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31 May, 2006

Scottish experts recognizing that there are -- SURPRISE! -- 'unruly pupils'

Schools urgently need off-site "behaviour" units to deal with unruly pupils, teaching experts have said. The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) blamed spiralling indiscipline and an official policy of "inclusion" for pupils with behavioural problems. Both, it claims, lead to difficulties dealing with uncontrollable children who constantly disrupt classes. Education Minister Peter Peacock said he would look closely at the recommendations made by the EIS.

Schools are bound to group children together regardless of ability or learning difficulty. The requirement was set out in the Standards in Scotland's Schools Act 2000. But in a report out on pupil indiscipline, the EIS claimed it had made it virtually impossible to exclude disruptive children on a permanent basis. Sandy Fowler, convener of the EIS indiscipline committee, said the effects for teachers were time-consuming, stressful and damaging for the education of other pupils.

"These challenges certainly require teachers to be more reflective about their teaching and about pupils' learning," he said. "But they also call into question the level of support that they receive from school management, from local authorities and indeed from the Scottish Executive." Mr Fowler, a teacher with 35 years' experience, added: "It is the responsibility of the Scottish Executive and local authorities to meet these requirements. "The Scottish Executive should provide, as a matter of urgency, additional off-site behaviour facilities for children and young people displaying particularly challenging behaviour." Such units would be staffed by specialist teachers or volunteers, he said.

Mr Fowler claimed all of Scotland's estimated 3,500 primary and secondary schools had been affected by indiscipline to some degree. Mike Finlayson, director of Teacher Support Scotland, backed the EIS comments and said 90% of teachers thought indiscipline had got worse over the last five years. He added: "Indiscipline over a protracted period of time, even at apparently low levels, can have a devastating effect on the health of individual teachers. "This can lead to anxiety, depression and illness. "The unique pressures teachers experience are still not recognised and support for them remains inadequate."

James Douglas-Hamilton MSP, Conservative education spokesman, said: "The presumption in favour of mainstreaming has created a number of new problems and power needs to be given back to teachers. "At the moment they do not have powers to permanently exclude disruptive children from class. "Teachers must be put back in control of the classroom."

Responding to the report, Mr Peacock said: "I want to see teachers everywhere benefiting from the experience and practices of the strongest leaders and most effective techniques. "I also welcome the recognition that there is now an unprecedented level of activity dedicated to seeking solutions to these difficult issues. "Nonetheless, I will look closely at their recommendations for the executive, many of which we are already working on or have made provision for, and I look forward to continuing this constructive dialogue with EIS over coming months."

Source



OXFORD IS DIFFERENT

The academics below are addressing the claim that State school pupils have to be brighter to get the same High School results as private school students

Oxford academics have challenged the belief that state-educated pupils perform better at university than those who have been privately educated. Their study suggests that at Oxford and Cambridge, A-level grades accurately indicate success and that admissions tutors should not be more lenient towards those from state schools. Oxford and Cambridge took a smaller proportion of entrants from state schools in 2004 than the previous year, despite government pressure.

The academics, writing in The Oxford Magazine, noted that research published by the Higher Education Funding Council for England in 2003 had shown that, given equal A-level scores, a higher proportion of graduates from state schools achieved a 2:1 than those from the independent sector. Dr N.G. McCrum, Emeritus Fellow of Hertford College, Dr C.L. Brundin and A.H. Halsey, Emeritus Professor of Social and Administrative Studies, said that at Oxford and Cambridge this was not the case. Looking at A-level scores and finals scores of graduates between 1976 and 2002, they concluded that, overall, A-level results determined finals results. "For both types of school for both genders at Oxford and Cambridge, A level dictates finals score, except in the sciences for males," the dons wrote. "This is surely a boost for the use of A level in the admissions exercise."

In other words, Oxbridge colleges should not expect state school students to do better than their privately educated peers with the same grades, except if they are male and studying science at Oxford. Conversely, privately educated men studying science at Cambridge also had a lead; traditionally, scientists from private schools have gone to Cambridge.

The academics insist they are making "no comment on the intrinsic value of different institutions and courses". Dr Brundin, who taught engineering at Oxford and was Vice-Chancellor of Warwick University, said of the funding council: "We're saying we can't challenge their study as a whole, but that we cannot say it applies to a single institution and in particular, it does not apply to Oxbridge." The study, which corrected A levels for grade inflation over the decades, showed that a pupil who achieved two A grades and a B grade would continue to do less well in the finals - whatever their background, except as a man studying science - than a student who achieved three A grades.

John Thompson, an analyst for the funding council, argued that the Oxford academics had "not fully appreciated" its findings. "Overall, if you make a comparison, keeping everything the same, state school students do a little better," he said. At the most selective universities, including Oxbridge, he said, the picture was less clear. Advocates of widening participation have argued that the findings of the council made the case for tutors being more lenient when admitting comprehensive pupils to the top universities. The latest study appears to favour a system where students are measured entirely on their A-level grades.

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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30 May, 2006

What if your child is being left behind by design? Evidence that local educators withholding federal funds purposely

Imagine being the parent of a child enrolled in a school that isn't working. You can't send him to a private school because you can't afford it, nor to another public school because there's no room. Every day he comes home from school depressed and disengaged. You do what you can. You visit with his teachers. You help with his homework. But you aren't a teacher. And his teachers, good people, are too busy to focus on your child. Slowly, he is drifting away.

Now imagine being told that your child is eligible for free tutoring after school, on weekends, whenever and wherever convenient. You are told that the tutoring will focus on reading and math, that it will be based on the needs of the child, and that those providing the service have been certified by the state as qualified to tutor. You learn that the services will be aimed at making sure your child can read and calculate at his grade level and ensuring he is prepared to do well on the state's school assessment. Most important, the tutoring will help him be promoted to the next grade ready for success.

What would be your response? Could you possibly say "no, thank you" to such an offer? And yet that is what the people in charge of a huge number of America's public schools would have us believe has been the response of parents around the country to this guarantee of supplemental educational services, which is contained in the landmark No Child Left Behind Act. These school administrators claim that of the 1.4 million children eligible for such tutoring during the past school year, only 233,000 (17 percent) had parents and guardians who found this offer worthy of acceptance. All the rest apparently declined free tutoring for their children.

That is simply preposterous. The No Child Left Behind Act holds out the promise that children attending schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress toward academic proficiency for all students in reading and math will have access to tutoring services paid for with federal dollars. For the first time in more than 40 years of federal education policy, dollars are going directly to serve the academic needs of students rather than the schools the students attend. The law says schools and school districts are to set aside money equal to 20 percent of their federal Title I funds for these tutoring services. It says the schools are to notify parents of their children's eligibility for the services, inform them of the names and varieties of tutoring services available, and make it easy for parents to enroll their children for the services.

But in far too many places this simply isn't happening. Why would only 17 percent of eligible children be enrolled in this program? Said U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, "Too many parents never hear about these options because they don't see the letter that comes home in their child's backpack or they can't attend the informational meeting at the school. All of us — from the federal government to the states to districts to schools — must do a better job of reaching out to inform parents about their options."

Here is what Spellings did not say: In far too many places, it's not the parents' fault or an oversight that's to blame. It is the people in charge of the schools, who, in far too many cases, think that the money set aside for free tutoring is money that ought to stay with their schools and districts instead — that it's their money to manage as they see fit. And so they come up with ways to make access to the services difficult for parents. They don't disobey the law; they just don't abide by it.

The tactics can be quite subtle. In some places parental notification comes late, in letters full of legal and policy jargon and language encouraging families to refrain from signing up. Perhaps parents are given only a few days to make a decision or are told they will need to be at a certain place at a certain time to enroll their child. Maybe they are informed that the services can't be delivered at their child's school and that they will need to find their own way to get their child to and from the tutoring program. Potential providers of tutoring might be told that they can't talk to parents about what they do, or to principals, or to teachers. They might be told they must serve a certain number of kids at a certain rate at a certain place and time. Whatever it takes to make it difficult for children to get the free help they deserve and need — whatever it takes to keep control of the money.

Too many children in this country are failing to get the education they need and deserve. What a tragedy it would be if, years from now, we learned that those responsible for providing that education to our children were the very ones responsible for their not getting it.

Source



Western Australia: Teachers in line of fire over boycott of postmodern rubbish

The West Australian Government has threatened to empty entire high school departments of rebellious teachers who are refusing to implement its new-age gradeless curriculum. The State School Teachers Union yesterday made good its threat to boycott the 17 new subjects in a range of government high schools next year, issuing a directive to faculties to treat the new courses as voluntary. The union representing private school teachers pledged to do the same, creating a dilemma for the Carpenter Government as it attempts to roll out the controversial new courses in all high schools next year.

Acting Premier Eric Ripper yesterday warned teachers that he expected them to "do their job" and teach the new "outcomes-based education" courses as per government orders. If they did not, he said, they could be forced to teach lower years than Years 11 and 12 where the new courses are due to be introduced. Education Minister and former teacher Ljiljanna Ravlich has attempted to keep a low profile as the curriculum crisis engulfs the Government and was again unavailable for comment yesterday. But Mr Ripper, who is Ms Ravlich's long-time partner and also a former teacher, rose to her defence. "Outcomes-based education is the way of the future," he said. "The Government expects teachers to do their job." He then issued a threat to mutinous teachers, saying that if any were uncomfortable with the new courses for years 11 and 12, there would be "plenty of spots in years 8 and 9" for them to teach.

Opposition education spokesman Peter Collier, a former high school teacher, said Ms Ravlich was out of touch and the Premier should step in. "The only resolution is to delay the implementation of all 17 courses until the endemic problems are resolved and then you have full implementation by 2008," Mr Collier said.

Under the new curriculum, all subjects are equal, meaning a top performance in cooking and dance could help a student into a university law degree, ahead of those who studied physics and chemistry. Supporters say the courses are more inclusive and recognise a wider range of achievement. Critics such as the teacher lobby group People Lobbying Against Teaching Outcomes claim the courses lack substance and say that assessing students against eight new "levels" of achievement is subjective and not as accurate as giving them grades or percentages.

The State School Teachers Union's directive yesterday means high school departments that are not ready will continue teaching the present curriculum next year. Entire departments at private schools are also expected to boycott the new subjects, according to the Independent Education Union of Western Australia. Its state secretary Theresa Howe said there were "system-wide" concerns about the courses. The architect of the new courses, the state Curriculum Council, was last night reeling from the news that its planned rollout was in jeopardy. Acting chief executive David Axworthy said the council needed time to discuss the implications of the union's directive.

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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29 May, 2006

A better way to prevent student cheating

If faculty cast cheating as an issue of justice, they won't have to play cop

As another academic year draws to a close, amid a rushed flurry of final exams and term papers, it's time for professors to play their least favorite role: cop. With some surveys finding that up to three-quarters of college students cheat, faculty and administrators are making a bigger push for integrity. What most still lack, however, is a compelling moral argument against cheating.

A growing number of universities have enacted honor codes, but many of these codes - along with campus efforts to publicize them - fail to make a strong case for why cheating is wrong. Often they invoke fuzzy ideals of honor or, conversely, dwell on the negative consequences for cheaters who are caught. Neither approach gets very far - not these days, anyway.

Honor, with its emphasis on doing the right thing for its own sake, is no match for the anxious cynicism of many college students. This point was driven home to me by a junior I met last year in North Carolina. Why not cheat, he argued, given how many of America's most successful people cut corners to get where they are? Cheating is how the real world works, he said. Look at the politicians who lie or the sluggers who take steroids, or the CEOs who cook the books. The student also pointed to the hurdles he faced as he tried to get ahead: high tuition costs, heavy student loans, low-paying jobs without benefits. America wasn't a fair place for kids like him, so it made sense to try to level the playing field by bending a few rules.

Many young people take this bleak view. A 2004 poll of high school students found that 59 percent agreed that "successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating." Young people believe in honor and value integrity; they also worry that living by these beliefs could mean ending up as a loser. In justifying her cheating, one student told a researcher: "Good grades can make the difference between going to medical school and being a janitor." Few professors have a ready retort to this logic.

Appeals to self-interest only worsen the problem. If you tell a student that she shouldn't cheat because she might get caught, or that she's "just cheating herself" by not learning the material, or that integrity is an asset in life to be cultivated, she might respond - as the student I met in North Carolina did - by spelling out the ways that successful cheating could advance one's self-interest, especially if "everybody else" is doing it.

Students with a strong sense of right and wrong, learned early in life, may be more willing to sacrifice personal advancement for the sake of their values. Some research has shown, for instance, that students with a theistic outlook are less likely to cheat. But most colleges aren't in the position to reshape students' character at this level. Likewise, our universities have limited influence over the broader socioeconomic trends that help fuel cheating, such as rising economic inequality and increasing middle-class insecurity.

What can faculty and administrators do to stem epidemic cheating? Their best hope is to cast cheating as an issue of justice. Students may be cynical about what it takes to succeed these days, but they do care about fairness. And cheating is nothing if not unfair. Cheaters get rewards they don't deserve, like scholarships, admission to college or grad school, internships, and jobs. Cheating is the antithesis of equal opportunity - the notion that we all should have a fair shot at success and that the people who get rewarded are the people who deserve those rewards because they worked the hardest.

Many students understand that the ideal of equal opportunity is threatened in an era of rising inequality. Quite a few say they want to do something about this. Anticheating efforts offer a way to build, on campus, a microcosm of the kind of society they want to live in - one with a level playing field for all. Some students see this and are organizing to fight cheating. Maybe academic integrity will never become a great campus cause. But if faculty can cast this issue as a matter of justice, and empower students to take action, perhaps some day they won't have to spend so much time playing cop.

Source



U.N. making homeschooling illegal?

Threat seen from U.S. judges who bow to child-rights treaty

A U.N. treaty conferring rights to children could make homeschooling illegal in the U.S. even though the Senate has not ratified it, a homeschooling association warns. Michael Farris, chairman and general counsel of the Home School Legal Defense Association, or HSLDA, believes the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child could be binding on U.S. citizens because of activist judges, reports LifeSite News.

Farris said that according to a new interpretation of "customary international law," some U.S. judges have ruled the convention applies to American parents. "In the 2002 case of Beharry v. Reno, one federal court said that even though the convention was never ratified, it still has an impact on American law," Farris explained, according to LifeSiteNews. "The fact that virtually every other nation in the world has adopted it has made it part of customary international law, and it means that it should be considered part of American jurisprudence."

The convention places severe limitations on a parent's right to direct and train their children, Farris contends. The HSLDA produced a report in 1993 showing that under Article 13, parents could be subject to prosecution for any attempt to prevent their children from interacting with material they deem unacceptable. Under Article 14, children are guaranteed "freedom of thought, conscience and religion," which suggests they have a legal right to object to all religious training. Further, under Article 15, the child has a right to "freedom of association." "If this measure were to be taken seriously, parents could be prevented from forbidding their child to associate with people deemed to be objectionable companions," the HSLDA report explained.

Farris pointed out that in 1995 the United Kingdom was deemed out of compliance with the convention "because it allowed parents to remove their children from public school sex-education classes without consulting the child." Farris argues, according to LifeSiteNews, that "by the same reasoning, parents would be denied the ability to homeschool their children unless the government first talked with their children and the government decided what was best. This committee would even have the right to determine what religious teaching, if any, served the child's best interest."

Offering solutions, Farris suggests Congress use its power to define customary law and modify the jurisdiction of federal courts. "Congress needs to address this issue of judicial tyranny by enacting legislation that limits the definition of customary international law to include only provisions of treaties that Congress has ratified," he said. Farris also suggested Congress could pass a constitutional amendment stating explicitly that no provision of any international agreement can supersede the constitutional rights of an American citizen. He pointed out two such amendments have been proposed in Congress.

Finally, he says specific threats to parental rights can be solved by "putting a clear parents' rights amendment into the black and white text of the United States Constitution."

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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28 May, 2006

THE FLORIDA STRAITJACKET

Florida's Constitution requires the state to maintain a uniform system of free public schools. It doesn't say that this system must be the only education policy the state adopts, just that such a system has to exist. But that's not how the state Supreme Court read it when five of its justices struck down the Opportunity Scholarships school voucher program in January. They inferred that because the Constitution mentions a uniform public school system, it automatically forbids any alternatives.

This puts the state's elected representatives in a bit of a bind, because the Constitution also demands that Florida's education system be "efficient, safe, secure, and high quality," allowing students "to obtain a high quality education." The problem is that a one-size-fits-all education system isn't the best way to provide efficiency, safety, or high quality, no matter how the Court chooses to interpret the Constitution.

Consider, for instance, that Florida's public schools spend around $8,000 a year, per pupil -- more than one-and-a-half times the average independent school tuition. That doesn't exactly make the public system look like a paragon of efficiency. Of course, some independent schools have revenue sources other than tuition, but in a forthcoming study of Arizona I find that even after considering non-tuition revenues, independent schools still spend far less than the public schools.

As for safety, one out of every 12 Florida students reported having been threatened or injured with a weapon at school in 2003, according to a recent federal study.

Finally, high quality has also proven elusive. Sure, test scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) often go up from year to year, but if you got to perform your own employee review, don't you think your ratings would go up, too? The FCAT is designed and administered by the same system that it is supposed to evaluate. Nice work if you can get it.

To really get at the truth, it's better to use more objective performance measures like graduation rates or SAT scores. And the truth isn't pretty. According to two independent studies of the nation's public school graduation rates (one by the Urban Institute, another by the Manhattan Institute), Florida falls between sixth-to-last and second-to-last place among the states, depending on how you crunch the numbers. And Florida's SAT scores? They are below average in Math and far below average on the Verbal portion of the test -- results that can't be explained away by demographics. Even Floridians whose first language is English have Verbal SAT scores 15 points below the nationwide average for such students.

So despite decades of improvement efforts, it would be hard to argue that Florida's "uniform" public schools are the efficient, safe, high quality institutions that the Constitution demands.

Ironically, they aren't particularly uniform either. Nassau County schools spent a little over $6,200 per pupil in 2003. Hamilton county spent upwards of $13,600. Is that uniformity? Nassau's test scores are usually quite high, while Hamilton's are generally low. Not a lot of uniformity there either.

With results like these, it seems reasonable to ask if there are alternatives to the status quo that would do a better job of fulfilling children's needs. Reasonable, but illegal. Thanks to the state Supreme Court, state legislators are not allowed to color outside the lines. If they do, no matter what kinds of education alternatives they come up with, they'll likely get rapped on the knuckles by the judiciary. This makes no sense. The legislature is being asked to squeeze efficiency, safety, quality, and uniformity out of a school system that is still not especially efficient, safe, high-quality, or uniform despite having been around for more than a century.

You don't have to be an advocate of any particular education reform to recognize the seriousness of this problem -- or to see the solution. An amendment to the Florida Constitution explicitly allowing representatives to consider alternative educational options would free them from the straightjacket into which the Supreme Court has forced them. In the process, it might finally give all Florida children a real chance at that safe, efficient, high quality education they've been promised.

More here



Few of the English can now write good English

People who can string a sentence together grammatically could be forgiven for feeling like old fogeys, reports Kevin Donnelly



The British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill is considered one of the 20th century's greatest political orators. An important reason why Churchill was able to communicate so effectively was because, when at school, he was taught how to write. As observed in his autobiography: "I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing." Judging by a British report on undergraduate writing skills by the Royal Literary Fund, it would appear the ability to structure an essay and to master the basics of syntax and grammar are things of the past.

The report, Writing Matters, outlines the observations of about 130 professional writers who worked on a one-to-one basis with undergraduates in 71 universities. The writers conclude that considerable numbers of students, even at some of Britain's leading tertiary institutions, arrive at university without the skills necessary to make the most of their education. "In many cases, the problems occur at a basic level: poor vocabulary, inaccurate phrasing, bad syntax, incorrect punctuation [and] an inability to form well-structured sentences," the British report notes. The report also states that many students are incapable of sustaining a consistent and coherent argument in prose.

Falling standards and dumbed-down English are not restricted to Britain. Last year's report, Remedial or Rhetorical English?, in which academics at the Australian Defence Force Academy tested the writing skills of about 600 undergraduates, also discovered significant weaknesses. "Written work was characterised by common grammatical errors and knowledge gaps, an inability to select stylistic devices to express relationships between ideas and purpose, and difficulties in producing complex written texts while demonstrating control over generic structure," Fiona Mueller, one of the authors of the ADFA report, says.

Baden Eunson, from the English department at Monash University, also notes that many undergraduates have gone through six years of secondary school without learning the fundamentals of English: "I teach professional writing at Monash University and I have to spend far too much of my scarce curriculum time cramming the basics into my students."

Concerns about poor writing skills, especially basics such as spelling, punctuation and grammar, are not restricted to undergraduates. Beatrice Booth, the president of Commerce Queensland (the state chamber of commerce), has publicly criticised literacy standards and was recently quoted as saying, "We have a plethora of people who can't spell, comprehend what they are reading or write a proper sentence."

Notwithstanding the evidence, some argue that there is no crisis and that approaches to teaching English, especially literacy, are beyond reproach. The children's author Mem Fox, based on Australia's strong performance in the Program for International Student Assessment, a test of 15-year-old students in literacy, mathematics and science, argues: "We don't have a literacy problem. We have a very high literacy rate. We are absolutely sensational in this country. "So we always come either second after Finland, or third after Canada, or fourth after New Zealand. But we are always in the top four, always."

What Fox ignores is that the PISA test did not correct or penalise students for mistakes in spelling and grammar, and that if students had been corrected, many would have failed. "Errors in spelling and grammar were not penalised in PISA; if they had been, probably all countries' achievement levels would have gone down, but there is no doubt that Australia's would have," one Australian researcher says. "It was the exception rather than the rule in Australia to find a student response that was written in well-constructed sentences, with no spelling or grammatical error."

The Australian Association for the Teaching of English also argues that concerns about falling standards are a media beat-up and that present approaches to English teaching, such as whole language, critical literacy and postmodern theory, are not the reason many students leave school unable to write a grammatically correct, fluent and well-structured essay. The AATE is also wrong. Much of the focus on teaching literacy in schools is on so-called critical literacy, where students are taught to analyse texts in terms of power relationships from a range of theoretical perspectives, including Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, postmodern, class and race. As noted by Eunson, when comparing today's syllabuses and examination papers with those of the 1960s, the reality is that more traditional approaches, including precis, discussing definitions and word meanings, and analysing comprehension passages grammatically, have long since disappeared.

At the primary school level, judged by curriculum documents, the prevailing approach, with the exception of NSW, belittles the more structured phonics model of teaching reading in favour of whole language. Teacher training is also a concern, evidenced by a 2001-02 national survey of 680 beginning teachers that found only "half of the new graduates indicated that they felt prepared to teach spelling and phonics".

That teacher training has suffered is understandable. Those in charge of Australia's schools of education, the Australian Council of Deans of Education, in New Learning: A Charter for Australian Education, argue that the basics, represented by the three Rs, are obsolete, old fashioned and irrelevant. The deans argue in favour of the new basics: "Nor is literacy a matter of correct usage [the word and sentence-bound rules of spelling and grammar]. Rather, it is a way of communicating. "Indeed, the new communications environment is one in which the old rules of literacy need to be supplemented. Although spelling remains important, it is now something for spell-checking programs, and email messages do not have to be grammatical in a formal sense."

This ignores the ability to use language that does not happen intuitively or by accident and that spell-checking cannot differentiate between whether and weather or their and there. Not only do students have to be taught and regularly practise the rules of grammar and correct composition, they must be given the technical vocabulary that will free them to more consciously control what it is they wish to write.

Source



UK: Inquiry rejects high-security schools "The head of a government inquiry into pupil behaviour has rejected demands for airport-style security to be set up in schools in the wake of the murder of 15-year-old schoolboy Kiyan Prince. Sir Alan Steer, the headteacher of Seven Kings High School in Ilford, Redbridge, warned such a move 'might actually create more problems than you solve.' ... 'You would create a certain atmosphere in schools,' he said at a conference organised by the National Union of Teachers on pupil behaviour. 'Schools should be comfortable, warm, sociable places, and you've got to get the balance right between security and creating the right atmosphere.' Sir Alan pointed out that Kiyan was knifed to death outside the school -- and therefore any airport-style security check would not have helped him."

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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27 May, 2006

"Tough love" for those that nothing else has helped

Squeamish do-gooders invent a "human right" not to be helped

When New York regulators meet today to consider limiting a Massachusetts school's use of electric shocks as punishment, it will not be the first time that states have tried to rein in the unorthodox methods at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center. Massachusetts officials tried to close the school in 1985 after a student with autism died while being forced to listen to loud static through a helmet. They tried again in the mid-1990s when the school began giving mild shocks to students for misbehavior. Each time, judges protected the Rotenberg Center, siding with parents who said the school had improved the lives of children with autism, mental retardation, and emotional problems after gentler methods had failed. And doctors concluded the death was caused by the student's neurological disorder.

Now, the center -- the only school in the country to rely so heavily on painful punishments -- faces a challenge from the state that supplies almost two-thirds of its 251 students. Today, the New York Board of Regents is scheduled to debate emergency regulations that would severely limit electric shock and other corporal punishment on students from New York after one New York teen complained that the shocks were a form of torture. ''Mommy, you don't love me anymore 'cause you let them hurt me so bad," sobbed the former Rotenberg Center student, Antwone Nicholson, 17, to his mother, Evelyn, according to her sworn statement. The family plans to sue the state of New York for $10 million for sending the teen to the school where he received 79 two-second shocks over a year and a half.

If New York adopts the rules, Rotenberg officials would need permission from a panel of three specialists for each child they want to shock, in addition to the court and parental approval they already obtain. The limits on the use of electric shock could require a fundamental change in the school's methods -- currently half the students, including 77 from New York, wear electrodes so that teachers can shock them.

But Matthew Israel, the psychologist who founded the school in 1971, is counting on parents to mount an eloquent defense against the limits. They have written 82 letters in support of the school that are posted on its website, www.judgerc.org. ''When you first hear about a school that uses skin shock, it's shocking if you don't understand the severity of the mutilation that the students would otherwise engage in," Israel said.

The debate over the private residential school -- which costs local school districts and states more than $200,000 per student each year -- boils down to whether there are children who pose such a danger to themselves that an electroshock version of ''tough love" is justified. Mark Fridovich, deputy commissioner of mental retardation, said in a recent interview, ''There are a small number of people who have very severe and frequently multiple problems where other treatments have proven to be ineffective. . . . For this small number, what the Judge Rotenberg Center has done has proven to be effective." More than 60 Massachusetts children and adults attend the school.

But many others say electric shock violates human rights. This year, 20 advocacy groups are pushing a bill in Massachusetts to ban the punishments used at Rotenberg. ''We don't do this to prisoners in the criminal justice system, so we shouldn't be doing it to people with disabilities," said Leo Sarkissian, executive director of the ARC of Massachusetts, an advocacy group for people with mental retardation.

At first blush, the Rotenberg Center seems more like a theme park. Rooms are filled with statues and posters of cartoon characters, chandeliers that glisten like disco balls, and plush, brightly colored furniture. But a close look at the neatly dressed students shows that about 50 percent have electrodes strapped to their arms or legs and that the teachers carry activation switches on their belts inside clear plastic boxes, each labeled with a child's photo.

Student Catherine Spartichino received her first shock after an obscenity-laced rant at a teacher who would give her only half a bagel. With the push of a button, the teacher sent a startling burst of energy into Spartichino's forearm that the 19-year-old remembers vividly four years later. ''They zapped me!" recalled Spartichino, a suicidal teen who was made to wear three electro-shock devices. ''It feels like you stick your finger in an electric socket for two seconds, and the tingling didn't stop right away." Spartichino now believes the electrodes, called ''gradual decelerator devices," turned her away from ''suicidal gestures" like banging her head until she was black and blue. This month, she graduates from the school and expects to attend college in the fall.

However, one former Rotenberg Center employee said that other students endure far more pain than Spartichino, especially the 15 to 20 who are equipped with higher-powered devices that deliver 45 milliampere shocks -- 4 1/2 times stronger than the standard shocks. Greg Miller, a former teacher's assistant for more than three years, said one boy with autism was shocked by the higher-powered device so often that he had ''burn scabs all over his torso, legs, and arms," forcing nurses to remove the electrodes for weeks so that his skin could heal. State Police are investigating his allegations. Rotenberg officials deny that the unnamed student was burned, saying the electrodes were removed because of other medical conditions. They also say that the child's parents still support the shock therapy.

