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30 September, 2008

UK's biggest school scraps homework

The dumbing down never stops in Britain. And these kids are backward already! It's just lazy teachers who don't want the hassle

A new school that will be the biggest in the country is to abandon homework because the head teacher believes it does not justify the detentions and family rows it causes. Nottingham East academy, which will have 3,570 pupils, claims it will be the first school to scrap homework. It will instead have an extra lesson and after-school activities such as sport, model aircraft-building and sari-making.

Government guidelines suggest primary schools should set pupils between one and 2 1/2 hours per week, while those at secondaries receive up to 2 1/2 hours a day. Many of the most academically successful schools in the private and state sectors prescribe three or four hours of homework a night for older children. Barry Day, who will be principal of the new academy, believes much of this time is wasted. "If you ask most heads what most detentions are for, they will tell you for non-completion of homework," he said. "Homework causes an enormous amount of home conflict and parents and the community certainly won't mind children coming home later. "It is often set simply because there is an expectation it should be set. It does not help with education at all."

Day's move follows news last week that Tiffin boys' school in Kingston, Surrey, one of the country's most successful selective schools, had slashed homework from two or three hours a day to just 40 minutes for the oldest pupils. [What you can get away with among bright kids can be very different from what works with average or backward kids]

Day believes his changes will be fairer particularly for children from poorer or illiterate families or those whose parents do not speak English. Nottingham East will retain some homework for exam revision and coursework, but otherwise will simply encourage parents to read books in a relaxed way with their children and ask the pupils to report twice a term what they have read.

Signs of moves away from homework were welcomed by Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, which is campaigning for an end to the practice at all primary schools. "A lot of the time, state schools are just competing with the independent sector in setting lots of homework as they think that is what the parents want," Bousted said. "It is perfectly possible to teach independent learning properly within the school day."

However, Professor Dylan Wiliam, deputy director of the Institute of Education at London University, said Day was going too far. "Research shows homework does not make much of a difference, but that is because it is not properly planned and is too often, for example, just finishing off what you did during the day. "Properly designed, it can help pupils develop their autonomy in learning."

Geoff Lucas, general secretary of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference of independent schools, warned that, if widely adopted, the policy would result in lagging comprehensives falling even further behind. "Private study and independent learning are vital skills for university and employment," Lucas said. "It seems a terrible shame to have a blanket decision like this. It will inevitably widen the gap between schools like this and our members and the best-performing state schools."

Kenneth Durham, headmaster of University College school, London, said he was an enthusiast for homework. GCSE pupils at his school were given about two hours a night. "It is an education in its own right," Durham said. "Well-managed homework programmes leave students better able to cope with independent learning and give them time management skills."

The new academy has been given the go-ahead by Ed Balls, the schools secretary, and will open next year, educating children from nursery age to 19. It will cost about $100m and will start life in former school buildings next September before moving into new buildings in 2011, when homework will be scrapped.

Nottingham East will make its vast size manageable by sharing children around three mini-schools on different sites. Balls approved it after a confidential review backed the plan in June, finding that education at one of the schools to be replaced, Elliott Durham, was "parlous". The school's head was quoted in the review as declaring: "The attendance rate is very low . . . swearing and shouting is [sic] common . . . students flout the rules openly."

Source




Texas education board members back Bible curriculum

Only a small minority of Australians are religious to any degree but when I was in Grade school we had a religion lesson every week given by a clergyman. It was seen as just another thing that kids should know about

Four State Board of Education members have recommended to school districts a Bible course curriculum that was at the center of a lawsuit filed by parents against a West Texas school district. In a letter sent to superintendents and school boards, the four board members said while they were not trying to prescribe the curriculum to be used in an elective Bible course authorized this summer, they wanted to recommend course materials sold by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools. "It makes logical sense to select a curriculum that has already been tested and proven within the field," the letter said. It was signed by Republican board members Barbara Cargill of The Woodlands, Cynthia Dunbar of Richmond, Terri Leo of Spring and Gail Lowe of Lampasas.

The materials were not recommended by the Texas Education Agency.

The National Council curriculum was the basis for a lawsuit filed by parents in the Ector County School District last year alleging that a Bible course in two Odessa high schools using the study plan violated the religious freedom rights of some students. The curriculum uses the King James version of the Bible as its main text. Ector County school officials settled the lawsuit in March by agreeing to quit using the National Council class materials and switch to a curriculum developed by seven local educators.

The Texas Freedom Network, a progressive group that follows education issues, sharply criticized the four board members for the letter and noted they were part of a board majority that declined to set specific guidelines for the Bible course. TFN and others had argued that guidelines were needed to avoid lawsuits against school districts. "These board members are recklessly encouraging school districts to adopt a curriculum that will put those districts and their taxpayers in legal jeopardy and threaten the religious freedom of families to pass on their own faith beliefs to their children," said Dan Quinn of the TFN.

But the four board members emphasized they "have no desire or intention of prescribing a set Bible curriculum for individual school districts to use. Rather, it is our desire to see local districts maintain complete control concerning this discretionary subject matter."

In August, Attorney General Greg Abbott decided that Texas high schools are not required to offer the elective Bible course under a Bible study bill approved by the Legislature last year. While his legal opinion said schools must include some coverage of the Bible's impact on history and literature in their curriculum, they do not have to offer a separate Bible course unless a local school board chooses to do so.

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29 September, 2008

How the culture wars killed free expression

Christopher Shinn, the writer of new political play Now or Later, explains how campus censorship strangles debate

In America and Britain, theatre has become a notable battleground on questions of free speech and free artistic expression. In 2004, the controversial play Behzti was cancelled in Birmingham after Sikhs protested that the play offended their community, while in America religious fundamentalists have objected to The Crucible and My Name is Rachel Corrie on similar grounds.

American playwright Christopher Shinn has followed, often in exasperation, the on-going discussions and debates on the rights and wrongs of staging controversial plays in the West. He decided to do something artistic about it: write a play called Now or Later that tackles campus censorship through the very topical lens of the American presidential elections.

Shinn's play is set on the eve of a presidential election. The Democrats are on the point of victory when news breaks out, via political blogs, that the would-be new president's homosexual son, John, has gone to a party dressed as the prophet Mohammed and his friend as the gay-baiting evangelist Pastor Bob.

As footage of the party circulates around the globe, sparking riots in the Muslim world, John is under immense pressure from presidential advisers to make a public apology. While John insists on the importance of free expression, and also that he was attending a private party, his friend Matt points out that he could be responsible for deaths around the world. Principle and pragmatism collide to fascinating effect. Staged in real-time, Now or Later carefully explores the anguish and arguments of this very contemporary concern.

When I meet the man behind Now or Later, he is dressed in casual t-shirt and jeans and overseeing the play's final rehearsals at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, London. The Royal Court discovered Shinn 10 years ago - when he was just 23 - meaning that most of his plays, such as Dying City and Other People, have been premiered there, too. The theatre's director, Dominic Cooke, has programmed the play to coincide with the run-up to the real American presidential elections. Now or Later couldn't be more timely.

`I think the first thing I wanted to do was give myself a formal challenge', says Shinn carefully, `which was to write a play in real time and then I started to think, what could happen in real time that is interesting and dramatic? And in politics today, with blogs and 24-hour news channels, things can happen very rapidly. So I started thinking about politics in order to find a subject that was fit for formal challenge. In my mind, I had politics, power and issues of freedom of expression and, as a dramatist, I'm always looking for conflict.'

Shinn says that in Now or Later he is exploring conflicts and clashes between the West and Islam. As he puts it: `With Islam, it is perceived that the current administration is responsible for suffering in the Muslim world', says Shinn, `and therefore there can be no criticising of that world or how Muslims might experience that. The end result is to limit the conversations that Muslims can have about that themselves.'

Nevertheless, Shinn's well-crafted central protagonist in Now or Later, John, is motivated just as much by exposing the censorious nature of Ivy League students, as attacking Muslims in and of themselves. Surely, I ask him, the problem of censorship has its roots within the liberal left rather than any external threat to `Western values'? `Yeah, I think you're right,' says Shinn. `I think in many ways American campuses are a distorted and extreme way of dealing with problems in US culture. The left-wing ideology in these campuses doesn't seem to be related to the way the world is. The antics on campus almost have a feeling of play acting, as it's so divorced from people's lives. Nevertheless, the Ivy League students are the future politicians and opinion leaders so it's worth examining how they're getting a distorted picture of how the world is working.'

As a left-wing champion of free speech, and a fan and reader of spiked, Shinn is exasperated that it is often the left who are now the loudest advocates of blue pens and artistic clampdowns. He reckons that there was a sea change in universities back in the 1990s that has now become politically mainstream.

`As a gay man, I found the left's fight for free expression very beneficial', he says, `but that crossed over into identity politics. From there it was important to privilege the subjectivity of people who had previously been oppressed and marginalised. But instead of this emphasis on a diversity of voices, there became an unspoken rule whereby only people who experienced something, whether as a gay man or black woman, were allowed to speak about it directly. This created a real fracture where these oppressed groups, rather than finding commonality, separated out. These different groups ended up in these retreats which itself created paranoia and bad blood.'

Shinn's work seems to belong to a lineage of American playwrights and artists, from Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer through to Philip Roth, who offer an unflinching examination of the gaping holes in American society. Although European liberals love to dismiss American culture as rather candy-floss and dumb, no other Western nation produces art that is not only self-aware and self-critical, but resists the temptation of self-loathing. Shinn's work is no exception.

`Yes, it is one of the really good things about America', says Shinn cheerfully, `it thrives on that self-critique. You know, you even see it in relation to the Bush administration where a lot of extreme policy has been moderated due to the ongoing critiques and debates. The real strength of American culture is always in searching for ways of moving on from difficulties. That's something I'm proud of within America and what I want to achieve in my work as well.'

Naturally enough, Shinn has been eagerly following the US presidential election and is neither cynical nor goggle-eyed about Obama. `He has no track record so people are projecting all kinds of things onto him', says Shinn. `The Democratic Party haven't yet been in a position whereby they are explicitly running to the right in order to appeal to swing voters.' And as Now or Later deals with the question of a presidential candidate's children, the play unwittingly anticipates the furore surrounding Sarah Palin's pregnant 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, who is under pressure to conform to conventional morality. As Shinn says, `yes, all that does evoke the play in general, as it deals with children, sexuality and lies.'

At heart, though, Now or Later is a timely, not to mention, expert exploration of how censorship, and perhaps the need for self-censorship, is acting as a straitjacket within Western culture and politics. Although the play might seem a little didactic, Shinn doesn't marshal the audience into accepting any conclusive argument. Now or Later provokes thought rather than stymies it. `It is one thing to believe in freedom of expression,' he says, `but that may lead to the death of other people. So the play is asking: would you be responsible for that? And then what happens afterwards? So how badly do you believe in freedom of expression?'

Source




Official education fraud in Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh Public Schools officials say they want to give struggling children a chance, but the district is raising eyebrows with a policy that sets 50 percent as the minimum score a student can receive for assignments, tests and other work. The district and teachers union last week issued a joint memo to ensure staff members' compliance with the policy, which was already on the books but enforced only at some schools. Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers President John Tarka said the policy is several years old.

While some districts use "F" as a failing grade, the city uses an "E." "The 'E' is to be recorded no lower than a 50 percent, regardless of the actual percent earned. For example, if the student earns a 20 percent on a class assignment, the grade is recorded as a 50 percent," said the memo from Jerri Lippert, the district's executive director of curriculum, instruction and professional development, and Mary VanHorn, a PFT vice president.

In each subject, a student's percentage scores on tests and other work are averaged into a grade for each of the four marking periods. Percentages for marking periods later are averaged into semester and year-end grades. A student receives an "A" for scores ranging from 100 percent to 90 percent, a "B" for scores ranging from 89 percent to 80 percent, a "C" for scores ranging from 79 percent to 70 percent, a "D" for scores ranging from 69 percent to 60 percent and an "E" for scores ranging from 59 percent to the cutoff, 50 percent.

The district and union insist the policy still holds students accountable for performance. "A failing grade is a failing grade," district spokeswoman Ebony Pugh said.

At the same time, they said, the 50 percent minimum gives children a chance to catch up and a reason to keep trying. If a student gets a 20 percent in a class for the first marking period, Ms. Pugh said, he or she would need a 100 percent during the second marking period just to squeak through the semester. "We want to create situations where students can recover and not give up," she said, adding a sense of helplessness can lead to behavior and attendance problems. "It's not grade inflation. We're not saying, 'Give people passing grades,' " Ms. Pugh said.

But the policy strikes some teachers and parents as rewarding bad work and at odds with the district's "Excellence for All" improvement campaign. "Clearly, some people will not be pleased with this policy," Mr. Tarka said. But he added, "We stand by that decision."

Judy Leonardi, a Stanton Heights resident and retired district home economics teacher, said she objected to the notion that a student could "walk in the door, breathe the air and get 50 percent for that." "I don't think it sets kids up properly for college, for competition in life," she said. To Ms. Leonardi, a 20 percent score means a student isn't trying or needs more help with the material. Automatically putting 50 percent in the grade book, she said, doesn't help the student in either case. "To me, it's morally wrong," she said. Ms. Leonardi worries that the policy could cause high-performing students to goof off from time to time, safe in the knowledge that they wouldn't have to bounce back from anything lower than a 50 percent. And she said one teacher she knows already worries about how awkward it will look when a student correctly answers three of 10 questions on a math quiz -- and gets a 50 percent.

The state Department of Education doesn't regulate grading scales, and schools and districts across the state use various models. Districts nationwide have debated use of a 50 percent minimum.

Northside Urban Pathways, a Downtown charter school, gives students zero credit for any work below a "C." Linda Clautti, chief executive officer, said that approach complements the school's college-preparatory mission. "I have not had any complaints. We do parent surveys every year," Ms. Clautti said.

In a recent article in Harvard Educational Review, Freedom Area School District Superintendent Ron Sofo recounted an experimental program that he said helped to dramatically raise the math scores of struggling sixth-graders. Among other features, the program included "A, B, Not Yet" grading, in which students were required to redo work until it merited an A or B. Some Freedom Area teachers opposed the special grading scale, calling it coddling of bad students, Dr. Sofo said.

In suburban Philadelphia, a Bensalem School District task force on testing and grading has recommended that 50 percent be the minimum score a student receive. Superintendent James Lombardo said he's in favor of implementing the idea, partly as a fairness issue. He noted that a failing grade carries far more mathematical weight than any other grade if the "E" or "F" has a range of zero to 59 percent. "I guess I laud the Pittsburgh district for recognizing some of the foibles of our numerical system," he said, adding low percentage scores sometimes are given to students because of their attitude or work ethic, rather than their level of accomplishment.

Asked whether she agreed with the 50 percent minimum, Regina Holley, principal of Pittsburgh Lincoln K-8 and president of the Pittsburgh Administrators Association, said: "Well, that's the board's policy, and that's what we have to use." She said teachers and principals should take other steps to give parents a clearer picture of how their children are performing in class. "Our school provides that to the parents in a conference. We provide it in a letter. We give it to the parents in a phone call," Dr. Holley said.

Source





28 September, 2008

Bigoted university chaplain revealed -- who then spins like a top under the glare of publicity

University of Massachusetts officials on Monday quashed efforts by an Amherst campus chaplain to offer two college credits to any student willing to campaign in New Hampshire this fall for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Chaplain Kent Higgins told students in a Sept. 18 e-mail, "If you're scared about the prospects for this election, you're not alone. The most important way to make a difference in the outcome is to activate yourself. It would be just fine with (Republican candidate John) McCain if Obama supporters just think about helping, then sleep in and stay home between now and Election Day."

Higgins added that an unnamed "sponsor" in the university's history department would offer a two-credit independent study for students willing to canvass-identify supporters-or volunteer on behalf of the Democratic nominee.

University officials disavowed the effort after inquiries Monday by The Associated Press. They said it could run afoul of state ethics laws banning on-the-job political activity, as well as university policy. "We do not engage in or sponsor partisan political activity," said Audrey Alstadt, chairwoman of the history department. "We certainly do not give academic credit for participation in partisan politics."

UMass-Amherst spokesman Ed Blaguszewski said Higgins had previously arranged history department credit for students working on disaster relief efforts or other humanitarian ventures, and had raised the idea of similarly rewarding students who got involved in the political process during the 2008 election. Blaguszewski said university officials had envisioned that the efforts would involve nonpartisan work such as get-out-the vote campaigns, but changed their minds about the proposal when they saw a portion of Higgins' e-mail.

"The history department chair feels that what they were told was misleading, and then when the details of this emerged through the correspondence, they said, `Hey, this is not appropriate and it's not going to happen,'" Blaguszewski said.

A spokesman for the Massachusetts Republican Party criticized the effort. "We're disappointed, but frankly not surprised, that the liberal academic elite have once again decided to promote one candidate over another," said GOP spokesman Barney Keller. "Our tax dollars pay their salaries so they can teach our children how to make up their own minds, not to advance a partisan political agenda."

Higgins said he never intended for the program to be limited to supporters of Obama. Regardless of the opinions expressed in his e-mail, he said he would also have been open to those students who wanted to canvass for McCain. "The idea was there just to see if we could help with folks who want to be active with any of the campaigns in New Hampshire," he said during an interview with the AP. "We have to be bipartisan, multilateral."

Higgins refused to identify the history department sponsor and referred all further questions to university officials. Blaguszewski said Higgins is one of about a dozen chaplains from different faiths working in Amherst, the flagship campus among the university's five schools.

Source




Co-ed dorms for gender-confused males?

The University of Pittsburgh is changing its anti-discrimination policy to include gender identity. The new policy means that a man who feels like he is a woman can be housed in the women's dormitory and vice versa. And that involves "showering and using the restroom and the whole shebang," explains Diane Gramley, president of American Family Association of Pennsylvania (AFA of PA).

Gramley mentally puts herself in the position of being in a women's dorm restroom, when a man walks in to use the facilities. "I think that she would be shocked and dismayed -- and I would think she would also be concerned about her safety," she contends.

The family advocate says it is conceivable that a man could convince university officials of his gender confusion and gain access to the women's dorm to search for prey. Gramley also notes the university should be concerned about potential lawsuits from "concerned parents and students."

Gramley believes school officials are pandering to a small group and ignoring the best interests of the majority. "They're bowing down. They're doing the politically correct thing and putting their entire student body at risk by doing this," she adds. "They're bowing down to the pressure from a very small group of students, and they're just not considering the full impact of the policy change. Why can't the institutions of higher education stay within their academic goals and not seek to be agents of political correctness?" she wonders.

Gramley has lodged a protest with University of Pittsburgh officials and believes parents who are paying the high tuition for their youngsters ought to do the same.

Source




Britain's anti-citizenship education

According to a study by the National Foundation for Educational Research, children who have citizenship lessons at school - introduced in 2002 to boost pupils' civic pride and sense of social responsibility -- display less trust in authority figures and institutions and end up with a more negative attitude towards society.

Why is anyone surprised at this? I could have told them this would be the outcome. Indeed, I did tell them this would be the outcome. Repeatedly. I wrote column after column warning that the model of citizenship being adopted, drawn up by the retired politics Professor Bernard Crick, was actually a model of anti-citizenship. In 2004, for example, I wrote in the Mail that

the citizenship teaching inspired by Sir Bernard amounted to politically correct indoctrination in which multiculturalism, `globalisation' and `a shrinking planet' were all buzz phrases; and in which, far from being taught about their obligations to Britain, pupils were encouraged to develop `their own ground rules'.

The doctrinaire thinking behind this hollowing out of citizenship was clear enough in the late nineties, when Sir Bernard first produced his advice on citizenship for Mr Blunkett who was then Education Secretary. Beneath its pious invocations of `responsibility' and `community involvement', it was all about enabling young people to get more out of society. Even more strikingly, it wanted teachers to promote `active citizenship', by equipping pupils with the political skills to change the laws. Duty to obey the law - the first obligation of citizenship - wasn't even mentioned.

Now we read in the Telegraph:

The study said that pupils in their final year of school only expressed `moderate levels of agreement with laws'.

Well, there's a surprise. Let's raise our glasses once again to Antonio Gramsci, whose posthumous triumph in turning Britain's values inside out has surely been more spectacular than he could ever have dreamed.

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27 September, 2008

Hopeless U.S. High schools: Colleges spend billions on remedial classes to prep freshmen

It's a tough lesson for millions of students just now arriving on campus: even if you have a high school diploma, you may not be ready for college. In fact, a new study calculates, one-third of American college students have to enroll in remedial classes. The bill to colleges and taxpayers for trying to bring them up to speed on material they were supposed to learn in high school comes to between $2.3 billion and $2.9 billion annually.

"That is a very large cost, but there is an additional cost and that's the cost to the students," said former Colorado governor Roy Romer, chair of the group Strong American Schools, which is issuing the report "Diploma to Nowhere" on Monday. "These students come out of high school really misled. They think they're prepared. They got a 3.0 and got through the curriculum they needed to get admitted, but they find what they learned wasn't adequate."

Christina Jeronimo was an "A" student in high school English, but was placed in a remedial course when she arrived at Long Beach City College in California. The course was valuable in some ways but frustrating and time-consuming. Now in her third year of community college, she'd hoped to transfer to UCLA by now. Like many college students, she wishes she'd been worked a little harder in high school. "There's a gap," said Jeronimo, who hopes to study psychology. "The demands of the high school teachers aren't as great as the demands for college. Sometimes they just baby us."

The problem of colleges devoting huge amounts of time and money to remediation isn't new, though its scale and cost has been difficult to measure. The latest report gives somewhat larger estimates than some previous studies, though it is not out of line with trends suggested in others, said Hunter Boylan, an expert at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, who was not connected with the report.

Analyzing federal data, the report estimates 43% of community college students require remediation, as do 29% of students at public four-year universities, with higher numbers in some places. For instance, four in five Oklahoma community college students need remedial coursework, and three in five in the giant California State university system need help in English, math or both. The cost per student runs to as much as $2,000 per student in community colleges and $2,500 in four-year universities.

Jeronimo was hardly alone at Long Beach City College, where 95% of students need remedial coursework, according to President Eloy Oakley. "It's the number one issue to Long Beach City College and the entire California community college system, easily," Oakley said. "I don't believe that the public in general really understands the magnitude of the problem."

Simply dumping the remedial students into large classes isn't necessarily expensive for colleges, although it's also not very effective. But smaller classes typically require more attention and money. Some states have refused to fund remedial courses at the university level. In California, Oakley said, state funding for community colleges favors credit courses. Remediation (or "basic skills" as he and many educators call it) is typically noncredit.

Educators are working to improve remedial courses. Long Beach is developing "success areas" that give extra time and attention to students. Community colleges in Tennessee have completely redesigned giant introductory and remedial courses where many students were struggling.

Boylan says colleges are learning such courses must also teach study skills to be effective. Indeed, students often report that the hardest aspect of the transition to college isn't the material. It's the new rhythm and structure of college-level work. "One of the things that they don't teach in high school is time management," Jeronimo said.

Eric Paris, who earned a 3.8 high school GPA but is finding his freshman year at Virginia Tech much more challenging, says the big difference is "it's all on my own." In class, "it's up to me if I want to sit on Facebook or pay attention." He, too, wishes he'd taken more challenging high school classes but thought a high GPA was more important.

Boylan says the gap between what high schools teach and what colleges expect isn't the only problem. He says there's often a mismatch, with high schools and colleges teaching material in different ways.

It's true that only recently have K-12 and higher education begun talking seriously about aligning standards. But Romer, who has also headed the Los Angeles Unified School District, doesn't buy that it's a communication problem. "We're not expecting enough of our youngsters and the institutions that train them," he said.

Source




Guns OK in Australian schools?

A remarkable contrast to how American schools respond. A bit TOO relaxed, maybe

THE father of the youth who took a handgun and ammunition to school said what his son did was "no big deal". The man, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, said he couldn't understand why other parents were "making such a fuss" about his 15-year-old producing the deadly weapon and ammunition during an English class.

