistinguishable from their non-participating classmates. Rather than scrap the program, President Nixon (a sheep in wolf's clothing where domestic policy was concerned) concluded that, "Head Start ... must begin earlier in life, and last longer, to achieve lasting benefits."

Later surveys showed similarly dismal results. By 1987, even the program's founder, Yale psychologist Edward F. Zigler, declined to claim educational benefits for the program. But as the Thernstroms concluded, "Everyone could agree that poverty was hard on blameless children, so any federal effort purporting to help them was difficult to attack without seeming mean-spirited."

That remains true, as witness Mr. Dionne.

A just-released study by the Department of Health and Human Services delivers incredibly harsh news about Head Start. A large, nationwide survey of 4,600 preschoolers who were randomly assigned to either the Head Start (experimental group) or no program (control group) were studied on 114 different measures ranging from academic skills to social-emotional development, to health status. The study found no statistically relevant effects from the Head Start program by the end of first grade.

If a study falls in the forest and the major news organizations fail to report it, does it make a sound? Hardly a whimper. A few conservative websites like Heritage, CATO, and the Independent Women's Forum noted the results, but elsewhere, all was silence.

Or, not silence actually, complete denial. President Obama had boosted funding for Head Start from $6.8 billion in 2008 to $9.2 billion in 2009. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and Education Secretary Arne Duncan support even greater "investments" in the failed program in the future. Study? What study?

According to Douglas Besharov of the University of Maryland, it costs $22,600 annually to keep a child in a year-round Head Start program. Typical preschools run about $9,500. But the price simply doesn't matter. The lack of results doesn't matter. The only thing that seems to matter is that liberals are able to preen about their compassion -- oh, yes, and condemn anyone not impervious to evidence as heartless.

SOURCE





Ga.: Kids not allowed to sound off about teachers

Even while at home

Two Douglas County students were suspended and one student was expelled after a negative Facebook posting about a teacher.

Twelve-year-old Alejandra Sosa said she regretted posting a Facebook status calling one of her teachers at Chapel Hill Middle School a pedophile. The comment got the honor roll student suspended for 10 days and she is now facing expulsion. "I was just expressing myself on Facebook, because like I said I was mad that day because of what he [did]. So, I mean I had no intentions of ruining his reputation," said Sosa.

"I shouldn't have done it," said student William Lambert, III. "Because I could have still been at school, like right now, if I never had commented on the post." Lambert, a seventh grader, was also suspended for calling the same teacher a rapist.

The honor student's father said he didn't condone the comment but believes that what's done in the privacy of one's home should not be the subject of disciplinary action at school. "Because it is a privacy issue. When you're at home on your computer, a lot of people say a lot of things on Facebook, about a lot of people, including our president, including senators, governors. [I think] the school should write the rules of Facebook into their policy before they try to take rules out of context," said Lambert's father, William Lambert, Jr.

A third child was expelled for posting that the same teacher is bipolar. The student's mother asked not to be identified but said she believed the school's punishment did not fit the crime. "She made a disrespectful comment, however she is 12-years-old and she didn’t even get a chance to apologize for it before its done and over, you're out of school," said the parent.

At least two of the families said they plan to hire attorneys and fight the disciplinary charges in a school tribunal.

A social networking expert said the case should serve as a lesson for students and parents alike. "When you go home, yes it is your private environment but the school can actually say we would expect you to have nice behavior, be kind to others, not be a cyber bully, not be a bully in general. But it doesn't mean they can enforce it because we're coming into free speech territory here," said social networking expert Ben Halpert.

Douglas County School officials said the three students violated the disciplinary code and they could not comment on the case due to an impending tribunal.

SOURCE





Liberal Ideology Will Not Make Your Campus Safer

Mike Adams

On Thursday, March 3, 2011, President James D. Spaniolo sent a letter to the “Students, Faculty, and Staff” of the University of Texas – Arlington (UTA). Some are criticizing the letter as an inappropriate use of state property to influence pending legislation. But it is far worse than that. It is an ideologically-driven missive that could get some “Students, Faculty, and Staff” at UTA seriously injured or killed.

The letter begins innocently enough with Spaniolo simply noting that “The Texas Legislature is currently considering several bills that (he knows) many of you are following with great interest and an increasing level of concern and alarm—legislation that could allow concealed handguns on college campuses across Texas.”

By the beginning of the second paragraph, Spaniolo, who does not have a PhD (or, apparently, any record of scholarly research whatsoever) states his opinion on the legislation: “I have followed very closely the disparate views that have been expressed on this issue, and I am keenly aware of and sensitive to the arguments in favor of this legislation. But I have concluded that allowing concealed handguns on campus would not make UT Arlington—or any college campus—a safer place.”

It is unsurprising that Spaniolo comes down on the wrong side of this issue with an opinion that is not informed by scholarship. The president of the university has only five publications (this century) listed on his resume. They are all non-scholarly city newspaper opinion pieces with titles like “U.S., Cuba Must Start Anew.”

Yet without any visible expertise in this important and well-researched area he says the following: “As president of UT Arlington, my top priority must always be to do everything possible to ensure the safety and security of our students, faculty, staff, and visitors. I firmly believe—as does virtually everyone in leadership positions at colleges and universities and in law enforcement—that allowing concealed handguns on campus would significantly increase the potential for members of our community to be injured or killed.”

This last paragraph suffers from two severe deficiencies:

First, it claims (without supporting evidence) that virtually everyone in law enforcement believes “that allowing concealed handguns on campus would significantly increase the potential for members of our community to be injured or killed.” Spaniolo provides no references – not one, but zero - for this bold assertion. I hereby publicly challenge him to do so. Note that I do not issue a challenge with regard to his assertion concerning “virtually everyone in leadership positions at colleges and universities” and their opposition to the pending legislation. I do not care what people in “leadership positions at colleges and universities” believe about guns. They are not an ideologically neutral population. Nor are they, as a group, specially qualified to make a judgment on the issue of concealed weapons. Police officers are different.

Second, it is his frank admission that his position is based on what he “firmly believe(s).” Of course, “firm belief” simply means “strong feeling” in this context. But public policy should not be made on the basis of “strong feelings.” It should be made on the basis of empirical evidence. And, to date, the empirical evidence supports those who assert that concealed weapon permits (CCWs) reduce violent crime, rather than increasing violent crime.

To date, there are sixteen refereed publication, which demonstrate that CCWs decrease violent crime. There are ten refereed publication that say they make no difference in violent crime rates. There are zero refereed publications demonstrating that CCWs increase violent crime.

But President Spaniolo hasn’t looked at the empirical research. He’s looked to the following sources (quoting from his letter):

1) “UT Arlington’s Student Congress adopted a resolution—by a vote of 36 to 6—against the proposed concealed-carry bills that have been introduced in the Legislature. Student Congress also sponsored a well-attended campus forum on the issue last week.”

2) “UT System Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa sent a letter to Governor Rick Perry last week strongly expressing the concerns of the many constituents of the UT System institutions.”

3) “The Texas Council of Student Services Vice Presidents, which comprises 46 public institutions across the state, has expressed in a letter to legislators the serious concerns its members have on this issue. Frank Lamas, vice president for student affairs at UT Arlington, serves as chair-elect of this group.”

Students – even members of the UTA Student Congress - cannot be looked to as expert sources on this topic. Neither does the UT System Chancellor nor the Texas Council of Student Services Vice Presidents have the needed expertise. The problem should be addressed by citing peer-reviewed research by the criminologists and economists who have studied the costs and benefits of CCW legislation.

As one with a Master’s degree in public policy, President Spaniolo should know where to look for information that credibly informs public policy. But he does not. Instead, he intentionally seeks information from both biased and uninformed sources, which do nothing but reinforce his strong feelings on an admittedly emotional topic.

President Spaniolo ends his letter to the UTA community with this chillingly misleading paragraph: “We are fortunate to be a part of a vibrant campus community where debate and dialogue are part of the fabric of intellectual exchange. We must ensure that our campus is a safe place for pursuing and advancing an education. Allowing concealed handguns on our campus would be antithetical to our mission.”

His suggestion is that the presence of guns would close down rational debate in an otherwise free and open marketplace of ideas. But that isn’t so. Concealed guns will never shut down debate at UTA. Instead, administrators who conceal research will prevent debate, dialogue, and informed intellectual exchange. And no one should have a license to do that.

SOURCE



8 March, 2011

Where they teach you how to be thick

The writer below says that state education in Britain has consistently encouraged working-class children to accept their lot in life. He has some interesting history but ignores several problems: Such as the virtual abolition of discipline and IQ differences

As loudly as the middle classes moan about the state school system, it is the working class that has been let down. Middle-class children do very well out of state education. It is the middle-class children who pass the exams, and get the college places. They go on to get good, well-paid jobs, too. Working-class children, however, do worse than they ever have.

Studies for the Sutton Trust found that social mobility in Britain started to go backwards from 1970 onwards – those born after 1970 will earn no more than their mums and dads. Since 1973 wages have fallen as a share of Britain’s wealth, from 65 per cent to 55 per cent.

Since the 1960s there have been big reforms in schools and colleges:

* Comprehensive schools were brought in, in 1969.

* The school leaving age was raised from 14 to 16.

* The share of those going on to colleges and universities was boosted from 8.4 per cent in 1970 to more than a third today

These reforms were supposed to help working-class people. Instead the working class has lost out. Wages have not kept up with growth. Working-class people are doing no better than their mums and dads before them.

You might argue that the schools did not make the class divide – and you would be right. But schools have not done anything to fix the class divide, either. All those years of education reform have done nothing for working-class people.

The state education system has let down the working class. It has not helped people to better themselves. Instead it churns out school-leavers who are more divided along class lines than ever before. For working-class children, state education is not part of the solution. It is part of the problem.

The origins of state education

When Robert Owen opened the Hall of Science in Manchester, a committee of churchmen and mill owners was set up to put down ‘that hideous form of infidelity which assumes the name of socialism’. The good burghers of Manchester founded their own school to rival Owen’s. Soon after, the Hall of Science was set on fire.

