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31 July, 2006
RISE IN TRUANCY TO BE WELCOMED?
Press release below:
The Libertarian Alliance, Britain's most radical free market and civil liberties policy institute, today welcomes the rise in truancy rates announced in a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
According to Libertarian Alliance Director, Dr Sean Gabb: "State schooling is an instrument of ruling class control. It is a means by which ideologies of obedience are imposed on the young. "State schools have always encouraged intellectual passivity and trust in the authorities. In the past generation, they have begun also to celebrate illiteracy, innumeracy and a general ignorance of the world. Add to this endemic bullying and temptations to unwise experimenting with sex and recreational drugs, and we have in state schooling a comprehensive absence of what used to be meant by education.
"Rising truancy levels are to be welcomed. They show that increasing numbers of the young are withdrawing from the process of mass brainwashing. The young may not yet be expressing positive discontent with the corporatist police state New Labour and the Conservatives have made for us. But they are beginning to vote with their feet.
"While the Libertarian Alliance does not encourage breaches of the criminal law, even if the law happens to be pointless or malevolent, we do look forward to a time when state schooling will be as dead an institution as the workhouse and the debtor's prison."
Smearing education choice
This month, papers all around America reported that according to the U.S. Department of Education, "children in public schools generally performed as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools." The New York Times put the study on its front page, along with a quote from teachers' union president Reg Weaver, who claimed it showed "public schools were doing an outstanding job." Please.
Most public schools are far from outstanding. America's government schools have rigid one-size-fits-all rules that reward mediocrity. Despite raising per-student spending to more than $10,000 (at least $200,000 per classroom!), test scores have stayed flat. On international tests, Americans now lag behind students from less developed nations like Poland and Korea that spend a fraction as much money on education.
The people who run the international tests told us, "the biggest predictor of student success is choice." Nations that "attach the money to the kids" and thereby allow parents to choose between different public and private schools have higher test scores. This should be no surprise; competition makes us better.
It's true in America, too, as we know from the few tiny choice experiments that have squeaked past the restrictions of the unions and the education bureaucrats. There are now eight studies from some of the places where choice has been tried. All show that when parents are given choices, kids' performance improves. But those studies didn't make the front page of The Times.
Why? Were they inferior to the new study? Not at all. Many were the best kind of controlled studies -- they followed students who were assigned by lottery to get a ticket out of the regular public schools. That gave the researchers two nearly identical populations to compare. Again and again, kids who won the lottery did better than those who were stuck in the standard government schools.
Then why did the new study conclude that public schools performed as well? The researchers tortured the data. It seems the private school kids actually scored higher on the tests, but then the researchers "dug deeper." They "put test scores into context" by adjusting for "race, ethnicity, income and parents' educational backgrounds to make the comparisons more meaningful."
Maybe it's unfair to call that "torturing the data." Such regression analysis is a valid statistical tool. But it's prone to researcher bias. Statistical hocus-pocus is not the best way to compare schools. "Ideally, to ascertain the difference between the two types of schools, an experiment would be conducted in which students are assigned (by an appropriate random mechanism) to either public or private schools." That quote, believe it or not, is from the study. But the ever-scrupulous journalists at The Times didn't find that "fit to print."
In any case, it's telling that they put so much emphasis on 4th and 8th grade tests. That's just the beginning of a student's education. American 4th graders do pretty well in international competitions. It's by 12th grade that Americans are so far behind. The longer they spend in America's bureaucratic schools, the worse they do. I'd like to see The Times publish results of 12th grade comparisons, but I won't hold my breath.
Why are the mainstream media so eager to defend a unionized government monopoly? Maybe The Times gave the "adjusted" test data (and an earlier version of it published in January) so much play partly because of the editors' dislike of "conservative Christian" schools (which did poorly in the study) and the Bush administration (which has talked about bringing market competition to education). But I suspect the biggest reason is that the editors just don't like capitalism and free markets.
Source
Lost literary heritage
Excerpt from an article by Imre Salusinszky that appeared in "The Australian" on July 29, 2006
The recent experiment perpetrated by The Australian, in which a chapter of Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm was submitted to 10 publishers and agents and rejected by all of them, tells us little if anything about literary genius, or about some purported decline in modern civilisation that means genius is no longer recognised.
It tells us something that is both more mundane and more interesting, which is that young commissioning editors in Australian publishing houses - those who did not simply bin Eye of the Cyclone after a glance but offered Wraith Picket remedial writing advice - have not read Eye of the Storm or sufficient Patrick White to recognise his style.
Have a look at a range of school and university curriculums across Australia and it is easy to see why. In the Victorian Certificate of Education, for example, students of English are presented with a range of perfectly worthy contemporary Australian texts but study no classic Australian literature, apart from a few Henry Lawson stories.
Meanwhile, in universities you will find plenty more contemporary Australian texts, this time grouped. explicitly according to the organising categories of cultural studies: race, gender, sexuality and class. What you won't find are courses with boring titles such as "19th-century Australian fiction" in which the organising feature is canonical; that is, these are important writers with whom any Australian student of literature should be familiar.
In a sense, we have returned to the situation of 30 years ago. When I was stumbling around the corridors of the University of Melbourne stoned out of my gourd in the 1970s, Australian literature was considered a minor offshoot that could be studied only around the fringes of the core courses in English (British) literature. The situation was not quite as bad everywhere, but neither was it good. All this changed in the late '70s thanks to the activism of a group of energetic young academics who formed the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. For a while, Marcus Clarke, Henry Handel Richardson, Shaw Nielsen and, yes, Patrick White loomed large in the window of Australian undergraduates.
But who was to know what a narrow window it would turn out to be? The study of classic Australian literature in universities thrived only during a brief interval - say 1975-90 - sandwiched between cultural snobbery (no Australian belongs in the canon) on one side and cultural studies (there is no canon) on the other. Unless the readers of the publishing firms caught out by The Australian were educated in that interval, I can easily imagine they would not have read The Eye of the Storm or much White.
Responding to a complaint by John Howard that the teaching of history in our schools has degenerated into a "stew of fragmented themes and issues", federal Education Minister Julie Bishop has convened a history summit to meet in Canberra next month. I would suggest that the teaching of literature has degenerated into the same kind of stew, partly courtesy of cultural studies, and that a national strategy to address that situation (with a special emphasis on the teaching of Australian literature in schools and universities) is long overdue.
Cultural studies is a perfectly legitimate area of study but one that should come after, not before, an immersion in literary works studied for their own sakes as imaginative structures. Proceeding in that order, students can make their own educated investigations into the ways that literature, along with other forms of symbolic expression, reflects cultural values. Taken in the wrong order, however, categories such as gender and class themselves become canonical, and education narrows into indoctrination.
