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31 October, 2007

1 in 10 Schools Are 'Dropout Factories'

Showing a complete failure to tailor black education to black characteristics. There have been very successful black schools in the past -- and all had high levels of discipline. But blacks kids get just the opposite of that these days -- with predictable results. For decades there have been the bright-eyed reformers who get passable results for a while by giving selected student huge amounts of individual attention but they always have been and always will be an ungeneralizable model for education as a whole -- as the immovably low level of overall performance reported below shows. Learning to shut up, sit up and listen is of itself one of the most valuable lessons these "dropout" kids could learn

It's a nickname no principal could be proud of: "Dropout Factory," a high school where no more than 60 percent of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year. That description fits more than one in 10 high schools across America. "If you're born in a neighborhood or town where the only high school is one where graduation is not the norm, how is this living in the land of equal opportunity?" asks Bob Balfanz, the Johns Hopkins researcher who coined the term "dropout factory."

There are about 1,700 regular or vocational high schools nationwide that fit that description, according to an analysis of Education Department data conducted by Johns Hopkins for The Associated Press. That's 12 percent of all such schools, about the same level as a decade ago. While some of the missing students transferred, most dropped out, says Balfanz. The data look at senior classes for three years in a row to make sure local events like plant closures aren't to blame for the low retention rates.

The highest concentration of dropout factories is in large cities or high-poverty rural areas in the South and Southwest. Most have high proportions of minority students. These schools are tougher to turn around because their students face challenges well beyond the academic ones - the need to work as well as go to school, for example, or a need for social services.

Utah, which has low poverty rates and fewer minorities than most states, is the only state without a dropout factory. Florida and South Carolina have the highest percentages. "Part of the problem we've had here is, we live in a state that culturally and traditionally has not valued a high school education," said Jim Foster, a spokesman for the South Carolina department of education. He noted that residents in that state previously could get good jobs in textile mills without a high school degree, but that those jobs are gone today.

Washington hasn't focused much attention on the problem. The No Child Left Behind Act, for example, pays much more attention to educating younger students. But that appears to be changing. House and Senate proposals to renew the 5-year-old No Child law would give high schools more federal money and put more pressure on them to improve on graduation performance, and the Bush administration supports that idea. The current NCLB law imposes serious consequences on schools that report low scores on math and reading tests, and this fallout can include replacement of teachers or principals - or both. But the law doesn't have the same kind of enforcement teeth when it comes to graduation rates. Nationally, about 70 percent of U.S. students graduate on time with a regular diploma. For Hispanic and black students, the proportion drops to about half. The legislative proposals circulating in Congress would:

_Make sure schools report their graduation rates by racial, ethnic, and other subgroups and are judged on those results. That's to ensure that schools aren't just graduating white students in high numbers, but also are working to ensure that minority students get diplomas.

_Get states to build data systems to keep track of students throughout their school years and more accurately measure graduation and dropout rates.

_Ensure that states count graduation rates in a uniform way. States have used a variety of formulas, including counting the percentage of entering seniors who get a diploma. That measurement ignores the obvious fact that kids who drop out typically do so before their senior year.

_Create strong progress goals for graduation rates and impose sanctions on schools that miss those benchmarks. Most states currently lack meaningful goals, according to The Education Trust, a nonprofit group that advocates for poor and minority children.

The current law requires testing in reading and math once in high school, and those tests take on added importance because of the serious consequences for a school of failure. Critics say that creates a perverse incentive for schools to encourage kids to drop out before they bring down a school's scores. "The vast majority of educators do not want to push out kids, but the pressures to raise test scores above all else are intense," said Bethany Little, vice president for policy at the Alliance for Excellent Education, an advocacy group focused on high schools. "To know if a high school is doing its job, we need to consider test scores and graduation rates equally."

Little said some students pushed out of high schools are encouraged to enroll in programs that prepare them to take the GED exam. People who pass that test get certificates indicating they have high-school level academic skills. But the research shows that getting a GED doesn't lead to the kind of job or college success associated with a regular diploma.

Loretta Singletary, 17, enrolled in a GED program after dropping out of a Washington, D.C. high school that she describes as huge, chaotic and violent. "Girls got jumped. Boys got jumped, teachers (were) fighting and hitting students," she said. She said teachers had low expectations for students, which led to dull classes. "They were teaching me stuff I already knew ... basic nouns, simple adjectives." Singletary said a subject she loved was science but she wasn't offered it, and complaints to administrators went unanswered. "I was interested in experiments," she said. "I didn't have science in 9th or 10th grade."

A GED classmate of Singletary's is 23-year-old Dontike Miller, who attended and left two D.C. high schools on the dropout factory list. Miller was brought up by a single mother who used drugs, and he says teachers and counselors seemed oblivious to what was going on in his life. He would have liked for someone to sit him down and say, "'You really need to go to class. We're going to work with you. We're going to help you'," Miller said. Instead,"I had nobody."

Teachers and administrators at Baltimore Talent Development High School, where 90 percent of kids are on track toward graduating on time, are working hard to make sure students don't have an experience like Miller's. The school, which sits in the middle of a high-crime, impoverished neighborhood two miles west of downtown Baltimore, was founded by Balfanz and others four years ago as a laboratory for getting kids out on time with a diploma and ready for college. Teachers, students and administrators at the school know each other well. "I know teachers that have knocked on people's doors. They want us to succeed," 12th-grader Jasmine Coleman said during a lunchtime chat in the cafeteria.

Fellow senior Victoria Haynes says she likes the way the school organizes teachers in teams of four, with each team of teachers assigned to a group of 75 students. The teachers work across subject areas, meaning English and math teachers, for example, collaborate on lessons and discuss individual students' needs. "They all concentrate on what's best for us together," Haynes said. "It's very family oriented. We feel really close to them."

Teachers, too, say it works. "I know the students a lot better, because I know the teachers who teach them," said 10th-grade English teacher Jenni Williams. "Everyone's on the same page, so it's not like you're alone in your mission."

That mission can be daunting. The majority of students who enter Baltimore Talent Development in ninth grade are reading at a fifth- or sixth-grade level. To get caught up, students have 80-minute lessons in reading and math, instead of the typical 45 minutes. They also get additional time with specialists if needed.

The fact that kids are entering high schools with such poor literacy skills raises questions about how much catch-up work high schools can be expected to do and whether more pressure should be placed on middle schools and even elementary schools, say some high-school principals. "We're at the end of the process," says Mel Riddile, principal of T.C. Williams High School, a large public school in Alexandria, Va. "People don't walk into 9th grade and suddenly have a reading problem."

Other challenges to high schools come from outside the school system. In high-poverty districts, some students believe it's more important to work than to stay in school, or they are lured away by gang activity or other kinds of peer or family pressure.

At Baltimore Talent Development, administrators try to set mini-milestones and celebrations for students so they stay motivated. These include more fashionable uniforms with each promotion to the next grade, pins for completing special programs and pizza parties to celebrate good attendance records. "The kids are just starved for recognition and attention. Little social rewards matter to them," said Balfanz. Balfanz says, however, that students understand the biggest reward they can collect is the piece of paper handed to them on graduation day. Without it, "there's not much work for you anymore," he said. "There's no way out of the cycle of poverty if you don't have a high school diploma."

Source




Australia: Bureaucracy choking universities too

Three new bureaucrats for every new teaching position

Universities had increased administrative staff numbers by nearly 300 per cent in 10 years because the federal Government had swathed them in red tape, a sector union said yesterday. National Tertiary Education Union policy analyst Andrew Nette scoffed at Education Minister Julie Bishop's comment on ABC radio that universities did not need more money but rather better management, more academics and fewer administrators. "It's a simplistic argument to say that universities should employ less general staff and more academics, given the demands of her own Government that have been a significant factor in the increase in general staff," Mr Nette said.

Education Department figures show that full-time academic staff increased by 85 per cent between 1997 and last year, from 21,787 to 40,216. In the same period, general staff numbers increased by 293 per cent, from 17,665 to 51,792. The Group of Eight largest universities released a report at the weekend saying that because of a fall in public funding, university standards were falling as students paid more to attend.

In response, Ms Bishop told ABC radio: "The administration costs of universities are increasing at the expense of teaching and research. I believe the universities should be employing more lecturers and fewer administrators ... they should be changing that balance."

National lobby group Universities Australia said that since 2004, increases in academic staff were higher than in administrative staff. UA chief executive officer Glenn Withers said: "We are prioritising teaching."

Labor education spokesman Stephen Smith agreed that universities had to be efficient. "When the commonwealth hands over money, it needs to be satisfied that sufficient and appropriate governance and accountability procedures are in place," he said. "My criticism is there is not enough invested. The Government has tried to micro-manage the inputs and not stand back and focus on the outputs. There is no doubt some of the regulatory red tape-burden can be relieved."

Source





30 October, 2007

Antisemitism at Columbia Teachers' College

I am inclined to think that the noose incident was a "plant" -- as I have said before. I am inclined to believe that the incident below is genuine, however. There are a lot of Leftists in the universities and the Left today seems to be as Jew-hating as it was in Hitler's day

Two Teachers College faculty members received "anti-Semitic materials" yesterday, according to an e-mail sent to TC students by Provost Tom James. In his message, James wrote that TC reported the incidents to the New York City Police Department and have consulted the Anti-Defamation League. In order to protect the privacy of the faculty members involved, James wrote that TC will not release their names. "As always, Teachers College deplores these hateful acts and takes them extremely seriously," James wrote.

The incident comes during a time of turmoil in Teachers College, two-and-a-half weeks after a noose was found on the door of a TC professor and anti-Semitic graffiti was found in a bathroom stall in Lewisohn Hall.

Source




Oxford University students stirring the pot again

They have a long tradition of it -- but some understandable concern is voiced below

Less than a month after Columbia University gave Holocaust denier, Iranian president Ahmadinejad, a platform in the name of freedom of expression, the Oxford University debating society has contacted Holocaust denier David Irving using the same argument and asked him to participate in one of the society's forums in November. The club also wants to invite Belarus dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, and chairman of the British Nationalist Party (BNP), Nick Griffin.

Debating society president, Luke Tryl, told the British Guardian newspaper that the Oxford Union debating society "is famous for is commitment to free speech" and that the three had been invited despite their "awful and abhorrent views" He argued that the students at Oxford are intelligent enough to challenge and ridicule them.

Tryl's weak rationale for the invitation has failed to convince various groups of students and anti-fascist campaigners in Britain. In a joint statement the co-presidents of the Oxford Jewish Students Union said it would be a disgrace if the three were allowed to address a forum on free speech, and that it would leave a black mark on the reputation of the Oxford Union. Students at the university said that their appearance would encourage right wing extremist groups which have become increasingly arrogant.

Irving, who until recently was serving a three year prison sentence in Austria after being convicted of Holocaust denial, told the Guardian that he had not received a formal approach but if he did he would like to speak to the students. He said that he had received many invitations to appear at Oxford but most had been withdrawn due to public pressure, threats, and intimidation even though he thinks "there are a lot of students who would like to hear what I have to say".

Last month Irving told the Guardian that his views on the Holocaust have not changed at all and that his views have become stronger over the years. In several books he plans to publish soon, Irving maintains that "the Jews are the architects of what happened to them in the Second World War" and that the "Jewish problem" has been the cause of most wars in the past hundred years. Irving also claims that the gas chambers in Auschwitz never existed and that the camp was not an extermination camp and has only been publicized because it was well preserved.

Besides offering further proof of growing activism (such as the call to boycott Israeli universities which went into the garbage bin of history) by the extreme left in Britain, Europe, and the United States, the problem with inviting loathsome Holocaust deniers like Irving and Ahmadinejad and asking them to address forums, is that it offers legitimacy to the very discussion of whether the Holocaust and the genocide of the Jewish people actually took place. If not prevented, discussions on this subject may pave the way for a future debate on Israel's status as the home of the Jewish nation and the right of the Jewish People to exist.

Israel's political leadership must face it that the world does not take for granted the right of the Jewish People to live as a free nation in the land of Israel, and that there are some who question this. Consequently, they must do everything possible to stem the growing phenomenon of hiding behind academic freedom of expression to lend legitimacy to the debate on the destruction of the Jewish People. Given the doctrine preached by Ahmadinejad and his like, the Israeli government must be more pro-active and not be indifferent in its policy on Iran, which seeks to destroy us.

Iran is more problematic for Israel than it is for the rest of the world, and Israel must act accordingly with regard to Iran and anyone else who challenges its existence. If Irving is invited to speak to students others will follow and it will become legitimate to discuss the right of the Jewish People to exist. The Israeli government together with the Jews of the Diaspora must specifically challenge Ahmadinejad and David Irving and all those who want to question the right of the Jewish People to live in Israel and ensure the Jewish People keeps its promise of "Never again".

Source





29 October, 2007

Dropouts cost state more than $850M

This is not very good cause-effect thinking I am afraid. Many of those who dropped out would probably have been dysfunctional regardless

A group favoring school vouchers says high school dropouts cost North Carolina hundreds of millions of dollars each year. A new report from the Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation says the 716,000 working-age dropouts in North Carolina cost the state $712 million in tax revenue every year. That's based on research that says dropouts make less money and are less likely to have jobs than those who finish high school.

The report also says that dropouts use Medicaid disproportionately and cost the state $155 million in extra expenditures for the government-backed health insurance program. And dropouts cost the state at least $6 million in prison costs, the report states, because they're more likely to be incarcerated.

The Friedman Foundation's report was commissioned by Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, a group favoring vouchers that would give families public money to help send their children to private school. Added competition, the organization says, would also improve public schools, increasing the graduation rate and saving money. Currently, only about two of every three North Carolinians finish high school.

Source




Some people will complain about anything

Silence is a religion?

A 14-year-old girl and her outspoken atheist father filed a federal lawsuit Friday challenging a new Illinois law requiring a brief period of prayer or reflective silence at the start of every school day. The lawsuit asks the court to declare the law unconstitutional, said attorney Gregory Kulis, who represents Dawn Sherman, a freshman at Buffalo Grove High School, and her father Robert Sherman, a radio talk show host.

Kulis said the law is an attempt to inject religion into public schools in violation of the First Amendment. The suit also seeks a temporary restraining order to halt schools' obeying the law until the case is decided. A judge will consider that request at a hearing Monday. The lawsuit names Gov. Rod Blagojevich and officials of Township High School District 214 as defendants. School district spokeswoman Venetia Miles said schools will continue to comply with the law.

Blagojevich spokesman Abby Ottenhoff said the law was passed over the governor's veto. "We don't believe requiring time for reflection is the role of government," Ottenhoff said.

Sherman said he went to court after he asked the school board to ignore the law and was rebuffed. The school district informed him it would carry out the moment of silence during third period, beginning Tuesday, the lawsuit said. "What we object to is Christians passing a law that requires the public school teacher to stop teaching during instructional time, paid for by the taxpayers, so that Christians can pray," Sherman told The Associated Press.

An Illinois law called the Silent Reflection and Student Prayer Act already allowed schools to observe a moment of silence if they wanted. A new measure changed just a single word: "may" observe became "shall" observe. The Illinois law originally passed during the spring legislative session, but Blagojevich vetoed it, saying he had doubts about its constitutionality. Lawmakers overrode the veto this month.

It's not Sherman's first church-and-state lawsuit and not the first to involve his children. He has sought removal of religious symbols from city seals and a ban on Boy Scout meetings at public schools. Some school administrators have complained the law is too ill-defined and puts many teachers and some students in an awkward position.

The Shermans may have legitimate concerns, but they are suing the wrong party when they target the school district, said Brian McCarthy, an attorney for the district. "The General Assembly -- for better, worse, foolish or wise -- passed this law and it's not up to school districts to pick and choose which laws they follow," McCarthy said. "He needs to go after the entity that enforces that law."

Source





28 October, 2007

Don't make public schools a state church

Americans would revolt if the government forced them to join a state-established church. They guard too fiercely their liberty of conscience, guaranteed by the First Amendment. Yet when some parents choose not to submit their children to the government-operated school system - whose curriculum and culture embody beliefs and values with which they disagree - they still must pay taxes to support the system. Even then, they often face opposition.

We contend that the conduct of schooling in the United States should be determined by the rights of conscience of parents, in accord with the democratic nature of our society and our confessional pluralism. Parents who choose not to send their children to public schools should not be subject to harassment. Nor should they be forced to support the state system as well as their preferred educational arrangement.

Contrary to popular belief, the US has never had one universally accepted system of public education. American history is full of dissenters who acted on conscience - and faced opposition for it. In the mid-19th century, Americans created what was then called the "common school." Allegedly free of the evils of sectarian educational institutions, the common school, supported by mandatory taxation, was touted as the bastion of republicanism, guarantor of liberty, and avenue of equal opportunity for all Americans. Advocates claimed it would abolish crime and poverty, and establish morality on a universal scale.

As was the case with prior government-established ecclesiastical institutions in Europe and early America, for example, Congregationalism in Connecticut and Anglicanism in Virginia, the "inclusive" common school was not common to all. Like its predecessors, it bred dissent. The leading educational dissenters in the 19th century were Roman Catholics. Their religious conscience clashed with the "nonsectarianism" of the common school, which in reality was a form of Unitarian pan-Protestantism. At considerable sacrifice, and despite their poverty, Catholics established their own schools and were confronted by opposition that sometimes turned violent.

As the 19th century progressed, others, most notably German Lutherans, joined Catholics in their conscience-based dissent from state-sanctioned educational orthodoxy. As had been the case with the established churches, those advocating the state system of education attempted to quell the "uprising" by regulating the dissenting schools.

In the 1960s, new groups joined the ranks of dissenters. A minority of evangelical Protestants were outraged by Supreme Court declarations that state-sanctioned prayer and devotional Bible reading violated the "no establishment" clause of the First Amendment. They felt discouraged by what they perceived as the establishment of secularism as the de facto religion of government-sponsored education. Consequently, they created Christian day schools to educate their children according to the dictates of conscience. Like Catholic and Lutheran dissenters, these schools, and some of their leaders, were harried at times by the state.

Most recently, a small but rapidly growing number of parents, a majority of whom are conservative Christians, have chosen to educate their children at home. Holding to the proposition that parents have the primary right to direct the education of their offspring, a right affirmed by the Supreme Court several times since the landmark Pierce v. Society of Sisters decision of 1925, they are the most radical dissenters yet. Like earlier dissenters, most home-schooling families believe the public school system transmits an orthodoxy alien to their belief system. As a matter of conscience, they feel bound to provide an education congruent with their worldview. And like other dissenters from earlier state churches and the current functional equivalent, the public school system, these parents have had to pay taxes to support a government-privileged institution as well as the costs of the education they prefer, been occasionally harassed, and sometimes hauled into court.

Any government establishment, ecclesiastical or educational, breeds dissent. Unfortunately, dissenters have often been subjected to legal prosecution, unjust financial burdens, and sometimes outright persecution. Such actions have often been justified as necessary for the "common good," while the "unorthodox" have been demonized as "divisive" or, in the case of 19th-century Catholic schools, "un-American." Today, home-schoolers are sometimes accused of being "selfish" or "undemocratic."

For those wanting a secular education for their children, as it currently exists in public schools, that is their choice and their right. Parents desiring a different kind of education should not have to pay twice as the price of liberty of conscience. The role of government in a democracy should be to see that the public is educated, not to mandate, directly or indirectly through financial policies, one particular form of education. When the government privileges a specific set of propositions of knowledge and dispositions of value and belief, it has established the educational equivalent of a state church. Such an arrangement is just as incompatible with liberty of conscience, as were the established churches of America's early history.

Source




This poor sod thinks the world owes him a living

His "ideals" require him to sponge off others rather than doing something useful. A good Leftist, in other words

I am 24, live with my parents, can't find work and am floundering in a sea of debt five figures high. I think of myself as ambitious, independent and hardworking. Now I'm dependent, unemployed and sleeping under the same Super Mario ceiling fan that I did when I was 7. How did this happen? I did what every upstanding citizen is supposed to do. I went to college. I took out loans so I could enroll at Alfred University, a pricey private school. The next year, I transferred to the more finance-friendly University at Buffalo, where I could commute from home and push carts part-time at Home Depot.

I related my forthcoming debt to puberty or a midlife crisis - each an unavoidable nuisance; tickets required upon admission to the next stage of adulthood. But as interest rates climbed and the cost of tuition, books and daily living mounted to galactic proportions, I realized this was more than some paltry inconvenience. Upon graduating, I was helplessly launched headfirst into the "real world," equipped with a degree in history and $32,000 in student loans. Before ricocheting back home, I would learn two important lessons: 1) There are no well-paying - let alone paying - jobs for history majors. 2) The real world is really tough.

Desperate times called for desperate measures, and I had no intention of living in a society that was as unfair as this one. To seek a haven devoid of the ruthless 9-to-5 ebb and flow of contemporary America, I moved to Alaska. As a liberal arts major, I dreamed of making a profound difference in people's lives. Instead, for a year, I lived in Coldfoot, a town north of the Arctic Circle that resembles a Soviet Gulag camp. My job as a tour guide for visitors temporarily alleviated my money woes because it provided room and board, but when the season ended and I moved back home, I was again confronted with the grim realities of debt.

Desperate, I browsed through insurance and bank job descriptions. I had hit an all-time low. Could I surrender my soul for health coverage and a steady income? Could I sacrifice my ideals by falling into line? Suddenly, living at home didn't seem nearly as degrading as selling out. But sadly, other graduates don't have any choice but to work for temp agencies and retail stores to eke by.

That's the tragedy of student debt: it doesn't just limit what we do, but who we become. Forget volunteering. Forget traveling. Forget trying to improve your country, or yourself. You've got bills to pay, young man. Unfortunately, the recent passage of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act doesn't portend that times are a-changin'. The act reduces interest rates on Stafford Loans and increases Pell Grant awards. Whoopty-do.

There's no question that this is a step forward. But we're still talking pennies and nickels when we need to completely revolutionize the government's role in financing post-secondary education. College is a wonderful experience and something every young citizen should pursue. But without help, a college education is becoming an unaffordable rite of passage and a privilege of the affluent.

My loan payments can't wait much longer, and soon I must leave home to find work that doesn't compromise my integrity. Although I sometimes wonder what it would be like if I had declared as an accounting major and got a cushy job punching numbers somewhere, I'll take my history major, my debt and my mom's cooking any day of the week.

Source





27 October, 2007

THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE

Affirmative action causes less able blacks to pass through the educational system at all levels. So when they finally get to be teachers, it is reasonable to expect that they will be less able as teachers. And that is exactly what students report. They evaluate black faculty less favourably. PREJUDICE! Or so the authors below seem to think. They suggest that the evaluations of black faculty by students be "adjusted" upwards. Inconvenient truths must be suppressed! This is Soviet Russia, you know. Abstract follows:

Leveling the Playing Field: Should Student Evaluation Scores be Adjusted?

By Michael A. McPherson & R. Todd Jewell

Objectives. Colleges and universities routinely use evaluation scores to assess the quality of an instructor's teaching for purposes of promotion and tenure and for merit-raise allocations. This article attempts to identify the determinants of these scores, and to suggest ways that departments' numerical rankings of instructors might be adjusted.

Method. This article applies a feasible generalized least squares model to a panel of data from master's-level classes.

Results. We find that instructors can "buy" better evaluation scores by inflating students' grade expectations. Also, the teaching experience of instructors has an impact on evaluation scores, but this effect is largely seen as an increase after tenure is granted. In addition, we find evidence of a bias against nonwhite faculty.

Conclusion. Our results suggest that an adjustment to the usual departmental rankings may be in order.

Social Science Quarterly. Volume 88 Issue 3 Page 868-881, September 2007




Age differences in grade-school classes

Some reflections by Prof. Brignell below on the latest British panic. In any given class some kids will be younger than others. How awful!

Long ago in the dim dawn of pre-history, your bending author experienced the first day at grammar school. At the end of the day he was taken aside by the form master, who explained the special problems he would experience as the youngest boy in the class, born (like Number Watch) on July 13th. That advice came from the accumulated wisdom that can only accrue from a century of existence as an institute of learning. That school was wantonly destroyed for ideological reasons and, when the demolition ball crashed through the elegant gothic arches, not only the fabric was destroyed but also that priceless store of wisdom. Now instead of wisdom we have what Kingsley Amis called "pseudo-research into non-problems" as illustrated by this heading in The Telegraph:

Pupils born in summer more likely to struggle

How things have changed! Now schools no longer run themselves, but are subject to endless interference and targetry by Government ministers and underemployed bureaucrats. Pupils are repeatedly tested into a state of coma. Expensive research is commissioned to replace what was once common knowledge. Stupid interventions and "urgent action" are thought up at the drop of a hat. "Equity" and "efficiency" are the watchwords, while teachers and parents are deemed too stupid to be able to make the allowances that they once made without instruction from above.

Furthermore, changes are suggested that are self-evidently nonsense. However many children are "held back" there is always going to be one who is the youngest in the class, while those held back now become the eldest, so there is always a difference of one year between them. Even common sense is no longer common.





26 October, 2007

Good teachers make a big difference

But why would any capable person want to go into teaching these days? There are a lot more attractive things for an able person to do than stand up in front of an undisciplined rabble every day. As more money has been spent on education, discipline has eroded -- thus neutralizing any advantage the better funding might have given. Money cannot replace discipline

THE British government, says Sir Michael Barber, once an adviser to the former prime minister, Tony Blair, has changed pretty much every aspect of education policy in England and Wales, often more than once. "The funding of schools, the governance of schools, curriculum standards, assessment and testing, the role of local government, the role of national government, the range and nature of national agencies, schools admissions"-you name it, it's been changed and sometimes changed back. The only thing that hasn't changed has been the outcome. According to the National Foundation for Education Research, there had been (until recently) no measurable improvement in the standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools for 50 years.

England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems, standards refuse to budge (see chart). To misquote Woody Allen, those who can't do, teach; those who can't teach, run the schools.

Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet something must. There are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea.

Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question: what do the successful lot have in common? Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries.

Now, an organisation from outside the teaching fold-McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments-has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says, need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly "first-of-its-kind" (which is how Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research, describes McKinsey's approach): schools surely do all this already? Actually, they don't. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically.

Begin with hiring the best. There is no question that, as one South Korean official put it, "the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers." Studies in Tennessee and Dallas have shown that, if you take pupils of average ability and give them to teachers deemed in the top fifth of the profession, they end up in the top 10% of student performers; if you give them to teachers from the bottom fifth, they end up at the bottom. The quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything else.

Yet most school systems do not go all out to get the best. The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a non-profit organisation, says America typically recruits teachers from the bottom third of college graduates. Washington, DC recently hired as chancellor for its public schools an alumna of an organisation called Teach for America, which seeks out top graduates and hires them to teach for two years. Both her appointment and the organisation caused a storm.

A bias against the brightest happens partly because of lack of money (governments fear they cannot afford them), and partly because other aims get in the way. Almost every rich country has sought to reduce class size lately. Yet all other things being equal, smaller classes mean more teachers for the same pot of money, producing lower salaries and lower professional status. That may explain the paradox that, after primary school, there seems little or no relationship between class size and educational achievement.

McKinsey argues that the best performing education systems nevertheless manage to attract the best. In Finland all new teachers must have a master's degree. South Korea recruits primary-school teachers from the top 5% of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30%.

They do this in a surprising way. You might think that schools should offer as much money as possible, seek to attract a large pool of applicants into teacher training and then pick the best. Not so, says McKinsey. If money were so important, then countries with the highest teacher salaries-Germany, Spain and Switzerland-would presumably be among the best. They aren't. In practice, the top performers pay no more than average salaries.

Nor do they try to encourage a big pool of trainees and select the most successful. Almost the opposite. Singapore screens candidates with a fine mesh before teacher training and accepts only the number for which there are places. Once in, candidates are employed by the education ministry and more or less guaranteed a job. Finland also limits the supply of teacher-training places to demand. In both countries, teaching is a high-status profession (because it is fiercely competitive) and there are generous funds for each trainee teacher (because there are few of them).

South Korea shows how the two systems produce different results. Its primary-school teachers have to pass a four-year undergraduate degree from one of only a dozen universities. Getting in requires top grades; places are rationed to match vacancies. In contrast, secondary-school teachers can get a diploma from any one of 350 colleges, with laxer selection criteria. This has produced an enormous glut of newly qualified secondary-school teachers-11 for each job at last count. As a result, secondary-school teaching is the lower status job in South Korea; everyone wants to be a primary-school teacher. The lesson seems to be that teacher training needs to be hard to get into, not easy.

Having got good people, there is a temptation to shove them into classrooms and let them get on with it. For understandable reasons, teachers rarely get much training in their own classrooms (in contrast, doctors do a lot of training in hospital wards). But successful countries can still do much to overcome the difficulty.

Singapore provides teachers with 100 hours of training a year and appoints senior teachers to oversee professional development in each school. In Japan and Finland, groups of teachers visit each others' classrooms and plan lessons together. In Finland, they get an afternoon off a week for this. In Boston, which has one of America's most improved public-school systems, schedules are arranged so that those who teach the same subject have free classes together for common planning. This helps spread good ideas around. As one educator remarked, "when a brilliant American teacher retires, almost all of the lesson plans and practices that she has developed also retire. When a Japanese teacher retires, she leaves a legacy."

Lastly, the most successful countries are distinctive not just in whom they employ so things go right but in what they do when things go wrong, as they always do. For the past few years, almost all countries have begun to focus more attention on testing, the commonest way to check if standards are falling. McKinsey's research is neutral on the usefulness of this, pointing out that while Boston tests every student every year, Finland has largely dispensed with national examinations. Similarly, schools in New Zealand and England and Wales are tested every three or four years and the results published, whereas top-of-the-class Finland has no formal review and keeps the results of informal audits confidential.

But there is a pattern in what countries do once pupils and schools start to fail. The top performers intervene early and often. Finland has more special-education teachers devoted to laggards than anyone else-as many as one teacher in seven in some schools. In any given year, a third of pupils get one-on-one remedial lessons. Singapore provides extra classes for the bottom 20% of students and teachers are expected to stay behind-often for hours-after school to help students.

None of this is rocket science. Yet it goes against some of the unspoken assumptions of education policy. Scratch a teacher or an administrator (or a parent), and you often hear that it is impossible to get the best teachers without paying big salaries; that teachers in, say, Singapore have high status because of Confucian values; or that Asian pupils are well behaved and attentive for cultural reasons. McKinsey's conclusions seem more optimistic: getting good teachers depends on how you select and train them; teaching can become a career choice for top graduates without paying a fortune; and that, with the right policies, schools and pupils are not doomed to lag behind.

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The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history

The article below is by Mark Morford, who is Leftist and generally rather excitable, but I think he is not far wrong this time. The only thing that I think he overlooks is that society has always depended for its progress and for its management on a small and generally gifted elite and that elite undoubtedly still exists and is mostly being privately educated to a reasonable standard. So the general dumbing down may not be all that influential on anything other than the life-satisfaction of the less-gifted students who have been deprived of much culture and understanding of the world about them

I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career. And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be. His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new. No, my friend takes it all a full step - or rather, leap - further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that. We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking - and nearly hopeless - dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home.

He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.

Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens. Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.

This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.

I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.

Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America - and many more who aren't - now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?

As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better. What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means

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25 October, 2007

S. Carolina: Another insane school

Freaked by butter-knife possession but happy to make murderous gunmen feel safe by declaring the school a "gun-free zone"

A Berkeley County student is kicked out of school for bringing a butter knife to campus. "I know I made a really stupid decision but I don't think I should be expelled for it," Amber Dauge said. Amber says that stupid decision was taking a butter knife to school. She ran out of the house to meet the bus while making a sandwich, when she realized she had the knife. She put it in her bookbag, then she put it in her locker at Goose Creek High school. She forgot it was there until a few weeks later when the knife fell out of her overstuffed locker.

"A kid behind me yelled out a comment that I was going to stab someone with the knife and everyone started laughing and the teacher saw it," Amber told us. The teacher told the principal. Amber was suspended and recommended for expulsion. She attended an expulsion hearing last Thursday and it was made official.

"We got the paperwork for the expulsion in the mail on Friday. They had sent the paperwork out before they had even done the hearing saying she was expelled," Amber's mother, Kristi Heinz said. The Berkeley County school district has a zero tolerance policy. But is it too harsh? "I don't think zero tolerance is the right thing. I really don't. Every situation has its own circumstances," said Steven Heinz, Amber's father.

Amber realizes she could have made a better choice, like leaving the knife on the porch at home or actually giving it to a teacher. "I knew I was gonna get in trouble but I didn't think I was was gonna get expelled," Amber said. Amber can appeal the school board's decision. Her parents will write a letter to the superintendent and will attend the next school board meeting on Tuesday.

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Maryland: Colleges report dismal results

Wishy-washy approach to High School standards bears the inevitable fruit: Kids who are rarely ready for further study

Baltimore school board meetings have been ending on a somber note lately, as schools chief Andres Alonso is capping the evenings with presentations of student data that thus far have been dismal. Last night was no exception, as the new chief executive officer turned to the subject of city students' college enrollment and graduation rates.

According to the data presented at the meeting, only 14 percent of students who graduated from Baltimore's public high schools in 2001 had earned a college degree five years later. And among students who graduated from high school in the spring of 2006, just 44 percent enrolled in a two- or four-year college that fall, compared with a national college enrollment rate of 66 percent.

Alonso was quick to acknowledge the information's shortcomings: The data were gathered by the National Student Clearinghouse, which collects student enrollment and graduation information from the majority of the nation's colleges and universities. But Morgan State University did not provide statistics to the clearinghouse, nor did Allegany College or Sojourner-Douglass College. Still, even if those schools had been included, Alonso said the data show that the city is clearly not doing its job to prepare students for college. "If there are still people out there who argue that the children should be graduated, this is what happens," said Alonso in an interview before the meeting. He added that college graduation rates for students from other urban school systems are comparably low.

The report adds fuel to the debate on the state's High School Assessments, which would require students starting in the Class of 2009 to pass exams in English, Algebra 1, biology and government to graduate. Faced with the prospect of denying diplomas to thousands of students, many in Baltimore, state officials are weighing whether to back down. State Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick has proposed allowing students who fail the tests to instead complete a senior project.

But Grasmick, too, said in an interview that the city's college enrollment and graduation rate data show why schools must still prepare their students for the tests. "If we don't create a meaningful and accountable foundation for these students, we're never going to be able to build on that to make students work-ready and college-ready," she said. Grasmick pointed to the city's low pass rate on the Algebra 1 test: Only 35.6 percent of students in the Class of 2009 have passed so far. To do well on the SAT college entrance exam, she said, students must have mastery not only of Algebra 1, but also Algebra 2.

Like Grasmick, Alonso has backed the senior project option, but he says he also wants to make sure that students are earning a diploma that means something. He supports keeping students in school for as long as they want up to age 21 to get a diploma with value. At the same time, he must find a way to curb the high school dropout rate. In the Class of 2009, about 6,300 students started out as ninth-graders two years ago. Today, the class has about 4,500 students, meaning 1,800 have dropped out or moved.

Since taking the helm of the city school system in July, Alonso has been fixated on measuring the baseline from which he is starting. He says it is important for him, and the public, to understand the magnitude of the task at hand to reform education in Baltimore. Skeptics question whether he might be trying to paint an overly negative picture now so he can take credit for improvements later.

The statistics presented last night called into question even the value of diplomas from the city's prestigious citywide magnet schools: Polytechnic Institute, City College, Western High, Dunbar High and School for the Arts. Only 33 percent of students from those schools' Class of 2001 who enrolled in college that fall had earned a bachelor's or associate's degree five years later, the data show. At the city's career and technology high schools - Carver, Mergenthaler and Edmondson - 6 percent of students in the Class of 2001 had a degree within five years. At the city's neighborhood high schools, the figure was just 4 percent.....

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24 October, 2007

Schoolyards are just full of 'Charlie Browns'



The problem described below is an old one and the Leftist response is to eradicate as far as possible all distinctions between the achievements of different children. This is however to found a policy on a lie. That comes easily to Leftists but a healthier response is clearly needed. I thought therefore that I might mention that I am rather clumsy physically and was therefore spectacularly bad at all school sporting activities in my youth. As a consequence I was rather socially isolated (though not unhappy) at school. But "nerds" often do well in later life (look at Bill Gates) and I have certainly done so. The clear strategy for genuinely kind people therefore is not to ignore differences in ability but to stress to all that sometimes in the long run "the last shall be first" (Mark 10:31). Just the thought that the jock might one day be asking the nerd for a job should have considerable effect

Charlie Brown, the sad and loveable loser, is a real character in many school playgrounds, psychologists say. In the American comic strip Peanuts, sensitive Charlie is never able to kick a football, fly a kite or win at baseball. He is of often ridiculed by his classmates, made the butt of jokes and called "blockhead". Now a Canadian study has found that Charlie Brown's problems are true to life. Children appear to place a great deal of value on athletic ability, and those with a reputation for lacking such skills often experience sadness, isolation and social rejection.

Dr Janice Causgrove Dunn, of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, said: "For both boys and girls, we found that popular children reported less loneliness and received higher athletic ability ratings from their peers than rejected children. "Conversely, the kids who reported higher levels of loneliness tended to receive lower athletic ability ratings and lower social acceptance ratings from their peers."

The findings are published in the latest issue of the Journal of Sport Behaviour. Previous research has shown that loneliness in childhood and adolescence is often associated with psychosocial and emotional problems. Prolonged loneliness has the potential to undermine seriously an individual's psychological, emotional and physical wellbeing.

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Hypocrite or realist?

Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty has taken full control over his city's long suffering public schools. But he sends his own twin girls to a private school. Does that make him a hypocrite? A bad mayor? Or, perhaps, just a good father?

Fenty is not alone. Many big city mayors educate their kids privately. A far greater percentage of public school teachers -- especially in urban areas -- send their own kids to private schools than does the general public. And a 2003 survey of members of Congress found that 41 percent of U.S. representatives and 46 percent of U.S. senators now send or have sent at least one of their children to a private school.

Granted, there is hypocrisy at work. Many of these folks stump for public schooling, opposing systems of private school choice. And yet, they choose to opt out of the system they allegedly shore up . . . from competition. The kind they themselves rely upon.

Years ago, during a campaign, Fenty pledged to send his kids to public schools. So, if voters want to hold that against him, they have every right to do so. My point is only that had Fenty -- or any politician or educator -- made the opposite decision, wouldn't that be even worse? Mayor Fenty's choice boils down to this: Should he put the public schools ahead of his own children? Or should he put his children ahead of the public schools? Which would you put first?

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23 October, 2007

Brits fleeing disastrous government schools

If they are lucky enough to be able to afford to do so. The cost is a considerable burden for many families but keeping their children safe and in an environment where they can learn is a huge priority. Would YOU want your kid to go to a school where some of the black kids are armed with machine pistols?

The middle-class exodus from state schools in London is speeding up, with nearly half of children in some parts of the capital now privately educated. An analysis of government figures suggested a widening of the social class divide in education since the turn of the century. Some of the highest levels of child poverty, as measured by the proportion of children eligible for free school meals (FSM), were found in areas with the greatest proportion of children in independent schools. The figures followed concern from Christine Gilbert, the Chief Inspector of Schools, who said that the school system was dividing children along social and economic lines.

The finding was most striking in [largely black] inner-London boroughs. In Kensington and Chelsea, 45.3 per cent of children are educated in independent schools, yet the borough has the sixth-highest rate in the country for FSM [poor] children, at 37.7 per cent. [What a coincidence!] The national average for FSM is 12 per cent.

In Hammersmith & Fulham, which has the third-highest rate of FSM children in the country at 42.2 per cent, a quarter of children are independently educated. In Westminster, 26.4 per cent go to independent schools, and yet the borough has the eighth-highest rate in the country for FSM children, at 35.8 per cent. Greg Hands, the Conservative MP for Hammersmith and Fulham, obtained the figures from the House of Commons, amid concern about the flight of middle-class families from state schools in his borough. In 2000 22.6 per cent of children in the borough were educated independently. Now the figure is 25.6 per cent. Other inner-London boroughs have seen similar shifts. In Wandsworth, the proportion in independent schools has risen from 15.1 to 18.7 per cent.

These figures come against a nation-wide long-term demographic decline in the number of young people and steady increases in independent school fees to an average of about 11,000 pounds a year.

Mr Hands said: "In Hammersmith & Fulham, we have one of the fastest-rising rates of private school attendance in the country and one of the highest rates of surplus places in [state] secondary schools. "Part of that can be explained by changing demographics in that we now have more parents who can afford to go private. But there is more to it than that. Middle-class parents concerned about standards are opting out of the state system and it's my objective to get them to opt back in. Our local state schools are making themselves better, but the missing element in their bid for improvement is the professional classes."

Sam Friedman, head of the education unit at the Policy Exchange think-tank, said the social divide in education was particularly acute in London [which is now 50% black]. The phenomenon could be attributed in part to its population, which is extremely socially mixed. "In more rural areas, populations tend to segregate naturally. In London, there are pockets of advantage and disadvantage right next to each other and one way they segregate themselves is through school choice."

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ARCHAEOLOGISTS CHALLENGE BARNARD PROFESSOR'S CLAIMS

On Monday night, Columbia University's pro-Israel student group played host to the latest installment in a lecture series aimed, at least partially, at rebutting Nadia Abu El-Haj, whose work has been critical of the traditional narratives of Israeli archeology. Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard since 2002, first gained notice with her 2001 book "Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society," in which she argued that Israeli archaeologists use their research to validate a national origin myth. The book was praised in some quarters - it won the top award from the Middle East Studies Association - but was slammed by others as poor scholarship motivated by ideology. Columbia is currently deliberating whether Abu El-Haj should be given tenure, and the university has received petitions from her opponents and supporters.

"If you get real live archaeologists on campus who know the material, they're naturally going to contradict her," said Alan Segal, a professor in Barnard's religion department who delivered the first lecture in the series. The bottom line, Segal said, is that Abu El-Haj "hates Israelis." Abu El-Haj could not be reached for comment.

On the academic level, the debate about Abu El-Haj has drawn out a conflict between those scholars who believe archaeology has the potential for objectivity, and others - particularly younger scholars in disciplines such as anthropology - who see archaeological practice as inextricably tied to ideology.

On Monday night, the featured speaker was William Dever, a retired professor of Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Arizona who is a critic of Abu El-Haj. Although he never referred explicitly to Abu El-Haj in his lecture, Dever challenged notions advanced by some academics about archaeology's inherent biases. "Archaeology has never been edited," he said. "When we dig these things up, they are pristine."

Judith Jacobson, a member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, made the opening remarks at Dever's lecture. She said that the lecture series, titled "Underground: What Archaeology Tells Us about Ancient Israel," was conceived partly to remind the community that good Israel archaeology exists in abundance. Asked if she thought the series served a political purpose, Jacobson answered carefully. "Only to inform the community," she said. "It's all we can do."

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22 October, 2007

One school fits all

Do you have the right to take my earnings by force and spend them on football gear, school buses or teaching Greek to your kid? Maybe I needed tires for the car, removal of an infected tooth or food. Can you decide that for me? What gives you the right? Are people unique? Can one system fit them all? Would you like to have a simplified life where government agents design THE car that we all get to drive, and THE clothes that we all get to wear, and THE store where we buy the selection of foods government planners put there. I assure you it would be a drab world bereft of choices, absent innovation and backward in the extreme.

Why, when it comes to something as important as education, do we abandon choice, control, innovation, variety and the individual prioritization that comes from paying as you go for what you want?

I wouldn't care if the school system down the road was the best or the worst possible. As long as I didn't have to use it. As long as I didn't have to pay for it. There would be plenty of choices, just as there are for electronics, food, clothing and trombones. What if the government made two models of trombone, tenor and bass. What more could you ask for? Got both bases covered. Quality - Bah! Tone - Bah! This model is all you NEED. You want better sound, learn to play better.

So we have a kid who should be working on a ranch, learning animal husbandry, veterinary science, living and working in the outdoors. But our ONE SYSTEM puts him in a classroom doped up on Ritalin so he won't disrupt the teacher who is boring him to distraction. Another is writing symphonies in her head while a small fraction of her brain multi-tasks to keep up with the snail's-pace the rest of the room is on. She should be at music academy, but our single-model school system isn't set up that way.

One of my daughters escaped in the 10th grade with an academic scholarship to a challenging private school to the wealthy. She was atrophying in public school, while getting A's. The buildings were old and cheap, but the teachers earned university-level pay and had the freedom to make their subjects come alive.

Another daughter was being age-channeled along, testing at the 4.5-grade-level as she entered the 8th grade. A had many hours in helping her with her work, talking with teachers, resource specialists, psychologists. She spent 8th grade in a Waldorf school. She studied and homeworked until midnight-to-3:00am. She worked her butt off for that teacher and the class - to exit 8th grade AT GRADE LEVEL.

My middle girl left in her high-school Jr year. They weren't reaching her or teaching her. She got her GED. Graduated from North American Firefighter's academy. Worked there a bit. Started putting herself through a University Nursing program, getting A's in the weeder courses where 40 enter and a dozen survive.

So the one-size-fits-all school system only failed to serve 3 out of 3 for me. Do you wonder why I resent paying for it? I resent far more the educational opportunities that IT DISPLACES. There is next to nothing that should be taught at an age-specific level. I have just as much right to learn calculus on my dollar as my next-door neighbor's kid does. more, in fact. . and I would love to be teaching trombone to a dozen kids between 8 and 80 years old. This town would have a great trombone choir. But no, here you learn trombone in government school when you are 12 and play it for 1/2 hour a day until you are 17. Then put it away forever.

In case I didn't make it clear: I do not want to design THE ONE school system, teaching or learning environment for this community. I don't want anybody else to do that either.

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Australia's education wars

Education unions and left-wing education academics cling to proven failures in education theory, despite years of evidence demonstrating the errors of their thinking. They reject, for instance, the research-based evidence showing that "whole language" dominated reading programs do not work for a large proportion of children.

The power of sensible thinking by political leaders in holding off barbarian ideologues can be seen in the influence of the former NSW premier Bob Carr, who saved NSW from the worst educational excesses suffered elsewhere, particularly in Western Australia, where a decade-long experiment in outcomes-based education has just been abandoned.

But while governments control the purse strings they have little effect on deep-rooted cultural prejudices in organisations such as the ABC and teacher unions. In the battles for hearts and minds, they are outclassed by ideological guerillas, who can only be vanquished from within. At last, however, there are encouraging signs from teachers that the civil war may have begun.

Take the English Teachers Association, which claims to speak for all English teachers. Its most honoured operative is former president Wayne Sawyer, an associate professor at the University of Western Sydney, who has helped develop the NSW English curriculum and is editor of the journal English in Australia. It was his editorial that blamed the Howard Government's 2004 re-election on the failure of English teachers to properly educate their charges in critical theory.

And in the last edition of the International Journal of Progressive Education, Sawyer tackled the discredited "whole language" theory of teaching reading in an article entitled Whole language and moral panic in Australia. He claimed "moral panic" was behind a "media campaign . to demonise whole-language methods" of teaching reading, despite the fact the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (which I served on) spent a year examining the worldwide evidence about the best way to teach children reading and came down on the side of systematic, direct instruction in phonics.

If you ever wondered how the teaching of reading could be politicised, the journal is instructive, having devoted its entire June edition to whole language, including "the multilayered dimensions of social justice activism involved in whole language teaching". The articles read like a long confession from the stubborn practitioners of a movement which has condemned so many underprivileged children to illiteracy, while professing to care about injustice.

In an article about teaching sixth graders in Grover Cleveland Middle School, New Jersey, the authors "search for ways to disrupt the pre-service [trainee] teachers' traditional notions of teaching, learning, and curriculum . We strive to help our pre-service teachers understand that their roles as teachers include a political dimension . "Too often," they complain, the teachers "fall back into the direct instruction model with which they feel comfortable."

Naughty teachers, trying to teach rather than indoctrinate their students. But Sawyer and his acolytes at the association have so provoked those they purport to represent they have sparked a grassroots protest movement of teachers across the country. In Western Australia, one group of teachers became so fed up at having to implement outcomes-based education, a favourite of the English Teachers Association, that they managed to have it overturned this year. Their lobby group PLATO, People Lobbying Against Teaching Outcomes, persuaded the West Australian Government to reinstate the traditional syllabus, concentrating on literacy and numeracy.

Now a group of secondary English teachers from Catholic, government and independent schools in Western Australia have formed the English Teachers Forum, the ETFWA, in direct opposition to the English Teachers Association, because they are "concerned about the misrepresentation of English teachers and their views regarding the implementation and the efficacy of the English Course of Study". In a letter to the association, the breakaway group wrote: "The ETAWA must realise that the collective voice of the majority of English teachers simply cannot be ignored any longer. It is not just a matter of numbers. It is also a matter of fairness." The English Teachers Forum has also managed to have Western Australia's year 11 and 12 curriculum reviewed by a "jury" of impartial classroom teachers, with the result the West Australian Government agreed to rewrite the courses by 2010.

In NSW, there is similar grassroots unhappiness with the English Teachers Association, judging by a letter I have received from an anonymous secondary English teacher of 30 years. "The problem in NSW English teaching is not the syllabus. It is the way the syllabus has been interpreted by the English Teachers Association of NSW and its transformation from a wonderfully principled, supportive professional association to a site of left-wing political activism and ideological posturing .. "My dismay comes from a jettisoning of our literary heritage for an obsession with critical literacy and an approach to English based on overt critical theory. "I look through my past issues of [the association's journal mETAphor] and ask myself what has happened to the aim of fostering a love of literature in our children? What has happened to the great works of literature?"

That journal is full of articles about postmodernism and such literary gems as: "Power Struggles in the Big Brother House" and "Earnestly Queer: Responding to Oscar Wilde's The Importance of being Earnest Through the Critical Lens of Queer Theory" by Mark Howie, the president of the English Teachers Association. It is no good for Australian students that a body promoting extremist ideology should have come to represent their English teachers. But it seems their teachers have finally had enough. Hoorah for them.

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21 October, 2007

BIG BROTHER AT SCHOOL

By Jeff Jacoby

"Freedom of education, being an essential of civil and religious liberty . . . must not be interfered with under any pretext whatever," the party's national platform declared. "We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental . . . doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government."

Now which political party said that? The Libertarians? The Barry Goldwater Republicans of 1964? Some minor party on the right-wing fringe? Actually, that ringing endorsement of parental supremacy in education was adopted by the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1892, which just goes to show what was possible before the Democratic Party was taken hostage by the teachers unions. (The same platform also warned that "the tendency to centralize all power at the federal capital has become a menace," blasted barriers to free trade as "robbery of the great majority of the American people for the benefit of the few," and pledged "relentless opposition to the Republican policy of profligate expenditure.")

Today, on education as on so much else, the Democrats sing from a different hymnal. When the party's presidential candidates debated at Dartmouth College recently, they were asked about a controversial incident in Lexington, Mass., where a second-grade teacher, to the dismay of several parents, had read her young students a story celebrating same-sex marriage. Were the candidates "comfortable" with that? "Yes, absolutely," former senator John Edwards promptly replied. "I want my children . . . to be exposed to all the information . . . even in second grade . . . because I don't want to impose my view. Nobody made me God. I don't get to decide on behalf of my family or my children. . . . I don't get to impose on them what it is that I believe is right." None of the other candidates disagreed, even though most of them say they oppose same-sex marriage.