The Daily Telegraph yesterday revealed the Year 9 student at Kurri Kurri High School had been suspended after he was found with the gun in his bag. The Education Department had tried to keep the incident quiet from other parents. The school responded late yesterday by sending a note home to parents explaining the incident -- almost four weeks after it happened.

Police confirmed they had seized an antique-looking pistol together with bullets, which had been sent for ballistic testing. But the boy's father said the incident was "old news" and people should have better things to talk about. "What's the fuss, it's no big deal. It happened a month ago. People ought to worry about something else," he said. The teenager is expected to return to school today.

Kurri-Kurri parent Debbie Thornton said she was outraged the school did not inform parents about the incident, instead leaving them to hear about it through the media. A Year 9 student, who was in the English class when the weapon was allegedly produced, said the teenage boy had been "bragging" to his mates when he produced the gun. At that stage, English teacher Alison Miller called the boy to the front of the room and asked him to hand over the weapon. The Education Department said parents were not informed because "there had been no real threat to students".

Meanhwile, a youth who pointed a pistol at his teacher's head and pulled the trigger is about to return to school - but his victim's life may be ruined. The male teacher is now on indefinite stress leave and is undergoing counselling after the 13-year-old male student at Randwick Boys High School pointed the replica gun at him on September 5. It is unknown when - or even if - the computing skills teacher will return to the school. The Year 7 student will return to class at the start of next term after a short suspension.

Sources said the student went to the front of the class and held the pistol to the teachers head. The teacher grabbed the pistol, which he did not know was a fake, from the student and the police were called. Parents at the school say they were not informed of the incident. NSW Teacher's Federation deputy president Bob Lipscombe said schools were meant to be among the safest place in the community, yet incidents like this, and a similar one at Kurri Kurri High School in the Hunter Valley, caused a great deal of stress for teachers. "We are concerned for the wellbeing of teachers, and we expect the Education Department to act appropriately when such acts occur," he said.

Source




Australian universities dumbing down

A REVOLUTION from below is transforming Australian higher education as leading universities unleash radical course reforms in advance of the Rudd Government's policy overhaul. The University of Western Australia has joined a group including Melbourne, Macquarie, Monash, South Australia and Victoria universities undergoing radical course reform unprompted by government policy.

Melbourne, UWA and Macquarie have jettisoned the smorgasbord of credentials characterising Australian higher education in favour of a much smaller number of broad undergraduate courses integrating the humanities and science. UWA last week announced plans to cut its undergraduate courses from 70 to six, while Macquarie University plans to cut the number of undergraduate courses by 75 per cent in time for the 2010 academic year as part of an attempt to "reinvent" and "reposition" the university.

University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Glyn Davis, who in 2005 instigated a process of curriculum reform leading to the Melbourne graduate-school model, told the HES this was the first time in living memory universities had decided to take charge of their own futures rather than allow government to determine policy. "The move for change has come from within the sector and has been attempted without additional federal investment," he said. "This means those universities pursuing change are taking all the risk."

The reform process has strong international parallels, as individual universities such as Harvard, and entire systems such as the European universities covered by the Bologna Accord, have embraced the cause of curriculum renewal. Professor Davis said the curriculum revolution was prompted in part by the sector's internationalisation, and questions about the attractiveness of Australian degrees in the light of Asian, US and European reforms. "If we remain passive, existing markets will drift away," he said. "For universities without viable local income - which is to say all public universities - losing our international markets is slow death."

In a marked departure from Australian higher-education policy's emphasis on structural and financial reform, the curriculum revolution goes to the heart of teaching, learning and graduate competencies.

UWA vice-chancellor Alan Robson told the HES that his course review committee, whose recommendations are the culmination of an exhaustive 18-month process, had on his instructions taken the university back to first principles: "What are the best educational outcomes for our students and how can we implement them?"

At Macquarie, as at Melbourne and UWA, the proliferation of narrow undergraduate courses will be replaced by a broader undergraduate education in which all students are exposed to science and the arts, taught communication skills, and encouraged to participate in projects outside the university. Macquarie vice-chancellor Steven Schwartz told the HES the revamp was needed to ensure Macquarie graduates were better prepared professionally and also ready to take their place as engaged citizens. He said: "Of course we will continue to teach professional skills - accounting students will still learn to keep books - but we will also ensure that each of our students learns how to analyse scholarly papers, criticise research methods, solve problems and integrate information into coherent arguments."

Meanwhile, Monash University has launched an "internationalisation of the curriculum" policy to foster understanding of national and global perspectives, while the University of South Australia is preparing to mandate indigenous studies in all degrees by 2010. Victoria University is also undergoing a curriculum review aimed at strengthening its relationships with local industry and the community. Students will be required to take 25 per cent of their course on the job or in the local community.

Professor Davis remarked that the curriculum revolution in many cases registered a need on the part of Australian universities to ensure their courses were "compatible" with overseas competitors. "All this is happening in a world in which a very large number of Australian graduates expect to work overseas for part of their career," he said. "Without compatible qualifications they will choose international university choices rather than risk a local qualification, such as an Australian undergraduate law degree, that is not instantly recognised in the US." "New curriculum models, such as the 3+2 graduate school structure Melbourne has adopted and UWA is now considering, allow a university to offer foundational training alongside specialisation."

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26 September, 2008

A democracy without civics?

When asked, a third of eighth-graders didn't know the significance of the Declaration of Independence.

September 17 marked the 221st anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. Students across the country spent a few minutes of their day learning about the remarkable work of our nation's founders. This is nice, but America's schools should be doing a much more thorough job of honoring the civic mission that was the reason for their founding.

Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the first advocates for public education in America, argued forcefully that schools play a crucial role in preparing the citizens of a democracy. "There is but one method of rendering a republican form of government durable," he wrote, "and that is by disseminating the seeds of virtue and knowledge through education."

With young people voting at higher rates than ever before, it might seem that the founders would be pleased with our progress. Yet civic engagement requires more than voting in presidential elections every four years. A healthy democracy demands sustained citizen participation, and our schools must give students the knowledge and tools to participate. Sadly, civic education has been in steady decline over the past generation, as high-stakes testing and an emphasis on literacy and math dominate school reforms. Too many young people today do not understand how our political system works. They lack the tools to shape their communities through their own participation.

This shows up on national tests - though not, disappointingly, any of the tests our government uses to gauge school performance. On the last nationwide civics assessment, administered in 2006, two-thirds of students scored below proficiency. Not even a third of eighth-graders surveyed could identify the historical purpose of the Declaration of Independence. Less than a fifth of high school seniors could explain how citizen participation benefits democracy.

Equally troubling, we face a widening civic achievement gap. Hispanic and African-American students are twice as likely as their white counterparts to lack civic knowledge and skills, while low-income students score significantly lower than middle- and upper-income students. In other words, our schools' failure when it comes to civic education is especially stark in communities most in need of civic engagement.

If we hope to sustain American democracy, we need to treat civic learning as on a par with other academic subjects. To participate fully in our democracy, students need to understand our government, our history, and our laws. They need to appreciate the skills democracy imposes on us - consensus building, compromise, civility, and rational discourse - and how they can be applied to the problems confronted by their communities and our nation as a whole. Restoring this civic mission of schools will require a concerted effort in school districts, at statehouses, and by the federal government.

The federal government should embrace civic education when it revisits education reform next year. Developing and then mandating civics standards - and increasing funding for civic learning - would go a long way toward jump-starting progress. States likewise can elevate the importance of civic learning by creating commissions to review thoroughly the state's approach to civic education, instituting civics as a graduation requirement, and funding professional and curricular development.

Schools, which the noted education reformer John Dewey called the "midwife of democracy," should include civic learning in their mission statements and incorporate civics - including discussion of controversial topics and the responsibilities of citizen engagement - into their curricula for students of all ages.

The anniversary of the Constitution and the upcoming presidential election offer a chance to reflect on the health of American democracy. Still, democracy is a sustained conversation among citizens over how best to govern their communities. It is not enough for this conversation to take place on one day, or even over the course of one campaign. Our democratic discourse must begin in America's schools, which shape the attitudes and experiences of more citizens than any other institution.

The anniversary of the Constitution should be an occasion for reaffirming our long-term commitment to civic participation. That means restoring education for democracy to its central place in our schools. Only then can we fulfill the Constitution's promise of a more perfect union.

Source




Australian government pushing open access to research data

An excellent idea. It would stop Greenies from hiding their sloppy and dishonest research methods

INNOVATION Minister Kim Carr today will flag the possibility that researchers who win grants from public funding agencies will have to make their results freely available over the internet. "Australia may want to consider making its own competitive research grants conditional on recipients sharing their research results through open-access repositories," Senator Carr will say in a video address to the Open Access and Research conference in Brisbane.

Funding agencies overseas, including the British Wellcome Trust and the US National Institutes of Health, have adopted mandatory open-access policies. The Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council only encourage open access.

In his innovation report, consultant Terry Cutler says: "(Open access) progress in Australia has been patchy and lacking the comprehensiveness and boldness of leading countries such as the UK."

In his address Senator Carr strongly endorses Cutler's open access recommendations, saying: "If we are serious about boosting innovation, we have to get knowledge and information flowing freely." He says the push to have researchers commercialise their discoveries could "safely be declared a failure" as universities on average earned less than 1 per cent of their income from royalties, patents and licences.

But Senator Carr told the HES the Government did not want to jeopardise the business done by commercialisation offices such as UniQuest, which had made a success of technology transfer. He said: "The ARC and the NHMRC distribute more than $1 billion of research funding each year. "Very few of those dollars end up as any part of an (intellectual property) deal ... so I don't think there should be any serious adverse effect ... but we want to look at that."

UniQuest managing director David Henderson said some projects, such as the Gardasil cancer vaccine, would never get to market without the confidence that IP protection gave investors: "There needs to be an ability to exclude (from any open access policy) research that requires investment to get to product."

Source





25 September, 2008

California: Obscene Language Class

(Fresno, California) Check out the latest behavior course being loafed out by the progressive public school system in Fresno.

During the first week of school, the kids got a lesson on words they shouldn't use, including terms for oral sex and prostitution. The teachers and kids were focused on behavioral expectations instead of the normal subjects, but some parents say the way the school taught kids not to swear was obscene.

The first week of school included a vocabulary lesson for Phoenix Hawkins and the words he learned won't help him on the SAT. He says his history teacher wrote out 15 dirty words for the whole class to see and then asked them not to use those words.

Phoenix says he only knew a few of the words, but he and some of the other kids tried to figure out the ones they didn't know. "After school, I asked my mom what some of the words were," he said. "And she said, 'where did you hear those words?'"

His mother says it was quite a shock to her ears and that he wasn't using "standard swear words." She called the words the most vulgar and disgusting words she's ever heard. "I couldn't believe what he was saying to me," said Erin Hawkins. "I felt so violated."

Phoenix says he's heard a lot more bad words at school since the cursing class, including that same day, when he says kids were using the 'C' word.

The obscene language curricula apparently is a system-wide project to improve behavior. Unfortunately, I see significant unintended consequences, a customary attribute of progressive ideas, plus the fact that the project, contrary to intent, appears to introduce new avenues of bad behavior for the children.

First of all, the kids only learned many of the words when they were told not to use them.

Second, once the kids knew the words, they searched for explanations regarding their meaning.

Third, vigorous discussion about the words and their meanings ensued among the kids.

Fourth, the parents found out what the school is doing and they are angry.

Fifth, valuable classroom time is being wasted on the obscene language program and the kids are not learning anything that will help them score good grades.

A Fresno Unified School Board meeting has been scheduled and the issue will be discussed. I expect it will be lively as angry parents seek answers to their complaints.




Has Title VI Been Deep-Sixed?

In its Overview of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Department of Justice states:

Title VI, 42 U.S.C. ~ 2000d et seq., was enacted as part of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. As President John F. Kennedy said in 1963:

Simple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers of all races [colors, and national origins] contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes or results in racial [color or national origin] discrimination.

If a recipient of federal assistance is found to have discriminated and voluntary compliance cannot be achieved, the federal agency providing the assistance should either initiate fund termination proceedings or refer the matter to the Department of Justice for appropriate legal action....

In an interesting article today on the decidedly mixed results that have been achieved by several institutions that announced with great fanfare several decades ago their determination to increase the numbers of minorities on their faculties, the Chronicle of Higher Education noted Duke had cited the "pipeline" problem - not enough highly qualified minority candidates in many fields. "The university," it said,

is taking small steps to widen the pipeline. Duke has financed two postdoctoral positions for minority candidates each year, with the hope that it will eventually hire some of them for tenure-track faculty positions.

Was Title VI repealed when I wasn't looking? Is Podberesky v. Kirwan, 38 F.3d (4th Cir. 1994) (discussed here), which barred the University of Maryland from creating an honors scholarship limited to blacks, not still good law in the Fourth Circuit?

Oh, wait. Duke is private. Maybe it's free to discriminate because it doesn't receive any public funds.

Nope, that's not it. A quick check of FedSpending.org reveals that in Fiscal Year 2005 Duke received $454,076,071 in federal assistance.

Has our idea of "simple justice" so eloquently stated by President Kennedy in 1963 really changed so much since then?

Source (See the original for links)




Mismatched Minorities?

Addressing the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Friday, a panel of researchers discussed whether minority students are doomed to failure if admitted into highly selective science programs on the basis of racial preferences. The commission's briefing centered on the "mismatch" theory, which suggests minority students are less successful in science majors when they are placed in colleges with academic standards that far exceed the students' preparation. "Race preferences in admissions . are harming the aspirations of blacks," said Rogers Elliott, professor emeritus of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College.

The controversial mismatch theory purports to explain, in part, why black and Hispanic students are less likely than whites to complete degrees in the so-called STEM disciplines of science.

Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, drew upon data from the University of Michigan's graduation rates to illustrate the mismatch theory. He noted that for black students who entered Michigan in 1999, 73 percent who were given "no preference" graduated in four years compared with 70 percent of white students with the same credentials. But for black students who were given "large preference," just 21 percent graduated in four years, compared with 35 percent of whites who were also given a large preference.

In order to determine the level of preference given to applicants, Sander used an index that included standardized test scores and grade point averages. A 50-point difference on the verbal SAT, for instance, would be considered a moderate preference under Sander's analysis. A 90-point difference would be considered a large preference. (Michigan officials could not be reached for comment, but in previous debates over affirmative action they have rejected the idea that applicants can be grouped by SAT scores alone to judge their relative ability.)

Sander introduced his mismatch analysis of black law school students in 2004. Since that time, his argument that some minority students might be better served at less prestigious institutions has been met with criticism by affirmative action advocates, who say that race-blind admissions in law schools, for instance, would ultimately undercut minority participation altogether.

California Data Shows Mismatch, Sander Says

The University of California System also served as a model for Sander's research. Citing unpublished data from the system, Sander noted that black and Latino students have far greater success rates in science when they enroll in the California's less selective campuses. Minority students were about half as likely to earn bachelor's degrees in science at Berkeley or UCLA, for instance, as they were to earn science degrees from five of the of the other six campuses in the system, according to Sander's study of those entering between 1998 and 2000. "All those [data] show very compelling evidence that there really is some mismatching going on," he said.

Michael Yaki, a member of the commission, was the lone commissioner to publicly criticize Sander's analysis at Friday's briefing. "Part of what we're talking about is the potentiality of human beings, and that's not something you can really measure," said Yaki, a rare Democrat on the Republican-dominated commission.

Richard Tapia, a panelist at the briefing and a math professor at Rice University, expressed concern about steering minorities to less rigorous academic programs - just for the sake of increasing degree production in the sciences. The net result, he argued, will be fewer minorities on faculty at prestigious institutions, which are disinclined to hire professors lacking in academic pedigree. "Our current path will lead to a permanent underclass," he said.

Tapia, a Los Angeles native whose parents emigrated from Mexico, renounced the "sink or swim" mentality that some embrace in higher education. Retention and mentoring programs can work for minorities, he argued, if they are given funding and support. "Treating everyone the same is not good enough," Tapia said.

K-12 Draws Scrutiny

As would be expected, the briefing inevitably led into discussion of improving college preparation. Thomas Fortmann, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, argued that it's far too late to discuss achievement gaps by the time students are applying to college. As such, steering minority students toward less selective programs where they are more likely to get science degrees "may result in more STEM majors, but I think it masks the underlying problem," he said.

The commission also explored industry expectations for science graduates, seeking input from an IBM executive. Robin Willner, vice president of Global Community Initiatives for IBM, touted the need for creative thinkers and leaders in high tech fields. She added that it's essential that tomorrow's industry leaders reflect the diversity of the global market in which IBM operates.

In a blunt assessment, Willner said IBM would be headed for big trouble if colleges fail to produce a diverse pool of talent with knowledge of the needs and desires of a growing global consumer base. "IBM would go into the toilet immediately," she said, "because we won't be able to make products for our customers."

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24 September, 2008

The harmful mistakes of sex education in school

Comment from Britain

Those who can, do, according to the old saying, and those who can't, teach. That has always seemed to me unfair. However, I have come to think that those who can't teach, teach sex education. Judged by its results - not a bad way of judging - sex education has been an utter failure. The increase in sex education here in recent years has coincided with an explosion of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease (STD) far worse than anywhere else in Europe. Since the government's teenage pregnancy strategy was introduced in 1999, the number of girls having abortions has soared. You might well be tempted to argue that sex education causes sexual delinquency.

Only two months ago the Health Protection Agency reported that a culture of promiscuity among the young had driven the rate of STDs to a record. Almost 400,000 people - half of them under 25 - were newly diagnosed, 6% more than in 2006.

When something fails, the usual procedure is to drop it and try something else. With sex education, the worse it gets, the more people cry out for more of it and earlier. Ministers are considering whether to make schools offer more sex education, offer it earlier and deny parents the right to withdraw their children from it.

Last week the Family Planning Association - now calling itself the fpa, having joined other charities in a mad rush to reduce themselves to a couple of lower-case letters - published a comic-style sex education booklet for six-year-olds to be marketed in primary schools for use in sex and relationships lessons. It has printed 50,000 copies of Let's Grow with Nisha and Joe, and tried it out in more than 50 primary schools; it hopes to encourage schools that have shied away from sex lessons to take them on with Nisha and Joe. Oh dear.

There's nothing wrong with the pamphlet itself. Admittedly it's more of a dreary workbook than a "fun" comic, but there's nothing that would startle a child or should upset even the most conservative of "family campaigners". The rudest thing is a drawing of two children, naked, with instructions to draw lines connecting interesting bits of their bodies with the appropriate words. This is all to promote discussion of sex and relationships when children are young enough not to feel self-conscious.

It seems to me highly unrealistic (given that 25% of children leave primary school struggling to read and write) to assume that many six-year-olds could begin to read the labels "testicles" or "vagina". And it is infuriating, given that medical-style euphemism has triumphed over plain English, that the authors have chosen one that's wrong. "Vagina" does not mean the external genital organs, commonly referred to as "front bottom". It comes from the Latin for sheath or scabbard and means what that suggests. The correct word would be "vulva", but the ill-educated educationists blithely impose inaccuracy on our tiny children. However, that is not what I most object to.

What I object to about the book is what I object to about sex education as a whole (quite apart from its failures). Sex education - particularly compulsory and standardised sex education - is based on mistaken assumptions. The first is the pervasive assumption of equality - that is, that all six-year-olds or all 11-year-olds or 15-year-olds can discuss the complexities of sex in the same form in the same way. That's nonsense. Children vary in intelligence and progress. Some young children can easily decipher words such as "urethra"; others may never be able to read them.

More importantly, children and teenagers mature at different ages and come from different backgrounds with different family expectations. You cannot talk the same way to a shy 13-year-old who hasn't had her first period to another who is well acquainted with the darker recesses of the school bike shed. Some boys are men at 11 and 12, physically; others are children until much later. Some children's parents find it acceptable that their sons and daughters are having sex at 13, while others would be shocked: you cannot talk to all these children together. It would puzzle and offend them and might do them serious damage. And it undermines the authority of those parents who do not share the values of the teacher, or of the majority of the other pupils. It is wrong to assume that people want equality in such matters. They want differences.

Children and families and moral values are not equal, neither within schools nor outside them. They simply aren't the same.A sensitive teacher will try to make allowances, but there is a shortage in this country of good and sensitive teachers - hence the crisis in education.

Another mistaken assumption is that sex education ought, necessarily, to be entrusted to teachers, given how wildly they vary in ability and in moral attitudes. The thought that the government is considering making sex and relationship education compulsory in schools is terrifying. I can hardly imagine anything worse than subjecting a sensitive child to guidance on such matters from an inexperienced and politically correct teacher, who is neither well informed nor self-critical.

The relationships between sex, love, babies, crime and disease are too explosive to be left primarily to such a person, or to any person apart from the parents. Of course where parents can't, or won't, guide their children on such matters, the duty falls on teachers. Some may do a good job, although the evidence isn't encouraging. But none should take it on without parental consent.

It always amazes me when people complain that people don't talk about sex and there's not enough information about it. The truth is, you can hardly avoid it. Newspapers, magazines, chat shows, blogs, internet information sites, doctors' surgeries and all the rest are groaning under the weight of information about sex, contraception and relationships. Some of it I think is good; some of it you might think is better. And that's the point. Schools shouldn't be required to impose sex education, still less a standard sex curriculum on us. We should be able to pick and choose for our children among the infinity of information out there.

Channel 4's The Sex Education Show, for instance, strikes me as informative and helpful but depressingly vulgar. Others might find it tastefully frank. It's up to us to choose. Teacher, leave that child alone.

Source




In Praise of Educational Pluralism

I often hear it said that if the government did not determine what our children are taught, we would have no way to assure they learned the right things. The idea here is that every child deserves a proper education and that, although government education has its share of problems, at least we can keep an eye on who is being allowed to teach and what they are teaching. The free market, on the other hand, would supposedly allow us no such control; schools could simply teach whatever they wanted, and our children might grow up thinking that up is down, black is white, and right is wrong.

While this argument comes from the best of intentions, it is completely misguided for two basic reasons. The first, which has been widely discussed elsewhere, is that it gives an unreasonably pessimistic view of how a free-market education system would look. In a free market, competition would force producers to cater to their customers or risk losing business to other firms. This should lead us to expect that when customers are free to choose, producers will end up creating better products, not worse.

And in fact we can see this happening in the real world. For example, the success of graduates from particular universities reflects on the quality of the education there, with the consequence that universities are constantly trying to better themselves and their current students in order to compete for the best students in the future. The same seems to be true of private and preparatory schools at the high-school level and below. Although the government funds a number of these schools, universities and private schools are generally permitted to make their own decisions about what they will teach and who will be doing the teaching. And yet we do not see these institutions systematically teaching their students poorly or indoctrinating them with false ideologies. On the contrary, it seems fair to say that these more laissez-faire systems generally perform far better than our centralized public-school system.

But there is another reason to question the idea that governments must be involved to ensure that our children receive a proper education. That reason is that there is no such thing as a proper education. Different people have different conceptions about what kind of lives they want to lead, what kind of knowledge is important, and how they want their children to be raised. These differences do not represent one group's being right and the other's being wrong. Rather, a free society will always be characterized by reasonable pluralism in values and worldviews. But if this is the case, then it seems the idea that we should all get together under one roof and democratically decide how to educate our children is a bad one. Instead, it's sensible to welcome a number of different approaches to education, with the crucial decisions about how children are to be educated ultimately being left to their parents. As philosopher David Schmidtz writes in Elements of Justice:

In effect, there are two ways to agree: We agree on what is correct, or on who has jurisdiction -- who gets to decide. Freedom of religion took the latter form; we learned to be liberals in matters of religion, reaching consensus not on what to believe but on who gets to decide. So too with freedom of speech. Isn't it odd that our greatest successes in learning to live together stem not from agreeing on what is correct but from agreeing to let people decide for themselves?