The attack on the Hall of Science was just the beginning of the ruling-class attack on working-class schools. Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, a baronet, was made Britain’s first secretary of education in 1839 – it was his job to set up a state education system in Britain.

Kay-Shuttleworth’s principal motivation in 1839 was a fear of the growing, and independent, working-class movement: ‘We confess that we cannot contemplate with unconcern the vast physical force which is now moved by men so ignorant and so unprincipled as the Chartist leaders.’

The mill owners and landlords did not like parting with their money, but Kay-Shuttleworth told them schools would ‘promote the security of property and the maintenance of the public order’. Spending a little money on schools now would save them their whole fortune, said the first minister of education, ‘Only by experience and education can the workmen be induced to leave undisturbed the controls of commercial enterprises in the hands of the capitalists.’ Ever since then, the whole point of state schools has been to curb the threat of the working class.

Forster go to school

The first law to say that you could be forced to go to school – compulsory education – was passed in 1870. It was the idea of William E Forster: ‘We had this fearful state of things – a large portion of the nation growing up in our large towns without education, and ready to become members of the dangerous classes.’

Forster’s backer, MP Charles Buxton, made it clear at whom the act was aimed: ‘No feeling of tenderness for the parents would deter him for one minute from adopting compulsion. Society was suffering grievously from their shameful apathy with regard to the education of their children.’ (House of Commons, 12 March 1869)

Forster forced mums and dads to hand over their children to the vicars and priests who ran the church schools – who duly beat the word of God into their backsides – from the age of eight to 13. Later on Forster would force Irishmen to obey British rule under the so-called ‘Coercion Act’.

The 1944 Act and a Brave New World of tripartite education

Tasked with setting up schools for children aged 11 to 15, Labour education minister Ellen Wilkinson told local authorities to ‘think in terms of three types’ of state school (Circular No 73, 12 December 1945). The three sorts of schools were: grammar schools for clever boys and girls; technical schools for practical children (only a few were built); and, last of all, new ‘modern’ schools for working-class children ‘whose future employment will not demand any measure of technical skill or knowledge’ (Ministry of Education, 1945). ‘Not everyone wants an academic education’, Wilkinson said: ‘After all, coal has to be mined and fields ploughed.’

Wilkinson was on the far left of the Labour Party. But just what ‘left wing’ meant was changing. In Churchill’s war cabinet Labour ministers got into the habit of pushing people from pillar to post. The ‘tripartite’ education system seems a bit stiff-necked today; it treated boys and girls like cogs in a machine. But that was pretty much in keeping with the way that ministers bossed workers around in the war.

The ‘Blackboard Jungle’ scare

The upwardly-climbing liked grammar schools. Ellen Wilkinson’s Ardwick Grammar School helped her out of the working class and into Manchester University. Another Labour minister, Roy Jenkins, went to Oxford after Abersychan County Grammar – not bad for a miner’s son. Shopkeeper’s daughter and later Tory education minister Margaret Thatcher went to Kesteven and Grantham Girls School before going to Oxford.

But three-quarters of children did not go to grammar schools. An exam at age eleven – the ‘Eleven Plus’ – sorted children out into the grammar school winners and the secondary modern school losers. It was called ‘selection’. That meant a lot of unhappy children, and unhappy parents.

Before long, the better-off began to get scared of what was going on in secondary modern schools. Newspapers ran scare stories about crime and violence in ‘The Blackboard Jungle’ (taken from the title of a New York school novel and film).

‘A 15-year-old boy draws a knife on a master who is chastising him then waits for the teacher with a studded belt outside – forcing him to ask for police protection.’ This lurid tale was part of a big ‘Blackboard Jungle’ spread in the Sunday Graphic, 12 July 1959. The News Chronicle editor backed up such scare stories, saying, ‘until the black spots in secondary schools are cleaned up they will continue to taint the whole’ (in a letter to The Schoolmaster, 23 September 1955).

Secondary modern teachers wrote racy novels, like ER Braithwaite’s tale of hopeless youngsters stirred by a young Guiana-born teacher, To Sir, With Love. It was published in 1959 and made into a film with Sidney Poitier eight years later. Another was Edward Blishen’s The Roaring Boys – a Schoolmaster’s Agony. The blurb read: ‘They came from the backstreets and slums of London’s east end. They were the roaring boys. Teenage delinquents living for kicks. Young tearaways full of searing hate and fury.’

Class war

It was fear of the young tearaways that put an end to school selection and the tripartite system. It was fear of the class war getting out of hand. In a speech in 1966, Labour minister Tony Crosland owned up to a ‘deeply felt’ and ‘controversial’ view that ‘separate schools exacerbate social division’ and ‘the eleven plus divides overwhelmingly according to social class’.

Crosland did not want to start a class war. He wanted to stop one. He promised he would not ‘argue the point in terms of equality’; he would argue it ‘in terms of a sense of cohesion’. ‘We only have to consider our industrial relations’, he warned, ‘to see the depth of social division’. ‘But so long as we choose to educate our children in separate camps’, he warned, ‘for so long will our schools exacerbate rather than diminish social divisions’.

The rise of the meritocracy?

Crosland’s fears of class war were outlined by the social scientist Michael Young, the collator of the 1945 Labour Party manifesto in which Labour promised to build new secondary schools. In 1958 he wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy, a darkly comic fable set in the year 2033, which tries to guess at what will happen to a country that selects its children according to their ‘eleven plus’ scores – what he called ‘a meritocracy’.

In The Rise of the Meritocracy the upper-class owes its standing to intelligence, not money or land. But they have made an awful mistake. The lower orders, domestic servants and the ‘Technicians Party’ rise up in revolt against the cruel meritocracy. Half a million copies of The Rise of the Meritocracy were sold worldwide. The case for the comprehensive school, and against selection, was won. It was won because while the ruling class were too scared of what would happen to the working class if they were shut up in no-hope schools, the middle class were too embarrassed to say out loud what they secretly thought: that their sons and daughters deserved better than the rest. (Michael Young is Toby Young’s dad.)

School choice

Even though comprehensive schools became the norm, the professional classes were never really happy about it. Right-wing university lecturer GH Bantock was outraged at the idea that ‘the future doctor, dustman, admiral and cabin-boy must be taught together in the same mixed-ability class’. Instead of calling for a return to the eleven plus and selection, critics called for different kinds of schools and for school choice.

What they meant was that some schools could be made more ‘academic’ and that they could ‘choose’ to send their kids there.

The Labour Party leaders do not send their children to comprehensive schools. Tony Blair sent his children to the London Oratory – a grant-maintained school. So did New Labour stalwart Harriet Harman. Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press secretary, is one of few who does send his sons to a comprehensive school: William Ellis in Camden. It was Campbell who coined the phrase ‘bog standard comp’.

More here






Australia: How the Left hate the Brethren

What the report below omits to say is that the Federal government has part-funded church schools since the days of Bob Menzies. Church schools of all denominations ALWAYS get private as well as government funding. So many parents send their kids to private schools in Australia that they represent a significant voting bloc that no government can ignore -- as Mark Latham found out to his cost. So the report below is not news at all.

The furore is just another Leftist attack on a very conservative group. Although it is doubtful that anybody takes much notice of them, the leaders of the mainstream churches almost always come out in support of the Labor party at election time. The Brethren are a rare group that actually funds advertisements supporting the conservatives. And hell hath no fury like a Leftist scorned

A RELIGIOUS school run by the secretive Exclusive Brethren religion was granted more than $9 million in government funding despite getting $15 million from "other private sources", the MySchool 2.0 website reveals.

The government handout was based on it being rated one of the most disadvantaged schools in the nation, equivalent to an impoverished Aboriginal mission school. Yet despite its government classification as a "category 12" school, with private funding it is able to spend more than $20,000 a year on each student. The average for a state school is about $10,000 per student.

It runs MET (Meadowbank Education Trust) School, based at Oatlands near West Ryde, but is, in fact, 18 schools spread throughout the state as far as Albury and Condobolin.

"This is a complete, total abuse of the funding system," NSW Greens MP John Kaye said. "It's very hard to argue that these schools are impoverished when they're getting $15 million from private sources."

Australian Education Union federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said the school's arrangements highlighted the flaws in the federal funding system. "Like all private schools, this school is funded regardless of its income or wealth," Mr Gavrielatos said. "As a result it has almost double the average income per student of a public school."

The school, which had no input over its rating, failed to return calls over the funding issue yesterday.

SOURCE




Clumsy fakery of test results in Australia

THE "gobsmacking" NAPLAN score of one disadvantaged Melbourne primary school, detailed on the My School website, has raised fresh questions about whether schools are manipulating the literacy and numeracy tests to gain an unfair advantage.

Education consultant and NAPLAN expert Philip Holmes-Smith said of the result achieved by Dallas Primary School in Broadmeadows that he had "never seen anything like it". "In statistics I never say it's impossible because there is probably a 0.0004 per cent chance it would happen," Mr Holmes-Smith said.

A growing number of principals and academics believe that schools face so much pressure to perform well in NAPLAN (National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy) that manipulation will result.

In the United States city of Atlanta, 109 educators faced scrutiny or sanctions after an investigation found test-related cheating at 58 public schools. Funding decisions there are made on test results. Similar problems have been found elsewhere in the US and in Britain.

The federal government, under its National Partnership Agreement on Literacy and Numeracy, will begin allocating large reward payments to schools based on their improvements in NAPLAN.

In the 2010 test last May, only 74 per cent of Dallas Primary students sat the test; 20 per cent were "withdrawn" and 7 per cent "absent". The national average attendance was 96 per cent.

Former education department bureaucrat John Nelson said the Dallas results were "gobsmacking". Despite a large migrant population and low socio-economic status, year 3 students were reading, spelling and understanding grammar and punctuation at significantly higher levels than the national average for year 5 students. In grammar and punctuation, the school's year 3 students outstripped its year 5 students, by a score of 596 to 522.

The students' improvement from year 3 in 2008 to year 5 in 2010 was enormous, putting year 5 students at near year 8 levels.