As former NSW premier Bob Carr has argued in connection with the study of history, the study of literature, too, is a vocational necessity in an information economy where the ability to organise arid express complicated ideas is at a premium.
While I am a non-believer at the church of "national identity" and the cultural protectionism based on it, I certainly believe there are such things as cultural traditions. Unlike an identity, which cannot lead to a liberal education, a tradition is inseparably a part of all that comes before it and exists alongside it.
Just as Howard and Bishop have asserted that the study of Australian history requires a sound understanding of European history at least as far back as the Enlightenment, so the proper study of Australian literature requires a grounding in European literature as far back as Shakespeare. Bring on the literature summit!
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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30 July, 2006
American diploma mill endorsed by British High Court!
The celebrity hypnotist Paul McKenna won his libel battle yesterday over a newspaper claim that he had bought a fake doctorate from an American university. The ruling in the High Court followed a trial over articles in the Daily Mirror that he claimed had portrayed him as a fraudster and made him "a laughing stock". He was not in court for the ruling by Mr Justice Eady, who will assess damages in October.
McKenna, 42, whose self-help hypnotherapy business has a turnover of 2.5 million pounds a year, said that he was devastated when the columnist Victor Lewis-Smith alleged that he had bought a "bogus" PhD from La Salle University in Louisiana for 2,615 pounds. Under the headline "It's a load of doc and bull", Mr Lewis-Smith wrote: "I discovered that anyone could be fully doctored by Lasalle within months (no previous qualifications needed), just so long as they could answer the following question correctly: `Do you have $2,615, sir?'." The newspaper's publisher, MGN, which denied libel and pleaded justification, called evidence from Mr Lewis-Smith's co-writer, Paul Sparks, who said he was told by the university that he could obtain a doctorate for that fee within a matter of months and without undertaking any formal course.
The judge, who heard the case without a jury, said that the newspaper had not proved that the sting of the words complained of was substantially true. McKenna was awarded his costs, estimated at 300,000 pounds, and the judge ordered the newspaper to pay an interim amount of 75,000 pounds. Marcus Partington, head of MGN's legal department, said: "We are dismayed about the judgment."
Source
School integration that happens naturally offers real promise for furthering understanding
Unlike "Busing"
Tamia, Farhan, Isabella, Giovanni, Shebob. These are some of the names that my son, Zakir, has rattled off to me over the course of the last school year. He graduated from kindergarten in June, and I will remember his first year of school wistfully. Every morning since September, we've raced out of the house to join the parade of parents and children trekking to P.S. 150. Pulling their book-laden bags on wheels or toting them on their backs, boys and girls, big and small, filled the sidewalks of my Sunnyside, Queens, neighborhood. Mothers with infants in strollers trudged alongside the grade-school members of their families. Some kids rode their dad's shoulders.
Waiting for the doors to open each morning, I stood in the company of mothers in saris, mothers in headscarves and mothers in sweatpants. I would reciprocate a nod of recognition to Jason's mom, who is Japanese, and say good morning to the Chinese mom and white-haired American dad of identical twin boys. Greetings of "Buenos dias. . . . Buenos dias" sprinkled the air, along with a few others I couldn't translate so easily.
This multiethnic population is a far cry from the homogeneous student body of my own grammar school in Flushing, Queens, back in the 1960s. Esther Paik and William Fong were the sole Asians in my class. In 1967, when I was in fifth grade, black students from the nearby neighborhood of Jamaica were bused into Flushing. (At first, this was a voluntary effort on the borough's part; it was not until a year later that the Supreme Court, in Green v. New Kent County School Board, required school boards to develop desegregation plans.)
At the time, my neighborhood consisted of private homes owned by a mix of blue- and white-collar families. They were predominantly composed of second-generation Italian- and Irish-Americans, although there were some Jewish families as well. The influx of blacks into my own school was met by the frenzied protests of parents. Until then, the PTA meetings had been attended only lightly; the prospect of classroom integration inspired mass turnouts.
When all was said and done, the number of students bused into my school was minimal. Only two African-Americans were transferred into my own class. We adjusted to one another without incident; our young age kept overt expressions of prejudice to a whisper. Junior high school was another matter. By 1969, busing was being conducted on a much larger scale throughout the nation, including Queens, and a much larger proportion of bused students attended my own school, Campbell Junior High. The sheer numbers didn't allow for polite introductions or gradual assimilation but instead fanned the flames of adolescent angst on both sides of the racial divide. Territorial postures were staked out, threats were made and fights ensued. Hallways, bathrooms and cafeterias were sites of intimidation and confrontation.
Busing produced similar results all over the country. And, sadly, there is no evidence that it raised the educational prospects of African-Americans, the purpose for which it was intended. This failure was implicitly foreseen as early as 1966, when "Equality of Educational Opportunity," a study by James Coleman at Johns Hopkins University, found that racial integration did not necessarily improve achievement levels in urban schools. Later studies at Harvard revisiting Coleman's data concluded that the best way to help academic achievement was to raise overall family income and that "racial composition of the school does not have a substantial effect [on academic success]--not nearly so strong as the social class composition of the school."
The apparent assimilation of the ethnic and racial groups in my son's school seems to speak to this last point. Of course, I am not in a position to judge academic achievement per se. But the natural mixing of groups is a reflection of the neighborhood population: It achieves diversity without imposing it, and it blends social classes without a court order.
I often tell people that I don't need to travel--the world is outside my door: Irish, Turkish, Armenian, Russian, Polish, Indian, Mexican, Asians, Muslims, Jews and Christians, black and white. These days, the working-class immigrant population in Sunnyside is offset by middle-class professionals. Large apartment buildings dominate the neighborhood, complemented by walk-ups and private homes. We share the streets, restaurants and stores--interaction and assimilation follow a natural course. The children in such neighborhoods have more than enough opportunity to cultivate tolerance and understanding for those unlike themselves. Zakir seems to have learned this lesson. To him, the kids that he has learned with and laughed with for the past year are simply his friends. I think they will stay that way.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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29 July, 2006
Does Education Matter?
A review of "Does Education Matter?" By Alison Wolf
Yes, of course education matters. The author, who holds the Sir Roy Griffiths professorship of public sector management at King's College, London, is not questioning whether education is good at all. Rather, she questions whether governmental efforts to expand "access" to higher education and public training programs are justified. The book's subtitle - myths about education and economic growth - suggests that her answer is in the negative. It certainly is. In my view, Professor Wolf has given us one of the most useful books on education policy in many years because she quietly and carefully demolishes the conventional wisdom that it is imperative for government to "invest" more in higher education. After reading the book, I believe that most people will agree that the best we can do is to provide a solid education in each child's early years and forget about trying to manage higher education and workforce training.