For far too long we have ignored the possibility that in a society which embraces freedom of belief, religion, and expression, it is best to respect people's freedom to decide for themselves how they want their children educated. I understand that some may feel shocked by the suggestion that they do not know what is best for everyone else's children. But for the rest of us, it is clear that the only fair and equitable solution to the differences in our values and worldviews is to reject the flawed model of centralized government education and to put the power to choose back in the hands of parents.

Source




Far-Leftist sympathy for terrorists being preached to future Australian army officers

A RETIRED Australian general has dismissed as "unmitigated rubbish" a defence force course which teaches soldiers that terrorists are "victims". A Bali bombing victim has also expressed dismay at the Australian Defence Force Academy's terror studies degree. Maj-Gen Jim Molan, who in 2004 was Chief of Operations of Coalition forces in Iraq, has hit out at the lecturers who run the security and terror course.

Prof Anthony Burke, senior lecturer at the University of NSW where ADFA classes are held, in his book Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, said students should try to understand terrorists rather than fight them. "In the wake of 9/11, our critical task is not to help power seek out and destroy the 'enemies of freedom' but to question how they were constructed AS enemies of freedom . . . It is to wonder if we, the free, might already be enemies of freedom in the very process of imagining and defending it," he wrote. In another book, Fear of Security, Australia's Invasion Anxiety, Prof Burke said we should "abandon selfish visions of security, sovereignty and national interest".

Maj-Gen Molan said Prof Burke was "naive in the extreme". In 2004, he commanded major battles in Iraq during one of the most turbulent periods of the war. He said the experience taught him that Australia needed to heighten security, not go softly-softly with terrorists, but the ADFA degree seemed to be teaching surrender to a ruthless enemy. "It is like saying Churchill could have avoided World War II by surrendering to the Germans," he said.

He also rejected the idea that terrorists were victims. "Even if some of these people have had it tough, they are still making the choice to strap a bomb to their body, go to a location packed with innocent civilians and detonate," he said. "I didn't see any morality (in Iraq). These Islamic extremists are prepared to use extraordinary levels of violence. "If this is the view of ADFA staff then it is naive in the extreme."

Bali bombing victim Dale Atkins said he was shocked and upset that academics were excusing those terrorists who bombed the Sari nightclub killing 200 people. "Maybe this wouldn't have happened if we didn't go to war, but it's wrong to say it's our fault. We didn't deserve to go through such pain," he said.

Maj-Gen Molan, author of Running the War in Iraq, advocates a tightening in security and is shocked that ADFA is proposing the opposite. And Dr Mervyn Bendle, senior history lecturer at James Cook University, said the ADFA's course was being mimicked at other universities. "They are avoiding using terms like Muslim, Islam or Jihad as if we have to ignore the obvious religious connection that has been confirmed by the terrorists themselves," he said.

The Department of Defence said it encouraged "robust debate among ADF personnel at all levels". [I wonder if "robust debate" about the level of African immigration into Australia would also be permitted? I suspect that debate on that topic would be too robust altogether!]

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23 September, 2008

Social class 'determines child's success' in Britain

Given the woeful standards of government schools, it's no surprise. People with a bit of money in Britain send their kids private

Children's social class is still the most significant factor in determining their exam success in state schools, the Government's head of teacher training acknowledges today. In an interview with The Independent, Graham Holley, the chief executive of the Training and Development Agency, said: "The performance of a school and a child in it is highly linked to social class. "If you turn the clock back on pupils in school today 15 years and predict their outcomes from where they were born, you can do it.

"We need to change that. It's not something this government has done. It's not something the last government has done. It's something that has been there since the Second World War and probably even before that."

Mr Holley also warned that as many as three in every 10 secondary schools (around 1,000 state schools) were "arguably still performing unsatisfactorily". But he distanced himself from the claim made by Gordon Brown that schools that failed to get 30 per cent of their pupils to achieve five A* to C grade passes at GCSE were "failing". "I'm not saying they [the three in ten] are failing and I'm not saying that these schools all have a challenging intake. There are some schools whose results do not look bad on paper that are complacent and coasting and they're not doing as well with their children as are schools in very similar circumstances. "We have to ask why is that? It is not down to individual teachers' competence. It is down to they way they are managed."

Mr Holley was speaking after presenting his views to a high level private meeting of senior educationalists in an attempt to improve the impact teaching can have on the quality of children's lives. He called for moves to ensure the most highly qualified teachers were persuaded to teach in the country's most disadvantaged schools.

He said the Training and Development Agency was examining ways of achieving this - including the prospect of paying "golden hellos" and "golden handcuffs" (where newly-qualified teachers are paid extra provided they sign a contract committing themselves to working for a certain period of time in a school). But he insisted: "It's not just about money. We need to ensure they have the professional support to deal with issues as they arise. "It takes some time to manage a class well and control and manage behaviour - including poor behaviour. It is quite possible to tolerate a level of disruption in a class and for there still to be learning taking place. Also, just because pupils have stopped throwing things about, it doesn't mean they're now learning well. "It is a very difficult challenge for a teacher to learn this. They will not have had this experience and they will need continuing professional development."

Mr Holley also called for more investment in schools offering extended services - such as breakfast and homework clubs - to help deprived children overcome the handicaps of working at home. "Children are turning up to school, cold hungry and not in the right frame of mind to learn," he said. "There also may be nowhere for them to do homework at home - their parents may be working or a single parent could be pre-occupied with other things."

He also revealed that the agency is increasing the number of "enhancement" courses to boost the number of maths and science teachers in schools. Under this initiative, graduates with an allied degree - in engineering or, say, oceanography - can spend up to six months topping up their skills to become science teachers. They would be paid a bursary of œ225 a week while on the course.

Source




1 in 5 fail portion of Grade 10 Massachusetts exam

The percentage of sophomores who passed the MCAS exam on the first try this year declined for the first time because thousands of students failed the science section, a new graduation requirement, according to statewide scores released yesterday. Twenty percent of the class of 2010 failed at least one portion of the test, compared with 13 percent last year, when sophomores needed to pass only the math and English portions.

One of the few bright spots in the latest results of the 10-year-old Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam was math, where scores hit a historic high for all grade levels. But even there, state education officials expressed concern that middle school math performance remained stubbornly sluggish. Subpar math scores have largely caused the state to designate two-thirds of the state's middle schools for improvement under a federal accountability law, according to a recent Globe analysis.

Overall, the results of the spring exams showed a persistent achievement gap, with white and Asian students outperforming other students at all grade levels, often by a wide margin, while reading scores for the youngest test-takers declined.

The mixed results prompted many state education advocates to highlight the urgent need to jump-start the state's 15-year-old effort to overhaul education, which they contend has sputtered in recent years. "State policy makers are getting wobbly in their support for education and high standards," said Jamie Gass, director of the Center for School Reform at the Pioneer Institute.

The results could also provide fodder for next year's debate on Governor Deval Patrick's sweeping 10-year plan to better prepare students for college and jobs in the fields that drive the state's economy: biotechnology, engineering, healthcare, and other science-related fields.

State education officials were mostly upbeat about the results during a press conference yesterday morning. They applauded improvement in performance among student groups who historically struggle on the exam, such as black and Latino students, although the officials voiced frustration that the achievement gap remains wide. For instance, in Grade 4 math, Latinos scoring in the top two categories improved by 4 percentage points, to 28 percent. White students improved by 2 percentage points, to 56 percent. The four scoring categories are advanced, proficient, needs improvement, and warning/failing. "Students of color and low-income backgrounds have made more progress than their counterparts . . . but we need to do a better job," said Mitchell Chester, the state's commissioner of elementary and secondary education.

Yesterday the state released only statewide results for the exam, which is given each spring to students in grades 3 through 8 and in Grade 10. Individual district and school scores are scheduled for release next week. The exam, part of the 1993 Education Reform Act, was first given to students in 1998.

Students in the class of 2010, who took the MCAS this past spring as sophomores, will be the first group that must pass the science exam to graduate, adding to a five-year-old graduation requirement for passing the math and English exams. Students have the choice of testing in biology, chemistry, physics, or technology/engineering, and must take at least one of those exams either their freshman or sophomore year.

While the decrease in the percentage of students passing the test disappointed many educators and advocates, many believed that students did much better than expected on the science exam. The 17 percent of sophomores who failed the science exam this year represented a decrease from the 25 percent who flunked last year. "This is a great start," said Jill Norton, executive director of the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy. "As people become more familiar with the science exam, we'll see scores increase in the coming years."

However, many student groups who typically struggle in school are in jeopardy of not graduating because of the science exam, alarming many educators and advocates. Overall pass rates for English, math, and science show barely half of black and Latino 10th-graders and less than half of students with disabilities passed. Even more staggering, just 28 percent of students who speak limited English passed all three tests. By contrast, 85 percent or more of Asian and white students passed.

"A tremendous amount of work remains," said Lance Hartford, executive director of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Education Foundation. "I'm increasingly concerned about the gap between inner-city students and what's going on with students in the rest of the state."

Boosting performance, educators and advocates said, may have to start as early as kindergarten to foster a genuine interest in the sciences among students. That, they said, will require devoting more time to the subject in elementary schools and more training for those teachers.

In secondary schools, the state is facing a critical shortage of qualified science teachers. Yesterday, educators and advocates said the state needs to do more to bolster the numbers by creating mentoring programs or paying those teachers more. Science labs, many of which date to the 1960s, also require updating.

In the short term, students who fail the science exam once can file an appeal with the state based on passing grades in a comparable high school course, under emergency rules adopted last week by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Students have to take the math and English exams three times before appealing. Prospects for a successful appeal are slim. The department has granted only 2,800 appeals in the last five years, rejecting roughly 20 percent to 30 percent in recent years. A rejected appeal would force students to take the science test again.

Reading scores for younger students also raised concern. They dropped for grades 3, 4, and 5 after largely stagnating in recent years, prompting state education leaders once again to call for a renewed focus on the lower grades. A student's ability to master reading is widely considered the best gauge of future academic success. Chester said he believes schools are doing a good job in teaching the fundamentals of reading, such as letter and word identification, but more attention needs to be devoted to teaching students to read for meaning.

State Representative Patricia Haddad, a Somerset Democrat who is chairwoman of the Joint Committee on Education, said she found the flatness in the middle school scores in English to be the most worrisome. "The middle school scores are a really good indicator of where kids are heading," she said.

Yesterday Chester and Education Secretary Paul Reville reaffirmed their support for MCAS testing as the governor embarks on a host of initiatives aimed at overhauling the education system. They were attempting to quash speculation within the state's education community that the less stringent appeals process on the science exam was a sign that the agency was softening its stance on MCAS as a graduation requirement. "When you are adding a new requirement, like science," Chester said, "it's hard for me to see how that's backing off standards."

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Shock! Horror! Politician speaks the truth!

It's only part of the truth but we have to be thankful for small mercies. This story is from Australia but could easily be from the USA. The previously unmentionable fact is that blacks are, by and large, educationally hopeless. And Queensland has a lot of blacks. But that is not of course the whole story. The other half is that Left-run educational systems don't educate very well and there is a lot of "postmodernist" nonsense in Qld. schools

STATE Education Minister Rod Welford has blamed indigenous and remote area students for dragging down Queensland's academic performance. In comments to the Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Associations' annual general meeting, Mr Welford said the state had been "weighed down" in the national literacy and numeracy tests for Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students. Queensland finished second last among the eight states and territories, prompting calls for a parliamentary inquiry into the state education system.

Mr Welford yesterday said he was simply making the observation that "statistically there are groups that get lower scores", which affected average scores. "This isn't a reflection on any of those communities," he said. Mr Welford also acknowledged more had to be done to lift indigenous and remote area classroom standards.

However Mr Welford's remarks have sparked an angry backlash from Aboriginal education leaders, who say Education Queensland has badly failed disadvantaged children. "I find it offensive," Indigenous Education Leadership Institute executive director Dr Chris Sarra said. "I acknowledge the lag associated with indigenous performance (but) the system is failing indigenous kids quite dramatically."

Dr Sarra, leader of a successful national program to raise classroom performance through self-belief, said that accepting low standards and poor use of current resources were at the core of problems.

Indigenous scholarship program founder and Yalari chief executive Waverley Stanley said Mr Welford was trying hard but repeated failures called for a new approach. "It's about time we gave the education system a big kick up the bum," he said. "The definition of insanity is doing things over and over and not expecting the same result."

Academics such as Dr Peter Ridd, of Queensland's James Cook University, claim a wider overhaul of education in Queensland is needed. "There is clearly a problem ... you have to fix the syllabus," he said. Dr Ridd said the Queensland Studies Authority - the statutory body responsible for syllabuses and testing - was "woolly eyed" and corrupted by modern teaching philosophies inferior to traditional approaches in other states and countries that get results.

Opposition education spokesman John-Paul Langbroek, the MP for Surfers Paradise, said Mr Welford's remarks were a sign of failure. The Isolated Children's Parents Association of Australia has been campaigning for more teachers and teacher aides in remote area schools for 18 months.

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22 September, 2008

Underhand racial preferences at UCLA

A UCLA professor blows the whistle on the persistence of racial preferences.

University of Los Angeles political science professor Tim Groseclose publishes studies that get noticed, and even participated on the school's faculty admissions committee, which oversees the staff that chooses each year's new undergrads.

Still, he's lucky he has tenure. Last Thursday, Groseclose resigned from the admissions committee, in protest of the school's behavior when it comes to racial preferences.

Such preferences ought not to be an issue at UCLA - according to California's Proposition 209, "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of . . . public education." Prop 209 was passed in 1996, but it's no secret that campuses in the left-leaning state - Berkeley and UCLA in particular - have been defying the will of California's electorate.

Heather Mac Donald detailed as much in City Journal last year; and now, Groseclose has made public an 89-page report blowing the whistle, complete with closed-door conversations, private e-mails, and a chronicle of his school's sketchy handling of data that could prove or disprove his suspicions. Basically, Groseclose alleges that changes to the scoring system improved the likelihood that a personal essay - in which applicants often mention their race - would get a student admitted.

Groseclose's documentation makes clear that the committee - despite Prop 209's clear injunction against public institutions using race-based preferences - soldiered on in its drive to engineer each class's racial makeup. Without the individual-level data Groseclose seeks, it's impossible to tell how much the racial bean-counters were able to distort the school's admissions process, but the available numbers strongly suggest that race played a significant role in shaping the school's 2007 freshman class.

Groseclose joined the admissions committee in September of 2005. "At least 75 percent of what we discussed related to race and improving diversity," he said in a phone interview. "There's pressure on the admissions staff [to let in more minorities]. They're constrained by Prop 209. So it's a very tough situation for those staff, and I kind of feel sorry for them."

In June 2006, the Los Angeles Times ratcheted up the intensity with "A Startling Statistic at UCLA," a front-page story revealing that of the 4,853 freshmen expected to enroll at the school, only 96, or 2 percent, were black. (Eventually, four more blacks enrolled than were expected to, for a total of 100.)

"At the end-of-summer meeting of my committee, the chancellor [Norm Abrams] shows up, which never happens," Groseclose says. "He said the number of African-Americans was too low. He said, `I don't want to pressure you, but here's what I want you to do.'"

The chancellor suggested the committee adopt a "holistic" system, which Berkeley was using at the time. The New York Times would later describe the change thus:

In the past, the admissions office divided every application between two readers: one evaluated a student's academic record, the other looked at extracurricular activities and "life challenges." Berkeley, by contrast, had taken a more holistic approach, with a single reader judging an entire application, and Berkeley was attracting more black students than U.C.L.A. Why? Maybe the holistic approach takes better account of the subtle obstacles that black students face - or maybe the readers, when looking at a full application, ended up practicing a little under-the-table affirmative action.

The Times reporter interviewed two application readers - about a quarter of readers were black, and Groseclose writes that some were selected under explicit direction to "hire underrepresented minorities" - who had been told not to consider race and claimed they hadn't. But one reader noticed that more students mentioned race in their essays.

Some weird things happened statistically the following year. The 100 black students who enrolled in 2006 came from an applicant pool of 2,173 and an acceptance pool of 249, meaning that 11.5 percent of black students who applied got in - but only about 40 percent of those chose to attend. But in 2007, 2,460 blacks applied, 407 were admitted, and 204 enrolled - an outsize 16.5 percent of applicants got in, 50 percent of whom matriculated.

One might argue that the school's recruiting efforts simply paid off - it is not illegal to target minority areas in recruiting. Perhaps recruiters not only got more blacks to apply, but got enough high-achieving blacks to apply to significantly and legitimately boost blacks' admission rate. But then, why would admitted blacks' average SAT score drop 45 points?

Alternately, one could say the university just considered disadvantage in general more than it had in the past - this would let in more poor, lower-scoring students, raising the acceptance rates but lowering the average scores of disproportionately poor groups. But acceptance rates for American Indians, Hispanics, and other minorities actually fell.

"If you take a random Vietnamese applicant, the probability of acceptance went down significantly, from 28.6 to 21.4 percent," Groseclose says. "And when you look at these applications, the ones who have faced documented, verifiable family hardships are very often Vietnamese."

A detailed statistical analysis is the only way to know for sure what role race played in the admissions process. So in April of this year, Groseclose made waves by requesting a random sample of 1,000 applications, 500 each from 2006 and 2007. This would let him compare, within each year and between years, how similarly situated individuals of different races fared in the admissions process.

"The reaction was immediate - within 18 hours, the chair suggested we have the whole committee do the study. I said I'd be happy to participate, but I'd like to do my own as well," Groseclose recalls. He didn't get data for his own study, "and it turned out the committee would not get the data, either. We'd hire an outside expert to do the study - despite the fact that nearly all of us have the statistical ability needed."

Groseclose tried other methods. He made a motion to get all committee members a sample of random applications, which failed on a 3-3 vote (three other non-voting members wrote letters supporting Groseclose). He appealed to higher authorities at the university, who denied him access, purportedly for privacy reasons.

Four member of the admissions committee - Groseclose, and the three who voted against his motion to give all members the data - formed a work group to choose an outside academic and devise research questions. They chose sociologist Robert Mare, but directed Mare not to look at the 2006 or 2007 data - just the 2008 applications. Thus, Mare will be unable to determine how the "holistic" approach changed admissions, and to detect any illegal behavior that occurred in 2007 but not 2008.

Groseclose doubts the staff stopped using preferences in 2008; all the admissions decisions were probably made before he came forward with his objections. But 2007 might have been a particularly egregious year: "We had [pro-affirmative action] protests at the chancellor's office, and we had an acting chancellor at the time - he was the one who showed up at our meeting. He was a lot more likely to put pressure on people."

In the report, Groseclose provides a transcription of a meeting where one committee member slipped up while discussing the 2007 applications: "The readers in the first year, given the change, were not doing exactly what they were supposed to do. They were motivated by other concerns. . . . maybe the training wasn't as rigorous." Another replied, "All those T-shirts that said, `Got black students?'"

Mare's data collection won't begin until spring of 2009. In the meantime, the conversations and statistics in Groseclose's report should be more than enough to make California voters suspicious about their public universities' commitment to adhering to colorblind admissions. They deserve better than the evasion they're getting.

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Why today's British children just can't win

With the Olympics still fresh in their little minds, my daughter and a few more seven-year-olds staged their own truncated athletics gala in the back garden recently. I almost choked on my coffee when I heard the words: "You're the loser. Here, have the bronze." When I explained to her later that medals are only for the winners and that losers get no awards, she was incredulous. Bronze, being the least exciting prize, must surely be for the person whose performance is the worst, she explained. Is it any wonder that she might labour under this misapprehension? For today's British child, life is one long awards ceremony. It's not whether you win or lose, it's the taking part that gets you the trophy.

At any children's party, it's often hard to work out who is the birthday boy or girl. Every child is weighed down with gifts from stage-managed pass-the-parcel games and overflowing loot bags. It's everyone's special day.

Yesterday we learnt that the results of children's football matches will no longer be published and there will be no league tables in case it makes the mini soccer players too competitive. I could write everything I know of the beautiful game on a postage stamp in large letters, but I am pretty certain that the competitive aspect is something common to many sports and sometimes known as The Whole Point. Yet the Football Association has said the results of matches for seven- and eight-year-olds will not be disseminated and there will be no silver cups.

Talk about moving the goal posts; in this case they've disappeared. The FA handbook says: "Under-sevens and under-eights are not permitted to play in leagues where results are collected or published or winner trophies are presented."

The reason for the move, according to the organisation, is that children ought to learn to play the game without facing the pressure to win. The FA is not trying to ban winners - in fact, it appears it wants all the players to enjoy a sort of diluted victory. It is losing that is feared here and non-competitive football is a natural consequence of the non-competitive culture being forced upon children.

Contemporary child-rearing mores conspire against all forms of losing. The amateur psychologist in all of us tells us it is bad for a child's confidence. Everything from coming last to spelling in indecipherable text lingo must, we are told, get a "Well done!" sticker. As a consequence, the taste of genuine victory and the thrill of true excellence is a rare and illicit treat for today's children.

It is grown-ups, however, not children, who fear defeat. Children, particularly younger ones, are the greatest champions of the school of hard knocks and hierarchy - often frighteningly so. Though our education system tries to conceal it, every child knows who is "top of the class". On the CBBC website yesterday, young commentators were largely up in arms about the FA spoilsports. Some blamed the scourge of pushy parents for the ruling: "Parents are very competitive and I think this spoils the game. But this shouldn't be taken out on the kids as it is not fair. It is the parents."

Parents of my generation have, quite rightly, largely given up forms of chastisement that involve humiliating little people. Most of us agree that smacking children and bullying them is wrong. The idea that we must avoid telling them anything they don't want to hear has somehow become tacked on to this. Wouldn't we do more for their self-worth if we let them win? Wouldn't we teach them more about life if we showed them how to recover from losing?

"Some you win, some you lose" is not the harshest of truths and we do our children no favours in protecting them from it. It's a lazy kind of love that doesn't teach a child to win with grace and lose with courage. Everybody loses if nobody can win.

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Prof tells students: 'Undermine' Palin

Metro State class assignment compares VP candidate to 'fairy tale'

Students in an English class at Metropolitan State College in Denver have been told to assemble criticisms of GOP vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin that "undermine" her, and students say they are concerned about the apparent bias. "This so-called 'assignment' represents indoctrination in its purest form," said Matt Barber, director of Cultural Affairs with Liberty Counsel, whose sister, Janna, is taking the class from Andrew Hallam, a new instructor at the school.

The instructor also, according to students, is harshly critical of President Bush during his classroom English presentations. He reportedly has allowed students who identify themselves as "liberal" to deride and ridicule those who identify themselves as "conservative" or Republican. "So much for critical thinking. What's happening in that classroom represents a microcosm for what's happening with the angry left around the country," Matt Barber told WND. "The visceral and even abusive reaction Hallam and some of his students are having against Sarah Palin and Republican students in the class is occurring on a much larger scale among left-wing elitists throughout the media, academia and the larger Democratic Party."

The assignment was just one issue that several students raised. Hallam, who previously told students he expected them to be "courteous," assigned an essay about Palin's nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.

"Arguably, the entire event was designed to present Sarah Palin in an idealized – indeed, as if her life is like a fairy tale in which America could be included if she is voted into office with John McCain," he wrote in a copy of the assignment provided to WND by students. "Note her body language, facial expressions, the way she dressed, what she said and who she pointed out or talked about in her speech. How do these elements form a 'fairy tale' image about Sarah Palin as a person and as a politician that the Republican Party may wish its members and the American public to believe? How may the story 'Sleeping Beauty' and/or Tanith Lee's 'Awake' be used to compare the image of Palin with fairy tales, especially as they portray women, their behavior, and their lives?"

He said students should find commentaries that criticize Palin. "Using clear reasoning, explain how these sources may undermine or otherwise paint a different picture of Palin as a person and as a politician than what she or the Republican Party may wish the American public to believe," he said. There was no opening for students to find commentaries or statements supporting Palin or her positions. But Janna Barber, who is among the students who have raised concerns about the instructor, said she would do the assignment and include a number of supportive arguments as well.