The case of Antwone Nicholson is in some ways more typical. He came to the center with a history of aggression after treatment at five psychiatric hospitals, and, with his mother's consent, the school began shocking him for behaviors ranging from defying teachers to banging objects. School officials said his behavior immediately improved. The school also said that the number of shocks Nicholson received -- about one per week -- is average, and he received them for a shorter period than the 26-month average before transferring recently to another school. Evelyn Nicholson initially approved the shocks, but said she changed her mind as her son became more desperate, complaining that the shocks knocked him to the floor. Previously, she said, ''I was advised that the shock . . . felt like a small pinch," and that the devices were rarely used. Investigating Nicholson's objections, New York officials found that many more New York students were subjected to shocks than they had believed: 77 out of the 151 at the school. Last week, Rebecca Cort, New York State's deputy education commissioner, called for tight limits on the use of shocks, saying she could find no independent proof that they work.

Though enrollment at the center has tripled in recent years, specialists who treat disabled children question whether so many students need such treatment. ''I have seen about a dozen cases out of hundreds and hundreds that would not respond to our positive-based approaches," said L. Vincent Strully, director of the New England Center for Children, a Southborough program for children with autism. ''Behavior that is not life threatening . . . does not require that you shock them."

Source



BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. - High school students are going to be held accountable for what they post on blogs and on social-networking Web sites such as MySpace.com. The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action. The rule will take effect at the start of the next school year, officials said. District officials won't regularly search students' sites, but will monitor them if they get a worrisome tip from another student, a parent or a community member.

Mary Greenberg of Lake Bluff, who has a son at Libertyville High School, argued the district is overstepping its bounds. "I don't think they need to police what students are doing online," she said. "That's my job."

Associate Superintendent Prentiss Lea rebuffed that criticism. "The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron," he said. "It is called the World Wide Web."

The social networking Web site MySpace.com allows its nearly 80 million users to post pictures and personal information while communicating with others. District 128, in Lake County north of Chicago, has some 3,200 students, about 80 percent of whom participate in extracurricular activities, according to school officials.

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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26 May, 2006

HOW CONTROVERSIAL IT IS! SHOULD CALIFORNIA HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES BE ABLE TO DO EIGHTH GRADE MATH?

The California Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated the state high school exit exam as a graduation requirement for this year’s senior class, leaving 47,000 high school students who failed the test in danger of not graduating. The high court ordered a state appeals court to hold hearings in the case, but with schools ready to hold commencement ceremonies as soon as this weekend, a resolution appeared unlikely before then. The high court ordered a state appeals court to hold hearings in the case. This year's class was the first in which passing the test of 10th grade English and eighth grade math and algebra was required for graduation.

A group of students sued the state, claiming the test discriminates against low-income and minority students. On May 12, Alameda Superior Court Judge Robert Freedman invalidated the graduation requirement for the Class of 2006, saying California was ill equipped "to adequately prepare students to take the exam," especially in poor, underfunded areas of the state. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell planned an afternoon news conference. The plaintiffs' lawyers were not immediately available for comment.

After Freedman threw out the graduation requirement for this year's seniors, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, demanding that the decision be promptly reversed ahead of looming commencement ceremonies. But the justices rarely decide a case before an appeals court hears it. The high court ordered the 1st District Court of Appeal to hear the case, but did not say when - leaving students who failed the test in a state of legal limbo. Still, the justices said they were not convinced that Freedman ruled correctly. "At this juncture this court is not persuaded that the relief granted by the trial court's preliminary injunction ... would be an appropriate remedy," five of the seven justices wrote.

Lawyers for the state wrote in their appeal that Freedman's decision was "bad public policy" and an illegal intrusion into the lawmaking branch of state government. O'Connell wanted the decision overturned to "further society's interest in ensuring that students demonstrate minimal academic proficiency in order to receive a high school diploma." O'Connell, who wrote the 1999 exit exam legislation while he was a state senator, said students who fail the test can still get further remedial instruction and take the test again.

The plaintiffs' lead attorney, Arturo Gonzalez, told the justices in a filing that the students should not be punished for the education system's shortcomings. "As of the start of the current academic year, fewer than half of California high schools had taught all of the course material that is tested on the exam," Gonzalez wrote.

Source



EDUCATION DISASTER IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Two articles below:

Nutty music-education honcho

A "postmodern" ignoramus is trying to destroy music education

A drama teacher who does not play a musical instrument and believes turntables and computers are musical instruments is the co-ordinator of Western Australia's new music course. State Curriculum Council arts framework officer Christine Adams said yesterday that music-producing machines such as turntables and computers were equal to the piano or violin. "Sales of turntables are way outstripping sales of guitars," Ms Adams said. "In this course, the status of all instruments is equal and the turntable is one of them."

But the course for Years 11 and 12 students, revealed in The Australian yesterday, was condemned by one of Australia's leading music educators and conductors, Richard Gill, who described it as "educational double-speak and claptrap". "It could just as easily be the curriculum for cooking as music," said Mr Gill, a former dean of the West Australian Conservatorium of Music. To describe turntables and computers as musical instruments was "totally meaningless", he said. "A computer is a computer and a turntable is a turntable. One of the points of education is to make the distinction."

Ms Adams, who learned the flute in high school in the 1970s, has spent the past three years working on the new music course and described it as more inclusive than the old course, which was "very Western-focused". "For example, if there is a student from India who wants to play the tabla, they can - and they couldn't do that in the old course," she said. Ms Adams said the new course placed an appropriate emphasis on theory. Students are required to write about politics, racism and other aspects of society that influence music in one of four subject areas called Music in Society, worth 25 per cent of the total mark. "It's really important to know the political and cultural background to music," she said. "It makes it a really, really rich experience."

But Mr Gill, who has received an OAM for his services to music and is recognised around the world for developing young musicians, said the course attempted to teach students how to respond to music, which was impossible. "Reaction to music is a personal and subjective thing - you can't teach it," he said. "The teaching of music should be about music itself. We learn to understand music by making music, by writing music, by performing music." Mr Gill said the first four sentences of the new music course, to be introduced next year, were rubbish. "By all means define music, but don't tell tell us the role it plays - that's up to us to determine. You can't teach the emotion of music. It's personal."

The course introduction starts: "Music plays an important part in the life of people the world over. It brings people together through a natural form of communication by providing a means of expressing ideas and emotions. "It combines words, sounds and movements which enhance the meaning of life in world cultures. Music has unique aspects which give expression to human experiences and understandings that cross cultural and societal boundaries."

Mr Gill challenged this. "Who says? Where's the evidence for that? How do you teach that? What are the ideas communicated in I Still Call Australia Home, which is in the course, or the ideas nominated in a Beethoven symphony?" Mr Gill said the course read like "a generic curriculum to which the word music is applied from time to time". The course also requires students to study ethical and health and safety issues of music, and asserts that "audiences construct meaning from music according to their own values, attitudes and ideological positions".

The course has been condemned by music teachers in Western Australia, who say students are no longer required to play an instrument and that the course downgrades the importance of reading music. State Education Minister Ljiljanna Ravlich said yesterday she was unaware students in the new course could pass without playing a musical instrument. "That's news to me," she said. But Ms Ravlich was not prepared to label this as unacceptable until she verified the position at a meeting with the Curriculum Council in the next day or two.

Source



Dum-dum-dum down: WA's new music curriculum hits all the wrong notes

An editorial from "the Australian" newspaper puts the music madness into perspective. It is education generally that is being destroyed in Western Australia

Music education is the latest casualty of Western Australia's misguided foray into the world of outcomes-based education. The state's new music curriculum will no longer require students to learn to play an instrument, and rap songs backed by downloaded music will be considered perfectly acceptable come exam time. Long-time music teachers are aghast at a plan that threatens to make Western Australia "a laughing stock". But as The Australian reports today, those involved with the new course admit that all instruments will be treated equally - even turntables and computers - and complain about the Western focus of the old curriculum. As with so much of outcomes-based education - which has become so controversial in Western Australia that the federal Government has threatened to withhold billions of dollars in funding if introduction of the new curriculum is not delayed - music lessons will now be more concerned with theory and sociology than actual skills.

Sadly for the state's students, music is not the only area to suffer under outcomes-based theory, which seeks to turn every subject into a subset of sociology. Under the proposed new curriculum, physics students will be asked to debate the ethics of airbags, while chemistry students will discuss the cosmetics industry. English students will not be required to read a book, spell, or demonstrate their ability to write continuous prose. Needless to say, failure is not an option under the new curriculum: in a system where everyone is allowed to achieve at their own pace, it is impossible not to pass. This will translate into terrible wake-up calls for many students whom outcomes-based education will allow to coast by, on the rationale that they are being prepared for the "real world". The fact is, the state's new curriculum does anything but. Musicians who can't play instruments, engineers who can't get complex maths problems right and just about anyone who can't string a sentence of correct, standard English together will find the job market a cruel place indeed. At the rate Western Australia is going, its music students will be lucky if they graduate knowing how to play anything more than an iPod.

Source

***************************

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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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25 May, 2006

Some Schools Are Leaving Recess Behind

One sure way to get parents exercised is to take away recess, the playful part of the school day when their kids can run wild. In some places, it no longer exists. The proportion of schools that don't have recess ranges from 7 percent for first and second grades to 13 percent by sixth grade, new government figures show. Put in perspective, the overwhelming majority of elementary schools still offer recess each day, usually for about 25 minutes. Most children get one recess a day, if not two or three. What troubles parents, though, is a sense that recess is under siege, so much that the Cartoon Network and the National PTA have launched a "Rescuing Recess" campaign. Kids are leading the huge letter-writing effort to school officials with one theme: Let us play.

"The reason I get riled up - and that most parents do - is we see recess as an opportunity for children to play," said Diane Larson, a mother of four in Tacoma, Wash. "It's a time for children to be imaginative, to show innovation on the playground. And it's one of the times when kids actually get to interact with their friends." Larson and other parents in her district want elementary schools to offer separate recess periods each day, but students often get only their lunch periods to let loose. The recess drop-off is most noticeable in third grade, she said, when preparation for testing kicks in.

Where recess is in decline, school leaders usually blame academic pressures. Under federal law, schools must test and show progress in reading and math starting in third grade. But how schools manage their time is a local decision. Recess competes with many other activities for schedule time, from music and arts to gym classes and computer classes. At Rivers Edge Elementary outside Richmond, Va., children get only one gym class a week, which makes their daily recess period even more important, said PTA President Wendy Logan. "The kids study all day, and they need some time for social activities," Logan said. "And those kids who struggle sitting the whole day - they're the ones who need it the most."

Nationwide, 99 percent of elementary schools schedule time for physical education apart from recess. More than half, though, offer those gym classes only once or twice a week. Elementary schools in poor communities offer less recess, and less overall time for exercise during the school week, than other schools, the government study found. The 2005 school figures, released Tuesday, come from the Education Department's first study on food and exercise in public elementary schools. It includes no data from previous years to determine, for example, whether recess has been declining over time.

Local disputes over the elimination of recess have popped up in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Miami and other communities. Such local stories, not the national picture, worry parents. To them, recess is an institution - how could an elementary school not have it? When are kids supposed to yell with their friends, play tag or kickball, just have some fun? "It's how I believe they start building their social structure," said Sandi Hocker, a mother of two in San Antonio, Texas. "Their P.E. classes are organized, and they are activity related. I think (children) need recess just for the socialization."

In an informal survey by the National PTA of its state leaders, more than half said daily recess is at risk. Only 9 percent were confident recess would not be reduced in their school. The Cartoon Network has pledged more than $1.3 million to save recess. That includes more than $300,000 in grants to PTA chapters for participating in the ongoing letter campaign. Mark Schneider, commissioner of the National Center of Education Statistics, presented the government findings on recess and exercise. He declined to draw conclusions from them. But given the obesity rates among children, he said: "I think we should all be concerned about any schools that aren't providing sufficient physical activities."

Source



Australia: School holy war ends with victory for churches

Plans to widen religious education in state schools have been dumped after the Beattie Government bowed to pressure from conservative Christian groups. The backflip followed growing concerns among Labor backbenchers that the Government would face electoral opposition from some Christian churches and right-wing community groups if a wider range of beliefs were permitted to be taught in schools. But humanists and representatives of some minority religions said the current rules were discriminatory and vowed to continue their fight for equal access.

Premier Peter Beattie and Education Minister Rod Welford yesterday announced the Government had shelved the plan but did not rule out similar changes in the future. Mr Welford stood by his earlier claims that some groups had misunderstood the intention of the laws and said the Government would not have allowed cults or witchcraft to be taught. "It was never intended on our part that there would be any adverse effect on the availability of Christian religious instructions in schools," he said. "Clearly there was concerns about the potential access of other groups. "The appropriate course of action is not to proceed with the amendments at this time."

Under the current system, state school students attend religious classes unless their parents ask for them to be exempt. Those classes are taught by a range of Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist groups. The proposed changes would have allowed a wider range of beliefs to be taught in schools with the consent of parents and Education Queensland.

There were also concerns the changes would have required students to "opt-in" to study religion. Humanists had been celebrating the proposed reforms and planned to immediately apply for access to schools once they were passed. Humanist Society of Queensland president Zelda Bailey yesterday said she was "bitterly disappointed" over the decision but hopeful the Government would reconsider. "If we live in a democracy, non-religious people should have the same rights as religious people," she said. "It's discriminatory not to include non-religious people." ....

Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop said the backdown showed the Commonwealth would not tolerate the marginalisation of religious education in state schools. She had threatened to withdraw federal funding if the plan went ahead. "I am delighted to hear that commonsense has finally prevailed," she said. "This is responding to the concerns that I have raised, and concerns raised by parents and church groups." Ms Bishop said parents across Australia were asking for values to be taught in school. "(These) crazy notions were obviously dreamt up by some ideologue in an Education Department," she said.

More here

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

***************************



24 May, 2006

9TH CIRCUIT COURT PROMOTES A RELIGION IN SCHOOLS! THE MUSLIM RELIGION

Against parent protests but with the blessing of the second highest court in the land, California is now indoctrinating kids into Islam -- having kids learn Muslims prayers and repeat them in school, during school hours, as a mandated part of the curriculum. I wonder what happens when the first Jewish child refuses to say a Muslim prayer?

In our brave new schools, Johnny can't say the pledge, but he can recite the Quran. Yup, the same court that found the phrase "under God" unconstitutional now endorses Islamic catechism in public school. In a recent federal decision that got surprisingly little press, even from conservative talk radio, California's 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it's OK to put public-school kids through Muslim role-playing exercises, including:

* Reciting aloud Muslim prayers that begin with "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful . . . ."
* Memorizing the Muslim profession of faith: "Allah is the only true God and Muhammad is his messenger."
* Chanting "Praise be to Allah" in response to teacher prompts.
* Professing as "true" the Muslim belief that "The Holy Quran is God's word."
* Giving up candy and TV to demonstrate Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.
* Designing prayer rugs, taking an Arabic name and essentially "becoming a Muslim" for two full weeks.

Parents of seventh-graders, who after 9-11 were taught the pro-Islamic lessons as part of California's world history curriculum, sued under the First Amendment ban on religious establishment. They argued, reasonably, that the government was promoting Islam. But a federal judge appointed by President Clinton told them in so many words to get over it, that the state was merely teaching kids about another "culture." So the parents appealed. Unfortunately, the most left-wing court in the land got their case. The 9th Circuit, which previously ruled in favor of an atheist who filed suit against the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, upheld the lower court ruling.

The decision is a major victory for the multiculturalists and Islamic apologists in California and across the country who've never met a culture or religion they didn't like - with the exception of Western civilization and Christianity. They are legally in the clear to indoctrinate kids into the "peaceful" and "tolerant" religion of Islam, while continuing to denigrate Judeo-Christian values.

In the California course on world religions, Christianity is not presented equally. It's covered in just two days and doesn't involve kids in any role-playing activities. But kids do get a good dose of skepticism about the Christian faith, including a biting history of its persecution of other peoples. In contrast, Islam gets a pass from critical review. Even jihad is presented as an "internal personal struggle to do one's best to resist temptation," and not holy war.

The ed consultant's name is Susan L. Douglass. No, she's not a Christian scholar. She's a devout Muslim activist on the Saudi government payroll, according to an investigation by Paul Sperry, author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington." He found that for years Douglass taught social studies at the Islamic Saudi Academy just outside Washington, D.C. Her husband still teaches there.

So what? By infiltrating our public school system, the Saudis hope to make Islam more widely accepted while converting impressionable American youth to their radical cause. Recall that John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban," was a product of the California school system. What's next, field trips to Mecca? This case is critical not just to our culture but our national security. It should be brought before the Supreme Court, which has outlawed prayer in school. Let's see what it says about practicing Islam in class. It will be a good test for the bench's two new conservative justices.

Source



CORRUPT BLACK HIGH SCHOOL IN MISSOURI

Dozens of St. Louis teachers are suspected of giving passing grades to students who missed more than 65 days of classes last semester. The allegations involve at least 60 teachers at Vashon High School. After missing 20 days in a year in St. Louis, students who are at least 17 years old can be expelled, but it's not a mandate.

In some cases, Vashon students who reportedly missed numerous classes received A's and B's. Superintendent Creg Williams says he's outraged. Vashon is one of several high schools that will be reconstituted or reorganized this summer. Williams says, "Those schools are corrupt and I'm going to clean them out and fix them through the reconstitution process. That's going to be the clear message."

Mary Armstrong is the president of the St. Louis Teachers' Union, Local 420. Armstrong agrees that changes are needed. "The district needs to develop a policy that with guidelines that says if a students has so many absences, what the grade should be."

The allegations were contained in an e-mail sent to teachers and obtained by some journalists. Superintendent Williams said he was disappointed that the information was not sent to his office.

Source



Time to sink or graduate: "Seven days before the test, Stephanie Yeh stood in her sorority house and cried. An electrical engineering and computer science major, she was set to graduate near the top of her MIT class next month and start a six-figure job as a Wall Street analyst. Just one test, terrifying to her, remained. ... She had to swim 100 yards, four lengths of a pool, without stopping. ... At Cornell, Dartmouth, and Columbia, where swim proficiency also is required, it is time to sink or swim. For students like Yeh, who has aced virtually every exam in her 22 years, it is time to face demons under the surface. College swim requirements, which sprang up after World War II, have been in decline since the 1970s. One criticism: The test was biased against those who grew up away from the water.... On test day, she jumped in the deep end, scrunched up her face and began kicking and moving her arms like a windmill. It was not pretty, but she was moving. The first length went well. By length two, a tiring Yeh switched to breast stroke, then to crawl, her arms barely moving over her head. For the fourth, she rolled onto her back and finished."

***************************

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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

***************************



23 May, 2006

A LITTLE MORE CHOICE COMING IN BRITAIN

A return of that wicked "elitism"?



Pupils who achieve higher than predicted A-level grades will be encouraged to apply for places at better universities under reforms to be announced by the Government today, The Times has learnt. The changes will lead the way to a complete shift to the selection of university places after publication of examination results, in the most radical transformation to the centralised admissions system since it started more than 40 years ago.

The 300,000 students who begin sitting A-level papers this week will have to ditch their confirmed university places to bid for a course at better universities if they achieve higher grades than have been predicted by teachers. But from 2008 a new upgrade week will allow those who do better than expected to seek places at universities that they may not have considered previously for fear of getting insufficient grades. They will be able to hold on to confirmed offers at the universities they had chosen while they seek a better alternative.

The reforms follow concerns that talented state school pupils are missing out on places at the best universities because their teachers tend to predict lower grades than those from the independent sector. Ministers believe that the reform will encourage more students, particularly from poorer backgrounds, to set their sights higher once they realise that they have the grades to compete for the best universities. A-level results would be released a week earlier to give students the time to make fresh applications. Universities would be expected to hold back a proportion of places so that they can consider these candidates.

At least 9,000 students are expected to benefit from the upgrade week. Changes to application forms will also be introduced within two years. Students will apply to five universities initially, instead of six as at present, and will have their AS exam results included alongside predicted A-level grades. Predicted grades, which are inaccurate in 45 per cent of cases, will be removed from application forms if AS grades are shown to be a better measure of students' final results.

Admissions tutors will begin to consider candidates only after the deadline for all applications has passed, eliminating concerns that some students gain an advantage by sending in their forms early.

A partial post-qualification applications (PQA) system will be controversial, however, with the leading universities claiming that holding back places could disadvantage initial applicants and others that it implies they are second-rate. Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, said that the reforms would be much fairer. "I believe these two-stage reform proposals will help us to achieve that."

Members of the Russell Group of 19 leading universities, which are heavily over-subscribed, have been reluctant to endorse the reforms but have been persuaded of the benefits of considering more candidates. They will not be required to hold back a fixed quota of places and all institutions have agreed to participate in the scheme. Both new candidates and students who were rejected at the initial application stage will be able to seek places if their results are good enough.

The CMU group of 31 universities, representing many of the former polytechnics, fears that the new system will rob them of many of their most able applicants, who could drop confirmed places at the last minute because of a better offer.

All sides were convinced to back the reforms by the promise of a review in 2010 to examine their effects, and the prospect of adopting an applications system based entirely on final exam results [How innovative!] two years later. Ministers hope that the changes will break the log jam that has prevented reform of admissions so far.

Schools and universities favour a full PQA system but neither side has been willing to change its academic timetable. By establishing a better match between students and universities, based on results, ministers believe that the reforms will create the momentum to allow all 350,000 applicants to seek places after the publication of exam results

Source



Australian Holy war

Feds heavy a Leftist State government over the teaching of religion in schools



Queensland could lose millions of dollars in federal funding to schools if it changes a century-old law governing religious education. Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop will threaten the state with funding cuts at an education ministers conference scheduled for Brisbane in July if the law is tampered with. "We provide billions of dollars of funding each year," she said. "It is fair enough that we have our say on the issue." Ms Bishop fears witchcraft and other fringe religions could enter the classroom if the Bill is not stopped. And she has accused the Queensland Government of hastening a tide of students moving away from the public system to the private. "Political correctness has gone too far when religious education at school now permits almost any belief system to be taught, including witchcraft and paganism," she said.

But the State Government already appears to be watering down the controversial legislation, which also came under attack from the State Opposition last week. "She's boxing at shadows," Education Minister Rod Welford said yesterday. "We are not planning any substantial changes."

Ms Bishop said the Bill before the Queensland Parliament was a blatant attack on religious education and moral values in schools. She said proposed changes to the state's Education Act got rid of the "opt out" on religious education system where student's parents could inform the school they did not want religious education for their children. The proposed "opt in" system forced parents to provide a school principal with a written notice if they wanted their child to receive religious education.

"The proposed changes also widen the definition of what can be taught to religious or other belief," Ms Bishop said. "This would now allow cults and fringe groups to register and begin teaching their beliefs to Queensland schoolchildren." Ms Bishop said Queensland schoolchildren should not be taught in a moral vacuum "imposed by political correctness gone mad". "The Beattie Government's proposed change to Queensland's Education Act will do two things," she said. "First they will place hurdles in front of parents who want to ensure that their children get some religious instruction at school, and secondly they will open the door to cultish groups to start preaching unacceptable views in schools."

Mr Welford said he would be happy to meet Ms Bishop and listen to what she had to say in July.

Source





American schools are a law unto themselves: "A 13-year-old Highland Student was suspended Thursday for bringing a soft-air BB gun to school. They are called soft-air BB guns but there's nothing soft about them. Chief Mike Klein of Harrison Township Police said the BB's can easily take out an eye, making it a dangerous weapon. The soft-air guns are legal, so the teen can't be charged with a crime [How pesky!]. The student remains suspended pending a school board hearing next week." [You can take an eye out with a stick, too, if you use it carelessly]

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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22 May, 2006

Hot Air: How States Inflate Their Educational Progress Under NCLB

Critics on both the Left and the Right have charged that the No Child Left Behind Act tramples states' rights by imposing a federally mandated, one-size-fits-all accountability system on the nation's diverse states and schools. In truth, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) gives states wide discretion to define what students must learn, how that knowledge should be tested, and what test scores constitute "proficiency"-the key elements of any educational accountability system. States also set standards for high school graduation rates, teacher qualifications, school safety and many other aspects of school performance. As a result, states are largely free to define the terms of their own educational success.

Unfortunately, many states have taken advantage of this autonomy to make their educational performance look much better than it really is. In March 2006, they submitted the latest in a series of annual reports to the U.S. Department of Education detailing their progress under NCLB. The reports covered topics ranging from student proficiency and school violence to school district performance and teacher credentials. For every measure, the pattern was the same: a significant number of states used their standard-setting flexibility to inflate the progress that their schools are making and thus minimize the number of schools facing scrutiny under the law.

Some states claimed that 80 percent to 90 percent of their students were proficient in reading and math, even though external measures such as the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) put the number at 30 percent or below. One state alleged that over 95 percent of their students graduated from high school even as independent studies put the figure closer to 65 percent. Another state determined that 99 percent of its school districts were making adequate progress, while others found that 99 percent of their teachers were highly qualified. Forty-four states reported that zero percent of their schools were persistently dangerous.

With the approval of the U.S. Department of Education, many states are reporting educational results under NCLB that defy reality and common sense. In so doing, they are undermining the effectiveness of the law.

Not all states have set lax standards. Some, like Maryland and Massachusetts, have worked hard to set a high bar for achievement and report honest information to the public. But the large variance in data reported by states that have set high standards compared to states with low standards further undermines the credibility of NCLB by creating significant and seemingly arbitrary differences in how the law impacts students and educators from state to state.

Principals and teachers in states that establish high standards under NCLB are under intense pressure to improve, while similar educators in states with low standards are told that everything is fine and they're doing a great job. Students in states that set the bar high for school performance have access to free tutoring and public school choice when their schools fall short; students in identical circumstances in other states must do without.

The result is a system of perverse incentives that rewards state education officials who misrepresent reality. Their performance looks better in the eyes of the public and they're able to avoid conflict with organized political interests. By contrast, officials who keep expectations high and report honest data have more hard choices to make and are penalized because their states look worse than others by comparison.

It is understandable, even predictable, that some state education officials would make these choices. But their actions threaten NCLB. While the most high-profile opposition to the law has come in the form of lawsuits filed and public relations campaigns waged by national teachers unions, lax state standard-setting may actually be far more harmful to the law in the long run-not by attacking it directly, but by falsely asserting that most of its goals have already been met.

Policymakers and the public won't stand behind an education system that isn't truthful. Thus, federal lawmakers have no choice but to confront the historically contentious issue of how to balance federal and state responsibility for setting education standards. Unless steps are taken to bring state standards in line with reality, NCLB's credibility-and viability-are at serious risk.

Much more here



Tennessee: Home-schooler's seat on board thrills, rankles

Having a home-schooling parent on the Metro School Board thrills some taxpayers who've long felt disenfranchised from the system, but it worries traditional education advocates who say Kay Brooks doesn't have the experience or background to do a good job. "I am concerned with someone's experience not being in public schools and what she brings to the table," school board member Marsha Warden said. "She doesn't have the experience, she doesn't have the knowledge base."

But Bonnie Hoskins, an Old Hickory mother teaching two sons at home, said Brooks, a well-known and vocal home-schooler, will bring a lot of passion and knowledge to the table. "Maybe Kay can act as a bridge to see it from both sides. It's clear that the public schools need people in there that have a passion for education," Hoskins said. "Kay can be a great source of ideas, and hopefully they'll listen to her."

The Metro Council elected Brooks, 49, by an 18-17 vote Tuesday over Gracie Porter, a retired Metro principal. Brooks will fill the school board's District 5 seat, which the Rev. Lisa Hunt left to take a job in Texas, until August. She'll have to win election by the east Nashville district's voters to serve beyond then. Porter, 60, and former Councilman Lawrence Hart plan to run for the remainder of Hunt's unexpired term, which ends in 2008.

Brooks, who lives in Inglewood, said she wants to see all children learn, will learn quickly herself and will bring new ideas to a 72,000-student school district with plenty of room for improvement. Metro has 614 home-school students registered, but Brooks said she would not push a home-school agenda. "I care about my friends' children," Brooks said. "I don't want them to get a bad education, and I don't want to pay (as a taxpayer) for a bad education."