Wolf, who has worked both in the U.S. and in Britain, has heard the standard political rhetoric about the new "knowledge economy" and how it supposedly compels governments to make higher education almost universal. In the finest academic tradition, she asked whether those beliefs are true and found them not to be. She writes, "But doesn't follow is that vast amounts of public spending on education have been the key determinant of how rich we are today. Nor is it obvious that they will decide how much richer, or poorer, we will be tomorrow. The simple one-way relationship which so entrances our politicians and commentators - education spending in, growth out - simply doesn't exist." Saying that in today's education-infatuated world is not unlike saying that the sun doesn't go around the earth in Galileo's time.
A standard -- but completely unsubstantiated - notion in America, Britain, and other advanced countries is that the economy is changing dramatically in ways that call for greater knowledge and skill among the workforce and therefore if a nation fails to educate its workers to a greater extent than in the past, it will find itself falling behind. For example, in a recent paper that I wrote about here, former North Carolina governor Jim Hunt states that "The emergence of a global and highly competitive new knowledge-based economy.requires enormous numbers of workers with education and training beyond high school." Wolf is one of the few who doesn't accept that idea. "Politicians may think it is clear that everyone's work will soon be dependent on `creativity', `ingenuity', and `knowledge capital' in a way that is quite different from the past: but it is no such thing. It is just as likely that we already have an over-educated workforce as that we need more graduates for a high-skills economic future."
Instead of beating the drums for increasing "access" to higher education through more government spending in the mistaken belief that a more formal eduction is always better, Wolf contends that the modern economy calls for nothing other than the same solid education in "the basics" that we used to do quite well. "The ability to read and comprehend, write fluently and correctly, and do mathematics appears more important than ever," she writes. "It isn't obvious why this means pouring extra resources into more years of education, rather than maintaining quality in the places that already teach these skills." I would only add that maintaining quality is not the problem in lower education; it will have to be restored. Nevertheless, Wolf is absolutely right that putting people through college who have not mastered reading, writing, and mathematical fundamentals will do very little to make up for their academic deficits. Moreover, conferring college degrees on such people does nothing to improve a nation's productive capacity.
We keep hearing that if a nation "invests" more in higher education for its people, then it will be rewarded with better economic results, but Wolf demonstrates that a national commitment to increasing the percentage of citizens who go to college is neither necessary nor sufficient for prosperity. Switzerland is an example of the former proposition. The Swiss have one of the world's highest standards of living, but only about a third as many Swiss go to college as in other developed countries. On the other hand, Egypt is an excellent example for the latter proposition. Wolf points out that Egypt embarked on a campaign to raise the level of education among its population beginning in the 1970s, more than doubling the rates of secondary schooling and university participation. During that period of time, the nation went from the 47th poorest in the world to .. 48th poorest. Formal education is no panacea.
The World Bank has done a number of analyses finding that there is a negative relationship between education levels and economic growth across the developing nations. Unfortunately, the widespread belief that there is a direct and positive relationship between education and economic growth has, Wolf writes, "led many developing countries, notably in Africa, South-East Asia, and South America, to spend a very great deal of money without creating successful economies in the process." More seat time in classrooms does not automatically mean that students will be more productive than they would otherwise have been.
After burying the "more education equals faster economic growth" myth, Wolf changes focus to ask what kind of preparation for work business leaders would like to see in young people. While she writes specifically about Britain, I have no doubt that the U.S. is no different. She writes, "For the most part, businessmen's views about the public education system were - and are - quite simply expressed. They are that schools turn out pupils who simply do not have the relevant skills or personal qualities. They can't add up; they can't write a business letter; they don't know how to work in teams, or talk to customers, or to understand the need to turn up to work on time. In fact the schools are doing a dreadful job for a lot of money and need to improve, fast."
The most beneficial educational reform, in other words, would be for K-12 to graduate students who have the basic skills to be readily trainable. Wolf is not a fan of government "job training" programs that supposedly compensate for the less-than-optimal degree of training that businesses provide. She doubts the assertion that businesses don't provide the ideal amount of employee training and further doubts that even if it were to some extent true, government could devise any useful policy to improve matters.
What will be the result of a concerted program to raise the "educational attainment" of the populace? Answer: more credential inflation. Employers often use the possession of a college degree as a screening device. That is why it's so often true that when a job ad specifies that a college degree is a requirement, it does not indicate that any particular studies are necessary. As educational credentials escalate, so will employer demands. Although she doesn't cite his work, I believe that Wolf is in agreement with Stanford professor David Labaree, who has observed the ratchet effect of ever-increasing levels of formal education. Labaree writes in his book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning, "Consumers have to spend increasing amounts of time and money to gain additional credentials because the swelling number of credential holders keeps lowering the value of credentials at any given level..Employers keep raising the entry-level education requirements for particular jobs.but they still find that they have to provide extensive training before employees can carry out their work productively."
Education is a sacred cow in the U.S. and few people question the idea that more of it is necessarily beneficial. However, it is no more true that adding education (i.e., formal classes for credit) is always a good thing than it's true that adding more fertilizer to a field is always a good thing. Congratulations to Alison Wolf for challenging the sacred cow and giving us this extremely insightful book.
Source
How to spend limited taxpayer education dollars
By Star Parker
The National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Education, has just released a study comparing the performance of fourth- and eighth-graders in public and private schools. As important as this research may sound, I think it is more a symptom of our education problems than a useful tool in solving them.
Generally, studies show students in private schools outperforming students in public schools. However, in this research, statistical adjustment was made to account for differences in socioeconomic background. The result: Whereas the raw data shows superior performance in private schools, much of that differential is eradicated after the statistical massaging. Public-school fourth-graders did better; however, the reading advantage at the eighth-grade level remained with the private-school kids. Predictably, the National Education Association wasted no time to use this study to affirm the unqualified success of the public-school system and to use it as ammo to further load up in its endless and tireless attack on vouchers and school choice.
But there are many things the study doesn't say. One, as John Tierney of The New York Times points out, is that, on average, private-school tuition is about half of what the average public school spends per student (no, most private schools are not fancy New England prep schools). So, even after going through statistical gymnastics to account for differences in kids' backgrounds, public schools spend far more to get not much better results. Tierney goes on to point out that studies specifically designed to test results for providing a choice option in a district under controlled circumstances show that kids with vouchers do better.