There was no answer at Hallam's phone number, and a WND e-mail to him did not generate a response over four days. Cindy Carlson, the head of the Metro State English department, said she was unaware of the concerns. She said Hallam was available for two hours a week, one hour each on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

"People who irrationally lash out in such a way do so for a reason. In this case, I believe the reason is fear," Matt Barber told WND. "Sarah Palin has connected with a majority percentage of Americans and the polls reflect that connection. She poses a direct threat to Barack Obama's candidacy and they know it. She's about to upset the applecart. She's about to undo much of what they've accomplished. Imagine Sarah Palin as a role model for millions upon millions of young girls. Imagine those young girls embracing life over death on the abortion issue, embracing true feminism over radical feminism. They absolutely can't allow that to happen and will stop at nothing to destroy her. We expect liberal bias from the media and those in academia. But this time around, the bias is off the charts. It's exposed the left for who they truly are, and we have Sarah Palin to thank for it."

Matt Barber told WND his sister is one of five students who have been belittled by the teacher, and "bullied and harassed" by other students "because they support McCain-Palin." The students had documented a series of incidents in which Hallam reportedly told his class, "Bush-bashing is one of my favorite things to do."

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21 September, 2008

British child footballers banned from reading results

Children have been banned from reading their football results in local newspapers because it makes them too competitive.

Football Association laws dictate that from this season, the results of matches between children aged seven and eight must not be published, league tables must not be kept and prizes must not be given out. Some local associations have chosen to extend the regulations even further, it has emerged, banning league tables and trophies for 9, 10 and 11-year olds as well.

Scott Ager, who last season managed Priory Parkside under-9s 'A' team in Huntingdon, was sharply reprimanded after declaring that his team had won the league and having them photographed with a trophy by their local newspaper. Mr Ager said: "I find it bizarre. It seems to me to work against talented players, as the teams who may lose heavily are likely to be ones with players who just play for a bit of fun. It is very frustrating. Kids put all this effort in but there is no reward. "All the other managers in the league acknowledged that we had been the best team as we had won the most games. Football is our national sport, yet there are some strange rules around it."

A spokesman for Hunts FA said: "We were very angry. We do not allow competitive leagues until after under-11s. Mr Ager was chastened very severely and eventually left his club."

The FA handbook states: "Under-7s and Under-8s are not permitted to play in leagues where results are collected or published or winner trophies are presented." The move was designed to allow young children to nurture their skills without facing the pressure to win. Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA's director of football development, said: "In the youngest age groups there's too much emphasis on winning leagues, often to satisfy parents and coaches. "That's what we're looking to change. We need better, more skilful players coming through. Undoubtedly having league tables at this age is not helping their development."

Andy Szczepanski, whose son plays for Brampton Spartans under-8s, said: "I understand where they are coming from but I also think there is a need for competition. "It will make it more difficult for managers trying to arrange friendlies against sides of a similar standard because without seeing results there is no frame of reference."

During a visit to the Olympics in Beijing last month, Gordon Brown admitted that Labour's decision to reduce competitive school sport had been a "tragic mistake" and promised to re-introduce it. "We want to encourage competitive sports in schools, not the 'medals for all' culture we have seen in previous years," the Prime Minister said. "It was wrong because it doesn't work. In sport you get better by challenging yourself against other people."

The Conservatives said that last year 3.1 million school children - 42 per cent of all pupils - did not compete in intra-school sport. Jeremy Hunt, the shadow culture secretary, said the figures showed Mr Brown's promise was hollow. He said: "Gordon Brown talks the talk on competitive sport but doesn't get past the starting blocks when it comes to delivery of policy. "If he wants to end a 'medals for all' culture, why has the number of children doing competitive sport at school gone down by nearly a million last year alone?"

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"Postmodernist" English teachers in Australia: Teachers of English or ideology monomaniacs?

Of all people, you would think those who run the professional organisation representing English teachers in NSW would be able to write a clear, precise sentence. You would also think they would want students to read books. Alas, no. The English Teachers Association's submission to an HSC syllabus review by the NSW Board of studies uses the sort of incomprehensible cant George Orwell warned against, to argue against the inclusion of more Australian literature in the syllabus. "The ETA opposes the selective nomination of some types of text as this implies hierarchies in generic form and medium rather than in the quality of the texts themselves."

The nine-page document takes some effort to decipher, with its mind-numbing jargon, bolted-together phrases, pompous tone and scare quotes, all cloaking the banality of its thinking. Essentially ETA opposes the board's plan to ensure students read more Australian books, plays and poems. It's not so much the Australian part the association people dislike. It's the books, plays and poems.

In their world, as in the curriculum, "texts" can be books as we know them - words on a page that ideally have some literary merit - and can also be music videos, movies, reality TV shows, comic books ("graphic novels") or songs. To ETA, all texts are equal, and sceptical students are required to expend considerable effort trying to prove it.

The author Sophie Masson recalls her elder son having in year 11 to compare Arthur Miller's play The Crucible - "which he loves and thoroughly responded to" - with an ad for a weight-lifting gym. "If it wasn't horrible, it would be hilarious, and in fact it's both [and stems from] I believe subconscious hate and envy of writers." Masson's sons, who both sat the HSC in the past three years, "had a horrible time with [Advanced and Extension] English despite both once loving it," she says. "They were utterly contemptuous of the syllabus, and the fact they hardly had to read anything at all."

She says defenders of the syllabus point to "heaps of great books on the curriculum [but what] they fail to say is that hardly ever are more than a tiny, tiny proportion of these books studied, because there is no time. What students have to do - and the poor teachers have to enforce - is a whole lot of crappy assignments that are all to do with themes, ideologies, frameworks and outcomes but no originality, curiosity, imagination or thinking for yourself . The students generally loathe it."

So do most teachers, she says, from her experience of hosting writing workshops at schools. "Most of them absolutely hate the new HSC and its heavy emphasis on theory, themes and so on, rather than character, story and response . But they are bound to do it. There is a huge burden on them to comply with curriculum rules and what has to be accomplished in a year."

In the 1980s, when Dr Kevin Donnelly taught high school English in Victoria, his students were hungry for literature. "Kids are like water. They'll find the lowest level. But if you challenge them, and help them, they just love it because they're mastering something difficult." At one boys' school, he said the student favourite was Shane, a short novel made into the classic 1953 cowboy movie. They loved a passage in which a gun slinger and a farmer dig out a tree root and act all "male and aggressive". But it became too politically incorrect to teach Shane and Donnelly was accused of reinforcing masculine stereotypes.

Donnelly, author of Dumbing Down, says Australian curriculums are suffused with a debased neo-Marxist and postmodernist theory that became fashionable among academics 30 years ago. This is the ideology that underpins the ETA submission. It is pure social activism, not aimed at helping children gain wisdom, but to "emancipate" them from blind belief in Western civilisation, especially what they might learn from "literature".

The association is "most concerned at the use of the term 'literature' [and the] privileging of 'print medium' ", its submission states. "This stipulation harnesses Australian literary achievements to an important technology, but one that no longer enjoys the cultural predominance it once enjoyed."

Well, words are words, whether they are on a computer screen, Kindle, iPod or papyrus. They are the marks we recognise as the 26 letters of the English alphabet in combinations to form words, which are then combined to form sentences, in groupings we call paragraphs, with additional marks we know as punctuation, all of which are combined to create meaning. Written language is the highest form of expression, the purest way of communicating ideas, of pinning down the abstract, describing the concrete, explaining the world.

While oral language and iconography - pictures - are important, it is the written word that has helped us most to think. To elevate pictures and sounds to equal status is to rewind human evolution and primitivise the brain. Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay Politics And The English Language that if you can't write you can't think.

English becomes "ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts". "If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself."

Which, of course, is why ETA people write the way they do. If they wrote in their submission: "students should not read good books because literature is elitist", everyone would laugh at them and parents would bite their heads off.

Of the 1800 English teachers the association professes to have as members, just 43 responded to the survey that informed the board submission. This is a clear sign the membership has switched off, as well it should.

Source




Far-Leftist academic teaching at Australia's defence academy

Some of Australia's top thinkers on national security have opened a new front in the culture wars - over whether a postmodernist interpretation of terrorism is brainwashing our next generation of military leaders. At the centre of the intensely personal battle is the appointment as an associate professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy of Anthony Burke - who after claiming he was being misrepresented as "pro-terrorist", has demanded his chief critic be investigated for academic misconduct. Dr Burke, 42, complained to James Cook University over an article in Quadrant magazine by Merv Bendle, a senior lecturer in history and communications, which claimed university terrorism studies had been hijacked by a "neo-Marxist, postmodernist orthodoxy" among academics.

Another senior Canberra academic, Paul Pickering, of the Australian National University, fired off a separate protest to the Townsville-based university, but stopped short of calling for action against Dr Bendle.

The barrage of complaints and counter-claims brought to a head a row that began two months ago when Carl Ungerer, former national security adviser to the federal Labor leadership, questioned Dr Burke's appointment to the defence force academy as "eyebrow-raising". Dr Burke withdrew his complaint against Dr Bendle yesterday after conceding "it may be that administrative action is not the best way to address the problem". He told The Weekend Australian: "I remain deeply unhappy about Dr Bendle's accusations, and the violation of scholarly protocols they represent."

Dr Bendle, 57, turned up the heat on Dr Burke, who describes his political orientation as "liberal-left", by singling him out for being part of an academic clique that had compromised university terrorism studies. "In the war on terror, a main battleground has become the universities where Islamist groups openly recruit members while an updated, post-9/11 version of the old neo-Marxist, postmodernist orthodoxy on terrorism dominates among academics," Dr Bendle wrote in the latest edition of Quadrant, a standard-bearer for Australia's conservative intelligentsia.

Dr Bendle accused Dr Burke of trying to deny the right of countries such as Australia to defend themselves against attack by terrorists. In doing so, "one wonders how students at the ADFA would feel if they are asked to place their lives on the line for Australia in Afghanistan, Iraq or other battlegrounds in the war on terror", Dr Bendle wrote.

Describing the ADFA man's published writings as "astonishing" for someone who was responsible for educating military officer cadets, Dr Bendle said Dr Burke had presented national security in "post-modernist terms, not as a concrete state of affairs or balance of political forces". He turned Dr Burke's words back on him, saying it was clear he doubted that "terrorists are enemies of freedom or that freedom has any particular value". Dr Bendle said Dr Burke's take on Australia's counter-terrorism polices was that they provoked "the very thing they claimed to defend us from - i.e. terrorism is Australia's own fault".

Dr Bendle quoted his fellow academic as saying that Australia's national values and way of life were merely "vast ideological abstractions". Talking up "fundamental freedoms" was actually a "narcissistic performance of self in which Australia is represented as pure and good, as falsely superior to the religion of Islam," Dr Bendle wrote of Dr Burke's work.

Dr Burke told The Weekend Australian that while Dr Bendle had quoted him accurately, he had misrepresented his broader view that terrorism was immoral and politically counter-productive. "The quotes are accurate, but the characterisation is not," he insisted. The inference that he was pro-terrorist was an outrageous slur, Dr Burke said.

In his letter of complaint to JCU vice-chancellor Sandra Harding, dated last Monday, the Canberra academic hit out at Dr Bendle for claiming that he and Dr Pickering, among others, had "relentless sympathy for terrorists, defend the Islamist terrorists who conducted the July 2005 London bombings and are generally pro-terrorist".

Dr Burke initially complained that the Quadrant article raised "serious concerns about the integrity and honesty of Dr Bendle's research", and invited a "formal and transparent investigation by JCU as to whether or not it constitutes a case of serious academic misconduct". Dr Burke, in withdrawing his demand yesterday, said he had decided that a university investigation was not warranted. "I think there is still a matter of principle there," he said. "But I don't believe that asking for administrative action is the best way to respond."

Dr Bendle said he was relieved, but stood by his criticism of Dr Burke's supposedly post-modernist interpretation of terrorism. He disputed Dr Burke's assertion that their altercation was an extension of the culture wars, "very much in the American strain where people see the university as a battleground". Dr Bendle said the issue was actually academic freedom. Dr Burke and Dr Pickering should have approached him with their concerns before going over his head at James Cook University. "It is a basic rule of academic etiquette for parties in an academic dispute to respect the right of free inquiry and free speech," he said. "These gentlemen could easily have emailed or telephoned me with their concerns and I would have done everything possible to reach some compromise."

Dr Pickering did not return calls yesterday.

Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon shied away from comment, referring questions on Dr Bendle's complaints to the Australian Defence Force. In a statement, the ADF said academic staff at the defence force academy were employed on their research and teaching record, according to the rules of the University of NSW. "Taking any course out of context of the whole degree program does not truly reflect the overall education being provided to students at ADFA," a defence spokesperson said.

However, the battlelines were hardening among supporters of the two feuding academics. Dr Ungerer, now director of national security for Canberra-based think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Unit, yesterday backed Dr Burke's concerns. Many academics teaching terrorism-related courses at university were "off on a tangent", which had no relevance to real-world security issues, he said. Dr Burke's immediate boss at ADFA, humanities and social sciences head David Lovell, said the lecturer had his full confidence. He said the academy, which operates academically as an offshoot of the University of NSW, produced graduates for the military "with no particular ideological views ... who approach issues with an open mind, in a critical spirit".

Dr Burke said ADFA had a balanced mix of teachers. "If everyone was like me, it wouldn't be appropriate ... you don't force your views on students. You must teach a range of perspectives," he said.

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20 September, 2008

Britain: Must condemn creationism at all times

"On the word of no one" is the Royal Society's motto. Authority, it contends, is nothing: evidence everything. Scientific papers, even by the most distinguished thinkers, should live or die by the facts alone. This week senior members of the society forced the resignation of Michael Reiss, its director of education, after a speech in which - parts of the media implied - he advocated teaching creationism in schools. On the word of no one.

His speech is online, so let us assess the evidence. The first thing you notice is that, if this were a scientific paper, it is no Principia Mathematica. Its conclusions seem obvious: almost truistic. Professor Reiss, while strongly defending evolution, says that teachers should be respectful to creationist students and not ridicule their views - because it is counter-productive, and puts them off science. He concludes: "A student who believes in creationism has a non-scientific way of seeing the world, and one very rarely changes one's world view as a result of a 50-minute lesson."

But take one sentence out of context, "creationism is best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view", prefix it by explaining that Professor Reiss is a clergyman, and suddenly he is a creationist.

The strangest thing is that the Royal Society accepts that he has been badly treated. "Professor Michael Reiss's recent comments... were open to misinterpretation," it says. "While it was not his intention, this has led to damage to the society's reputation. As a result, Professor Reiss and the Royal Society have agreed that, in the best interests of the society, he will step down immediately." So he resigned not because he was wrong, nor even because he was particularly controversial. He resigned because others ascribed to him beliefs that were not his own.

He is not the first. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave a 6,000-word lecture about Sharia in the UK, it was summarised in headlines implying that he advocated public executions and the stoning of women. When Patrick Mercer, the Conservative defence spokesman, talked about the use of the word "nigger" while he was in the Army, he was sacked - not for being racist, but for allowing people to think he might be.

In an odd pact between journalists who want to write sensation, and readers who want to buy it, we choose cartoonish half-truths over complex reality. Professor Reiss is the victim of a culture where all arguments must be expressible in a sentence, and all sentences able to stand on their own. But don't take my word for it: read the speech.

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Australia: Teacher overhaul report stresses standards for pay rises

TEACHERS would qualify for pay rises only after meeting performance standards under an overhaul of the profession's salary system recommended in a federal government report. The report, obtained by The Australian, recommends a comprehensive restructure of the way teachers are paid that would end the system of awarding pay rises based on length of service.

It outlines a model of performance pay that restructures the pay scale into bands reached by performance thresholds, with a level for accomplished teachers at the top. At present, teachers are paid according to an incremental scale that rises with years of service and reaches the maximum wage in about eight years, after which they must enter administrative or leadership positions to gain any further salary increase. The report will be considered as part of deliberations by the Rudd Government, and state and territory governments, over ways to improve teacher quality and reward good teachers.

The productivity working group of the Council of Australian Governments, chaired by federal Education Minister Julia Gillard, is developing a national partnership with the states on ways to improve teacher quality, including performance pay. The report -- Rewarding Quality Teaching, by Perth-based international management consultants Gerard Daniels -- was commissioned by the former federal minister Julie Bishop. In July 2006, Ms Bishop, now federal Deputy Opposition Leader, first floated the idea of paying teachers more based on their performance but the idea was universally rejected the following year by state Labor education ministers. The states have since agreed to work with the Rudd Government to investigate ways to reward quality teaching. A ministerial meeting in May agreed to research ways of rewarding teachers for performance and skills.

The Business Council of Australia and the Australian Education Union have since released models for paying teachers based on their performance. Western Australia has a limited scheme paying bonuses to teachers reaching a high standard, and the NSW Institute of Teachers launched earlier this year its system of accrediting teachers against standards of accomplishment and leadership. But the NSW Government, which is embroiled in a pay dispute with the NSW Teachers Federation, is yet to allocate any extra pay to teachers accredited as accomplished, which the federal report argues is crucial.

The report's recommendations are based on an examination of other merit-pay schemes for teachers worldwide and in analogous professions. It says the most effective systems exist within a national framework but aim to improve performance locally by linking pay to specific outcomes set at an individual, group or institutional level. The report says that, ideally, the performance-pay system should: use an evidence-based approach to demonstrate teacher performance; make the reward or recognition meaningful to teachers; and provide a clear career structure.

It also recommends a performance-management system be developed to support the pay model, focusing on regular reflection and feedback about teaching practices assessed against standards. It cautions about linking standards to pay. "The process of assessing teachers is most fraught," the report says. "Some independent schools reject any external assessment of their employed teachers. However, most stakeholders expect that for critical performance-based assessment -- between performance bands or for accomplished teacher programs -- there will be a mix of internal and external assessment."

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19 September, 2008

YALE STUDENTS VOTE TO CUT TIES WITH ISRAEL

It's difficult to overstate the political and social currency that a Yale degree carries. A Yale student basically walks into just about any job he/she chooses. So to say that the students of Yale are going to be the high court judges, politicians and C.E.O.s of tomorrow is to state the obvious. No wonder the `Progressives' have well and truly got their hands round the throat of this institution and others like it.

This week, a group of Yale students voted to `end' America's relationship with Israel in a protracted debate. "An undergraduate debating society at Yale University has voted 44-25 in favor of ending America's "special relationship" with Israel." (SOURCE)

This echoes the results of a similar debate in Oxford back in January. Interestingly and heartening in its implications though, over two thirds of the 300 who turned up for the Yale debate walked out. Disgusted maybe? So they should be.

It's ludicrous that we are driving Israel to self-destruct while elevating the Palestinian Authority to the status of ally. America is over 75% Christian. Why are we behind an entity which supports the torture and abuse of Christians?

Under the Palestinian regime Christian Arabs have been victims of frequent human rights abuses by Muslims. There are many examples of intimidation, beatings, land theft, firebombing of churches and other Christian institutions, denial of employment, economic boycotts, torture, kidnapping, forced marriage, sexual harassment, and extortion. Palestinian Authority (PA) officials are directly responsible for many of the human rights violations. Muslims who have converted to Christianity are in the greatest danger. They are often left defenseless against cruelty by Muslim fundamentalists. Some have been murdered.

Christian Arabs also fall victim to the chaos and anarchy typical of PA rule. This situation is fostered by societal rigidity, criminal gangs, lack of education, absence of due process, incitement, unreliable courts, and the denial of these problems-all running counter to Israel's desire for a prosperous and stable neighbor. (Read the rest at ICJS)

Why then is the U.S. government pushing for a Palestinian state?

The U.S. is planning to issue a letter guaranteeing the country will back agreements reached during current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations aimed at creating a Palestinian state before President Bush leaves office in January<.> The move is intended to ensure any agreements reached by the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority, and spelled out in a joint document, will be recognized by the next U.S. administration and binding for Israel and the PA.

Bush is driving a move to set up the Palestinians BEFORE he leaves office. His position is already sullied. The next president, whoever he/she may be can walk in and not have to make any unpopular decisions. How convenient.

This is a predictable tactic of current politics. BE FOREWARNED. The test will be if the new leader seeks to overturn the decision of Bush. I'm positive he/she won't. This destruction of Israel is being directed from entities WAY BEYOND BUSH. As a matter of fact, I wonder who is driving this; the all-powerful Saudi dollar, maybe? Globalist manipulators? All of the above perhaps?

The influx of enemy refugees and the giving away of key neighborhoods in Jerusalem is designed to destroy Israel from within no doubt.

According to a report by the Qatari Al-Sharq, the new agreement taking form between Israel and the Palestinian Authority will include the admittance of 20,000 Palestinian refugees into Israel, as well as the annexing of a number of east Jerusalem neighborhoods to the new Palestinian capital. (SOURCE)

I wonder which Yale and Oxford students were willing to sell their souls for the destruction of Israel. If-you-want-a-promising-career-in-this-town.and all that. And who really cares about Israel anyway? The agenda must march on and it seems that no-one will stand in the way. Dirty and low. Shame. Shame. Shame.

We can't rely on political designations any more it seems. Bush did some things right, but in many ways he was NO CONSERVATIVE. We have to look at the individual this time round.

If it's Obama who wins the next election, Israel hasn't got a chance. He's given plenty of clues about that. Sarah Palin is, once again, the only person in this race who has shown real support of Israel.

Meanwhile, hats off to Sir Paul McCartney, former Beatle who will not be deterred from playing in Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations despite the fact that he has been threatened with being made the target of suicide bombers and being declared an enemy of Islam. Read that story at Woman Honor Thyself.

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Children are best educated at home

Britain: It is back-to-school this week. All over the country, stressed parents made last-minute dashes to the shops to force children to try on clumpy school shoes. Then they got up early, hurried their children into cars or on to buses, got stuck in jams, arrived later than intended and said a rushed goodbye. Then they found that the children had gone. Relief may have been mixed with melancholy, loss and a hope that the children were all right behind those high windows, told what to do by strangers.

The return to school is a well-established part of the journey of life. It seems normal, right and inevitable. But actually it is none of these things. Yes, it is normal in the early 21st century. But if modern civilisation started about 10,000 years ago, this way of treating children has been "normal" only for the last 2 per cent of the time. It is a new, artificial construct designed to provide education at low cost. It certainly was not created to provide a pleasant or socialising experience for children.

Schools are not clearly "right", either. People tend to think that what everyone does and what they themselves experienced must be right. But there is nothing obviously ideal about delivering your children to other people who do not love them as you do, and who are likely to teach them things with which you may disagree. And sending children to school is not inevitable. Under the law, children must be educated. But they do not have to be educated at a school. There is another way.

Home education is not for everyone - not even a large minority. It is a luxury in most cases. The parent who becomes a home teacher earns no money. There have to be savings, or partners, husbands or wives must be willing to pay the bills. But lots of well-educated wives do not work and could save money by home educating. For those who can find a way, home-educating is a glorious, liberating, empowering, profoundly fulfilling thing to do. Far more people should try it. At present it is estimated that about 50,000 children are taught this way. The number has jumped from a decade ago but is still very few compared with America.

I have just finished two years of teaching my younger daughter, Alex, now 11. We have become very close. Many fathers see their children at supper time and a bit more at weekends. Alex and I were with each other all day, every weekday, in all sorts of places and circumstances. We knew and shared thoughts, ideas and feelings. I believe the closeness that we developed will benefit our relationship for the rest of our lives.

We had enjoyable educational trips to France, Italy and China. Instead of learning about the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius from a text book, Alex and I climbed up to the rim and peered into the still-smoking crater. We visited Pompeii and Oplontis to see the parts of Roman civilisation that had been preserved by the most famous of its eruptions.

One of the beauties of home education is that you can teach children things that you want them to know - some of which are not taught in most schools. I wanted Alex to know something of the origin of the Universe, and astronomy. We studied far more history than schools do, including overviews of Rome, China and Britain. We looked at the Second World War, using DVDs of the superb Channel 4 series on it. We started learning Italian. But all parents would have different ideas of what they want their children to know. You can go for whatever you think important. This is freedom, thrilling freedom. You don't have to teach just what some civil servant in Whitehall has lighted upon and stuck in the national curriculum.