Brooks and her husband, Jon, have four children 9 through 18. She told a council committee Tuesday that they decided to home-school their oldest child 13 years ago because their public school was "not doing well." She said she came to love the "lifestyle" and decided to stick with it.

Michelle Fraley, an active home-school parent in Clarksville whose husband is president of the Middle Tennessee Home Education Association, applauded Brooks' appointment. Fraley said she hoped Brooks' role on the school board would improve the image of home-school families. "There are home-schoolers that are very anti-public schools, but that's a minority. Most home-schoolers care that all students are provided a good education."

But David Kern, former chairman of the Metro Parents' Advisory Council, said Brooks' lack of experience with the schools would put her at a disadvantage. "She is someone who is out of touch with the school system," Kern said. Several council members who voted against Brooks said they also were troubled by how she was elected. Councilman Mike Jameson of Lockeland Springs in east Nashville, who nominated Porter, said Brooks' chief supporter, Councilman Michael Craddock of Madison, rounded up votes in private, possibly in violation of the state's open meetings law. The law says anytime two or more members of a public governing body deliberate policy or administration, the public must be notified.

Jameson said he began hearing that Craddock had 15 to 18 votes lined up May 10, a day before Craddock formally nominated Brooks. "We've been striving to get past these proverbial backroom deals, and here we go again," Jameson said Wednesday. "If someone asks you for your vote, you don't vote until you know the entire range of candidates or options."

Kathy Nevill, vice chairwoman of the school board, said council members cast their votes without deliberating publicly. Nevill said she felt Porter, who worked in Metro schools for 34 years, had better credentials. "It just makes me really worry for the city if this is how we're going to do business for the long term," Nevill said.

Craddock said he talked to fellow council members in a place and way he considered open: in the council chamber during previous meetings. He said he even introduced Brooks to some of them at the May 4 meeting. "Sure, I lined up votes, but I didn't violate the law doing it," Craddock said, adding that he had not traded votes with anyone.

The council members who supported Brooks tended to be white men from suburban areas. But Ludye Wallace and Edward Whitmore, African-Americans from downtown and north Nashville, respectively, also voted for her. All others on the Black Caucus voted for Porter, who is black.....

Craddock, who lives near Brooks and has known her for 10 years, said he had as much of a right to look out for east Nashville's interests as anyone. A graduate of East High School, he said he felt Brooks would be "aggressive" about making Metro schools better and that "the fact she home-schools her children is an aside."

More here

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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21 May, 2006

IDEOLOGY AND THE HANDICAPPED

I have come across a question from next year's Standard Assessment Tests for 11-year-olds: if Miss Mopps spends eight minutes changing A's nappy and thirteen minutes cleaning out B's tracheotomy tube, how many minutes of the literacy hour does she have left to teach the rest of class how to read and write? Answer: rather less than is ideal.

I have every sympathy with the primary school teacher quoted by Cambridge educationists in a report published today that, thanks to the Government's policy of closing special schools and including special needs children in mainstream schools, her job has become "more like nursing than teaching". My nine-year-old daughter, Eliza, is mentally handicapped, and has attended both a mainstream and a special school. I have seen enough to conclude that the Government's policy of inclusion is rather stronger on ideology than it is on common sense.

I have the right to insist that Eliza is taught in a mainstream school right up until the age of 16. But to what purpose? Maybe it would add to the self-esteem of disability rights campaigners, but it wouldn't help Eliza. And it certainly wouldn't help children of normal ability who just wanted to get on with their studies as Eliza giggled in the corner. Far from benefiting from inclusion, Eliza would simply earn a reputation as "the girl who ruined my GCSEs".

There is a lot to be said for some forms of inclusion. Nobody wants to go back to the days when blind children were taught how to be piano tuners because no one imagined they could benefit from any other kind of education. Physically disabled children of normal intelligence should of course be taught in mainstream schools. It is right, too, that mentally handicapped children should be included with ordinary children in nursery and the early years of primary school. There is a big difference between the kindness that Eliza's classmates have shown towards her and the rather cruel language in which school children used to speak of the mentally handicapped.

But beyond the age of about 7, when serious academic education begins, it is nonsense to pretend that you can teach a child with an IQ of 50 alongside one with an IQ of 120. Good special schools, like good grammar schools, have been sacrificed to fulfil a misplaced egalitarian philosophy - to the detriment of all children

Source



Public Schools Fail ACT

"Teaching to the test" is a common complaint of public school teachers whose students have an increasingly difficult time passing such examinations with the passage of every school year. "Teach to the test, please," Richard Ferguson of the ACT advises, "because the skills we are measuring are the skills that are needed." Ferguson spoke at a conference at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel here in which the ACT released its new report, which is entitled "Ready to Succeed: All Students Prepared for College and Work."

The ACT that Ferguson heads administers one of the two most widely-used college entrance exams in the United States. At least those teachers who dread exams such as the ACT might be consistent. The odds are that they didn't handle such tests very well as students either. Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, who also spoke at the conference, pointed out that the aggregate number of college graduates who take up teaching represent the bottom third of scores on the ACT and the SAT.

Ferguson has worked with the ACT for more than 30 years. "Where the United States used to be number one, we are now ninth in the world in high school rankings and 10th in college rankings," he points out. "NAM [the National Association of Manufacturers] did an important survey in which 90 percent of their members reported a shortage of skilled workers," Ferguson said. "Specifically, they lack reading, writing and communications skills."

"Toyota is building a plant in Canada because they can find a higher skill level there," Ferguson notes. Arthur Rothkopf of the United States Chamber of Commerce agrees. "Businesses spend hundreds of millions of dollars in remediation in workforce training," Rothkopf told the crowd. The USCOC represents three million businesses nationwide-small, medium and large, according to Rothkopf. "The K-12 system is not doing what it has to do," Rothkopf says. "Studies showing that most parents are satisfied with their children's schools points up part of the problem. The public is unaware of the problem."

"Out of every ten students who enter ninth grade, seven will graduate high school in four years, four will go on to post-secondary education and two will earn a Bachelor's or Associate's degree," Ferguson reports.

"Far too many students are not being educated for either college or the work force," Cynthia Schmeiser, also of the ACT, concluded. "Two-thirds of new jobs require post secondary education." "They need math and reading skills to enter the work force or to enter college without remediation." Schmeiser is the senior vice president for research and development.

"Seventy-five percent of our students require remediation in the first year of college," Keith Bird, chancellor of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, says, explaining the mushrooming of remedial courses in institutions of higher learning. Bird recommends changing pedagogy and teacher training. "The line between high school and college is becoming blurred," he observes.

Source



HOW AMERICA'S LEFTIST "EDUCATORS" HATE CHILDREN!

Hatred for the world around them is what makes the Left tick, so this is not really surprising. A little kid does what a teacher asks and the kid is penalized for it!

Seth Hall loves going to school, playing baseball, and building things with his grandfather. He's not the kind of kid you'd expect the superintendent to kick out of school for weapons possession. "He said that I am in deep trouble!" Seth said. Seth, who attends kindergarten in the Honeoye Central School District, was slapped with a three-day suspension.

The weapons in question were two hammers. Seth brought them to class last Friday at the request of his teacher. "It's a judgment call. There's no doubt about it," said Bob Schofield, Honeoye District superintendent. Schofield said the teacher demonstrated poor judgment, and he knows Seth did not mean any harm. The teacher has been reprimanded.

After learning the boy's teacher played a role, Schofield dropped the suspension after Seth missed a day. "It wasn't like we were out to get this young man! That was the last thing we were trying to do. We were just trying to look for the safety of all of the students in implementing a policy that the Board of Education had OK'ed," Schofield said.

Seth's mother wants an apology. She also wants the superintendent to be disciplined. "But they can't take away what they did to him, the way they yelled at him and upset him," said Melissa Wetherwax. "I just feel that they handed it totally wrong. He's not an adult. He's not a 15-year-old. He's a 6-year-old. They just needed to talk to him like a 6-year-old." Seth said he would not have hit anyone with the hammers because, "I'd be going to the principal's!"

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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20 May, 2006

NO SUB-JUDICE PROTECTION FOR ACCUSED BRITISH TEACHERS?

An attempt to introduce anonymity for teachers facing serious accusations from pupils will be opposed by ministers, despite strong support from schools, The Times understands. The protection would include those involved in court cases - until conviction - because of the low conviction rate for teachers accused by pupils.

The Conservatives are seeking to secure confidentiality for all school staff facing claims that they have harmed a child. David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that an amendment to the Education and Inspections Bill was needed because of the dramatic rise in malicious and unfounded allegations that have wrecked teachers' careers. The NASUWT union recorded an increase from 41 allegations of physical and sexual assault in 1991 to 192 in 2004. Conviction rates fell from 12 per cent (five teachers) in 1991 to 3.6 per cent (seven teachers) in 2004.

The Tories hope that the amendment will be given a chance to be debated when the Bill returns to the Commons next Tuesday. But even though they took legal advice in framing their amendment, the Government looks set to reject it on legal and practical grounds. Officials fear that it would trigger demands from other public sector employees, as well as proving difficult to enforce in close-knit school communities where details of serious claims are difficult to conceal.

At present, police are urged not to release the names of school staff unless they are charged. A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said: "There was recent guidance to the Association of Chief Police Officers making clear that anyone under investigation but not charged should not be named or details provided to the media."

The National Union of Teachers urged the Government to try to use the Tory amendment to introduce extra legal protection. Steve Sinnott, the union's general secretary, said: "The question the Government should be asking itself is whether there is a workable way of protecting teachers from mass publicity."

Mr Willetts said: "I hope they do not object to this on fundamental grounds because it is what a lot of teachers are concerned about. This is something the teacher unions have been calling for and it is a growing problem."

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said: "I think the level of accusations has gone up simply because children now are very aware of their rights but not their responsibilities. It has become one of the weapons in the armoury of children to make teachers' lives difficult over some sort of perceived injustice. "It has become common to have reported to me that children respond to teachers by saying, `I am going to make an allegation against you and you will lose your job'. An allegation is seen as proof of guilt and people's family lives and jobs are affected by that."

In one dramatic case this year, Charlie King, a senior technology teacher, said that his 30-year career was ruined by allegations from two teenage girls that led to a 13-month public ordeal. A jury took 30 minutes to clear him of indecent assault. Mr King said: "Any hope of resuming my career has been dashed by the adverse publicity. After all I have been through, the prospect of going back into teaching is very worrying."

Weeks earlier a judge said that the case against Lydia Gane, 63, was "weak and muddled" after she was cleared of assaulting a six-year-old pupil she had tried to restrain. The teacher, who had a 30-year unblemished record, said: "I don't know if a younger teacher would have coped with this. It is incidents like this that stop people from entering the profession."

In another dramatic case of false allegation, a music teacher who died in prison while serving an eight-year sentence for raping a pupil was posthumously cleared last month. The Court of Appeal quashed the conviction of Darryl Gee after a long campaign by his mother, Molly, 88. The alleged victim made similar allegations against another man, John Hudson, who was jailed for 12 years. His conviction was quashed last year after a psychiatric expert concluded that his accuser's recollection was "implausible".

Source

An editorial from "The Times" on the above:

The rising tide of unfounded malicious allegations against teachers has a host of consequences. It can wreck the lives of innocent teachers who are forced to endure lengthy suspensions in the glare of publicity. It makes people even more wary of teaching as a career. And it fuels the impression that children and parents can lie and get away with it.

Schools are right to take allegations seriously. Children with a genuine grievance must know that they will always be heard. But it is time to redress the balance between teachers and those who set out to wreck their careers: by granting teachers anonymity while they are under investigation.

The figures are staggering. Of 2,210 accusations of physical or sexual abuse recorded by the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers in the past 15 years, only 88 - less than 4 per cent - have led to a conviction. More than 80 per cent of cases have never come to court: the police have decided there is either insufficient evidence to mount a case, or no truth in the allegation. The vast majority of cases are utterly without foundation.

Allegations are made not only by pupils but also by parents, some of whom hope for compensation. Others wilfully misunderstand their child's story and go straight to the police without checking with the school. In the case of Pamela Mitchelhill, the head teacher whose case attracted enormous publicity when she was accused of slapping a six-year-old girl three years ago, the pupil did not mention any assault in her police interview.

Once an allegation is made, a head teacher has no choice but to alert the police and social services. While these bodies investigate, teachers endure suspension, alienation and ridicule. There is surely no reason for them also to endure the glare of publicity. Teachers should be accorded the same privilege as their pupils, whose identities are kept confidential. Only if they are found guilty should they be named. It is a tragedy that teachers have killed themselves while under investigation, protesting innocence but unable to bear the stigma.

Government guidance currently advises schools, local authorities and the police to keep names private. But teacher unions feel this does not go far enough. A Conservative amendment to the Education and Inspections Bill seeks to provide statutory anonymity. Ministers are understandably concerned about creating a precedent for teachers. But there are very strong grounds for considering them as a special case.

If anonymity is not guaranteed, the National Association of Head Teachers says that it will support teachers who sue for defamation. But few will want to take that step. It is, nevertheless, quite wrong that there are no repercussions for those who make these allegations. They should surely be treated as serious disciplinary offences that could lead to expulsion.

Last month a jury took less than an hour to clear a teacher who had been suspended for 18 months after being falsely accused of groping a pupil. The girl is thought to have made up the claims in an attempt to postpone an exam for which she had not prepared properly. This is an unacceptable state of affairs. Cases should be resolved more speedily, and teachers should know that at least they will not have to suffer public ignominy as well as malice at the school gate.

Source



POLITICKING PROFESSOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

Comment by a student

There are those who say universities are festering grounds for liberal propaganda, places where teachers regularly try to indoctrinate students - covertly or openly - with their radical leftist viewpoints. I've always been a little skeptical of this theory. I don't deny that university professors, including my own, overwhelmingly lean to the left. But after spending four years in the political science department at a super-liberal university in a super-liberal city, I can honestly say that if my teachers have been trying to get me to renounce the free market, demand an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and worship at the feet of Ralph Nader, I haven't noticed it.

And not because I'm oblivious to such propaganda. Rather, the professors I've had the privilege of learning under are professionals who recognize that politics play no role in the classroom. Perhaps I just wasn't looking in the right places, however.

I received an e-mail from an economics professor, one whom teaches a class in which I am enrolled this semester, late Sunday night alerting students that class on Monday morning would be canceled. The reason, as he put in the e-mail: "Tomorrow there will be a nationwide protest of mostly hispanic [sic] immigrants against some proposed legislation that would declare illegal immigrants criminals. I am not an "illegal" immigrant and my opinion in favor or against restrictions to immigration is irrelevant. The problem is that many hispanics [sic], myself included, feel that there's a substantial racist motivation behind the proposed bill, which is not only insensitive an [sic] cruel, but also insulting."

As I wrote in a column three weeks ago, I disagree with this opinion. Illegal immigrants flagrantly disregard the laws of our society, pose potential security risks and - while filling unpopular low-wage jobs - leach on governmental services without always paying their full share in taxes and civic responsibilities (jury duty, for instance).

But that's not the point here. The bottom line is that it is wholly inappropriate for a professor to voice his opinion on a matter that bears no relation to the class subject matter, much less cancel class because of it. And it cuts both ways: while I might personally find arguments for a hard-line stance on illegal immigration more palatable, it would be no more appropriate in the context of a professor communicating to his class.

The professor even seemed to realize as much, claiming his opinion on immigration is "irrelevant." Of course, irrelevance in his book apparently necessitates the accompanying claims that immigration legislation is "insensitive," "cruel" and "insulting."

He certainly is allowed that opinion, and if he wants to shout it from the top of his lungs and drown out the religicos on Library Mall, by all means he should. But don't do it in the classroom (or via a class e-mail list).

What's vital to remember is that professors at UW are paid to teach. They are state employees in charge of educating students at Wisconsin's flagship university. To cancel class for overtly political reasons is a blatant dereliction of duties. In doing so, a professor cheats not only the students who expect to learn from him, but also the taxpayers of Wisconsin who foot his salary.

Imagine, for instance, if a police officer assigned to Monday's immigration rally at the Capitol had decided the night before that, due to his ideological views, he wished to join in the protest, as opposed to enforcing the law at it. That wouldn't fly.

Sadly, this isn't the first time such an incident has occurred at this university. In 2003, UW women's studies lecturer Susan Pastor canceled her class due to an anti-Iraq War protest occurring the same day, leading former Badger Herald columnist Matt Modell to declare that "instructors have an obligation to teach the subjects they are being paid to teach - and no more." Mr. Modell's words ring just as true today.

Part of the problem is the lack of any concrete university policy on when and for what reasons professors may cancel regularly scheduled classes. While attempting to indoctrinate students on issues irrelevant to the class's subject material is generally frowned upon, there is no policy prohibiting teachers from canceling classes for political - or indeed, any - reason.

Rather, professors are merely charged with covering the material they set out to teach during the semester. If they can still cover the syllabus despite canceling a class here or there, so be it. In a sense, this is reasonable - outside academic opportunities, such as research, speaking engagements and the like, may sometimes pop up. In another, more accurate sense, though, there need to be clearer rules - starting with a prohibition on ever canceling, rescheduling or devoting class time for political purposes.

To be fair, Assistant Professor Juan Esteban Carranza didn't have to worry about such a policy earlier this week. And that's a shame, because actions like his are unfair to the vast majority of professors on this campus who maintain their professional integrity, uphold their job responsibilities and keep their personal politics where they belong - out of the classroom.

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

***************************



19 May, 2006

OK to insult Christians at the University of Oregon

The usual double standards

The Insurgent didn't violate any student government or University rules by publishing material many Christians considered offensive in its March issue, according to an ASUO ruling on the most recent grievance, filed jointly by 91 students against the publication. A new coalition, Students of Faith, filed the grievance May 5, saying the publication's content violated three University policies and was "discriminatory, knowingly false, slanderous and egregious," according to the grievance.

David Goward, ASUO programs administrator, ruled in favor of The Insurgent on all three allegations and said student free speech is protected, even when it involves religious ideas or concepts, according to his ruling Monday. "Furthermore, there are no grounds for demanding an apology from the Student Insurgent," according to the ruling, which reinforced an earlier decision in favor of The Insurgent after University student Zachary White filed a grievance against the publication over the same issue.

Students of Faith member and University junior Jethro Higgins said the group members expected to lose but wanted to cover their bases before taking a complaint to the University administration. "We want to make sure the University isn't using public funds to support hate speech," he said. "They have the right to say whatever they want, but I don't want to have to pay for it."

Members of The Insurgent agree with the ASUO ruling. "If you start suspending publications because you don't like what they said, then that leads to the dictatorship and kind of things Russia used to do that we hated so much, supposedly," said Don Goldman, contributor to The Insurgent.

Higgins said Students of Faith is well organized, has lots of community support and won't go away.

Source



BRITISH TEACHERS NOW REJECT CRAZY "MAINSTREAMING" FOR PROBLEM PUPILS

The policy of educating children with special needs in mainstream schools has failed and must be changed immediately, the country's biggest teaching union said yesterday. The National Union of Teachers dramatically reversed decades of support for "inclusion" and demanded a halt to the closure of special schools. It called on the Government to carry out "an urgent review of inclusion in policy and practice". The union issued a report by academics at Cambridge University, which suggested that inclusion was harming children with special needs, undermining the education of others and leaving teachers exhausted as they struggled to cope with severe behavioural and medical conditions.

John MacBeath, one of the authors, described inclusion "as a form of abuse" for some children, who were placed in "totally inappropriate" schools where they inevitably failed. Pupils with special needs were nine times more likely to be expelled and teachers were leaving the profession because they could not cope with the pressure of working with them. Teachers were being given responsibility for tasks such as clearing out tracheotomy tubes, changing nappies and managing children prone to harming themselves in outbursts of extreme violence.

Other pupils lost out as staff devoted excessive time to special needs children. Many students witnessed highly disturbing behaviour as special needs pupils reacted in frustration and anger to their surroundings. Teachers often delegated responsibility for special needs pupils to classroom assistants. Parents felt betrayed as their children's educational needs went unmet and the children sunk into a spiral of misbehaviour that often ended in expulsion. Parents of other children were unhappy at the repeated disruptions to their education.

Steve Sinnott, the union's general secretary, said that "inclusion has failed many children". Teachers supported the idea in principle, but felt let down by the practice. He said: "It demonstrates very clearly the failures in policy and practice in our education system and in our schools."

The Cambridge researchers interviewed teachers, children and parents at 20 schools in seven local authorites. They concluded that the reality of inclusion was very far from the "world of fine intentions" inhabited by policymakers. "While there are many examples of social benefits both for children with special needs and their peers, there is much less positive evidence that learning needs are being met across the whole spectrum of ability," the report said.

But Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, said: "Children should be taught in mainstream schools where this is what their parents want and it is not incompatible with the efficient education of other children." David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said: "This report should lead the Government to a radical rethink on its inclusion policy."

Source



WIDESPREAD STUDENT DISSATISFACTION WITH TERTIARY COLLEGES

According to a study published by the U.S. Department of Education, as many as 60 percent of American college students attend more than one school before they graduate with a Bachelor's degree. The college transfer rate has been rising steadily for the last two decades, but in recent years, admissions officers have seen an explosion in transfer applications - and they say the reasons are clear.

Miranda Spradlin is a second-year student at New York University, where she is studying communications and public relations. She grew up in California, but says she decided to go to school in New York, because she wanted something different. After just two months here, though, she started to feel that the move may have been a mistake. "I just wasn't happy with NYU," Spradlin says as she sits in a coffee shop after a morning of classes. "Despite the fact that they don't have a campus, they said 'we make up for it; we're still a community; you see students all the time.' And I really didn't get that. I'd go out on the weekends, and I'd be with 30-year-old men at the bars that knew college girls were going to be there and stuff, and it just wasn't very appealing."

She stuck it out for the year, but when she found she still was not happy at the start of her second year at NYU, Miranda Spradlin decided to transfer. She has applied to three schools in the state of California's university system. "They're much more social schools, much more community-oriented," she says. "I like the idea of having Greek Life (i.e. fraternities and sororities) - not necessarily to be in a sorority, but just because it kind of brings the students together. I like the idea of having sports teams, because it does the same thing. And they're closer to home."

Homesickness and a general dissatisfaction with their social lives are two big reasons college students transfer -- but they are not the only reasons. Many switch schools because they can no longer afford to stay where they are. And according to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly two-thirds of college students who transfer these days say they are doing it because they want a more prestigious degree, or because they want an educational program that is not offered at the school they first entered.

Nicholas Sharac

That is the case with Nicholas Sharac, who is finishing his first year at Fordham University. The school has a tightly-defined core curriculum that requires students to take a number of Humanities courses. But Sharac says he has decided he wants to concentrate on the sciences. "In the beginning, when I first came to college, I was happy with the core (curriculum), because it enabled me to not have to pick a path, as far as education goes," he says. "But now that I want to get into biology and more into science courses, I don't really feel the need to learn about theology, or spend time on courses that don't really have to do with what I want to do."

Sharac says he is not surprised to learn so many college students choose to transfer. He says when you are in high school, you do not always know what you like, or what you are good at - and sometimes you are forced to make a decision about college before you really understand who you are. "You can't really know how you're going to be doing or what you're going to be thinking in college, when you're in high school," Sharac says. "So the way high school is set up now, you can't really make a great decision as far as college goes. In my case, high school didn't really motivate me to pick any direction at all. So that's kind of why I couldn't pick a direction in high school."

Indeed, that may be why some students start out at a two-year community college, where they get an Associate's degree, and then transfer to a four-year institution, to get their Bachelor's. But teenaged aimlessness is not a new thing - and by itself, it cannot explain the explosive increase in college transfer rates. Lehigh University, for example, has seen the number of transfer applications increase by 30 percent in the last three years, according to Eric Kaplan, Director of Admissions at Lehigh.

Eric Kaplan

Kaplan says the transfer rate may be up because colleges are doing a much better job of marketing themselves - and recent changes in technology have helped them do that. "There are lots of resources that are devoted to marketing," he says, "Either through institutional print pieces or through websites - which is a great example of something that in the mid 1990s students didn't have access to, that now are one of the key sources of information for high school students."

But something else may also be at work. The average cost of tuition and housing at a private university in the United States has gone up 40% in the last five years. At NYU - where Miranda Spradlin goes to school - it costs more than $43,000 a year to get a Bachelor's degree. "My parents are paying for college," she says with conviction, "And I think it's unfair to them for me to be somewhere that I don't want to be, and they're spending all this money - you know, that's just dumb."

In this sense, a college education may have become just another commodity for America's consumer-savvy young adults - who are not willing to pay good money for a jacket. a pair of shoes. or an education that does not suit them.

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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18 May, 2006

A LETTER FROM A CANADIAN TEACHER -- ABOUT PHONICS:

In my own kindergarten year, I would occupy myself during those long long sermons by reading the hymnary. I remember being excited when I figured out the "igh" combo. Later in school, I was taught with the Dick and Jane sight word series. I was often partnered with kids who couldn't read very well, if at all.

By the time I hit teachers college I had a few firm beliefs. The way you were taught to read in school is not necessarily the way you learned. I was an early-bird reader because I picked up phonics quickly (and on my own.) Enjoying reading is not a building block for learning to read because non-readers in my classes loved being read to by the teacher, enjoyed looking at books and still didn't catch on. The poor readers I was paired with guessed at the first letter or searched the pictures for clues. I was lucky because I just got it.

My first Faculty of Education course on reading was selling whole language. I could make neither hide nor hair of it all, and it seemed to lack commonsense. Trying to understand where all this came from, I learned that whole language travelled through the International Reading Asociation. In North America, the big poobah was Ken Goodman. (Smith came a little later) Many faculty members belonged to the IRA and carried WL back to their home turf. Many had never taught children to read, or had not taught long enough to grasp the tough spots. They became gurus themselves and flogged their WL ideas on the innocent, and made lots of money writing new WL reading series and speaking at teachers' professional development events. They were death on phonics. Period. Reputations and egos were now strongly in the picture. Primary teachers, who are characteristically caregivers and gentle folk, got confused by the edugabble and meekly followed the NEW WAY. After all, who wanted to be accused of teaching "half" language" or of being "teacher focused". ("Balanced literacy" today is another one of those terms that suggests anything else would be "unbalanced".) Things got ugly. Phonics holdouts were vilified publicly when they raised questions. The word "dinosaur" became the most popular insult. (What other profession treats its veterans like this.) Fear entered the scene. Older teachers retreated quietly into their classrooms and waited to retire.

Publishers liked the new WL readers. They could market a entirely new sets of readers and WL sells lots of books. Quickly, both phonics and sight word readers were removed from print and only WL were published . As teachers can only select from Mnistry-approved texts, the choice had disappeared. When I plagued the various Ministry bureaucrats as to why there was no phonics-based reading program on the list, I was told repeatedly "that's all the publishers send us". I didn't speak to a single bureaucrat over that 15 year span who knew the differences between the texts of the three methodogies or who had ever taught children to read. So now publishers were determining the method for teaching children to read.

The WL gurus (letters after their names gave them a lot of clout) grabbed the ears of the Ministers. Education Ministers didn't bother to investigate or question. They were far far too busy and it all sounded pretty rosy. Politicians weren't really interested at all. Most letters I got back were "thanks for your interest."

In time, the phonics-based readers and sight-word readers hit the dumpsters or were shipped off to third world countries. The preamble in the teacher's guides to my phonics readers were filled with creative ideas (art,drama, poetry etc) and teachers were encouraged to fill their classrooms with books. The evidence is no longer there to show younger teachers that phonics reading programs were not just about drills, workbooks and booklets focussing on one phonics skill at a time, but were full-fledged reading programs with all the good stuff now thought to be exclusive to WL.

It was the growing number of children identified as "learning disabled" and complaints from the high school teachers that they were getting too many poor readers and non readers that finally caught the attention of the politicians. (Parents and grassroots organizations got very little attention.) Once again, they listened to the WL gurus, still holding the reins at the faculties of ed. By now, the gurus were getting nervous with the increase in research pointing to phonics. Knowing that sticking to the ideas they'd been teaching for years might cause others to question their credibility, they attempted to slime their way back to some middle ground calling it "balanced literacy": "Of course we always meant teachers should use phonics ". Meanwhile their old articles and dissertations say the complete opposite. Politicians bought it, because, once again they simply had absolutely no time to do their homework and get the terms straight.