But, frankly, with limited taxpayer dollars available, and 3 million kids nationwide in failing schools, is funding more research what we need? Let's keep in mind that this is work funded by the Department of Education. The department was established in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter to improve education in our country. The department's budget then was $14.5 billion. Today, its budget has grown sixfold. Yet over the same period of time there has been virtually zero change, on average, in test scores.
Now I have no doubt that many of the bureaucrats walking the halls of the Department of Education are very fine people. But my common sense is violated to think that a parent in Los Angeles, where my organization CURE is headquartered, needs a single one of these folks in Washington to get his or her child educated. I certainly question that parents need much, or indeed any, of the reams of research and studies the department conducts to get their child educated.
The Department of Education may report that, on average, after filtering out socioeconomic differences, fourth-graders in public schools did better on tests than fourth-graders in private schools. But what are black and Latino parents with kids in Los Angeles Unified School District schools supposed to do with this information? Nine out of 10 black and Latino fourth-graders in L.A. public schools score below proficiency in reading and math. What are the parents of the 250,000 kids in Los Angeles who are in schools that are failing by No Child Left Behind standards supposed to do with this information?
Can anyone still in touch with their common sense doubt that these parents would prefer having a choice where to send their kids to school? Anyone who does doubt this should talk to these parents. My staff does. We're working with them and trying to get at least the school choice that No Child Left Behind guarantees them. We, along with the Alliance for School Choice, have filed complaints with the school districts in Los Angeles that they are not in compliance with NCLB because they are not informing parents that they have the option to transfer their child. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has given the districts until Aug. 15 to respond to our complaint or have their Title I funds from the federal government jeopardized.
Choice, competition and freedom are core values that define what we are about as a nation. It is troubling to think that we have gotten to the point where these truths are no longer obvious and we have to do research to try and figure out if they are a good idea. The Bush administration proposal to appropriate $100 million in opportunity scholarships for poor kids in failing schools is a needed program. Let's use our limited taxpayer dollars to enhance education freedom for poor families and not on superfluous research and bureaucracy.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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28 July, 2006
BRITAIN'S CHARTER SCHOOLS POPULAR
Parents are backing Tony Blairs controversial city academy programme overwhelmingly, according to an independent report that will reveal today that each place is heavily oversubscribed. The day after a mother failed at the High Court to prevent her childrens Islington primary school being replaced by an academy, a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is expected to show that the semi-independent schools are receiving three times the applicants to places available. The findings are a massive vote of confidence by parents in the Governments programme to build 200 academies by 2010, Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, told The Times, in spite of criticism by teachers unions and Labour leftwingers that they are unaccountable and too expensive.
Twenty-five of the twentyseven academies opened so far are oversubscribed for the next term more than six times so in the case of new academies in Hackney, Southwark and Lambeth. Mossbourne Community Academy, which replaced the failing Hackney Downs school, has had 1,137 applications for 191 places. Those academies that had replaced failing or weak schools even those that were severely criticised or failed by Ofsted, such as Bexley and Unity were also oversubscribed, though less so. No one has ever pretended, least of all the Government, that wed be able to provide instant success, Lord Adonis told The Times. The key issue is the rate of progress, and what the report shows is that we are getting the basics right, the rate of improvement is good and that in particular the leadership of the academies is strong.
According to the Government, the PwC report finds that results for 14-year-olds are improving faster than in other schools facing similar challenges. The accountants also found that the freedoms enjoyed by the principals of the semi- independent schools had paid off with more innovative teaching. Since Charles Clarke announced the ambitious education reform programme in 2000, the spotlight has been shone on the new schools, often with uncomfortable results. Last summer it emerged that although only 42 per cent of state school students who took GCSEs passed five with A*-C grades, including English and maths, at the academies the results were far worse. At the Kings Academy, 23 per cent of pupils passed at the same rate, while at Unity only 6 per cent achieved similar results, as did 11 per cent at Capital in Brent. Only 14 of the 27 academies had been open long enough for last years results to be included, but 7 were in the worst 200.
Lord Adonis said that the Government recognised that more progress needs to be made at GCSE level, but while many of the schools were still in the process of being turned around, it was striking that parents wanted to send their children to them
Source
Spelling: A shameful comparison
When kids whose native language is not English can spell English better than our kids can, what does that tell you?
The "wallpaper method" of teaching spelling by sticking words on the classroom wall for children to absorb is failing in Australia. Writing tests conducted by the University of NSW reveal that about nine times more students in Singapore - where about half of children speak English as a second language - can spell less-common English words or those with unusual spelling patterns. The stark difference is attributed to the more traditional drill approach adopted by Singapore schools to teach spelling, with the syllabus even listing words that students are expected to be able to spell.
About 9 per cent of Year 3 students in Singapore could spell words such as chaotic, dilemma, laborious, perceive and voyage, while only 1 per cent of Year 3 students in NSW reached an equivalent score. The improvement in students' spelling over two years was also markedly different, with 36.5 per cent of Year 5 students in Singapore able to spell at the same level, compared with 12 per cent of Year 5 students in NSW.
The tests, conducted by Educational Assessment Australia at UNSW and involving more than 110,000 Australians and more than 10,000 Singaporeans, required students to construct a news story based on an event. While the EAA students comprised a high proportion of private school students, the results are similar to those of the NSW Government's basic skills tests, which are sat by all Year 3 and 5 students in government and non-government schools. The 2003 results for the primary writing assessment of the NSW test show only 2 per cent of Year 3 students and 11 per of Year 5 students composing a factual piece of writing could spell words such as actions, appearance, camouflage, disappeared, frightening, muscular and predators.
EAA director Peter Knapp attributed the difference in spelling capabilities to the teaching methods used, with Australian schools adopting a more progressive strategy that encourages teachers to teach spelling in context. The fact that results for the different tests in Australia and Singapore, and populations of students, were so similar suggested the problem was the way in which spelling was taught. "I think it's definitely an issue of pedagogy and the absence of anything explicit in our syllabus documents," Professor Knapp said. "Spelling is not a high-order cognitive skill such as sentence construction, however, it requires practice and memory - two aspects of traditional pedagogy that have somehow fallen out of favour. "Teachers are encouraged to teach spelling in context, the wallpaper approach, that children absorb the spelling of words through reading them and saying them or looking at them on a classroom wall."