It is strange that children all over the country study the same bits of history - all knowing certain periods and hardly studying outside them. It verges on the totalitarian. With home education, there can be enormous diversity. At the same time, there is nothing to stop one's child taking the same GCSEs and Alevels that others are taking.

But some of the greatest gains from home education are not easily measured or tested. They come from the daily flow of conversation - the times when your child asks you a question and a conversation follows.

You may make an observation, or your child may see something and become interested in it. If that happens, you can encourage the interest. This is developing the ability to think and discuss. It is a big contrast with what happens at school where it is impossible in a class of 25 to chase the individual interests of everyone present or to enter separate conversations. It may even be the case that schools can damage a child's curiosity and enthusiasm for learning. I have seen children totally turned off education and making no attempt to hide how bored they are.

The widespread concern is that a home-educated child misses out on "socialisation". But I have never heard anyone offer any evidence for this. As far as I know, the evidence from America is rather the other way - home-educated children are better socialised. We know that young children left in inferior nurseries and not given much attention can get withdrawn or aggressive. It is possible, to put it no higher, that being left at school and not given much attention can, in some cases, have a similar, if milder, damaging effect on older children.

You don't have to educate a child for all his or her years of learning. It could be for just one or two. Several teachers have told me that they would love to take their children on a round-the-world journey, perhaps when their offspring are aged somewhere between 11 and 14. I would recommend it.

Home education, however you structure it, can bring you and your child closer together. You can both learn. You will have shared experiences that will enrich your relationship for ever. Yes, there will also be arguments and tears. But children and parents who never experience it are missing out badly.

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18 September, 2008

Lower Education Blues

With another school year just under way, parents understandably wonder how well their children are advancing. Perhaps parents' real concern should be whether their children are actually falling behind. From a comparative viewpoint, they clearly are. America spends the most on education and gets less than virtually any developed nation. The failure of America's "lower education" system bears witness to competition's absence. Without fundamental reform, future generations will pay an increasing cost for this absence.

The National Center for Education Statistics compared 15 year-old public school students in several countries in several subject areas. Released in 2006, their study of 2003 results (their latest figures) shows the U.S. below the OECD average in math (483 to 500) and science (491 to 500) and just slightly above average (495 to 494) in reading. Only five nations scored below the U.S. in all these categories -- Greece, Italy, Portugal, Mexico, and Turkey.

Perhaps these results would be understandable, if not acceptable, if the U.S. spent less on education, but the reverse is true. The U.S. spent $8,900 per pupil. France spent $7,200; the U.K. $6,800; Japan, $6,800; and Germany, $6,500. As recently as the last school year, the U.S. spent $9,969 per pupil and $489 billion nationwide on elementary and secondary public education.

The difference between America's higher education and "lower education" -- its elementary and secondary systems -- is dramatic. While "lower ed" under-performs other developed countries', graduates from those systems flock to America's higher education institutions. This may convince some that everything equalizes over the long-term -- what's lost in the beginning is recouped at the end. Such thought is as shortsighted as it is wrong.

This is especially true for lower income students. Many such students begin the education race behind the starting line. It is little surprise that too many never reach the finish line at all. This slow start virtually requires additional education will be needed by those least able to afford it, or its absence. For lower income families, a self-replicating cycle threatens.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN America's primary and secondary public schools and its higher education system has been noted before; however, the defining difference of competition is too often overlooked. The performance gap is instead attributed to other factors -- colleges and universities' large endowments and that these institutions attract only the most motivated and talented students (while public primary and secondary schools take all comers).

Yet, the fact remains that on a global basis, U.S. higher education out-performs while U.S. elementary and secondary public education under-performs. Why? Competition. Competition is not the result of our higher education excellence, it is the cause. Students do not simply compete to get in, they do so because colleges compete with each other.

Competition is the very thing from which our primary and secondary public schools have so assiduously insulated themselves. America's "lower education" is literally locked in place. While American colleges attract students on a global level, our primary and secondary public schools trap students at the local level.

Thoroughly unportable, elementary and secondary public school students are forced to attend where they live -- unable to go across town, let alone across country. College students go wherever they wish (grades permitting). Because of it, colleges strive to attract dollars and students wherever they are -- locally, nationally, and internationally. Lower education neither wants nor needs students from beyond its local area. It defines a monopoly: many buyers facing a single supplier.

In contrast, the absence of competition drives out resources. Competition attracts them because, whether money or students, they know they will be rewarded in a competitive system. Of course American colleges excel. Students are willing to pay more to go to the better ones and colleges in turn are willing to make the investment to attract them -- ironically both are able to do so because federal education aid at the college level is completely portable.

THE OBVIOUS SOLUTION is to raise our "lower education" system as much as possible. To do this, our public schools must compete as much as possible and to do that, federal aid needs to be as portable as possible. Despite the laudable reforms of No Child Left Behind, portable federal school aid at the elementary and secondary level remains the exception, not the rule.

While our "lower education" system may imagine itself insulated from competition, America itself is not. To compete globally, we must start at the beginning. One look at the global competition dynamic explains why. Undeveloped nations compensate for worse education with lower wage and operating costs. Developed nations can compete, but only with higher productivity, which requires greater education. Where then is America's advantage? If it cannot compete with undeveloped nations' lower wages and is falling behind its developed competitors in the basic educational skills for the majority of its workforce, it finds itself in a particularly unattractive position. As the school year begins, perhaps what is most in need of education is our "lower education" system itself.

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AN EDUCATION ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

Three articles below:

Australian teachers oppose more Australian literature teaching

For once I am partially in agreement with a teachers' organization. I think kids should be introduced to the best literature in the language -- regardless of where it came from. Broadening the definition of "literature" to mean anything written or displayed is just a way of evading study of the classics, however. If parents really want their kids to be given lessons in cornflake packaging, let the kids do a separate course in that

ENGLISH teachers oppose moves to strengthen the study of Australian literature in schools, with their professional association arguing it confers a superiority over the literature of other cultures. In a submission to a review of the New South Wales syllabus, the English Teachers Association of NSW says its members also object to giving privilege to print literature above other forms, including film, television and websites.

"A definition of literature with a restriction to the print medium is imprudent, reductive, short-sighted and, most importantly, undermines the integrity of current English syllabuses," the submission says. "The ETA opposes the selective nomination of some types of text as this implies hierarchies in generic form and medium rather than in the quality of the texts themselves."

The ETA's submission, sent to the board late last month, is in response to proposed changes to the English syllabus for all years of school requested by former state education minister John Della Bosca in May. Mr Della Bosca asked the board to explore ways to improve the presence of Australian literature in school English courses and ensure the study of more Australian books, poems and plays.

The ETA says schools are committed to the "notion and practice of diversity and do not want to see a narrow or exclusive interpretation of 'Australian' and Australian concerns". "Any definition of 'Australian' needs to see Australia in a global context, and to take account of indigenous and multicultural perspectives," the association says.

In particular, it opposes the introduction of a mandatory module on Australian literature in the extension English course for Year 11. It argues that most students do not take extension English so the module is a limited response to moves to strengthen the study of Australian literature.

The main criticism was that by narrowing the study to print literature, it reduced the syllabus's focus on comparing different types of texts, effectively "dumbing down" the curriculum. "It also signals an insularity and lack of confidence about the place of Australian achievement in world literature reminiscent of the 'cultural cringe' that we thought had been laid to rest," the ETA says.

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Many school drop-outs enjoy life at the top

REPORTS of the death of the self-made man or woman have been greatly exaggerated. Research to be published today shows that despite the widespread perception that a good education is a prerequisite to a good income, many Australians with relatively modest levels of education still push their way into the top bracket of the nation's money earners.

The study, in the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research's third annual report on its longitudinal HILDA survey, finds personality traits, such as a willingness to take risks, and social networks also play a significant role in determining financial success. "Without wishing to cast doubt on the value of education ... it is still worth pointing out that many people who lack much formal education still make good money," the report says. Among men who were working in 2005, 24.8 per cent of those with less than a Year 12 education were in the top half of the male earnings distribution. Among women the figures were even more remarkable; 29.2 per cent of those with less than Year 12 education were in the top half of the distribution."

The numbers were slightly skewed, the study admits, in that those with low levels of education were more likely not to be working at all, and therefore not included in the above figures. The report says factors outside education can influence earnings, in particular personalities that take risks. "For both men and women, not being financially risk-averse was quite a strong determinant of high earnings," it finds.

Also choosing particular industries could help those with lower levels of education earn more money. "Men working in the mining industry were paid well above what is usual for people with their level of education," the report says.

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Smutty teacher: Another regulatory failure

A TEACHER who sent smutty messages to students and propositioned one to a skinny dip in a school pool has had his registration suspended. Sean David Grady, 27, has admitted his sex chats with young girls "scarred" a small Victorian country town.

But questions have been raised over why a Victorian watchdog took two years to formally punish him - and how he secured a teaching job interstate despite concerns about his character. A Victorian Institute of Teaching inquiry has heard Mr Grady had graphic phone or computer conversations with four pupils while working as a rookie at the college. The wayward government school teacher admitted he:

SENT messages to a year 10 girl, including words to the effect, "I want to get you into bed", called her and said he was "horny", and asked her to sneak out of her home.

PROPOSITIONED a year 11 student to a naked swim in the school pool and suggested he climb in her window.

BOUGHT a year 12 girl a glass of wine for her 18th birthday and kissed her in a hotel foyer.

INVITED a year 11 student to his flat and pushed her on to his bed.

USED a school computer to email sexual material to another teacher.

Mr Grady told a hearing earlier this year he was suffering personal problems and was drawn into a culture of heavy drinking when he landed in the isolated town as a young graduate. He argued he was now a changed man who had learned from his actions and would keep getting help through counselling.

Mr Grady was found guilty of serious misconduct. He cannot reapply to teach in Victoria until January 2010 and will require a mentor if returned to the classroom.

Opposition education spokesman Martin Dixon attacked the time taken to investigate the teacher. The Education Department advised the teaching watchdog in July 2006 that Mr Grady had been blocked from working in state schools. Despite this and the VIT's separate inquiry, it emerged Mr Grady worked as a teacher interstate this year. His interstate registration was frozen when the Victorian hearing came to light. VIT president Andrew Ius partly blamed workload pressures for the disciplinary hearing delay.

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17 September, 2008

British faith schools `will hinder fight against terrorism'?

Lumping all faith schools together is deliberately obtuse. Faiths that are hostile to Western civilization and faiths that support it are DIFFERENT! Islam and Christianity are NOT the same

The expansion of faith schools in Britain will hinder the fight against terrorism by fostering a belief in separate identity, says a psychologist who has studied the causes of violent religious extremism. Professor David Canter, director of the Centre for Investigative Psychology at Liverpool University, said: "Faith schools are terribly dangerous. Setting up these divisions based on faith is the starting point for people thinking of themselves as separate, and identifying an 'out-group' that you are not part of. "Identifying yourself as part of a group with power is a well-established notion in social psychology - social identity. Social identity is in part defined by an out-group distinct from yours."

A division of schools based on religion fostered separate identity between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, and expansion of faith schools in England and Wales is likely to do the same, Professor Canter said. "It will create the possibility of people considering their significance in terms of religion."

Professor Canter has overseen psychological interviews with 49 convicted terrorists in India. "They seem to [have] got really hooked into a very intensive religious framework early on," Professor Canter said at the British Association's science festival in Liverpool. "Schools with a mixture of faiths seems psychologically more healthy."

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Australian far-Leftist professor under fire over his attack on free speech for a conservative professor

STUART Macintyre can run from one prestigious appointment to another, but he just can't hide from the Blainey affair. Macintyre, who is at a conference in Canada, will return to Melbourne University and a post on the new National Curriculum Board later this month, after a 12-month stint at Harvard University as chair of Australian studies.

Awaiting him are damaging allegations that he played a role in destroying historian Geoffrey Blainey's academic career. The event, which some regard as the most squalid in Australian intellectual history, if not the opening shot in the history wars, is reprised in a forthcoming essay by Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle. It relates how Macintyre and fellow academic staff at Melbourne University's history department turned on Blainey in 1984, after he had made public statements about the high volume of Asian immigration amid a bruising economic recession.

Blainey made the comments at a Rotary International meeting in Warrnambool, Victoria, and they were quoted in the Melbourne press. A mild-mannered scholar and elegant writer, Blainey became a controversialist overnight. A fortnight later, 23 staff, including Macintyre, signed a letter of protest against Blainey, then the Ernest Scott Professor of History. This set in train a series of events, including student protests and pickets, that led to Blainey's resignation from his tenured post: an extraordinary move for a mid-career scholar of high repute. Macintyre succeeded him in the post.

The letter of protest began: "As historians at the University of Melbourne, we wish to dissociate ourselves entirely from the widely publicised attacks which Professor Geoffrey Blainey, an eminent member of our profession, and a professor in our department, has recently made on the Government's immigration policy with regard to Asians."

In his forthcoming essay on the history wars, Windschuttle alleges Blainey was the victim of a "calculated move to make him feel as uncomfortable as possible within his own department, to generate hostility towards him among the wider university community, and to sanction the actions the signatories expected students to take". "In short, it was done to get rid of him," Windschuttle writes. He points out that Macintyre was the "greatest beneficiary" of Blainey's resignation.

Soon after the staff letter was published in Melbourne's The Age newspaper in May 1984, Blainey ceased teaching. He became dean of the arts faculty and retired officially four years later.

Macintyre has discussed the events in his book The History Wars, in the guise of an observer rather than a participant.

In an email conversation with The Weekend Australian yesterday, he said: "The claim that I led the attack on Geoff out of malice or ambition was propagated by (former publisher at Melbourne University Press) Peter Ryan, who repeatedly elided four years that passed between the Warrnambool speech and Geoff's decision to retire after his second term as dean."

In a 2006 interview, Blainey, who went on to a successful career as a freelance historian, said he would have stayed at Melbourne University if not for the hostility on campus. "Why should you leave an institution you've been in for a long time, where you are close to a very good library, are well paid and have a lot of time to write after doing your teaching and administration?" Blainey said. "Compared with writing as a freelancer, the university is infinitely preferable. It was a great disappointment having to leave but there was no future for me there."

Windschuttle describes the protest letter as an authoritarian action and its signatories as enemies of free speech. The event was a crux moment in Australian intellectual history, helping to shape the identities of Left and Right.

Former Treasury secretary John Stone regarded Blainey as "a brave man set upon by various political and intellectual thugs", while former prime minister John Howard thought for a time that Blainey, who became his administration's favourite historian, had been hounded out of office.

Left-wing historian Henry Reynolds has argued that Blainey "lost the respect of practically the whole profession" through his intervention in the immigration debate.

In Macintyre's view, the letter's primary purpose was "to declare that he (Blainey) spoke for himself and not for us". "Over the preceding two months he had been regularly identified as a professor of history at Melbourne University and dean of the faculty of arts," he said. "There is a loose convention that academics should reserve use of their university title to commentary on matters of professional expertise and our letter therefore said that he spoke as an individual."

Windschuttle describes this as "dissembling ... the members of his own staff sent a very clear message that they found him unwelcome ... It certainly ended his university career."

Gerard Henderson, executive director of the Sydney Institute and former Howard speech writer, said the impression he had gained from conversations with Blainey was that he resigned not because he was hounded out but because he wanted to go. He also pointed out that Macintyre had declined to join Blainey's critics in a subsequent book on the events of 1984, titled Surrender Australia.

Historian Ross Fitzgerald said the history wars of recent years began with Blainey's 1984 speech and the reaction of his colleagues, who later "slammed his academic work as a way of slamming him". He added that recent criticism of Macintyre, including references to his past as a Communist Party member, amounted to a campaign of vilification "almost as reprehensible" as the attacks on Blainey. Blainey could not be contacted for comment.

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16 September, 2008

British government's neo-Marxist education policy punishes excellence

By Simon Heffer



When I went up to Cambridge University almost 30 years ago, I didn't think I was going to spend three years in a laboratory staffed by social engineers. I thought I was about to have the privilege of getting a world-class education, with no hidden agenda. Happily, the university's vice-chancellor, Alison Richard, takes the same view, and this week, thanks to some welcome and outspoken remarks on this subject, she has entered into a confrontation with the Government over its neo-Marxist education policy.

I can think of few greater hypocrisies than Labour criticising our old and great universities for taking, in its view, too few people from "disadvantaged" backgrounds. Every time someone from a public or grammar [selective] school gets into Oxbridge, the Leftists (many of whom went to one of these universities from just such a school) wince at the "inequality" that has been perpetuated. They cannot bear to acknowledge the truth: that more people from "their" comprehensive schools would get to Oxbridge, beating the competition in a fair fight, if "their" comprehensive schools were better.

Thanks to the determination of Labour to stick to Marxist educational practices in these schools, with their emphasis on anti-elitism and their fear of stretching pupils, children who go through them have at least one hand tied behind their back from day one. Some are lucky to live in areas served by one of our 164 grammar schools, but with all the main political parties now opposed to these magnificent institutions, that lifeline will not be made available to a wider clientele. This is sad, not least because if there were grammar schools in every town, everywhere - even the meanest council estate - would be in a catchment area.

Having put these obstacles in the way of children whose parents cannot afford to have them privately educated, or to live in a grammar-school catchment area, the Government compounds the nightmare. It has in many cases made an education at the best universities financially beyond the reach of students from poor families.

My college at Cambridge is currently raising funds to offer financial help to those from poor families who feel they cannot afford the education they have earned by merit, so low is the family income above which one qualifies for no state help.

As Labour wastes money on poor universities with vacuous degree courses in order to boast that more people get into higher education, some students are too intimidated by the size of the debt they would have to incur to take up places at Oxbridge. In fact, because of subsidised college rents, Oxbridge can be less expensive than other universities. However, some students feel their only option is to attend a university near home, cutting costs by living with their parents. How a government that brings about this situation can turn round and lecture Oxbridge on elitism is beyond me.

Cambridge has a point only if it continues to be a university for very bright undergraduates who can benefit from the teaching of often brilliant dons who work there doing research. Admitting people on a quota system based on social class can only drag down Cambridge's standards, driving quality elsewhere, and ultimately harming the future of the country. There is no snobbery about class at Cambridge. There is a desire to give the best education to those best equipped to benefit from it.

If the state schools could produce more suitable candidates, and if the funding system enabled them to afford to go to such a university, there wouldn't be a problem. That one exists is not Cambridge's fault. It is the Government's. And until its education policy ceases to serve the outdated ideological obsession of the Left, and starts instead to serve the best interests of our children, that will remain the case.

Source




Some Australian schools still using discredited literacy teaching method

With predictable results

OUTDATED methods for teaching children to read were the cause of Queensland's dismal performance in national tests, a literacy expert claims. Smart State students came seventh out of eight states and territories in the first national literacy and numeracy tests, released last Friday. Only the Northern Territory, where absenteeism and social disadvantage rates are highest, fared worse.

Private literacy consultant Carol Christensen blamed the state's dire literacy test scores on Education Queensland bureaucrats who were obsessed with "whole language" reading philosophies. Ms Christensen, who co-ordinates school reading programs based on the rival phonics method of reading, said it was time the bureaucrats stopped "covering their butts" and start worrying about their students. "You wouldn't believe the amount of (Queensland) children in Years 9 and 10 who can't read simple, three-letter words," Ms Christensen said. "It breaks your heart. "(The department's) practices are the cause of the misery of our children, compromising their whole life opportunities."

Education Minister Rod Welford downplayed the claims, saying academic opinion on the best reading techniques was diverse. "There are a number of academics with varying views," he said. "(Ms Christensen) has one perspective and Professor Ken Rowe, who wrote the national literacy inquiry report, has expressed another that encapsulates world's best practice."

He said the Government was spending $35 million over four years to target literacy blackspots and millions more in one-to-one tuition for struggling Years 5 and 6 students. "Every (Queensland) teacher is being brought up to speed on how to teach literacy and numeracy successfully and effectively," he said.

While he admitted to being surprised at the gap between the state's results and performance in NSW and Victoria, he was confident recently introduced measures would lift future performances. The national test results released last week showed Queensland students in all year levels tested were below average competency in reading, writing, spelling, punctuation and grammar.

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15 September, 2008

British middle school graduates with the spelling skills of seven-year-olds

Pupils can gain a good GCSE in English despite being unable to spell basic words, according to a report. Many were awarded at least a C grade - considered a decent pass - even though scripts were littered with errors, it is claimed. Some teenagers were unable to spell there and where - words the average pupil is expected to master at the age of seven. Pupils were also awarded B grades despite spelling words such as finally with one "l" and failing to appreciate the difference between woman and women.

Researchers from Cambridge Assessment - one of the country's biggest exam boards - analysed spelling in 60 English papers. Three per cent of all words were wrong, rising to one-in-14 among teenagers awarded a G grade, they said. Some words were so badly spelt that researchers had problems working out what they meant. In one script, gorgeous was spelt "gourges", anxious came out as "angshuse" and familiar became "formiler". In other examples, nervous was spelt "nufse", thought became "faunt" and talk "torck".

The disclosure comes just days after a leading academic called for an overhaul of the English spelling system to allow irregularities to be accepted. Professor John Wells, from University College London, said that forcing pupils to memorise irregular spellings was holding many back in the classroom.

But Ian McNeilly, of the National Association for the Teaching of English, said too many schools were forced to ignore bad spelling in tests to inflate pupils' overall marks. "I am not saying that we make spelling a huge priority over understanding, analysis and interpretation," he told the Times Educational Supplement. "But students should be able to spell securely. It's an ongoing battle that isn't helped by wider society."

In the latest study - presented to the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association - academics analysed papers taken by students in 2004. They were able to present a detailed breakdown of the number of spelling mistakes by grade. Around four per cent of all words in papers graded an F were incorrect and more than two per cent of spellings by C-grade candidates were wrong.

Most common mistakes surrounded uncertainty over double letters. Spellings such as "allways", "quiettly", "untill" and "stoped" were common errors. Many pupils confused new and knew - and failed to spot the difference between too and to. Some teenagers were unsure about when "h" followed "w", using phrases such as "I whant", "he whas" and "we where".

Basic rules of primary school spelling were also forgotten by GCSE candidates. This led to misspellings such as "slightley", "angrey" and "comeing". Researchers said many errors came down to pupils' speech patterns, with some substituting -ing for -ink, producing words such as "somethink" and "nothink".

It comes amid on-going concerns over spelling standards among young people. Last month, one academic said that standards of spelling among university students were now so bad that lecturers are being urged to turn a blind eye to mistakes.

Source




Girls at British single-sex schools outperform co-education pupils

There have been a lot of findings elsewhere to this effect but socio-economic differences might be part of the explanation

GIRLS attending single-sex schools far outperform their contemporaries in mixed education, an analysis of government data have found. The research by the independent Girls' Schools Association (GSA) shows that this year 56.7% of their member schools' A-level results were at grade A, compared with 48.9% at coed independent schools. At GCSE the margin was wider still, with 68.5% marked A or A* compared with the mixed figure of 54%.

The research, based on figures from the Department for Children, Schools and Families, reflects a trend that has been apparent for at least the past four years. In recent decades single-sex education has declined in popularity, with the number of schools falling from nearly 2,500 30 years ago to about 400. In the past decade alone, some 120 independent schools have gone co-educational.

Some of the best-known former boys' schools, such as Wellington and Uppingham, are now mixed, although others, including Eton and Winchester, have remained boys-only.

Girls' schools have been more likely to resist going co-educational. Advocates of the system believe that in mixed classes girls are more likely to be inhibited and reluctant to voice their opinions openly. Girls in single-sex schools are also more likely to take A-level subjects which in mixed schools have traditionally been seen as the preserve of boys, such as science and maths.