Now, the public doesn't know who to believe. Smith and Goodman blew their confidence in research. Blind acceptance by teachers of WL made this group suspect. Parents whose kids learn to read early took up the WL banner in drives and forgot about the unfortunates. And then there are the faculty members. Who can trust a bunch who have come up with ideas like open-concept, multi-age grouping, multi-generational grouping, discovery math, whole language,and who just recently were flogging Gardners Theory of Multiple intelligences as a cure-all. (Like, duh, people are good at different things).

So the reading wars continue here. (It really was and is a phonics massacre.) The only ray of hope seems to be in the UK. They are prepared to say on public TV: "We know whole language was very bad for children".



THE DISTORTION OF HISTORY TEACHING

In 1950, a U.S. Senate committee released a report on the "employment of homosexuals and other sex perverts" in the federal government. The report warned that gays "lack the emotional stability of normal persons," so they could be easily blackmailed by communist spies. Newspapers claimed that 10,000 gays had infiltrated federal agencies, posing what Senator Joseph McCarthy called a "homosexual menace" to national security.

So if the Legislature passes a bill requiring instruction about gays in history, will students hear about this sordid chapter of our past? I doubt it. That's because the bill's supporters - like so many of us - regard history as therapy. They want the gay kids to feel good.

Listen to the bill's author, Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, one of the Legislature's six openly gay lawmakers: "Teaching materials mostly contain negative or adverse views of us, and that's when they mention us at all." By requiring schools to teach about the "role and contributions" of homosexuals, Kuehl argues, her bill would help gay kids overcome the stigmas that surround them.

Maybe so. But it would also distort the past, exaggerating the exploits of heroic gays and neglecting the continued discrimination against them. Most of all, this approach would allow all of us - straights as well as gays - to evade the complex and painful history that we share.

It has happened before. In the 1920s, when anti-immigrant sentiment was at its zenith, a wide range of ethnic groups fought to insert their own heroes into America's grand national narrative. Polish-Americans demanded that textbooks include Thaddeus Kosciusko, the Polish nobleman who aided our Revolution; Jewish-Americans pressed for Haym Solomon, a merchant who helped finance it; and blacks celebrated Crispus Attucks, the first American to die in it.

Oh, yes, and German-Americans wanted textbooks to include Molly Pitcher. Why? You guessed it: She was German. Her birth name, some said, was Maria Ludwig; and eventually, thanks to German pressure, the textbooks said so as well.

Germans also claimed Abraham Lincoln as one of their own, providing an easy target for satirists in the press. "The German origin of Honest Abe clashes with the Italian theory [of] L'Inchiostro, meaning 'the ink,' " one newspaper teased. "The Chinese theory proves direct descent from the famous Lin family. Abraham Llyncollyn was Welsh beyond a doubt, and the origin of Abraham Linsky-Cohen needs no further explanation."

Worst of all, these ethnic groups helped block a more critical, complicated reading of the Revolution itself. During these same years, historians began to question the long-standing myth of freedom-loving Continentals against tyrannical Red coats. Roughly a third of Americans fought on the British side, we discovered, while many people in England supported the Revolutionary cause. Even more, the leaders of America's freedom struggle often practiced - and defended - the enslavement of African-Americans.

But very little of this complexity entered the textbooks, thanks to the combined efforts of our newly multicultural patriots. If we rejected the glorious tale of America's birth, ethnic activists said, we would diminish ethnic contributions to it. Each group "could have its heroes sung," as one editorialist observed, but no group could question the underlying melody that united them all.

Fast-forward to the 1960s and 1970s, when blacks and Hispanics inserted a whole new set of great men - and even a few great women - into our history texts. Crispus Attucks took a bit part, or disappeared altogether; leading roles went to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez.

Even as textbooks included these new activists, however, the books gave little sense of what the heroes were acting against: white racism. A real examination of racism would interfere with the optimistic themes that still permeated the texts, as reflected in their sunny titles: "Quest for Liberty," "Rise of the American Nation," and so on. Nor did the books discuss the less-than-heroic involvement of Africans in the slave trade, or of Hispanics in the genocide of Native Americans. After all, the purpose was to make the kids feel "positive" about themselves. And only "positive" information would do the trick.

So if the bill about gay history passes, we can expect another round of heroes - this time, of course, gay heroes - to enter the books. But that won't help us address the really tough questions about American history writ large. Why have gays suffered so much discrimination, during the McCarthy era and into the present? What does that say about our nation - about its conceptions of love, of family, and of "freedom" itself?

Nor can we expect any criticism of homosexuals: Once heroes enter the pantheon, they become as sacred as all of the other gods. So the texts might discuss how gays bravely fought AIDS during its early years, promoting education and safe sex. But we'll never hear the unlovely coda to this happy tale: In the era of protease inhibitors and the Internet, many gays have reverted to the destructive practices that spread the disease in the first place. It happens to be true, but it isn't nice. Forget about it.

So say it loud, and say it proud: Walt Whitman! James Baldwin! Harvey Milk! But please, don't say anything bad about these gay Americans - or about anyone, really. Remember, the first goal here is to feel good. The truth comes second.

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

***************************



17 May, 2006

BRITISH ACADEMIC ANTISEMITISM RESURFACES

An editorial in The Guardian this week noted that Britain's two major faculty unions are engaged in a protracted and bitter fight with the government over salaries. Faced with the need to keep unity strong and to win concessions from the government, the editorial explained that some union leaders thought they had found a perfect solution: Attacking Israeli academics.

One of the faculty unions - the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education - is getting ready to vote on a resolution that would call on members to consider staying away from Israeli colleges or professors unless they specifically oppose a series of policies opposed by the union. The proposal has reignited tensions over anti-Israel boycotts that became quite intense last year when the other major union in British academe started its own boycott and then called it off - amid widespread criticism from American faculty groups.

The latest boycott proposal - which will be voted on later this month and which calls Israel's policies ones of "apartheid" - differs from last year's in several ways. Last year's boycott was stated as general policy, but applied only to two Israeli universities: Bar-Ilan University and the University of Haifa. This year's resolution (#198C from this link) is at once more narrow and more broad. It calls only for individual faculty members to consider "their own responsibility" and to "consider the appropriateness of a boycott." But it appears to apply to all Israeli academics and institutions - and it exempts those Israeli academics who "publicly dissociate themselves" from the positions of the Israeli government.

That provision may seem like an acknowledgment of something pointed out by boycott critics last year and this year: Israeli academics as a group are among those in Israeli society most sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and among those most likely to question decisions of Israel's government. But the provision has also infuriated many academics in Britain and elsewhere because it effectively sets up a political litmus test for Israeli academics (if they take certain stands, they are OK to deal with), and the idea of subjecting academics to political tests offends standards of academic freedom in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere.

It is unclear whether the boycott proposal will pass - and there have been press projections both ways. Generally, the leadership of British academic unions is very supportive of Palestinians and to the left of the rank and file. For example, another resolution on which the faculty union will be voting seeks to condemn those who question Hamas with "hysterical reporting."

If the resolution does pass, the practical impact may be minimal. The two faculty unions in Britain merge this summer, and so the boycott would not apply. But many academics in Britain and elsewhere say that there is a larger impact from having professors there seen as obsessed with the Middle East when they are unable to achieve their goals at home. "People start to think of the unions as nothing by Israel-haters," said David Hirsh, a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmith College of the University of London. "At this moment, we're in quite a difficult dispute with management" over wages and some professors are saying "why do we want to listen to the union" when it is viewed as having misplaced priorities, said Hirsh, who is a member of the union at his institution. "This kind of boycott motion gets in the way of the core business of academic unions."

Hirsh is one of the leaders of Engage, a group of British academics opposed to the boycott. Hirsh said that, if the boycott is approved, "the world will think of British academic unions as anti-Semitic." He said he does not believe that to be true, but thinks that many of the most active members of the union "see America and Israel as the greatest evils in the world."

Leaders of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education declined to answer questions about the boycott proposal, saying that they did not have time to do so. One of the most prominent British academic supporters of the boycott is Sue Blackwell, who teaches English at the University of Birmingham. Blackwell maintains a Web site with text and links about why she backs a boycott, as well as links to Palestinian calls for a boycott of Israeli higher education.

The dispute in Britain last year crossed the pond to American academe and is already doing so again this year, as scholars take note of what is going on. Major scholarly associations and faculty unions in the United States all denounced the boycott last year. The American Association of University Professors drafted a statement condemning academic boycotts and organized an international conference about academic boycotts. But the conference was called off amid criticism that too many pro-boycott academics had been invited and after anti-Semitic materials were accidentally distributed to conference attendees.

Cary Nelson, who was recently elected as the AAUP's next president, said that he couldn't say for sure how the association would respond to a new boycott but that he had long been opposed to such boycotts and that AAUP policies strongly opposed them. "Dialogue is almost always preferred to the cessation of dialogue," he said.

Nelson also criticized the idea of any boycott that would ask professors to consider which Israeli professors were sufficiently distanced from their government to merit continued contact. "People have a whole range of complex positions," Nelson said, and shouldn't be considered as either supportive or critical of Israel. "People's positions don't fall into simple categories," he said.

The return of the boycott movement to British academe is taking place "at the worst possible time," Nelson said. He said that "on so many grounds," professors' groups worldwide are finding how much they have in common in terms of salaries, the growth of part-time positions, and academic freedom. He noted that he has received numerous resolutions and other gestures of support from international academic groups since he was arrested as part of a protest against New York University, which has stopped recognizing a union of teaching assistants. "This kind of international solidarity is very important," he said.

One sign of that solidarity: In the current British dispute over faculty salaries, one of the professors' associations that has sent a letter of support is the primary faculty group in Israel.

Source



Nutty Boston College professor resigns over bee in his bonnet

Good riddance! Below is his open letter to William P. Leahy, SJ, president of Boston College

I am writing to resign my post as an adjunct professor of English at Boston College. I am doing so -- after five years at BC, and with tremendous regret -- as a direct result of your decision to invite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be the commencement speaker at this year's graduation. Many members of the faculty and student body already have voiced their objection to the invitation, arguing that Rice's actions as secretary of state are inconsistent with the broader humanistic values of the university and the Catholic and Jesuit traditions from which those values derive. But I am not writing this letter simply because of an objection to the war against Iraq. My concern is more fundamental. Simply put, Rice is a liar.

She has lied to the American people knowingly, repeatedly, often extravagantly over the past five years, in an effort to justify a pathologically misguided foreign policy. The public record of her deceits is extensive. During the ramp-up to the Iraq war, she made 29 false or misleading public statements concerning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda, according to a congressional investigation by the House Committee on Government Reform. To cite one example: In an effort to build the case for war, then-National Security Adviser Rice repeatedly asserted that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapon, and specifically seeking uranium in Africa.

In July of 2003, after these claims were disproved, Rice said: ''Now if there were doubts about the underlying intelligence . . . those doubts were not communicated to the president, the vice president, or to me." Rice's own deputy, Stephen Hadley, later admitted that the CIA had sent her a memo eight months earlier warning against the use of this claim. In the three years since the war began, Rice has continued to misrepresent or simply ignore the truth about our deadly adventure in Iraq. Like the president whom she serves so faithfully, she refuses to recognize her errors or the tragic consequences of those errors to the young soldiers and civilians dying in Iraq. She is a diplomat whose central allegiance is not to the democratic cause of this nation, but absolute power.

This is the woman to whom you will be bestowing an honorary degree, along with the privilege of addressing the graduating class of 2006. It is this last notion I find most reprehensible: that Boston College would entrust to Rice the role of moral exemplar. To be clear: I am not questioning her intellectual gifts or academic accomplishments. Nor her potentially inspiring role as a powerful woman of color. But these are not the factors by which a commencement speaker should be judged. It is the content of one's character that matters here -- the reverence for truth and knowledge that Boston College purports to champion. Rice does not personify these values; she repudiates them. Whatever inspiring rhetoric she might present to the graduating class, her actions as a citizen and politician tell a different story.

Honestly, Father Leahy, what lessons do you expect her to impart to impressionable seniors? That hard work in the corporate sector might gain them a spot on the board of Chevron? That they, too, might someday have an oil tanker named after them? That it is acceptable to lie to the American people for political gain?

Given the widespread objection to inviting Rice, I would like to think you will rescind the offer. But that is clearly not going to happen. Like the administration in Washington, you appear too proud to admit to your mistake. Instead, you will mouth a bunch of platitudes, all of which boil down to: You don't want to lose face. In this sense, you leave me no choice. I cannot, in good conscience, exhort my students to pursue truth and knowledge, then collect a paycheck from an institution that displays such flagrant disregard for both.

I would like to apologize to my students and prospective students. I would also urge them to investigate the words and actions of Rice, and to exercise their own First Amendment rights at her speech.

Source



Middle East Wars on U.S. Campuses

The Muslim Student Union has a full slate of activities planned for this week on the theme of "Holocaust in the Holy Land." Among today's events are a rally around the idea of "Hamas: The People's Choice." And if you missed the point of the week's theme of equating Israel to Nazi Germany, there is a lecture/rally on Thursday called "Israel: the Fourth Reich."

Not surprisingly, many Jewish students at Irvine are angry. They are not calling for events to be banned, but have asked Irvine's leaders to condemn the language being used as offensive and as a way to hurt Jewish students, not to engage in debate about Israel's policies. Irvine officials are refusing to do so - saying that they can't get into picking which campus events to disagree with or pick sides between the vocal critics and supporters of Israel on the campus.

Irvine in many ways reflects the way debates about diversity and respecting different groups of students are no longer issues of black and white. A majority of undergraduates at Irvine are Asian American - and largely uninvolved in a series of Middle East wars that have taken place at Irvine for years. But campus leaders who have spent their careers focused on how to encourage black and white students to get along (and of course Latino students and at some institutions Native Americans or foreign students) are finding that they may have their biggest challenge with religious differences among groups of American students. (While there are some campuses where strong criticism of Israel comes from students from the Middle East, the students at Irvine and many campuses are American citizens.)

"All of our institutions are just so much more complex than they used to be, and the tensions are very different," said Robert M. O'Neil, who is leading the Ford Foundation's "Difficult Dialogues" program to encourage colleges to find ways to debate touchy issues in civil, open-minded ways. "And right now, tensions about the Middle East happen to be most acute."

Irvine has a history of tense Jewish-Muslim relations. Many other campuses are experiencing sharp debates over the Middle East and these debates frequently also focus on issues of free speech. At Pennsylvania State University last month, the president overturned a decision by the art school director, who had called off a student art exhibit that criticized Palestinian terrorist groups. Brandeis University is under fire, meanwhile, for pulling an art exhibit that shows the violence suffered of late by Palestinians.

The tensions are by no means limited to student activities and art exhibits. A scholarly paper that is highly critical of the Israel lobby set off a furor soon after it appeared on the Web site of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The paper - by professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago - has been called bigoted and inaccurate by some, and praised by others as on target.

Some academic defenders of the article - led by Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan - have started a petition to protest the "character assassination" of the authors of the paper and to call on Jewish leaders to respect academic freedom by not "smearing" such "eminent political scientists" by stating or implying that they are anti-Semitic. And critics of Cole's analysis of the Middle East are up in arms over his possible appointment to a professorship at Yale University.

The situation at Irvine is a good illustration of how relations can deteriorate, leaving campuses in messy situations. After years of back-and-forth complaints and accusations, the Zionist Organization of America filed a complaint in 2004 with the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, charging that Jewish students were being harassed and intimidated. The complaint - still under review by the department - cites incidents in which, the organization says, a Jewish student wearing an Israeli flag lapel pin was followed by group of Muslim students who made death threats, and another student wearing a T-shirt that identified him as Jewish had a rock thrown at him. The complaint also noted the frequent use of materials by Muslim students equating Israel with Nazi Germany.

Irvine officials said that they tried to investigate all the allegations, but that most were made well after the incidents are alleged to have taken place, and as a result they could not be verified. Muslim students have also complained about opposition that violates their rights. A year ago, students at Irvine built a wall to symbolize and protest the wall being built by Israel to separate itself from Palestinian territories. Shortly after the wall was set up at Irvine, it was burned to the ground. Police investigated the incident as arson, but never had leads on who set the fire.

Muslim students make no apologies for their use of Holocaust imagery in their programs designed to criticize Israel. Kareem Elsayed, a student who is a former president of the Muslim Student Union, said in an e-mail interview that "the pro-Zionist media has allowed for the monopolization of the term `holocaust'" to refer to what the Nazis did to the Jews. But he said that there have been many holocausts, and that the group looks to link Israel to the Nazis for specific reasons. "We are using this title to emphasize the fact that the apartheid state of Israel has moved from oppressed to oppressor," he said. "We refer to the apartheid state as the fourth reich to emphasize the fascist and oppressive policies, and genocidal tendencies, of the apartheid state." Those who criticize the use of language linking Israel to the Nazis "are using the issue of the name as a cloak to cover their true intentions of silencing anyone that would reveal the realities of the oppression of the indigenous Palestinian people."

Jeffrey T. Rips, executive director of the Hillel Foundation of Orange County, which includes Irvine, said that the hidden agenda had nothing to do with open debate about the Middle East. "These aren't lectures or the kinds of events you see on campuses. These are rallies to incite hate," he said. Rips said that Jewish students at Irvine have a range of reactions on how to respond to these events. Some think they are best ignored, others say that's not an option. Jewish groups plan to set up booths on campus, take out ads in the student newspaper, and hand out leaflets offering alternative views about the Middle East. But no attempt will be made to interfere with the events. "Jews here have no issue with questioning Israel's policies. "But this is about things that incite hate and that make people feel unsafe."

Rips said that there is much to be proud of in the Jewish community at Irvine, but that the university is losing prospective Jewish students because of a perception that the entire campus is anti-Semitic (which he doesn't think is true). "I hear from parents [of prospective students] all the time and that's what they hear," Rips said.

Sally Peterson, dean of students at Irvine, has worked at the university since 1974 and she said that she's seen a gradual shift away from students tensions based on race to the point today where issues of religion, international affairs, or ideology can set off a controversy - and are more likely to do so than issues of race.

Irvine has so many potentially controversial events that the student affairs staff has a Free Speech Advocacy Team, members of which attend all such meetings or lectures to make sure that university rules are followed and to witness what happens. If, after the fact, there is a dispute, the university doesn't want to rely on second-hand reports, Peterson said. "We want our eyes there."

As a public university, Irvine also opens most of its events to the public, and while Peterson said that is appropriate for a state institution, it complicates her job. At controversial events, she said, problems are more likely to be caused by non-students than students. Beyond dealing with controversy, Irvine also tries to promote discussion of issues like the Middle East that involve balanced panels and programs that are not focused on the question of declaring one side or the other to be" right." Some of these events have been quite successful, she said, drawing large audiences. In contrast, she said, events sponsored by partisans of the Palestinians or Israelis tend to draw people who agree with the program organizers.

Officials at Irvine have been criticized by many Jewish groups for not publicly criticizing the repeated use of Holocaust language and imagery to criticize Israel.

Rips, of Hillel, said that Jewish students accept the idea that "the university has to protect free speech and can't stop programs." But he said that the request he and others have made repeatedly of Irvine isn't that it stop programs. "The university has been consistent in protecting free speech, but the university has its own free speech. They can say that these events are going on but they condemn them."

Having events semester after semester where Israel is compared to Nazi Germany "gives the perception" that Irvine accepts such a view as legitimate, Rips said. "Silence sometimes makes a statement," he said.

Peterson said that there is no way Irvine can get in the business of commenting on individual programs or their titles. "If we were to comment on this particular speaker, we'd have groups saying `why aren't you commenting on that speaker?'" she said. "When you are a large university, there are lots of issues that people want us to say something about, and we're not there to do that."

Some academic leaders who think university leaders can condemn offensive speech think there is good reason to avoid the Middle East debate. O'Neil, who is running the Difficult Dialogues program, is also director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression and is a former university president (University of Virginia and University of Wisconsin System). O'Neil is a strong believer that speech must never be limited and that campuses must be open to a full range of ideas - however infuriating or even hurtful they may be to some people.

O'Neil said, however, that colleges need to look at offensive events not just as events, but as opportunities to learn. This is a conviction O'Neil said he has had since he worked as a truck driver at a Jewish summer camp in New Hampshire in 1957. One morning he arrived to start his day, and he found the remains of a burning cross. The camp director wanted the ashes cleaned up right away and O'Neil said that's what he did, feeling that it would have been presumptuous for him, as one of the few non-Jews working there, to tell the director what to do.

But clearly a professor-in-making even as a truck driver, O'Neil said that the course of action bothered him. "There was a possible lesson here - you could really see something," he said, about the nature of bigotry, and he wishes that the camp participants had all talked about it. So when bigoted speakers come to campuses, O'Neil said, you start by defending their right to speak, but you can go beyond that - or at least you do when you can. "In general I tend to be a strong defender of the power of university presidents and chancellors to condemn," he said. "But in the particular Middle East context, the risk is so high that what may appear to be a neutral, principled condemnation may appear to partisans on both sides to be taking sides in an inappropriate way," he said. As a result, O'Neil said, a president who might not hesitate to speak out about a racially charged event "might feel constrained."

O'Neil recalled that in 2002, when the late James O. Freedman, former president of Dartmouth College, prepared an open letter opposing the intimidation of Jewish college students, several hundreds college presidents signed. But hundreds of others declined to sign the statement, which was published in The New York Times, because it didn't also comment about bias problems faced by Muslim and Arab students. "There is unique volatility on this particular issue," he said.

Since this issue shows no sign of going away, O'Neil said that he hopes Ford's Difficult Dialogues project - through which colleges were selected in December to receive $100,000 grants to promote civil, open discussion on tough topics - has a positive impact. Many of the first 27 grants focused on issues of religion, and a number related specifically to the Middle East. Macalester College, for example, is receiving a grant to promote work on a dig in Israel and planning "peace summits" on the Middle East, to bring together various thinkers at the college's Minnesota campus.

Caryn McTighe Musil, who leads the Office of Diversity, Equity and Global Initiatives at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, said that promoting tough conversations is essential - and vexing - for colleges. Take the issue of comparing Israel with Nazi Germany. "I don't think one says to a group that you may never use a word in a certain way because it would offend me," Musil said.

The job of colleges is to explain why using "holocaust" as Irvine's Muslim groups does causes offense - and also explaining why they are doing so. "I think colleges should talk about why comparing Israel to the Nazis is not defensible," Musil said. "But I also think you have to explain why a Palestian might see parallels," she said. There is not genocide, but there are identification passes, borders changing, and more. "Higher education has to provide a space for this discussion." But college leaders shouldn't expect it to be easy, she said. "There are issues on which there are irreconcilable differences and that really tests the limits of what a campus community is about."

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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16 May, 2006

ANOTHER ARROGANT AND IGNORANT SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION

A Seminole County principal said a boy was drunk at a school dance, but his parents, a doctor, and a police officer all said he wasn't. However, until Thursday, he was still at home serving a suspension. The eighth grade student at Lawton Chiles Middle School in Seminole County got violently ill at the dance last Friday. On Monday, his principal suspended him because he suspected the 14-year-old was drunk. The school district would not talk about the specifics of the case, but said that a principal only has to have reasonable suspicion to suspend a student.

The boy's mom said that's not enough for her, especially when her son's doctor said otherwise. "I just want to get back to school so I can finish my work so I can pass," 14-year-old Joey Muller said. He has spent two and a half days working at his kitchen table instead of Lawton Chiles Middle School. His mom said he's learning the wrong lesson about fairness. "I just feel you shouldn't point a finger without actual evidence," said Michelle Hernandez, the boy's mother.

It all started Friday night at the eighth grade dance. Joey was driven there by a friend's parents and he felt fine at first. "I went inside, was talking with friends, went and got some punch and food," he said. But half an hour later while dancing, Joey felt violently ill. Friends had to help him to the bathroom. "My stomach was just turning the whole time and I felt like I had to throw up," he said.

School administrators and the resource officer called his mom to pick him up. He went to the doctor that night, but Monday morning the school principal called him in and suspended him for being drunk. Off camera, the resource officer said Joey did have trouble balancing and seemed like he could be intoxicated, but he did not see or smell any alcohol. The doctor wrote a note saying there was no evidence to justify the suspension from school.

"I just don't feel it's fair to suspend a child without actual evidence that they know for sure that's why he was sick," Hernandez said. The school district said, under state and federal policies, evidence isn't necessarily needed. "It's the sole prerogative of the principal and that's based on the professional training and educational experience that they make wise decisions," said Regina Klaers, Seminole County School District.

But the principal did shorten the suspension from ten days to five when Joey's mom complained he'd miss his final exams. Then, after Channel 9 started asking questions, suddenly the suspension was lifted. His mom brought him right to school on Thursday. There were rumors going around that the punch may have been spiked with alcohol or Visine. The officer said he found no evidence of that. About ten other children later told the officer they felt ill after the dance, but none of them were vomiting or sent home. The district wouldn't say why Joey's suspension was suddenly dropped Thursday. His mom's just glad he's back at school.

Source



IDEOLOGY VERSUS WHAT WORKS

What nobody seems to be mentioning is that "whole language" seems to work for the children of more affluent families because the parents take their kids aside at some stage and explain phonics to them. Kids with less involved parents are not given those clues and so flounder. A particular interest of the excerpt below is that it does try to explain what motivates the "whole language" religion

The reading wars, of course, aren't only about reading. Yes, reading skills matter tremendously to New York parents, whether they aim to get their children into Harvard or just to their age-appropriate reading level. But the Reading Wars are also about race and class. Everyone stands to gain from phonics, advocates say, but no one figures to benefit more than children from low-income families who-unlike, say, the kids at elite private schools, most of which use a whole-language approach-often can't get extra tutoring in the basics. Parents of children with learning disabilities say their children benefit similarly from phonics.

There's also a political component to the Reading Wars. To phonics advocates, whole language is rooted in the worst liberal traditions: It's a freewheeling approach that lacks rigor and standards and could even, some say, be the first step down the slippery slope to abominations like Ebonics. And the entire New York City education culture, they say, is permeated by such soft thinking. Whole-language proponents, in turn, say phonics perpetuates authoritarian, patronizing "drill and kill" strategies that insult the art of teaching and turn kids into fifties-style robots, putting them off learning for life.

Where George W. Bush and many red states are phonics supporters, New York is dyed-in-the-wool whole-language country. Influential programs at Columbia and Bank Street College developed variations of the approach before it even had a name. Balanced Literacy, or at least the way it's practiced in New York, is largely the brainchild of Lucy Calkins, founder of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, who is looked upon nationally as a godmother of whole-language learning.

The issue in New York is that at the exact moment that Bloomberg and Klein made Balanced Literacy the cornerstone of the curriculum here, phonics scored several major victories in the Reading Wars. A National Institutes of Health-created commission of Ph.D.'s came down squarely on the side of phonics in a 2000 report, influencing the Bush administration to crack down-some say improperly, perhaps even scandalously-on non-phonics programs. And where hard science once had little to say about how various reading methods affected kids, a series of MRI studies done at Yale starting in the late nineties appeared to show that as many as one in every four children, regardless of class, race, or other demographic factors, needs direct instruction in basic skills before he can read. When kids with learning difficulties read with phonics, their brains light up on MRI scans like a Christmas tree. The conclusion, phonics advocates say, is clear: Kids need technical instruction in the basics before being immersed in the world of literature.

That argument doesn't persuade Klein. He's cultivating mindful, curious readers, he's said, not vanilla word-decoders. "I'm quite convinced the curriculum we're using, with inquiry-based learning, will serve our students throughout the city well over time," he says. In particular, Klein likes that Balanced Literacy looks a lot like the reading approaches in successful school districts on the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side and in most of the city's elite private schools. In a system where so many great schools coexist with so many horrible ones, Klein is convinced that the solution is not to adopt the practices of the worst schools but to export the best practices of the successful ones and end the educational apartheid.

To phonics advocates, this is like turning your back on the invention of the wheel or the secret of fire. Despite the modest improvements in city reading scores, they say, the reading crisis isn't going away here: The city's high-school-graduation rate is still only 54 percent. Phonics, supporters say, could be the closest thing New York gets to a vaccine that can stop kids' reading difficulties before they start. Why, they demand to know, isn't New York using it?