Thus in a little over 100 years, the Democratic Party -- and, for that matter, much of the Republican Party -- has been transformed from a champion of "parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children" to a party whose leaders believe that parents "don't get to impose" their views and values on what their kids are taught in school. Do American parents see anything wrong with that? Apparently not: The overwhelming majority of them dutifully enroll their children in government-operated schools, where the only views and values permitted are the ones prescribed by the state.

But controversies like the one in Lexington are reminders that Big Brother's ideas about what and how children should be taught are not always those of mom and dad.

Americans differ on same-sex marriage and evolution, on the importance of sports and the value of phonics, on the right to bear arms and the reverence due the Confederate flag. Some parents are committed secularists; others are devout believers. Some place great emphasis on math and science; others stress history and foreign languages. Americans hold disparate opinions on everything from the truth of the Bible to the meaning of the First Amendment, from the usefulness of rote memorization to the significance of music and art. With parents so often in boisterous disagreement, why should children be locked into a one-size-fits-all, government-knows-best model of education?

Nobody would want the government to run 90 percent of the nation's entertainment industry. Nobody thinks that 90 percent of all housing should be owned by the state. Nobody believes that health care would be improved if the government operated 90 percent of all hospitals, pharmacies, and doctors’ offices. Yet the government's control of 90 percent of the nation's schools leaves most Americans strangely unconcerned.

But we should be concerned. Not just because the quality of government schooling is frequently so poor or its costs so high. Not just because public schools are constantly roiled by political storms. Not just because schools backed by the power of the state are not accountable to parents and can ride roughshod over their concerns. And not just because the public-school monopoly, like virtually all monopolies, resists change, innovation, and excellence.

All of that is true, but a more fundamental truth is this: In a society founded on political and economic liberty, government schools should have no place. Free men and women do not entrust to the state the molding of their children's minds and character. As we wouldn't trust the state to feed our kids, or to clothe them, or to get them to bed on time, neither should we trust the state to teach them. What Americans in an earlier era knew in their bones, many in the 21st century need to relearn: Education is too important to be left to the government.




Hope for the innumerate from Australia

A teaching program that helps students "trust their heads" to recall basic mathematical facts has turned students failing maths into some of the best performers. The QuickSmart program, developed at the University of New England at Armidale in northern NSW, targets students failing national numeracy benchmarks who enter high school struggling with basic arithmetic and who often still count on their fingers.

John Pegg, who developed the program with Lorraine Graham, said QuickSmart was a last chance for students who needed to be proficient in basic maths before the end of primary school to develop the skills and proficiency required in high school. "These students use inefficient and error-prone approaches to learning and recalling information," he said. Professor Pegg, director of the National Centre of Science, ICT and Mathematics Education for Rural and Regional Australia, said students likened the improvement to "trusting their heads", meaning the answer to a sum like 7x5 came immediately.

The program received funding last week worth $200,000 from the federal Government and is being used with 800 students in 60 schools in NSW and the Northern Territory, including remote indigenous communities, where the rise in test scores is more than double the improvement in the average student.

At Orara High School in Coffs Harbour on the NSW north coast, about 70 students in Year 7, with about one in three having failed to meet minimal national numeracy benchmarks, were then taught using QuickSmart. Learning support teacher Lyn Alder said the school had a large proportion of students from low socio-economic backgrounds and about 11 per cent were indigenous. When they sat the NSW numeracy test earlier this year, the improvement in their results had almost doubled compared with the rest of the state, while the indigenous students' marks more than doubled compared with other indigenous students.

Ms Alder said about 40 per cent of the students jumped two levels in the four-level assessment system, from low to proficient or elementary to high. "It's given students the confidence to put up their hands and answer questions in class," she said. "They may not always be correct but they're prepared to have a go, and when you're dealing with students in a low socio-economic school, that's not always the norm."

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20 October, 2007

Some good no-degree jobs

Sure, college is a good idea. Over a lifetime, a college graduate makes, on average, $1 million more than someone who only has a high school diploma, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But despite what parents and teachers would like teenagers to believe, college is not essential to making a decent living.

Indeed, some no-degree jobs will have you earning more, and earlier in your career, than your average college grad with a liberal arts degree. If you're focused enough to know what you want to pursue, you can get on a non-college career track at 18 and earn more than your contemporaries--and keep out-earning them 10 years down the line.

We've compiled a list of 10 jobs that can pay more than $85,000 a year at the top end, no degree required. But beware, just because no college is required doesn't mean you'll be able to slack off. Many of these jobs require extensive training, either on the job or in a vocational school.

Take being an elevator mechanic: With mean earnings of $61,930 a year and a possible annual income of $87,660, these jobs are more secure and pay better than many in construction. But new elevator mechanics, who install and repair elevators, escalators and moving walkways, have to undergo a four-year training period. And that's after being admitted to an apprenticeship program, run jointly by the International Union of Elevator Constructors and employers. Getting in is competitive, and the field has low turnover.

On the other hand, some of the highest-paying jobs in the U.S. have no barriers to entry other than hustle. Plenty of billionaires have made it on talent and entrepreneurship alone, perhaps most famously Microsoft's Bill Gates, a college dropout.

For many sales jobs, technical knowledge is less important than powers of persuasion. Sales reps for wholesale and manufactured goods, not including technical and scientific products, make a mean of $58,540 and $101,030 at the top end. Real estate brokers--who must be licensed but don't necessarily need a college degree, make a mean of $80,230, with their earnings at the high end limited only by effort, salesmanship and the hours in the day.

In fact, there are very few jobs that require a bachelor's degree. You can even become a lawyer without ever setting foot on a college campus, though you still have to pass the bar exam. But official requirements are one thing, and career reality another. In many competitive fields, recruiters use a college degree to filter applicants. Even aspiring artists and writers usually get master's degrees these days. Nobody cares about your diploma when you're selling a manuscript or a piece of art. But at the beginning of your career, when you're trying to develop your talents and make connections, school can be a useful pit stop.

Most career paths have multiple entry points. If you want to become a talent agent, you'll probably need a college degree if you want to start out with a big company. On the other hand, plenty of actors' agents were one-time actors themselves, who built up contacts among casting directors and others in the industry. In the end, the mean annual income of all agents and managers for artists, performers and athletes is $84,070 a year. Among the top 25% of earners, the average income is $114,400 a year. At the top end of the wage scale, the sky is the limit. And once you get to the top, no one cares whether you went to school.

Source




Britain's hopeless "NEETs"

No discipline means no education for the less able

More than 200,000 young people aged 16 to 18 have virtually no hope of getting a foot in the door to the world of work after leaving school with no qualifications, the Chief Inspector of Schools said yesterday. Christine Gilbert, head of Ofsted, said the fate of these young people, known as Neets (not in education, employment or training), highlighted the enormous challenge facing society in closing the gap in educational attainment between rich and poor.

Publishing her annual report yesterday, Ms Gilbert said the barren prospect facing these young people, who represent more than ten per cent of all 16 to 18-year-olds, was “alarming and unacceptable”. Her predictions for their immediate future were even more gloomy. It was hard, she said, “to find encouragement from inspection evidence” that things would get better for young people on the cusp of adult life.

In a bold attempt to widen the public debate about educational standards beyond the school gate, Ms Gilbert focused her attention on the “stark” relationship between poverty and educational achievement. “It cannot be right that people from the most disadvantaged groups are least likely to achieve well and to participate in higher levels of education and training,” she said.

Overall, Ofsted reported that just 51 per cent of secondary schools were judged to be good or outstanding, up from 49 per cent last year. Ten per cent of secondaries were classed as inadequate, down from 13 per cent. In primary schools, the proportion of good and outstanding schools rose from 58 to 61 per cent.

Ms Gilbert said that a large proportion of failing schools were in the most deprived areas and that poorer children still had the “odds stacked against them” in education. The road to recovery would be a long one with “no quick fixes”, she added. On the gap between rich and poor, the figures show that only 12 per cent of 16-year-olds in care and just 33 per cent of pupils entitled to free school meals (FSM, the proxy measure for poverty) gained five or more good GCSEs last year, compared with 61 per cent of nonFSM children and a national average of 56 per cent. Among primary pupils, 61 per cent of FSM children achieved the expected level in English, compared with 83 per cent of nonFSM pupils. For maths the figures were 58 and 79 per cent respectively.

Ms Gilbert said that failures in leadership and management and poor practice in the classroom were the primary causes of school failure. But she was critical, too, of the lack of aspiration often displayed by teachers when it came to vocational education. Students often seemed far more enthusiastic about such opportunities than their teachers, she said, blaming this divide on a misguided tendency among teachers to associate vocational teaching with the least able students. Ms Gilbert added that she hoped that Ofsted, having taken over the inspection of children’s services and adult education in the last year, would now have greater leverage across a wide range of services to effect change.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, hoped that Ms Gilbert’s comments on the “poverty gap” would act as a rallying cry to those working with young people. “No child should be held back because of poverty and disadvantage, or deterred from going to the best school because of where they live or their family background, their ethnicity or their disability,” he said.

But teachers’ leaders said it was “totally unrealistic” to think that schools could tackle socio-economic disadvantage on their own. Martin Johnson, of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: “Schools cannot compensate for a child’s family background - financial or aspirational poverty – or a local culture of unemployment.” John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that it would not be easy in a society as divided and diverse as England for schools to overcome social inequality on their own. “It requires action from central and local government in areas much wider than education to make this task feasible,” he said.

The report also highlighted concerns over behaviour, which was “just satisfactory” in 29 per cent of secondary schools, and about the failure of schools to give children a clear understanding of “what it means to be British”.

Source




Australia: Government school unable to stop bullying

Good at bulldust, though



Dale Fitzhenry was a happy grade 4 student until he was picked on by a vicious school bully last term, his family says. Over 12 weeks Dale, 10, said he was repeatedly kicked, punched and pushed by a classmate. He claims he was assaulted so badly he suffered concussion one lunch time. His glasses were shattered in another playground attack at River Gum Primary School in Hampton Park.

His attacker, who was in Dale's 3/4 composite class, received a suspension, Dale's mother said. The school said the accused bully was moved to another class. It said every effort was made to settle a dispute between the students.

Dale now attends another school. His mother said her boy suffers nightmares and his doctor has recommended that he see a psychologist. Mum Melissa Fitzhenry believes the school did not do enough to protect her son. "I was going up to the school every second day, begging them to do something, telling them my son is coming home terrified," she said. Ms Fitzhenry said the school's decision to keep the bully in Dale's class made no sense. "I am so angry that I have had to pull Dale out of school while the bully remains in class," she said. "I think the bully should have been pulled out of the school."

Acting principal Joan Johnston said the school put strategies in place to deal with the situation and kept Ms Fitzhenry informed with letters and offers of further help. "Any bullying is taken very seriously at River Gum Primary School and is simply not tolerated," Ms Johnston said. "If any students or their parents have any concerns they are always encouraged to come and see me and we will take immediate and appropriate action. "I can assure parents that it was taken very seriously at the time by the school and dealt with promptly and appropriately."

Dale said he was disappointed with the school. "They just told me to stay away from him, but he kept coming after me," Dale said. "It made me very sad and angry, and I just wished they would have made him stay inside at lunch time like I asked, or I wished they expelled him." Bullying expert Evelyn Field said the school had failed Dale. "The situation always seems to end with the bullies staying and the victims leaving," said Ms Field, a psychologist.

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19 October, 2007

Law fails to make dummies smart

As the director of high schools in the gang-infested neighborhoods of the East Side of Los Angeles, Guadalupe Paramo struggles every day with educational dysfunction. For the past half-dozen years, not even one in five students at her district's teeming high schools has been able to do grade-level math or English. At Abraham Lincoln High School this year, only 7 in 100 students could. At Woodrow Wilson High, only 4 in 100 could.

For chronically failing schools like these, the No Child Left Behind law, now up for renewal in Congress, prescribes drastic measures: firing teachers and principals, shutting schools and turning them over to a private firm, a charter operator or the state itself, or a major overhaul in governance. But more than 1,000 of California's 9,500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing. Barring revisions in the law, state officials predict that all 6,063 public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014, when the law requires universal proficiency in math and reading. "What are we supposed to do?" Ms. Paramo asked. "Shut down every school?"

With the education law now in its fifth year - the one in which its more severe penalties are supposed to come into wide play - California is not the only state overwhelmed by growing numbers of schools that cannot satisfy the law's escalating demands. In Florida, 441 schools could be candidates for closing. In Maryland, some 49 schools in Baltimore alone have fallen short of achievement targets for five years or more. In New York State, 77 schools were candidates for restructuring as of last year. Some districts, like those in New York City, have moved forcefully to shut large failing high schools and break them into small schools. Los Angeles, too, is trying small schools, along with other innovations, and David L. Brewer III, its schools superintendent, has just announced plans to create a "high priority district" under his direct control made up of 40 problem schools.

Yet so far, education experts say they are unaware of a single state that has taken over a failing school in response to the law. Instead, most allow school districts to seek other ways to improve. "When you have a state like California with so many schools up for restructuring," said Heinrich Mintrop, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, "that taxes the capacity of the whole school change industry."

As a result, the law is branding numerous schools as failing, but not producing radical change - leaving angry parents demanding redress. California citizens' groups have sued the state and federal government for failing to deliver on the law's promises. "They're so busy fighting No Child Left Behind," said Mary Johnson, president of Parent U-Turn, a civic group. "If they would use some of that energy to implement the law, we would go farther."

Ray Simon, the deputy federal secretary of education, said states that ignored the law's demands risked losing federal money or facing restrictions on grants. For now, Mr. Simon said, the department is more interested in helping states figure out what works than in punishment. "Even a state has to struggle if it takes over a school," he said.

A federal survey last year showed that in 87 percent of the cases of persistently failing schools, states and school districts avoided wholesale changes in staff or leadership. That is why, Mr. Simon said, the Bush administration is proposing that Congress force more action by limiting districts' options in responding to hard-core failure.

In California, Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of schools, calls the law's demands unreasonable. Under the federal law, 700 schools that California believed were getting substantially better were counted last year as failing. A state takeover of schools, Mr. O'Connell said, would be a "last option." "To have a successful program," he said, "it really has to come from the community."

Under the No Child law, a school declared low-performing for three years in a row must offer students free tutoring and the option to transfer. After five years, such schools are essentially treated as irredeemable, with the law prescribing starting over with a new structure, new leadership or new teachers. But it also gives schools the option of less sweeping changes, like reducing school size or changing who is in charge of hiring.

Source




"Associational Preference" And The Rationale For "Diversity"

Post below lifted from Discriminations. See the original for links

I have criticized more than once the, for lack of a better term, hypocrisy of higher education institutions whose lofty statements of principle trumpet their devotion to fundamental principles of non-discrimination, including the "without regard" principle, while other statements and a myriad of policies proudly proclaim exactly the opposite, that they are committed to using race, ethnicity, and gender to produce "diversity."

As I discussed several years ago, in a post that I invite you now to re-read (or read), Preferences, Principles, And Hypocrisy In Higher Education (Hey, I just had to re-read it; why shouldn't you?), the University of Pennsylvania is a typical example. Its Policy of Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action and Nondiscrimination states (or least it did in 2004 when I first quoted it):

Penn adheres to a policy that prohibits discrimination against individuals on the following protected-class bases: race, color, sex (except where sex is a bona fide occupational qualification), sexual orientation, religion, creed, national or ethnic origin, age (except where age is a bona fide occupational qualification), disability (and those associated with persons with disabilities), or status as a special disabled, Vietnam era veteran or other eligible veteran.....

Penn is committed to ensuring that all academic programs (except where age or sex are bona fide occupational qualifications), including social and recreational programs, and services are administered without regard to an individual's protected-class status.

Penn is also committed to ensuring that its personnel and other employment decisions are made without regard to an individual's protected-class status.

Penn, of course, is permeated with policies that explicitly violate the "without regard" principle, and my post went on to mention some of them. Now take a look at this initially similar statement of principle at the University of Iowa, as quoted in this fascinating column in the Des Moines Register (HatTip to RealClearPolitics):

The University of Iowa prohibits discrimination ... on the basis of race, national origin, color, creed, religion, sex, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or associational preference.

If you note that somewhat opaque "associational preference" at the very end of the string of protected categories that are off limits to discrimination, you will see why I said the Iowa statement was only "initially similar" to others of its ilk.

What is "associational preference," you ask, and what does it actually protect? Good question. Nobody seems to know, including officials at the University of Iowa, although there is evidence at Iowa that political affiliation comes under its somewhat leaky umbrella. As a result, a controversy has been ignited by a complaint filed by Mark Molar, an unsuccessful applicant for a position in the history department noting that the department contains 27 registered Democrats and 0 registered Republicans. The Des Moines Register column describes Molar as

a[n] historian with an impressive record: bachelor's degree from Harvard, doctorate from Cambridge; two books, one with Cambridge University Press; laudatory recommendations from distinguished historians; and a growing record of public commentary in national periodicals.

The point of his complaint is not that he wasn't hired but that he was more qualified that all eight candidates who were selected for a final screening. His problem?

He is also a conservative, and his thesis about the Vietnam War - that it was a noble cause that could have triumphed had the United States supported its allies more vigorously - falls well on the right side of things.

Molar himself has an article today on National Review Online going into greater detail about his complaint, and it is well worth reading. He makes, not surprisingly, a variation of the familiar "diversity" (in this case, however, real diversity) argument, noting that

the University's own hiring manual states that search committees must "assess ways the applicants will bring rich experiences, diverse backgrounds, and ideology to the university community."

Molar proposes, in effect, that universities spend as much time delving into the ideology of applicants as they do in determining skin color and, presumably, weigh it as heavily on the "diversity" scale. I have reservations about this approach - would, should, it for example, encourage the creation of "Conservative Studies" programs on the model of the Blacks Studies and Womens' Studies programs that were and remain a primary means of promoting race and gender "diversity"? One of their initial functions was to funnel black and women that traditional departments would not hire onto faculties. That seems to be what Prof. Molar (now a professor at the U.S. Marine Corps University) suggests, calling on universities "to create new faculty positions for conservatives beyond the reach of other professors' tentacles, as other schools have started doing."

But I don't want to argue remedies today; I want to discuss the nature of the problem. Or I should say, the nature of the problem if there is one, since Iowa, and other universities, maintain there is no problem, that they cannot assess the ideology of applicants and, even if they could, they should not. If there's no problem, of course, no remedy is needed.

Whether we are still in a post-modern era or have progressed (or regressed, if you prefer) into a post-post-modern era, it remains powerfully true that fields like history are much more enthralled by interpretation than fact. Graduate students spend as much (usually, quite a bit more) time mastering the various and conflicting interpretations of the past than they do on the pedestrian and mundane details of what actually happened. ("Actually!" they might exclaim aghast. "Actually? Don't tell me you still believe in the correspondence theory of truth.") If point of view takes precedence over what is viewed, if it takes a black to teach black history and a woman to teach womens' history, then ... well, you can see where this leads.

What interests me, however, is not what (if anything) should be done about the ideological imbalance in humanities and social science faculties. What interests me is how a whole generation of academics appears to have so little difficulty reconciling irreconcilable principles and behaviors: professing a commitment to treating people "without regard" to race, ethnicity, and gender while proceeding flagrantly and proudly to "take race [and ethnicity and gender] into account," favoring some and disfavoring others on the basis of characteristics they continue to promise not to regard; professing a profound commitment to the fundamental indispensability of "diversity" while remaining cavalierly unconcerned about an ideological conformity in many departments that would make forced re-education camps green with envy. At first I though the answer might lie in cognitive dissonance:

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon first identified by [Stanford psychologist] Leon Festinger. It occurs when there is a discrepancy between what a person believes, knows and values, and persuasive information that calls these into question. The discrepancy causes psychological discomfort, and the mind adjusts to reduce the discrepancy. In ethics, cognitive dissonance is important in its ability to alter values, such as when an admired celebrity embraces behavior that his or her admirers deplore. Their dissonance will often result in changing their attitudes toward the behavior. Dissonance also leads to rationalizations of unethical conduct, as when the appeal and potential benefits of a large amount of money makes unethical actions to acquire it seem less objectionable than if they were applied to smaller amounts.

But this, on reflection, doesn't work, since our esteemed faculties don't seem to experience any dissonance at all, cognitive or otherwise. If they did, they'd at least revise all their statements of civil rights principles to reflect what they actually do in their affirmative action policies. But they don't.

In any event, for whatever reason I'm simply not very interested in hearing about (much less proposing) cures to this conformity. But I do confess one keen interest: I would dearly love to hear a learned exposition of exactly why the fate of the university and indeed of the western world as we know it rests on our success in achieving pigmentary "diversity" - what, for example, does it contribute to the life of the mind? - while ideological diversity appears to be of no concern whatever.




Low expectations won't help anybody

Full disclosure: My wife got good grades in law school. She graduated third in her class. She practices law with a firm downtown that only hires lawyers with good grades, just like every attorney there. Full disclosure: I got good grades in graduate school (though I was nowhere near third in my class). That helped me get on the faculty at one of the most selective institutions in American higher education. There, I give out grades. Good ones to those who master the material, bad ones to those who do not. That is my job. It is, I think, an important one.

So when it comes to today's topic, I might be biased. I actually believe in things like academic excellence and intellectual merit. I believe that right answers are better than wrong answers, that people can differ in their ability to distinguish between the two, and that identifying those who can do that well, is an important social good.

Grades, professional careers, and academic excellence are in the news thanks to the President of the National Urban League. In an interview that made national news, Marc Morial talked about law firms and diversity. It turns out that lawyers at the best firms want to hire only applicants who got good grades in law school. This, apparently, is bad.

Grades in post-secondary education exist to solve an important social problem: discovering who is good at what. It is highly beneficial to society to identify individuals with intellectual ability and professional skill, so that people can find them when they need them. That's how things like "reputation" and "prestige" work. It's also important for smart people to find and work with other smart people. Professional ability is best when leveraged. No one is suggesting that grades are the only thing professional firms should consider. There are plenty of straight-A law school and medical students who have no business being around people. That's why law firms and residency programs conduct interviews. Where you went to school is important too. Some places are tougher than others. Grades aren't perfect, but they're a pretty good indicator of whether or not you can do what you trained for and how you compare with your peers.

Morial's comments were particularly insulting to the minorities he claims to defend. The comments imply that minority law students can't achieve the same grades as white students. Since he doesn't claim discrimination by a conspiracy of racist law professors (good thing too, since there's no evidence for it), I can only assume that he's given up the fight. He seems to imply that the only way non-whites will ever be proportionally represented in American law firms is if lawyers with good grades stop asking for the same in the associates they hire.

Let's do a little thought experiment. Suppose you were accused of a crime, or your kid got into trouble, or someone decided to sue you. Whatever it is, you need a lawyer. You've heard good things about Smith & Jones, so you stop by their office. On their front door you find a newly painted sign: "The law firm of Smith and Jones now supports the hiring policies of the National Urban League. We are proud to announce that, in support of the visual diversity of our professional staff, we have reduced the emphasis we place on the academic performance of applicants for positions with the firm." Would you want them to represent you?

The National Urban League is right when they declare that urban black America is in crisis. They are right in that the standard "solutions" of modern politics have not worked. At the risk of stating the obvious, they are also right in that racism in America has not gone away. But they are wrong if they believe that lower academic standards for law firms, or medical practices, or any professional organization, are the answer. That would be unfair to those who use professional services, unfair to everyone who meets high standards, and unfair in the long run to those it supposed to help. If you ever have wondered what the phrase "soft bigotry of low expectations" means, look no further.

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18 October, 2007

Criticism and censorship in academe

Leftists whine but it is they who are doing the censoring

Fears are repeatedly voiced about dangers to academic freedom. But these expressions of concern exhibit a great deal of hyperbole. In essence, there is a common mischaracterization. It treats criticism as though this were tantamount to censorship. To be sure, criticisms can be shrill and they may be warranted or unwarranted, fair or unfair, and serious or unserious, but they simply do not amount to the banning or suppression of scholarly ideas. Those of us who venture to express our views about matters of public policy and engage in debates about domestic and foreign affairs should expect that at times our ideas will evoke vigorous and even caustic disagreement. And even under the best of circumstances our words may come back to haunt us. Our written and spoken words are fair game, and we can hardly complain when these are subjected to comment and criticism.

In Middle East studies and among much of the academic left, denunciations of U.S. foreign policy, past and present, and sweeping condemnations about America's world role are common. This has been evident for a considerable period of time, beginning at least as early, for example, as the debates about the 1973 Middle East War and Arab oil embargo, and continuing through the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Rushdie affair, Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the 9 ? 11 terrorist attacks, war and insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Not surprisingly, a good deal of professorial writing and speaking on these subjects has been subject to strong criticism, some of it from within the academy and a considerable amount from outside. In response, a number of Middle East scholars have complained about what they consider to be intimidation and threats to academic freedom. Their alarms are expressed in various ways. For example, an established Middle East expert, writing in a book for a top university press, voices such concerns in earnest but hyperbolic language: ``The last several years of often vicious attempts to intimidate members of the academy, particularly the Middle East Studies community, have been both disturbing and angering.'' The author refers to ``grim'' circumstances and declares a determination to pursue her scholarship, ``as a protest against those who seek to curb the polyphony of the academy'' in ``saying `no' to the trampling of free speech.'' (Brand 2006:xiii). Still others add to the complaints about infringement of academic freedom by alleging a prohibition on criticism of Israel.

It is not at all evident, however, that anything like intimidation, the ``trampling of free speech,'' or the curbing of the ``polyphony of the academy'' has occurred. Indeed, much of the alarm about censorship is a reaction to having one's words held up to critical scrutiny, both inside and outside the academy. For example, Martin Kramer's (2001) thoughtful critique of Middle East Studies has elicited angry reactions among those he has identified for what he describes as analytical deficiencies in their work. But one need not agree with every single conclusion he draws to note that a very large part of his monograph consists of copious quotations from the words of the academic figures whom he critiques.