Last year, 72.5% of pupils in the GSA schools won A grades in maths A-level while the figure was 64.9% for girls in their mixed equivalent. The national figure was nearly 30 percentage points lower. Separate research by the Girls' Day School Trust, an independent chain, has found that the proportion of their pupils taking science subjects at A-level is more than double the national average. Vicky Tuck, president of the GSA and principal of Cheltenham ladies' college, said girls schools "have a brilliant track record in helping pupils attain".

However, Richard Cairns, headmaster of the mixed Brighton college, said boys and girls complemented each others' learning. "Boys will focus on what's going on in the killing fields, and girls will think, `What's the impact [over] the next 40 years when there's no father at home?' "

Rebecca Ogilvie-Smith, from Oxfordshire, who last month scored top grades in all her AS-levels at Cheltenham - while also winning top grades in her French A2- said attending a single-sex school had taken off "a certain pressure" which the presence of boys can bring. "There is a very intense feeling of community and it is not judgmental," said Ogilvie-Smith. "Your focus is not on how you look."

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14 September, 2008

Spelling correctly is a bridge to a better and more respected life

In a cheery letter to her son John, Margaret Paston wrote: "Yor sustere recomaundyt hyr to yow, and thankyt yow hertyly that ye wyll remembyre hyr." What? The problem in understanding The Paston Letters is not that they are written in Old English (their period is early modern) but that their authors' spelling was so haphazard.

Now Professor John Wells of University College, London, is egging on the Spelling Society in its attempts to dissuade children from mastering spelling. "It's time to remove the fetish that says that correct spelling is a principal mark of being educated," he says. The Spelling Society needs no egging. Its prime objective is: "To publicise the unnecessary difficulties of English spelling and the benefits that its simplification would bring." That sounds all right, and so does the name Spelling Society. The trouble is that it is an anti-spelling society. It used to be called the Simplified Spelling Society, but it simplified the name, rather misleadingly.

While it is slightly unfair to characterise members of this society as the kind of people who recoil at a lamb chop, shudder at beer and insist on wearing wool next to the skin, one should remember that a stalwart of their cause was George Bernard Shaw - never happier than when sitting in his Jaeger underwear in an ABC cafe, toying with a nut fritter and a glass of milk.

Shaw it was who came up with the tired joke of spelling fish as "ghoti" (gh as in laugh; o as in women; ti as in motion). He left money in his will to fund spelling reform, which caused endless squabbling between rival beneficiaries.

There is no difficulty in devising an alphabet that reflects English pronunciation. The 40 or 50 symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet do a tolerable job. It would expand the minds of schoolchildren to learn it. But that is entirely beside the point.

To limit education by using only reformed spelling would be a great betrayal because it would cut off children, later adults, from reading old books. They'd soon tire of trying to make out the words, just as Germans today puzzle over books printed in their old gothic type. A new elite would be born. In the same way as the knowledge of Latin used to distinguish the educated, so in future anyone who knew only reformed spelling would be stigmatised as being educated to a rudimentary level.

Quite apart from this fatal flaw in spelling reform, the spelling single-issue mob completely misunderstand the function of spelling in English society. It is a pons asinorum, a donkeys' bridge that anyone who learns to read or write must cross. On it depends all future employment. Employers are confused by school qualifications: GCSEs, A-levels, pre-Us, IBs, new diplomas.

Every prospective employer is swayed by spelling in a letter of application or CV. I know someone who almost failed to get an interview because she lived in Guilford Street, London WC1, and the interviewer thought it was her mis-spelling for "Guildford". Spelling does count. Not only does it make communication possible without the headaches of Paston peculiarities, it reflects a stocked and ordered mind. One of the glories of 19th century reform was the banishing of corruption in public appointments by the Northcote-Trevelyan report, which in 1854 recommended competitive examinations.

These did not, like the Mandarin examinations of the sixth-century Sui dynasty, demand that candidates be locked in bare sheds for three days to show flawless knowledge of 10,000 characters. They did expect a modest ability to spell plain English. Learning to spell may be dull at times, but anyone who can learn to speak English and read it should be expected to get it right.

What Thomas Gaisford, the Dean of Christ Church, once said in a sermon about the study of Greek, applies today to accurate spelling: "It not only elevates above the vulgar herd, but leads not infrequently to positions of considerable emolument".

Source




More insane British bureaucracy

Twin girls born either side of midnight to be split up in school - because they fall in different academic years

As twin girls, the parents of one-week-old Lexus and Amber Conway expected them to share everything as they grew up. But the possibility they will be separated for much of their formative years is already hanging over the pair - and all because they were born either side of midnight. The girls were born just 45 minutes apart on the the night of August 31, but one arrived before it officially became September 1 and one after. A matter of minutes means they are now facing being separated at school because their official birthdays fall either side of the division for academic years.

Under the current rules, Lexus would be able to go to school aged four but because she was born slightly later, Amber would have to wait until she was five. Their parents, Sarah Conway and Ian Caldwell, however, are determined they will not be split up and plan to fight for the next four years to prevent it. Miss Conway said: 'Doing everything together is what being a twin is all about. How could I keep one at home and send one to school? 'I've been told this is a really unique case and I'm going to fight to make sure they go to school together even if it takes me the next four years.'

The 37-year-old administrator gave birth to Lexus naturally at 11.40pm on August 31at the Barratt Maternity Unit in Northampton. Amber was delivered by Caesarean section just 45 minutes later but by that time, it had become September 1. 'The midwife said it was the first time she had ever heard of this happening to twins,' Miss Conway, from Northampton, said. 'It's such a shame for the girls, especially as Amber only missed the cut-off point by a matter of minutes. 'We tried to persuade the registry office to give them both August 31 as their birthdays but they said there was no leeway.'

Mr Caldwell, who is also a twin, said they would teach the girls at home or move to Spain if they cannot start school together. 'My family live in Spain and they have a different academic year so we'd rather move out there than split up the twins,' his girlfriend added.

Keith Reed, chief executive of the charity The Twins and Multiple Births Association, said this was the first case of its kind he had ever heard of. 'It's highly unusual for twins to be born in separate school years and I hope the local authority gives due regard to the individual needs of the children and family involved,' he said.

Northamptonshire County Council, the family's local authority, have also never encountered such a scenario before. A spokesman said: 'We will need to look into this nearer the time Lexus and Amber are due to start school as part of their overall application for a school place. 'Any decision made will be in the best interests of both children as well as taking into consideration the wishes of the parents.'

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13 September, 2008

Leading British scientist urges teaching of creationism in schools

Creationism should be taught in science classes as a legitimate point of view, according to the Royal Society, putting the august science body on a collision course with the Government. The Rev Michael Reiss, a biologist and its director of education, said it was self-defeating to dismiss as wrong or misguided the 10 per cent of pupils who believed in the literal account of God creating the Universe and all living things as related in the Bible or Koran. It would be better, he said, to treat creationism as a world view.

His comments put him at odds with fellow scientists as well as the Government. Former Fellows of the Royal Society include Charles Darwin, who first proposed the theory of evolution. National curriculum guidelines state that creationism has no place in science lessons. The Government says that if it is raised by students, teachers should discuss how creationism differs from evolution, say that it is not scientific theory and that further discussion should be saved for religious classes.

Professor Reiss, a biologist, was speaking at the British Association's Festival of Science in Liverpool. Other scientists were vociferous in their response, saying that creationism should remain entirely within the sphere of religious education.

Professor Lewis Wolpert, of University College Medical School, said: "Creationism is based on faith and has nothing to do with science, and it should not be taught in science classes. It is based on religious beliefs and any discussion should be in religious studies."

Dr John Fry, a physicist at the University of Liverpool, said: "Science lessons are not the appropriate place to discuss creationism, which is a world view in total denial of any form of scientific evidence. Creationism doesn't challenge science: it denies it!"

However, Professor John Bryant, a biologist at the University of Exeter, agreed that creationism should be discussed as an alternative position of the origins of man and earth. "If the class is mature enough and time permits, one might have a discussion on the alternative viewpoints," he said. "However, I think we should not present creationism as having the same status as evolution."

The Royal Society's support for the presence of creationism within the classroom points to a remarkable turn-around. Last year the society issued an open letter stating that creationism had no place in schools and that pupils should understand that science supported the theory of evolution. A spokesman for the organisation, which counts 21 Nobel Prize winners among its Fellows, confirmed yesterday that Professor Reiss's views did represent that of its president, Lord Rees of Ludlow, and the society. He said: "Teachers need to be in a position to be able to discuss science theories and explain why evolution is a sound scientific theory and why creationism isn't."

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'Vege math' to be abolished in Australia

The national maths curriculum is still a blank page but the man in charge of framing the document knows what won't feature: easy maths courses for weaker students. While so-called "vege maths" courses teaching day-to-day skills have been offered to less able students, Peter Sullivan said they basically told students to give up. Instead, he envisages a national maths curriculum that gives all students the understanding they need for life after school.

Professor Sullivan, appointed by the National Curriculum Board to draft a direction for maths, said the course should offer the depth for talented maths students to pursue their interest, but still provide comprehensive skills to weaker students. "People need maths to be able to understand the world and their lives but also to be able to participate effectively in the workplace and their job," he said. "That's what curriculum can do, it can make education more interesting and relevant to the world today."

Professor Sullivan, from Monash University, said extended courses were necessary for students in the final years of school, when they were making choices about their careers. But for the compulsory years of schooling, the curriculum should preserve opportunities for all students as long as possible and not discard them as unable to do maths. "If there were low-achieving students falling behind, then schools and systems have to find ways to support them so they can improve, not give up on them and say 'here, do this easy course'," he said.

Professor Sullivan said many young students developed an attitude that they just could not do maths and one of the aims for the curriculum was to teach them that persistence pays off. "Giving up is not the way to do it. The amount of maths they learn depends on how hard they try, not how bright they are. These are the sorts of things the curriculum should try to do."

Professor Sullivan said technology had a crucial part to play. "It has the potential to change the way students study maths. It will allow students to place less emphasis on the memorisation of skills and formulas and use technology to solve real problems with real data."

He said fundamental knowledge such as the times tables would always be required. Rather, he was referring to the blind manipulation of memorised formulas. "A lot of people learn things in maths they don't understand, but once they're able to use technology to explore the concept, the maths makes sense," Professor Sullivan said.

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12 September, 2008

Maine shoots the messenger

After 78 percent of eighth-graders fail to make the grade on the state writing test, officials toss the results

More than three-quarters of Maine's eighth-graders performed below standard on the state writing test for 2007-08, prompting education officials to toss the results and try to figure out why so many students missed the mark.

State Education Commissioner Susan Gendron and her staff say the one-question test was somehow flawed because 78 percent of the estimated 14,900 eighth-graders who took the exam failed to write a persuasive essay as required. That's a 50 percent increase, over 2006-07 in the number of eighth-graders who failed to meet or only partially met state writing standards.

In a rare move, Maine's Department of Education found the test results inconclusive, and withheld them from school districts and the media when it released the latest Maine Educational Assessment scores in July. The department's decision surprised even longtime educators like Tom Lafavore, director of educational planning in Portland Public Schools, Maine's largest district. "I've never seen test results pulled like this," Lafavore said.

The department provided overall Grade 8 writing results to the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram only after the newspaper requested the information under Maine's Freedom of Access Act. "It is our responsibility to ensure the validity of test data," Gendron said. "It would be irresponsible for us to release data if that performance is based on a question that was unreliable." Gendron and her staff say parents shouldn't worry. Students are learning to write. The test triggered false results. Still, they say, they don't know exactly why.

The 45- to 70-minute test, administered last March, asked students to support or refute the following statement, known as a prompt: "Television may have a negative impact on learning." Instructions outlined how the essay would be scored and listed 20 writing skills students should demonstrate, from identifying a logical position to using correct punctuation. The test included two lists of facts, pro and con, to use in the essay.

"Kids got ticked off at the (question)," Gendron said. "In many cases, it was an emotional response rather than the intellectual exercise we were seeking, so it was not an accurate reflection of their writing skills."

One student's essay began: "These facts are lies. I do my homework and get good grades even though I watch TV." This example came from an e-mail to Susan Smith, Maine's MEA coordinator, from Julie-ann Edwards, a staff member at Measured Progress, the state's testing consultant based in Dover, N.H. The newspaper obtained the e-mail through its request for records and internal communications related to the test question. "This year, students often took issue with the prompt and fact sheet," Edwards wrote. "They reacted emotionally, spouted a bit, and did not use the fact sheet information to support their argument."

Edwards noted that eighth-graders who took the writing test in 2007 were able to draw from their own experience to sustain arguments for or against the following statement: "Rather than maintaining separate teams for boys' and girls' sports, a high school is considering combining teams and having a completely coed sports program." "That did not appear to be the case this year," Edwards wrote.

Patricia Ross, spokeswoman for Measured Progress, referred questions to state officials. Overall, less than 23 percent of eighth-graders who took the test last spring met or exceeded state writing standards, down from 48 percent in 2006-07, indicated a report from Measured Progress. That's a 52 percent decrease. The marked difference surprised education officials because the television prompt had done well when it was field tested in 2005-06, Smith said. The state started administering writing tests as part of the MEA in 2006-07. The MEA assesses reading and math skills

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Why we should teach the Bible in all our schools

Comment from Australia -- a much less religious place than the USA

Fewer and fewer people know the Bible, even among those with religious commitment. The latest National Church Life Survey of 500,000 people across 22 denominations, reported in yesterday's Herald, shows a whopping 59 per cent of respondents read the Bible only occasionally, rarely or never at all. But why would you bother reading it if you didn't have some belief the words of the good Book were true? What could motivate you to wade your way through those strange, cigarette-paper pages?

To my mind, there are still plenty of reasons to bother with the Bible. But at least one is indisputable, and it reveals a gaping hole in the Australian educational experience. You need to know the Bible in order to understand the history, literature and arts of Western culture. In fact, it is an educational and cultural tragedy that the Bible has quietly disappeared from the schooling experience of many Australians.

In the US, a major project to restore biblical literacy is under way, called the Bible Literacy Project. It is a joint venture of Jewish and Christian educators intended to "encourage and facilitate the academic study of the Bible in public schools". In a country where religion and public education mix like oil and water, it is no mean feat they have got their textbook, The Bible And Its Influence, into the curriculum in 40 states, and counting.

The project had its own statistical grounding. A Gallup Poll for the project found only 37 per cent of American high school students could recognise any of Jesus' words from the Sermon on the Mount (Australia would have to be worse). And yet 98 per cent of English teachers surveyed agreed knowing the Bible delivered a distinct academic advantage in the study of English literature.

I know it firsthand. I was the only one in my first year tutorial who understood what the title of John Bunyan's book, Grace Abounding To The Chief Of Sinners was about. (You need to be familiar with the first letter to Timothy, chapter one, verse 16, to get it.) And I laughed alone at the joke in Waiting For Godot when one of the tramps says, "One of the thieves was saved. It's a reasonable percentage." (See Jesus' crucifixion in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 23.) Two ticks to the boy with the Sunday school upbringing.

We need something similar to the Bible Literacy Project, something that enables the teaching of the Bible in the English, art, music and history classrooms. An Australian version of the project would see discussion of Les Murray, Tim Winton and John Coburn in place of Emerson, Melville and Abraham Lincoln. But the backbone is there in the American work: a textbook that respects the content and structure of the Bible, Hebrew and Christian, and then seeks to communicate to students its vast significance for understanding the Western tradition, and more.

There's no need to be sidetracked by six-day creationism, or Zionism, or the subtleties of denominational differences. This is about teaching the Bible in the same way that you teach scales for learning a musical instrument, or the colour palette for painting. It's necessary to the whole task of understanding what is going on in our culture, literature, and history.

I have a vested interest in biblical literacy; after all, I'm a Christian and I think there's something to the big, unfolding story it tells. But I'm also a literary academic, and I can't bear the biblical ignorance students display. Regardless of whether you find something alive and kicking in the Scriptures, there is a strong argument it should be somewhere near the foundation of Australian education.

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11 September, 2008

A nasty British school bullies handicapped kid

But publicity has them spinning. It's a government funded school with pretensions to quality. Sounds like it's just pretentious

Since losing his hair to a serious illness as a young child, Dale Platts and his baseball cap have become inseparable. The New York Yankees hat has not only helped the 13-year-old to cope with the cruel taunts of other children, but also protects his head and lashless eyes from the sun. But the schoolboy has now been ordered to remove the cap after his school decided it went against its uniform policy. Dale - who was warned that he would be taught in isolation if he refused - is now at home and missing classes.

His mother, Kenina Platts, 41, said: 'It's really cruel. I'm outraged the school can be so short-sighted. He wears the hat for medical reasons - it's not a fashion statement. 'Dale has to suffer at the hands of child bullies. Now the school itself is pressurising him and bullying him. He is too ashamed to take it off. 'To say he would be taught in isolation is madness. It is like putting him in solitary confinement. It is punishing him for being bald.'

Dale lost his hair, toenails and fingernails when he was five months old after suffering from severe bronchiolitis, a respiratory virus that left him in hospital for a week. During the illness, his immune system began to attack parts of his body, including his hair follicles, stopping the hair and nails from growing - a condition known as alopecia universalis. Dale lost his hair at five months old after suffering from bronchiolitis. The condition is the most severe form of alopecia, affecting one in 100,000 people, including Little Britain comedian Matt Lucas.

However, Dale, of Collingham, Nottinghamshire, was unconcerned by his baldness until he started secondary school aged 11 and the bullying began. He has had items thrown at his head and been taunted with cruel names and chants. He has not left his bedroom without wearing his baseball hat for two years. But at the end of last term, Maggie Brown, the deputy head of Robert Pattinson School in North Hykeham, Lincolnshire, told him the cap contravened its dress code.

Although he has been told he can wear a beanie hat as a compromise, Dale has complained the woolly hat causes eczema and headaches, and does not offer the same protection-against harsh fluorescent lighting and dust as his cap. He was sent home last Thursday, the first day of the new school term. Dale said: 'I just want to go to school and get no bother.'

A spokesman for the school said its uniform policy does not allow peaked caps or hoodies, but some allowances could be made for medical or religious reasons. In Dale's case, the school said it believed the family had agreed the teenager would wear a beanie hat.

Source




Australia: Far-Left school curriculum coming up under PM Rudd

The latest chapter in the history wars returns one of its chief protagonists, Stuart Macintyre, to the front line, with his appointment by the National Curriculum Board to draft the course for schools from the first year of school through to Year 12. Professor Macintyre, the Ernest Scott professor of history at Melbourne University and chairman of Australian Studies at Harvard, was sidelined by the Howard government in its pursuit of a national curriculum for Australian history. But Professor Macintyre is one of four educators appointed to draft "framing documents" setting out a broad direction for the curriculum in four subjects.

The board has made another controversial appointment in its adviser on the English curriculum, selecting Sydney University literacy researcher Peter Freebody, who is identified with the critical literacy side of the so-called reading wars. The adviser on science is University of Canberra professor Denis Goodrum, and Monash University professor Peter Sullivan will draft the mathematics curriculum.

Professors Macintyre and Freebody were understood to be overseas yesterday and unavailable for comment, but NCB chairman Barry McGaw defended the appointment of both academics, saying they were leaders in their fields. Professor McGaw said Professor Macintyre - a former communist - was a "very sane historian" and the politics of Australian history was less of an issue with the board developing a broader history curriculum. He described Professor Freebody as a "fine scholar" and while his background was not in literature, the board would convene a panel of experts to work with him on that aspect of the curriculum.

"Almost anyone is controversial in literacy," he said. "If anyone doesn't have enemies, they probably haven't been engaged in the debate." Professor McGaw said the framing documents were intended as a starting point for public consultation. The final decision on the curriculum would rest with the board.

A spokeswoman for Education Minister Julia Gillard said she was confident in the judgment of the NCB, which is independent. But Wollongong University associate professor in history and politics Greg Melleuish said Professor Macintyre's appointment was akin to the Howard government appointing Keith Windschuttle, noted for his questioning of the Aboriginal genocide. "They seem to have selected the person who is most likely to raise the hackles on the other side," he said. "I would have thought it incumbent on whatever government it was, particularly in history, to try to depoliticise the process and Professor Macintyre's appointment won't do that."

Professor Macintyre is often described as a left-leaning historian and co-authored a book about the history wars, which debates the interpretation of European colonisation and its effect on indigenous people. The debate became heavily politicised after John Howard championed an alternate to the black-armband view of history.

Professor Freebody was a developer of a widely used model in the teaching of reading called the four pillars of literacy, which sees it as "not a 'scientific' decision, but rather as a moral, political and cultural decision". Literary academics say Professor Freebody has since moved away from that model, and now has a strong commitment to the need to teach phonics or the letter-sound relationships.

Professor Goodrum, who is working with the Australian Academy of Science in developing school curriculum, said the challenge was to reduce the amount covered in courses. "There's a tendency to succumb to breadth rather than depth of learning and that's one challenge to try to meet," he said.

Professor Sullivan said the challenge was to create a maths curriculum for the 21st century. "Children who start school at the same time as this new curriculum is implemented will enter the workforce in 2030 and they're not going to need the type of skills people needed in the 1950s," he said.

Opposition education spokesman Tony Smith said: "Stuart Macintyre brings a well-known, left-wing perspective to Australian history. We can only hope that Stuart Macintyre is able to suppress his views and develop a quality, non-biased, Australian history curriculum, but I'll guess we'll find that out when it's released."

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My worst fears have been realised. No educational balance under Rudd

By Kevin Donnelly

Leading up to the federal election, I welcomed the ALP's policy calling for a national curriculum based, as it was, on a conservative agenda very much like the Howard government's approach to reshaping the teaching of history and English. The fear was that the devil would be in the detail and, given the cultural-Left's control over the curriculum, that the agenda would be captured by those opposed to the more academic and balanced approach.

Stuart Macintyre's appointment as a so-called eminent educationalist to oversee history as a subject in the national curriculum - primary to Year 12 and mandated for all schools at the start of 2011 - shows such fears were well-founded. Macintyre, from the University of Melbourne and one-time member of the Communist Party, is a staunch advocate of what he terms "history from below" - one that dismisses a grand narrative celebrating what we have achieved as a nation. For historians like Macintyre, unlike Geoffrey Blainey, who called for an end to what he termed a black-armband view of history, the subject is about privileging victim-groups and interpreting the past in terms of power relationships.

In his book The History Wars, published in 2003 and launched by Paul Keating, Macintyre condemns so-called conservatives such as Keith Windschuttle, Janet Albrechtsen and me for suggesting history teaching is unfairly slanted towards a left-wing, blinkered view. Macintyre continued his attack on the more traditional view of history at a recent Australian Council for Educational Research conference where he defended "educational progressivism". One wonders what Macintyre has to say about Julia Gillard, the Minister for Education, who describes herself as an educational traditionalist and argues that Australia was settled, not invaded.

The second appointment proving that the national curriculum has been captured by the usual suspects is that of Professor Peter Freebody, from the University of Sydney, who will oversee English as a subject. One of the main criticisms of the way English is now taught in schools and teacher education is the impact of critical literacy - a view of reading that asks students to analyse and deconstruct texts in terms of power relationships and theory. Critical literacy draws on the work of the Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire and, as noted by one overseas academic: "Where Freire's ideas have found the most fertile soil in recent years is in Australia. The Australians have led the world in a movement now called critical literacy."

Freebody advocates critical literacy on the basis that being literate is no longer defined as being able to read and write to the required level. Instead, in the jargon loved by advocates of theory, it involves "a moral, political and cultural decision about the kind of literate practices that are needed to enhance people's agency over their life trajectories and to enhance communities' intellectual, cultural and semiotic resources in print/multi-mediated economies". Freebody, like the Australian Association for the Teachers of English, argues that any talk about a literacy crisis is manufactured and that teachers need to be wary of approaches to literacy that lend themselves to "centralised political surveillance and technocratic control in education".

Given Kevin Rudd's belief in academic standards and a back-to-basics approach, one would have hoped the national curriculum would represent a break with the politically correct, ideological view so prevalent over the past 10 years. Such is not the case.