Dallas principal Valerie Karaitiana has in the past attributed her school's success to its specialist programs, but would not respond to questions on Friday. Northern region director Wayne Craig has, in private forums, used Dallas as an example to other principals of what can be achieved, but he refused on Friday to defend its performance. A departmental investigation of the school has found nothing wrong.

Other Victorian principals are suspicious. Doug Conway, principal of the western suburban Kings Park Primary School, believes the "lowest-performing kids were told to stay at home". "If you did that at my school, the low SES, high non-English-speaking background children, we'd get a colossal spike," he said. "I think the pressure on schools has led some schools to have lower participation rates than they should have." Terry Condon, Roxburgh Rise Primary principal, called Dallas "one of the most miraculous schools in the state".

Schools Minister Martin Dixon said he was concerned about Victoria's low participation rate in the NAPLAN tests, but was not aware of problems with any individual school.

Mr Holmes-Smith, a consultant at School Research Evaluation and Measurement Services, pointed out that Dallas's score for writing was much lower than for spelling and grammar. "Writing is the most authentic assessment because the children actually have to write something," he said. The other tests are multiple choice.

Mr Nelson, who quit his Education Department job because he thought a departmental investigation into Dallas was "a whitewash", asked: "What did they do that took a kid in Broadmeadows from the bottom 10th or 20th percentile and put them in the top percentile? Whatever they did needs to be copied by everybody, so why hasn't it? Why didn't they celebrate their methods?"

SOURCE



7 March, 2011

Losing the Brains Race

America is spending more money on education while producing worse outcomes

In November the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released its Program for International Student Assessment scores, measuring educational achievement in 65 countries. The results are depressingly familiar: While students in many developed nations have been learning more and more over time, American 15-year-olds are stuck in the middle of the pack in many fundamental areas, including reading and math. Yet the United States is near the top in education spending.

Using the OECD data, Figure 1 compares K–12 education expenditures per pupil in each of the world’s major industrial powers. As you can see, with the exception of Switzerland, the U.S. spends the most in the world on education, an average of $91,700 per student in the nine years between the ages of 6 and 15. But the results do not correlate: For instance, we spend one-third more per student than Finland, which consistently ranks near the top in science, reading, and math.

Naturally, the OECD’s report has sparked calls for more spending. Speaking at Forsyth Technical Community College in North Carolina at the beginning of December, President Barack Obama said the federal government should spend more on improving achievement in math and science, much as Washington did in response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik launch a half-century ago.

But throwing more money at poorly performing schools has not moved the needle on performance. During the last 40 years, the federal government has spent $1.8 trillion on education, and spending per pupil in the U.S. has tripled in real terms. Government at all levels spent an average of $149,000 on the 13-year education of a high school senior who graduated in 2009, compared to $50,000 (in 2009 dollars) for a 1970 graduate.

Despite the dramatic increase in spending, there has been no notable change in student outcomes. Using data provided by Andrew Coulson, an education policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, Figure 2 shows National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in reading, math, and science, along with per pupil spending. The only trend line with a pulse is the amount of spending.

More spending usually means more teachers. Last year Obama not only used stimulus funds to preserve education jobs but called for “10,000 new teachers.” Yet as Figure 3 shows, the number of students per teacher in U.S. public schools fell from 17.4 in 1990 to 15.7 in 2007.

We have tried spending more money and putting more teachers in classrooms for more than a generation, with no observable improvements to anything except the schools’ bottom lines. Why? Because of the lack of competition in the K–12 education system. Schooling in the United States is still based largely on residency; students remain tied to the neighborhood school regardless of how bad its performance may be. Federal spending on education (which amounted to 8.3 percent of total public education spending in 2007) is funneled to students through the institutions to which they are tied, largely regardless of student performance. With no need to convince students and parents to stay, schools in most districts lack the incentive to serve student needs or differentiate their product. To make matters worse, this lack of competition continues at the school level, where teacher hiring and firing decisions are stubbornly divorced from student performance, tied instead to funding levels and tenure.

If reform is to be defined by something other than the amount of money flushed down the toilet, it is time to reverse the flow of power from the top (administrators, school districts, teachers unions, governments) to the bottom (students, their parents, and taxpayers who want their money spent wisely). A first step in that direction is to change our teacher labor market practices in terms of both hiring and firing. On the hiring end, there are too many restrictions on who can become a teacher. On the firing end, we need to restore the relationship between job retention and job performance. Lisa Snell, director of education at the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit organization that publishes this magazine and does public policy research), points out in an email one recent example of how bad a school’s labor practices can be: “L.A. Unified School District laid off hundreds of its top teachers and replaced them with lower-performing teachers with seniority.”

In long-suffering California, a bipartisan coalition is supporting a new response to such irrational practices: the “parent trigger,” which allows fed-up parents whose children are in a consistently underperforming school to quickly change the school’s leadership. By signing a petition, parents can force reorganization of a school’s management or conversion into a charter school. In December parents of students at Compton Unified School District’s McKinley Elementary School did just that.

A parent trigger is not a panacea, but it introduces an element of choice (and hence competition) into a monopoly that has been shortchanging its customers and benefactors for decades. Wealthy people already exercise school choice, either by sending their kids to private schools or by choosing where to live based on school districts. The parent trigger gives less fortunate parents a similar and much less expensive tool. Along with the growth of online education and the charter school movement, these lurches in the direction of consumer choice are heartening and long overdue.

SOURCE (See the original for graphics)







Teachers' Unions 101: "A" is for "Agitation"

If public school teachers spent more time teaching in classrooms and less time community-organizing in political war rooms, maybe taxpayers wouldn't feel as ripped off as they do. Before the Big Labor bosses start complaining about "teacher-bashing," let's be clear: An increasing number of rank-and-file teachers feel exactly the same way.

Retired New York teacher Vinne Cusimano, who was required to pay forced union dues in order to work, wrote me this week after receiving the March 2011 edition of his union's monthly publication. The cover of the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) magazine reads: "Defend What Matters! Educate. Collaborate. AGITATE." Inside the pamphlet, NYSUT President Richard Iannuzzi rails against "malicious politicians" in Wisconsin and elsewhere proposing "extreme anti-union" budget cuts. He urges his members to join "advocacy" efforts to "maintain critical resources" and lectures about the need to "value education over ideology and greed."

Cusimano, who taught for four decades in the Empire State, fired back at Ianuzzi in an open letter:

"As a member for over 40 years, I have never been so disappointed at the stand you are taking to call members to 'AGITATE!' We are trying to tamp down the rhetoric and you are outward(ly) inciting agitation. How dare you! You are supposed to be for the students/teachers. ... How can you support 'EDUCATE,' 'COLLABORATE,' and then encourage agitation?"

More to the point, what business does Iannuzzi -- a fat-cat union official who rakes in nearly $300,000 a year (plus a $100,000 pension) while his organization's net assets are more than $117 million in the red -- have lecturing anyone else about "ideology and greed"? Instead of imposing fiscal discipline on NYSUT, Iannuzzi and his cronies have gone on a spending spree -- dumping nearly $10.5 million into left-wing Democratic politics this past year alone. The NYSUT boasts a lobbying staff of 500, a 200,000-square-foot palace in Albany and a $213 million operating budget -- paid for through compulsory union dues of about $300 a year from some 600,000 members.

"Agitation," of course, is a full-time job for teachers' union officials in New York and across the country. As the New York Post reported exclusively this week, the city Department of Education compensates some 1,500 teachers for their union activities and also subsidizes other teachers who take their places in the classroom: "It's a sweetheart deal that costs taxpayers an extra $9 million a year to pay fill-ins for instructors who are sprung -- at full pay -- to carry out responsibilities for the United Federation of Teachers."

The UFT soldiers "collect top pay and fringe benefits, but work just one class period a day." Nice non-work if you can get it.

NYSUT, by the way, is the parent of the double-dipping UFT, which itself rakes in $126 million in member dues -- but only reimburses the city less than $1 million out of the $9 million it costs to take teachers out of the classroom to serve at the altar of Big Labor. UFT is also a chapter of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which spent nearly $2 million on the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. (In return, you may recall, the Obama administration granted the UFT one of its coveted health care Waivers for Favors last year -- exempting the behemoth union in a sweetheart deal from the federal mandate's costly rules on phasing out annual health coverage limits.)

The forced-dues racket is big business for teachers' unions crying poor. In Ohio, the state's education association siphoned nearly $23 million from rank-and-file school workers to fatten up its union staff. The Ohio Education Association donated more than $1.6 million to Democratic campaigns last year and tossed off five-figure checks each to union and progressive allies in Oregon, Colorado and Policy Matters Ohio, a left-wing think tank funded by radical billionaire George Soros.

At the federal level, the National Education Association squandered $13 million in teachers' dues on every pet liberal cause and crony from the AFL-CIO ($150,000) and AFSCME ($90,000), to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate ($200,000), Media Matters for America ($100,000) and the White House brigade at Health Care for America Now! ($450,000).

The goals of the teachers' union machine are not academic excellence, professional development and fairness. As former NEA official John Lloyd explained it: "You cannot possibly understand NEA without understanding Saul Alinsky. If you want to understand NEA, go to the library and get 'Rules for Radicals.'"

The goals are student indoctrination, social upheaval and perpetual agitation in pursuit of bigger government and spending without restraint. No wonder the signature "solidarity" color of the teachers' union protests this month is red.

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Britain needs more overalls and fewer suits

The plans put forward last week by Michael Gove for “university technical colleges”, seem eminently sensible. The colleges, backed by businesses, would teach skills such as bricklaying, plumbing and engineering to pupils aged 14 and above, at the same time as more traditional subjects.

Some critics have warned of a system designed to funnel working-class children into non-academic learning. This is an absurdly snobbish way of looking at things. Now that the jobs market is increasingly flooded with graduates waving degrees of questionable quality, those with a verifiable practical qualification will be more sought after than ever.