It's safe to say that when Michael Bloomberg came to City Hall in 2002, one of the last things on his mind was the best way to teach kids how to read. Taking over the public schools, as he improbably persuaded the state to let him do in his first six months in office, was more about management changes to him than pedagogy. In the summer of 2002, he hired Klein, a fellow outsider, as his chancellor, and Klein recruited a career superintendent named Diana Lam as his deputy for instruction. It was Lam who brought in Balanced Literacy. Neither Klein nor Bloomberg knew much about the program at the time, except that Lam had used it in cities where test scores went up, like San Antonio, Texas, and Providence, Rhode Island. For a mayor who wanted his first term judged on what he did with the schools, this was a clear plus. In what would be one of their only moments of agreement, Randi Weingarten, the teachers-union chief, agreed at first with Klein's plan and even went out of her way to praise his bravery. "If the system isn't working and someone has an idea that could theoretically make things much better," she said in an interview, "why not try it?"

It didn't take long-just days, actually-for the phonics camp to open fire. When Lam and Klein unveiled their reading program in January 2003-Balanced Literacy, with a small supplemental program called Month by Month Phonics-seven reading researchers unconnected to the public schools wrote an open letter to the mayor and Klein, blasting Month by Month Phonics as a phonics program in name only. They called Month by Month "woefully inadequate," lacking "a research base" and "the ingredients of a systematic phonics program" and putting "beginning readers at risk of failure in learning to read." Others were still less kind: Sol Stern of the conservative Manhattan Institute and the education historian Diane Ravitch berated Balanced Literacy's whole-language roots. "Many of the programs and methods now being crammed down the teachers' throats have no record of success," wrote Stern, "and are particularly ill suited for disadvantaged minority children. In fact, a cabal of progressive educators chose them for ideological reasons, in total disregard of what the scientific evidence says about the most effective teaching methods-particularly in the critically important area of early reading."

Parents in the more politically connected parts of town didn't need to be won over by Balanced Literacy, since more than 200 elementary schools already used it. But the ones who sent their kids to the other public schools were bewildered by a reading program that didn't have a textbook. "I held four days of hearings on reading," recalls Eva Moskowitz, then the City Council's Education Committee chair. In the hearings, she says, the city was hammered for what some called its "loosey-goosey" approach to teaching basic skills.

Phonics could be the closest thing New York gets to a vaccine that can stop kids' reading difficulties before they start. Why, advocates demand to know, isn't New York using it?

Parents' outrage was matched by that of teachers who had been asked to switch curricula in real time with just a few days of training and little day-to-day support. Instead, principals were handing them daily directives from the Tweed Courthouse to reconfigure their classrooms and lesson plans. The workload became staggering, and many teachers resisted, blasting Lam in the press for punishing teachers who didn't rearrange their rows of desks into cozy clusters or lay "reading rugs" in the corners. To some, Balanced Literacy became a buzzword for a new, bizarre form of tyranny. What was supposed to have been a progressive, flexible technique to unleash a child's inner reader had become something so claustrophobically scripted that critics predicted Klein would drive the most talented teachers out of the system.

The curriculum, in fact, became a lightning rod for the mayor's entire overhaul of the schools. Every criticism of the reforms, it seemed, circled back to the reading program. When the mayor tangled with the teachers union over contract negotiations, Weingarten abandoned her early enthusiasm for Balanced Literacy and demanded it be abolished. When the mayor ended social promotion for third-graders in 2004, Ravitch insisted that Klein ditch the scientifically flimsy curriculum. And when Lam abruptly resigned from her job in disgrace-exposed for getting her husband a job in the school system and trying to cover it up-it surprised no one when Sol Stern and others argued that it was time to scrap the "unproven" curriculum Lam brought in.

Cognition experts like Harvard's Steven Pinker have argued for some time that while learning to talk is an organic process you can generally learn on your own, like walking, reading is more like riding a bike or driving a car. Someone has to take you through the initial steps and get you over the unfamiliarity of the experience; then you have to spend time on your own perfecting the skills until it becomes second nature. The question at the heart of the Reading Wars is how much direct instruction do children really need.

The debate has raged, back and forth, across the country-phonics was out in California, then in again, and battled over in Texas and elsewhere-until finally, in the mid-nineties, NIH launched a project intended to settle the matter. In 1997, Congress asked NIH to create the National Reading Panel (a commission of academics) to consider the question. The panel took three years to review and scrutinize 1,000 recent academic studies of phonics-related reading programs, eliminating all but the most carefully constructed. In 2000, the panel released its "meta-analysis" and concluded that in order to learn to read, all children must master five separate skills: phonemic awareness (separating words into distinct sounds, like the c, a, and t in cat), phonics (learning the sounds letters and letter combinations make), fluency (the ability to read with speed and accuracy), vocabulary (learning new words), and comprehension (understanding what you're reading). These basic skills were nothing new to most people who taught elementary-school English. What the NRP added to the debate was the notion that direct instruction of these skills was the only proven method for teaching reading.

As a direct result of the NRP, those directing federal educational policy held up phonics as a sort of magic bullet, even though the data, critics say, fell well short of supporting such a blanket conclusion. For example, while the full NRP report acknowledged that "phonics instruction failed to exert a significant impact on the reading performance of low-achieving readers in second through sixth grade" and "there were insufficient data to draw conclusions about the effects of phonics instruction with normally developing readers above first grade," the more widely distributed NRP summary report endorsed phonics without qualification. "Phonics instruction," it read, "produces significant benefits for students in K through sixth grade and for students having difficulty learning to read."....

In the years after the NRP report, phonics racked up more scientific support. In the Yale MRI studies, researcher Sally Shaywitz, a member of the NRP, demonstrated that kids learning the NRP way developed their occipital-temporal parts of the brain (the part responsible for reading) more dramatically than the other children did. (Shaywitz was one of three members of the NRP to co-sign the open letter to the mayor in 2003 lambasting Month by Month Phonics.) "Learning to read used to be catch-as-catch-can, but now it is real science," she says. "There is evidence now that if you use evidence-based teaching methods, you can really rewire the brain." Faced with these results, Shaywitz says, it's foolish to hang on to whole language. "If you had a program that you know works, and something else you just feel pretty good about, would you volunteer your child for the one you weren't sure worked?"....

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

***************************



15 May, 2006

Shame! Eighth Grade In Mexico Sounds as good as a Low-Ranked American University

From Fred Reed

Just now the furor over illegal immigration from Mexico is most wonderfullt a'boil, with much billingsgate and vituperation emanating from practically everywhere. Well and good. People should all afflict each other as vigorously as they can. I mean, why were we put on earth if not to be disagreeable?

Howsomever, I've received email telling me how poorly educated the Mexicans are. Hmmm. Maybe. You can make a case for it. I know that immigrant kids do terribly in school in the US, which augurs ill indeed. Most kids don't read here either. Still, I found myself wondering just how bad the Mexican schools really are.

My stepdaughter, Natalia, aged fourteen and in the eighth grade, attends a public school in downtown Guadalajara, La Escuela Estatal Secundaria Manuel M. Dieguez Numero 7 para Senoritas. I am not an authority on Mexican education and cannot say whether hers is typical of urban Mexican schools. Nor do I know enough about American middle schools in general to make comparisons. The following are scans of pages from her texts of mathematics and biology accompanied by a few observations. I found them interesting. The translations are mine. Please excuse the sloppy scans and slow loads.

From Mathematicas 2 (ISBN 970-642-210-2)

“Consider two urns, one with 13 balls numbered from 1 to 13, and the other with 4 balls marked with the following figures: a red triangle, a red square, a black circle, or a black rhombus. How many combinations can be obtained by drawing one ball from each urn?

The possibilities can be represented by ordered pairs. For example, if from the first urn is drawn the ball marked with 2, and from the second, the ball with the square, the result is expressed thus: (2, square).The 52 pairs listed in the column to the left represent all possibilities…The probability of drawing an even number from the first urn is P(even) = 6/13 and the probability of drawing a red shape from the second urn is P(red) = 2/4 = ½. If the two probabilities are multiplied, the following is the result:

P(even) P(red) = (6/13)(1/2) = 6/26”

Not Nobel math, but not too bad, I thought.

From Biologia 2, her biology text:

 

"An important property of phospholipid bilayers is that they behave as liquid crystals; the carbohydrates and proteins can turn, and move laterally...." Note internal hydrophobic tails and external hydrophilic heads. This is not too shabby.

In the next pages is an account of both aerobic and anaerobic respiration, the 36 molecules of adenosine triphosphate resulting from aerobic glycolysis, and so on.

Early in Biologia 2 is a treatment of the role of RNA, including the substitution of uracil for thymine, transcription as distinct from translation, and the functions of messenger, transfer, and ribosomal RNA. Polypeptides are described and peptide bonds mentioned, but not with the NH3-COOH dehydration synthesis. A typical vocab list: “Endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, endocytosis, ribosomes, cellular membrane.”

Then, “The synthesis proceeds only in the 5’-3’ sense, which means that the chain that is being copied is read...."

Also, (above) "DNA is formed by the union of five atoms: carbon (C), oxygen (O), hydrogen (H), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P). The DNA molecule can be decomposed into the monomers that form it. There are called nucleotides, each of which contains three parts: a sugar of five carbons, deoxyribose; the phosphate; and a nitrogenous base, either adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), or thymine (T). Two of these bases, adenine and guanine, are structures of two rings and are called purines, while the other two, thymine and cytosine, have only one ring and are called pyrimidines.”

All of this has a notable resemblance to real if basic molecular biology. I'm not sure that it is anything to be embarrassed about.

Biologia 2 has a 31-page section on human reproduction that is purely scientific as distinct from socially propagandistic. There is no indoctrination about homosexual rights or oppression of the transgendered. The coverage is detailed and complete, with cutaway drawings of the genitalia, detailed discussion of meiosis as compared with mitosis, primary meiotic division, secondary meiotic division with prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase nicely laid out; chromatin, centromeres, and centrioles explained, and so on at length. There is an explanation of the menstrual cycle complete with a graph of variations of body temperature; description of embryonic growth; a table of tissues and organs arising from endoderm, ectoderm, and mesoderm; and explanations of various venereal diseases and how to avoid them. The treatment is neither prurient nor prissy. It is just biological : Here is how the lungs work, here is how the heart works, here is how the reproductive organs work.

Consequences however are presented straightforwardly. For example, there is a photograph of a primary syphilitic sore, which doubtless persuades students that they don’t want any and, in the section of what we would call “substance abuse,” a photo of a badly cirrhotic liver, sectioned. There are no pretty pictures for the sake of having pretty picture. All graphics have a direct bearing on the material being studied.

It may be that all of this is now standard in the eighth-grade in the United States. For all I know, American texts may be more advanced. I can’t make comparisons with things I don’t know about. But these do not seem to me to be bad books. Certainly when I was an eight-grader we didn’t get much of this; when I went on a physiology kick, I had to find a university text.

Still, I have my doubts as to whether the big-city schools in America are greatly ahead of Guadalajara. Detroit recently had, and probably still has, a forty-seven per cent rate of functional illiteracy. Guadalajara doesn’t. If someone were inspired to compare the foregoing material with what students, if so they can be called, are learning in downtown schools in, say, Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York, I would be interested to see the results.

It will be said, correctly, that the cities of America are populated by extensive underclasses of blacks and Hispanics. True enough. However, they are still American kids (now or soon to be) who are learning nothing. Natalia would eat them alive. I have some familiarity with the suburban, mostly white schools of Arlington County, Virginia, just outside of Washington, because my daughters went to them. At least one of these schools served populations living in very pricey neighborhoods.

The girls came home with misspelled handouts from affirmative-action science teachers, and they learned about Harriet Tubman and oppression. Of the sciences they learned very little. I knew bright kids who had trouble with the multiplication tables. Yes, there are schools and schools, some better than others, and advanced-placement and such. I do not suggest that Mexico has a great school system, because it doesn’t. Yet Natalia, in her particular school, is better off than she would be in Washington, heaven knows, or the Virginia suburbs. Ain’t that something?



CALIFORNIAN EDUCATION SLIPS FURTHER DOWNHILL

More than 47,000 California high school seniors will be able to graduate next month after a state judge blocked a law requiring students to pass an exit exam. Judge Robert Freedman in Oakland today ruled the California High School Exit Examination, required for the first time this year, is unfair because some teachers aren't certified in the subjects tested, according to Arturo Gonzalez, a lawyer for the students.

Freedman's decision upholds an injunction blocking the state department of education from denying a diploma to any high school seniors who passed all required courses. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said lawyers for the schools have asked the court to stay the injunction as they prepare an appeal to Freedman's decision. The ruling is ``bad news for employers who want meaning restored to our high school diplomas,'' O'Connell said in a conference call with reporters. ``We do no favors to unprepared students by handing them a diploma without the skills needed to back them up.''

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said he supports O'Connell's decision to appeal the ruling, adding in a statement that the exit exam is the ``best resource'' for ensuring students are learning the ``skills they need to begin successful lives.''

Gonzalez cautioned students that they need to pass their classes in order to graduate. Freedman's decision gives ``47,000 students an opportunity to walk the stage with their classmates and to receive their high school diplomas,'' he said in a statement.

Source



Kick politics out of education: It is only when Britain's leaders are in trouble that they start marching into schools

'Since I became leader of the Labour Party, I have emphasised that education will be a priority for me in government.... Our economic success and our social cohesion depend on it. An age of achievement is within our grasp - but it depends on an ethic of education.' (Twentieth-anniversary Ruskin College lecture given by UK prime minister Tony Blair on 16 December 1996.)

Nothing better illustrates modern politicians' retreat from politics than the images of US president George W Bush sitting in a primary school classroom, absorbed in the children's story My Pet Goat, on 11 September 2001, after he was informed that the country was under terrorist attack. For a few minutes he looked completely lost, as if he had suddenly been reminded that there was a big bad world outside.

Many have commented on Bush's lack of leadership on that occasion, but the problem is not so much that he was not ready when the terrorists struck. The real problem is that modern heads of government seem to be spending more and more of their time in classrooms. Governments are devoting time and energy to determining the minute details of children's educational experience.

There would be nothing wrong with improving standards in education if this had not replaced the more important task of improving society through politics. Annual school examination results, together with other public sector performance measures, have all but replaced ideology and political principles as a measure of government performance.

Public examinations' main aim now is not so much to measure student learning but rather to measure teachers, schools and government performance. This became obvious during the A-level scandal of summer 2002 that led to education secretary Estelle Morris' resignation. Government agencies and examination boards were clearly more worried about the political repercussions of a sudden rise in A-level marks, with the inevitable accusation of grade inflation, than they were in assessing the actual performance of students in England and Wales.

It is now common for government ministers to celebrate examination results as if they themselves, and not the students, had passed the exams. The Guardian website, for instance, informs us that 'Ministers celebrated hitting an education target a year earlier today'. The target the government had set for itself was 69.8 per cent of 19-year-olds obtaining at least five good GCSEs. The government had originally set the target at 70 per cent by 2006, but hit it a year earlier after it had revised it downwards by 0.2 percentage points, following its realisation that the 2004 results had been overestimated.

It is only 30 years ago but it seems like a different geological age when chief inspector of schools Sheila Browne could tell Labour prime minister James Callaghan: 'What are you doing interfering in education? This is none of your business.'

Callaghan's famous speech at Ruskin College, Oxford, on 18 October 1976, is widely credited with having started government meddling in education. Before Callaghan, 'the principle remained that government did not interfere in how, what or how well schools taught - it was enough to ensure that education was provided'. As Callaghan explained 20 years later: 'It was not normal for prime ministers to interfere openly in such questions. Obviously I must have ulterior motives.'

Obviously he did. Callaghan argued that education should be at the centre of political discussion: 'Everyone is allowed to put his oar in on how to overcome our economic problems.. Very important too...but not as important in the long run as preparing future generations for life.' For Callaghan, education was the main means to economic and social prosperity: 'the endowment of our children is the most precious of the natural resources of this community. So I do not hesitate to discuss how these endowments should be nurtured.'

It is not surprising that Callaghan, with his dire economic record, should have wanted to deflect public attention away from economics and on to education as a means of planning the country's future. What is extraordinary is that 20 years later New Labour should have embraced these same principles, elaborated in a moment of great crisis by a leader who has since told the press that he expected to be considered 'the worst prime minister since Sir Robert Walpole [1721-1742]'.

Today Blair proudly proclaims from the Downing Street website that 'education is now the centre of economic policymaking for the future'. He explains that education is 'central to everything we stand for - making our nation strong and competitive, enlarging opportunity, building successful families and responsible citizens, and eliminating social exclusion'.

Free universal education is certainly the mark of a civilised society, so perhaps we should welcome the fact that the government devotes so much interest, time and effort to it. Unfortunately, the use of education for political ends corrupts both education and politics. It corrupts education by twisting its purpose - from the intellectual emancipation of the child through the transmission of knowledge, to the attempt to create responsible citizens and workers, with the correct skills, attitudes and opinions. By using knowledge in an instrumental way, it devalues its importance.

Schools now consider knowledge as virtually useless unless it leads to an official outcome or objective, both within each lesson and at the end of the educational process, usually in the form of a state qualification, a job skill, or an awareness of some pet government issue such as teenage pregnancy or obesity.

Even universities are finding it increasingly difficult to justify knowledge as an end in itself. Higher education minister Bill Rammell's response in February 2006 to the news that university applications are down on subjects such as history, philosophy and classics, is typical. 'If students are making a calculation about which degree is going to get them the best job and the best opportunity in life, I see that as being no bad thing', he told the Press Association. One would have thought that it was the job of the minister for higher education at the very least to pretend to take an interest in the value of philosophical, historical and classical knowledge.

Rammell's philistine attitude, however, is not too surprising if one considers that his critics in the universities were also unable to defend the intrinsic value of their disciplines. 'I think the minister is just out of date', said Professor Douglas Cairns, who is honorary secretary of the Classical Association and head of history and classics at Edinburgh University. 'Like every other arts subject, we provide the full range of transferable skills that have been expected of us for the last 10 to 15 years. A degree in any humanities subject is an excellent training for the world of work.'

Jonathan Wolff, philosophy professor at University College London and honorary secretary of the British Philosophical Association, stated: 'It is a bad mistake to think that subjects like philosophy, history and classics do not prepare students for the workplace. In the modern world, detailed factual information goes out of date so quickly that employees need the skills to conduct research, and the flexibility of mind and imagination to see problems and possible solutions from many points of views. This is what philosophy and similar subjects provide so well.' And talking of skills, whoever said that university professors are not good salesmen?

The use of education for political ends also corrupts politics, by treating adult citizens as 'lifelong learners' in constant need of education. The call for education, education and education to be the first three priorities of a New Labour government represents a recognition of the limits of political debate to influence the economy and the direction of the country - and it therefore represents a change in the relationship between the government and its citizens. Where politics is based on argument and persuasion, education as a political tool is a form of behaviour modification.

Through political debate, citizens make important decisions about their country's future. The purpose of education is not to arrive at political decisions, but only to make children think so they can arrive at the conclusion that the educator already has in mind. The uneducated citizen by definition cannot have a valid opinion.

As the political theorist Hannah Arendt has explained: 'Education can play no part in politics, because in politics we have to deal with those who are already educated. Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from political activity.... The word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretence of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force.'

It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that Callaghan at the start of his speech addressed the trade unionists in the audience as incompetent adults in need of education: 'The work of a trade union official becomes ever more onerous, because he has to master continuing new legislation on health and safety at work, employment protection and industrial change. This lays obligations on trade unionists which can only be met by a greatly expanded programme of education and understanding. Higher standards than ever before are required in the trade union field.'

Unfortunately, the frenzied political debate on education has little to do with improving children's access to knowledge. Rather, it is an expression of anti-politics. It is our society's disillusionment with politics and democracy that makes us look to the education system as the only hope for a better society and a better future for the individual.

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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14 May, 2006

HYSTERICAL GRADE-SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION VICTIMIZES A LITTLE KID

At least they didn't call in the SWAT team. Penn Hills School District officials, however, did react swiftly and harshly when Jokari Becker triggered a crisis of near-Columbine proportions by bringing a toy gun to school for a class project. First, they suspended the Dible Elementary School fifth-grader for three days. Then they decided that wasn't punishment enough. So they suspended him for an additional seven days. They decided that wasn't quite punishment enough, either. So on Tuesday, they expelled Jokari. He won't be allowed back in school until January -- at the earliest. At the rate the penalties keep increasing, Jokari soon might find himself strapped on a gurney while Superintendent Patricia Gennari administers a lethal injection.

Gennari did not return calls Thursday, but Melissa Becker, 32, Jokari's mother, was available. She remains dumbfounded over the disciplinary action. "This whole thing is absurd," she said. It's difficult to dispute her assertion. Few would confuse the fluorescent, oversized, green-and-orange plastic toy with a Glock. Jokari brought the gun to school for inclusion in a memory box he was making. He kept it in his book bag until it was time to work on the project.

Jokari never pointed the unloaded gun at a student or teacher. Even if it had been loaded, even if he had aimed it at a classmate, no one would have been in jeopardy. "It says 'paintball' on the gun, but it doesn't shoot paintball pellets," Melissa Becker said. "It shoots water soluble paint. It's a kid's toy." A kid's toy that wouldn't even have ruined anyone's clothes.

This might be mildly amusing if Melissa Becker wasn't a single mother trying to raise Jokari and his 12-year-old brother while completing her education at Point Park University. Her major: Criminal justice. While an appeal of the expulsion is being prepared, Melissa Becker wonders how she is going to juggle her family and occupational obligations. Her son is barred from school, and she is scheduled to begin training next week to become an Allegheny County 911 emergency dispatcher. "I don't know what I'm going to do yet, but of course I'm not going to leave my child home alone," she said.

Meanwhile, Penn Hills residents -- who are facing a significant 4.48-mill school tax increase -- will pay to have Jokari tutored because he apparently is too much of a menace to mingle with other students. The district student discipline code bars students from bringing to school weapons, replicas of weapons or any instrument capable of inflicting serious bodily injury. It's difficult to find any evidence of misconduct by Jokari. Unloaded squirt guns don't cause serious bodily injury.

The code also states, "No disciplinary action should exceed in degree the seriousness of the offense." District officials need to re-familiarize themselves with that portion of the code. They have violated their policies far more egregiously than the student they expelled.

Source



BRITISH EDUCATION GOES EVEN FURTHER DOWN THE DRAIN

The degrees standards watchdog has warned universities that emergency measures to award degrees amid an academic boycott threaten to devalue the qualifications. As up to 400,000 students prepare for their final exams next week, the Qualification Assurance Agency has expressed concern that contingency plans to beat the industrial action, could put academic standards "in peril". Thousands of lecturers have refused to set, mark or invigilate exams and coursework since starting industrial action in March. Several institutions are preparing to award degrees before students get their full results. Others have appealed to solicitors and doctorate students to help to cover marking.

The warning comes as universities, students and the Government unite to increase pressure on the lecturers to accept the latest offer - a 12.6 per cent rise over three years. Academics, led by the Association of University Teachers, its sister union, Natfhe, and EIS in Scotland, insist, however, that the offer falls far short of their demands and are refusing to ballot members.

The QAA warning comes after fears were raised that the integrity of degrees was at risk. Peter Williams, the QAA chief executive, admitted that universities faced difficult choices. He said that they had "contractual obligations to students, but cannot readily meet these if they are unable to assess students in the normal way". By refusing to award degrees, they could be in breach of contract, as well as jeopardising career prospects. "If, in these circumstances, an institution chooses to continue to assess students and award qualifications, we shall expect it to do so taking every measure available to it to ensure that its academic standards are not put in peril and the value of its awards is maintained," he said. In a letter seen by The Times, Mr Williams said that it was up to each university to decide on emergency measures and to ensure that it adhered to the code of practice. The QAA would examine arrangements if invited to do so by the funding council or the university.

Penalties for dropping academic standards could mean a reduction of funding grants. Several top universities, including Birmingham and Cambridge, are preparing to award degrees on the basis of exams and papers marked so far. Students may take outstanding exams later if they feel their classification would be improved. At Bristol, students will be awarded a temporary unclassified degree, getting marks later. Employers will receive references that will indicate the award expected.

The dispute has split academics, students and universities. Next week 35 student unions - representing more than 500,000 students - will have talks with AUT members to try to persuade them to enter into local pay deals, with a minimum threshold of 12.6 per cent over three years. Last week Aberdeen, St Andrews and Huddersfield universities awarded local rises to staff of 5 per cent from August 1. AUT members at St Andrews had voted to end the boycott, but were overruled by AUT Scotland.

Gaston Dolle, the leader of Bristol student union, is one of 35 student presidents to have broken with the National Union of Students to find a resolution. "Natfhe and the AUT are being too stubborn," he said. "I think if there are a few more incidents like those at Aberdeen and St Andrews, they will realise they're not backed by their members on the ground." Universities, however, fear that the dispute has gone on too long to avoid serious disruption to degree examinations. Finals at most institutions should begin next week.

More here

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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13 May, 2006

About time: Universities to dock pay of British professors who boycott exam duties

These underworked elitists show no concern for the students they are being paid to teach

University vice-chancellors are to cut the pay of lecturers who refuse to set, invigilate or mark students' exams and coursework. The move came as Alan Johnson, the new Education Secretary, called on academics to end their boycott, which threatens to disrupt the graduation of up to 300,000 students this summer. Many students are due to start exams next week. Lecturers, led by the Association of University Teachers (AUT) and its sister union Natfhe, are calling for a 23 per cent pay rise over three years. They have refused the latest 12.6 per cent offer. More than 20 universities have told the Universities and College Employers Association (UCEA) that they will dock staff pay by between 10 and 100 per cent.

Michael Sterling, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, said: "The employer has to send a letter asking staff to inform him when they are starting the action. From that point on, the employer will deduct different amounts from their pay according to the university's point of view." Professor Sterling, who chairs the Russell Group of universities, informed his staff of the proposed action in January. He is docking 10 per cent and says that 150 of Birmingham's academics are taking industrial action, fewer than 5 per cent of the whole. Birmingham, where exams are taken earlier, will award degrees to students on the basis of exams sat and papers marked. A "no-detriment clause" means that degree results will only be revised up, not down. At Northumbria University, staff will find their pay cut completely until they return to working full-time. Salaries will also be cut or withheld at Sunderland, Coventry and Strathclyde universities.

The dispute worsened this week after the AUT and Natfhe rejected the universities' 12.6 per cent rise over three years as falling far short of the increase sought. AUT delegates meeting in Scarborough yesterday voted to continue their boycott. The unions have so far refused to put the offer to members. This week, AUT members at St Andrews voted to accept a local 12.5 per cent deal over three years offered by the university, but they were overruled by AUT Scotland.

Intervening for the first time, Mr Johnson urged lecturers to accept the "very generous" deal and end their action. He added that it would be "incredible" if union leaders did not put the 12.6 per cent pay offer to their members. "The employers have made a very decent offer, actually a very generous offer, but I hope the unions now put it to their members," he said. "I think if they do it will be accepted. For the unions not to put that to the members would be incredible."

Boris Johnson, the Shadow Minister for Higher Education, said that the strike had gone on long enough and he called on the unions to put the offer to members. "Lecturers have a legitimate grievance," he said, "but it is not right that students across the country should be penalised and potentially robbed of their degrees by this action. I join with the Secretary of State in urging the unions to put the latest deal to their members for them to decide."

Alan Johnson, who was the Higher Education Minister who pushed through tuition fees, said that it was not for him to "step in" and resolve the dispute, but he emphasised the significance of the latest offer. He was speaking as AUT delegates discussed the dispute at the union's annual council meeting. Sally Hunt, the AUT general secretary, said that the row must be resolved soon to avoid "meltdown" at universities this summer. She said that members had been debating the pay issue since arriving in Scarborough. "They gave a clear democratic mandate in a unanimous vote to reject the offer and continue with the assessment boycott," she said. "What is clear is that this dispute will end when, and only when, there is a decent and credible offer on the table."

Source



BIBLE COMEBACK IN U.S. SCHOOLS?

The long-dormant idea of teaching public school students about the literary and historic importance of the Bible is getting a fresh look this year from state legislatures and local school boards - though with political bickering and questions about what should be included. The buzz results mostly from "The Bible and Its Influence," a glossy high-school textbook with substantial interfaith and academic endorsements. It's available for the coming school year, and some 800 high schools are currently considering the course. The publisher, the Bible Literacy Project of Front Royal, Va., will issue a teacher's edition next month and is providing online teacher training through Oregon's Concordia University. The group expects no legal problems, but is promising school districts worried about lawsuits that Washington's Becket Fund for Religious Liberty will supply attorneys without charge.