The chairman of the national inquiry into the teaching of literacy, Ken Rowe from the Australian Council for Educational Research, said the secret of Singapore's success was its direct and explicit instruction.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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27 July, 2006
"No Child Left Behind" is beyond uninformative. It is deceptive
CHARLES MURRAY points out below that Blacks and Hispanics are still lagging about as much as they ever did. So the burdens imposed by NCLB are not getting compensatory results. Murray knows WHY the gap is not closing but he does not pursue that below
Test scores are the last refuge of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). They have to be, because so little else about the act is attractive. NCLB takes a giant step toward nationalizing elementary and secondary education, a disaster for federalism. It pushes classrooms toward relentless drilling, not something that inspires able people to become teachers or makes children eager to learn. It holds good students hostage to the performance of the least talented, at a time when the economic future of the country depends more than ever on the performance of the most talented. The one aspect of the act that could have inspired enthusiasm from me, promoting school choice, has fallen far short of its hopes. The only way to justify NCLB is through compelling evidence that test scores are improving. So let's talk about test scores.
The case that NCLB has failed to raise test scores had been made most comprehensively in a report from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, released just a few weeks ago. The Civil Rights Project has an openly liberal political agenda, but the author of the report, Jaekyung Lee, lays out the data in graphs that anyone can follow, subjects them to appropriate statistical analyses, and arrives at conclusions that can stand on their scholarly merits: NCLB has not had a significant impact on overall test scores and has not narrowed the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap.
Is it too early to tell? As a parent who has had children in public schools since NCLB began, I don't think so. The Frederick County, Md., schools our children have attended have turned themselves inside out to try to produce the right test results, with dismaying effects on the content of classroom instruction and devastating effects on teacher morale. We actually lost our best English teacher to the effects of high-stakes testing. "I want to teach my students how to write," he said, "not teach them how to pass a test that says they can write." He quit.
So, yes, I think that if we parents have had to put up with these kinds of troubling effects on our children's schooling for four years, we are entitled to expect evidence of results. After all, "accountability" is NCLB's favorite word, and the Department of Education is holding school systems accountable for improvements in test scores with a vengeance. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.
The Department of Education will undoubtedly produce numbers to dispute the findings of the Civil Rights Project, which brings me to the point of this essay. Those numbers will consist largely of pass percentages, not mean scores. A particular score is deemed to separate "proficient" from "not proficient." Reach that score, and you've passed the test. If 60% of one group--blondes, let's say--pass while only 50% of redheads pass, then the blonde-redhead gap is 10 percentage points.
A pass percentage is a bad standard for educational progress. Conceptually, "proficiency" has no ive meaning that lends itself to a cutoff. Administratively, the NCLB penalties for failure to make adequate progress give the states powerful incentives to make progress as easy to show as possible. A pass percentage throws away valuable information, telling you whether someone got over a bar, but not how high the bar was set or by how much the bar was cleared. Most importantly: If you are trying to measure progress in closing group differences, a comparison of changes in pass percentages is inherently misleading.
Take the case of Texas, from which George Bush acquired his faith in NCLB. As the president described it to the Urban League in 2003: "In my state, Texas, 73% of the white students passed the math test in 1994, while only 38% of African-American students passed it. So we made that the point of reference. We had people focused on the results for the first time--not process, but results. And because teachers rose to the challenge, because the problem became clear, that gap has now closed to 10 points." President Bush's numbers are accurately stated. They are also meaningless.
Any test that meets ordinary standards produces an approximation of what statisticians call a "normal distribution" of scores--a bell curve--because achievement in any open-ended skill such as reading comprehension or mathematics really is more or less normally distributed. The tests that produce anything except a bell curve are usually ones so simple that large proportions of students get every item correct. They hide the underlying normal distribution, but don't change it. Thus point No. 1, that using easy tests and discussing results in terms of pass percentages obscures a reality that NCLB seems bent on denying: All the children cannot be above average. They cannot all even be proficient, if "proficient" is defined legitimately. Some children do not have the necessary skills. Point No. 2 goes to the inherent distortions introduced by the use of pass percentages: Because of the underlying normal distribution, a gain in a given number of points has varying effects on group differences depending on where the gain falls.
To illustrate point No. 2, consider a test that has a hundred-point scale with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 15 (the standard deviation, a measure of the variability of the scores, tells you how tall and skinny or how short and broad the bell curve will be). How many students are involved when a range of, say, 10 points is at issue? The shaded areas in Figure 1 show two possibilities.
The total area under the bell curve includes all the students. The shaded area on the left includes all those with a score of 40 to 49 points--24.8% of all students, if the distribution is perfectly normal. The shaded area on the right includes all those with a score of 80 to 89 points--just 1.9% of all students. Suppose we are still comparing redheads and blondes. If the mean score of redheads goes from 40 to 50, it has risen all the way from the 25th to the 50th percentile of all students. If the blonde mean goes from 80 to 90, it has moved merely from the 98th to the 99th percentile of all students. You do not have to be a statistician to see that these built-in features of normally distributed scores--gains that are equal in points are not equal in the number of students they affect or in the percentile distances that students move--complicate the use of pass percentages when comparing groups.
If you want to get deeper into the math, you may visit a quirky and provocative Web site, www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com, run by someone who calls himself La Griffe du Lion. I surmise that he is an established scholar--a quantitative discipline seems likely--who once published on the fraught topic of group differences, learned how unpleasant and even professionally perilous that can be, and decided to remain anonymous henceforth. In any case, his technical skills are first rate. Click on the topic line entitled "Closing the Racial Learning Gap" for a much more detailed version of the argument and data that I am presenting here.
For our purposes, you need know only this: If the real difference between two groups, measured as it should be with means and standard deviations, remains constant, the size of the pass-percentage gap between two groups changes nonlinearly in a mathematically inevitable way. In other words, if there really is a constant, meaningful difference between groups, you can generate a curve that predicts how the point gap will change as tests are made easier or harder or as students become more or less competent. La Griffe has done this, and his curve fits the Texas data almost perfectly. In Figure 2, the white pass rate is used as the basis for predicting the size of the white-black gap. The circles represent the observed sizes of the test score gap from 1994 to 2002.
Test scores in Texas went up for both blacks and whites. Maybe that's good news, representing real gains in learning for everyone, or maybe it's not so good, representing the effects of teaching to the test. The data Texas reports do not permit a judgment. But the black gains are almost exactly what would be predicted if the magnitude of the underlying black-white difference remained unchanged. If there really was closure of the gap, all that Texas has to do is release the group means, as well as information about the black and white distributions of scores, and it will easy to measure it. Whatever the real closure may be, however, it cannot come close to the dramatic reduction that President Bush found in the difference between black and white pass rates.