At present, a trained plumber or master builder can still command a handsome salary, even though many other positions are highly uncertain. People joke about “cowboy builders” largely because the trade has been infiltrated by the inexperienced and unscrupulous – a problem that would be reduced by widespread training.

Yet how curious it is that, before the meltdown, society revered besuited conmen who built rotten markets on toxic debt much more than those with the talent to construct a solid home.

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6 March, 2011

Bill Gates fires arrows at the sacred cows of America's Education System

Good to have him onside

Speaking at the 2011 TED Conference (Technology, Education, Design), Gates sharply criticized states for the waste in American education. "The guys at Enron never would have done this! I mean this is so blatant, so extreme that, is anybody paying attention to what these guys do?" Gates said.

The 55-year-old multi-billionaire has made it a mission to find the money to make schools and teachers better.

"State budgets are a critical topic because here's where we make the real tradeoffs," he said. "If we make the wrong choice education won't be funded the right way."

Gates said many states, in their efforts to close their budget deficits, are making the wrong choices, cutting education. "The bottom line is we need to care about state budgets because they're critical for our kids and our future."

Gates' theory: Identify and develop teachers, then reward excellence in the field.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he and his wife started, is studying and videotaping teachers in seven urban school districts. The goal is to determine exactly what teaching methods work, and which don't.

In the meantime, Gates challenged some long-held assumptions about education. He said the U.S. spends $50 billion a year on automatic salary increases for teachers based on seniority, but, according to Gates, "Seniority seems to have no effect on student achievement."

Gates also questions spending $15 billion a year on salary bumps for teachers who get advanced degrees. "Such raises have almost no impact on achievement," he said.

The head of the nation's largest teachers union vehemently disagreed. "I was a math teacher for 23 years," said Dennis Van Roekel, President of the National Education Association. "I can guarantee you that what I took as part of my masters degree program in mathematics made a difference to me as a teacher."

Gates challenged the notion that smaller class sizes are better. He proposed that the best teachers actually take on more students. He said skilled teachers ought to be paid more to take on five or six more kids per class, so more children can benefit from what those teachers are doing right.

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Free the Children, Cut the Budget: States have no business running schools

Pundits like David Brooks of the New York Times lament that the deficit-cutting mood supposedly sweeping the United States is myopically targeting education in favor of more powerful constituencies. “If you look across the country, you see education financing getting sliced — often in the most thoughtless and destructive ways,” Brooks writes. “The future has no union.” In Washington, he adds, early-childhood programs might be slashed, and

Many governors of both parties are diverting money from schools in thoughtless and self-destructive ways. Hawaii decided to cut the number of days in the school year. Of all the ways to cut education, why on earth would you reduce student time in the classroom?

Texas is taking the meat cleaver approach. School financing will be cut by at least 13.5 percent, around $3.5 billion. About 85,000 new students arrive in Texas every year. There will be no additional resources to accommodate them.

To Brooks’s relief, the Obama administration has at least one voice of sanity:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan gave a superb speech in November called the New Normal. He observed that this era of austerity should be an occasion to increase productivity and cut the things that are ineffective.

As though a bureaucrat’s bromides about increasing productivity and reducing ineffectiveness stands a chance of righting what’s wrong with education. We’ve had quite a lot of that over the years, with little to show for it. Education budgets went up; the quality of education did not.

Bureaucracy

There’s a reason for that: bureaucracy. That’s the antonym of “competitive entrepreneurial undertaking.” If we’re truly in a budget-cutting mood and wish to breathe life into education at the same time, we should de-bureaucratize schools by putting them entirely into the entrepreneurial arena: the marketplace.

I do not mean vouchers or charter schools. At best they operate according to a constricted model of competition tended by education bureaucrats and legislative bodies. The central flaw in these “reforms” is taxpayer financing. As long as the money comes through government, demands will be made for schools to be accountable to government rather than parents and students, setting limits to competition. Tax financing also reduces individual responsibility, while limiting — because of the double payment — most people’s ability to break out of the system altogether.

Moreover, financing learning through the compulsion of taxation is perverse. Education should be a consensual relationship among parents, children, and (when necessary) formal teachers. I’m fond of Isabel Paterson’s questions to teachers in her book The God of the Machine: “Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?”

What’s Really Radical?

No school taxes and no compulsory attendance. Sounds radical, but what’s really radical is the State’s asserting the power of parens patriae over children and forcing everyone to pay for the outrage. As education historian E. G. West noted, it did not take laws to achieve virtually universal education in the nineteenth century (among the free population). But it did take laws to give us schools that function like indoctrination centers, preaching the glory of government while preparing children to be quiescent taxpaying citizens who will take their place in industry, the bureaucracy, or the military. Today the goal is to train the personnel necessary to assure America’s status as the undisputed leader of the global economy, as though the world marketplace were a race among nations.

My references to competition, entrepreneurship, and markets do not imply that education should be provided by for-profit firms only or even predominantly. A freed education market would include nonprofits, co-ops, extended homeschooling, and things no one has thought of yet. The key is to liberate all participants from the heavy hand of bureaucracy. No authority should interpose itself between aspiring providers competing with one another and consumers of education services. Only then will the “discovery procedure” that F. A. Hayek identified with competition be fully ignited.

What about the Poor?

That’s the inevitable question. The irony is that poor children in this society have been treated disgracefully by government school authorities. It is sheer chutzpah for advocates of “public education” to say they worry about the poor after having inflicted and/or tolerated such abuse for so long.

The poor would stand a much better chance in a freed education environment. If some of the most destitute places on earth manage to have private for-profit schools for poor children, then so can the United States, especially if the shackles were removed. Of course, there would be far fewer poor people in a freed society.

Will School be separated from State any time soon? Unlikely. The public-school industry, including the unions and all the vendors selling things to school districts, is big, rich, and powerful. The education-industrial complex surely rivals the military-industrial complex in its capacity to consume tax revenues.

But if for no other reason, the dismal fiscal condition of the states makes this a good time to talk about separation. It certainly won’t happen if nobody ever mentions it.

How would we go about it? I’ve long thought the best way would be simply to turn each school over to the people who work in it. Let them run the schools and compete independently of government without tax revenues. An alternative would be to turn the schools over to the parents if they want them. Just get them away from the bureaucracy.

Brooks is right. Education is important – far too important to leave to politicians and bureaucrats.

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The cheating epidemic at Britain's universities

A cheating epidemic is sweeping universities with thousands of students caught plagiarising, trying to bribe lecturers and buying essays from the internet. A survey of more than 80 universities has revealed that academic misconduct is soaring at institutions across the country.

More than 17,000 incidents of cheating were recorded by universities in the 2009-10 academic year – up at least 50 per cent in four years.

But the true figure will be far higher because many were only able to provide details of the most serious cases and let lecturers deal with less serious offences.

Only a handful of students were expelled for their misdemeanours among those universities which disclosed how cheats were punished.

Most of the incidents were plagiarism in essays and other coursework, but others examples include:

* Three cases categorised as "impersonation" by Derby University and three at Coventry, along with 10 "uses of unauthorised technology"

* Kent University reported at least one case where a student attempted to "influence a teacher or examiner improperly".

* At the University of East Anglia students submitted pieces of work which contained identical errors, while others completed reports which were "almost identical to that of another student", a spokesman said, while one was caught copying sections from the Wikipedia website.

* A student sitting an exam at the University of the West of Scotland was caught with notes stored in an MP3 player.

* A Bradford University undergraduate completed work at home, smuggled it into an examination then claimed it had been written during the test.

* The University of Central Lancashire, at Preston, reported students had been caught using a "listening and/or communications device" during examinations.

* Keele undergraduates sitting exams were found to have concealed notes in the lavatory, stored on a mobile telephone and written on tissues while two students were found guilty of "falsifying a mentor's signature on practice assessment documents to gain academic benefit".

Many institutions reported students buying coursework from internet-based essay-writing companies. Dozens of websites offering the services are available on the web, providing bespoke essays for fees of £150 and upwards. Some offer "guaranteed first class honours" essays at extra cost and many "guarantee confidentiality and privacy" – hinting that the essays can be used to cheat.

In one website offering "creative, unique, original, credible" essays, a testimonial from a previous customer says: "I am very satisfied with my order because I got the expected result." There are even sites which offer express services, while many claim the work is written by people with postgraduate qualifications.

Nottingham Trent discovered examples of bespoke essays, and Newcastle reported three cases of essays being purchased from a third party. Two students bought work at Salford and cases were also reported at East London University, Greenwich and London South Bank, which uncovered three incidents.

Professor Geoffrey Alderman, from the University of Buckingham, who is a long-standing critic of falling standards in higher education, said: "I think it is a pretty depressing picture. "It is worrying that students now resort to cheating on such a widespread scale and that the punishments on the whole are not robust enough. "In my book it should be 'two strikes and you're out'.

"Although universities are perhaps better than they were at detecting certain types of cheating, such as plagiarism, when I talk to colleagues across the sector there is a view that cheating has increased."

Professor Alderman said the style of teaching and assessment now used at some institutions was partly to blame for the rise in academic dishonesty. "There has been a move away from unseen written examinations and most university degree courses are now assessed through term papers, which makes it more tempting to commit plagiarism," he said.

"I advocate a return to the situation where it is impossible to pass a degree unit without achieving a minimum score in an unseen written test."

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5 March, 2011

VA: Old-fashioned courtesy penalized

There is an old legal principle that says the law does not concern itself with trivialities. And I suspect that it happens that way most of the time. Here it did not and the punishment could presumably be overturned in the courts on that ground

A local middle school student held open a door at school, reportedly because someone had their hands full. But after that, the student was suspended.

All schools in Southampton County have tight security at the front door, and students are told not to open the door for anyone. But Superintendent Charles Turner tells NewsChannel 3 that the rule was disobeyed when the student opened the door for the woman with her hands full.

The school system recently spent thousands of dollars upgrading door security at all of its schools. Once the construction was complete, administrators said that no students would be allowed to open the doors for anyone, with safety being the reason.