Bible Literacy isn't alone in the field. Its older rival, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools of Greensboro, N.C., is backed by numerous conservative Protestant activists and says 36 new clients have adopted its program this year, compared with just a couple per month in 2005. Overall, the group says school districts in 37 states with 1,250 high schools use its curriculum. The National Council believes the Bible should be students' only textbook. It offers teachers a course outline, "The Bible in History and Literature," and a CD-ROM of "The Bible Reader," a 1969 anthology of texts and commentary. The outline follows the King James Version and recommends the conservative Protestant Ryrie Study Bible for further background.

Both efforts pursue an opening created by the U.S. Supreme Court. In a notable 1963 ruling, the court banned ceremonial Bible readings in public schools but allowed "objective" study of the text in a manner divorced from belief. "The Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities," the court said.

Last month, Georgia's Gov. Sonny Perdue signed a law that sanctions but doesn't require Bible courses, and directs the state education department to pick a curriculum by February. Legislators are mulling similar proposals in Missouri, Tennessee and Alabama. In Alabama, Republicans have killed a Democratic proposal specifying use of Bible Literacy's textbook after conservatives complained to Republicans about its pluralistic approach. "To some extent, this is about Democrats trying to get religion, and certain Republicans trying to spread religion," says Mark Chancey of Southern Methodist University.

Representing the Campaign to Defend the Constitution, Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky charges that Georgia is "clearly violating" the First Amendment with "state-sponsored religious promotion" both through Bible classes and another law allowing Ten Commandments displays. At Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a spokesman finds it "deeply worrisome" that a "religious pressure group" like Bible Literacy is promoting coursework.

Americans United cites religious activities of Bible Literacy Chairman Chuck Stetson, an Episcopalian and New York entrepreneur, who co-edited the textbook. The National Council's course outline is anonymous, and President Elizabeth Ridenour declines to state her religious affiliation. The National Council's Web site features attacks on Bible Literacy from conservatives, including megachurch pastors John Hagee of San Antonio and D. James Kennedy of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Hagee calls the new textbook "a masterful work of deception, distortion and outright falsehoods" that would leave pupils "greatly damaged." Kennedy says it would be "a tremendous mistake to impose such very anti-biblical material."

Other conservatives disagree. Bible Literacy won endorsements from a lineup of evangelical scholars and leaders including Charles Colson, who says, "I do not see how any of its content would work to undermine one's faith." The National Council also faces attacks, particularly a scathing 32-page report last year by SMU's Chancey that was sponsored by the liberal Texas Freedom Network and endorsed by 187 religion professors. Chancey branded the National Council version he examined "a sectarian document" that promoted primarily conservative Protestant views, lacked input from scholars in other faith traditions and is inappropriate for public schools. The class outline has since been revised somewhat. The National Council notes in response that its "Bible Reader" was compiled by two Protestants, a Roman Catholic priest and a rabbi, and cites support from several Catholics and an Orthodox rabbi.

Bible Literacy's textbook tries to sidestep sectarian disputes. Its textbook is designed to fit with a 1999 agreement it helped broker on coursework and other issues regarding the Bible in schools. That pact was endorsed by, among others, seven major public school organizations, four Jewish and three evangelical groups and the National Council of Churches. Asked to answer the barbs from the National Council, Bible Literacy spokeswoman Sheila Weber said: "With 8 percent of the nation's schools offering coverage of the Bible, there's plenty of room for different kinds of projects."

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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12 May, 2006

CAMPUS CONSPIRACY THEORIES

From Mike Adams

Over my last 13 years as a college professor, I've heard some pretty wild conspiracy theories attempting to blame various social ills on white people. After hearing a particularly strange one about Hurricane Katrina - from a 20-year old white girl, no less - I decided to publish my Top Ten. Most of these quotes are paraphrased because they were not recorded soon enough after I heard them for exact duplication. But no subtle nuance in wording can alter the idiocy these paraphrases contain. And, sadly, 100% of them come from college professors and students at our so-called institutions of higher learning. I hope they entertain you as much as they entertained me - although something tells me they will irritate more than a few readers:

10. "911 was a conspiracy planned between the Bush administration and the Jews. They wanted an excuse to attack Arabs and the ignorant public bought into it." (from a now-deceased college professor).

9. "I don't want any teacher who supports George W. Bush. If Bush is elected he's planning - along with the rest of the Republicans - to bring back slavery. I don't want to work picking cotton in the cotton fields like my ancestors." (college student).

8. "It is a known fact that the Reagan administration invented crack to destroy the black community." (college professor).

7. "The Reagan administration hired Jewish doctors to develop the AIDS virus to destroy Africa." (college professor).

6. "The Mona Lisa was painted by an African artist and stolen from a museum in Ethiopia. Most of the great works of art are African in origin and stolen by white people. This is done to promote the myth of white cultural superiority." (graduate student).

5. "The voting machines in Florida were built by white supremacists. They may well be able to distinguish between black and white voters. Who knows what they are capable of making those machines do?" (college professor).

4. "Newt Gingrich's election as Speaker of the House, limiting affirmative action, limiting welfare, the Republican tax cuts, and the balanced budget are all part of the same idea. Everything the Republicans do or discuss is about racism. Everything is a well-orchestrated effort to keep the black man down." (college professor).

3. "The ABC news doesn't tell you. The CBS news doesn't tell you. The NBC news doesn't tell you. Even CNN doesn't tell you. Nobody tells the truth that almost all serial killers are white. The news outlets all work together to make folks think that all killers are black." (college professor and diversity director).

2. "The death penalty is a genocidal mechanism that seeks to control black people through extermination or, more importantly, the threat of extermination." (college professor).

1. "It is a proven fact that U.S. Coast Guard ships - on orders from President Bush - were seen crashing into the New Orleans levees during Hurricane Katrina. Bush did it to kill black people living in government housing projects." (college student).

If you haven't been following the campus cultural wars lately, you might find it hard to believe that some of those quotes were actually uttered. But if you have worked or studied on a campus lately, chances are you've heard variations of several of them.



Fight Against Campus Bias Gets Boost

If you're a Jewish college student, you no longer have to tolerate anti-Semitism or Israel-bashing on your campus. You are protected under our federal civil rights laws. These were the landmark conclusions of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent federal agency that analyzes information about discrimination and reports its findings and recommendations to the president and Congress.

In November 2005, the commission held its first-ever hearing on the issue of campus anti-Semitism. One topic was the Zionist Organization of America's precedent-setting civil rights complaint on behalf of Jewish students at UC Irvine, who have faced a pattern of anti-Jewish hostility that university administrators have known about but have failed to adequately address. Based on the hearing, the commission recently issued historic findings and recommendations that both Jews and non-Jews can applaud.

According to the commission, the problem of campus anti-Semitism is "serious." In addition to name-calling, threats, assaults and the vandalism of property, hatred toward Jews is being expressed on campus in subtler ways. Zionism - the expression of Jewish rights and attachment to the historic homeland of Israel - is being unfairly mischaracterized as racism. Israel is being demonized and illegitimately compared to Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, and its leaders are being compared to Hitler.

At UC Irvine, annual campus events (titled, "Anti-Zionist Week" and the misnomer "Israel Awareness Week") have been regular opportunities to attack Jews, Zionists and those who support Israel's right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state. Signs have equated the Star of David with the swastika and depicted it dripping with blood. Speakers have portrayed Jews as overly powerful and conspiratorial; one referred to "the Jewish lobby" as a "den of spies."

At San Francisco State University, fliers depicted a baby with the caption, "Palestinian Children Meat - Slaughtered According to Jewish Rites Under American License." The commission rightly condemned all this conduct as anti-Semitism, finding that "[a]nti-Semitic bigotry is no less morally deplorable when camouflaged as anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism."

The commission also recognized that Jewish students face harassment inside the classroom. Many academic departments present a one-sided, anti-Israel view of the Middle East conflict, squelching legitimate debate about Israel. According to a Jewish student at Columbia University, her professor said that she had no claim to the Land of Israel because she had green eyes and therefore could not be a Semite. In response to such incidents, the commission recommended that academic departments "maintain academic standards, respect intellectual diversity and ensure that the rights of all students are fully protected."

According to the commission, "severe, persistent or pervasive" anti-Semitism on campus may violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI requires that colleges and universities ensure that their programs and activities are free from harassment, intimidation and discrimination based on "race, color or national origin." Otherwise, they risk losing their federal funding. The commission recognized that Jews are protected under Title VI because they are an ethnic group sharing a common ancestry and heritage.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education ensures that colleges and universities comply with Title VI. The commission recommended that OCR vigorously enforce Title VI to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism.

The commission also urged university leaders to denounce anti-Semitic and other hate speech. Some have already done so: When a cartoon mocking the Holocaust was published in a Rutgers student newspaper, the university president publicly recognized that although the publication was constitutionally protected, it was hurtful to the community and inconsistent with the university's values. He urged the students involved to take responsibility for their actions and succeeded in getting them to apologize for the hurt they caused to the community.

Not all university leaders have exercised the same moral leadership. Some have remained silent in the face of anti-Semitic speech and conduct, justifying their silence by saying that offensive behavior is constitutionally protected. Of course, we must all stand up for free speech and vigorous debate - especially on a college campus, where the exchange of ideas should be encouraged. But hateful, degrading and demeaning speech is hateful, degrading and demeaning, no matter where it occurs.

We can't lose our common sense about what is hateful and harmful, just because it is expressed on a college campus. If college officials remain silent, they help perpetuate the bigotry. And their silence contributes to making the targets of the hate feel even more marginalized and unwelcome. What should you do if you are experiencing anti-Semitism on your campus, to the point that the environment feels hostile or intimidating?

First, you should try to resolve the problem internally by working with university officials to create an atmosphere that is tolerant and respectful. While colleges and universities must uphold the right of free speech, they have a legal obligation to provide you with an educational environment that is free from harassment, intimidation and discrimination. If working with university officials fails and the hostile environment persists, then you can and should file a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights (www.ed.gov/ocr).

More information is forthcoming. The commission has recommended that OCR conduct a public education campaign, and it will be distributing its own materials to inform students of their rights. Hillel directors should be getting the message out to college administrators and to their Jewish constituents. The Zionist Organization of America will be undertaking its own nationwide effort to inform Jewish students and college administrators that anti-Semitism is illegal and that students have legal tools to fight it.

Whatever your campus experience, if you are a Jewish student, it's important to know that the Civil Rights Commission has staked out its position firmly supporting your right to be free from campus anti-Semitism. You have the right to obtain your education in an atmosphere that is conducive to learning and that does not intimidate or harass you because you are Jewish or support Israel.

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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11 May, 2006

Mob Rule: In departmental disputes, professors can act just like animals

When songbirds perceive some sign of danger - a roosting owl, a hawk, a neighborhood cat - a group of them will often do something bizarre: fly toward the threat. When they reach the enemy, they will swoop down on it again and again, jeering and making a racket, which draws still more birds to the assault. The birds seldom actually touch their target (though reports from the field have it that some species can defecate or vomit on the predator with "amazing accuracy"). The barrage simply continues until the intruder sulks away. Scientists call this behavior "mobbing."

The impulse to mob is so strong in some birds that humans have learned to use predators as lures. Birders play recordings of screech owls to attract shy songbirds. In England, an ancient duck-hunting technique involved stationing a trained dog at the edge of a pond: First the dog got the ducks' attention, and then it fled down the mouth of a giant, narrowing wickerwork trap, with the mob of waterfowl hot in pursuit all the way. Birds mob for a couple of reasons. One of them is educational: Youngsters learn whom to mob, and whom to fear, by watching others do it. But the more immediate purpose of mobbing is to drive the predator away - or, in the words of the eminent Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, to make "the enemy's life a burden."

Sometimes, especially in winter, Kenneth Westhues can hear a flock of crows tormenting a great horned owl outside his study in Waterloo, Ontario. It is a fitting soundtrack for his work. Mr. Westhues has made a career out of the study of mobbing. Since the late 1990s, he has written or edited five volumes on the topic. However, the mobbers that most captivate him are not sparrows, fieldfares, or jackdaws. They are modern-day college professors....

Max Weber, a founding father of modern sociology, saw bureaucracy as the living embodiment of cool, procedural rationality. In Mr. Westhues's view, mobbing is a pathological undercurrent of irrationality in bureaucracies - a crabby ghost in the machine. According to Mr. Westhues, mobbing occurs most in institutions where workers have high job security, where there are few objective measures of performance, and where there is frequent tension between loyalty to the institution and loyalty to some higher purpose. In other words, the ghost is alive and well in many academic departments. Tenure is supposed to protect scholars from outside control, but it does a lousy job of protecting them from one another, Mr. Westhues says. In the hothouse of a department, disputes can easily cascade from individual disagreement and disapproval to widespread revulsion to a concerted effort to get a colleague removed. "Mobbing is a turning inward," he says. "People lose a sense of purpose and they're at one another's throats."....

Mr. Westhues conducts his research on mobbing mainly by doing case studies - by studying official documentation of disputes and by interviewing people. By now, he has conducted just under 150 full case studies, but he is contacted all the time by people who believe they have been mobbed. The view he has acquired of higher education is a panorama of the academic down and out.

It includes a professor from South Asia working in Texas who, after years of getting sniped at by his colleagues, was eventually drummed out of his position for careless accounting and unauthorized use of a photocopier. It includes a German-accented professor who so unnerved fellow faculty members that during a tirade against her one of them actually had a seizure. (She was soon after served with a petition demanding her physical removal from the department for charges of "creating a hostile work environment" and "unethical behavior.")

A few times a year, Mr. Westhues embarks on research trips to campuses where he has gotten wind of a mobbing. He sometimes combines his research missions with lectures or panels on mobbing, to bring the idea out into the open. Last month one such trip took him to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, just as spring was showing on the trees....

Jerry Becker, a 69-year-old professor of mathematics education at Carbondale, is the son of a Minnesota truck driver and holds a doctorate from Stanford University. He is a workaholic. In 27 years of teaching at Carbondale, he has never taken a sabbatical, he says. By his estimate, he brings in "hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars" in grant money to the university, and often gets the highest marks on performance evaluations.

In November 2003, 15 of Mr. Becker's colleagues signed a 12-page complaint against him, charging him with bullying, buttonholing professors to talk about union issues, and multiple other offenses, as well as calling him "toxic" to the work environment. They said they wanted him removed "physically and professionally" from their midst. In response, Mr. Becker spent nearly every evening for more than two months writing a point-by-point rebuttal. The rebuttal persuaded the administration to clear him of all charges. However, just a few months later, Mr. Becker's colleagues submitted yet another complaint, this one containing several charges of sexual harassment. Once again, Mr. Becker successfully rebutted the charges and was exonerated. But his colleagues still scored a victory: Mr. Becker's office was moved far away from theirs, to a part of campus where no other professors work.

Essentially, Mr. Westhues says, anything that can be a basis for bickering can be a basis for mobbing: race, sex, political difference, cultural difference, intellectual style. Professors with foreign accents, he says, often get mobbed, as do professors who frequently file grievances and "make noise." But perhaps the most common single trait of mobbing targets, he says, is that they excel.

"To calculate the odds of your being mobbed," Mr. Westhues writes in his most comprehensive book on mobbing, The Envy of Excellence: Administrative Mobbing of High-Achieving Professors, "count the ways you show your workmates up: fame, publications, teaching scores, connections, eloquence, wit, writing skills, athletic ability, computer skills, salary, family money, age, class, pedigree, looks, house, clothes, spouse, children, sex appeal. Any one of these will do."

With a history of consulting for the tobacco industry, a prominent critique of affirmative action to his name, and a poster that says "I Love Capitalism" hanging over his desk, Jonathan J. Bean is not exactly a shy Republican. A square-jawed, youthful-looking man in his 40s, Mr. Bean is a professor of history at Carbondale. Last April, during a freshman-level American-history course, he gave his teaching assistants a text he wanted them to use in a discussion section on the aftermath of the civil-rights movement. The text came from FrontPage Magazine, the aggressively conservative online publication run by David Horowitz, and it gave an account of a string of black-on-white murders in San Francisco during the 1970s called the Zebra Killings. Its central argument was that cultural taboos on discussing black-on-white racism had made the murders all but vanish from public memory.

Within days, Mr. Bean discovered that the reading had caused a stir among his teaching assistants and among professors in the department. In response, he first issued a rather sarcastic apology impugning the "timidity" of acceptable debate on campus, but soon after wrote a more straightforward "I'm sorry" and canceled the reading assignment. A few days later, six of Mr. Bean's colleagues in the history department published an open letter in the campus newspaper. "Academic responsibility," they wrote, "demands that professors promote the free exchange of ideas without creating a hostile environment, running the risk of nurturing racist attitudes among their students, and putting their teaching assistants in an untenable position. "Moreover," they continued, "it is our academic responsibility as history professors to disassociate ourselves from this irresponsible use of objectionable and inflammatory material."

Mr. Bean happened to own a copy of Mr. Westhues's book, Workplace Mobbing in Academe. When he looked at Mr. Westhues's indicators of a mobbing, he said to himself, "That's me all over."

But then something strange happened: People outside the department turned against the letter signers. FrontPage Magazine published a long, vitriolic article on the incident under the headline "Academic Witch-Hunt." The campus newspaper also published a story that was largely sympathetic to Mr. Bean. "I had two direct ancestors hung as witches at Salem," Mr. Bean was prominently quoted as saying. "I don't plan to be the third." In the same article, another professor was quoted describing Mr. Bean's troubles as "a classic case of mobbing." Before long, the e-mail in boxes of the letter signers were crammed with hate mail.

Not surprisingly, Robbie Lieberman, one of the letter signers, is not a fan of mobbing rhetoric. "I don't think it's accidental that it evokes lynch mobs," says Ms. Lieberman. "Blaming a lynch mob is one thing. Blaming a department for criticizing a colleague is another." "Mobbing is such a colorful term that it tends to pre-empt debate," says Rich Fedder, Ms. Lieberman's husband and the chairman of the Southern Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It plays into an American love of talking about victims."

Mr. Fedder and Ms. Lieberman do have a point: Leveling the charge of mobbing can be a quick and easy way to seize the moral high ground in a dispute. And while Mr. Westhues does, in fact, see Mr. Bean's case as a mobbing, he largely agrees with this argument. "There's a tendency for anybody who wants some leverage in campus politics to say, You know, I'm being mobbed," he says, "and the whole thing becomes quite meaningless." This is one reason why Mr. Westhues, unlike many mobbing researchers, is dead set against anti-mobbing legislation.

At his lecture on mobbing in Carbondale, Mr. Westhues told an audience of about 50 people that, in fact, his best hope for his work on mobbing is that it might have an impact on administrators. (The provost of Southern Illinois sat in the back row, scribbling notes.) Professors seeking to eliminate one of their colleagues cannot get very far without the backing of the administration, he said. And in cases where many professors are pitted against one, administrators' first instinct will often be to side with the majority.

But because mobbers tend to be so impassioned and sloppy in their reasoning, Mr. Westhues argued, administrators who side with them may suffer for it later. Mr. Westhues's research provides numerous examples of mobbing victims who have walked away with fat court settlements, and of administrators who have walked away without their jobs. "Administrators need to know that it's in their interests to prevent this," Mr. Westhues said. "They take a big risk when they encourage the mobbing of a professor."

He said that universities should wean themselves of the quasi-judicial bodies, like ethics committees, that, in his opinion, simply dignify pettiness and give professors a chance to have power over one another. At his own university, he said, after having been the subject of several ethics committee proceedings himself (of course, he has what he considers to be his own history with mobbing), he worked to persuade the Board of Governors to abolish the committee. He argued that an ethics committee "lets people play judge" and "brings out the worst in good people." His arguments succeeded. "If you ask me," Mr. Westhues told the audience in Carbondale, "we've been more ethical without the ethics committee."

More here. (HT Neil Craig).



BRITISH PRIVATE SCHOOLS STILL RESPECTED

Learning in English is a major motivation not stressed below

Public schools ["public" in the British sense] are attracting soaring numbers of pupils from across Europe despite fees averaging 20,000 pounds a year and reaching 25,000 pounds in London and the South East. The number of French, German and Spanish pupils attending British independent schools rose by more than a quarter this year, with a record number from France.

The annual census of the Independent Schools Council (ISC), published yesterday, also showed a small rise in the number of British children attending private schools, as well as strong interest from Russia, Eastern Europe, Hong Kong and China. Overall, the number of new overseas pupils at British boarding schools rose by 11 per cent to 23,056. The reason, according to the Boarding School Association (BSA), is that British public schools offer a broader curriculum, smaller classes, better teaching and more sports facilities.

Jonathan Shephard, the general secretary of the ISC, said that it was also partly down to better transport links and the greater take-up of the International Baccalaureate. "There are low-cost flights coming in to a number of different airports so you are not abandoning your child for a whole term. They can go backwards and forwards at weekends," he said.

Giggleswick school in Settle, North Yorkshire, which charges annual fees of 19,000 pounds, has 325 boys and girls, 14 per cent of whom are from overseas, including French, German, Chinese and Nigerian. Geoffrey Boult, the headmaster and vice-chairman of the BSA, said: "Overseas students, in particular Europeans, see the move as a springboard to UK universities. Initially the Germans came for the first year of their Abitur, or A levels, and then went back. Now they're staying on for two years before going on to university. They're often aiming for Oxbridge, Warwick and the LSE. They know they'll graduate at 22 instead of 26, so they see British schooling as an acceleration into the workplace."

The number of new European students studying in Britain last year came to 7,469, with a record 24 per cent increase in students from France. For Lorenz Caspar-Bours, 17, from Aachen, Germany, it is the support of the teachers at Giggleswick that is the key. In Germany, teachers are often teaching classes of up to 35. The average class size in British independent schools now stands at ten pupils per teacher. "You have a very different relationship with your teacher than if you see him with 30 others before then disappearing," Lorenz said.

The total number of pupils in the ISC's 1,272 schools rose slightly this year to 505,450. This was up but still well below the 2004 figure of 508,027. The number of boarders rose slightly from 68,255 to 68,409.

PHILIPP DANNENBERG, 17, arrived last September from Berlin at Trinity school in Devon. What started out as a year's exchange to improve his English will end with the completion of his A levels. Philipp said that he had been won over by the family atmosphere. "It's so different from Germany," he said. "I hated all the teachers there. They were so unfriendly." Having discovered that German universities will accept A levels, Philipp stayed on. Although he studies for more hours than in Berlin, he swims twice a week, studies martial arts and plays football.

Speaking from Germany, his father, Thomas Dannenberg, a psychologist, said that he had been impressed by his son's timetable. "I've been very pleasantly surprised how well English schools are organised," he said. "From dawn till dusk they're learning."

However, the exercise is not cheap. Having paid nothing for Philipp to attend the local Gymnasium, or secondary school, Herr Dannenberg pays 16,000 pounds a year in fees, and a further 2,000 a term so that his son may stay with a family at weekends.

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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10 May, 2006

HOW THE HELL DO THE KIDS LEARN ANYTHING USEFUL WITH TEACHERS LIKE THESE?

Amidst relentless warnings that America's schools are graduating only two-thirds of 18-year-olds, are failing to produce the scientists and engineers we need, and need to address stubborn racial achievement gaps, more than 14,000 of the nation's education researchers gathered recently in San Francisco for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Their task is not easy. Former AERA president David C. Berliner has explained in Educational Researcher, a prestigious education journal, that education research is "the hardest science of all." Berliner argued that educational science is much harder than "splitting either atoms or genes" because those who study schooling find their research confounded by "the ordinary events of life" such as "a messy divorce, a passionate love affair, hot flashes, a birthday party, alcohol abuse...[or] rain that keeps the children from a recess outside the school building." Clearly, these scholars in San Francisco would have no time for the frivolity one might find at a gathering of biochemists or physicists.

It was quickly made evident that the scholars had buckled down to the crucial, serious work at hand. Professors had unflinchingly tackled each of the five major fields of educational inquiry: imperialism; ghetto culture; hegemonic oppression and right-thinking multiculturalism: cyber-jargon; and the utterly incomprehensible. There was also some boring work on questions like student achievement and policy evaluation, but you only had to follow the crowds to see where the action was.

Flipping open the two-inch-thick program of research presentations, no responsible educator concerned about imperialism could bear to miss the session that featured "Na Wahine Mana: A Postcolonial Reading of Classroom Discourse on the Imperial Rescue of Oppressed Hawaiian Women," "Every Shut Eye Ain't Sleep and Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: Paradoxes of Race in the Production of Political Knowledge of Decolonizing Nationhood," and "Written On, Written Over, but Refusing to be Written Off: Indigenous Educators Teaching in the Empire."

Possibilities for future research abound. If shut eyes are not sleeping, are they absorbing algebra? Where do goodbyes go when they are not gone? And, of course, is the empire likely to strike back? If it does, how many oppressed Hawaiian women will be further victimized by the postcolonial discourse?

Researchers seeking to celebrate ghetto culture were riveted by the scholarship of "Ho No Mo': A Qualitative Investigation of Adolescent Female Language Reclamation and Rejection." A subsequent piece of research, "'He's Driving a BMW and I'm Riding the Bus': Examining Spirituality in Urban Youths' Lives," no doubt delved into the question of what happens after the ho's are no mo'. Meanwhile, the burning issue of hip hop pedagogies was explored by the research session on "Black Language, Literacy, and Liberation: The Promises and Challenges of Critical Hip Hop Language Pedagogies."

Those more interested in hegemonic oppression could not afford to miss "The Formation of the Subjectivity of Mail-Order Brides in Taiwan and Their Educational Strategies Toward Their Children." The import of an oppressive "majority culture" was tackled in a provocative piece that unfortunately suffered from a limited sample size: "Translating, Paraphrasing, Helping: Coming of Age for One Child of Immigrants."

One scholar of multiculturalism showed how to do away with injustice and racism, while promoting compassion and wisdom, in "Resisting Resistance: Using Eco-Justice and Eco-Racism to Awaken Mindfulness, Compassion, and Wisdom in Preservice Teachers."

Other work promised to promote proper multicultural teacher attitudes, as with "Teaching White Preservice Teachers: Pedagogical Responses to Color-Blind Ideology" and "Overcoming Odds: Preparing Bilingual Paraeducators to Teach for Social Justice." Breakthrough research on this front included "Discovering Collage as a Method in Researching Multicultural Lives" and "Artistic Code-Switching in a Collaged Book on Border Identity and Spanglish."

Among the panels tackling the pressing questions of "queer studies" (formerly "gay and lesbian studies") were "Queering Schooling and (Un)Doing the Public Good: Rubbing Against the Grain for Schooling Sexualities," "The Silence at School: An Ethnodrama for Educators About the School Experiences of Gay Boys," and "Working Against Heterosexism and Homophobia Through Teacher Inquiry." Unfortunately, this work may have seemed a bit conventional to those researchers fortunate enough to catch the 2004 analysis of ableist oppression in homoerotic magazines: "Unzipping the Monster Dick: Deconstructing Ableist Representations in Two Homoerotic Magazines."

Cyber-jargon is a rapidly growing field, with scholars tackling such pressing questions as what happens when dyads co-quest in Quest Atlantis. One intriguing session included scholarly analyses that tackled "The 'Unofficial' Literacy Curriculum: Popular Websites in Adolescents' Out-of-School Lives," "Not Just the OMG Standard: Reader Feedback in Online Fan Fiction," and "English-Language Learning in a 3-D Virtual Environment: Native/Non-Native Speaker Dyads Co-Questing in Quest Atlantis."

Perhaps the most stimulating work was that penned by authors who dabble in utter incomprehensibility. The allure of this work resides partly in trying to discern what the authors are actually talking about. Scholarship like "Semiotics and Classroom Interaction: Mediated Discourse, Distributed Cognition, and the Multimodal Semiotics of Maguru Panggul Pedagogy in Two Balinese Gamelan Classrooms in the United States" and "Education a la Silhouette and the Necessary Semiotically Informed Alternative" leaves one a bit breathless.

Other work that may not be quite as dazzling, but nevertheless boasted its own pleasing bouquet of complexity, included "Fostering a Distributed Community of Practice Among Tribal Environmental Professionals During Professional Development Courses" and "Vygotskian Semiotic Conception and Representational Dialogue in Mathematics Education."