In this instance, the percentage-passed measure misleadingly showed a huge reduction in the black-white achievement gap. But look at the left-hand side of the curve. In a state that imposes tough standards--for example, one that establishes a threshold that only 40% of whites pass--across-the-board improvements in scores can misleadingly show an increase in the white-black achievement gap when none occurred.
Question: Doesn't this mean that the same set of scores could be made to show a rising or falling group difference just by changing the definition of a passing score? Answer: Yes. At stake is not some arcane statistical nuance. The federal government is doling out rewards and penalties to school systems across the country based on changes in pass percentages. It is an uninformative measure for many reasons, but when it comes to measuring one of the central outcomes sought by No Child Left Behind, the closure of the achievement gap that separates poor students from rich, Latino from white, and black from white, the measure is beyond uninformative. It is deceptive.
Source
BRITISH LEFTIST PRAISES PRIVATE SCHOOLS
The Education Secretary praised independent schools yesterday for helping children to become more rounded individuals by teaching sport, music and drama and allowing them to develop the social skills needed in the workplace. Alan Johnson, the MP for Hull West and Hessle, is widely tipped as Labour's next deputy leader. He made the comments a day after revealing that he had appealed to a private school to admit the gifted son of a constituent because there were no suitable state schools in the area. His speech to the National Family and Parenting Institute in London irritated teachers' unions and leftwingers.
He told parents: "One of the reasons why independent schools get such good results, apart from the level of selection and the extra resources, is the time they spend with children doing sport, music and drama, building social skills, confidence and team-working. "This helps children develop not just academic and vocational skills but social skills as well. These skills are vital in today's workforce where the ability to communicate, interact and engage are essential - they are the skills which employers increasingly look for first."
Mr Johnson said that schools could play a role in the community and help children to develop not just academic and vocational skills, but also social skills. The former postman and grammar school boy said that some primary schools were trying to develop good team-working and communication skills in young children through the "seal" programme, which is on trial in Nottingham.
In February, the managers of 222 top businesses said that they did not expect to receive applications from graduates "with the correct skills". The reason, they said, was that students spent too much time studying and not enough time joining clubs, where they might learn how to work in teams and give presentations. Poor spelling, grammar and arithmetic were also problems.
John McDonnell, the Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington and a fierce opponent of private schools, dismissed Mr Johnson's comments. He said: "It runs counter to all the evidence . . . that comprehensive education builds up social cohesion, whereas private education reinforces the divisions."
Teachers' leaders said that the minister had shown naivety. Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said that one of the biggest selling points of private schools was smaller class sizes, which made it easier for teachers to give pupils more individual attention. "Reducing class sizes has a direct impact on the time teachers can spend with children," he said. The only limit on class sizes for state schools was 30 for children aged 5 to 7. Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "We think there are a lot of independent schools which provide an excellent education and we would really love state schools to have the resources to do the same."
Mr Johnson's speech was edited before being posted on his department's website. The edited version omitted any reference to independent schools.When asked why, an adviser said: "This should be as delivered - but some of the party political sections have been removed for propriety reasons."
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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26 July, 2006
CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS HAVE BECOME EATERIES
Why feed your kid when the school will do it? Particularly if you are an illegal immigrant, which a large proportion of those discussed below are. And the schools probably do a better job of feeding the kids than they do of educating them. Just what we all need: Well-fed dunces!
More than half of California's K-12 public education students enrolled in free or reduced-price meal programs last year, the first time that the majority of youngsters were approved for assistance, according to state and federal officials. California was one of a dozen states where the majority of students were certified for such programs, said Jean Daniel, a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman.
In Contra Costa, almost a third of all students signed up for the federally subsidized lunch and breakfast programs, the third school year in a row the county has seen an increase in the percentage of students. Nearly seven out of 10 Pittsburg students enrolled, the largest percentage in Contra Costa, and an increase for the fifth year in a row. Roughly six out of 10 West Contra Costa students registered, according to the state Department of Education. "That's what schools are combating -- the impact of poverty," said Tom Tesler, director of categorical programs for Antioch schools, where almost 40 percent of students are enrolled in meal assistance. "The overlying factor that no one argues with is why students perform poorly is poverty. The socio-economic condition makes it difficult for them to do well in school."
State and federal officials, food-policy advocates and scholars point to a variety of factors for the increase, such as higher costs of living and stagnant wages, improved efforts to enroll students and changing views that school-meal programs are an important tool for families.
More funds for meals
Although some scholars consider the milestone another sign of public school decline, school food service managers and food-policy advocates see the increasing percentage of enrollees as a boon. Not only does it mean more students are being served, it also brings more federal money to school districts. "It's good for me financially," said Heidy Camorongan, director of food services for West Contra Costa schools. "The more free-and-reduced students I have who qualify -- I can feed them. Then once I feed them, I can claim reimbursement from the (federal government) and the state."
The larger trend of growing need may be difficult to address, but the federal government's capacity to change nutrition is huge, said Matt Sharp of California Food Policy Advocates. "On the micro level it positively influences the long-term eating habits of half of public-school children in the state," he said. To be eligible for free meals, the income of a student's family must be at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line. For a family of four, that will equal $26,000 next school year. To qualify for reduced-price meals, for which students are not charged more than 40 cents, annual income must be from 131 percent to 185 percent of the poverty line, which would be at or below $37,000 next year for the same-sized family. A full-cost lunch is $2.50 at Antioch secondary schools, for instance, and $2.25 at elementary schools.
'Psychological marker'
Although the percentage of the enrolled students hovered under 50 percent for the three previous school years, crossing the majority threshold is a psychological marker for California, said Sean Reardon, an education professor at Stanford University. That does not mean that half the state's families are poor, said Deborah Reed, an economist with the Public Policy Institute of California. But free and reduced-price lunches commonly are used to gauge child poverty and are a prime marker of a school's socio-economic structure. A 2003 Public Policy Institute study shows that a school's academic performance tends to decline when the percentage of students who receive free or reduced-price lunch increases.
The state's child poverty rate stayed relatively the same from 2000 to 2004, at about 20 percent, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty. The percentage of low-income children, which includes poor children, declined slightly in that period to about 43 percent. Meanwhile, state Department of Education figures show that the percentage of students who receive free or reduced-price lunch has increased over the past five school years. Kathleen Walden, assistant director of child nutrition services for Pittsburg schools, said she sees more students approved for reduced-price lunch and fewer free lunches.