As for any prohibition on criticism of Israel, the opposite is far more prevalent in the majority of academic Middle East studies programs and departments. Indeed, even while citing examples of what he considers to be inappropriate efforts to protest or even forestall Israel's critics from expressing their views, Wolfe (2006) concedes that ``none of those cases resulted in suppression of ideas.'' And he adds that ``even Walt and Mearsheimer, despite the factual errors and sometimes hysterical tone of their working paper, received a very lucrative offer from Farrar Strauss to publish a book based upon it.''

A much earlier case in point concerns assessments of the Iranian revolution. In 1979, a prominent international relations scholar wrote in a New York Times op-ed about Ayatollah Khomeini that, ``.the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.'' The author ventured the prediction that ``Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third-world country,'' and weeks later he responded to a rejoinder from a Times columnist by writing, ``To single out Iran for criticism at this point is to lend support to that fashionable falsehood embraced by Mr. [Anthony] Lewis that what has happened in Iran is the replacement of one tyranny by another'' (Falk 1979a, 1979b). In light of subsequent events in Iran, the writer of those words has come in for periodic and even strident criticism, so that nearly three decades later his words are still recalled and quoted.

Criticism of such judgments is fair game, as is the give and take in debates about 9 ? 11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, radical Islamism, and the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Indeed, such criticism can even be unfair, but cases in which moderate, conservative or right-wing criticism has led to genuine infringement on academic freedom-through censorship, punitive action or dismissal- are very hard to find.

Moreover, an alleged case involving University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill does not constitute a breach of academic freedom at all. Churchill, who gained notoriety for likening some of those killed in the 9 ? 11 attacks to ``little Eichmans,'' became the subject of an academic investigation which determined that he had committed research misconduct. A report by the University's Privilege and Tenure Committee ``found, by clear and convincing evidence, three instances of evidentiary fabrication by ghost writing and self citation, two instances of fabrication of material, one instance of falsification, two instances of plagiarism, and one instance of failure to comply with established standards on the use of author names on publications,'' according to a letter from the President of the university to the Board of Regents recommending Churchill's dismissal (Monastersky 2007). In other words, the actions taken by the University of Colorado against Churchill have been for serious violations of academic principles and do not constitute suppression of academic freedom.

Others have pointed with alarm to David Horowitz's controversial book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. His criticisms come from outside the established academic and think tank community and are at times polemical, though they do include copious and sometimes damning quotations and endnotes. Whatever the merits or lack thereof in his critique, Horowitz's book is not taken seriously within the academy, and there exists little evidence that academic freedom has been infringed by his condemnations

There are threats to academic freedom, though they are almost entirely the opposite of those cited by some contributors to this forum. In practice, it is scholars who do not share the dominant sympathies, ideologies, and beliefs that characterize the current Middle East studies community who are marginalized, often excluded, and thus isolated and even stigmatized. The response to their work takes a variety of forms, some of them subtle, others less so.

One form of bias involves marginalizing serious scholars. Distinguished academic authors who do not conform to the dominant Middle East studies worldview, and whose work has elsewhere been recognized and honored, are subjected to ad hominem attacks and their important writings are often absent from the syllabi of courses on the Middle East, the Arab world, and Islam. For example, two of America's most distinguished authorities on the Middle East, Princeton University Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis and Professor Fouad Ajami of The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, are virtually ostracized in vast swaths of the academic world because they do not attribute the region's ills mainly to America, Israel, and ? or Western imperialism. Other serious scholarly authors, such as Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and Michael Doran, are similarly slighted-when they are not being attacked ad homine.

What is insidious about this marginalization is that the ideas and writing of these scholars are less subject to critical engagement. Because dissenting authors are treated in this way, those who disagree with them only rarely take part in the genuine debate and dialog that are essential to any discipline, and students who study these subjects risk missing the opportunity to think about, explore and assess competing ideas.

An even more overt problem concerns campus speakers programs. Lectures by such authors are relatively infrequent compared with those who articulate the conventional wisdom, and when such invitations are extended, the speakers may face the prospect of hecklers who seek to disrupt their lectures or the presence of groups who aim to prevent them from speaking altogether.[2] One obstructionist tactic includes making claims of racism or hostility to Islam. Another involves creating such a prospect of disorder that university authorities have become reluctant to see the event take place and have even gone so far as rescinding invitations tendered to these scholars.

For example, consider the reactions to Daniel Pipes, a serious and widely published scholar, albeit one who has been the subject of controversy for his website, Campus Watch. Pipes has been a frequent critic of radical Islamism and his aim has been to foster balance in Middle East studies. He does so by scrutinizing the discipline and commenting about courses, conferences and writings, though he has not sought to intervene in cases of hiring and promotion. There is certainly room for debate about Campus Watch, but Pipes has been subject to misquotation, virulent ad hominem attacks, and spurious allegations of Islamophobia. His campus appearances have been marked by threats and disruptions and there have been repeated attempts to prevent him from speaking.[3]

Still another real infringement on academic freedom involves the process of faculty hiring. Here, the issues and pressures are complex and the context highly subjective. Nonetheless, there is reason to infer that subtle and not so subtle political considerations affect hiring in Middle East studies and in certain other disciplines, and that those who express ideas that do not conform to the prevailing ethos face an uphill struggle. One recent applicant for a faculty position recounts a promising interview experience that turned sour when he was accused of being too conservative in his assessments of the Islamic world. He notes, ``I met again with the search chair, who tried in vain to assure me that the ideological litmus test I'd just failed in fact had never occurred. I asked her if she had ever heard a committee member accuse a candidate of being `more liberal than others in the field.' Of course she answered `never.''' The writer concludes by observing, ``If getting a Middle East or Islamic history job at a college or university means converting from following Bernard Lewis to the false messiah Edward Said, I won't be changing jobs anytime soon'' (Furnish 2007).

An egregious assault on academic freedom has been taking place in Britain, where there have been repeated attempts to organize boycotts of Israeli universities. The most recent of these was a May 2007 resolution of the University and College Union, calling on its branches to debate the withholding of cooperation from Israeli institutions. The anti-Israeli bias and the anti-intellectual bigotry on display is quite striking.[4] Israel is the only real democracy in the Middle East, its colleges and universities enjoy academic freedom (a feature altogether absent among its neighbors), they are open to students and faculty of other ethnicities and faiths, and they host an extraordinary range of scholarly and political views (some of these extremely critical of Israel). Moreover, Israel is the sole country subject to such exclusion, while countries with appalling human rights records and in which academic and intellectual freedom is routinely abused or nonexistent are subject to no such sanctions.

Challenges to academic freedom are not limited to Middle East studies. Comparable problems exist in some other fields of study. These difficulties are most evident for those whose work or writing does not share many of the pieties of political correctness, particularly in regard to such topics as gender, race, diversity, and sexual orientation. A dismaying example can be found in campus speech codes, some of which have attempted to curtail free speech not because it is obscene, racist or risks inciting violence, but because it might be perceived as hurtful or insensitive. Given the historic patterns of robust and raucous free speech in American public life from the time of the founding of the republic to the present day, such restraints on speech are excessive and unwarranted.

Although strictly speaking not a matter of academic freedom, one problem that does exist is the often truncated range of discourse now tolerated on many college campuses. Here too, it can be useful to invoke another fundamental AAUP statement on academic freedom. This one dates from 1915, and includes the words, ``The university teacher.should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine'' and ``should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves'' (quoted in ``Anne Neal vs. Roger Bowen''). But in many universities, students are not being exposed to the ``best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine.'' This stems from the fact that the professorial political spectrum ranges mostly from moderate left of center liberalism to the farther reaches of sparse or missing altogether. As one thoughtful (nonconservative) observer notes, ``The absence of conservative minds from the liberal arts curriculum and the off campus ignorance of them.are standard features of intellectual life'' (Bauerlein 2006).

Data for the political affiliations of college faculty provide evidence of this. One study has shown that Democrats outnumber Republicans by huge margins: 21:1 among anthropologists, 9:1 among political and legal philosophers, more than 8:1 among historians, and nearly 6:1 among political scientists (study by Dan Klein, cited in Neal 2006). A study by Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte, published in 2005, found that 72% of faculty self-identified as liberals and 15% as conservative (Rothman et al. 2005). Another authoritative survey, this one by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, found that 5.3% of faculty identified as far left, 42.3% liberal, 34.3% middle of the road, 17.7% conservative, and 0.3% far right (study cited in Neal 2006).

One consequence of this politically tilted environment is that some faculty members are tempted to inject their personal political preferences into their teaching in ways that are completely extraneous to the subject matter at hand. This evokes complaints from off-campus, for example by Anne Neal, the president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (a right of center group critical of what it considers political imbalance in academia). She offers a litany of complaints about the campus atmosphere: ``disinviting politically incorrect speakers; mounting one-sided panels, teach-ins and conferences; sanctioning speakers who fail to follow the politically correct line; politicized instruction; virtual elimination of broad-based survey courses in favor of trendy, and often politicized courses.; reprisal against or intimidation of students who seek to speak their mind; political discrimination in college hiring and retention; speech codes and campus newspaper theft and destruction'' (Neal 2006). One need not accept the entire list, nor assume it applies to all or even many universities, in order to recognize that there is some merit in these complaints.

The relative paucity of conservative scholarly voices and literature in the universities deprives all of us of the opportunity to incorporate intellectually serious traditions and ideas as we and our students contemplate not only the debates of the past, but the great issues of our era. Mark Bauerlein, Professor of English at Emory University, has addressed this shortcoming by observing that, ``We need to subject it [conservatism] to the full analysis-critical and appreciative-of the academy.It would be healthy for everyone if the academic curriculum broadened its scope, if the lineage of conservatism were consolidated into a respectable course of study-that is, if Hayek won one-tenth the attention that Foucault receives'' (Bauerlein 2006).

Bauerlein's observation comes from a discipline outside the field of international studies, but another more subtle concern has been expressed by Robert Jervis, one of the leading scholars within our discipline (and certainly not a conservative), who cautions about the potential unintended consequences of truncated discourse:

An intriguing complication is that our explanations here may of necessity be strongly influenced by our own policy preferences. The political science profession is dominated by liberal Democrats, which means that most of us feel that the country is harmed by the conservative tendencies that are so powerful now and have operated throughout most of American history. Our preferences may drive us toward explanations involving forms of false consciousness because it is otherwise hard to explain why so many of our compatriots act against what we believe to be their own interests (Jervis 2005:316).

Jervis's remark is well worth contemplating, and his caution about invoking explanations of ``false consciousness'' is insightful. A recent article in Perspectives on Politics appears to succumb to exactly this temptation. In their essay entitled, ``Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy: A Study in Weberian Activism,'' the authors recount how in October 2004 they and a number of prominent international relations scholars signed a letter critical of existing policy in Iraq and calling for a major shift in American foreign policy. The letter received little attention in the media and none by television news or in the major national newspapers. The authors address what they term ``the Failure of Weberian Activism,'' and in so doing appear to attribute this to the media's failure to distinguish between ``political partisanship and scientific scholarship'' ( Jackson and Kaufman 2007:100). In short, they take it as self-evident that their position represents a ``scientific consensus,'' blame the public and the media for being unwilling or unable to assess the worth of competing claims, and nowhere appear to consider the possibility that foreign policy assessments other than those in their own letter may have any validity.

In summary, the problem of truncated discourse is not, strictly speaking, a matter of academic freedom, but it comes at a cost in terms of intellectual breadth and rigor. What is needed is greater intellectual pluralism, which would serve both the ideal of ``fearless sifting and winnowing'' called for by the University of Wisconsin Regents and the ``free search for truth and its free exposition'' invoked by the AAUP Statement.

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Pope Benedict Urges Government Subsidy of Faith-Based Schools

Pope Benedict XVI said today that governments are morally obligated to fund faith-based schools. His remarks were made in greeting Francis Kim Ji-young, the new ambassador of the Republic of Korea to the Holy See. "Faith-based schools have much to contribute," said the Pope in ensuring young people receive a sound education. "It is incumbent upon governments to afford parents the opportunity to send their children to religious schools by facilitating the establishment and financing of such institutions." "Insofar as possible," he added, "public subsidies should free parents from undue financial burdens that attenuate their ability to choose the most suitable means of educating their children."

The Pope specified that he was referring not only to Catholic but also other faith-based schooling, and also insisted that governments allow faiths freedom in terms of curricula. "Catholic and other religious schools should enjoy the appropriate latitude of freedom to design and implement curricula that nurture the life of the spirit without which the life of the mind is so seriously distorted," he said.

In the same address, the Pope condemned research which threatens the human embryo. "The destruction of human embryos, whether to acquire stem cells or for any other purpose, contradicts the purported intent of researchers, legislators and public health officials to promote human welfare," he said. "The Church does not hesitate to approve and encourage somatic stem-cell research: not only because of the favorable results obtained through these alternative methods, but more importantly because they harmonize with the aforementioned intent by respecting the life of the human being at every stage of his or her existence."

See the Pope's full address to the Ambassador here

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Minneapolis Catholic College Requires Reading of Sexually Explicit Anti-Catholic Novel

Catholic parents of students at a Catholic college in Minneapolis are outraged that their children will be forced to read the sexually explicit and anti-Christian novel, A Handmaid's Tale by Canadian author and far-left feminist Margaret Atwood. The English Department's faculty at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, Minneapolis, has voted to use the book in all sections of freshman English as this year's "common text".

Catholic columnist Matt C. Abbott has reported that concerned parents have informed the university of their objections and been ignored. The group has formed to convince the university administration to drop the "sexually offensive" book and reform its English curriculum in favour of more serious literature.

Atwood is known in Canada as a major figure in the ultra-feminist, anti-religious and largely state-funded literary establishment. When it was first published by McClelland and Stewart in 1985, the book was heavily criticized, largely outside Canada, as an anti-Christian screed relying for its appeal on the titillation provided by its frequent expletives and graphically depicted sex-acts, and a heavy-handed feminist ideology.

Despite this, the book remains at the top of charts in literary circles and has received and been nominated for numerous literary awards, including the prestigious Booker Prize. It is featured as part of the high school literature curricula in the UK, the US, Germany and Australia. It has been listed as No.37 on the "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000" by the American Library Association, as parents continue to object to its anti-Christian and sexual content.

The parents' group, UST Class Action, says the book has no place on the curriculum of a Catholic university. They are seeking not only to have the book removed from the curriculum, but for the university to apologise and review and reform its policy. They accuse the university of deliberately choosing the book for its "anti-Christian/anti-Catholic indoctrination value".

UST Class Action calls the book "insultingly vulgar, boorish and obscene." The story of A Handmaid's Tale revolves around an oppressive right-wing Christian totalitarian state in which women are forbidden to be educated, work, hold property or vote. They are separated, according to their fertility and social status, into three classes: wives, domestic servants and "handmaids" who are used as breeding stock for the ruling class of white Christian men. The story follows the adventures of "Offred" a handmaid who is given as a state benefit to a member of the elite and ritualistically raped to produce a male heir. Handmaids who attempt to resist or escape are publicly excuted as enemies of the state along with abortionists and homosexuals.

UST Class Action says, "Reading and analyzing this book is a profligate waste of the parent's or student's money, and a waste of the student's time. It cheats the students of a truly quality education that includes great Western literature by Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, [and] Chesterton".

The group wrote to the chairman of the English Department, Andrew Scheiber, on September 4, 2007. They were told that the objections were brought to the attention of Father Dennis Dease, the President of St. Thomas University who "said he would not intervene". The group is taking their concerns to the university's Board of Trustees.

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17 October, 2007

Ideological coercion in social work education

Very reminiscent of Mao's China

In 1943, the Supreme Court, affirming the right of Jehovah's Witnesses children to refuse to pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag in schools, declared: "No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." Today that principle is routinely traduced, coast to coast, by officials who are petty in several senses.

They are teachers at public universities, in schools of social work. A study prepared by the National Association of Scholars, a group that combats political correctness on campuses, reviews social work education programs at 10 major public universities and comes to this conclusion: Such programs mandate an ideological orthodoxy to which students must subscribe concerning "social justice" and "oppression."

In 1997, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) adopted a surreptitious political agenda in the form of a new code of ethics, enjoining social workers to advocate for social justice "from local to global levels." A widely used textbook -- "Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skill" -- declares that promoting "social and economic justice" is especially imperative as a response to "the conservative trends of the past three decades." Clearly, in the social work profession's catechism, whatever social and economic justice are, they are the opposite of conservatism.

The Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), the national accreditor of social work education programs, encourages -- not that encouragement is required -- the ideological permeation of the curricula, including mandatory student advocacy. The CSWE says students must demonstrate an ability to "understand the forms and mechanisms of oppression and discrimination."

At Arizona State University, social work students must "demonstrate compliance with the NASW Code of Ethics." Berkeley requires compliance as proof of "suitability for the profession." Students at the University of Central Florida "must comply" with the NASW code. At the University of Houston, students must sign a pledge of adherence. At the University of Michigan, failure to comply with the code may be deemed "academic misconduct."

Schools' mission statements, student manuals and course descriptions are clotted with the vocabulary of "progressive" cant -- "diversity," "inclusion," "classism," "ethnocentrism," "racism," "sexism," "heterosexism," "ageism," "white privilege," "ableism," "contextualizes subjects," "cultural imperialism," "social identities and positionalities," "biopsychosocial" problems, "a just share of society's resources," and on and on. What goes on under the cover of this miasma of jargon? Just what the American Association of University Professors warned against in its 1915 "Declaration of Principles" -- teachers "indoctrinating" students.

In 2005, Emily Brooker, a social-work student at Missouri State University, was enrolled in a class taught by a professor who advertised himself as a liberal and insisted that social work is a liberal profession. At first, a mandatory assignment for his class was to advocate homosexual foster homes and adoption, with all students required to sign an advocacy letter, on university stationery, to the state legislature.

When Brooker objected on religious grounds, the project was made optional. But shortly before the final exam she was charged with a "Level 3," the most serious, violation of professional standards. In a 2 1/2 -hour hearing -- which she was forbidden to record and which her parents were barred from attending -- the primary subject was her refusal to sign the letter. She was ordered to write a paper ("Written Response about My Awareness") explaining how she could "lessen the gap" between her ethics and those of the social-work profession. When she sued the university, it dropped the charges and made financial and other restitution.

The NAS study says that at Rhode Island College's School of Social Work, a conservative student, William Felkner, received a failing grade in a course requiring students to lobby the state legislature for a cause mandated by the department. The NAS study also reports that Sandra Fuiten abandoned her pursuit of a social-work degree at the University of Illinois at Springfield after the professor, in a course that required students to lobby the legislature on behalf of positions prescribed by the professor, told her that it is impossible to be both a social worker and an opponent of abortion.

In the month since the NAS released its study, none of the schools covered by it has contested its findings. Because there might as well be signs on the doors of many schools of social work proclaiming "conservatives need not apply," two questions arise: Why are such schools of indoctrination permitted in institutions of higher education? And why are people of all political persuasions taxed to finance this propaganda?

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The dumbing down of Britain's teachers

The only real qualification required is willingness to stand up in front of a mob of undisciplined hooligans

A STUDENT was allowed to become a teacher even though it took 28 attempts to pass a basic numeracy test that included questions such as "what is 6.03 multiplied by 100?". Figures released in parliament show that many students retake the basic maths and literacy tests required to join the profession several times. In both 2005 and 2006, there was at least one teacher who needed 28 attempts at the numeracy test; for literacy it was 20 and 19 respectively. In each of the last six years, there was at least one student who had to re-take the basic numeracy test more than 20 times, and the literacy test as many as up to 25 times.

Questions from the tests, which are set by the Training and Development Agency for Schools, included: "A pupil scores 18 marks out of 25. What was the score as a percentage?" In the literacy test, candidates are asked to choose the right answer from four alternative spellings for words such as preference, acknowledge and relieved. Options given included releived, releaved and realived.

The tests were introduced in 2000 and, initially, candidates who failed after four attempts were not allowed to qualify as teachers. This rule was relaxed in 2001 after complaints from the profession and students are now allowed unlimited re-takes. "If they have to do the test nearly 30 times, it's clear they can't read and write and add up. They shouldn't be allowed to teach," said Chris Woodhead, a former chief inspector of schools and a Sunday Times columnist.

Last year the tests were taken by 34,000 aspiring teachers; 700 failed to pass the numeracy test. Students must pass in numeracy, literacy and information and communications to qualify. A spokeswoman for the agency said: "We don't want to deny potential good teachers the opportunity to re-take tests. If you don't pass first time, it does not necessarily make you a bad teacher."

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16 October, 2007

Nervous atheists fear exposure of their bigotry

Atheist scientists who have become famous for attacking those who disagree with them are now loudly complaining about supposedly being mistreated in a film -- EXPELLED -- that they haven't seen. The point of the movie is not to prove or disprove evolution or intelligent design. The purpose is to report the personal attacks on anyone in academia who does not toe the line on evolution

Oxford zoologist, Richard Dawkins, has made a lot of money and fame calling people who believe in God "delusional." Yet he is now grumbling that the producers of EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed "tricked" him into doing an interview. EXPELLED exposes the intimidation, persecution and career destruction that takes place when any scientist dares dissent from the view that all life on earth is the mere result of random mutation and natural selection.

"Some of these people -- especially Mr. Dawkins -- spend a lot of time insulting the millions of folks who disagree with them, so you would think they would have a little tougher skin," said Mark Mathis, one of the film's producers. "The funny thing is they are whining about the fact that the film is going to allow them to insult people on a much larger stage."

Other notable scientists who claim they were "deceived" by the producers of EXPELLED include Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education and PZ Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, who devotes much of his time to his popular science blog. Myers has attacked the film several times on his blog since EXPELLED announced its arrival in theatres in February 2008.

EXPELLED's producers say they aren't surprised by the academic uproar over the film because it is consistent with what happens on university campuses when students or professors question atheistic materialism. "There is some serious mistreatment and downright reprehensible behavior going on here, but I can assure you it's not coming from us -- we're just the ones exposing it," said Executive Producer, Walt Ruloff. "When our audience sees the stories of the real victims of scientific malpractice they're going to be outraged."

The producers of EXPELLED are particularly amused by Dawkins's complaint that the name of the film was changed from "Crossroads" to "EXPELLED" suggesting that this re-naming was a deception. Dawkins is well aware of the fact that movie titles change. When he was interviewed for EXPELLED he made the comment that the title of his anti-religion documentary, "Root of all Evil?" was chosen as a replacement for the original title late in the process.

Additionally, Dawkins participates in the documentary "A War on Science," which is an attack on Intelligent Design (ID). Producers of that film presented themselves to the Discovery Institute as objective filmmakers and then portrayed the organization as religiously-motivated and anti-scientific. "I've never seen a bigger bunch of hypocrites in my life," said Mathis, who set up the interviews for EXPELLED. "I went over all of the questions with these folks before the interviews and I e-mailed the questions to many of them days in advance. The lady (and gentleman) doth protest too much, methinks."

"Both Myers and Scott say they would have agreed to be interviewed under any circumstances, so why are they complaining?" said Ruloff. "In fact we had a second interview set up with Eugenie Scott, which she cancelled once rumors about EXPELLED began to circulate."

The legal releases all of the interviewees signed were quite explicit in regards to editorial control and transferability, something that is standard in the film business. Dawkins, Myers, Scott and many other scientists were paid for their interviews (Scott's check went to her organization, the National Center for Science Education).

EXPELLED's producers have made it clear the film will portray the scientists interviewed in a way that is consistent with their actual viewpoints or other public statements.

EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed is scheduled for release in February 2008. See the Ben Stein video about the film here and more details and commentary here

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All schools are equal according to British government socialists

Oxford and Cambridge universities are unlikely to reach their targets for recruiting more students from state schools, analysis of admissions data suggests. Last year the two universities signed agreements with the Office for Fair Access pledging to increase the proportion of students they take from state schools by 2011. But a study by the Institute for Public Policy Research indicates that, at current rates of progress, their targets will not be met at Cambridge until 2012 and at Oxford until 2016.

The institute's analysis suggests that 36 per cent of students who got three A grades at A level went to independent schools, but the independent sector takes up 46 per cent of Oxford places and 43 per cent of Cambridge places.

Lisa Harker, co-director of the institute, said: "Oxford and Cambridge need to be more pro-active. Students getting three A-grade A levels at state schools are significantly under represented at both universities. Oxford and Cambridge must stop blaming a lack of applications for failure to make progress."

Oxford takes 54 per cent of its students from state schools. Its target is for 62 per cent of applications to come from state schools in five years. Cambridge takes 57 per cent of its students from state schools. Its target is for 60 to 63 per cent by 2011.

Admissions officers at both universities said that the analysis was flawed as it wrongly assumed that all A grades were equal and took no account of what subjects students had studied or what courses were on offer at Oxbridge. Geoff Parks, head of admissions at Cambridge, said: "Independent and grammar school students are more likely to have the right subject combinations that we are looking for at Cambridge."

The figures come days after John Denham, the Universities' Minister, said that he wanted the question of bias against pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds settled before a review of university tuition fees in 2009.

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Attempting to revive history education in Australia

AS expected, Prime Minister John Howard's intervention in the culture wars, represented by the proposed Australian history guide for years 9 and 10 of high school, has drawn a chorus of criticism from the usual suspects. State Labor education ministers are one in the argument that each of their history curriculum documents represents best practice and that the guide is superfluous and a political stunt. Historians such as the University of Melbourne 's Stuart Macintyre, author of The History Wars and a vocal opponent of the Howard Government's education polices, have criticised the guide as well meant but overly detailed, solipsistic and difficult to implement in the classroom.

As a result of a 1991 meeting of Australian education ministers, the school curriculum was divided into eight learning areas and history was re-badged as "time, continuity and change", disappearing into the amorphous and politically correct stew represented by the subject known as studies of society and environment.