Of course, beckoning any researcher truly concerned about teaching and learning was the Presidential Session that featured a compelling new paper: "'Mami, What Did Nana Say?' Public School and the Politics of Linguistic Genocide." This special session called to mind one of the more compelling papers presented at a past AERA: "Chicanas From Outer Space—Chupacabras, Selena as Marian Image, and Other Tales from the Border."

Perhaps none of this should surprise. After all, Nel Noddings, the president of the National Academy of Education, spoke for many education researchers when she complained, "Why the emphasis on experimental and quasi-experimental research, when there's so much other good stuff out there, I don't know."

Given the challenges facing our schools, and the fact that most of these researchers are supported and employed by public institutions, it might make sense for educational researchers to devote attention to analyzing public policy, improving teaching and learning, and addressing the practical concerns of parents and teachers. Such topics were pursued in San Francisco, of course, but if those engaged in serious work want their work to be accorded the respect they seek, they need to emerge from their hushed sessions and do something about the prominent place their profession grants to scholarship that promotes narrow values, spouts incomprehensible nonsense, and studies the semiotic conceptualization of hegemonic linguistic genocide (or dyadic co-questing in Quest Atlantis).

Source



Australian literacy shortfall spelt out

Business groups have welcomed the Beattie Government's moves to rid the state's English curriculum of post-modern "mumbo jumbo", saying too many school-leavers were effectively illiterate. Commerce Queensland president Beatrice Booth said yesterday employers constantly complained that it was a constant complaint among employers that employees under 30 years of age had serious communication problems, especially with spelling. "There are no remedial programs for people that age, yet we have a plethora of people who can't spell, comprehend what they're reading or write a proper sentence," Ms Booth said. She said employers had "no interest whatsoever" in whether or not staff could deconstruct films, magazines or analyse the "discourse of gender" or comment on the "invited reading, foregrounding or gaps and silences" of particular texts. Nor did they need staff to be able to make film and video presentations. "We hire experts for that," she said.

She said the only thing wrong with Education Minister Rod Welford's plain-English push was that he did not plan to act until 2008 to rid Queensland's controversial English curriculum of post-modern "mumbo jumbo". "That will be another two years lost," Mrs Booth said. She said Commerce Queensland, which represented 40,000 employers, wanted immediate changes to make reading and writing, including grammar and spelling, the main English focus of Years 1 to 4, with a love of reading fostered by suitable books. "As far as prospective employers are concerned, the lack of basic primary school reading and writing skills among Year 12 school leavers and university graduates is the main concern employers have about education," she said. "This is a frequent complaint among small business owners from the local story to surveyors and doctors." "After Year 4, the program could be expanded to take in wider skills like writing a letter."

Mrs Booth also believed critical literacy had contributed to a "labelling" mentality among young people which planted hostility towards business and business owners. "We should be out there encouraging them to become business entrepreneurs, not suggesting that business is a bad word," she said.

Professor Erica McWilliam, Assistant Dean of Research at QUT's Faculty of Education, agreed with Mr Welford that clear communication was important, but said today's students needed "a range of literacies including sound, images and text" to cope with the demands of the modern world. "English is certainly about communication but we have to be careful that as we reassert the importance of clarity that we have to be careful not to collapse into the notion of simplicity," Professor McWilliam said. As a former teacher of poetry she admitted to "a little frisson of despair" at the thought of poems like Fern Hill (Dylan Thomas) being "deconstructed" rather than simply appreciated for their beauty. She said school programs should allow students the time to appreciate and enjoy fine writing rather than constantly expecting them to "perform" by analysing, deconstructing and criticising literary works

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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9 May, 2006

BIG EDUCATION SPENDING DOES NOT SHRINK THE CLASS DIVIDE

If there is one fact about modern Britain that should cause us more shock and disappointment than any other, it is that social mobility seems to be declining. Politicians all talk about spreading opportunity, but we are failing to deliver. This is shocking because we are so used to thinking of social trends inexorably pushing us to become a more open and mobile society "classless", with "opportunities for all", as we politicians like to say. So what is going on?

The figures show that a boy born to parents in the poorest quarter of the population in 1958 had a 31% chance of still being there aged 33 and a 17% chance of being in the top quartile. By 1970, those figures had worsened: a boy born in the bottom quartile had a 38% chance of staying put and just a 16% chance of moving into the top quartile.

If social mobility is still declining, many people assume that education must be the culprit. Gordon Brown focused attention on universities in 2000 with his notorious intervention in the Laura Spence affair.

Britain over the past 20 years has seen a big increase in the earnings of graduates relative to non-graduates. But it looks as though the expansion in higher education has meant more places for students from more affluent backgrounds rather than students from poorer backgrounds. The chances of a child from a high-income family getting a degree are still much greater than those for a child from a low-income background. So the expansion of higher education has not increased social mobility but, if anything, has contributed to its decline.

There is clearly much that education can do: it is incredibly frustrating that despite the best efforts of successive governments to try to improve educational standards, the contribution of education towards social mobility is, if anything, going backwards. Can we offer any further explanation of all this, beyond the continuing failings of our education system?

There is one powerful explanation. The enormous expansion of education, especially higher education, must by definition have succeeded in bringing extra opportunities to many more to gain university qualifications than ever before. The assumption was that this would mean more students from modest backgrounds. But in reality the main beneficiaries have been a different, though equally meritorious, group.

The biggest single group of beneficiaries from the expansion of higher education have been young women, often from higher-income backgrounds, even if ones that would not previously have sent daughters to higher education. In 1974, 145,000 men and 75,000 women went to university. So there was a total of 220,000 university students with almost twice as many men as women. Since then, of course, polytechnics have become universities, increasing the number of university students at a stroke by several hundred thousand. But the trend has carried on upwards as well. Thirty years later, in 2004, the number of male university students quadrupled to 650,000. But the number of female university students increased twelvefold to 950,000. Now there are one and a half times as many female students as men. The expansion of education has helped both men and women. But it has had a far greater impact on women than on men.

The women who have above all benefited from this expansion are those from more affluent backgrounds. If anything, the gap between the chances of a girl from a high-income background getting to university as against a girl from a low-income background has actually widened.

More here



Push for plain English in one Australian school system

Post-modernist "mumbo jumbo" is on the way out of Queensland's controversial English syllabus. Education Minister Rod Welford said students as young as Year 8 were being presented with "incomprehensible gobbledegook" that was not being explained to them in plain English. Mr Welford said he wanted to see improvements by the time the new junior and senior syllabuses were fully implemented in 2008. "We want plain English guidelines going to teachers so they can get on with teaching and ensuring students have the knowledge and skills they need," Mr Welford said. "What's wrong with teaching kids to communicate clearly in plain English?"

The Queensland Studies Authority last year appointed independent Sunshine Coast-based educational consultant Ray Land, 53, a former English-social science teacher and education official, to review the preschool to Year 10 syllabus. Mr Land, who found curriculum jargon more of an issue in the primary syllabus than in the secondary syllabus, has completed three out of four stages of his year-long review and his final report is due next month. While unable to pre-empt his report or recommendations, Mr Land has found major variations between schools, English programs and student proficiency levels. While some schools were doing four novels a year, others were doing one and more plays, films, poetry or study of media texts. Some schools, including Thursday Island High School, studied Shakespeare up to Year 10 while others did not.

Mr Land said some measure of critical analysis would remain part of English. It always had been since the earliest days of literary criticism, he said. "But I think deconstruction itself and the jargon is on the way out," he said.

Mr Land found that between a third and a quarter of secondary students up to Year 10 were studying English, not as a traditional subject called English but as part of wider integrated studies courses, where it was linked to a subject such as study of society and the environment. "There a range of reasons for this, including staff shortages in growth areas like Hervey Bay," Mr Land said. "Most English teachers are also qualified to teach in the social sciences. A third issue is the continuity. Students are familiar with an integrated approach at primary school." He said the quality of such integrated studies programs varied and depended on how they were put together and taught, as did all English courses.

Mr Land has found that teachers and school administrators get "a bit chary" at any suggestion that lists of set or suggested novels, plays and poetry be included in the English curriculum. Mr Land is unsure, at this stage, whether he will recommend that a list of suggested reading be included in the English curriculum. He said many schools covered a wide range of works and studied good books in depth. "But about this, it is fair to say that some don't get it right," he said. Mr Land said different schools should have the freedom to select material that best suited their particular students, and the problem with every pupil studying a couple of set books was that it was impossible to suit all tastes and often too difficult to obtain sufficient numbers of the books.

Asked whether it was appropriate for lower secondary students to spend most of a term studying magazines like Dolly or Girlfriend, he said too much deconstruction of such material "becomes tedious and boring". "At the same time, banning them or asking students not to read them just privileges them with the kids," he said. "Balance is what is important."

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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8 May, 2006

THE ABSURDITY OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL MONOPOLY

The notion that local governments should have almost total monopoly control over our children's education is not only unjust and tyrannical, it is also absurd. Children need education, to be sure, but they also need food, clothing, and shelter. The same poor or irresponsible parents who public-school apologists claim will not educate their children without compulsion, might not feed, clothe, or shelter them either.

Yet, we do not see local governments owning and operating supermarkets, department stores, or apartment houses. Instead, government food stamp or rent-subsidy programs give temporary financial help or loans to those parents who are too poor to provide for their children.

When it comes to K-12th grade education, however, instead of giving vouchers or other temporary loans or subsidies to poor families so they can pay for their children's education, we've created a government-owned-and-operated monstrosity called public schools.

Millions of parents now pay for private pre-schools, kindergartens, and colleges for their children in a vibrant, competitive, education free-market. Most parents who can't afford college tuition for their kids usually apply for student loans either from a bank or a government agency. Yet for kindergarten through 12th-grade education, suddenly government must step in, treat all parents like idiots or potential child abusers, and own and operate all the schools.

To more fully understand the absurdity of this system, imagine for a moment that well-intentioned government authorities want to make sure that every child has enough to eat, that no child gets "left behind" when it comes to food. To insure this goal, local governments across the country take control of all supermarkets and grocery stores in your town.

Under this new system, bureaucrats now own and operate all food stores, and store workers become tenured civil-service employees who can't be fired. Your local government then passes a new "food tax" to pay for these stores and employees-- salaries. This tax is added to your current real-estate tax bill. If you don't pay this new tax, local government officials can and will foreclose on your home.

Also under this system, suppose the local Food Board forces you and your family to buy from a particular store. The store clerks know you have to shop in their store, and that they can't be fired. As a result, many clerks become lazy, incompent, or arrogant. The store managers have tenure and can't be fired, so they manage the stores badly. The stores can't go out of business because they are subsidized by your compulsory food taxes, so the stores give you poor service and rotten food. If you want to change stores, you have to ask permission from your local Food Board bureaucrat, who will usually refuse your request. Also, changing food stores doesn't accomplish much because they are all the same—all owned aand operated by the same incompetent government food monopoly.

If this system sounds absurd to you, if you would scream bloody murder at having to put up with such a system simply to buy food, why do you put up with such a system when it comes to your children's education? Shouldn't you be looking for education alternatives to rescue your children from incompetent government schools?

The politicians we elect to office are our agents, not our masters. They derive their powers from our consent. They are supposed to represent our interests, follow our instructions, and respect our natural and Constitutional rights as parents. Politicians, bureaucrats, and school authorities therefore have as much right to dictate how we educate our children as a real estate agent has to dictate who we sell our house to and at what price.

More here



CORRUPT UC IRVINE

Two state senators have called for an inquiry into the University of California, Irvine, following a scandal in its hospital's liver transplant unit and concerns over nepotism involving top executives. Sens. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, and Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, on Tuesday called on the heads of two senate committees to hold a joint hearing to address "exceptions made in university policy, favoritism charges (and) lack of transparency and disclosure" at UCI. The lawmakers said no one has been held accountable for repeated problems. "No one's manning the house," Maldonado said. "Who's in charge? Why have all these problems happened at UCI? Is there a systematic problem there? The bottom line is too many unanswered questions."

Federal agencies are investigating UCI for possible fraudulent billing related to its now-closed liver transplant program. UCI shut down the program in November following federal reports that more than 30 patients died on its waiting list in 2004 and 2005, even as the hospital turned down scores of organs that might have saved some of them. During that period, UCI had no full-time liver transplant surgeon.

Questions have also been raised about the hiring of top executives' close relatives in the medical school and medical center, and the awarding of a residency position to the son of a donor to the school. In each case, UCI investigations concluded that nothing was wrong. A university spokeswoman said UCI had taken steps to address problems since the liver program was shuttered that include convening an independent panel of experts to review the medical problems and recommend changes. "UCI has aggressively addressed these problems since the liver issues came to our attention in November," said spokeswoman Susan Menning.

Source



Gradeless courses under fire in Western Australia

One of Western Australia's chief examiners, who has vowed to quit over the state's controversial "gradeless" curriculum being rolled out into Years 11 and 12 classrooms, claims the system is too subjective and will backfire. Jan Bishop said the new system was filled with "gobbledegook" and would cause inequities in how students were graded. Her claims were backed yesterday by former chief examiner Bill Leadbetter, who described the new courses as "content free".

Mrs Bishop helped write the new history course but stepped aside from that role last year over what she described as the Curriculum Council's insistence on writing the course using meaningless language. Mrs Bishop has signalled she will resign next year, 12 months before her contract as chief history examiner ends. She said the marking process, in which teachers decide at which of eight levels a student has performed, was complicated and subjective. "There are major problems with this system and teachers are having difficulties properly assessing students' work because they don't understand," she told The Weekend Australian.

The Carpenter Government has faced increasing pressure to delay the rollout of 17 outcomes-based subjects. Under the new system, all subjects are equal and students achieve at their own level. Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop has raised concerns over Western Australia's outcomes-based education system, claiming it is "inevitable" that standards will fall.

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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7 May, 2006

AN INCREASINGLY MEANINGLESS EXAM

The closer the pass-rate gets to 100%, the more meaningless it becomes. Why have it if 100% pass? But I guess it makes some kids work for a change

The high school graduation season is weeks away, and nearly 47,000 California seniors -10.7 percent of the class of 2006 - have yet to pass the test required for a diploma, according to figures released Thursday by the state Department of Education. "We're making progress," said Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of public instruction, in a telephone news conference. "Every student needs the skills to have success in the new global economy, and that's what we're measuring with this test." Students in the class of 2006 are the first required to pass the California High School Exit Exam to graduate. It measures achievement in math and English. Students started taking the test their sophomore year, and more students have passed the test each time it has been administered. Another test is scheduled for later this month.

Some groups of students have fared better than others: 97 percent of whites have passed, as have 95 percent of Asians. Meanwhile, the pass rate is 83 percent for Latino students and 81 percent for African Americans. Students considered "economically disadvantaged" are passing at a rate of 83 percent. And for those who don't speak English as a first language, the rate drops to 71 percent. Disabled students are exempt from taking the test this year as the result of a lawsuit. "The gaps are scary, disappointing, sad," said Russlynn Ali, director of Education Trust West, an Oakland group pushing for high standards for disadvantaged students. But overall, she said, "The progress is hopeful. We're on a steady trajectory."

Some critics say it's unfair to demand that everyone pass such an exam when the school system isn't doing a good enough job educating students, especially those in poorer districts that tend to have less-experienced teachers and older textbooks. "Before we can morally or constitutionally apply the exam to all students, we need to ensure all students' constitutional rights have been served and they have been adequately prepared," said Jeff Affeldt, managing attorney for San Francisco-based Public Advocates, which is involved in one of two lawsuits filed against the state over the test.

O'Connell said he has asked the Legislature to approve additional money that will allow struggling students more chances to take the test during the summer and on Saturdays. Students can still pass the test after their classmates graduate. Exit exam or not, the state never graduates every student. Every year, about 45,000 to 50,000 high school seniors don't graduate with their class, according to the Department of Education. Most members of the class of 2006 - 68 percent - passed the exam on their first try as sophomores. In March, the state announced the pass rate had risen to 88 percent. Since that report, another 6,931 students have passed. But those gains have largely been offset because the state identified 5,774 students who hadn't previously taken the test.

The state isn't sure why those students didn't take the test earlier, but it offered three theories: The students missed previous test dates, recently moved to the state or repeated part of their junior year and were recently reclassified as seniors. The state's figures are tallied by a consultant, the Human Resources Research Organization, which has tracked the exit exam for six years.

Source



DISASTROUS POLITICIZATION OF MEDICAL EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIA



Teaching of basic anatomy in Australia's medical schools is so inadequate that students are increasingly unable to locate important body parts - and in some cases even confuse one vital organ with another. Senior doctors claim teaching hours for anatomy have been slashed by 80 per cent in some medical schools to make way for "touchy-feely" subjects such as "cultural sensitivity", communication and ethics. The time devoted to other basic sciences - including biochemistry, physiology and pathology - has also been reduced.

Several senior consultants have told The Weekend Australian they have been "horrified" to encounter final-year medical students who do not know where the prostate gland is, or what a healthy liver feels like. When asked by a cardiac surgeon during a live operation to identify a part of the heart that he was pointing to, one group of final-year students thought it was the patient's liver.

A coalition of senior doctors appealed this week to the federal Government to step in, claiming public safety was at stake and that national benchmarks for teaching the basic medical sciences were urgently needed. The Australian Doctors Fund lodged a 70-page submission with the federal Department of Education, Science and Training this week, listing arguments from more than two dozen professors, consultants and medical academics for a rethink on medical education. The document warned of a "rising chorus of concern across the medical profession" that students were not getting "exposure to the necessary amount of training in anatomy" and other key sciences.

The heads of Australia's medical schools fiercely contest the criticisms, saying there has been an "explosion" of medical knowledge that doctors need to know, in fields such as genetics and new drugs, and that other areas have to be cut to accommodate the newer topics. They also strenuously deny that they are turning out inadequately trained doctors. But many students are also unhappy about core science training. One group of students wrote anonymously to two noted academics last year, saying they were "sick of being asked, 'Didn't you study anatomy?"' by consultants amazed by the gaps in their knowledge. "How can we learn if we are not taught the basics?" they wrote.

One of the two recipients of the letter, Barry Oakes, a former anatomy teacher at Monash University, said part of the problem was the "fads and trends" now current in medical education, and that students were "not taught where the body parts are - they are not even taught the organisation of the nervous system". "We will be turning out Dr Deaths out of our own medical schools," he said. "They (doctors) won't be competent to manage patients ... it's just appalling. "It's part of the new educational dictums - 'don't put any stress on them (students) ... it doesn't matter if they don't know anything'." Associate Professor Oakes plans to provide voluntary anatomy lessons for Monash students.

Michael Gardner, 22, a fifth-year medical student at Monash, said that when he posted this fact on a student discussion board last year, 60 out of the 200 students in the year expressed interest in attending. "I think probably the old curriculum had too much emphasis on anatomy, but the new course has probably swung a little bit too far in the other direction," he said. "If you are assessing (a patient) who has had a stroke, if you do not have a good knowledge of the different parts of the brain, it can be difficult to assess which parts have been compromised and what treatment is warranted."

The criticisms of teaching methods are fiercely contested by the heads of Australia's 17 medical schools. Lindon Wing, chairman of the Committee of Deans of Australian Medical Schools, dismissed the examples of student ignorance as anecdotal and said the attacks stemmed from a "clash of cultures" within the profession. "It's the difference between people who have been brought up (through medical school) in a certain way, and want it to stay that way, and the people who are leading a revolution," Professor Wing said. "I have never seen any evidence ... in any of our disciplines that would show we are deficient." Ed Byrne, dean of medical, nursing and health sciences at Monash University, said his university's teaching was "superb" and said a redesigned medical course would graduate its first doctors this year. Although the amount of anatomy teaching had been cut from "several hundred" hours a few years ago to about 100 hours now, this had been matched by many new and better methods for teaching the subject. "We now teach anatomy in a more sophisticated way, using electronic models, images such as X-rays and MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging)," Professor Byrne said. "The fact that we have to reduce some of the things we taught in the past to make way for new areas of knowledge is a worldwide tendency."

Nick Lee, 22, is a fourth-year medical student at the University of NSW, and was part of the university's last intake before the course was remodelled. "I prefer the old method because that prepares us before we enter the hospitals," he said.

Source



BOOK ABOUT A CHARTER SUCCESS -- AUTHOR SIGNING

Joanne Jacobs has two book events coming up for "Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the School That Beat the Odds" -- her book about a charter school that prepares Hispanic students for college. Joanne writes:

"I'll speak and sign books on Thursday, May 11 at 5:30 pm at William E. Doar Jr. (WEDJ) Public Charter School for the Performing Arts, 705 Edgewood St. NE, Washington, DC (near the Rhode Island and Brookland-CUA metro stops). In addition, the school's musical troupe will perform and I'll ask guests to donate a children's book to the school library.

Founded in 2004, WEDJ School enrolls students from all over the city. Students take classes in music, dance and theater and perform in at least one public exhibition or performance each year. A longer school day and Saturday classes ensure enough time for academics and arts. Currently an elementary, the school is adding middle and high school classes in the fall.

On Wednesday, May 17 at 5:30 pm, I'll speak at Russell Byers Charter School, 1911 Arch St., in downtown Philadelphia. I'll also do a "bookraiser" for the school's library.

Founded in 2001, the school educates children in kindergarten (a two-year program starting at age four) through sixth grade using the Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound program. The school was created to honor the memory of Russell Byers, a Daily News columnist killed in a mugging.

Both the Washington and Philadelphia charter schools primarily serve black students. "Our School" follows the principal, teachers and students at Downtown College Prep, a San Jose charter high school that's 90 percent Hispanic. Most students come from Spanish-speaking immigrant families; most earned D's and F's in middle school and enter ninth grade with fifth-grade reading and math skills. They were left behind academically but promoted anyhow. Operating with a work-your-butt-off philosophy, Downtown College Prep now outscores the average California high school on the state's Academic Performance Index and sends all graduates to four-year colleges.

After 19 years as a San Jose Mercury News editorial writer and Knight Ridder columnist, I quit in 2001 to freelance, start an education blog at joannejacobs.com and report and write "Our School." I think "Our School" enables readers to step inside a charter school that's struggling, learning from mistakes, adapting and improving."

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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6 May, 2006

SOME EXPERIENCES OF BRITISH EDUCATION TODAY

For the past four years I have been writing a novel about two schools that form an unlikely partnership: one a rich, wildly successful boarding school, the other a fast-failing urban comprehensive. As my husband and I and our two children had all attended private secondary schools, I was familiar with independents. But the heroine of Wicked! A Tale of Two Schools is battling to save her comprehensive, so I needed to research the state sector, and in particular state school heads.

And what an inspiring bunch I found them. I was constantly bowled over by their compassion, their courage and their humour, and appalled by their vast workload, lack of resources and the stranglehold of red tape against which they struggled. I took out a subscription to The Times Educational Supplement and found a brave and beautiful deputy head called Katherine Eckersley who, when her school in Derby was closed, managed to chivvy the local authority into giving her a building and funding to "save" year 10, who would otherwise have been uprooted and transferred to other schools to take their GCSEs. It seemed to me that a miracle had happened.

All the older teachers at the Village Community High school, who'd been demoralised trying to control large, unruly classes, came back two or three days a week and, as Mrs Eckersley's "golden oldies", taught these 60 children in small classes. The teachers were free to teach and the children, previously regarded as no-hopers, were able to learn and have attention and love lavished upon them. The result was a happy school.

On other occasions I was appalled by the brutality with which schools were shut. Virginia Frayer, the marvellous former head of the Angel primary school, in the London borough of Islington, misread the privately controlled education authority's request to visit her thriving and successful school, hoping she would have a chance to ask for more funding. When told the real reason, she gasped: "But you haven't seen over my school; we've all spent weeks making it beautiful." Back came the deadly reply: "I don't need to see over a school to close it down." I only hope the designer flats built on the site of the Angel are ever more haunted by the weeping of children.

I also detested the way schools that shut have to endure the humiliation of other schools descending like vultures to appropriate desks, books, computers and lab equipment, though I rejoiced in the story of the enterprising school that flogged off the girls' uniforms to the local sex shop.

In other schools I encountered extraordinary poverty. Tactlessly teasing an enchanting little girl for wearing a long-sleeved winter shirt in the summer, I was hissed at by the head that her family couldn't afford two shirts. Then there was Danijella, the asylum seeker who was put in charge of the school bird table. She was discovered tipping bird seed, stale cake, discarded fat and broken biscuits into her school bag to augment her family's rations at the holding centre.

I was frequently moved to tears by the heroism of pupils who were determined to get an education in the face of daunting odds. One child was single-handedly looking after three younger sisters, as her mother lay in a drugged stupor on the living room floor. Such children face a wall of indifference and cruelty beyond the school gates: no food in a freezing cold house, drunken parents waiting to knock them about, or worse. But they love their parents and won't sneak because they're so terrified of being taken into care. One of the heroes in Wicked! is Paris, who has been in care since he was two, and who regularly goes missing as he travels the country searching for his mother.

I know it costs a fortune to keep a child in care - far more than to send them to Eton or Harrow - and children like Paris get only 10 pounds a month clothes allowance, so someone somewhere is doing nicely out of the arrangement.

I was horrified too by the vulnerability of teachers who are accused of abuse: arrested, named and shamed, allowed no contact with anyone from the school until a court case comes up often months later - their lives, too, are truly blighted.

My husband claims he can play the piano with only one hand because he was always using the other one to fend off a music master at his Yorkshire prep school. Perhaps schools were once dens of vice, but the pendulum has swung much too far when you can't give a pupil a lift home in a snowstorm, or cuddle a sobbing child who's just been taken away from her parents.

I was depressed by the creeping erosion of freedom and fun. No more conker fights, detentions if you chuck a snowball, no playground slides, experiments in science being phased out for fear of litigation. Half the joy of physics was seeing teachers emerging from a cloud of black smoke with their eyebrows singed, wailing: "But it worked with the other division."

Consider too the poor jack russell cast as Bill Sikes's dog in a Stroud school production of Oliver!, then sacked for health and safety reasons, an experience that his owners said had left him much saddened. He might have been cheered up by the dreadful but hilarious statistic that, in a survey, 80% of secondary school children thought Winston Churchill was the dog in the television advertisements for an insurance company. It makes one wonder if English history is still taught in schools.

On my travels around schools I also learnt how to converse with teenagers of either sex. "What football team do you support?" or "I've actually met Colin Firth," always breaks the ice. (Although, interestingly, the character that girls most frequently cite from Pride and Prejudice is Mrs Bennet: "Because she's soooo embarrassing - like my mum.")

To return to Katherine Eckersley. I was proud to be invited to the end-of-school prom, but I goofed. Imagining it meant some kind of promenade concert, I arrived in a crumpled pink suit only to find all the children, ravishing in ball dresses and dinner jackets, spilling out of limos. My embarrassment was soon dispelled by lashings of "teacher's lemonade" (bottles half full with Fanta and half vodka) as we danced to a splendid band in a hall transformed by hundreds of cut-out gold stars. When the prom king was crowned, one of his mates yelled out that it was the "first time there'd been a poof on the throne since James I", so they had learnt some English history after all.

When the balloons came down, the girls burst them with their stilettos to symbolise the end of a fantastic year. Outside the night was lit up by fireworks, culminating in white stars spelling out "Goodbye Village High". The words I heard over again as sobbing children flung their arms round Katherine were: "Oh, Miss, I'm going to miss you, Miss."

The children's GCSE results weren't spectacular by beastly league table standards; only a handful had gained the magic five. But so many who had been expected to get none notched up several Bs, Cs and Ds and, fired with new confidence, went off happily to sixth-form colleges, or to learn to be hairdressers and carpenters, or take up places in sports academies.

I was unable to celebrate with them that year, but I did spend a wonderful results day at another favourite school, Barnwood Park in Gloucester. Most schools e-mail their results, or pin them in envelopes to the noticeboard. Gill Pyatt, Barnwood Park's inspiring head, broke the good (and bad) news personally to every girl and was so good at praising and comforting them all. Summoned by mobile and text, excited parents were soon storming the playground, bearing flowers in cellophane tubes and cards in coloured envelopes. One girl, flabbergasted to get the magic five, rang the factory where her dad worked and made them broadcast her results over the PA system.