More here
BRITAIN TACKLES BULLYING
Parents of persistent school bullies could face fines of up to 1,000 pounds if they fail to tackle their children's behaviour. The Government has issued tough new guidelines on cyber-bullying as research published today shows that one in five pupils has been bullied via their mobile phone or the internet. Under the guidelines, schools will have to monitor "all e-communications on the school site or as part of school activities off-site". They will also have to update their anti-bullying policies and teach pupils e-etiquette.
"No child should suffer the misery of bullying, online or offline, and we will support schools in tackling it in cyberspace with the same vigilance as in the playground," said Jim Knight, the Schools Minister. "Every school should account for cyber-bullying in their compulsory anti-bullying policies, and should take firm action where it occurs." Mr Knight said that the Education and Inspections Bill would give teachers a "legal right to discipline pupils" and enable them to take firm action on bullying. Meanwhile, orders would force parents to tackle their child's persistent bullying and attend parenting classes or face 1,000 pound fines. Currently, pupils must be excluded once or suspended twice from school before their parents face any fine.
According to recent estimates, almost two thirds of teenagers aged 13 to 17 have home pages on networking sites, where they post photographs or chat with friends. A survey for the Anti-Bullying Alliance - involving 92 pupils from 14 London schools - found that a fifth had been victims of bullying by text, email or phone at least once or twice in the past two months. "Happy slapping" - in which an attack on a victim is videoed via mobile phone - was considered to be the worst form of cyber-bullying, while chatroom and instant-message bullying were considered less harmful than traditional forms. One third of the victims said that they did not report bullying incidents.
The study was led by Peter Smith, Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths College, London. He said: "Ten years ago, psychologists thought of aggression in verbal or physical terms, which traditionally was a male domain. But cyber-bullying is more akin to relational or indirect bullying, such as spreading rumours, where girls are more likely to get involved." For phone abuse, the Government recommends that victims turn off incoming SMS for a few days, change their phone number and do not reply to text or video messages. Text harrassment is punishable by up to six months in prison.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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25 July, 2006
MEANINGLESS BRITISH EDUCATIONAL "PROGRESS"
Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, stood accused of fooling himself yesterday, as he prepared to defend the rising number of A grades at GCSE and A level in recent years. Weeks before this years results are published, Mr Johnson will launch a pre-emptive strike against critics of the ever-rising pass rate by insisting that pupils are simply getting better at exams. Since Labour came to power the proportion of young people getting five good GCSE passes has risen by 6.8 percentage points from 54.4 per cent in 1997 to 61.2 per cent in 2005. Last summer almost a quarter of all students were awarded one A grade or more at A level. Universities complain that they can no longer discriminate between the bright and the brightest. Pupils, teachers and examiners insist that the exams have not got any easier despite the improvement in results.
Now the Government claims that research carried out to investigate the writing skills of 16-year-olds proves that childrens achievements have improved over the past decade. Mr Johnson will today tell the UK Youth Parliament meeting at Leicester University that young people must be praised for excelling in exams. We should be celebrating the fact that pass rates are going up and attainment is rising, he will say. Despite the received wisdom of those that seek to detract from the achievements of our young people, research shows young peoples performance is improving. The minister will cite a report called Variations in Aspects of Writing Between 1980 and 2004 as evidence that the crucial skills of punctuation, grammar and vocabulary have risen in the past decade.
The study, by Cambridge Assessment, examined sentences written by 1,779 teenagers in the creative writing sections of English exams in 1980, 1993, 1994 and 2004. The academics found that todays GCSE pupils have a better mastery of written English than a decade ago and that pupils use a wider range of vocabulary and have a better grasp of grammar. The reports authors said: This evidence of improvement in skills which are fundamental to academic work in all subjects not just English should prove very welcome to all concerned in education.
However, Alan Smithers, director of education and employment research at the University of Buckingham, said that the minister was fooling himself over the grades being achieved in the exams. Professor Smithers said that independent studies had shown no, or slight, improvements in student achievement, and that this research did not support Mr Johnsons claims.
The report, which was published last year, looked specifically at vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure and the use of non-standard English. However, the authors said that investigating vital qualitative features of writing, such as imagination, content and style was impossible on the evidence. Sylvia Green, director of research at Cambridge Assessment, said that the study had found a dip in performance in the 1980s, but that during the 1990s punctuation, grammar and vocabulary had returned to previous standards.
Source
Low-income Australian families turn to private schools
It tells you a lot about the standards prevailing in most government schools
One in six children at independent schools is from a low-income family, a report on social trends has found. Data collected for 2003-04 and published in the Australian Bureau of Statistics report Australian Social Trends 2006 shows 16 per cent of students at independent secondary schools and 17 per cent of Catholic school students were from low-income families. More than one-quarter of students in government schools were from low-income households and 8 per cent were from high-income-earning families. The proportion of students from high-income households at independent schools was 26 per cent, compared with 16 per cent at Catholic schools.
The head of Christian Schools Australia, Stephen O'Doherty, said 80 per cent of students in schools belonging to the organisation were from families in the bottom half of income groups. "It is not the high-income families that have driven enrolments at all. The growth of enrolments in Christian schools are people in low income groups," he said. "It tells us that low-income families will spend money on education rather than other things. People will work two jobs and the perception is that they get quality education from non-government schools, values and discipline." Mr O'Doherty said even non-church goers were seeking "biblically-grounded values".
The Federal Government is reviewing its formula for funding private schools. Mr O'Doherty said the low-fee schools could become unaffordable for low-income families unless the Government addressed the way its formula was being applied. Brian Croke, who heads the Catholic Education Commission NSW, said the proportion of families who could afford to send their children to Catholic and independent schools was declining. Both were looking at expanding their scholarship programs to ensure low-income families were not shut out.
The report also shows that parents spent an average of $8690 on independent secondary school fees. Government secondary school fees were about $390. Fees at Catholic secondary schools averaged $3600. The Government was contributing an average of $10,000 for each student in public schools, almost double the $5600 it spent on students in private schools. Parents contributed more than $400 million in school fees and donations to government schools. Independent schools received more than half, and Catholic schools 22 per cent of their funding from fees and charges.
The data confirms the drift from public to private schools: 67.1 per cent of students were in government schools last year, against 71 per cent in 1995. The proportion of students in non-government schools has grown from 29 per cent in 1995 to 32.9 per cent last year. In NSW, government school enrolments fell from 749,880 in 2003 to 740,439 in 2005. Numbers in non-government schools grew from 357,456 to 367,247. Between 1995 and 2005 the total number of schools nationally fell by 25 as a result of amalgamations and closures. The number of independent schools increased by almost 20 per cent in that time.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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24 July, 2006
ANOTHER COMMENT ON THE BOY PROBLEM
Boys are falling behind in school and getting in trouble outside of it. Many seem to have a blank spot where their ambition should be. What's gone wrong?