While the secondary school curriculum in NSW, and more recently Victoria, gives history special status, treating it as a stand-alone subject and detailing significant events, people and historical forces that must be taught, the subject has not fared as well in other jurisdictions.

The more conservative view - where students are taught a narrative associated with significant historical events, individuals and historical forces that shaped Australia's growth as a nation - has been jettisoned in favour of an inquiry-based issues approach that emphasises what is local and contemporary. Teaching what US academic Jerome Bruner has termed the structure of a discipline has given way to so-called generic skills, dispositions and competencies. This is largely as a result of Australia's adoption of outcomes-based education, otherwise known as Essential Learnings.

The Tasmanian and the South Australian Essential Learnings approach defines curriculum in terms of broad and vacuous categories such as futures, identity, interdependence and thinking and communication. In Queensland, the main SOSE values are defined as peace, ecological and economic sustainability, social justice and democratic process, all with a politically correct slant. The West Australian Curriculum Framework document describes history as "time, continuity and change" and, instead of detailing what should be taught, provides teachers with generalised outcome statements, such as: "They (students) can identify the constructive and destructive consequences of continuity and change and describe examples of both evolutionary and revolutionary change."

Unlike the approach associated with SOSE, Howard's new Guide to Teaching Australian History in Years 9 and 10 treats it as a stand-alone subject, and its authors bite the bullet and stipulate in detail a series of topics, milestones and essential content that all students need to learn if they are to understand and appreciate the nation's past. Although it's being attacked as the product of a conservative ideology, it should be noted the new guide is inclusive when it suggests students should study history through a range of perspectives, including those of gender, the environment, and indigenous and everyday life.

History teaching, and education more broadly, was once based on a belief in essential content, and that some interpretations are closer to the truth than others and that evidence should be weighed impartially. But the SOSE curriculums argue that interpreting the past is subjective and clouded by each person's ideological baggage and that it is wrong to stipulate what must be taught about it.

In 1992, the new history within the Victorian curriculum was celebrated on the basis that "there is no single version of history that can be presented to students. History is a version of the past (that) varies according to the person and the times ... each generation reinterprets the past in the light of its own values and attitudes." The 2000 edition of the Queensland SOSE document says students should be told "knowledge is always tentative", that they should "critique the socially constructed elements of text"and understand "how privilege and marginalisation are created and sustained in society".

Instead of providing a clear narrative detailing Australia's unique cultural and social growth and valuing what we hold in common, the SOSE approach emphasises diversity and difference. The Tasmanian curriculum, in explaining what is meant by social responsibility, emphasises the need to endorse "multiple perspectives" and "diverse views".

The South Australian curriculum, in outlining the importance of students having an understanding of cultural and global connections, also emphasises diversity and difference, as does the ACT curriculum, under the heading "Australian perspectives", in saying that students should experience the "diversity of Australian life".

The way studying Australian history is described in the Victorian curriculum also stresses diversity and multiple influences. Significant is that the new federal guide, in opposition to the idea of cultural relativism, acknowledges under the perspective "beliefs and values" the importance of "the influence of Christian churches and the liberal democratic philosophies" that underpin and safeguard our unique way of life.

A 1999 report, The Future of the Past, funded by the federal Government and written by historian Tony Taylor of Monash University, concludes that "Australian history in schools is characterised by lack of continuity, topic repetition and lack of coherence". The national history report also includes an observation by Monash University historian Mark Peel that many students enter university with a fragmented historical understanding.

Peel observed that while they might be strong in terms of questioning interpretations and appreciating the contribution of those voices normally excluded, such as Aborigines and women, undergraduate students lacked an understanding of the larger picture or the ability to place isolated events and issues within the broader context. Peel states: "Students seem anxious about the absence of a story by which to comprehend change, or to understand how the nation and world they are about to inherit came to be. They do have maps of the past. Their maps are more likely than mine to focus on particular visual images, those snatches of documentary film or photographs (that) increasingly encapsulate the past. Indeed, their sense of the world's history is often based on intense moments and fragments that have no real momentum or connection."

In a speech given at the Queensland Teachers Union conference in 2005, Australian Education Union president Pat Byrne effectively argued that the cultural Left had extended its influence in and through the education system. Byrne said: "We have succeeded in influencing the curriculum development in schools, education departments and universities. The conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum." Although yet to be translated into classroom practice, the new guide to Australian history suggests that Byrne should not be overconfident.

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15 October, 2007

Girl did not know she was fat

More fallout from the stupid and academically discredited self-esteem gospel that tries to shield kids from information about their own limitations. Kids need to get used to the idea that they are not always going to be a star

In an effort to combat the problem of childhood obesity, the Denver Public School District is sending home student health reports to keep parents informed. However, one parent says it should not have been sent home in her daughter's backpack because she read it. "The part that upset her the most as she started reading it, there it stated that she was overweight and she started to cry saying, 'Mom, that school tells me I'm fat.' So, it was very heart wrenching," said Flaurette Martinez.

Her daughter Isabel was sent home from the Centennial K-8 School on Monday with the health notice. It listed her height, weight and body mass index – a measure of body fat. Underneath the listing it had a marking next to the status "overweight." "My daughter is big boned," said Martinez.

Isabel's mother does not have a problem with what the schools are trying to do. She says that type of sensitive information should be mailed directly home to parents, because kids are prone to reading letters sent home by the schools. "If she would have dropped this letter, a student may have found it and may have exposed it to other students," said Martinez. "Anything specific to the child should be mailed. It should not be given to the child." However, DPS Spokesperson Alex Sanchez says schools do that all the time. Report cards, disciplinary notices and letters from the principal are commonly sent home with students. Sanchez says it is cheaper for the district to send these things home with students instead of by mail.

Martinez says that decision is causing her daughter emotional distress. "Most of the information that we get sent to us through the kids is basically newsletters, but nothing this sensitive. This is a sensitive issue for everybody," she said. "It's real upsetting for me to see her worried so much about her weight issue when it's not really that big of a deal. She's not that overweight."

DPS issued this statement Thursday afternoon: "In an effort to help ensure our students' health, Denver Public Schools provides parents with their child's hearing, vision, and body mass index (BMI) results in a sealed envelope that is sent home with the students. DPS feels compelled to inform parents about these very important health screening results and provide information about making healthier choices. The health of our students is very important to us and we wish to be part of the solution, given the nation's childhood obesity epidemic."

9NEWS asked Martinez repeatedly if sharing Isabel's identity and her health information will make things worse. Martinez wanted people to see her picture so they would know Isabel is not that big. She also says the damage was already done when she read the notice and she's talked to Isabel about addressing this issue of sending the notices home with students. Martinez says her daughter is OK with this information being released.

Source




Ivory Tower Decay

By Michael Barone

I am old enough to remember when America's colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America's colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society.

Colleges and universities today almost universally have speech codes, which prohibit speech deemed hurtful by others, particularly those who are deemed to be minorities (including women, who are a majority on most campuses these days). They are enforced unequally, so that no one gets punished when students take copies of conservative alternative campus newspapers left for free distribution and dump them in the trash. But should a conservative student call some female students "water buffaloes," he is sentenced to take sensitivity training -- the campus version of communist re-education camps. The message comes through loud and clear. Some kinds of speech are protected, while others are punished.

Where did speech codes come from? There certainly weren't many when I was in college or law school. So far as I can tell, they originated after college and university administrators began using racial quotas and preferences to admit students -- starting with blacks, now including Hispanics and perhaps others -- who did not meet ordinary standards. They were instituted, it seems, to prevent those students from feeling insulted and to free administrators from criticism for preferential treatment -- treatment that arguably violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (although Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the swing vote in the 2003 Supreme Court case on the subject, said they could continue another 25 years).

Racial quotas and preferences continue to be employed, as a recent article on UCLA makes clear, in spite of state laws forbidding them, and university administrators seem to derive much of their psychic income from their supposed generosity in employing them. This, even though evidence compiled by UCLA Professor Richard Sander suggests they produce worse educational outcomes for their intended beneficiaries and even though Justice Clarence Thomas makes a persuasive case in his book "My Grandfather's Son" that they cast a stigma of inferiority on them.

Of course, college and university administrators insist they aren't actually using quotas when in fact they are, as O'Connor's decisive opinion in 2003 invited them to do. The result is that one indispensable requirement for being a college or university administrator is intellectual dishonesty. You have to be willing to lie about what you consider one of your most important duties. So much for open inquiry and intellectual rigor.

This is not the only way the colleges and universities fall far short of what were once their standards. Sometime in the 1960s, they abandoned their role as advocates of American values -- critical advocates who tried to advance freedom and equality further than Americans had yet succeeded in doing -- and took on the role of adversaries of society. The students who were exempted from serving their country during the Vietnam War condemned not themselves but their country, and many sought tenured positions in academe to undermine what they considered a militaristic, imperialist, racist, exploitative, sexist, homophobic -- the list of complaints grew as the years went on -- country. English departments have been packed by deconstructionists who insist that Shakespeare is no better than rap music, and history departments with multiculturalists who insist that all societies are morally equal except our own, which is morally inferior.

Economics departments and the hard sciences have mostly resisted such deterioration. But when Lawrence Summers, first-class economist and president of Harvard, suggested that more men than women may have the capacity to be first-rate scientists -- which is what the hard data showed -- then, off with his head.

This regnant campus culture helps to explain why Columbia University, which bars ROTC from campus on the ground that the military bars open homosexuals from service, welcomed Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government publicly executes homosexuals. It explains why Hofstra's law school invites to speak on legal ethics Lynn Stewart, a lawyer convicted of aiding and abetting a terrorist client and sentenced to 28 months in jail.

What it doesn't explain is why the rest of society is willing to support such institutions by paying huge tuitions, providing tax exemptions and making generous gifts. Suppression of campus speech has been admirably documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The promotion of bogus scholarship and idea-free propagandizing has been admirably documented by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. It's too bad the rest of America is not paying more attention.

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14 October, 2007

Stupid Ph.D. credentialism

The never-ending process of inflating the qualifications that people need in order to get a good job is getting really absurd. We read a plaintive story below about how many Ph.D. students have great difficulty in completing the dissertation that is (so far) essential to getting that degree. All it shows is that the students concerned are not really Ph.D. material and should never have been encouraged to try for a Ph.D. If you are a born academic -- as I am -- there is no problem. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation in six weeks towards the end of the first year of my Ph.D. program and then had to wait another year to submit it because the rules said "Two-year minimum program". Stupid rules and stupid credentialism! And, unlike many dissertations, most of mine was eventually published as a series of academic journal articles. All men are NOT equal. Abilities DO differ

Many of us have known this scholar: The hair is well-streaked with gray, the chin has begun to sag, but still our tortured friend slaves away at a masterwork intended to change the course of civilization that everyone else just hopes will finally get a career under way.

We even have a name for this sometimes pitied species — the A.B.D. — All But Dissertation. But in academia these days, that person is less a subject of ridicule than of soul-searching about what can done to shorten the time, sometimes much of a lifetime, it takes for so many graduate students to, well, graduate. The Council of Graduate Schools, representing 480 universities in the United States and Canada, is halfway through a seven-year project to explore ways of speeding up the ordeal.

For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.

These statistics, compiled by the National Science Foundation and other government agencies by studying the 43,354 doctoral recipients of 2005, were even worse a few years ago. Now, universities are setting stricter timelines and demanding that faculty advisers meet regularly with protégés. Most science programs allow students to submit three research papers rather than a single grand work. More universities find ways to ease financial burdens, providing better paid teaching assistantships as well as tuition waivers. And more universities are setting up writing groups so that students feel less alone cobbling together a thesis.

More here




Until Proven Innocent

By Thomas Sowell

Some of the most depressing e-mails received over the past year and a half have been those that asked why I was worrying myself about three rich white guys at Duke University. Neither those three students accused of rape nor the District Attorney who accused them are the ultimate issue.

If all District Attorneys in this country were like Michael Nifong, the United States of America would become the world's largest banana republic. Such levels of corruption in the law itself would make the American standard of living impossible. A steady diet of the racial polarization that Nifong promoted would make it only a matter of time before we would see in America the kind of violence seen between Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad. The "rule of law" is not just a pat phrase. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.

Nor is "innocent until proven guilty" just a throwaway line. The opposite notion -- guilty until proven innocent -- is a more poisonous import from the totalitarian world than the toys with lead paint imported from China.

"Until Proven Innocent" is the title of a devastating new book by Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson about the rape charges against the Duke lacrosse players -- and about so many in the media and academia who treated them as guilty until they were proven innocent. Even those of us who followed the case from the beginning will learn a lot more about what went on, both on the surface and behind the scenes, from this outstanding book.

More important, we will learn some chilling facts about how deep the moral dry rot goes in some of the fundamental institutions of this nation that we depend on, including its leading universities and its leading media.

"Until Proven Innocent" also tells us about one of the forgotten victims of the Duke rape case -- the African cab driver who cast the first doubt on the indictment, by saying publicly that one of the accused young men was with him in his taxi at the time the rape was supposedly happening. A flimsy charge against that cab driver from three years earlier was suddenly resurrected, and District Attorney Michael Nifong had him picked up by the police, indicted and put on trial -- where he was quickly acquitted by the judge. Could this country survive as a free nation if every District Attorney used the power of that office to intimidate any witness whose testimony undermined the prosecution's case?

How long will we in fact survive as a free nation when our leading universities are annually graduating thousands of students each, steeped in the notion that you can decide issues of right and wrong, guilt or innocence, by the "race, class and gender" of those involved? That is what a large chunk of the Duke University faculty did, while few of the other faculty members dared to say anything against them or against the Duke administration's surrender to the lynch mob atmosphere whipped up on campus.

In much of the media as well, the students were treated as guilty until proven innocent, and those who said otherwise were often savaged. Members of the women's lacrosse team at Duke who expressed their belief that the male lacrosse players were innocent were viciously attacked in the sports section of the New York Times. Nor was that the only place where the guilt of the players was virtually taken for granted, on either the sports pages of the Times or in other places there or in other newspapers.

Source





13 October, 2007

Britain fails to repeal the influence of IQ

Policies based on incorrect theories are bound to fail. Blaming the low ability of kids from poor families on what the poor families do rather than on the low IQ that they transmit genetically to their children will always lead to policies that fail. The proof of the pudding ....

Forty per cent of children struggle to write their own name or to sound out letters to form simple words such as “dog” or “red” by the age of 5, government figures show. The annual assessments of children’s progress during their first year in school also show that more than a fifth of youngsters have problems stringing a coherent sentence together by the time that they enter their reception year. A quarter fail to reach the expected levels of emotional development for their age.

The findings raise serious questions about the effectiveness of flagship government schemes such as Sure Start to boost the development of the under-5s, although some critics point out that in many countries children are not expected to start to read or write until they are 7. Around 21 billion pounds [What's a waste of a measly 21 billion between friends?] has been invested in a series of initiatives but the latest results for schools in England show little improvement in children’s language and literacy and personal, social and emotional development.

Sure Start was also supposed to help to narrow the attainment gap between children from poor backgrounds and the rest, but only 35 per cent of children from poor areas reached the expected level of attainment across all measures, compared with 51 per cent of children from other areas. The achievement gap has not moved since last year and the overall levels of achievement, at 45 per cent, are well short of the target of 53 per cent by next year.

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for children and families, said that the “yawning gulf” between rich and poor was deeply disturbing. Maria Miller, the Conservative families spokeswoman, said that the data, released by the Office for National Statistics, showed that Sure Start was not working. Beverley Hughes, the Children and Families Minister, conceded that more improvement was needed. She was disappointed that the gap between poor and middle-class children had not narrowed. She added: “Both we and local authorities must focus our efforts on improving the life chances of children who are the most vulnerable and disadvantaged.”

The foundation profile targets require five-year-olds to score at least six out of nine points in each of seven areas of learning covering language and literacy and personal, social and emotional development. Girls outstripped boys in every one of them – by 17 percentage points in the case of writing. Only 58 per cent of five-year-olds were reaching a “good level of development” in writing. One in three children (35 per cent) did not reach a good level of development in linking sounds and letters, for example through recognising and saying words such as “red” and “dog” or “pen”. Fifteen per cent could not write “mum”, “dad” or their own first name from memory, while a further 25 per cent struggled to do so.

But the assessments, which are known as the Foundation Stage Profile, were criticised by teaching unions last night. Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, called them “unreliable and unhelpful” because they are based on subjective teacher observations, not tests.

Source




Australian PM to revive real history teaching

JOHN Howard has gone above the heads of state education ministers and bureaucrats and set out a detailed course on the nation's history that he says should be taught to every student in every Australian school. The Prime Minister's guide to the teaching of Australian history, which will be released today, organises the nation's story into 10 chapters, stretching from indigenous settlement 60,000 years ago to the effect of globalisation on Australian life between 1976 and 2000.

The document is aimed at parents and teachers, but The Australian understands that the Government will use its four-year education funding agreement with the states, due for re-negotiation next year, to force them to teach a version of Mr Howard's course. Students in the program, which the Prime Minister says should be compulsory across Year 9 and Year 10, will be expected to be familiar with more than 70 "milestone events", along with the biographies of hundreds of characters from 18th century botanist Joseph Banks to former prime minister Bob Hawke.

The 10 periods are: First peoples; Early encounters; British colonies (1788-1850); Emerging nation (1851-1900); The new Commonwealth (1901-19); The Roaring Twenties and the Lean Thirties (1920-38); World War II and post-war reconstruction (1939-49); Building Modern Australia: Times of Prosperity and Social Change (1950-75); and Australia and the Shrinking Globe (1976-2000). In addition, students will be expected to analyse the material through nine "perspectives": Aboriginal; regional and global; biographical; beliefs and values; economic; everyday life; gender; environmental; and local.

Each period has explanatory notes, with the 1950-75 segment, for example, including the dismissal of the Whitlam government and urging students to "reflect on the emergence of new social and protest movements, reflecting changes in gender relations and family structures, in attitudes to race and ethnicity, and to human rights and morality".

The course is the latest step in the "root and branch renewal" in the teaching of Australian history for which Mr Howard called last year, and follows last year's History Summit, convened by Education Minister Julie Bishop, which delegated a working group to develop an ideal history course based on dates and narrative, rather than abstract themes.

The fact Mr Howard has chosen to release the model syllabus now, and brand it with his own authority, suggests he plans to give the so-called "culture wars" a prominent role in his campaign for a fifth term in office. At the moment, with the exception of NSW and Victoria, the states teach Australian history within a larger subject, Studies of Society and its Environment, along with geography, environmental studies and political and other social studies. However, since the summit, Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania have all shown a willingness to return to a more traditional approach believed to be popular with voters.

And Opposition education spokesman Stephen Smith last night made Labor's support for the push clear. "I strongly believe that history, particularly Australian history, is a very important part of the curriculum," he said.

Earlier this year, Mr Howard said Australian history, which he insists should be a stand-alone subject, was being taught "as some kind of fragmented stew of moods and events, rather than some kind of proper narrative". Importantly, a suggestion from the summit that the new subject should be taught via "open-ended questions", which was criticised by some conservative scholars, has disappeared from the final draft, which was overseen by a committee that included social commentator Gerard Henderson and historian Geoffrey Blainey. The Government plans eventually to follow the document with specific guidelines on outcomes and assessment and detailed curriculum resources for schools.

One of Australia's leading conservative historians, University of Wollongong scholar Gregory Melleuish, last night described Mr Howard's course as "the ultimate camel" because it had been shaped by so many committees. Dr Melleuish, who participated in the summit but criticised its outcomes, said: "The problem with this sort of document is that it tells one very little about how things will actually work in the classroom." He was particularly critical of the "nationalist" drift of the course, which he said did not include enough international context and would not equip students for understanding Australia's role in a globalised world.

Anna Clark, grand-daughter of the late Manning Clark and a historian at Monash University, said she was pleased Mr Howard's course "requires not only knowledge of what happened, but how we relate to it". But her Monash colleague Tony Taylor, whose draft version of the course was the basis for the Henderson-Blainey panel, said the final version was too crowded.

Source





12 October, 2007

An experience of an inner-city black school

An impossible learning environment due to negligible discipline. Permissiveness is the deadly enemy of black kids

Teach for America conducts an intensive five-week training program for its inductees during the summer before they start teaching. My year, this "teacher boot camp" took place in Houston. It was there that I quickly figured out that enthusiasm and creativity alone wouldn't suffice in an inner-city classroom. I was part of a tag team of four recruits teaching a summer-school class of low-income fourth-graders. Even in one- to two-hour blocks of teaching, I quickly realized that my best-planned, most imaginative lessons fell apart if I didn't have control of my students.

In the seminars we attended when we weren't teaching, I learned the basics of lesson planning and teaching theory. I also internalized the TFA philosophy of high expectations, the idea that if you set a rigorous academic course, all students will rise to meet the challenge. But the training program skimped on actual teaching and classroom-management techniques, instead overwhelming us with sensitivity training. My group spent hours on an activity where everyone stood in a line and then took steps forward or backward based on whether we were the oppressor or the oppressed in the categories of race, income, and religion. The program had a college bull session, rather than professional, atmosphere. And it had a college-style party line: I heard of two or three trainees being threatened with expulsion for expressing in their discussion groups politically incorrect views about inner-city poverty-for example, that families and culture, not economics, may be the root cause of the achievement gap.

Nothing in the program simulated what I soon learned to be the life of a teacher. Though I didn't know it, I was completely ill equipped when I stepped into my own fifth-grade classroom at Emery Elementary in September 2000.

The year before I taught, a popular veteran principal had been dismissed without explanation. Mr. Bledsoe finished out the rest of the year on an interim basis, hired me and four other Teach for America teachers, and then turned over the reins to a woman named V. Lisa Savoy. Ms. Savoy had been an assistant principal at the District's infamous Anacostia High School, in Washington's equivalent of the South Bronx. Before the start of school, she met with her four first-year TFA teachers to assure us that we would be well supported, and that if we needed anything we should just ask. Most of my veteran colleagues, 90 percent of them black, also seemed helpful, though a few showed flickers of disdain for us eager, young white teachers. By the time school opened, I was thrilled to start molding the brains of my children.

My optimism and naivete‚ evaporated within hours. I tried my best to be strict and set limits with my new students; but I wore my inexperience on my sleeve, and several of the kids jumped at the opportunity to misbehave. I could see clearly enough that the vast majority of my fifth-graders genuinely wanted to learn-but all it took to subvert the whole enterprise were a few cutups.

On a typical day, DeAngelo (a pseudonym, as are the other children's names in this and the next paragraph) would throw a wad of paper in the middle of a lesson. Whether I disciplined him or ignored him, his actions would cause Kanisha to scream like an air-raid siren. In response, Lamond would get up, walk across the room, and try to slap Kanisha. Within one minute, the whole class was lost in a sea of noise and fists. I felt profoundly sorry for the majority of my students, whose education was being hijacked. Their plaintive cries punctuated the din: "Quiet everyone! Mr. Kaplowitz is trying to teach!"

Ayisha was my most gifted student. The daughter of Senegalese immigrants, she would tolerantly roll her eyes as Darnetta cut up for the ninth time in one hour, patiently waiting for the day when my class would settle down. Joseph was a brilliant writer who struggled mightily in math. When he needed help with a division problem, I tried to give him as much attention as I could, before three students wandering around the room inevitably distracted me. Eventually, I settled on tutoring him after school. Twenty more students' educations were sabotaged, each kid with specific needs that I couldn't attend to, because I was too busy putting out fires. Though I poured my heart into inventive lessons and activities throughout the entire year, they almost always fell apart in the face of my students' disrespect and indifference.

To gain control, I tried imposing the kinds of consequences that the classroom-management handbooks recommend. None worked. My classroom was too small to give my students "time out." I tried to take away their recess, but depriving them of their one sanctioned time to blow off steam just increased their penchant to use my classroom as a playground. When I called parents, they were often mistrustful and tended to question or even disbelieve outright what I told them about their children. It was sometimes worse when they believed me, though; the tenth time I heard a mother swear that her child was going to "get a beating for this one," I almost decided not to call parents. By contrast, I saw immediate behavioral and academic improvement in students whose parents had come to trust me.

I quickly learned from such experiences how essential parental support is in determining whether a school succeeds in educating a child. And of course, parental support not just of the teachers but of the kids: as I came to know my students better, I saw that those who had seen violence, neglect, or drug abuse at home were usually the uncontrollable ones, while my best-behaved, hardest-working kids were typically those with the most nurturing home environments.

Being a white teacher in a mostly black school unquestionably hindered my ability to teach. Certain students hurled racial slurs with impunity; several of their parents intimated to my colleagues that they didn't think a white teacher had any business teaching their children-and a number of my colleagues agreed. One parent who was also a teacher's aide threatened to "kick my white ass" in front of my class and received no punishment from the principal, beyond being told to stay out of my classroom. The failure of the principal, parents, and teachers to react more decisively to racist disrespect emboldened students to behave worse. Such poisonous bigotry directed at a black teacher at a mostly white school would of course have created a federal case.

Still, other colleagues, friendly and supportive, helped me with my discipline problems. They let me send unruly students to their classrooms for brief periods of time to cool off, allowing me to teach the rest of my class effectively. But when I turned to my school administration for similar help, I was much less fortunate. I had read that successful schools have chief executives who immerse themselves in the everyday operations of the institution, set clear expectations for the student body, recognize and support energetic and creative teachers, and foster constructive relationships with parents. Successful principals usually are mavericks, too, who skirt stupid bureaucracy to do what is best for the children. Emery's Principal Savoy sure didn't fit this model.

To start with, from all that I could see, she seemed mostly to stay in her office, instead of mingling with students and observing classes, most of which were up at least one flight of stairs, perhaps a disincentive for so heavy a woman. Furthermore, I saw from the first month that she generally gave delinquents no more than a stern talking-to, followed by a pat on the back, rather than suspensions, detentions, or any other meaningful punishment. The threat of sending a student to the office was thus rendered toothless.