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10 September, 2008

The agonies of educational choice in Britain

The quality of British government ("State") schools is very uneven and is often very low, depending in part on where the school is located. Only the many private schools offer a reasonable guarantee of a good education. So the middle class try to send their kids to private schools in the hope of catching up with the upper class. But the upper class have the last laugh. They often send their kids to government schools! So what's a good British Leftist to do? The one below feels he has been cheated but still feels he has to send his kids to a private school! He explains:

Arabella Weir: "Why I would never send my kids to private school," she wrote in another newspaper last week. "The underlying snobbery and racism are shocking." Oh, I know. It's like the thought of another four years of Christian rightwingers in the White House. Don't get wound up, my wife says. But I can't help it. My kids dwell in a school playground that looks like happy hour at the United Nations but apparently we're all racists. I'm picking them up with Peter the plumber and Tom the builder but in Arabella's mind we're snobs. I wonder if her kids ever got met at the gates by a bloke in a van.

Apparently not, because she wrote that her ten-year-old daughter walks home from school through several council estates "without even thinking about it". I reckon mummy thinks about it, though. I reckon if you know how many council estates your children walk through you are not quite as down with the working class as you would like us to believe.

Really posh people don't send their children private these days. They go state and smug, judging all the hapless arrivistes scrabbling to give their children the half-chance that might protect them from having to get up before dawn each morning to run a greengrocer's like their dad. Gordon Brown's son, John, is going to the local community school where almost half the pupils have free meals, apparently. Big deal. Chances are that what with his father being the Prime Minister, junior might need less of a leg-up in his teenage years than some of his schoolfriends.

Ms Weir talked about sending her children to the less desirable of the two state primaries in her area - Camden, naturally - as if she were bestowing her bounteous gifts of spawn on the poor. She said that when her parents moved to Camden they were advised against it by friends because "people like us" didn't live near council-house folk. And that was the clue. Something was not quite right in that sentence. You know what it is. I'm talking to the state school attendees here. Were any of your classmates called Arabella? No, me neither. [In Britain, Arabella is a famously upper-class name]

Arabella may have attended state school in Camden, but there the gamble ended. Her father was Sir Michael Weir, Balliol scholar, Foreign Office diplomat, former Ambassador to Egypt and the man Jim Callaghan referred to as his mentor on Middle East politics. When Anwar Sadat was assassinated, Sir Michael was seated two rows behind. Sir Michael died two years ago leaving an obituary that read like a Who's Who of 20th-century history. It said that he persuaded Sheikh Ali bin Abdullah al-Thani of Qatar to abolish slavery, which my dad was definitely going to get round to, if he had not had 400 boiling chickens to gut at a market stall each day in East London.

"It's only information," sniffed Arabella of private education; but it isn't. It is an often forlorn attempt to level the playing field by those not born with connections that will put them at the front of every queue. State education can never provide the same opportunities for all because there will remain the sons and daughters of the truly powerful, the truly wealthy, the famous, who can call in favours from a network forever closed to the bloke with the plumbing business that has just had a good year. All he can do is try to buy his way in; this is why you rarely hear of a black guy with a guilt complex about getting his children privately educated.

My kids watch Doctor Who. The godfather to Arabella's kids is Doctor Who. David Tennant. You see the difference, Arabella, don't you? You don't need to send your little angels to private school. They are already in the Tardis, just like their mum.

Source




Parents 'are neglecting manners'

But those parents are themselves the product of a Left-dominated educational system which told them that there is no such thing as right and wrong! Teachers have sown the wind and are reaping the whirlwind

ANGRY teachers are sick of lazy parents who leave it to them to educate their kids everythying from manners and morals to eating habits and hygiene. They say they are fed up with playing "mum and dad" in the classroom and have told families to lift their game by devoting more time and effort to teaching their children on social issues. Teachers told a survey they were now expected to take responsibility for educating children on a host of subjects parents no longer bothered with - including respect, good behaviour and punctuality.

Even the etiquette of mobile phone use is listed in a new six-step guide prepared for parents by an elite teacher group fed up with the rising burden imposed on classrooms. The new guide, Parent-Teacher Partnerships, has been produced by the Australian Scholarships Group and the National Excellence in Teaching Awards organisation. Its key message is, "Education doesn't only happen in the classroom". The guide provides tips to parents to take up some of the slack for teachers whose desks are piled with extra programs on road safety, personal health, obesity, safe foods, civic pride, values, drugs and alcohol, multi-culturalism, child protection, life skills, bullying and anti-homophobia.

Most surveyed teachers said that despite being overloaded with extra curriculum work and other duties, they were under pressure from the increasing load imposed by having responsibility for issues no longer taught at home. The teachers' concerns follow suspension data in NSW showing students as young as five are being sent home at a rate of 1682 a week for misconduct including disobedience and bad behaviour.

Mother-of-three Kim Soldo from Minto in Sydney's south-west agreed yesterday teachers needed more help from their students' families. "I think teachers are getting too much lumped on them," she said. "Education starts at home - if you don't pack the child a healthy lunch you can't expect a teacher to solve it. "There are too many things a teacher has to juggle and it is distracting them so much from the curriculum."

Principal of Sarah Redfern Public School at Minto Cheryl McBride said parents ideally should shoulder responsibility for teaching their kids about punctuality, healthy foods and the benefits of exercise. "Any time there is a popular issue there is a mentality that teachers can cover it," Ms McBride said. "The curriculum gets stretched and the result is you dilute the effectiveness of the things you are supposed to be teaching."

Source





9 September, 2008

Muslims condemn censorship of hadiths seeking dead Jews

University calls website statements 'truly despicable'

Muslim students on the campus of the University of Southern California have condemned a school decision to take down certain hadiths - or sayings of Muhammad - that called for dead Jews and had been posted on a student group's website. "We are outraged at the censorship of a complete religious and classic text without consulting us or any religious authority first," the Muslim Student Union said in a prepared statement. "The 'compendium' is now incomplete. There are verses in many religious texts (be it the Torah or the New Testament) that when taken out of context can be taken as offensive."

The decision to order the hadiths taken down from a site run by the Muslim Student Association, a separate organization, was made by Provost C.L. Max Nikias, according to a report today in the student newspaper, the Daily Trojan. He approved the deletion of the statements because they urged Muslims to kill Jews. The statements were in a collection of hadiths, or historical sayings attributed to Muhammad although not included in the Quran.

The call for the deaths of unbelievers has become an issue even for some Muslims. In the new book, "Why We Left Islam," authors Susan Crimp and Joel Richardson profiled those who now would be under their old religion's sentence of death for abandoning Muhammad's teachings. One of those whose testimony is included in the book, Ali, wrote, "The Quran is full of verses that teach killing of unbelievers and how Allah would torture them after they die."

The offending student group hadith had been posted on a USC server as part of the MSA website, which now is defunct, the report said. Concerns had been raised by Rabbi Aron Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who approached university trustee Alan Casden, the Daily Trojan said. After a review by Nikias, he found the "passage cited is truly despicable . We did some investigations and have ordered the passage to be removed," the newspaper said.

The Muslim Student Union is the larger Muslim student group but is not associated with the MSA. Leaders declined Daily Trojan requests for an interview but issued a statement that Nikias' actions were unconscionable. "USC, as a place of higher education, has prided itself on academic freedom and freedom of speech . The administration's actions have gone behind the backs of their students and we have been left in the dark," the student group stated.

The head of the David Horowitz Freedom Center told the newspaper similar statements permeate Muslim Student Association websites around the nation. David Horowitz told the newspaper the MSA is "an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood." The call to kill Jews, he said, "may be part of the religious canon, but that doesn't make them less hateful."

Source




Australia: Third graders win mathematics awards



ARE you smarter than a third grader? Don't count on it. A national maths contest has proven Victoria has its share of baby brainiacs. Seven budding mathematicians rose to the top in this year's Educational Assessment Australia maths contest: Eddie Yao from Kew East Primary, Mingyi Wu from Tucker Rd Bentleigh Primary; Kelvin Sun from Parktone Primary; William Ruan from Serpell Primary; Laura Hung from Sunshine Christian School, Martin Huang from Glendal Primary and Morris Gu from Southwood Boys Grammar are Victoria's youngest whizzes.

Each will receive a medal for scoring 39 out of 40 on the written test. Kelvin Sun, 9, was shocked at the result. "I'm so surprised that I got that mark," he said. The New South Wales University's EAA program tests 1.7 million students a year across Australia and NZ.

Source

Notice something about the kids concerned? It's the usual Asian educational supremacy. And it's only because they work harder, right? So no white kids work hard? If you believe that you would believe anything. Asians are just BORN brighter at mathematics -- and lots else. If you can't cope with that, you've got a problem -- because it is reality. Australia is now about 10% Asian and is fortunate to have them





8 September, 2008

Madness in German academe again

Six weeks before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing, the German Professor of Sports History, ARND KRUEGER, from the University of Goettingen maintained at an academic conference that the 11 Israeli athletes and coaches who were murdered on September 5, 1972 at the Olympic Games in Munich had essentially committed suicide for the sake of Israel. Ilan Mor, the charge d'affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Germany, condemned Krueger's speech as the most abnoxious form of dehumanizing the State of Israel.

We, the German section of the international organization Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, SPME-Germany, strongly condemn Krueger's assertion. We express our sincere sympathy with the families of the 11 murdered Israeli athletes and coaches in Munich.

Promptly after becoming aware of Krueger's speech, SPME-Germany sent a strongly worded letter to the president of the University of Goettingen saying that this is not the first time Krueger has uttered anti-Israel views, and we urged him to take action against that.

Unfortunately our letter was only answered evasively. The Board of the University of Goettingen distanced itself from Krueger's assertions but nevertheless declared on its home page that is not willing to take any further actions, because a supposedly scientific malconduct cannot be proved (see: www.uni-goettingen.de).

We agree with the judgement of the Central Council of Jews in Germany calling this conduct of a renowned German university a "declaration of moral bankruptcy". If such a statement will find followers in Germany, then the day will not be too far on which ugly anti semitic paroles could be presented as scientific findings in our country. We will do our best to stop this development.

Source




U.N.-FUNDED SCHOOL HONORS INFAMOUS TERRORIST

Declared 'hero' led attack that murdered 36 civilians in Israel

A Palestinian Authority-allied university funded in part by the United Nations dedicated its graduation ceremony to one of the most infamous Palestinian terrorists, WND has learned. The Al Quds Open University dedicated the ceremony last weekend at a major campus in the West Bank city of Qalqiliya to the memory of female suicide bomber Dalal al-Mughrabi, who led an attack in March 1978 that killed a total of 36 Israelis.

According to a faculty member who helped lead the graduation, the master of ceremonies announced the year's graduation cycle was dedicated to the "hero" Mughrabi, who planned and led an attack in which she and 10 other Palestinians infiltrated Israel by sea, landed on a beach, killed an American photographer and then hijacked and blew up a crowded bus. Mughrabi long has been glorified as one of the most important "martyrs" in Palestinian society. Official PA institutions, such as girls' schools and police training camps, bear her name. Songs and poems in her honor are routinely broadcast on PA television and radio.

Israel had kept the remains of Mughrabi and the other terrorists in part so that Palestinian society would not make shrines of their burial places. But as part of a prisoner exchange deal with the Hezbollah terror group last month, Israel released Mughrabi's body and that of dozens of other Palestinians. In the controversial deal, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government also agreed to release Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar and four captured Lebanese guerrillas in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers.

Al Quds Open University functions like a community college and maintains campuses throughout the West Bank, with five additional centers in Gaza. The school's headquarters are in Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital. The university is funded by the PA and wealthy Palestinian donors as well as by the U.N. Development Program, or UNDP, the world body's global development network. Other contributors to the university include the French Agency for Development and the KFW Banking Group, a German development fund.

Several major U.S. charity funds, such as the Ford Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, contribute to the UNDP, but it could not immediately be determined whether those funds were used to donate to the Open University.

Source





7 September, 2008

Britain: White students 'avoid maths and science'

Thousands of high-flying white youngsters are giving up maths and science at 16 because they think they are not clever enough to succeed atA-Level, according to a report published today. The report reveals that white children who achieve A* and A grade passes at GCSE are far less likely than other ethnic groups to pursue the subjects to A-Level.

According to what is being billed as a "state of the nation" report on maths and science by The Royal Society, white youngsters are "known to develop the idea that success in mathematics comes from being naturally gifted". By contrast, Asian and Chinese youths, says the report, are more likely to believe that success comes from hard work.

It also warns that overall take-up of the subjects has fallen during the past decade. That means ministers are unlikely to reach targets they have set for qualified scientists and mathematicians to enable the UK to compete with other countries. "In chemistry, Pakistani students are 7.2 times more likely and Indian students 4.3 times more likely than white students with the same level of attainment at GCSE to progress toA-Level," the report says. "Bangladeshi, black and Chinese students are also more likely than white students with the same attainment to progress to A-Level. "A similar pattern can be seen in mathematics, with Chinese students being 4.7 times more likely to progress, Indian students 3.4 times more likely and Pakistani, Bangladeshi and black students also more likely to progress."

The report warns that - despite rises in the take-up of maths and science subjects in recent years - numbers are still well down on a decade ago. "Between 1996 and 2007, the proportions of 17-year-olds in each of the four UK nations taking chemistry, physics and mathematics have actually shrunk," it says. "In England, Northern Ireland and Wales no more than 6 per cent of 17-year-olds took A-Level physics in any one year. For chemistry, the figure was 7 per cent and for biology and mathematics it was 12 per cent."

Government attempts to reform the curriculum during the past 12 years to make the subjects more attractive have, the report adds, "had worryingly little impact on increasing the number of students taking maths and science in post-compulsory education". Those include rewriting the maths syllabus to make it more accessible - or "easier" as some critics would have it.

The report says that children's attitudes towards science become "less positive" at secondary school, with the lack of specialist teachers being cited as one reason pupils are put off the subject. "There is enduring concern that students do not find the science and mathematics they encounter at school as interesting as might be hoped. "Negative attitudes are linked to a view of the science curriculum in England as overly full, fact-laden and hard. The situation is worrying, given the needs of industry for science, technology, engineering and mathematical (STEM) skills, the Government's stated desire to increase the number of STEM graduates, and the need for more science and mathematics teachers." The Government, it says, wants at least 80 per cent of all pupils to take the equivalent of two science GCSE's. This figure has not been met since 2005.

Professor Michael Reiss, director of education at the Royal Society, said last night: "Science and mathematics education, particularly in England, has been assaulted by reform over the last 20 years. "Unless we break the cycle of politically motivated knee-jerk reactions and constant change, we are in danger of never giving reforms the time they need to bed in. "Therefore [we are] not getting to grips with what works and what doesn't."

A spokeswoman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "Recent exam results tell a different story and show that our reforms are having a positive effect. The number of young people taking maths and science A-Levels continues to increase and this year the number of young people taking maths A-Level was at its highest for a decade."

Source




Britain: Handwriting standards blamed as pupils ask for exam 'scribes'

Thousands of teenagers need "scribes" to help them write their A-level and GCSE papers because they are incapable of answering questions in longhand themselves, a study has revealed. The number of requests for "ghost writers" to help pupils do exams rose from 28,324 in 2005 to 40,215 last year, while the number of students asking to use a word processor or computer also soared by more than 50 per cent, to 21,713. Requests for practical assistance short of a "scribe", such as a teacher sitting in to help a pupil to write legibly, also increased.

Experts say more scripts than ever are illegible because the email and text generation are unable to write properly by hand. Teachers marking this summer's English, drama and citizenship GCSEs for the Edexcel exam board reported: "Some handwriting is a pleasure to read but an increasing minority is bordering on the illegible." They added: "Centres [where examinations are held] are asked to emphasise to candidates the importance of writing answers that are not only legible but coherent. Centres might wish to consider the use of scribes or word processors in more cases - especially for those candidates with known handwriting difficulties." In a report on this year's English exam, Edexcel added: "Centres should continue to stress to candidates the importance of clear handwriting which is not too small ... The actual quality of handwriting in some instances is such as to make responses virtually illegible."

Their concerns mirror those expressed by Scottish examiners, who have called for handwriting classes to be reintroduced because so many pupils cannot write longhand. They say teenagers who spend hours each week sending emails and text messages have lost the ability to work with pen and paper. As a result, a large number of Higher exams in English could not be marked because of illegible handwriting.

The latest report from exam assessors says "markers are increasingly concerned about handwriting that is difficult to read" and that dedicated classes should be held for "candidates whose handwriting is seriously weak or known to become so under pressure".

Nick Seaton, of the Campaign for Real Education, said yesterday: "This suggests to me that youngsters should be spending less time on computers and more on improving their handwriting skills. "Examinations are supposed to be a test of basic skills and, if they can't do the basics, they shouldn't be getting someone else to do them for them. Emails and text messaging have their place but not at the expense of basic skills."

The rise in requests for handwriting has prompted Ofqual, the new regulator of exams in England, to promise it will monitor the position. "The number of candidates approved for access arrangements has increased this year," it said. "This could be due to a greater awareness amongst exam officers in schools and colleges of what candidates are entitled to. As the regulator, we will closely monitor the situation to ensure that the system remains fair for all students." Exam boards pointed out that the figures related to the total number of scripts with which a pupil had asked for help - saying that a candidate might require help with more than one exam.

However, sources said the requests were only likely to be made in subjects which required detailed writing, such as English, history and citizenship, and it was unlikely that a single candidate would need help with more than three exams. To satisfy examiners that a request for a scribe is valid, a candidate must either have a physical disability, a sudden injury or be assessed by a qualified psychologist or specialist teacher. They are eligible for a scribe if they can prove they cannot write more than 10 words a minute.

Source





6 September, 2008

CAIR Gets Failing Grades at Running Ohio Charter Schools

The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) released their annual school report cards this week, and the results show that two taxpayer-financed Islamic charter schools operated by officials of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have failed miserably yet again. But protected by powerful political connections, including Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman, and apparently indifferent to their exploitation of the Somali children that comprise the vast majority of their students, the Islamic extremists running the operation appear to have no fear of losing their cash cows. In fact, Ohio educrats have renewed one school’s contract after five years of complete academic failure.

The two schools, International Academy and Westside Academy, are run by a group of local Islamic leaders, including CAIR national board vice chairman Ahmad Al-Akhras, CAIR-Columbus president and CAIR-Ohio board member Abukar Arman, and Islamic Society of Greater Columbus president and imam Mouhamed Tarazi (who serves as principal of one of the schools). At one time or another, all have served on the board of the local private Islamic school in Central Ohio, Sunrise Academy.

Beginning operations in 2002, International Academy has a long track record of failure. According to the school’s most recent state report card, the school only meets two of the 19 indicators measured (one of the two indicators it met was attendance). The performance index score of 73.9 fell well short of the 100 points required (of 120 total; the state median is 96.6), but since that was slightly more than the 72.2 scored the previous school year (2006-2007) the school received a “continuous improvement” designation. Only in the Orwellian world of union-controlled, taxpayer-financed public education does this performance rate a grade of C-, thanks to some grade inflation in this year’s report cards courtesy of the ODE.

That “continuous improvement” designation notwithstanding, since International Academy opened, it has never met the state’s required “adequate yearly progress” standard and has never met more than two of the state indicators. Looking at the past three years of academic performance data, we find in four of the seven tested areas, test scores declined last year from the previous year.

The second school, Westside Academy, appears to be following in its older brother’s failing footsteps. Their state report card shows that they met state standards in one area — attendance. Across all grade levels and subjects, less than 20 percent of their students rated proficient or better. In one subject area, 3rd grade math, the school achieved zero percent proficiency. Their performance index also dropped to 56.9 last school year (again, 100 of 120 points being the state requirement), putting them in the “academic watch” category.

No doubt, officials for both schools will place the blame on their students, claiming that since many of them speak English as a second language they are at a disadvantage. But in fact, ODE excluded testing results from students who had limited English proficiency. And the school curriculum itself continues to academically disadvantage the children. Instead of focusing their efforts on helping them improve their English skills, the language emphasis at these two schools is not on English, but instead, Arabic — a foreign language to Somalis. If there is one subject that both schools excel in, it is Islamic extremism.

More here




Is it Really 'Public' Education If Voters Get No Say?

At 9 a.m. Wednesday, the state Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that will shape the future of education in Florida. At issue are two constitutional amendment questions slated to go before voters in November. A lawyer for Florida's teachers union will argue that they should be removed from the ballot; the secretary of state's lawyer will ask the court to leave them in place, allowing voters to decide these questions. The court should let Floridians have their say.

The first question, Amendment 7, deals with religious discrimination. This amendment would make it illegal to exclude any person or organization from participating in a public program because of religion. It also would allow the state to continue operating programs under which religious organizations can receive funding as long as the purposes and primary effects of those programs are secular (as required by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution).

The second question, Amendment 9, would require at least 65 percent of school-district operating expenditures to be spent in the classroom rather than on administration. It also would allow legislators to create alternative education programs in addition to the constitutionally required public-school system (though it wouldn't create any new programs).

Judge John Cooper of Tallahassee's Circuit Court already approved both questions for inclusion on the November ballot, and opponents have asked the state Supreme Court to reverse his decision. It would be a surprise if the court were to oblige them. Cooper's written opinion was short and simple, demonstrating that the questions were legally added to the ballot, and that their wording is not misleading as plaintiffs claimed.

But although the legal details of the case seem almost trivial, the principles at stake, especially on Amendment 9, are momentous. This question would decide whether Florida children have access to the best system of education legislators can devise, or if they will be forced to make do with the status quo. And the status quo is nothing to cheer about.

In the early grades, Florida students have made some promising academic headway in recent years, but SAT scores are down from a decade ago -- a decline that can't be fully explained by changes in the number of students taking the test. Florida's graduation rate places it 42nd in the nation, even though it is in the middle of the pack when it comes to total spending per pupil ($12,000 last year).

But, ever since the Florida Supreme Court's 2006 decision in Bush v. Holmes, legislators have been forbidden to offer families any new alternatives to the traditional public-school system. If Amendment 9 does make it onto the ballot, and voters approve it, lawmakers would once again be free to design new educational options to serve Florida families. The amendment wouldn't create a single new program; it would just permit legislators to create such programs if they wished to do so.

And that's what's so remarkable about the case before the court on Wednesday. The Florida Education Association, the union representing the state's public-school employees, has sued to prevent Floridians from even having a say on the future of public education. Would it even make sense to keep calling it a "public" school system if voters are given no voice in the matter?

It's no surprise that the union opposes this amendment, because it opposes any education program that would provide families with an alternative to the schools employing its members. That's only natural. And it's no surprise that school-choice supporters are in favor of the amendment, because many of their proposals will be impossible without it. But, in the end, it is the people's education system, and the people should have a right to decide whether or not they want alternatives to it.

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5 September, 2008

More indoctrination for British kids

New pupils enrolling in secondary schools this week will be required by law to stay in education until the age of 17, the government said on Wednesday. Raising the minimum leaving age from 16 to 17 is just one of several initiatives taking place in schools this term. Teenagers heading back to school after the summer holidays will also be among the first to study new diplomas in engineering, construction, IT, media and health. The syllabus for 11 to 14-year-olds will also see significant changes, as will well as changes to GCSE and A level exams, with the latter getting a new A* grade for the top achieving pupils.

The steps are part of the government's drive to keep youngsters in education or training till the age of 18 -- a move which will become enforceable in 2015. Ministers estimate around 200,000 youngsters between 16 and 18 are not in education or training.

"Education is all about opportunities -- a good education opens doors. It is the single best way for anyone, regardless of background, to do well and to gain the skills they need to succeed at whatever they want to do," said Schools Secretary Ed Balls. "I want to see a situation where every single young person has a range of interesting, exciting and challenging options ahead of them at every stage of their education, so that they never feel tempted to drop out or give up," he said. "This year will see some of the biggest steps towards this goal yet."

Meanwhile, a slew of computer glitches has caused more embarrassment for ministers after it emerged that around 150,000 17-year-old pupils will not receive their maintenance grants. The allowances, worth up to 30 pounds a week, were held up when the company responsible for processing applications, developed software problems.