Looking back, I am touched that so many heads trusted me enough to let me wander round their schools, where I saw marvellous and imaginative teaching. "Macbeth was a killing machine on a fantastic high having routed the terrorists who were trying to overthrow King Duncan," wrote Claire Matthews, an English and drama teacher at Archway School, Stroud. "For homework," she had added, "if you were a costume designer, how would you kit out the weird sisters? Or imagine you're a war correspondent, like John Simpson, and write a script telling the viewers at home about Macbeth's first victory."

Wandering along the corridors at Archway, I found a touching poem written by a year 10 pupil: "Love is like rugby football, it can get a little rough." On the staffroom wall was a sign saying: "Thought for the week: chewing gum. We're gumming down." Then I remembered a postcard attached to the filing cabinet in the general office at Village High: "One man gets run over on the roads every five minutes and he's getting very fed up with it."

What I loved about schools is that despite the tragedies, cheerfulness always breaks in. Having my photograph taken with the girls at Barnwood Park, they told me that while eating their packed lunch in the playground, they'd been bombarded "by ginormous killer gulls", so they'd put a pretend owl called Ernie up on the roof to terrify the birds. As I left, however, two gulls were happily perched on Ernie's head and five others were noisily queuing up for a turn. It seemed to sum up education.

Source




Australian Leftist leader calls for tax breaks for private school parents

(More support for the view that Australia is the world's most conservative country)

Parents who sacrifice their lifestyles to send their children to private schools should be thanked and supported with tax incentives and childcare support, says Labor Party national president Warren Mundine. Just a day after Labor leader Kim Beazley discarded his predecessor Mark Latham's class-war policy of cutting public funding to the nation's wealthy private schools, Mr Mundine said his party should consider offering tax breaks on school fees and direct subsidies for parents using the private school system, similar to the childcare rebate.

Mr Mundine called for an end to the ideologically driven debate that has dominated the ALP's education policy for the past two or three decades and for debate instead on the best ways to support families in their choice of education. "I think they're great parents, I take my hat off to them," Mr Mundine said of people who sent their children to private schools. "These families are contributing on top of their taxes. They're paying for education twice. "They're paying $4 billion (in private school fees) on top of their taxes to provide the best education for their kids. Not all are wealthy people, they're just ordinary, average Australians trying to do the best for their kids."

Mr Mundine, a father of seven, said his own children attended both public and private schools. His two children still at school include his daughter, Garra, 14, who attends St Scholastica's at Glebe, in Sydney's inner west, and son Yawun, 17, who attends St Joseph's College in the northern suburb of Hunters Hill.

Despite confirmation yesterday that wealthy private schools may not secure real funding increases under Labor's plan, Mr Beazley's pledge that no private school would be worse off won support from elite school principals unhappy with the current funding system. Melbourne Grammar principal Paul Sheahan said the Howard Government's funding system for private schools was unfair and said it had entered into too many special deals with different schools.

The federal Government's funding model - known as the socio-economic status (SES) model - does not take private school fees and income into account when determining funding. Instead, it links enrolment details of where students live with census data on average income and education levels.

More here

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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5 May, 2006

California parents, taxpayers, finally understand government schools are failing their children

Californians have a low opinion of the state's education system, with residents of Los Angeles taking a dimmer view of their public schools than those in any other region, a poll released Thursday says. The Public Policy Institute of California survey found that just 15 percent of Los Angeles County residents gave the local public schools an A grade and 14 percent gave a D or F. By comparison, Orange County and San Diego residents gave their schools the highest rating, with 25 percent giving an A, and only 7 percent giving a D or F.

Los Angeles Unified School District board President Marlene Canter said the public perception lags the actual improvements the district has undergone in test scores and others areas in the last few years. "We're dealing with 30 years of neglect," Canter said. "What we have seen in the last six years is more progress than has happened over the last 30. "I think it will take time for the perception of success to catch up. We're moving in the right direction." She said, for example, the district has shown one of the best improvements in API scores at the elementary level in the state. One problem facing the district, she said, is adequately communicating some of the successes to the public.

The poll comes as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is pushing a controversial effort to establish control over the Los Angeles Unified School District. Villaraigosa said he was not surprised by the survey's findings. "I think there are a lot of reasons people are unhappy with their schools," Villaraigosa said. "I think people are looking for change and fundamental reform in the education system." He noted that statewide, education is underfunded and per-pupil spending in California is near the bottom among the states. "It's no wonder people are upset with the schools," he said. Villaraigosa's comments came at a news conference where he promised to take an active role to win voter support for Proposition 82, the measure on the June ballot that would increase income taxes on those making over $400,000 a year to fund a statewide preschool program.

The poll found 51 percent of likely voters support Proposition 82, and 40 percent oppose it. That measure would impose taxes on the wealthy, but the poll found most average Californians wouldn't be willing to let their own taxes increase to help improve education. Sixty-three percent of Californians would oppose an increase in the state sales tax and 72 percent oppose an increase in property taxes to help provide additional funding for schools. A majority, however, was willing to raise taxes on the rich, with 64 percent supporting raising the top income tax rate on the wealthy to pay for education.

"The public's frustration with the state of education is palpable," PPIC survey director Mark Baldassare said. "They see lots of rhetoric but little progress." LAUSD Superintendent Roy Romer said the district has made substantial progress in recent years. The lower poll ratings, he said, reflect the characteristics of large urban areas where people typically feel disconnected from their government institutions. Over the last six years, he said, Academic Performance Index scores are up 196 points at the elementary level, compared with a state average increase of 125 points. Meanwhile, the district is building more new schools more rapidly than any other large urban district in the country. "We are rapidly changing," Romer said. "If you took this poll five years ago, you'd have found a whole lot more negative. If you take it five years from now, you'd find a lot more positive." .....

Sixty percent of adults rated the state's public education as "not so good" or "poor" in preparing students for jobs and the work force.

More here



British school selection to be purely racial

No mention to be made of any differences except racial differences. Any mention of merit forbidden

Schools are to be required to balance the social and racial mix of all their pupils under new government rules designed to end backdoor selection, The Times has learnt. In plans described as a "minefield" by head teachers, schools will also have to carry out detailed research into applicants to ensure they "attract all sections of local communities".

At the same time they will be banned from asking about the financial, employment or marital status of parents before a child is admitted, to ensure fairness. Heads will also be barred from inquiring about a child's "behaviour or attitude" at primary school when deciding on admissions.

Ministers were given a warning last night that the rules in their proposed new admissions code would create extra red tape for staff and divert resources from teaching. John Dunford, of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: "These proposals are inconsistent and I think they will place impossible demands on head teachers." The measures were promised by ministers to appease Labour MPs who are unhappy over plans for trust schools.

The Tories, who support the creation of independent trust schools, accused the Government of planning a "draconian" admissions code with "prescription piled on prescription". Nick Gibb, a Tory schools spokesman, said: "The code is far too prescriptive and . . . reflects the Left's obsession with admissions rather than standards." He added: "The purpose of the code is to make the system of admissions crystal clear but measures like this are not crystal clear. "It will be an extra bureaucratic burden on head teachers when what they should be focusing on is raising the quality of teaching at the school. Instead, they will be bogged down conducting analysis for social engineering reasons."

The statistical work will be required from all "admission authorities", meaning the governing bodies of foundation, voluntary-aided and academy schools. In practice, much of the extra work will fall upon senior staff, heads fear. The requirement is included in a "skeleton" school admission code seen by MPs analysing the Education and Inspections Bill.

If schools fail to carry out the analysis and act upon any shortfall of certain categories of children they can be ordered to do so by the Education Secretary, the document states. The Liberal Democrats will propose a system of anonymous admissions, which they believe will be fairer than the Government's proposed rules.

Mr Dunford added: "The provisions on a mixed intake are a bit of a minefield because I do not know how people will determine whether schools have a balanced intake. "Encouraging schools to have a more balanced intake is good but it could mean a large amount of work for head teachers in making all the calculations into whether they have got the approved mix in their school. I think that whole area needs a lot more work."

The proposed code states that schools "must act" upon the new statistical information about children's backgrounds. Secondary schools should work with primary schools in more deprived areas, for example, to encourage applications from children of poorer families. The document adds: "Faith schools should similarly work with local primary schools to encourage local people of the faith, or of other or no faith, to apply for their school."

The code also urges schools to make it clear that there is no charge related to admissions. "It is poor practice for schools to refer to donations and voluntary contributions in their prospectus," it states. A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said: "We need to ensure that schools reflect their local community and some schools will already look at these issues. This is about serving a local community and we are clear that schools need to have open and transparent systems."

Jacqui Smith, the Schools Minister, has said that consultation on the code will begin in September and that it will come into force next February and govern admissions for September 2008.

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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4 May, 2006

TEACHERS AT RISK

Dan Janke knew something was wrong when he walked into the principal's office and found the superintendent waiting for him. When Janke sat down, the school administrators delivered a shocking message: Janke, an art teacher in the New Ulm, Minn., public schools, was suspected of sending sexually explicit e-mails to sixth-grade girls.

Janke was sent home that afternoon, suspended while police investigated. Within days, the truth came out. Two seventh-grade boys had posed as their teacher in an online chat with the girls.

Every teacher can recall times when a student has tried to get even. But the revenge assumes a new dimension online, where children raised in front of the computer often hold the upper hand. From New York to California, students are facing suspension, expulsion and even criminal charges for online spoofs targeted at teachers and school officials. In Florida, a high school English teacher sued a student who she said posted her picture online, along with sexually explicit comments.

This month, some Coon Rapids middle-schoolers got a bogus e-mail purportedly from one of their teachers, inviting them to visit him on MySpace. When they clicked on the link to the popular networking site, they were taken to a Web page filled with pornography and hate speech. Other assaults come on Web sites such as Ratemyteacher.com, where students can grade their teachers on a scale of 1 to 5, complete with nasty comments and frowning cartoon faces.

For educators, Internet harassment is "one more stressor to add to a very stressful job," said Sandy Skaar, president of Anoka-Hennepin Education Minnesota, the teachers' union in the state's largest district.

A student with a grudge - or playing a misguided joke - can put out a damaging message to thousands of people. With the Internet, adolescents have a powerful megaphone. Do they have the maturity to use it responsibly? Janke doesn't think so. "We don't let people drive until they're 16," he said. "They can't vote until they're 18, and they can't drink until they're 21. Yet kids in the third grade are on the Internet. "We have given them this big responsibility, when they're not ready for it without proper supervision and training," Janke said. "It's a dangerous thing."

Teenagers operate in a different world from adults, said Ascan Felix Koerner, a University of Minnesota professor who studies adolescent communication. "The moral compass fails them sometimes, and they're not fully appreciative of the consequences," he said. "They might create a website, and their peers would take it as a joke, and they perceive that adults would take it that way, too."

Kirk Bauermeister didn't know he was on MySpace until his teenage daughter told him. Students at the middle school in Costa Mesa, Calif., had created a fake MySpace site for Bauermeister, the school principal. "The anonymity of it makes it real scary," Bauermeister said. "It gives people the ability to do and say things they'd never do in real life."

Many schools have blocked access to MySpace on school computers, but Bauermeister said it's often futile: "As soon as we block it, they find a way around it."

Source



FAILING THE CALIFORNIA HIGH SCHOOL EXIT EXAM IS NO BAR TO COLLEGE ADMISSION

So who needs to read and write to go to college?

Students who do not pass will not graduate and will not receive a diploma, yet that does not necessarily mean the door to college is closed. It is possible, in fact, to get a bachelor's degree or higher without a high school diploma - as long as students go to community college first. While a diploma or its equivalent, such as the General Educational Development certificate, are required to enroll in CSU or University of California campuses, no such requirement exists at the state's two-year community colleges. Community college enrollment is open to anyone 18 or over.

Still, some campuses are watching the state's exit exam figures and are expecting they will counsel students on their options if the exit exam proves too tough. "Our counsel would be to go to community college," said Jeff Cook, executive director of enrollment services at Cal State East Bay - where he anticipates a "minimal" number of would-be freshmen will be turned away in the fall because they have not passed the exam. Once a student completes 60 units of transferable credits at a community college, they are eligible to transfer into CSU, Cook said. By that time, a diploma does not matter. "Once they've earned 60 units, the CSU doesn't look at their high school record at that point," he said.

Ditto at the University of California, said spokesman Ricardo Vazquez. But UC officials may also grant some wiggle room to would-be freshmen who have not passed the exit exam. "The university assumes that all students offered admission to UC will have passed the California High School Exit Exam, but if it turns out that is not the case, then individual situations will be reviewed by campuses on a case-by-case basis," he said. "Given our rigorous admission standards, we assume that all students will have passed the test," Vazquez said. "We expect very, very few, if any, of those cases."

Community colleges have varying degrees of concern about the exam and its impact on future students. "You don't need a high school diploma to go to a community college, you don't need a high school diploma to get an (associate of arts) degree, and you don't need a high school diploma to transfer to a four-year university from a community college, so it's not an issue for us," said Barbara Christensen,

More here



UK: Headteachers hit out at new "babysitting" role: "Schools will become 'a national babysitting service' as a result of government plans to force them to open from 8 am to 6 pm, the leader of Britain's biggest headteachers' organization said yesterday. Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said it meant a 50-hour school week for some children -- with headteachers seeing more of them than their parents."

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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3 May, 2006

OHIO: LEGAL ATTACK ON PARENTS

The Cleveland Bar Association is threatening to fine the parents of an autistic boy $10,000 for not hiring a lawyer when they brought, and largely won, a court case on their son's behalf four years ago. After a long court battle, Brian and Susan Woods settled their case with the Akron school district in 2002 when the district agreed to send Daniel, now 11, to a private school.

But in February, the Cleveland Bar Association took issue with the Woodses' handling parts of that case themselves and not through a lawyer. The bar charged them with unauthorized practice of law and threatened a $10,000 fine, saying that although the Woodses were allowed to represent themselves, they could not act as lawyers for their son. The charge is normally filed against nonlawyers who provide legal services for pay, but is rare against parents.

Representatives of several advocacy groups - plus the National School Boards Association, the American Bar Association and the Ohio bar's Committee on the Unauthorized Practice of Law - could not recall any cases of parents being charged with this misdemeanor offense. Last week, the Ohio Supreme Court, which will ultimately decide the case, ordered the bar to present evidence on why the case should not be dismissed, saying it appeared that "Woods has not engaged in the unauthorized practice of law."

Michael Harvey, the Rocky River lawyer handling the charges for the bar association, said the goal is to protect the rights of children. Harvey said special education laws are so complex that children need experts, not untrained parents, looking out for their rights. "You hope parents will do the right job for the child, but that's not always the case," Harvey said. Harvey said that although the bar is officially seeking a $10,000 fine, it would be happy with an admission that the Woodses broke the law and an agreement not to do it again.

Brian Woods thinks he's being intimidated to prevent parents from handling cases themselves - and to protect the large fees lawyers charge for such cases, which can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

More here



THE OLD ENVY OF PRIVATE SCHOOLS STILL FESTERING IN BRITAIN

(Note that when the Brits used to refer to "Public schools", they meant a place where you go to be educated when you do not have a personal tutor. That usage is now dying out however -- with "independent school" being the preferred term for the same thing. Some of the people quoted below do use the old terminology, however

Private schools face a fresh battle to preserve their charitable status in the face of a powerful campaign to end the tax break that helps to keep many of them in business. A coalition of charities and Labour MPs will target legislation this summer in an effort to block the tax breaks that give fee-charging schools 88 million pounds a year. Campaigners claim that the Charities Bill fails to put an end to the presumption that private schools should have charitable status.

The Bill calls on independent schools to demonstrate that they benefit the wider community to justify their tax advantages. But, according to the Charity Commission's interpretation of the proposals, private schools and other charities that charge high fees will have to prove only that the less fortunate are "not entirely excluded" from their services.

Campaigners, led by the British Red Cross, among others, say that this does not go far enough. In a joint letter to Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, they say that the public benefit test will have "minimal impact" on charities that charge high fees unless a more robust definition is drawn up. "The Bill does not go far enough. Anyone able to benefit from a charity's service must have a reasonable chance of doing so," the charities said in a joint statement. Their stance is supported by between 35 and 40 Labour MPs, who are planning to rebel against the Government when the Charities Bill is debated in the House of Commons this summer.

John McDonnell, Labour MP for Hayes & Harlington, said that he hoped to table an amendment to the Bill with a more robust definition of public benefit, modelled on Scottish law, to ensure that charities charging high fees did not place "unduly restrictive" conditions on people wanting to benefit from their services. "I would like to exclude public schools [He is using the old terminology. He means private schools] from being charities. However, if they do want to demonstrate how they are in the public interest, we need to raise the bar and then ensure they do it properly," he said. John Grogan, Labour MP for Selby, North Yorkshire, said that to pass a robust public benefit test a public school would have to do a lot more than merely allow the local comprehensive to play football on its grounds once a year or offer a couple of scholarships.

Rosamund McCarthy, a charity law specialist at the firm Bates, Wells & Braithwaite, said that the public benefit clause could scupper the Bill. "A lot of people might see this as an assault on public schools, but it is not. It's about identifying what is truly charitable. The vast majority of the public have no idea that the majority of independent schools are charities. It would be a tragedy if the Bill falters on this point because there are a huge number of very good things in it," she said.

Stephen King, of the Independent Schools Council, said that his members already provided immense public benefit to the wider community. "For every one pound in taxation benefits they get, schools are giving 3 pounds in assistance with fees," he said. A spokeswoman for the Home Office said that the Government's proposed definition of public benefit did provide a sound basis for the Charity Commission to determine whether organisations should have charitable status.

Source



U.K.: MALICIOUS STUDENTS SHOULD BE PROSECUTED

Head teachers said that they should be free to sue pupils and their families if allegations of abuse are made maliciously. Members of the National Association of Head Teachers voted unanimously to support legal action against children who make unfounded accusations of physical or sexual abuse with the intention of wrecking teachers' careers. The union said that the threat would help to deter malicious children who, at present, suffered no repercussions for making allegations that they knew to be untrue.

Michael Murphy, who proposed the motion, told delegates that it was not intended to hinder investigations of justifiable accusations against heads. "But the pendulum has swung too far. All we want is balance, fairness and freedom from fear," said Mr Murphy, head of Corpus Christi primary school in Wolverhampton. "If you do something wrong you expect to be accountable for it. But we must support those good people who do their best to support children and their communities but are thwarted by misguided and malicious individuals."

Heads who faced an allegation of abuse suffered the humiliation of suspension, isolation from the school and their colleagues, police investigation and the possibility of dismissal for gross misconduct. "Then the Crown Prosecution Service throws the case out. Our colleague goes back into the school and is left to face the reprehensible outcome of this malicious, unproven and unnecesary allegation alone. The perpetrator walks away without accountability. This cannot be right, fair or just," Mr Murphy said. The conference voted to instruct its ruling council to investigate "ways of taking legal action against a young adult, or member of their family, who make a clear cut, provable malicious allegation".

Source

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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2 May, 2006

THE ILLOGIC OF NCLB

It's a bold name for a piece of legislation. You'd be hard pressed to find a dentist that claimed, "No tooth shall ever have a cavity ... ever." There is no emergency room with a sign on the doors that reads, "No one will ever die here again ... and this time we mean it." It's absurd, of course. Some people don't brush their teeth. Some bullet wounds are bigger than others.

There's only so much any one doctor or dentist can control. The notion is almost as crazy as "No Child Left Behind." Many of our kids come in not knowing their alphabet. At other schools, all the kids arrive knowing the alphabet, with many already beginning to read. Still, at other schools, no children come in without any letter recognition at all, not even the ones in their names. There's only so much any one teacher can control. Some needs are just bigger than others.

Now, for us, the legislation has become tangible. It's easy to rail against something before the first shoes begin to drop. Just a few miles down the road from the school where I teach is another school in our district. Same teacher qualifications. Good people. It was one of the first schools to take on our district writing program. Teachers from that school were out training the rest of us. When I was looking for the most effective ways to service kids in my Title I program, I asked the person running their program. Learned a few things, too. Top-notch administrator. Somebody I'd want to work for. Just a few miles down the road from us.

And, that's a potentially failing school under "No Child Left Behind." On the other hand, our school received an honorable mention from the state of California under their Distinguished School Program. And the schools are just a few miles down the road from each other. Just a few. So, what's the difference? Same district. Same mission statement. Same practices and techniques. Same adopted materials. Are we, as a staff, that much better? More dedicated? Harder working? If only it were that easy. Each school has its seasoned veterans, its shining stars. Even some rookies. Just like all schools.

So, why were we invited to apply to be a distinguished school, while this other school is allegedly failing? The answer is poverty, mostly. Though only a few miles down the road, they have a far greater number of kids receiving free lunch. Their parents are much more likely to hold jobs, rather than build careers. Their families are also much more transient than ours. And they have greater language issues. Have you ever tried to take a standardized test in a foreign language? Don't bother. So what will happen if this school fails to meet testing goals again this year? Money will have to be diverted from the kids and put aside for transportation. Kids from this school will get to choose a new school in our area and this school will have to flip the bill to get them there. And which kids might actually leave? The kids who are doing well. The kids whose families are on top of it enough to make the move. This takes those kids away from their school testing totals. It takes away their brightest and best. And, once they leave, who will be "left behind"? Poor kids, the disenfranchised. Now we've got poor kids at an even poorer school.

And my school? Well, by luck, we may wind up with their brightest and best. We are, after all, just a few miles down the road. If that happens, our test scores will go up. The real answer is easy. The execution is not, but the answer is no great stretch. It's the same answer for most of society's ills. Fight poverty. Don't seek to make people poorer. You want children to perform better in school? Fight poverty. Their poverty....

Source



BRITISH HEAD TEACHERS REFUSE TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

Head teachers threatened a campaign of disobedience yesterday to wreck the Government's testing regime in primary schools.

The National Association of Head Teachers voted unanimously at its annual conference to oppose the continued publication of league tables of test results for 11-year-olds. Mick Brookes, its general secretary, said that parents who supported the campaign could be asked to keep their children at home when national curriculum tests in English, mathematics and science are due to be taken. They could also be urged to send children to school late on test days to invalidate the results. Regulations state that results are invalid at schools where less than two thirds of pupils take the tests.

The union, which represents 85 per cent of primary heads, said that it would seek support for a boycott from other teachers' unions and governors. It would also consider a ballot of its 28,000 members on a refusal to supply the Government with test results from their schools for publication. Mr Brookes, in a dig at Tony Blair's policy of promoting parental control of schools, said that the campaign would be a true demonstration of parent power. As a head teacher in Nottinghamshire, he had once invalidated results for his primary school by hinting that parents who opposed the tests might want to send their children in late.

Relations between the union and Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, have soured rapidly since it withdrew last year from a national agreement on reforming the school workforce. The union accused the Government on Friday of snubbing heads by refusing to send a minister to address its conference for the first time since Labour came to power in 1997. The threat of a tests boycott would pitch Ms Kelly into a confrontation with heads when she is struggling to win support for the Government's Education and Inspections Bill, which is promising greater autonomy for schools.

Mr Brookes said that his union would use the power of persuasion initially to try to convince ministers to abolish the tests. "We don't want to get into further confrontation but I think we have been given permission from this conference to take action to stop them," he said.

It was too late to stop this year's tests, later this month, but the union was determined to ensure that they were the last ones. It would draw up an action plan to replace the tests with alternative forms of assessment, as had been done in Wales. "We will say to the Government that we have tried to consult with you and this has fallen on deaf ears, so we are now going to take matters into our own hands," Mr Brookes said. Delegates at the conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, angrily condemned the pressure placed on pupils and teachers by the need for their schools to perform well in the league tables of results. Gail Larkin, the head of Auriol Junior School, in Ewell, Surrey, who proposed the motion, said: "We gave national council the green light to fight for the abolition of league tables two years ago and yet the situation has not changed. It is time we really stood up to be counted. The publication of league tables in England must stop now."

Chris Howard, a member of the union's national executive, said that the Welsh Assembly had abolished tests and league tables without any decline in standards [How do trhey know??] . Northern Ireland and Scotland also produced no league tables of schools. "League tables are there to referee an educational marketplace and there is no other justification for them," he said. "It is absolutely vital that we campaign to get rid of the tables in England."

The Department for Education and Skills insisted that the continuation of tests and tables was a non-negotiable part of its school reforms. David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that the Conservatives would not abolish league tables either. He drew rumbles of dissent as he told the conference: "We have to accept that we are working in a society where this information is something that parents expect."

Source



WHY IS THIS NOT IN PLACE ALREADY?

Teachers should be protected against malicious allegations from pupils by enjoying anonymity during any investigations, David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said yesterday. Mr Willetts told the annual conference of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, that too many allegations of abuse turned out to be untrue. School discipline was being undermined by false claims from pupils and the lives of individual teachers suffered tremendous harm. He said that the Conservatives would table an amendment to the Education and Inspections Bill to give teachers the same protection as children while allegations of abuse are investigated. This would prevent them from being named in public unless they were charged with an offence. Guidance to schools, local authorities and police already suggested that anonymity should be maintained during inquiries but Mr Willetts said that this needed to be given statutory force.

More here

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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1 May, 2006

PROPAGANDA IN LOUISIANA

Here is the indoctination of public school students - many of whom can hardly read and speak a complete sentence

Ten-year-old Kahlee Smith said she heard about Earth Day for the first time when fourth-graders from her school, Kerr Elementary, were invited to participate in Earth Fest 2006. But by lunchtime at Friday's event, Kahlee was on her way to learning all about recycling, environmentalism and nature. She was one of about 300 fourth-graders from a half-dozen Bossier Parish schools who gathered at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Bossier City to commemorate Earth Day, which was April 22. "I want to appreciate Earth Day," Kahlee said. "If we ruin (Earth), then where else would we live?" Jessica Lynn, another fourth-grader at Kerr, was also excited: "I get to meet new people and see what Earth Day is really about."

Bossier City, Bossier Parish and Keep Bossier Beautiful organized the second annual event. About a dozen organizations set up booths with information and demonstrations. Gail Kopp, the Bossier City employee who coordinated Earth Fest, said the event started because Elm Grove Middle School asked last year if the city had planned anything for Earth Day. Officials hadn't, but they liked the idea. They invited fourth-graders, because lessons on the environment are included in the state's Comprehensive Curriculum for that grade, Kopp said.

Teri Glasz, who teaches at Central Park Elementary, said she was as excited as her students were about the field trip. Like many teachers, she said she doesn't always have the time or the materials to do as many hands-on science activities as she would like. "It makes a big difference" when students make or do something, instead of reading about it in a book, Glasz said.

Students came in two shifts. They watched a performance of a traditional Native American dance, learned about recycling and looked at the difference between city water before and after it's treated.

Oscar Rodriguez, a senior water treatment operator for the city's water plant, said even most adults don't understand what happens to water before it comes out of the faucet. He hoped students would talk to their families about what they learned, as well as relate the lesson back to what they have learned in class. "There's chemistry involved in this, there's science involved," Rodriguez said. "They can actually see on the other end: I do need my math and I do need my science."

Eventually, Kopp said officials would like to expand Earth Fest to a weekendlong spring festival at the North Bossier Park.

Source



RACIAL TENSION ADMITTED AT CALIFORNIA HIGH SCHOOL

But note how extraordinarily brief the report is!

Authorities responded to a fight Friday afternoon at a high school in Santa Clarita. The fight at Hart High School was sparked by racial tensions, authorities said. The fights occurred at about noon and school officials said that they called deputies to keep the fights from spreading. Students were sent home for the day. Authorities said four students were detained for questioning. Students said the confrontations stemmed from a fight Thursday. No injuries were reported. Deputies carried guns that shoot pepper balls, but the weapons were never fired.

Source



AZ: English-learner plan rejected: "A judge on Wednesday rejected the Legislature's plan to improve instruction for students struggling to learn English, saying it did not include enough new money and would have violated federal law in several ways. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Raner Collins drew a defiant response from Republican legislative leaders that signaled more protracted political standoffs and courtroom battles before schools receive anything. 'I don't believe this judge is an activist; I just think he's wrong,' said Senate President Ken Bennett, R-Prescott. 'He has misconstrued the actual facts of the bill.' Collins' ruling was intended to send state lawmakers immediately back to the drawing board to satisfy a 6-year-old court order to help 154,000 mostly Latino schoolchildren who are falling behind and in danger of dropping out."

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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"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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