Worse, Ms. Savoy effectively undermined my classroom-management efforts. She forbade me from sending students to other teachers-the one tactic that had any noticeable effect. Exiling my four worst students had produced a vast improvement in the conduct of the remainder of my class. But Ms. Savoy was adamant, insisting that the school district required me to teach all my children, all the time, in the "least restrictive" environment. This was just the first instance of Ms. Savoy blocking me with a litany of D.C. Public Schools regulations, as she regularly frustrated my colleagues on disciplinary issues.

Some of Ms. Savoy's actions defied explanation. She more than once called me to her office in the middle of my lessons to lecture me on how bad a teacher I was-well before her single visit to observe me in my classroom. She filled my personnel file with lengthy memos articulating her criticisms. I eventually concluded that Ms. Savoy tended similarly to trouble any teacher, experienced or novice, who rocked the boat.

And in November I really rocked it. By then, despite mounting tension with Ms. Savoy, and despite the pandemonium that continued to ravage my teaching efforts, I had managed-painstakingly-to build a rapport with my fifth-graders. I felt I was turning a corner. I thought that my students (and their parents) would completely shape up once they saw their abysmal first report cards. D.C. Public Schools grade kids on a highly subjective 1 to 4 scale, 4 being the highest. Most of my students entered fifth grade with grave academic deficiencies, yet their cumulative records revealed fair to excellent grades, making clear that social promotion was standard practice at Emery. I wasn't playing along. I had given regular tests and quizzes that first semester, and most of my students had earned straight 1s by any rational measure. True to the credo of high expectations, I would give them the grades they earned.

I submitted my report cards to Ms. Savoy, who insisted that my grades were "too low" and demanded that I raise them immediately. I offered to show her all of my students' work portfolios; but she demurred, informing me that the law obliged me to pass a certain percentage of my students. I paid no attention, gave my students the grades they deserved, and patiently explained to every parent that their child's grades would improve once he or she started behaving in class and doing the assigned lessons. For this, Ms. Savoy cited me for insubordination.

Just after the New Year, Ms. Savoy informed me that she was switching me from fifth grade to second grade; the veteran second-grade teacher would then take over my fifth-graders. Her justification was that I would be able to control younger students more effectively-though I assumed she thought that I could wreak less disruption with the younger kids, who were relatively flunk-proof.

From the start, I tried my best to combat understandable parental resentment that their experienced teacher was being yanked out and replaced by me, a first-year teacher with notoriously poor classroom-management skills. I wrote letters home describing my ambitious plans, called parents with enthusiastic words about their children, and walked my students home after school to increase my visibility in the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, I never got a chance to show that I was in control. Unbelievable as it sounds, my second-graders were even wilder than my fifth-graders. Just as before, a majority of kids genuinely wanted to learn, but the antics of a few spun my entire class into chaos. This time, though, my troublemakers were even more immature and disruptive, ranging from a boy who roamed around the room punching his classmates and threatening to kill himself to a borderline-mentally retarded student, who would throw crumpled wads of paper all day. I was so busy trying to quell anarchy that I never had the chance to get to know my new students, let alone teach them anything.

Ms. Savoy had abandoned all pretense of administrative support by this point. Nearly every student I sent to the office returned within minutes. This lack of consequences encouraged a level of violence I never could have imagined among any students, let alone second-graders. Fights broke out daily-not just during recess or bathroom breaks but also in the middle of lessons. And this wasn't just playful shoving: we're talking fists flying, hair yanked, heads slammed against lockers.

When I asked other teachers to come help me stop a fight, they shook their heads and reminded me that D.C. Public Schools banned teachers from laying hands on students for any reason, even to protect other children. When a fight brewed, I was faced with a Catch-22. I could call the office and wait ten minutes for the security guard to arrive, by which point blood could have been shed and students injured. Or I could intervene physically, in violation of school policy.

Believe me, you have to be made of iron, or something other than flesh and blood, to stand by passively while some enraged child is trying to inflict real harm on another eight-year-old. I couldn't do it. And each time I let normal human instinct get the best of me and broke up a fight, one of the combatants would go home and fabricate a story about how I had hurt him or her. The parent, already suspicious of me, would report this accusation to Ms. Savoy, who would in turn call in a private investigative firm employed by D.C. Public Schools. Investigators would come to Emery and interview me, as well as several students whom the security guard thought might tell the truth about the alleged incident of corporal punishment.

I had previously heard of three other teachers at Emery that year who were being investigated for corporal punishment. When I talked to them-they were all experienced male teachers-they heatedly protested their innocence and bitterly complained about Ms. Savoy's handling of the situation. Now that I had joined the club, I began to understand their fears and frustrations.

To define as "corporal punishment" the mere physical separation of two combatants not only puts students at risk but also gives children unconscionable power over teachers who choose to intervene. False allegations against me and other teachers snowballed, as certain students realized that they had the perfect tool for getting their teacher in deep trouble. As I began to be investigated on almost a weekly basis, parents came to school to berate and threaten me-naturally, without reprisals from the administration. One day, a rather large father came up to me after school and told me he was going to "get me" if he heard that I put my hands on his daughter one more time. Forget the fact that I had pulled her off of a boy whom she was clobbering at the time.

With such a weak disciplinary tone set by the administration, by late February the whole school atmosphere had devolved into chaos. Gangs of students roamed the halls at will. You could hear screaming from every classroom-from students and teachers alike. Including me, four teachers (or 20 percent of the faculty) were under investigation on bogus corporal-punishment charges, including a fourth-grade instructor whose skills I greatly respected. The veteran teachers constantly lamented that things were better the previous year, when the principal ran a tight disciplinary ship, and the many good instructors were able to do their job.

It was nearly March, and the Stanford-9 standardized tests, the results of which determine a principal's success in D.C. Public Schools, were imminent. Ms. Savoy unexpectedly instituted a policy allowing teachers to ship their two or three most disruptive students to the computer lab to be warehoused and supervised by teachers' aides. My classroom's behavior and attentiveness improved dramatically for two weeks. Unfortunately, Ms. Savoy abandoned this plan the instant the standardized tests had passed.

After that, my classroom became more of a gladiatorial venue than a place of learning. Fights erupted hourly; no student was immune. The last three months were a blur of violence, but several incidents particularly stand out. One week, two of my emotionally disturbed boys went on a binge of sexual harassment, making lewd gestures and grabbing girls' buttocks-yes, seven- and eight-year-olds. On another occasion, three students piled on top of one of their peers and were punching him with their fists before I intervened. My students were not even afraid to try to hurt me: two boys spent a month throwing pencils at me in the middle of lessons; another child slugged me in the gut.

But for Ms. Savoy, apparently I was the problem. It seemed to me that she was readier to launch investigations when a student or parent made an accusation against me than to help me out when my students were acting up. Faced with a series of corporal-punishment charges, no administrative support, and no hope of controlling my second-grade class in the foreseeable future, I should have packed up and left midyear. Surely there were other schools, even inner-city ones, where I could have developed and succeeded as a teacher.

Why did I stay on? Part of the answer lay in my own desperate desire not to fail. I felt that if I just worked harder, I could turn my children around and get them to learn. Another part of the answer was Teach for America's having instilled in each corps member the idea that you have made a commitment to the children and that you must stick with them at all costs, no matter how much your school is falling apart. Because of this mentality, my TFA friends and I put up with nonsense from our schools and our students that few regular teachers would have tolerated.....

I've learned that an epidemic of violence is raging in elementary schools nationwide, not just in D.C. A recent Philadelphia Inquirer article details a familiar pattern-kindergartners punching pregnant teachers, third-graders hitting their instructors with rulers. Pennsylvania and New Jersey have reported nearly 30 percent increases in elementary school violence since 1999, and many school districts have established special disciplinary K-6 schools. In New York City, according to the New York Post, some 60 teachers recently demonstrated against out-of-control pupil mayhem, chanting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho; violent students must go." Kids who stab each other, use teachers as shields in fights, bang on doors to disrupt classes, and threaten to "kick out that baby" from a pregnant teacher have created a "climate of terror," the Post reports.

Several of my new acquaintances in the Washington schools told me of facing completely fabricated corporal-punishment allegations, as I did. Some even faced criminal charges. Washington teachers' union officials won't give me hard numbers, but they intimate that each year they are flooded with corporal-punishment or related charges against teachers, most of which get settled without the media ever learning of this disturbing new trend. It is a state of affairs that Philip K. Howard vividly describes in his recent The Collapse of the Common Good: parents sue teachers and principals for suspending their children, for allegedly meting out corporal punishment, and for giving failing marks. As a result, educators are afraid to penalize misbehaving students or give students grades that reflect the work they do. The real victims are the majority of children whose education is being commandeered by their out-of-control classmates.

I've come to believe that the most unruly and violent children should go to alternative schools designed to handle students with chronic behavior problems. A school with a more military structure can do no worse for those children than a permissive mainstream school, and it spares the majority of kids the injustice of having their education fall victim to the chaos wreaked by a small minority.

I know for sure that inner-city schools don't have to be hellholes like Emery and its District of Columbia brethren, with their poor administration and lack of parental support, their misguided focus on children's rights, their anti-white racism, and their lawsuit-crazed culture. Some of my closest TFA friends, thrilled to be liberated from the D.C. system, went on to teach at D.C. charter schools, where they really can make a difference in underprivileged children's lives. For example, at Paul Junior High School, which serves students with the same economic and cultural background as those at Emery, the principal's tough approach to discipline fosters a serious atmosphere of scholarship, and parents are held accountable, because the principal can kick their children back to the public school system if they refuse to cooperate. A friend who works at the Hyde School, which emphasizes character education (and sits directly across a field from Emery), tells me that this charter school is quiet and orderly, the teachers are happy, and the children are achieving at a much higher level-so much higher that several of the best students at Emery who transferred to Hyde nearly flunked out of their new school.

It should come as no surprise that students are leaving Emery in droves, in hopes of enrolling in this and other alternative schools. Enrollment, 411 when I was there, now is about 350. If things don't change, it will soon be-and should be-zero.

Much more here




Jagger has more sense than the historians

SCHOOLS should teach proper history, not pop music, Mick Jagger has suggested, after discovering that the Rolling Stones are a topic on the British high school syllabus. Still rolling at 64, Jagger was responding to a Bristol teacher who asked how best to present the cultural importance of the Rolling Stones to a class of eager history students. Despite being the subject of numerous academic works, Jagger said it was only rock 'n' roll and the Stones' importance in the grand scheme of things may have been overstated.

In a BBC News website question-and-answer session, Alison McClean wrote: "I am currently teaching my Year 11 students about the impact of the Rolling Stones in preparation for their GCSE history coursework on Britain in the 1960s. How does Mick feel about being part of the history curriculum and, if he was sitting the exam himself, how would he describe the Stones' impact on Britain?"

Jagger, who passed O-level history at Dartford Grammar School in 1959, was less than impressed. "I suppose pop music was very important in the 1960s, it became perhaps too important. It was one of the things in popular culture," he said. "Alison, I'm sure you're teaching it as part of the whole popular culture movement. I'm sure it's brilliantly accurate - or perhaps not because if you look up a lot of it, it's nonsense."

He was speaking as a concerned parent. "I have a daughter who's doing GCSEs at the moment," he said. "She hasn't got me in her syllabus. She's much more traditional. It's more the cause of World War I, that sort of thing." The best he could say for lessons in dad's role in the 60s cultural revolution was that "it was an interesting historical tipping point".

Jagger benefited from a traditional schooling at Dartford, where Latin was obligatory, masters donned gowns and pupils wore a cap at all times with a regulation blazer with gold trim. His first report in June 1955 placed him 15th out of 30 pupils. His form master, Dick Allen, wrote that he had made "a good start". His academic performance went into steep decline after he discovered "music and girls". Contemporaries recall a lecture young Jagger gave to the school's historical society on the blues.

The high-point of his Dartford career came when the emerging rebel led a protest against the quality of school dinners, which resulted in the dismissal of a kitchen supervisor. "It was probably the greatest contribution to the school I ever made," Jagger said in 2000, before returning to open a performing arts centre in his name. He gained seven O levels and two A levels in June 1961, and won a place at the London School of Economics.

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11 October, 2007

Boortz on American schools

I want you to focus your attention for a moment on a quote by C.S. Lewis that someone sent to me over the weekend. Read it .. perhaps a few times .. and then try to tell me with a straight face that C.S. Lewis, who took the eternal celestial dirt nap 44 years ago, wasn't talking about government education in 21st Century America:

"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.' Children who are fit to proceed may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's [of the same age] attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when 'I'm as good as you' has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway, the teachers -- or should I say nurses? -- will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men." C. S. Lewis

Now don't you want to go back and read that again? I guess I read it 20 times over the weekend ... just amazed at how well a man who has been dead for so long has perfectly nailed our current system of government education and what it is doing to our children. And referring to government school teachers as nurses? Brilliant! Absolutely effing brilliant! (Excuse me, I got carried away there for a bit.)

This country is in trouble. No, I'm not talking about the threat from outside – the biggest element of which would be Islamic radicalism. I'm talking about the threat from inside. The men who marched in bare feet wrapped in rags over frozen ground in 1776 – leaving a trail of blood for the British to follow – would scarcely recognize us. They put their lives on the line for independence, far too many of us strive for dependence. They embraced freedom. We embrace security. The men of 1776 were extraordinary. We reject the extraordinary for the mundane.

Our schools are turning out perfect little government subjects who have been taught that, somehow, it is bad to excel, but virtuous to simply fit in. Do you think the men and women of just two generations ago could ever imagine a school system where children aren't allowed to play tag because it involves chasing and unwanted touching? Of course you don't want to be touched! That makes you "it!" How about a school system that won't honor a valedictorian because other students might feel slighted or left out? Read again that sentence from C.S. Lewis where he says that the "nurses" are "far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching." We have schools now that grade with shapes instead of letters. "What did you get on your math test today dear?" "I got a square, mom!" In some schools teachers won't use a red pen to grade papers because red denotes errors or a bad grade, and they don't want the precious little students to get upset.

All you have to do is look around you to see what a miserable failure our government schools are. A huge percentage of entering freshmen at state colleges and universities have to enroll in remedial courses in order to bring them up to college speed. In Georgia we have students who, thanks to rampant grade inflation, graduate from their high schools with better than a B average who can't handle freshman-level courses in college without first going through a remedial program.

Our kids are being taught by the worst of the worst in their government schools. Check out the education school at most major universities. The freshmen who chose to pursue a degree in education come from the lowest level of the entering class; and those who go on to pursue a graduate degree in education come from the lowest ranks of their undergraduate class. This is how you get teachers sending home report cards that read "Johnny are learning to spell good."

If we don't do something to break the grip of these government schools, and the teacher's unions that run them, we are going to lose this entire country to mediocrity. We are going to continue to churn out generations of mind-numbed government subjects who can readily identify the faces of the current pop culture, but who couldn't tell the vice-president from the speaker of the house if their iPods depended on it.

The answer is competition. We need school choice. If you want to continue with taxing the stuffing out of the people to pay for education, fine. Just let the money follow the children, as they do in much of Europe. Let the parent investigate the choices and then make a decision as to where their child will go to school, public or private. Then send the money chasing after the child. Only competition will drive these schools to strive for excellence. The security of government mandated attendance will only foster laziness and complacency.

Several weeks ago Hillary the Hideous loudly proclaimed that "privatization isn't the answer to anything." As I said at the time, this means that Hillary Rodham must think that government is the answer to everything ... including education. The teacher's unions heard her loud and clear. Last week the American Federation of Teachers endorsed Hillary. No surprise. Look for the National Education Association to fall in line.

If we are to save our Republic we must create a generation or two of independent-thinking young adults who value freedom over security and who know the truth of what it was that made this country great. We will never get this from our government schools. Putting it bluntly, government schools and the teacher's unions that control them, and our politicians, are killing this country.

Source




Australia's universities of Leftism

WHEN federal Treasurer Peter Costello and Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey attacked the credibility of two researchers over a report that found workers worse off under Australian Workplace Agreements, it looked like a classic case of blaming the messenger. That impression was heightened when one of the researchers, John Buchanan from the University of Sydney's Workplace Research Centre, threatened legal action against the ministers over their descriptions of his work as contaminated by trade union connections. But Buchanan's howls of protest regarding his academic impartiality sound a wee bit precious now after revelations in The Weekend Australian that, in a 2005 speech, he described himself as a socialist and counselled his comrades to "strike the enemy (that is, the Howard Government) hard."

Perhaps more disturbing than the firebrand rhetoric, however, is that Buchanan appeared to have already made up his mind in February 2005 on the key issues that he would be reporting on 30 months later: "We are going to see wages get more and more unequal," he said. "We are going to see hours become more fragmented and we are going to see more casualisation and contractors." So why do research?

I was prepared for the Australia@ Work report and the kerfuffle that followed by some other research on the Howard Government's workplace laws released in August. Down and Out with Work Choices, by three academics from the Women and Work Research Group, also at the University of Sydney, concluded that the changes brought about by the new regime "have been negative and deleterious, reducing decency and democracy at work and in society".

Never mind that this was a conclusion based on interviews with just 25 low-paid female workers. More extraordinary was that two of the researchers, Rae Cooper and Marian Baird, chose to launch their report at NSW Parliament, sitting alongside NSW Industrial Relations Minister John Della Bosca, the man identified, more than any other, with the political campaign to use the workplace changes to bring about the downfall of the Howard Government. This was politicisation on a new level and suggested some of our publicly employed intellectuals have decided the game is up for John Howard, so what the hell?

None of the above should come as a surprise. A quick scan, using the internet, of research centres at universities reveals that many are structured around the "softie Left" world view that former Media Watch host David Marr memorably nominated as the primary qualification for entry into Australian journalism.

The University of NSW, for example, boasts a Centre for Corporate Change, a Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity, and a Co-operative Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism. Indeed, sustainable is the buzzword in university research: we have a Centre for Sustainable Technology at the University of Newcastle, a Foundation for Sustainable Economic Development at the University of Melbourne, a Centre for Sustainable Regional Communities at La Trobe, an Institute for Sustainable Systems and Technologies, along with a Centre for Research into Sustainable Health Care at the University of South Australia, a Centre for Research in International Education and Sustainability at the University of New England and, in an apparent attempt to establish a sustainable monopoly, a Sustainability Institute at Monash.

Other highlights of my search included the Centre of Full Employment and Equity at Newcastle, the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie, the Centre for Equity and Innovation in Early Childhood at Melbourne, the Centre for Colonialism and its Aftermath at the University of Tasmania, the Social Justice and Social Change Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney and the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining at the University of Queensland.

What's in a name, you ask, and you could be right. Scholars in all of these centres could be pursuing good work. And perhaps there is no reason to be concerned that, in the era during which the mainstream political class has come to accept the logic of the market, an academic paid to conduct research into the Australian labour market still describes himself as a socialist. For me, however, it confirms a point made by Paul Kelly in last week's Australian Literary Review: "A healthy democracy will see a healthy gulf between its politicians and its intellectuals. But this gulf in Australia is a chasm that demands serious attention."

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10 October, 2007

Racial achievement gap widens as school discipline declines -- such a "puzzle"

That blacks might be more in need of discipline to get them to learn is of course unthinkable. All men are equal, aren't they? As far as I know only God and Leftists think so

A generation ago, Bloomfield [Connecticut] was heralded as the all-American community. Blacks and whites lived side by side, chasing the American dream of middle-class stability without regard to skin color. There were trimmed lawns and good schools. Now, Bloomfield operates one of the most racially segregated school systems in the state. Minority students, mainly black children, account for 95 percent of public school enrollment. And when results were released recently on the state's annual 10th-grade achievement test, this quiet, middle-class suburb found itself confronting a question more often associated with the nation's poorest urban school systems: Why do black and Hispanic students lag so far behind their white counterparts?

Bloomfield's 10th-graders posted some of the worst results in the state on the annual test of reading, writing, mathematics and science. In a district that had made modest gains in recent years, students this year missed state goals in startling numbers. The results sparked one question after another: Is it a one-time anomaly? Is it the exodus of top students to private schools? Is it a growing number of poor children in the public schools? Or - in a school system that consists almost entirely of minority students - is it somehow rooted in more profound racial and cultural differences?

Most educators agree that poverty is a powerful underlying cause of the achievement gap. But as experts look at places like Bloomfield, some say that race and culture - apart from income - appear to influence achievement in ways that are not always easily understood. "The gap is as large among children of the highly educated as it is among the children of the poor," said Harvard University Professor Ronald F. Ferguson, who has conducted extensive studies on the achievement gap.

Poverty is without argument a key factor in academic problems plaguing black and Hispanic children in tough urban centers such as Hartford and Bridgeport. But the achievement gap also occurs among minority students in middle-class and wealthy suburbs. On a 2005 nationwide reading test, the gap between black and white high school seniors whose parents were college graduates actually was larger than the gap between blacks and whites whose parents had not finished high school.

Why? It is one of the most confounding questions confronting America's schools, and Bloomfield is hardly alone. Sometimes the problem is obscured. At upscale Hall High School in nearby West Hartford, for example, overall test results appeared good this year, but a closer look shows that only 16 percent of black sophomores met the state math goal, compared with 74 percent of white sophomores.

Some experts believe the problem is largely one of expectations - that schools demand less from minority students and channel them into less rigorous courses.

More here




Australian Labor party to keep private schools funding

Careful hewing to the (conservative) status quo again

KEVIN Rudd will retain the Howard Government's controversial private schools funding system until 2012 if elected, in a major pre-election pitch to parents. Abandoning plans to introduce a "needs-based" funding model that takes into account private school fees and income in his first term, the Opposition Leader will guarantee parents the existing framework will remain for five years. The policy shift, which was welcomed by private schools, delivers a blow to the Coalition's attempts to run a fear campaign over Labor's education policy.

Although Mr Rudd has previously promised to abandon the "schools hit list" policy promoted by former Labor leader Mark Latham, the ALP has until now retained the needs-based formula that underpinned the hit list. The change follows years of Labor criticism that the socio-economic-status model was "dysfunctional and unsustainable" and did not take into account the individual wealth of private schools. It follows similar reversals over the Medicare Safety Net, which Mr Rudd recently announced would be retained if he is elected. The major shift in ALP schools policy also ensures Catholic schools will not lose funding.

The strategy, designed to shift attention to the ALP's plans to boost funding to primary schools, was hailed by private schools last night as a breakthrough. Independent Schools Council executive director Bill Daniels said: "It's a huge shift from the past and a clear acknowledgement that the policy they took to the last election was a mistake. We would support that because it provides stability and certainty."

The ALP's move angered unions, prompting Australian Education Union deputy president Angelo Gavrielatos to describe the policy shift as "indefensible". "It is indefensible in this nation that we continue to deliver such large increases to the wealthiest schools," Mr Gavrielatos said. "To maintain that indefensible model until 2012 makes a mockery of everything the ALP has said about introducing a needs-based funding model. "It ensures private schools will maintain a position of privilege."

The federal Government's funding model - known as the socio-economic-status 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. Under current SES arrangements, 60per cent of Catholic schools are guaranteed more funding than they would be allocated if the SES model were strictly applied.

The ALP's decision follows lengthy negotiations with the Catholic sector. At Labor's national conference in April, references to the Howard Government's funding arrangements as "unfair and divisive" were removed from the party's new education platform. Opposition education spokesman Stephen Smith also sought to dump a reference that criticised the SES formula as having "delivered the largest increases in commonwealth funding to some of the best resourced schools in Australia". However, at the time he did not indicate any plans to retain the SES funding model, instead maintaining that a Rudd government would pursue a needs-based funding model. Labor's new policy platform pledges that public funding should be subject to non-government schools meeting quality standards for curriculum and teaching.

Currently, the basic entitlement to commonwealth assistance under the SES model ranges from a minimum of just $989 a student to $5052. For secondary students attending a private school, it ranges from a minimum taxpayer grant of $1277 a student to $6524.

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9 October, 2007

Hooray for the Clark Doctrine!

General Wesley Clark waded into the controversy involving Rush Limbaugh with a now-notorious appearance on Tucker Carlson's show on MSNBC last week. Carlson and Clark had a feisty exchange, and the General actually advocated the jaw-dropping notion of the government rating political discourse. Missed in all the hubbub over the government speech-rating proposal was an enticing implicit poltical deal, something one might call the "Clark Doctrine." The good General summarized his battle plan:

"There‘s no reason for the American taxpayer to pay for Rush to assault the character of men and women who serve in the armed forces for their political views."

Apparently, the General wants Limbaugh's show dropped from being broadcast over Armed Forces Radio and Rush dropped into a live volcano. That last part may not be an accurate transcription of the conversation as things got heated between Tucker and our soldier-scholar.

Granted, the Reagan and Truman Doctrines had more substance to them, but this, one must admit, has interesting possibilities. If the good General wants no taxpayer money used by people (I assume not just Rush) to "assault the character of the men and women who serve in the armed forces", then one must presume we may apply this doctrine to American academia, our valued public institutions of higher learning. If citizens employed in our public colleges -- and compensated with public dollars for their work -- are discovered to have "assaulted the character" of our military, may tax money be pulled from them as well?

No fooling? Hmm, I'm liking this doctrine General. You get Rush, we get to empty out about 40% of the faculty lounges across the country. It's a deal. Heck, Rush might even go for it too.

Source




Failure of the PhD

A comment from another skeptical Australian

THE PhD is a dinosaur from a previous age of elite education.  It has failed at least one generation of research scholars and continues to fail the overwhelming majority of currently enrolled candidates. A radical rethink would be justified.

I’d like to stir the possum [be provocative] and canvass two options: enrolments could be slashed by at least 50 per cent with a doubling of scholarship and research support funding; alternatively, the degree could head in the opposite direction with an overhaul to take into account the employment prospects of those two thirds of students who will never find full-time employment within the university sector.