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Sociology and political science have fouled their nests

Lots of opinion but little content

Key philanthropic and government programs offering grants for Ph.D. students appear to be excluding proposals for graduate students in sociology and political science, while favoring proposals from those in history, anthropology and a range of relatively small disciplines, such as art history and ethnomusicology, according to data released Friday.

The analysis was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association and focused on programs to support field research or international research. The issue is particularly important because the analysis comes at a time that many political scientists are urging the discipline to push those who focus on American government and politics to take a broader view, and to study other parts of the world as well. According to those who discussed the issue at the APSA meeting, a variety of factors - including biases and habits within disciplines - are hurting the "explanatory social sciences," in ways that are damaging to those fields and their graduate students.

Ronald Herring, a professor of government at Cornell University who focuses on South Asia, said that he first became concerned about the issue when he was on a board looking at fellowships for the American Institute of Indian Studies, which is the largest funder of support for graduate work in India. The year he looked at the situation, the success rates for political scientists and sociologists seeking grants were both zero. Nearly three-quarters of proposals in art history were accepted, two-thirds for history, and nearly half for anthropology. While the situation has since improved, Herring said he wondered why "some social sciences were being weeded out of area studies."

Asked Herring: "Are we entering a C.P. Snow world of `two cultures'?" While Snow lamented the lack of understanding between those in the humanities and the sciences, the two cultures seen as divided in the research presented Friday are the social sciences that are perhaps closer to the hard sciences and those that closer to the humanities. (Definitions are a bit mushy here, as some fields, such as history, were described at the session as a humanities-leaning social science while many historians view themselves as in the humanities.)

Whatever the causes, data presented suggest that political scientists and sociologists are at a distinct disadvantage in seeking certain kinds of graduate support. The data were presented by Rina Agarwala, assistant professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and Emmanuel Teitelbaum, assistant professor of political science at George Washington University. In terms of raw numbers, they left little doubt that some social science fields get more than others. For the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, for example, 31 percent of grants went to those doing work in history, 30 percent to anthropology, and 16 percent to regional studies, languages and literature. Political scientists gained only 5 percent of the awards - less than the 6 percent awarded to arts and ethnomusicology.

Relatively similar breakdowns were found in grants awarded by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council for similar programs supporting dissertation work abroad. Some of the data suggest that the trends are getting worse. For example, the Social Science Research Council's International Dissertation Research Fellowships, 10 years ago, were supporting 15 political scientists and 5 sociologists a year. Now each field gets two or three, a fraction of those going to anthropology and history.

The drops don't reflect a lack of applications, but lower success rates. Over the last 10 years of data for the SSRC program, anthropology's success rate had one year at 4 percent, but was otherwise between 5 and 8 percent. Since 2000, political science has been between 2 and 4 percent. Sociology, which used to be close to anthropology in success rates, has fallen to the 2 and 4 percent levels in recent years.

Notably, these shifts took place at a time that the composition of the selection committees for the fellowships was also changing, the Agarwala-Teitelbaum study found. In recent years, the committee has had one or two each from political science and sociology, while three or four each from history and anthropology. While history has been consistently high, political science used to be its equal, and anthropology's numbers have been growing on the panel as political science's have been shrinking.

At the National Science Foundation, the success rate for dissertation grant proposals for political science (20 percent) lags those for other fields, such as economics (37 percent), law and social sciences (53 percent) and cultural anthropology (27 percent, but with a larger grant total and many more grants given out than in other disciplines). But as Brian Humes, a program officer for the NSF who stressed he was sharing his opinions and not official agency policy, explained, separate panels are used to evaluate proposals, so the judges have plenty of knowledge of the various fields.

Humes said that certain problems tend to hold back political science proposals. He said that many of the proposals "don't provide a justification" for the funds. For instance, grad students will talk about their dissertation as a whole and not relate the grant's proposed trip to that work. Many other proposals, he said, don't suggest sufficient familiarity with the research challenges. In one case, an applicant had an interesting project for which he wanted to conduct research in French military archives, but the applicant admitted that he didn't know French. "When you add that you don't know French, you're cooked," said Humes.

Stathis Kalyvas, a professor of political science at Yale University, said that he sees the data pointing in part to ambivalence in political science about the value of field work. Many political scientists, he said, don't trust it at all and don't include it in their work. Others see "field work as an afterthought," and don't build it into their research agenda, but do field work to add "local color" to their work. This kind of approach isn't worth funding, he said.

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4 September, 2008

Mixed-ability teaching fails to make the grade in Britain

The 750,000 teenagers who collected their GCSE results yesterday are the first cohort of pupils whose entire schooling has taken place under Labour. They have plenty to be proud of. The number of top grades has risen more sharply than at any time in the past 20 years.

Inevitably, this will prompt complaints about grade inflation (so demoralising for pupils who have worked hard for their As) and the growing tendency for target-driven schools to steer children towards "easier" subjects to punch the right buttons for their Whitehall masters. In fact, it is not quite as simple as that.

Entries in Physics, Chemistry and Biology, for example, increased significantly this summer, although the numbers taking other "hard" subjects such as French, German and History fell.

There remains a worrying tendency for too many subjects to be taken - 10 appearing to be a sort of informal minimum - adding weight to the calls for a smaller number of core GCSEs including English, Maths, a science and a language to become the norm, allowing more time in the curriculum for wider-ranging, less exam-driven study.

But it is at the other end of the ability range that Labour's education policies have proved such a crushing disappointment. A quarter of pupils left secondary school this year without a single decent GCSE - that is, a Grade C or above.

Over the Labour decade, two million pupils have been let down in this way, with many of them emerging from 11 years of education unable even to read or write properly. This is Labour's core constituency; most of those being failed by the system are from poorer homes.

And Labour's spiteful decision to scrap the assisted places scheme kicked away the ladder of opportunity for bright working class children once provided by grammar schools; too many state comprehensives are showing themselves incapable of filling the gap.

This exposes weaknesses in teaching methods that go far beyond the mechanics of testing and examinations. The teaching establishment, shaped by a training structure that remains in thrall to clapped out liberal orthodoxies - to such an extent that most jobs are still advertised in The Guardian - refused to oblige.

Eleven years on, fewer than half of classes are set. In the remainder, mixed-ability teaching - which proceeds at the pace of the slowest - reigns. It is this enervating educational mindset that an incoming Conservative government will have to change.

Tory policies to give schools real control of their affairs - including admissions and staff recruitment - will in time break this ruinous consensus. But it will require immense political will. Just ask Tony Blair.

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Four-day week for French schools

Ten million French children returned to the classroom yesterday to find their lessons crammed into a four-day week - a revolution that delighted families but drew criticism from experts. In a scheme decreed by President Sarkozy, all primary and junior secondary children are being spared the unpopular tradition of Saturday morning classes. Since most schools are closed on Wednesdays, the majority will enjoy three days off school every week.

No other Europeans, except for a small minority in Germany and Luxembourg, follow a four-day week. French Lycee (senior secondary) pupils continue with Saturday classes. Children will still spend as much time in the classroom as the European average, but educators say that their learning faces disruption by being squeezed into two blocks of two days. "They took no account of scientific research," said Francois Testu, a lecturer at Tours university and the author of Life Rhythms and School Rhythms. "Children need a rhythm and the four-day week creates breaks. It is doubtless a decision that pleases parents but they do not realise the damaging consequences," he said.

The new system was cheered by parents and teachers when it was announced a year ago in fulfilment of an electoral promise by Mr Sarkozy. Saturday school had long been cursed by families who have to rise early to escort children and forgo weekend trips. It meant that divorced parents with weekend visits spent less time with their offspring. Teachers also disliked the two-hour Saturday session, which ate into weekends: quite a few played truant themselves.

Xavier Darcos, the Education Minister, originally wanted schools to make up time with classes on Wednesday mornings but most local councils strongly resisted the idea, which would have required them to spend more on transport and catering. Wednesdays are traditionally for sports and recreation. The fractured routine, unique in Europe, dates back to the days when Thursdays were devoted to Catholic instruction and children attended school all day on Saturday.

The teachers' unions, which are at war with the Government over staff cuts and other reforms, are predicting chaos because they must now also give new classes to underperforming children.

Mr Darcos, whose ministry employs more than a million people, ordered the extra classes to remedy the failure of about 20 per cent of primary school leavers to meet minimum literacy standards.

The unions, which are heavily left wing, and the Socialist opposition say that the end of Saturday classes will hurt poorer children because they will be left to their own devices rather than engaging in constructive recreation. "This free time will enable the children of the privileged to perfect their education, but what about the others?" asked Jack Lang, a veteran Socialist Education Minister. "One of the effects will be to widen the social and cultural gulf between children."

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3 September, 2008

Teachers Union: Decriminalize Teacher-Student Sex

(Tacoma, Washington) The Washington Education Association, the state's largest teachers' union, has filed a friend of the court brief in a case before the state Court of Appeals asserting that teachers who have sex with 18-year-old students shouldn't be prosecuted for felonies.

The specific case involved Hoquiam High School choir teacher Matthew Hirschfelder, 33, who is accused of doing the nasty with an 18-year-old student. Hirschfelder's attorney, Rob Hill, says the case should be dismissed because the student was not a minor. The teachers' union supports the position.

It appears that the union doesn't recognize risks to students. Even at 18 years old, a student is subservient to the authority of the teacher.



2 September, 2008

Britain: `Boring and mindless' GCSEs scrapped by independent schools for tougher courses

The GCSE [Middle school exam] is no longer considered tough enough by leading independent schools, which release their results today. Nine of the top ten in The Times independent schools league table offer the International GCSE (IGCSE), which is considered more rigorous, partly because it does not include coursework. Many other independent schools use the IGCSE in at least one subject. The qualification is not recognised by the Government, so such schools fare badly in official statistics, arguably making them less accurate than those in The Times.

One in five independent schools offers some subjects in IGCSE. They include Wycombe Abbey, a girls' school in Buckinghamshire, which came top with more than 98 per cent of examinations marked at A* to B grades. It uses the IGCSE for science and mathematics.

Cynthia Hall, the headmistress, said: "There was a feeling that, with GCSE maths, the coursework was really quite a waste of time. A lot of the material was not very stimulating - it was really rather dull for bright girls."

Mrs Hall said that the IGCSE in science was factually more rigorous but needed to be balanced with the larger amount of laboratory work offered in the GCSE. Andrew Halls, Head Master of King's College School in Wimbledon, southwest London, said that GCSEs were "no longer good enough" as they offered boring syllabuses and mindless coursework. He said: "We are increasingly moving away from standard GCSEs, with a sense of sadness. Frankly, they are no longer good enough. There are so many top grades that they're not proving fit for purpose."

The school for boys uses the IGCSE in maths and the three sciences and is likely to introduce it for more subjects. Guildford High School introduced the IGCSE this year for maths. Fiona Bolton, headmistress of the girls' school in Surrey, said: "It's the first year we've done the IGCSE and we chose it because it is significantly more challenging than GCSE. "It's a better preparation for A level. The girls weren't being challenged enough by the normal GCSE."

Girls dominated the league table of this year's independent school GCSE results, making up three quarters of the top 20. More boys' schools would have come higher were it not for a boycott of tables by 56 head teachers, who refused to release results. They included Eton, Radley and Winchester colleges and St Paul's School, southwest London.

St Paul's published some GCSE results on its website, saying that this year's pupils had broken all records. It used IGCSEs in four subjects and achieved 100 per cent A*s in chemistry and Italian and 98 per cent A*s in maths, but did not provide results for any other subjects.

Boys at Manchester Grammar School, which also declined to publish its results, attained 85 per cent A* and A grades at GCSE, according to the school's website. At Eastbourne College, which takes girls and boys, 64 per cent of exams were marked A* or A. Results from 552 schools were released through the Independent Schools Council.

They showed that 28.5 per cent of GCSE entries were marked A*, nearly two percentage points higher than last year and the fourth consecutive annual rise. Almost three fifths of independent schools' GCSE papers were graded A or A*, compared with one fifth of pupils nationally.

Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas, the chairwoman of the council, said: "These results show that ISC schools continue to deliver high quality teaching and learning. This is a time to focus on celebrating the success of all the individuals concerned." Candidates took an average 9.6 subjects each. More than 95 per cent achieved grades A* to C, compared with two thirds of pupils nationally.

This year almost half the 585 independent schools had at least one entrant for an IGCSE, compared with a third last year. Three schools offered it exclusively.

Source




Harold Ford says Obama Should Focus On Education Reform

Barack Obama made history this week by becoming the first black man to claim the presidential nomination of a major American political party. He almost certainly won't be the last. Another rising -- and arguably more substantive -- star is former Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford Jr. Mr. Ford is just 38 years old. But he's been thinking deeply about politics for a long time. In 2002, when he was a mere 32, the Tennessee congressman challenged his party in the House of Representatives to elect him leader, saying that Democrats were "O and five" in congressional elections because they needed to move to the political center.

He lost that race to California's Nancy Pelosi. But Mr. Ford continued to push his party to embrace a more muscular foreign policy (he voted for the Iraq war in 2003) and not shy away from entitlement reform (he was willing to talk to President George W. Bush about Social Security reform in 2005). In 2006, after losing a bid for the Senate, he was tapped to be chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. This was a post Bill Clinton once used to credential himself as a "Third Way," moderate Democrat on his way to the White House.

Mr. Ford is optimistic about the party's chances to control the House, Senate and presidency come January. But he says the stakes for Democrats will only be higher if they're in charge: "If we don't produce, it is likely we won't hold the majorities in both places, and it could hurt our president's chances at re-election."

When I sat down with Mr. Ford at The Wall Street Journal's offices recently, I looked forward to hearing what he would say about the direction of his party and its liberal presidential nominee. I wanted to know what he thought of the party's leftward tilt on taxes, trade, energy and education. Mr. Ford's answer: that his party was able to win control of Congress two years ago by running moderate Democratic candidates in Republican districts. That, he says, is what it needs to do to stay in power.

"If you look at the congressmen who won in 2006, the 'red to blue' as they call them as a group, not those who may have succeeded Democrats and are holding safe Democratic seats," Mr. Ford said, "and you consider the special election races this year, in the last couple of months in Mississippi, Louisiana and Illinois, what you will see clearly in the ascendancy in the party is a moderate, mainstream, Democratic approach to taxes, to fiscal policy, to spending as a whole, to national security, foreign policy. "I would contend that the Democratic majority is due to a moderate, mainstream, conservative philosophy -- conservative, a lot of people interpret that the wrong way, but just a moderate mainstream philosophy in the party being on the ascendancy, as opposed to [a philosophy that is] sometimes further to the left, some may call liberal."

On the numbers, I couldn't disagree. House Speaker Pelosi owes her gavel today to Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina, and about a score of other conservative or moderate Democrats who won by promising voters a certain level of independence from the Democratic Party's liberal wing. (Mr. Shuler won his seat in 2006 by telling voters he wouldn't "automatically" vote for Mrs. Pelosi to be speaker if elected.) But I'm skeptical of a conservative ascendancy in a party that promises tax hikes for the "wealthy," balks at expanding domestic oil drilling, and opposes nearly every form of school choice that would give poor children a way out of failing public schools. So I press Mr. Ford on the apparent divergence between the DLC's moderate agenda and that of Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party.

"I don't think there are as many differences as people may think," he said pointing to Mr. Obama's recent proposal, sketched out on these pages, to return the top capital gains tax rate to 20% -- a rate almost a third lower than the rate set by Ronald Reagan in the 1986 tax reform. He also cites Mr. Obama's support for teacher merit pay. "How we build an innovative agenda is what I am most concerned about," Mr. Ford said. "There are some slight differences . . . There is a real difference on trade. I want to be clear, we don't make ourselves more competitive by closing our borders."

But, he said of Mr. Obama on education, "I think he is open-minded. Let me put it this way, he hasn't come out in opposition [to school choice]. He is a pragmatist. . . . He's not looking to antagonize anyone. But he's not afraid to stir things up." Education is one of Mr. Ford's top priorities. That's because be sees fixing the public-school system as something that is essential for a dynamic, competitive economy -- and as the means for creating opportunities for millions of kids. Education is also an issue he is passionate about because, in part, he launched his political career from inside a kindergarten classroom.

In 1996, Mr. Ford ran for a seat in Congress that his father was vacating. But he soon found that being a 26-year-old scion of a political family had its disadvantages. He was attacked on talk radio for his lack of experience, and he had trouble lining up speaking engagements until finally two women lined up graduations for him at which to speak. "I spoke to 32 kindergarten graduations. True story," he says now with a laugh. "It was a weird thing, because these kids couldn't vote. I didn't know how I was helping myself. But I didn't have anywhere else to be, so I spoke at the graduations. . . ."

"Whatever works, in various communities, is what I support," Mr. Ford told me. "On the education front, if we are unwilling to take head on the issues that are facing our schools, meaning teacher quality, meaning classroom size, meaning accountability, then we kid ourselves if we think we're going to solve these problems. "We adopt a one-size-fits-all [model] in education, and it doesn't work. . . . I love charters, the charter school idea. Why? Because in some areas it actually works and it works well."

In Congress, Mr. Ford supported creating a school-voucher program in Washington, D.C., that is now being used by hundreds of students to get a better education. It enjoys the support of the city's Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty. But Democrats in Congress threatened to kill the program this year by starving it of federal funds. So I asked Mr. Ford if the program will be crushed by Democrats in the near future. "It probably won't be," he said. "Don't get me wrong, they've had to fight to keep it alive. They had to go up against their own member of Congress, their own delegate, who is opposed to it. The mayor wants it, and I view the mayor of D.C. almost like a governor because it is essentially a state."

Mr. Ford stresses that education is among "the types of things Democrats are going to have to focus on . . . Not because we want to win elections, but because the country needs it. "Without a serious, broad-based competitiveness plan for the country that organizes around energy and education, the country will continue to falter. The next 10 to 15 years, we'll be fine. But if you look past that 15 year horizon, we cannot expect to be the No. 1 center for innovation, for technology, for job creation, the No. 1 economic center, indefinitely."

What Mr. Ford sees in Mr. Obama is the potential to break the logjam on education and other issues that has prevented fundamental reforms from passing in Washington. "I think the country could invest in him and may be willing to align itself with his vision, if he has a broad enough vision to change the country 10, 20, 30 years down the road. "And those changes will obviously have to involve education, energy . . . entitlement reform, and will involve, frankly, thinking about these things outside of a Democrat/Republican box. . . . I think he may have the 12-to-18 month window [to pass real reforms]. He's gotta put some runs up on the board for people to say, 'I'm going to stick with him. I'm staying with him.'"

What's his advice for Mr. Obama? "Be bold, be daring and be big. Be realistic. . . . Lay out where you want to take us and say 'Here's why I believe we need to do this.'" Moving forward, he said, "We got the majority, the question now is can we govern. And to govern, we're going to have to realize that that mainstream, moderate, ascendancy in the party has got to be reflected in the kind of priorities that we set."

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1 September, 2008

Britain: Value of gaining a degree plummets

One-third of graduates are receiving no financial benefit from their degree as young people drawn in by Labour's mass expansion of universities see the value of studying decline for the first time. A study has identified a widening gulf between the highest-paid graduates, whose degrees have brought them soaring returns over the past decade, and those at the lower end.

Among male graduates, 33.2% end up in nongraduate jobs five years after leaving university, from 21.7% in 1992. The proportions for women are similar. These graduates now earn 40% less than if they had found a job where a degree was necessary. In 2001, before the market was swamped by university-educated applicants, those who had to settle for lower-paid jobs were only 32% worse off. The worst affected were from the former polytechnics and other new universities which had been encouraged to expand under Labour.

"This is the first real sign the tide is turning," said Francis Green, professor of economics at Kent University, who led the research. "If you are coming into university with not very good qualifications and do an arts degree at a low-ranked university, you are not really doing yourself any favours."

Official data, to be published in next month's Sunday Times University Guide, show there are many institutions where more than 40% of those leaving do not find degree-level jobs. The lowest-ranked include the Welsh universities Aberystwyth, Swansea and Lampeter as well as the former polytechnics Derby, Plymouth and Thames Valley. Lancaster, where 42.7% of graduates are in jobs below degree level six months after university, is the lowest ranked of the longer established institutions.

Many are now questioning whether it was worth going to university. They include Vanessa and Olivia Flaxman from west London, unemployed graduates of the University of the West of England in Bristol. "I was never interested in going to uni," said Vanessa, 25, who graduated this year with a 2.1 degree in business studies and a debt of about $40,000. "But you are under the impression that if you have a degree you're really employable."

Olivia, 27, added: "I didn't see it [university] could be massively useful, but my tutor said, `You've kind of got to go, so you may as well pick something that vaguely interests you'." Labour has expanded university education from 32% of school leavers in 1997 to about 43% now. It justifies tuition fees of more than o3,000 a year by claiming that an average graduate could expect to earn o120,000 extra in a career.

Some employers are now recognising that potential high-flyers may decide not to study for a degree because they are worried about running up debts. The management academy programme set up by HSBC, Britain's biggest bank, is targeted at school leavers with A-levels and management potential. Its first 38 trainees are about to move into junior executive jobs, complementing the bank's 230 graduate trainees. "The programme is targeted mainly at those who made a decision not to go to university because of the debts they would incur," said John Morewood, senior graduate recruitment manager.

Signs have also emerged that the job market for graduates is slowing. Allied Irish Bank has told its recruits who were offered jobs before they left university this summer, that the vacancies are no longer available, while Citigroup is cutting its graduate recruitment programme by 5%.

Vacancies for students graduating this year grew by 11.7% over 2007, but this is set to stall. Carl Gilleard, chief executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters, said he did not expect a fall in the jobs on offer at this autumn's "milk round" recruitment fair, but added: "I suspect the boom is over."

Defenders of university expansion point out that despite the worries over debt and the financial payback to be expected from a degree, applications from students are still growing strongly. Bill Rammell, the universities minister, said there were strong advantages to expanding higher education. "Having a workforce with graduate level skills has never been more important to economic success," he said. "There are also nonfinancial benefits for graduates, who tend to have better jobs and healthier lifestyles, be more involved in their children's education and be more tolerant and active citizens."

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Australian mathematics and science teachers to get university tuition fee relief

A move in the right direction but it does nothing to deal with the major problem that is keeping men out of primary teaching: Fear of false child abuse accusations

Mathematics and science graduates who choose careers in primary teaching will have their HECS repayments halved under new government initiatives to raise numeracy standards in schools. Graduates who take up primary school teaching positions, bringing their specialist expertise, will now be eligible for a 50 per cent refund on their HECS-HELP repayments for up to five years, Education Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced yesterday. This would amount to an individual benefit of up to $1500 a year for five years.

The HECS exemption marks an extension of the Government's existing $625.8 million package of incentives to lift the number of maths and science students and graduates entering teaching at primary schools. The initiative is in response to alarming figures revealed in the preliminary National Report on Schooling in Australia for 2007, which indicated that while 93.2 per cent of year 3 students achieve numeracy benchmarks, this declines over the ensuing primary years. By Year 5 the percentage of students meeting numeracy benchmarks falls to 89 per cent and by Year 7 it is 80.2 per cent.

The National Numeracy Review, released in July, concluded that systematic teaching of numeracy in the early years of schooling, in maths lessons and across the wider curriculum, was essential if these trends were to be reversed. The measure builds on the Government's investment of $40.2 million in 29 literacy and numeracy pilot projects in schools across Australia. "We must act urgently to improve our children's performance in maths and encourage those with aptitude to go on to study it," Ms Gillard said. "Literacy and numeracy in the primary years are crucially important to ensuring all students participate in education and make a positive transition to work and learning in adult life. "Students who do not achieve the minimum standards in literacy and numeracy are least likely to stay on through secondary school or to end up in further study and employment."

Already from January 1 next year, new students in maths and science will have their HECS contributions reduced. For a new full-time student, this could mean a reduction from $7412 to $4162 in 2009, at a Government cost of about $562.2 million over four years.

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