Any visitor who tries to get into the school during school hours is going to find out that all of the doors are locked. If they want to get in, they are required to press a button and someone inside the school will decide whether to let them in.

"We are very protective of our teenagers and it allows us to make sure that the people coming in to the door come into the office for help," Principal Allene Atkinson says, "Parents have been overwhelmingly supportive of this system because our whole objective is to ensure that our children are safe."

But some parents like Billy Haydu say they have mixed feelings about the student's suspension. While they understand that the student broke policy, they do believe the student is being unfairly punished for trying to do a good deed. Haydu says, "My personal opinion, I don't think that was fair. I would think they would talk to them, explain the situation, but I think suspending them was just a little bit harsh."

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America's College Obsession

Andy Ferguson, one of America's most engaging and perspicacious journalists, has not -- as Andre Malraux said of Whittaker Chambers -- returned from the hell of college admissions with empty hands. In "Crazy U," his chronicle of his son's senior year of high school -- a year of college visiting, application, essay writing, open-house attending, interviewing, financial aid seeking, and waiting, waiting, waiting -- is by turns hilarious, shrewd, and revealing.

The "crazy" in the book's title refers to our national obsession with college -- a little piece of insanity to which Ferguson is more prone than most. Preoccupied by his son's prospects of being admitted to a good college, Ferguson devours advice books, college guides, and, in weak moments, websites like College Confidential, prompting this reflection about anonymous advice websites:

"I'd been bewildered by [too much information] before ... Before a business trip I'd go online to find a recommendation for a rodent-free hotel or a reliable restaurant. Half a dozen websites would be waiting to help ... From them I learned that the local big-chain hotel was in fact a good bargain, with pleasant service and an excellent location, and also a hellhole staffed by human ferrets, with overflowing toilets and untraceable smells that had ruined the honeymoon of vox-12popula and iwantmyrum, who were now exacting their revenge by abusing the hotel on every website they could find."

But along with the confusion and the profusion of contradictory advice he found on the Web and elsewhere about getting into college, Ferguson notes the dismaying effects of following the advice. He quotes an expensive "consultant" who advises "'Early on in high school your child should find a teacher they like and go that extra mile. They should ... cultivate that relationship ... be enthusiastic in class ... and spend time outside of class with the teacher, if that's possible.'" The aim, Ferguson summarizes, is to "release" at recommendation time "a gusher of praise."

In other words, Ferguson interprets, the process "turned them into Eddie Haskell . . . It guaranteed that teenagers would pursue life with a single ulterior motive . . . It coated their every undertaking in a thin lacquer of insincerity."

If the process encourages a certain amount of obsequiousness and even dishonesty in America's youth, it also elicits more than a dollop of deceit by the colleges themselves. Fixated on their US News & World Report rankings, colleges "fudge" numbers like the SAT scores of incoming freshmen, the graduation rate, and average class size. Wall Street Journal reporter Steve Stecklow compared the data schools submitted to US News with the data they submitted to bond rating agencies. "(I)f they lied to a rating agency, they might go to jail; if they lied to US News they might make the Top Twenty. Reviewing credit reports for more than one hundred schools, he caught one in four fudging the numbers."

The college admission rigmarole reflects in so many ways the cultural and political preferences of the liberals who run the vast majority of these institutions. A "sample" college essay Ferguson purchased online reflected the fashion:

"There was no question our hired hand thought he knew the magic words that would make an admissions committee coo: 'I would be proud to work collaboratively with diverse populations to solve problems ... my readiness for greater challenges in the diverse learning environment ... my enthusiasm for history, diplomacy and cultural diversity...'"

Just as gag-inducing is the spiraling cost of this four-year excursion into diversityland. The annual cost of a typical private college went from $3,663 in 1975 to $34,132 in 2009. (Many are above $50,000 now.) Ferguson analyzes it succinctly: "It's the same problem that afflicts health care (the other sector of the American economy that has seen skyrocketing costs in the past few decades), a large portion of the people consuming the services aren't paying for the service out of their own pocket. The costs are picked up by third parties." No one has the incentive to cut costs.

But even paring away the layers of folly that surround the quest for college does not, in the end, disillusion Ferguson. A year's research and experience has revealed that the application process is needlessly complicated and stressful, that college admission is marred by many injustices, that college itself is perhaps a "bubble" investment that has been way oversold, and that the costs are completely unrelated to the value of the product.

But when his son is accepted at the school of his choice, Ferguson and his wife rejoice. They've drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid. We all have. But after reading this hugely entertaining book, we at least see it more clearly.

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Bad news for free schools in Britain

The Financial Times reports that the Department for Education is not going to meet its target date for relaxing school building regulations. This is bad news for the government’s ‘free schools’ agenda.

The idea behind free schools is a great one: expand the supply of good school places by encouraging private organizations to set up their own schools, which will then receive state funding on a per-pupil basis. This expansion in supply will allow British parents to exercise choice over where their children go to school. That choice will, in turn, bring competitive pressures to bear on the state education system: popular schools will be able to expand, bad schools will wither and die. Standards will be driven up across the board as a consequence.

But there’s a problem. For this to work, you need lots of new providers entering the market. And that’s not going to happen if you’ve got very strict building and planning regulations, which allow local authorities to obstruct the process.

The government always planned make it easier for schools to be set up in pre-existing buildings, like office blocks or empty shops. That’s what has happened in Sweden, where ‘free schools’ have been a huge success. It bodes ill that the government has fallen behind schedule, so let’s hope they can get things back on track quickly.

But there’s another big problem with the government’s free schools agenda, and that’s that they’ve decided to prevent providers from making a profit out of running the schools. But without profit-making chains entering the free schools market, it is unlikely that enough new schools will be established. The whole thing risks ending up a damp squib.

Overall, I have to question the government’s tactics. They’ve got good ideas and good intentions. But they are being too timid. Their opponents are going to make a huge fuss about anything they do to liberalize public services, so why bother attempting to placate them? Be radical and get it over with, I say. Otherwise, it’ll be 2015 before you know it, and you won’t have done half the things you set out to do.

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4 March, 2011

Texas College Scholarship Targets Only White Male Students

Only white men with a 3.0 grade-point average can apply for a new scholarship being offered by a Texas nonprofit group, the Austin American-Statesman reports.

Colby Bohannan, a Texas State University student, said he founded the Former Majority Association for Equality group after fighting in the Iraq war and returning home to find no college scholarships available for white males like himself -- only women and minorities.

"I felt excluded," Bohannon, a student at Texas State University, told the newspaper. "If everyone else can find scholarships, why are we left out?"

Bohannon went on to say that he and his friends will begin handing out $500 scholarships this summer, arguing that white male students now make up a minority group in Texas.

School officials have so far not taken issue with the group's objective, saying the scholarship is no different from one offered to students from different ethnic groups.

"From the university's standpoint, we can't take issue with a scholarship offered to a certain group," Joanne Smith, Texas State University's vice president of student affairs, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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10-hour school day on the way to boost grades in Britain (and Saturday mornings too!)

Children could go to school for ten hours a day and on Saturday mornings under a radical shake-up of secondary education. Education Minister Michael Gove wants school days to run from 7.30am to 5.30pm to improve pupils’ performance and enable them to study vocational courses alongside core academic subjects. He also wants sites to open on Saturdays and to increase terms by two weeks, to a total of 40 weeks a year.

It would mean youngsters gaining more than an extra year of teaching over a five-year period. Longer days in the state system would bring them in line with many private schools, giving disadvantaged youngsters more time in class to catch up with more privileged peers. They would also be popular with working parents who struggle to fit 3pm school finishing times in with their jobs.

Mr Gove said the measures – which would mirror exemplary Far Eastern schools such as in Singapore – would not be compulsory but strongly advised.

The teachers’ union criticised the plans, arguing that staff already have a punishing workload and that children need time to rest.

Mr Gove unveiled the plans yesterday alongside the findings of an independent review into vocational education. Led by Professor Alison Wolf, it found a third of non-academic GCSE-equivalent courses are pointless or even harm career prospects. One, the certificate in Personal Effectiveness, taught pupils, among other things, how to claim benefits.

Mr Gove said youngsters aged 14 to 16 should focus on core subjects of his English Baccalaureate – English, maths, a science, a humanity and a foreign language. He said vocational courses should be taught alongside the core and occupy up to 20 per cent of the school timetable.

If schools can manage to get all their pupils up to scratch during a short school day then they should stick to it, he said. But if pupils are failing to pass maths and English GCSEs, as more than half do, they must lengthen the school day.

Mr Gove said it was up to individual schools to decide whether to adopt the measures, but added: ‘I personally believe that people should be learning for longer. ‘Lots of schools have found having an extended school day – sometimes weekend education, or longer terms – helps.’

Mr Gove said he would not prescribe the longer hours, but has ‘lifted the bureaucratic requirement on schools to give us notice about varying the school day’. ‘The opportunity is now there for schools to offer students more,’ he said.

Academies, ‘free’ schools and faith schools are able to vary their hours, provided they teach for a minimum of 190 days a year. Comprehensives must seek permission from their local authority.

Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of education union ATL, criticised the plans. She said: ‘Longer hours in school do not neatly equate into higher achievement by pupils. ‘The reasons why some fail to achieve as well as they could are complex and varied. Being born into a disadvantaged family is the most significant. ‘Young people need to spend time with families and friends and to organise their own activities, or rest.

‘Teachers in the English state schools already work an average of 50 hours a week – 18 of them teaching and the rest marking and preparing students’ work, in parents’ meetings, staff meetings, and training. They need a life outside school too.’

Professor Wolf’s review attacked as ‘immoral’ the pressures of school league tables which have caused a move away from a core curriculum. She said it was ‘absolutely scandalous’ that half of all 16-year-olds are leaving school without good GCSEs – a C grade or higher – in English and maths.

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Gasp! Australian private schools spend more on their students than government schools do!

Did anyone expect otherwise? What do they think the parents pay for? A most unsurprising revelation. After the Latham debacle, the Labor party would be mad to use this as an excuse to attack private school funding -- but they are pretty mad. Witness their carbon tax and fibre broadband policies

The Coalition has warned the updated My School website will undermine government funding to independent schools while failing to help parents make better educational choices for their children.

Opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne said the government had not made a convincing case for publishing independent schools' financial data. "The Coalition doesn't believe that information being made available will add anything to the educational outcomes of either government or non-government students," he told The Australian Online. "There can only be one reason to publish non-government financial data and that is to undermine government funding of non-government schools."

Schools Minister Peter Garrett launched My School 2.0 this morning at Telopea Park bilingual school in the Canberra suburb of Barton. He said the site was "game-changing" and would give parents "unparalleled data" on school finances.

Mr Garrett warned against parents removing their children from schools simply because of the updated data, instead saying they should read the website carefully and consult their school principals. "Have discussions as you feel are necessary with the school in question," he said. "Think carefully about what you read and what you get from the site and then make your own decisions."

Australian Education Union president Angelo Gavrielatos warned that the My School 2.0 website showed an alarming resources gap between government and private schools. "The gap is being fuelled by a central government funding system which is blind to the real needs of students," he said.

The union boss told The Australian Online the new financial information pointed to a need for a greater investment in the nation's government schools. But he said the information on the website remained limited, as it failed to include millions of dollars held in trust by private schools. "Literally millions of dollars in surpluses and millions held in trust foundations, assets and investment portfolios by private schools will not be shown on the My School website."

He said even on the financial information available, private schools were spending more than double what government schools were spending per student on capital expenditure and 25 per cent more in recurrent funding.

Queensland Education Minister Cameron Dick urged parents to use the revamped My School website with caution, saying he was concerned about the potential for unfair comparisons, given the complexity of the information. “The data could be used unfairly in relation to some schools; some schools have different needs, some communities have different needs ... that's appropriate that they would be funded to a different level,” he told reporters in Brisbane.

“Funding is affected by location, school programs, age and size of facilities, staffing, overall enrolment and the number of indigenous, international, non-English speaking students and students with disabilities.”

The Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens' Associations said it too was concerned with the publication of school finances. “Every school is unique and therefore not comparable,” state president Margaret Leary said in a statement. “The figures presented on the My School website are not a true and fair indicator.”

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3 March, 2011

How low can we go?

CA: Student calls police after math teacher rattles table

An eighth-grade math teacher at Atherton's Selby Lane School rattled a table to get his students' attention Tuesday afternoon, police said. He succeeded on that score. But the demonstration landed him on paid administrative leave.

Officers went to the campus at 2:26 p.m. to check on reports of a teacher causing a disturbance in a classroom and possibly throwing objects, said Sgt. Tim Lynch of the Atherton Police Department.

When officers arrived, however, they found a calm teacher with class in session and determined nothing had been thrown.

Lynch said it appears the teacher's table-rattling act startled a female student who left the class and called police from a cell phone. "My impression by talking to her was that she was disturbed by what the teacher was doing," Lynch said.

Most of the students in the class weren't bothered by the teacher's actions, Lynch said. Though the teacher "dramatically" made his point, "it wasn't a teacher out of control," he added.

Redwood City School District Deputy Superintendent John Baker said the teacher will remain on leave pending an investigation. He said he didn't know what specifically happened and would interview the teacher, the student and her parents in the coming days, as well as other students.

No complaints have been lodged against the teacher in the past, Baker said. The district put the teacher on leave because of the police response and the nature of the complaint, he said.

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Why wasn't the student suspended for leaving class without permission? Or arrested for filing a false police report? This is like a child calling 911 for being punished





Keep taking English and maths in Britain till you get a good grade

Hundreds of thousands of students who fail to get good GCSE grades in English and maths are to be forced to carry on studying the subjects in the biggest shake-up of the curriculum for decades.

Education Secretary Michael Gove is appalled by official figures to be released today showing that the majority of teenagers fail to get C grades or above in both English and maths.

Sources say Mr Gove plans to accept the recommendations of an independent review which will mean that for about 300,000 pupils a year it will be compulsory to carry on studying the key subjects.

Under the rules, they will be forced to carry on doing so until they retake their exams and achieve a C grade or higher at GCSE level. Those who fail to get a good grade will have to keep on studying English and maths until they leave education at 18.

The review of vocational study, by leading academic Professor Alison Wolf of King’s College London, will today warn that 37 per cent of students achieve neither maths nor English GCSE at grades A* to C when they first take the exam. Of this group, only two per cent go on to achieve both by age 18. Some 12 per cent initially achieve an A* to C grade in their English GCSE, but not maths. About 17 per cent of them, or fewer than one in five, achieves a maths GCSE A* to C by the time they are 18. Seven per cent initially achieve a maths GCSE A* to C but not English. About a quarter – 24 per cent – of this group achieves English GCSE A* to C by 18.

Overall, the percentage of children achieving both maths and English GCSE grades A* to C rises from 44.8 per cent initially to 49 per cent at 18. But some 329,000 did not have maths and English A* to C when they first sat the exam. At age 18, 304,000 still did not.

The report will today blame the ‘shocking figures’ not on young people, but on ‘funding incentives which have deliberately steered institutions, and, therefore, their students, away from qualifications that might stretch young people and towards qualifications that can be passed easily’.

Mr Gove believes the previous government’s measures –aimed at helping boost schools’ league table rankings – encouraged hundreds of thousands of pupils to drop academic subjects in favour of easier options.

Students taking three or more A-levels will almost always have achieved at least a grade C in both maths and English, since this acts as an informal entry requirement for such courses. Conversely, most students on non-A-level, vocational courses will not.

There has been a 3,800 per cent increase in the number of children taking non-academic GCSE equivalents since Labour changed the rules in 2004. These gave non-academic qualifications – including computer skills, sports leadership and certificates of ‘personal effectiveness’ – parity with traditional subjects.

The move helped fuel a damaging collapse in the number of children taking academic courses. ‘No other developed country allows, let alone effectively encourages, its young people to neglect mathematics and their own language in this way,’ the report will add. ‘The UK is effectively unique in not requiring continued mathematics and own-language study for all young people engaged in 16 to 19 pre-tertiary education.’

To encourage schools to teach core subjects Mr Gove has already introduced an English baccalaureate A* to C in five core subjects including English and maths.

Professor Wolf will recommend that students who are under 19 and do not have GCSE A* to C in English and maths ‘should be required, as part of their programme, to pursue a course which either leads directly to these qualifications, or which provide significant progress’. Such requirements should be placed even on students who take up apprenticeships.

A Coalition source said: ‘We have inherited a disastrous system from Labour. Millions of children have been pushed into dead-end courses. ‘We want people to keep doing these GCSEs to get themselves up to a good grade. Of course there are children with special educational needs who may never achieve a C grade or above, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be continuing with these subjects.

SOURCE





Why Jews Are Losing The Battle For The Campus

The warnings have been there. In 2006, the US Commission on Civil Rights found that "many college campuses thoughout the US continue to experience incidents of anti-Semitism." Gary Tobin in his 2005 book "Uncivil University: Politics and Propaganda in American Education," concluded that "anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are systemic in higher education and can be found on campuses all over the United States." Across the country too many Jewish and pro-Israel students are patronized, mocked, intimidated and sometimes physically attacked, while anti-Israel professors poison the minds of America's future leaders. Yet Jewish leaders have by and large not responded effectively.

How did the Jewish community, known for its rhetorical genius, lose a critically important political battle on American campuses? Here is a thumbnail sketch:

In 1990, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, explained on Jordanian TV how the Arab Lobby can and will match Jewish political and organizational success in America (the clip is here). Zogby and his allies recognized that the campus and the media, unlike Capitol Hill, are two battle grounds that Arabists could win by allying themselves with the American left. In both venues they already had beachheads and feet on the ground. The campus was in transition politically, influenced by '60s tenured radicals who had adopted the dogma of post-colonialism, and its Palestinian version, Professor Edward Said's "Orientalism."

Moreover, America was experiencing a significant increase in foreign born Muslim students as well as increased Muslim immigration (many from countries with a culture of vicious anti-Semitism). Zogby focused on forming alliances with Marxist professors, die-hard socialist activists, African- American student groups, gay-lesbian groups and, most importantly, Jewish progressives. He also realized that an emerging anti-Israel Left/Muslim axis on campus could be better organized and benefit from an inflow of Arab petro dollars into prestigious American universities. All this was happening while many Jewish leaders, intoxicated by the Oslo agreement, were abandoning Israel programming.

Today, we can see the brilliance of Zogby's strategy: Anti-Israel sentiment suffuses the campus atmosphere. In the classroom, radical professors express the the dominant narrative that the Palestinians are right and the Israelis are in the wrong. In its mild form, the Palestinians suffer needlessly at the hands of Israeli occupiers; in its more vicious version, Israel is a racist, genocidal apartheid nation. Outside the classroom, anti-Israel groups hold conferences, screen films and conduct theatrical demonstrations that portray Israel in the harshest of terms.

Israel's advocates are rudely interrupted, prevented from speaking; pro-Israel events are disrupted; Jewish students are intimidated verbally or even physically, and are excluded from pro-Palestinian events. Pathetic attempts by Jewish groups to initiate dialogue with Palestinian students are rejected. Any acknowledgement of Israelis' humanity is seen as a validation of Palestinian oppression. Our epoch's secular religion - political correctness and multiculturalism - judges people by who they are, not what they do. Israelis are by definition always guilty, while darker skinned, impoverished, indigenous Palestinians are eternally innocent.

Far more than their parents and their community suspect, Jewish students find it challenging and often unpleasant, if not actually frightening, to support Israel on many campuses today.

Through research and interviews with campus activists and students from around the country, we are developing a compilation of anti-Israel incidents and descriptions of hostile atmospheres on campuses.

Here are just four recently reported incidents:

Hampshire College, Amherst. Last semester a pro-Israel student was repeatedly verbally harassed by individuals covering their faces. The student was called "baby killer," "genocide lover," "apartheid supporter" and "racist." After receiving an email that read "Make the world a better place and die slow," she moved off the campus. She has now returned but is still afraid to disclose her identity.