There is endless corridor chatter about shady practices surrounding the offering of higher degree research at Australian universities, but very few seem to want to speak out about the degraded state of the PhD itself. There is good reason for this.  It is called self-interest. 

At the top of the pile is an allocation system where universities receive competitive funding for PhD enrolments and successful completions.  Witness the trend in recent years towards advertising campaigns for research degree places around scholarship times, as universities attempt to trump and outbid one another for precious enrolments. This is reckless stuff and a possible breach of trust.  The ads do not mention that around 70 per cent of all enrolling PhDs will never secure research-related jobs in their fields of specialisation.

Down at the coalface, Gollum-like supervisors are endlessly suspicious of their colleagues’ intentions as they rake off workload points for the advice they offer to their students.  Such is the obsession with enrolments and candidacy that extra financial incentives are being offered for supervisions at a number of Australian universities. Given the circumstances, few would blame PhD supervisors for working the system in the manner they do.  Competitiveness is the name of the game and, like the bulk of Australian academics, PhD supervisors are afflicted by endemic workplace insecurity. 

The contemporary PhD suffers from a split personality.  The major and historic functions of the degree were to credential aspiring academics.  The problem is that only around a third of all successful contemporary PhD candidates will end up working in their specialist fields.

The PhD has been caught up in the movement towards mass education, but the degree itself has remained elitist and virtually unchanged for around fifty years.  Training in research methods is the exception and most universities provide a high standard here.  There is little evidence to suggest that other forms of training are being implemented.

Four years ago, DEST released a report into what it euphemistically called “generic capabilities”. The phrase was catchy corporate-speak, and there the debate seemed to end: “When workplace-related skills are discussed, a variety of terms is applied (such as generic skills, transferable skills, and graduate attributes, to select but a few). This report uses the term generic capabilities to mark off the skills and attributes that have a direct link to postgraduate research students’ employability, whatever their research topic and/or discipline base.”

The substantive matter was lost: “The past decade in Australia has seen increased debate and scrutiny by government, employers and universities themselves on the readiness of graduates to enter the workplace. This report is concerned with strategies and practices Australian universities have developed to address the issue of employability in relation to postgraduate research students. In the domain of research graduates, employability is conceived as including entry to the workplace and also career enhancement and change.”

Four years on, the PhD continues to fail its most important people: the best new research minds in the country.

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8 October, 2007

DC idiots still shovelling in more money



D.C. public schools would receive $81 million in additional revenue to fund a sweeping restructuring of the central office and help cover a projected budget shortfall, under a plan announced yesterday by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty. Fenty (D) and School Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee characterized the funding proposal as a one-time cost that would allow them to streamline the system, improve programs, including food service, and maintain surplus school building space.

The additional spending comes in concert with a proposal Rhee is drafting that would ask the D.C. Council to suspend the city's personnel law so that she could terminate staff members. The chancellor said yesterday that she intends to cut about 200 of the central office's 914 positions and would use some of the additional dollars to offer severance packages to employees. She declined to elaborate.

The money for Fenty's plan would come primarily from a pot of $100 million in unexpected tax revenue identified last month by Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi, the mayor said. At the time, Gandhi said the windfall came from continued growth in the city's residential and commercial property markets, and Fenty quickly pledged to use much of the tax money for schools.

The plan marks a sharp shift for Fenty. When he campaigned for mayor last year, Fenty said repeatedly that the school system did not need more money. In the spring, he took direct control of the struggling 50,000-student school system and set its budget for fiscal 2008 at about $800 million in local funds, approximately the same level as last year. "We still believe the current budget is what is needed for the day-to-day operations," Fenty said at a news conference on the steps of the John A. Wilson Building. "But there are issues, including layoffs and other emergencies, that need to be taken care of right away."

The funding plan requires approval from the D.C. Council, and Fenty appeared to have support of a solid majority of the 13-member body. Seven members stood with him at the news conference and two others sent letters of support. "I have confidence the mayor and chancellor will use this money wisely," said Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), chairman of the Committee on Finance and Revenue. Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) did not attend the news conference, but Fenty said he had been briefed. Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) sent Fenty a letter chastising him for announcing the plan publicly before fully briefing him. "This is disrespectful and politically damaging," Barry wrote.

Mary Levy, a longtime D.C. schools advocate for the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, had said that Fenty would probably find he needs to spend more before being able to fix systemic problems in areas such as human resources and financial systems. Yesterday, she said she wanted to know more details about how the new money will be spent. "I'm waiting for more precision," Levy said.

More here




Australian Leftist leader to raise the bar for schools

He sounds good but the teachers' unions will nobble him

KEVIN Rudd has attacked the nation's schools as unacceptably patchy in quality, expressing sympathy for parents struggling to find schools that provide a decent education. And the Labor leader has promised to impose on schools a level of rigour not yet seen in Australia by linking funding to improved standards rather than handing state governments or private schools "a blank cheque".

In an interview with The Weekend Australian yesterday, Mr Rudd also called for four-year fixed electoral terms "entrenched in stone" and said John Howard had created a whole new class of "forgotten people" marooned by his rejection of traditional liberalism. He also posed his alternative to Mr Howard's vision statement, delivered in the 1996 election campaign, that if elected, he wanted Australians to feel "relaxed and comfortable". Mr Rudd said he wanted Australians to be "confident in their kids' future, confident in Australia's future".

Mr Rudd made the comments in Sydney after a hectic week of campaigning on public hospital standards and amid increasing tension over when the Prime Minister will name a date for the federal election. Asked whether parents could be confident that any government school would provide an adequate education, Mr Rudd said one of the education system's worst problems was its variability. He said he felt sympathy for parents who faced a "vexed choice" on schooling, admitting he had seen excellence in public and private schools as well as inadequacy. "What you'll find us doing increasingly is lifting the bar nationally on performance measures for schools," he said. "When we talk about a new national curriculum, let me tellyou, its core hallmark when it comes to English, maths, science, history, languages, will be absolute rigour."

In an indication that the Opposition Leader is likely to take on the powerful teachers' unions if he wins office, Mr Rudd said Labor would negotiate a national curriculum with states and tie funding increases to improvements in educational outcomes. "We are doing kids an absolute disservice by a lack of rigour in schools' curricula, an absolute disservice by not testing them forrigour all the way through," he said. "And we are doing an absolute disservice to our kids if we don'thave intervention strategies properly resourced to deal with literacy and numeracy non-performance." A Labor government would deliver to the education system "a rigour that I don't believe any federal government has embraced before".

While he agreed he had no magic wand, Mr Rudd said a carrot-and-stick approach would deliver change, with schools measured against tough standards that would be regularly lifted. "Unless school performance continues to improve against robust measures of learning outcomes for kids, whether it's in trades or it's in academic subjects or their primary school equivalents, then we are not in the business of signing blank cheques," he said.

Mr Rudd is a product of the Queensland state school system and sent his three children to state primary schools and private secondary schools. Having ruled out a return to Labor's 2004 election policy, which included funding cuts affecting a "hit list" of exclusive private schools, Mr Rudd said his ambition was for the standard of Australian public and private schools to be the best in the world.....

Mr Rudd said he wanted Australians to feel proud of their country and confident it had the the best-educated and most highly skilled workforce in the Western world. He said he wanted "a country which celebrates enterprise, initiative and success, but which doesn't throw the fair go out the back door".

He said Mr Howard had spent his 11 years in office trying to shift the national character towards one opposed to concern for others and accused him of attempting to "terminate the fair go with extreme prejudice". ....

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7 October, 2007

CATS scores expose learning gaps

The old, old story: Black, low-income students fall behind. Only high-discipline schooling would do much to solve the problem but that of course is the No. 1 super-big No-no. Intellectual fashions trump reality every time. But if you can't get a kid to sit down, shut up and listen, you've got Buckley's chance of teaching him anything

Kentucky still has a long way to go to close academic achievement gaps among its black, low-income and learning-disabled students, the state's newest test results show. The percentages of white and Asian students statewide who reached proficiency in reading and math were 10 to 20 points higher than for Hispanic and black students, no matter the grade level, according to results released yesterday by the Kentucky Department of Education.

The state's learning-disabled students fared worse -- the percentage who reached proficiency was as much as 40 points lower than students overall in reading and as much as 30 points lower in math, depending on the grade tested. "These are very big gaps that everyone in Kentucky ought to be very concerned about," said Daria Hall, the assistant director for K-12 policy with The Education Trust, based in Washington, D.C. Test results for Jefferson County Public Schools showed similar learning gaps, especially between black and white students.

Kentucky and the federal No Child Left Behind law expect all students to reach proficiency by 2014. State educators and officials say they are concerned and disappointed by the results. "But, unfortunately, I am not surprised," said Johnnie Grissom, associate commissioner of special instructional services with the Education Department, which has worked to help schools address achievement gaps. "Some schools in Kentucky have closed the gaps successfully and are doing the right thing for all kids, but not all." .....

Hall said there are many reasons for achievement gaps in the nation's schools. "Many poor students and students of color come to school disadvantaged to begin with," she said. "And then once they get to school, they get less than their fair share of quality teachers, they are less likely to be placed in rigorous classes, particularly at the secondary level, and there seems to be lower expectations across the board."

Grissom said she has seen each of those factors in Kentucky's schools -- particularly lower expectations. "In some of our schools, African-American students tend to be assigned to lower-level classes and when they are put up against their counterparts, they are scoring lower because they didn't have the same access to higher-level courses," she said. "They also tend to be paired with the least effective teachers."

The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 made closing the achievement gaps a top priority. Schools that receive federal funds are held accountable for the annual progress of students in nearly every demographic group, and those who fail to meet reading and math goals can face sanctions ranging from student transfers to reorganization and state takeover.

Hall said schools across the nation have struggled for years to close achievement gaps. "We are beginning to see some narrowing of the achievement gap, particularly at the elementary level, but it is not happening fast enough," she said. Hall also said there has been a push by schools at the secondary level to get all students in rigorous courses. "However, we are finding in many cases that these courses are in name only," she said. "It may be called honors or advanced, but when you look at the course of study, it is not advanced and it will not prepare them for higher level work."

Several years ago, Grissom said the state put together a Minority Partnership Assistance Program. "We looked at the seven districts with the largest populations of black students and we worked with each one to develop plans on how they were going to address the achievement gaps," she said. "Most of those districts have made improvements, but they still have not closed the gaps."

Mernia Hill, principal at Shawnee High School, said reducing achievement gaps is not an easy challenge, especially in a district like Jefferson County, where so many students transfer from school to school. "The main thing is identifying the students who fall into the gaps and getting them the proper help," she said. "Our district tends to be very mobile, we have students transferring in and out every day, so you constantly have to stay on top and know what each child's needs are."

Source




HOMESCHOOLING GROWING

Weekdays in the Perry household start like those in any other. The kids brush their teeth, dress, grab a quick breakfast. Then, they make their way to school - at the dining room table. Anna, 7, tries to focus on her workbook. Bekah, 5, squirms in her chair and plays with 2-year-old Danielle, who needs a nap and starts wailing. Books are stacked on every surface. Little posters with insects and alphabets dot the walls, stand-ins for typical dining room decor. "Welcome," says their mother Kim Perry, smiling amid the disorder, "to our classroom."

The Perrys are part of a growing home-school movement. In 1999, according to federal statistics, there were 850,000 home-schooled children in the United States. In 2003, that number rose to 1.1 million. Some estimates put the figure today as high as 2.4 million. "It's certainly on the rise, there's no doubt about it," said Brad Haines, executive director for the Missouri-based Families for Home Education. "Exactly how fast is up to speculation."

Before their four children were born, Kim and her husband, David, decided they were going to home-school them. They had the most common reasons for doing so: They wanted an alternative to the sometimes violent culture of American public schools, and they wanted to educate their children with a Bible-centered focus. "People always ask me, 'Why do you want to stay home with your kids?'" Perry said. "I tell them, they're my kids. I want to have a positive impact on them. I want to raise them according to my values not someone else's."

Neither Missouri nor Illinois tracks students who are educated at home; the two states have some of the loosest regulations on home-schooling in the country. A parent doesn't have to tell authorities they're deciding to home-school their children, and home-schoolers want to keep it that way. Efforts in both states to tighten the rules have been extinguished as quickly as they flared. In both states, home-schooling support groups have flourished and multiplied. Membership in support groups suggests the number of home-schooled children in the St. Louis area is 6,000 or higher. "I get calls from people all the time, from people who want to pull their kids out of public schools," said Perry, who is on the board of an 80-member home-school group. "We've been growing by a third every year."

CONNECTIONS

In both Illinois and Missouri, parents who home-school their children, in effect, set up a private school, usually with the mother as teacher and father as principal. Neither needs any particular academic qualifications. There are lesson plans they can follow, and bookstores cater to home-school families. For many families, though, the most important resource has become the Internet, which has linked even isolated households and helped support groups organize field trips, athletic events or classes. "It's certainly made it a whole lot easier," said Wayne Walker, minister of the Affton Church of Christ, who home-schools his two children. "You can find like-minded people, more information."

Walker sends a 20-plus-page weekly e-mail with a list of available classes and activities to a host of home-schoolers every week. Like many home-schooled children, his participate in many activities. "It's really provided an opportunity for our children to meet friends," Walker said.

Home-schoolers say they feel more connected to a community. "We've chosen to be at home, but if we wanted to, there are so many classes, we could be gone all day, every day," Perry said.

MEASURING STICKS

Education authorities say they worry that, because home-schooled students aren't required to take statewide achievement tests in many states, including Missouri and Illinois, students may not meet expectations. Science class in a home-school household, for example, might veer from teaching evolutionary theory. A science course might instead have a name like "God's Design for Heaven & Earth," as it does in the Perry household.

Home-schoolers say the diplomas they confer on their children are evidence of a solid education. So are the transcripts they submit to colleges. Increasingly colleges say they agree. "They were so used to dealing with traditional transcripts and grades," said Ian Slatter, of the Home School Legal Defense Association. "Now the overwhelming majority of colleges have home-school admissions policies or a home-school admissions officer."

The University of Missouri and the University of Illinois have learned how to evaluate home-schoolers, though they receive relatively few applications for admission. "We're trying to do more to reach out to them," said Barbara Rupp, director of admissions at the University of Missouri. "I see a big difference in the level of sophistication of transcripts. But, yeah. Mom and Dad are assigning grades."

Regina Morin, director of admissions at Columbia College, says the school is seeing more home-schoolers apply each year. "They tend to be better than their public school counterparts," she said. "They score above average on tests, they're more independent, they're often a grade ahead." "Traditionally colleges can be afraid of them," Morin added. "They don't know how to assess them."

The home-school community concedes that not all kids emerge college-ready and that some parents aren't up to the task. "This is not an escape," Haines said. "It's a choice you make and stick with."

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6 October, 2007

Get Congress Out of the Classroom

DESPITE the rosy claims of the Bush administration, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 is fundamentally flawed. The latest national tests, released last week, show that academic gains since 2003 have been modest, less even than those posted in the years before the law was put in place. In eighth-grade reading, there have been no gains at all since 1998.

The main goal of the law - that all children in the United States will be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014 - is simply unattainable. The primary strategy - to test all children in those subjects in grades three through eight every year - has unleashed an unhealthy obsession with standardized testing that has reduced the time available for teaching other important subjects. Furthermore, the law completely fractures the traditional limits on federal interference in the operation of local schools.

Unfortunately, the Congressional leaders in both parties seem determined to renew the law, probably after next year's presidential election, with only minor changes. But No Child Left Behind should be radically overhauled, not just tweaked. Under the law, the states devise their own standards and their own tests. Based on the test results, every school is expected to make "adequate yearly progress" in grades three to eight so as to be on track to meet that goal of universal proficiency by 2014. Schools that do not meet their annual target for every group of students - as defined by race, poverty, language and disability status - are subject to increasingly onerous sanctions written into the federal law.

Schools that fail to meet their target for two consecutive years must offer their students the choice to go to a more successful public school; if they fail the following year, they must provide tutoring to their students. If the students continue to miss their target, the entire teaching and administration staff may be replaced, or the school may be turned over to state control, or it may be converted into a charter school.

Yet these tough sanctions thus far have been ineffective. Federal agencies report that only about 1 percent of eligible students take advantage of switching schools and fewer than 20 percent of eligibles receive extra tutoring. In inner cities, where academic performance is weakest, only a handful of students move to successful schools because there are very few seats available to them. In rural America, choice is limited by the small number of other schools in the geographic area. Furthermore, neither research nor experience validates any of the "remedies" written into law. There is little evidence that failing schools improve if they are turned over to state control or converted to charter status.

No Child Left Behind can, however, be salvaged if policymakers recognize that they need to reverse the roles of the federal government and the states. In our federal system, each level of government should do what it does best. The federal government is good at collecting and disseminating information. The states and school districts, being closer to the schools, teachers and parents than the federal government, are more likely to be flexible and pragmatic about designing reforms to meet the needs of particular schools.

However, under current law, state education departments have an incentive to show that schools and students are making steady progress, even if they are not. So the results of state tests, which are administered every year, are almost everywhere better than the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the benchmark federal test that is administered every other year.

Many states claim that 80 percent or more of their students are proficient in reading or math at the same time that the federal assessment shows only a minority of students in those states reaching its standard of proficiency. We will never know how well or poorly our students are doing until we have a consistent national testing program in which officials have no vested interest in claiming victory.

Under current law, Congress now decides precisely which sanctions and penalties are needed to reform schools, which is way beyond its competence. The leaders of the House and Senate Education Committees are fine men, but they do not know how to fix the nation's schools.

The obvious solution is to reverse roles. Washington should supply unbiased information about student academic performance to states and local districts. It should then be the responsibility of states and local districts to improve performance. Congress should also drop the absurd goal of achieving universal proficiency by 2014. Given that no nation, no state and no school district has ever reached 100 percent math and reading proficiency for all grades, it is certain that the goal cannot be met. Perpetuating this unrealistic ideal, however, guarantees that increasing numbers of schools will "fail" as the magic year 2014 gets closer. Unless we set realistic goals for our schools and adopt realistic means of achieving them, we run the risk of seriously damaging public education and leaving almost all children behind.

Source




British teachers 'fear evolution lessons' because of Muslims

The teaching of evolution is becoming increasingly difficult in UK schools because of the rise of creationism, a leading scientist is warning. Head of science at London's Institute of Education Professor Michael Reiss says some teachers, fearful of entering the debate, avoid the subject totally. This could leave pupils with gaps in their scientific knowledge, he says.

Prof Reiss says the rise of creationism is partly down to the large increase in Muslim pupils in UK schools. He said: "The number of Muslim students has grown considerably in the last 10 to 20 years and a higher proportion of Muslim families do not accept evolutionary theory compared with Christian families. "That's one reason why it's more of an issue in schools."

Prof Reiss estimates that one in 10 people in the UK now believes in creationism - whether it be based on the Biblical story or one in the Koran. Many more teachers he met at scientific meetings were telling him they now encountered more pupils who believed in literal interpretations of these religious texts, he said. "The days have long gone when science teachers could ignore creationism when teaching about origins."

Instead, teachers should tackle the issue head-on, whilst trying not to alienate students by dismissing their beliefs out of hand, he argues in a new book. "While it is unlikely that they will help students who have a conflict between science and their religious beliefs to resolve the conflict, good science teaching can help them to manage it - and to learn more science. "By not dismissing their beliefs, we can ensure that these students learn what evolutionary theory really says - and give everyone the understanding to respect the views of others," he added.

His book; Teaching about Scientific Origins: Taking Account of Creationism, gives science teachers advice on how to deal with the "dilemma". He supports new government guidelines which say creationism should not be discussed in science classes unless it is raised by pupils. But Prof Reiss argues that there is an educational value in comparing creationist ideas with scientific theories like Darwin's theory of evolution because they demonstrate how science, unlike religious beliefs, can be tested. The scientist, who is also a Church of England priest, adds that any teaching should not give the impression that creationism and the theory of evolution are equally valid scientifically. "They are not," he said.

Dr Hilary Leevers, of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, said science teachers would be teaching evolution not creationism and so should not need a book to tell them how to "delicately handle controversy between a scientific theory and a belief". "The author suggests that science teachers cannot ignore creationism when teaching origins, but the opposite is true," she said. "Science teachers are there to teach the scientific theory of evolution. If a student initiates discussion about creationism in a science lesson, it provides an opportunity for the teacher to discuss how it differs from a scientific theory.

"Further discussion of creationism should occur in religious education as it is a belief system, not one based on science."

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5 October, 2007

Why atheists, humanists and libertarians should embrace alternative schooling

Yesterday I reported on the role of fundamentalist extremism in causing a rise in the number, and loudness, of atheists in America. This was inspired by an article in the Washington Post on the new atheists. A second article on the topic has now appeared in the Post as part of a series of article on beliefs about religion.

The growth of atheism among young people is truly astounding. I have believed, for a couple of years now, that American fundamentalists were in trouble. They have overreached for power and they were too closely identified with Bush. They were pissing off a lot of people including other Christians and they were, as the saying goes, cruising for a bruising. And they are getting it.

In the 1980s about 11% of young people, ages 18 to 25, in Pew survey identified themselves as atheists, non-believers, agnostic or as having no religion. A follow up Pew poll that would have been done toward the end of last year said that the number had risen to 20%. The Post article mentions a recent Barna survey on religious beliefs and says "one in four four adults ages 18 to 22 describes themselves as having no faith."

If the Barna survey is correct that means the increase in self-identified atheists, among the young, is continuing at a rather astounding pace. I remember reading a New York Times piece on the social/camming network, Stickam, which is mainly occupied by young people. I read a few articles on the site and similar ones and then browsed through the site. I randomly read the "profiles" which users left for themselves. And I remember being surprised by the number of users, mostly young, who described themselves as atheists.

The article also mentioned another phenomenon based on classical liberal principles -- the rise of alternative schooling. And that is the main thrust of what I have to write about today. The Post said that "charter schools based on humanist principles have opened in New York City and Florida" in recent years along with summer camps for kids of atheists. The alternative education principle is one I have promoted here. Too many non-conservatives, mainly progressives, have seen alternative, non-state education as a means of pushing religion and other Religious Right values.

But last February, when Utah passed a state-wide voucher system (now being opposed heavily by the self-serving teacher's unions), I wrote:

I would like to see good quality, secular, private schools teaching kids. Instead of bitching about private education mainly being run by religious groups secular liberals need to open their own schools. Consider this my friends on the Left. You can have a school where you don't have to turn over the ID data to the military for recruitment as you do with state schools. You can have a school where you don't have to have some fundamentalist nutter come in with his version of sex education -- as you do in the public schools. You don't have to worry about some board of education forcing theology on you in the form of so-called Intelligent Design.

The non-believing community ought to be embracing alternative schooling. Oddly, for decades, they were the leaders in the field. Until the late 1960s alternative education in America, outside the Catholic school system, was almost entirely operated by humanists, progressives and secularists. But when racial integration became prominent thousands of "Christian" schools were created in order to continue segregation.

Unfortunately most people have notoriously short memories. They don't remember the work of Ivan Illich in his book Deschooling Society. It goes much further back than that. Joseph Neef founded three humanist oriented schools in the US between the years 1809 and 1827. Montessori began her first school in 1907, and Rudolf Steiner started his first school in 1919. By the 50s, 60s and 70s the alternative education movement was dominated by people like Paul Goodman, John Holt, Jonathan Kozol and Illich.

All this was forgotten by the tsunami of "Christian" segregated schools that rose up almost overnight. And in reaction to that non-conservatives clung to the state education system. The problem for them is the problem for the Religious Right today. The state is a cumbersome leviathan that creates chaos and conflict wherever it goes. If there is a job to be done they will screw it up. To have one's ideas associated with the perpetual destruction imposed by big government is the kiss of death.

Decent, humanist schools are possible. And with various voucher programs where funding follows the students good, secular schools can be created much more easily than ever before. And it can be done without the artificial conflict created by monopolistic education. In addition such schools can't be controlled centrally by some third-rate Texas politician and changed from above. Sex education, courses I would support in a private school, became abstinence courses across the US because of the now heavily centralized, and federally funded, nature of education. This couldn't happen nearly as easily with a decentralized network of humanist schools.

I suspect one of the great tragedies of libertarian politics in recent years has be the Quixotic political campaigns for candidates with little, or no, chance of winning. These campaigns act like black holes that suck up and destroy vast financial resources and activists leaving nothing in their wake to speak of. A campaign that consumes millions of dollars, and in a few times will end, eats up enough funding to open several alternative, libertarian-oriented, secular schools. That money would not only fund them but allow them to be tuition free for years. Of course if tuition is charged the schools would could go on a lot longer.

Bob LeFevre was closer to the mark than most modern libertarians when he founded Freedom School in 1957. But instead of only educating adults he should have expanded into all ages and opened an alternative schooling system. Considering that some of his teachers included Rose Wilder Lane, Milton Friedman, Leonard Reader, Gordon Tullock, Bruno Leoni, Ludwig von Mises, and Frank Chodorov -- what a school it would have been, even if they only gave guest lectures now and then.

Any group that wants to change a culture has to change minds. Political campaigns are short-term, sound bites. They reflect already existing views, they don't create them. They follow trends, they don't start them. What starts trends is the minds of people changing. And that is an educational process and politics is poor at educating anyone.

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Gore film OK for British students

Former US vice-president Al Gore's Oscar-winning climate change documentary can be shown in English schools, a judge said yesterday, even though he believes it promotes partisan political views. Educational authorities are making Mr Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, available to all English secondary schools, a decision challenged in court by a part-time school official who claims the the film is inaccurate and biased.

High Court judge Michael Burton said the movie could be shown if the written guidance for teachers bundled with the program was changed to prevent Mr Gore's views from being promoted to children. Earlier yesterday, the Government said it was rewriting its advice. "With the guidance as now amended, it will not be unlawful for the film to be shown," Justice Burton said. The judge said, however, that he felt the film promoted "partisan political views". He did not elaborate.

Justice Burton's comments, following a four-day hearing, were not an official ruling and he said a final judgment would probably be announced next week. He said he decided to indicate what his decision would be because he felt schools needed to know in what circumstances they could show the film. During the case, schools were not required to stop showing the documentary.

It was a partial victory for claimant Stewart Dimmock, a truck driver from Dover, a port city in southeastern England, who works part-time on a school board. Mr Dimmock has said he is fighting to have his children educated in an environment "free from bias and political spin".

While An Inconvenient Truth will still be shown, the judge said British teachers would have to be careful not to endorse Mr Gore's political views when they present it to pupils. [And how likely is that?]

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4 October, 2007

Britain: Creationism can be a topic in class

Teachers have been given permission to discuss the controversial theory of creationism in science lessons. Pupils should be able to ask questions about the theory provided teachers emphasise it has "no underpinning scientific principles", new Government guidance says. If the subject is raised teachers will be expected to contrast the strict Biblical belief that the Earth was created by God in six days between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Teachers are told to respond "positively and educationally" to such questions and be "respectful of students' views, religious or otherwise".

But the document – drawn up to clarify the rules after Christian academics challenged the teaching of Darwinism in GCSE biology – makes it clear that such beliefs are not "scientifically testable" and are not valid scientific theories.

It is hoped the guidance will help avoid the situation in the United States where some schools – under pressure from the religious Right – have compelled science teachers to introduce lessons in intelligent design, a creationist off-shoot.

The guidance says schools must teach the broad outlines of evolutionary theory to pupils aged five to 14, and focus clearly on the "nature of, and evidence for, evolution" at GCSE and A-level. Questions about creationism should provide an "opportunity to explain or explore why they are not considered to be scientific theories".

Source




The Freedom Trip Wire

For many liberals and conservatives, the pivotal battleground this election season isn't Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina. It's Utah. There, a fight over the state's universal K-12 school choice program portends to be the trip wire for the school choice movement across the country. Utah is the location of the fault line between those who would prod conventional public schools out of their mediocrity and those 21st century Luddites who will protect the status quo to their death. The latter group's battle cry is, "Entrenched bureaucracy forever!"

Earlier this year, Utah's legislature and governor - in the state's rugged western tradition - bucked the powerful teachers' unions and provided parents with true educational choices for their children. The groundbreaking initiative was met with substantial indignation by state and national teacher union bosses who immediately filed petitions to do away with the new law.

Ironically, as the nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of the historic civil rights struggle for access to quality education in Little Rock, Ark., these unions have been morphed into the George Wallaces, Lester Maddoxes, and other freedom deniers of our times. The head of Utah's largest teachers' union promised an "ugly, mean and expensive" campaign, and the National Education Association has given her $3 million to wage it. That's a lot of money in a state with one media market. School choice advocates have pledged to raise and spend whatever necessary to protect the program. They seem ready to blunt the union's trademark bare-knuckle tactics in defense of their children's civil rights.

In fact, grassroots groups like Parents for Choice in Education and child-centered school choice advocates like Dr. Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com are on the front line of this fight. They seem to have the will and fire power necessary to win this battle. If they succeed in defending the law, school choice advocates will give Utah's parents a valuable educational tool and the nation will have a universal school choice model to evaluate and, if successful, emulate.

Called the Parents Choice in Education Act, the program was carefully crafted to address the concerns typically associated with previous voucher-driven school choice programs. Children receive between $500 and $3,000 in scholarships depending on their parents' income. Every child currently in public school can participate. Children attending independent schools will be evaluated according to criteria such as prior qualification for federal lunch programs where lunch is either free or at a reduced cost. Students entering kindergarten this year are immediately eligible, with all students qualifying by 2020.

Non-government schools must meet rigid state standards to participate. The schools must give students nationally approved achievement tests. The results of the testing must then be given to state officials and parents. The schools must meet important accountability standards and disclose credentials of educators as well as the institution's own accreditation status. Independent auditors also must pour through the school's financial records and report the information to the state.

Under the program, vouchers can only be used at non-government schools. Before parents are given access to the scholarship funds, they must actively opt their children out of a conventional public school. When parents opt their children out of a conventional public school, the state will continue to fund that school - for five years - as if the students never left. Therefore, if a public school loses a significant number of students, it will have a few years to address the root causes of the departures before state funding is shifted.

The program seems to address the most often mentioned concerns of school choice opponents. It provides for non-government school accountability. It continues to fund underperforming government-run public schools and gives those schools five years to get their act together. And, it serves a very real public need - the need for quality enhancing, freedom-expanding competition in the education marketplace.

Parents want the empowerment that comes with educational choice. Pilot voucher programs in cities like New York, Cleveland, and Milwaukee are consistently overwhelmed with tens of thousands of applicants for a few hundred slots. Parents in those cities desperately want to rescue their children from failing public schools and unresponsive education bureaucrats. Utahns are no different. "With vouchers, parents can find the education that is best for their children," the spokeswoman for Utah's Parents for Choice in Education, Nancy Pomeroy, told the Desert Morning News.

Entrenched teachers' unions and their supporters see things differently. "This has nothing to do about educating children," State Senator Gene Davis, a Democrat, told the Associated Press. "It's about taking taxpayer dollars and giving them to private industry." Not really. It's about letting taxpayers make their own decisions with their money. Parents most certainly qualify as taxpayers.

The senator's comments may confound parents, but they shed light on the fact that for school choice opponents it's really not about educating children. For them, it's about collective bargaining, retirement benefits, and lowered accountability. How can we forget the infamous words of the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, who said, "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children." I doubt Utah's school choice advocates will let the voters forget this come November.

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3 October, 2007

Conservative group looking to aid U of I

Conservative commentator Robert Novak said Thursday that his Washington colleagues were stunned to learn that a group of University of Illinois alumni was setting up an organization to encourage and finance conservative studies on campus. They asked, "Capitalism and limited government at a public university? How can that be?" Novak, an Illinois graduate, told about 250 people gathered for the launch of The Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government Fund.

Some U of I faculty members fear that the group's plans to raise money to pay for classes and research on free-market capitalism and limited government would create an undue conservative political influence on campus. They also complain that the new group was formed without faculty input. "The main thing that concerned me is that this was something that was sort of dropped on the faculty," associate history professor Mark Leff said in an interview. "We read about it in the newspaper, and all of the sudden we find out that there's this organization."

Conservative groups, which have complained that universities serve as little more than liberal training grounds, have emerged on and around campuses across the U.S. to press their own ideology. "The left has made the university into a political platform," said David Horowitz, a conservative activist whose California-based Horowitz Freedom Center campaigns for greater conservative presence on campuses. "Of course there's going to be a reaction." The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, for instance, regularly pressures the University of North Carolina about what the group considers "shallow and trendy" teaching that ignores American history and conservative principles such as limited government.

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The destructive British class system

Which has become more entrenched under Labour, despite their inflated rhetoric. Why? Because the Labour party has done its best to block the best route to upward mobility -- the Grammar (selective) schools. A Grammar School graduate comments:

I recently met a bright 17-year-old from a working-class background who attended his local comprehensive in London. He was funny and articulate. I asked whether he or anyone at his school had considered applying to Oxford or Cambridge. He laughed: "We don't think it's for people like us." It is a reaction I hear often and helps to explain a sad waste of talent in Britain today. Last week a study showed that just 200 elite schools accounted for one third of admissions to the top dozen universities and half of all places at Oxford and Cambridge. The remaining 3,500 schools and colleges account for the other half. It is neither fair nor sensible.

While others are tempted to pin the blame on biased universities, I believe there is something more deep-rooted at work - a culture of low aspirations shared not just by students, but in many cases by their parents and teachers, too. There are many excellent teachers doing their best for the students, but it is a disturbing fact that some bright pupils are actively discouraged from reaching for the top.

I have long taken a personal interest in this question. Last week's university research was carried out by the Sutton Trust, the educational charity that I founded and chair, in an attempt to widen the circle of opportunity. I know first-hand how important aiming high can be. I grew up on a council estate in Yorkshire where I was lucky enough to pass the 11-plus [Grammar School admission]. Until this point nobody had suggested I might go to university. My parents encouraged me to work hard, but university was a world away from their own experiences. My father found a better job and we moved to a detached house in Surrey and I went to Reigate grammar school where, if you did well, you were encouraged to go on to university. Then, in another upwardly mobile shift, we moved again and I ended up at Cheltenham grammar, where bright boys were encouraged to aim for Oxbridge.

If my family had stayed in Yorkshire I would almost certainly not have gone to university. If we had stayed in Surrey I would not have gone to Oxford. Higher aspirations changed my life. Oxford led on to the London Business School, to a career in consulting and private equity. I never looked back. That was decades ago; I would have hoped that things had improved. But they have got worse. Sadly, in Britain today, aspirations are rooted in class. According to our research, parents in professional and managerial occupations believe that their children will go on to take A-levels, to attend good universities and end up in high-paying careers. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those in lower-paid jobs, by contrast, are likely to think that their children will leave school at 16 and go into routine employment.

You might think the classroom would act as a corrective. But all too often low expectations are reinforced by our socially selective school system. The Sutton Trust has surveyed 20% of the teachers in state schools who advise students on university - and more than 80% of them said they thought their pupils would find it difficult to fit into the top universities, particularly Oxbridge. Hard-pressed teachers face many other pressures and in some cases lack the confidence and know-how. Parents, meanwhile, are frustrated. Some even tell of instances where their children have been told not to bother applying to Oxford or Cambridge, despite being qualified.

That is why the Sutton Trust has announced that, together with its partners, it will spend 10 million pounds over the next five years to expand its sponsorship of outreach programmes such as summer schools to dispel the myths around the top universities. Even then it can be an uphill struggle. There is a shortage of applications from boys (less than a third). Many of those who do come hide it from their peers for fear of being branded a "swot".

This could not be more different from the attitudes of young people from independent schools. Their classmates are aiming to be bankers, lawyers and doctors. These children are articulate and confident. They have every reason to be. They have spent summers travelling overseas and undertaking internships at prestigious firms, not stacking shelves. Going to Oxford or Bristol or Durham is the natural next step.

It is no wonder that social mobility has declined in Britain and we languish at the bottom of the international league table. Also, the relationship between children's educational performance and their family background is stronger here than anywhere else in the developed world. If you are born poor, your qualifications will reflect the fact and you will remain poor.

Raising the aspirations of young people - as well as parents and teachers - is half the battle. The Sutton Trust is trying. We work with children in the early years, through school and into further and higher education, to provide the sort of support and encouragement to nonprivileged youngsters that better-off families and high-achieving schools provide as a matter of course. More is needed. Why not open up leading private and state schools to those from nonprivileged backgrounds, as has been done successfully at the Belvedere school in Liverpool and Pate's in Cheltenham? We should learn from successful schools and extend the opportunities they offer to all.

Children's futures should not be down to luck: we must ensure that all young people have access to real educational opportunities. That is a very modest ambition for a country that prides itself on fair play.

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Catholic School Board calls Pro-Family Group "Extremist Hate Group", Board Defends Pro-Gay Manual

Board's family life committee said to have approved homosexual-activist counselor who is raising male child with his homosexual partner

In an attempt to divert attention from a controversial pro-homosexuality resource that the Waterloo Catholic District School Board (WCDSB) has approved, the Board has taken to calling into question the motive and character of the Defend Traditional Marriage and Family (DTMF) group that brought the issue to light earlier this year.

At the heart of the issue is a teacher resource book called "Open Minds" that DTMF claims is misleading regarding issues of homosexuality. Also of concern to DTMF are decisions made by the WCDSB regarding numerous recommended resources and workshops being given to school administrators, many of which contradict Catholic teaching on human sexuality.

Statements made by Board spokespersons were published in today's main local area newspaper, The Record, that constitute ad hominem attacks on the DTMF and its members. Board spokesperson John Shewchuk called DTMF "an extremist hate group" as well as "a hate group with their own agenda that's making stuff up and lying." The article went on to state that "The group has an agenda that goes beyond the book to trying to discredit the school board, he charged."

In response to the allegations made by the board spokesperson, the DTMF's spokesperson, Jack Fonseca, told LifeSiteNews that, "Unable to defend his position on this inappropriate teacher resource, the Catholic School Board spokesperson has resorted to character assassination and a drive-by smear campaign against DTMF and the Catholic parents who are concerned about this inappropriate resource."

The assertions of the WCDSB spokesperson seem to be at odds with the published statements of DTMF. On a related issue regarding a Board approved counselor, a Sept. 24, 2007 press release by DTMF stated that: "we agree with the Board that students who experience same-sex attractions indeed deserve support and counselling. In fact, we believe that in this day and age where sex and sexuality have become so confused, that the Catholic community has an obligation to provide support services to affected students. Where we disagree with the Board is in who should deliver the counseling." The Board's family life committee approved of a homosexual-activist counselor who is raising a male child with his homosexual partner.

According to The Record "committee members discussed the book but won't make their decision until their next meeting on Nov. 1." The Board vehemently refused to discuss the other matters of concern to DTMF at the meeting.

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2 October, 2007

Britain: Israel boycott collapses

UCU announced today that, after seeking legal advice, an academic boycott of Israel would be unlawful and cannot be implemented. Members of the union's strategy and finance committee unanimously accepted a recommendation from UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, that the union should immediately inform branches and members that:

* A boycott call would be unlawful and cannot be implemented

* UCU members' opinions cannot be tested at local meetings

* The proposed regional tour cannot go ahead under current arrangements and is therefore suspended.

The union had passed a motion at its congress in May calling for the circulation and debate of a call to boycott. Since then UCU has sought extensive legal advice in order to try to implement congress policy while protecting the position of members and of the union itself. The legal advice makes it clear that making a call to boycott Israeli institutions would run a serious risk of infringing discrimination legislation. The call to boycott is also considered to be outside the aims and objects of the UCU.

The union has been told that while UCU is at liberty to debate the pros and cons of Israeli policies, it cannot spend members' resources on seeking to test opinion on something which is in itself unlawful and cannot be implemented. The union will now explore the best ways to implement the non-boycott elements of the motion passed at congress.

The legal advice states: 'It would be beyond the union's powers and unlawful for the union, directly or indirectly, to call for, or to implement, a boycott by the union and its members of any kind of Israeli universities and other academic institutions; and that the use of union funds directly or indirectly to further such a boycott would also be unlawful.' The advice also says that 'to ensure that the union acts lawfully, meetings should not be used to ascertain the level of support for such a boycott.'

UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said: 'Since congress our first priority has always been to keep the union, and its members, safe during what has been a very difficult time. I hope this decision will allow all to move forwards and focus on what is our primary objective, the representation of our members. 'I believe if we do this we may also, where possible, play a positive role in supporting Palestinian and Israeli educators and in promoting a just peace in the Middle East.'

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Illinois school district considers banning traditions seen as offensive to Muslims

So long, Halloween parade. Farewell, Santa's gift shop. The holiday traditions are facing elimination in some Oak Lawn schools this year after complaints that the activities are offensive, particularly to Muslim students. Final decisions on which of the festivities will be axed will fall to the principals at each of Ridgeland School District 122's five schools, Supt. Tom Smyth said.

Parents expect that the announcement is going to add to the tension that has been building since officials agreed earlier this month to change the lunch menu to exclude items containing pork to accommodate Muslim students. News that Jell-O was struck from the menu caused such a stir that officials have agreed to bring it back. Gelatin is often made with tissue or bones of pigs or other animals.

That controversy now appears to have been been dwarfed by the holiday debate, which became so acrimonious Wednesday that police were called to Columbus Manor School to intervene in a shouting match among parents. "It's difficult when you change the school's culture," said Columbus Manor Principal Sandy Robertson. Elizabeth Zahdan, a mother of three District 122 students, says she took her concerns to the school board this month, not because she wanted to do away with the traditions, but rather to make them more inclusive. "I only wanted them modified to represent everyone," she said. Nixing them isn't the response she was looking for. "Now the kids are not being educated about other people," she said.

There's just not time in the six-hour school day to celebrate every holiday, said Smyth, who sent the message to principals that they need to "tone down" the activities that he sees as eating too much into instructional time. "We have to think about our purpose," Smyth said. "Are we about teaching reading, writing and math or for parties or fund-raising during the day?"

Robertson is hoping to strike compromises that will keep traditions alive and be culturally acceptable to all students -- nearly half of whom are of Arab descent at Columbus Manor, she says. Fewer than a third of students districtwide are of Arab descent, according to Smyth.

Following the example of Lieb Elementary School, Columbus Manor School will exchange the annual Halloween parade for a fall festival next month. The holiday gift bazaars at both schools also will remain, but they'll likely be moved to the PTA-sponsored after-school winter festival. And Santa's annual visit probably will be on a Saturday.

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Stupid University Tricks: How Columbia Routinely Chills Speech It Doesn't Like

Post below lifted from Ace. See the original for links

John Leo counts the ways.

Several people, myself included, suggested that if Bollinger is as interested in free speech as he keeps saying he is, then he should reschedule the Minutemen and introduce them himself, with enough security around to discourage the reappearance of last year's stormtroopers in training.

A few weeks ago, it looked as though Columbia was about to make a rare lurch in the direction of free speech. Students re-invited the two Minutemen, but after these proposed speakers bought plane tickets, Columbia's pro-censorship DNA re-asserted itself and the two men were once again disinvited. Not a peep out of Bollinger.

One of Columbia's favorite tricks is to cancel a speaker, or reduce the size of the audience, on grounds that violence might break out. Last fall most of a large crowd that gathered to hear former PLO terrorist-turned-anti-Jihadist Walid Shoebat was turned away over securities worries. Only Columbia students and 20 guests got in. The same thing happened to Dinesh D'Souza, myself and several other speakers in 1999. A large crowd, including many from other New York campuses, had tickets, but the administration (this was a pre-Bollinger year) ruled that only Columbia students could attend. This was not the deal that had been agreed on, but Columbia was adamant. Rather than speak to a tiny remnant on campus, the speakers withdrew to a park nearby. As I spoke, one student shouted "Ha-ha. We're inside. You're out here," an excellent six-word explanation of how Columbia's robust free-speech tradition actually works.

Instapudit piths:

Yes, and this hypocrisy is a problem with higher education more generally, alas. It's why people don't take claims that "we're just opening up a debate" seriously -- because, you know, they're basically lies.

I've said this before, but add another trick to their arsenal: Claims of an absolutist commitment to hearing from speakers of all sorts, no matter how repulsive, in the interest of free speech for free speech's sake. Whenever these bastards are asked to defend their decisions, they claim they made no decisions at all, because their commitment to free exchange of ideas is so perfectly absolute as to admit of no decision-making, and no boundary-drawing, and no judgment calls, whatsoever.

So they avoid the question. Ask them to defend inviting a terrorist thug like Ahmadinejad on moral or national-interest grounds and they claim such grounds are wholly irrelevant.

Of course this is all a lie and a dodge. They are not free-speech absolutists; far from it. They exercise their judgment and own sense of propriety in these matters all the time; they just don't want to admit they do, because that would then invite questions about precisely what their judgment and sense of propriety, are, precisely, and they wish to lie to the public on such matters.

A commitment to free speech would begin nicely be actually speaking the truth and admitting one's true criteria for such invitations and permissions to speak at the university. Then there could actually be robust debate -- debate! what they always claim to be in favor of! -- of those criteria.

But they don't want debate over their criteria, because they don't want any chance they might have to abandon them. So they continue making their decisions and exercising their bias in the darkness of lies.

Commitment to debate and free speech? Uh-huh. Just like Joe Stalin was. Big fan of fair debate and vigorous dissent was Uncle Joe.





1 October, 2007

British "Education"

Inspired by Dr. Joseph Goebbels

A reader has sent me deeply disturbing evidence of the indoctrination into hatred and lies being perpetrated in at least one of our schools. This is a questionnaire that was distributed to pupils at a large mixed comprehensive school in Britain (the reader has asked me not to identify the school for personal reasons). The seven questions included litter, racism, refugees, a petition against `British attacks on Iraq', dolphin friendly tuna, racism again and then the last question:

`You know that Israel's actions against Palestinian civilians go against international law. Which of the following do you decide?

a) People like us in Britain should stop buying goods made in Israel, to help put pressure on Israel to stop attacking Palestinians (3)

b) This conflict has nothing to do with us and there is nothing we can do (1)

c) Our government should put pressure on Israel to do what international law says, and cut down its occupation of Palestine (2)

d) We need to find out more about the conflict between Israel and Palestine before we say what we do (3)'

The numbers in brackets indicate the score a student would receive for their answer - the higher the better. The week before they had a number of photos they had to group together - one was an Israeli tank and a Palestinian boy that was put under `Oppression.'

This travesty is being perpetrated in `citizenship' lessons. The teacher who devised this question clearly is completely ignorant of international law, within which Israel acts, and is merely recycling the ideological equivalent of saloon-bar bigotry that passes for discourse about the Middle East in Britain. Thus the calibre of those entrusted to pass on to the next generation a sense of national identity grounded in the values of this country. Once, these values included truthfulness, integrity and academic rigour. No more. We are now a country where the uninformed are instructed by the bigoted. From the Olympian heights of Britain's once unsurpassed education system, which produced the fairest, gentlest and most rational society on earth, Britain's children are now being equipped instead to inhabit Planet Virulence, where ignorance, irrationality and injustice rule.

I warned from the very introduction of these `citizenship' lessons that they would become a vehicle for crude propaganda. So it has proved. The irony is that the government introduced them in the first place because it was so alarmed that British identity and values were being eroded from within in the face of the threat to the nation from without. Now we can see the result. British citizenship includes hatred of Israel by way of the propaganda of one of the Big Lies of history - the very same Big Lie that is fuelling the murderous onslaught on the western world.

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Newfoundland University Denies Club Status to Pro-Life Group

On Wednesday, September 26, the Memorial University of Newfoundland Students' Union Board of Directors (MUNSU) voted to deny official club status to Memorial University of Newfoundland Students for Life (MUN for LIFE). MUN for LIFE President Patrick Hanlon informed LifeSiteNews.com that when the proposal to grant club status to the pro-life group came up, the chair asked for a motion to approve and none present volunteered. A motion to deny status was proposed and quickly made, seconded and passed nearly with only two abstentions.

Hanlon indicated that the main arguments used to deny club status were that MUNSU is a member of the officially "pro-choice" Canadian Federation of Students (CFS). Further since most of the MUSNU officers had identified themselves at the meeting as "pro-choice" they felt they could not approve a group in opposition to their beliefs.

Hanlon commented on the ruling saying that it "signaled the death of free speech on a university campus." He pointed out in comments to LifeSiteNews.com that the MUSNU supports other groups with opposing viewpoints such as pagan, Christian groups as well as opposing political groups. The University also recognizes as an official club the pro-abortion "Women's Resource Centre". Hanlon also pointed out that affiliation with the 'pro-choice' CFS has not stopped other Canadian university student unions from granting club status to pro-life groups.

Hanlon is encouraging his fellow union members and all concerned individuals, regardless of their position on life issues, to demand MUNSU immediately reverse the decision made at the September 26 meeting. "If this decision is not reversed, a dangerous precedent is set in place for MUNSU, and other Student Unions in Canada, which would allow the silencing of any other group that a union wishes not to have democratic and university rights," warned Hanlon.

University spokesman Ivan Muzychka told LifeSiteNews.com that it was an issue between the Student Union and pro-life students. "This is an issue between the student union and the students," he said. Asked if the administration was concerned about the the fact that the decision has produced an atmosphere where those who believe in the right to life are unwelcome, Mazychka said he'd respond later if possible.

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Discipline forbidden so instead thousands of unruly kids are expelled from Western Australian schools

How are these kids ever going to learn good behaviour?

GIRLS as young as five are being booted out of WA schools for assaulting or intimidating teachers. An Education Department spokesman confirmed that last year, "three girls in pre-primary were suspended for physical assault or intimidation of staff''. "Two (girls) in pre-primary were suspended for physical assault or intimidation of other students,'' he said. More than 2000 girls were suspended last year and there were 134 violent or intimidatory acts by girls against staff. There were another 950 such offences by girls against other students.

The spokesman would not reveal the schools involved, the girls' ages, or previous years' figures, but a media release conceded overall suspension rates were up from 2005.

State School Teachers Union vice-president Anne Gisborne said violence among young girls had been rising for five years and unruly students were getting younger. She said also violence in schools was significantly under-reported. Teachers who spoke to The Sunday Times said they could not stop violent students for fear of being disciplined or hurt. Ms Gisborne said: "But I think what's happening in schools reflects an increase in aggression and violence in the broader community because schools are a microcosm of the community.'' She said families' resistance to deal with out-of-control children meant behavioural problems went untreated and got worse when students left school.

Peak parent group the WA Council of State School Organisations called for more teacher powers to tackle violence. "Many times, if a child does something and a teacher does try to prevent them misbehaving -- and that could involve some sort of physical restraint -- the child will often shout `assault','' president Rob Fry said. "That puts the teacher under investigation when all they have tried to do is prevent the escalation of violent behaviour. "We have to bring back some strong rules. "I'm not advocating bringing back the cane. But the department needs to somehow put in more support behind teachers so they know that they are protected when taking appropriate action.''

He said the use of centres to deal with disruptive students at high school addressed the problem too late. "Maybe parents of disruptive students should be forced to attend school and look after their children,'' he said. Among the 9649 boys and girls suspended last year were 518 incidents where girls abused or harassed staff, 142 such incidents against other students and 628 cases in which girls violated school rules. The were 21 expulsions overall, compared with 26 in 2005.

Education Minister Mark McGowan said the Government had created three centres for badly behaved high school students. But he said the Opposition and Greens were blocking the passage of parental responsibility laws, which could force parents to control badly behaved students.

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