Rutgers University. Last month, a group of pro-Israel students and Holocaust survivors were made to pay an entrance fee to an event that likened Palestinians to Holocaust victims. The event had been advertised as free and open to the public; Palestinian supporters were let in without charge.

Indiana University. Last November, five incidents of anti-Jewish vandalism were reported in one week, including rocks thrown at Chabad and Hillel; sacred Jewish texts placed in various bathrooms and urinated upon; and an information board about Jewish studies programs smashed with a stone.

Carlton University, Ottawa. Last April, a non-Jewish supporter of Israel and his Israeli roommate were attacked by an Arab-speaking mob who screamed anti-Semitic epithets. Nick Bergamini was punched in the head and chased by a man who swung a machete at his head, missing by inches.

Now ask yourself: What would have happened on campus, in the media or in the community if these incidents had been directed at African American, Hispanic or Muslim students?

We have the answer: In October 2009, a noose was found at the University of California-San Diego library. Students occupied the chancellor's office. The governor, the chancellor and student leaders condemned the incident. The school established a task force on minority faculty recruitment and a commission to address declining African-American enrollment, and vowed to find space for an African- American resource center.

All this - only to discover a few weeks later that the noose was planted by a minority student.

Jewish students and Jewish buildings attacked and intimidated are not a hoax, yet Jewish leaders sit on their hands. No one calls for sensitivity training for Muslim and leftist students about the use of blood libels and anti-Semitism. No one demands students be taught about proper behavior in a civil society or about principles of free speech and academic inquiry. More and more, the ugly aspects of the "Arab street" are coming to campus. With the commendable exception of the Zionist Organization of America - which won civil rights protection for California students under Title 6 - Jewish leaders have remained mostly silent. Without their protest, why should university administrations care?

SOURCE



2 March, 2011

Letting the cream rise

For Princetonians, the senior thesis is a high hurdle before graduation. For Wendy Kopp, class of 1989, it became a career devoted to transforming primary and secondary education. What began as an idea for a teacher corps for hard-to-staff schools, urban and rural, became Teach for America. At first it was merely a leavening ingredient in education; it has become a template for transformation.

Back then, Kopp's generation was stigmatized by journalistic sociology as "the 'me' generation" composed of materialists eager to be recruited into careers of quick self-enrichment. She thought the problem was not her peers but the recruiters. So she became one.

This academic year, 16 percent of Princeton's seniors and 18 percent of Harvard's applied to join Teach for America, of which Kopp is CEO. TFA is the largest employer of recent graduates from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Eight percent of seniors at the University of Michigan (undergraduate enrollment: 26,830) applied last year for TFA's two-year commitments. More than 5 percent of graduating seniors at 130 colleges are applicants.

Kopp began by "meeting anyone who would meet with me," soliciting corporate executives for seed money. She believed something that bemused skeptics -- that students from elite schools would volunteer to have their first experience out of college teaching in difficult-to-staff schools in areas of urban and rural poverty.

"I knew college students would do it -- I had just been a college student." What was needed, she thought, was a high-status service organization with an aura of selectivity.

Raised in comfortable circumstances in Dallas, Kopp precociously understood not just the importance of education but the educational importance of where one is born. TFA's first recruiting was done by fliers shoved under dorm room doors. Her Yale recruiter had 170 messages on his answering machine in just three days. TFA's first cohort totaled 500 teachers. This year TFA will select 5,300 from 48,000 applicants, making it more selective than most colleges.

This school year, there are 8,000 TFA teachers. Of the 20,000 TFA alumni, two-thirds are still working full-time in education. Of those, only one in six says that even without TFA he or she might have gone into K-12 teaching.

TFA has become a flourishing reproach to departments and schools of education. It pours talent into the educational system -- 80 percent of its teachers are in traditional public schools -- talent that flows around the barriers of the credentialing process. Hence TFA works against the homogenization that discourages innovation and prevents the cream from rising.

Kopp, whose new book ("A Chance to Make History") recounts her post-Princeton education, has learned, among much else, this: Of the 15 million children growing up in poverty, 50 percent will not graduate from high school, and the half that do will have eighth-grade skill levels compared to those from higher-income families and neighborhoods.

Until recently -- until, among other things, TFA -- it seemed that we simply did not know how to teach children handicapped by poverty and its accompaniments -- family disintegration and destructive community cultures. Now we know exactly what to do.

In government, the axiom is: Personnel is policy. In education, Kopp believes, "people are everything" -- good ones are (in military parlance) "force multipliers." Creating "islands of excellence" depends entirely on finding "transformational leaders deeply committed to changing the trajectories" of children's lives.

We do not, she insists, have to fix society or even families in order to fix education. It works the other way around. The movie "Waiting for Superman" dramatizes what TFA has demonstrated -- that low-income parents leap at educational opportunities that can break the cycle of poverty. Teaching successfully in challenging schools is, Kopp says, "totally an act of leadership" by people passionately invested in the project.

Speaking of leadership, someone in Congress should invest some on TFA's behalf. Government funding -- federal, state, local -- is just 30 percent of TFA's budget. Last year's federal allocation, $21 million, would be a rounding error in the General Motors bailout. And Kopp says every federal dollar leverages six non-federal dollars. All that money might, however, be lost because even when Washington does something right, it does it wrong.

It has obtusely defined "earmark" to include "any named program," so TFA has been declared an earmark and sentenced to death. If Congress cannot understand how nonsensical this is, it should be sent back to school for remedial instruction from some of TFA's exemplary young people.

SOURCE




10 Commandments Removal From VA Schools Causes Student Unrest

Some students in Giles County, VA are upset after the local school board voted twice in as many months to remove framed copies of the 10 Commandments from its schools. A group of teens from one local high school says the move is causing dissension, with some students even coming close to physical blows over the issue. WVVA reports:

The Giles County School Board voted Tuesday to removed framed copies of the Ten Commandments from its schools — for the second time in as many months. Now some students are speaking out against the decision.

Some students have posted the Ten Commandments on their lockers. One group from Narrows and Giles have ordered t-shirts to express their opinions on the issue.

The commandments were first removed in December, 2010 after a complaint.

At one point, the board reversed its initial removal decision. But that changed after the Freedom From Religion Foundation threatened to sue the Giles County School Board on behalf of residents who wanted the Commandments removed after they were re-posted.

That group issued the following statement to WVVA:

Along with the ACLU of Virginia, we are monitoring the situation to ensure that the school board does not attempt to skirt the law and put the Ten Commandments back into Giles County Schools. Any such attempts to violate the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent would constitute a losing legal battle for the school board.

The Blaze contacted the American Center for Law and Justice, which many times represents defendants in religious cases such as this, but did not immediately receive a response. The local superintendent refused media requests from WVVA.

SOURCE






Australia: Degree target aims too high

Who sets these arbitrary and absurd targets anyway? And based on what reasoning, if any?

THE government's target for 40 per cent of young Australians to be graduates by 2025 is not realistic, according to a leading demographer, Bob Birrell.

One scenario would require the number of domestic students completing degrees to rise 82 per cent between 2009 and 2025, Dr Birrell and colleagues say in a new paper in the journal People and Place. "Neither Australia's higher education sector nor the government departments that administer it appear to understand that their target will require such an enormous increase," they say.

But a spokesman for Tertiary Education Minister Chris Evans said the government was confident its demand-driven system would deliver the university places needed to meet the target.

Dr Birrell said more realistic targets, funding and campus building should be aimed at poorly serviced regional and outer suburban areas.

The target for 25 to 34-year-olds was seen as ambitious when floated by the Bradley review in 2008 and adopted in modified form the following year by the government.

But as statistics revealed dramatic growth in young degree holders between 2006 and 2009, some commentators said the 2025 target looked easy. "The government's 40 per cent target could be reached naturally, well before 2025, allowing for enrolment pipelines, and without accounting for the contribution of degree qualified immigrants," the Group of Eight universities said in 2010.

The Birrell paper says the Go8 and others have misread the 2006-09 growth spurt. Domestic graduates and migrants with professional qualifications together account for just half this growth, according to modelling done by Dr Birrell and his colleagues. Their modelling takes into account the number of graduates who enter and leave the 25 to 34 age group as time passes.

Migrant professionals tend to be older and leave the age group more quickly than domestic graduates, meaning that on present trends their net contribution to the target would be nil before 2025.

The Birrell analysis suggests "that the recent rapid rise in the proportion of 25 to 34-year-olds with degrees is not a precursor to an easy pathway to achievement of the 40 per cent target, as asserted by the Go8". The paper concludes that overseas students who have graduated or arrived with undergraduate degrees are the most likely reason for the remaining half of the growth seen in 2006-09.

The survey that revealed the 2006-09 growth covers people who were residents in Australia for at least 12 months, meaning it would also pick up overseas students on temporary visas such as the graduate skills visa.

The authors say the growth represented by overseas students "is about to come to an end given that the government has largely removed the carrot of permanent residence as an inducement to study in Australia".

Between 2006 and 2009 the share of 25 to 34-year-olds with at least an undergraduate degree rose from 29.2 per cent to 34.6 per cent but another 410,000 graduates were needed to meet the 2025 target.

Even a 35 per cent increase in immigration would deliver only an extra 124,000 graduates over the period, the authors say. Relying on local students would require an 82 per cent increase from 98,732 domestic graduations in 2009 to 179,600 in 2025.

Senator Evans's spokesman said updated 2010 estimates suggested the demand-driven system would deliver an extra 195,000 domestic undergraduate places between 2010 and 2013.

SOURCE



1 March, 2011

Protests in Idaho

Many high school students throughout eastern Idaho weren't in class Monday morning, but instead, were outside protesting.

In response to Tom Luna's new Education Reform plan, and two of three bills passing the Senate on Thursday, high school students against the plan participated in a student walk-out.

Julia Donaldson, Senior at Highland High School: "We are protesting his plan and we are proposing that Luna publicly debate the American Falls counter plan which gives a lot more freedom to the schools as far as the technology bill goes."

If Luna's "Students Come First" proposal passes the Legislature, online education will be mandatory in the state, and laptops will given to every high school student. An online class would also be required.

Arizona Knight, Sophomore at Highland High School: "We need more one-on-one time. Not computers. Not technology, no. We need teachers."

Julia Donaldson, Senior at Highland High School: "His 'Pay for Performance' plan, which bases 50% of its evaluation on test scores, which is totally unfair, you know, you have the difference in socio-economic status's of the schools, teachers are going to start teaching us how to memorize instead of how to think."

In Boise, students walked a few blocks to the State Capitol, and several other Treasure Valley high schools participated.

Allison Westfall, Nampa School District Spokesperson: "We don't condone this during school hours. We do appreciate that students are passionate about this issue and want to express their opinion, but the appropriate form is to do that outside of the school day, or to contact their law makers."

Aliianna Kelemete, Highland High School, Pocatello: "We want to support our teachers the best way we can and we're out here and we know the consequences, but I think it's all for a good cause."

The bills that have passed the Senate last week will be discussed in the House Education Committee on Tuesday. In the meantime, emotions run high for those that oppose the bill, and those, like Governor Butch Otter, who support it.

Julia Donaldson, Senior at Highland High School: "It's just not good overall for the education of our students. And I'm a senior, but I care about my siblings future and the future of my teachers and friends."

The final bill, which funds the plan and has the technology elements was sent back to the Senate Education Committee for a reworking. That should be discussed this week as well.

SOURCE





An end to free higher education in Scotland?

Principals warn that universities in Scotland will be left with a £200m funding gap after tuition fees are raised in England

Scottish university principals have again called for an end to free higher education after a report warned of a £200m funding gap following the introduction of higher fees in England.

Universities Scotland, the umbrella body for higher education institutions, said the case for a "fair and modest" payment by Scottish graduates was now unanswerable if current levels of teaching and student numbers were to be maintained.

Its stance has increased pressure on the next Scottish government to scrap a longstanding tradition of free university education for domestic students, in the face of moves to allow English universities to charge between £6,000 and £9,000 a year in tuition fees.

But its conclusions were immediately challenged by the Scottish government, Universities Scotland's partner on the expert group that produced the report on funding, and by the National Union of Students Scotland.

Each side selected figures from the report that suited its policies. The universities used one of the highest figures based on the impact of inflation, while Scottish ministers chose figures that suited their current policy of funding universities entirely from general taxation.

The dispute – which has led to another rift on funding between the universities and Alex Salmond's nationalist government – follows weeks of speculation that Scottish universities faced a funding shortfall of up to £500m.

The country's leading colleges are now facing strikes, laying off staff and closing departments. Glasgow is planning to shut its modern languages and anthropology departments, while staff at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh are to take industrial action.

Salmond will campaign in this May's elections for the Scottish parliament by insisting that the shortfall is actually much smaller, and can be met by the taxpayer without fees or graduate taxes.

His officials believe Universities Scotland has been highly selective with the report's findings, by using a figure that included inflation and by ignoring the Scottish government's plans to charge English students up to £6,500 a year to study in Scotland.

If those fees were included and the baseline figure did not include inflation, the gap was actually £93m. And that, sources said, did not include another £35m in expected efficiency savings. Ministers are expected to promise this gap will be met by the government.

NUS Scotland accused Universities Scotland of "scaremongering" and misrepresenting the true scale of the funding gap in a deliberate attempt to bounce voters into accepting tuition fees.

The NUS will now be putting Labour, currently narrow favourites to win May's election, under pressure to pledge it would not charge students. Labour has said it believes some form of charge is now highly likely and refused to rule out a graduate tax or contribution.

More HERE




Universities 'told to discriminate against independent school pupils'

Universities should not be asked to “repair the problems of 18 years of upbringing and education” by skewing admissions in favour of poor-performing pupils, according to a leading headmaster.

Making lower grade offers to students from state schools is like forcing an engineer to improve the design of an aircraft “after the plane has already crashed”, it is claimed.

In a speech on Monday, Philip Cottam, chairman of the Society of Headmasters and Headmistresses of Independent Schools, says the number of children from deprived backgrounds failing to fulfil their potential is a “blot” on society.

But forcing admissions tutors to repair these problems by discriminating against privately-educated teenagers will fail to address key weaknesses in the education system, he claims.

Speaking at the society’s annual conference, he will criticise the decline of the state grammar school system which provided a decent academic education for pupils from the poorest families.

He will also attack the “culture of entitlement” at the heart of modern schooling “in which competition is seen as negative and all are expected to win prizes”.

The comments come just weeks after ministers insisted universities should hit targets to admit students from state schools and deprived backgrounds in return for charging more than £6,000 a year in tuition fees.

Institutions failing to do enough could be stripped of the power to levy fees as high as £9,000 under Coalition plans.

But Mr Cottam, head of fee-paying Halliford School in Shepperton, Middlesex, says more attention should be focused on repairing Britain’s broken education system than skewing university admissions.

“There is an argument to be made that our national failure to do the best by the 50 per cent or so of pupils who do not get five GCSEs at C or better, including mathematics and English, is in many ways more serious and more damaging than the under-representation of some in our selective universities,” he says.

Addressing headmasters, he adds: “Trying to force universities to repair, let alone make up for, the problems of 18 years of upbringing and education is certainly not the answer.

“It is approaching the issue from the wrong end and is like asking an aeronautical engineer to improve the design of an aircraft after the plane has already crashed.”

Private schools currently educate around seven per cent of children but privately-educated students make up more than four-in-10 of those attending Oxford and Cambridge.

But addressing headmasters at the society’s conference in Telford, Mr Cottam will say that "discriminating against independent school pupils using a mechanistic template" is unfair to the hundreds of thousands of young people in private education.

“It sometimes feels as though our critics believe that the academic success of our pupils has either been handed to them on a plate, or drilled into them, and does not reflect any real ability or potential, let alone hard, determined work by the individuals themselves,” he says.

In a wide-ranging speech, Mr Cottam says the modern education system has become too focused on “entitlement” and a culture in which “all are expected to win prizes”. This fails to promote true competition between young people or push pupils towards academic excellence, he says.

“An education system that emphasises entitlement at the expense of effort and commitment, and that tries to make everyone feel wonderful all of the time, will not develop the strength of character that we all need, in order to deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life,” he says.

Mr Cottam also criticises the decline of academically-selective grammar schools. Only 164 remain in England and Labour introduced legislation in the late 90s banning the opening of any more. The Conservative and Liberal Democrat front benches also oppose the expansion of academic selection.

“The grammar school system, for all its many faults, was a real engine of social mobility, and nothing since has been as effective,” he says. “As every estate agent knows, the selection by ability of the grammar school system has been partly replaced by selection by mortgage.

“I am not suggesting that we should necessarily return to the grammar school system but that we should take note of its successes, see how we can learn from them and replicate them where we can, within the different circumstances that now exist.”

The modern education system, he says, is increasingly expected to “provide the answer to all the social ills of society, with the result that it is in danger of resembling a branch of psychotherapy”.

SOURCE






Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.


TERMINOLOGY: The British "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".


MORE TERMINOLOGY: Many of my posts mention the situation in Australia. Unlike the USA and Britain, there is virtually no local input into education in Australia. Education is mostly a State government responsibility, though the Feds have a lot of influence (via funding) at the university level. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).


There were two brothers from a famous family. One did very well at school while the other was a duffer. Which one went on the be acclaimed as the "Greatest Briton"? It was the duffer: Winston Churchill.


The current Left-inspired practice of going to great lengths to shield students from experience of failure and to tell students only good things about themselves is an appalling preparation for life. In adulthood, the vast majority of people are going to have to reconcile themselves to mundane jobs and no more than mediocrity in achievement. Illusions of themselves as "special" are going to be sorely disappointed


Perhaps it's some comfort that the idea of shielding kids from failure and having only "winners" is futile anyhow. When my son was about 3 years old he came bursting into the living room, threw himself down on the couch and burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong he said: "I can't always win!". The problem was that we had started him out on educational computer games where persistence only is needed to "win". But he had then started to play "real" computer games -- shootem-ups and the like. And you CAN lose in such games -- which he had just realized and become frustrated by. The upset lasted all of about 10 minutes, however and he has been happily playing computer games ever since. He also now has a degree in mathematics and is socially very pleasant. "Losing" certainly did not hurt him.


Even the famous Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (and the world's most famous Sardine) was a deep opponent of "progressive" educational methods. He wrote: "The most paradoxical aspect is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but to crystallise them." He rightly saw that "progressive" methods were no help to the poor


I am an atheist of Protestant background who sent his son to Catholic schools. Why did I do that? Because I do not personally feel threatened by religion and I think Christianity is a generally good influence. I also felt that religion is a major part of life and that my son should therefore have a good introduction to it. He enjoyed his religion lessons but seems to have acquired minimal convictions from them.


Why have Leftist educators so relentlessly and so long opposed the teaching of phonics as the path to literacy when that opposition has been so enormously destructive of the education of so many? It is because of their addiction to simplistic explanations of everything (as in saying that Islamic hostility is caused by "poverty" -- even though Osama bin Laden is a billionaire!). And the relationship between letters and sounds in English is anything but simple compared to the beautifully simple but very unhelpful formula "look and learn".


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


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


A a small quote from the past that helps explain the Leftist dominance of education: "When an opponent says: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.'." Quote from Adolf Hitler. In a speech on 6th November 1933


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


Discipline: With their love of simple generalizations, this will be Greek to Leftists but I see an important role for discipline in education DESPITE the fact that my father never laid a hand on me once in my entire life nor have I ever laid a hand on my son in his entire life. The plain fact is that people are DIFFERENT, not equal and some kids will not behave themselves in response to persuasion alone. In such cases, realism requires that they be MADE to behave by whatever means that works -- not necessarily for their own benefit but certainly for the benefit of others whose opportunities they disrupt and destroy.


Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.


Comments above by John Ray