Who says there's a boy crisis?
Nearly everyone involved in education-and the statistics bear them out. Girls have opened a big gap over boys in reading and writing skills, and that gap grows wider the longer they are in school. In many high school honors and advanced-placement courses, girls outnumber boys five to one. Boys' share of college admissions has dropped to 42 percent and is declining steadily. Boys also are responsible for 80 percent of school discipline problems. They are almost twice as likely as girls to be suspended from school, while four out of five high school dropouts are male. And their problems extend far beyond the classroom. Boys are considerably more likely to commit violent crimes and go to prison. The suicide rate for boys has tripled since the 1970s, and is now four to six times the rate for girls.
Does the trend hold for boys of all races?
Yes, but the disparities are most dramatic among blacks and Hispanics. They bring up the rear in academic performance, and they have a much greater chance of being held back than either white boys, or girls of any racial or ethnic group. The achievement gap turns into a gulf as minority children grow older. Less than half of black and Hispanic boys graduate from high school, compared to nearly 60 percent of black and Hispanic girls and more than 70 percent of whites and Asians of either sex.
What's behind the gender gap?
There is no single explanation. Some experts say teachers often fail to take into account differences between boys' and girls' brains. Studies have shown that because of the way male brains are structured, boys prefer more kinetic, hands-on learning. Girls develop their verbal abilities earlier, so they generally learn to read younger and faster. Others blame feminism. Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys, argues that a feminist ethic has taken over education-to the detriment of boys. Boys are naturally boisterous and competitive, Sommers says, but mainstream education stresses decorum and obedience, making boys feel like outsiders. She also says reading lists are dominated by female-oriented literature that turns boys off to reading, which seems "girlish." Still other experts blame the broader culture.
What does culture have to do with it?
Author William Pollack argues in Real Boys that popular culture teaches boys to suppress all emotions except rage. This "boy code," Pollack says, prizes toughness and rebellion, and denigrates studiousness and traditional achievement. "The message does not come across that being smart is being cool," says University of Washington administrator Thomas Calhoun. This problem appears to be particularly acute among urban blacks. More than 50 percent of young black males grow up without fathers, and their role models are hip-hop stars who rap about financing their gaudy lifestyles through drugs or prostitution. Black youngsters who do try to stick to their studies often find themselves taunted for "acting white." In recent years, these attitudes have been adopted by middle-class white kids for whom hip-hop is the very definition of cool-and who assume they can succeed in life even if they don't get good grades. "The men don't seem to hustle as much," Jen Smyers, a dean's-list student at American University in Washington, D.C., recently told The New York Times. "They seem to think that if they have a firm handshake and speak properly, they'll be fine."
Why do they think that?
Partly, because it used to be true. Until recently, a college degree had little affect on the average earning power of men, because men dominated high-paying trades like plumbing, electrical work, and construction. And even for those going into white-collar professions, family and personal connections could often make up for a poor academic record. But in the new service- and technology-based economy, men must now compete directly with large numbers of highly educated, ambitious women and immigrants. Boys whose "educational attainment is not keeping up with the demands of the economy," says educator Tom Mortenson, are headed for trouble.
Can anything be done?
Yes-and some of the most promising solutions are the simplest. School psychologist Michael Thompson favors recruiting more male teachers, who now are outnumbered by female teachers by almost nine to one. One school principal reported that fights at his school dropped by 40 percent in one year after he recruited more male teachers. Other educators favor single-sex education, so curricula can be more finely tailored to boys' learning styles. Some parents have even begun to hold their sons out of kindergarten for a year, to give them a chance to catch up with the girls developmentally. "There is a still huge resistance to the idea that boys need help," says Lisen Stromberg, president of the nonprofit advocacy group Supporting Our Sons. "It flies in the face of our ideals of manhood in America." But the best way to make stronger men, Stromberg says, "is by having emotionally resilient boys who do well in the classroom."
The `Boomerang Kids'
Parents are paying the price for boys' failure to achieve. The Census Bureau reports that almost 14 percent of 25- to 34-year-old American men still live with their parents. (Only 8 percent of women in that age group live at home.) The trend holds for all races, ethnic groups, and economic classes, and has become so widespread that it has entered the popular culture. The recent film Failure to Launch centers on a 35-year-old man who still lives with his exasperated mom and dad. A similar premise underlies a new Fox sitcom, Free Ride. Housing developers, meanwhile, are starting to design homes to accommodate these so-called boomerang kids, adding separate entrances, bedrooms, and bathrooms to new single-family homes. Simple economics helps explain why so many young men are returning to the nest. Recent college graduates are carrying 85 percent more debt than graduates of a decade ago, while pay for entry-level jobs has not kept pace with inflation. "Him living here is not a problem for us," said Harry Hartshorne, a suburban Detroit retiree whose 42-year-son, Neal, a stained-glass craftsman, has been living at home since his early 20s. "It may be a problem for him, but he's not anxious to solve it."
Source
GOVERNMENT AND EDUCATION
A view from the inside
If you believe that Government provides the solutions, then you have to believe in me. As a member of an elected board of education I have been granted the power to mandate solutions to local education and health issues, real or perceived. My qualifications: I was elected to my position by receiving sufficient votes to beat enough of the other candidates. I was not elected by a majority, more like a plurality of the 25% or so residents who chose to vote in that election. Not much of a mandate, but I will take what I can get.
You see, once ensconced on the board, the fact that close to 85% of the residents in my district of voting age either voted against me, or decided my election was not worth their time, carries no weight. The power vested in my position, and now in me, by Ohio state law does not depend on unanimity of support. It does not even depend on majority support. All I needed was to be the marginal vote-getter in an off-year election and the board seat was mine.
Interestingly, the same folks who would never accept my omniscience as a friend, neighbor, or community member, accept my omniscience as an elected official. Of course these folks don't consciously acknowledge my omniscience, but they do subscribe to the omniscience of the governmental body, the school board in this instance. It is as if the board as a whole attains a higher plane of reason where the whole is multiples of the sum of the parts. In reality, most board members are simply parents trying to make the best decisions for their own children. Certainly they pray that they are right, but they do not subscribe to their omniscience at home, just in the board room.
Based on lots of research and agonizing internal reasoning, or simply the result of my then-current whim and fancy, I get to make decisions that affect the lives and future of others children. All it takes is for an article in an education periodical or posting on a web site to catch my attention and I could be advocating the next nuttiness in your life. Should someone suggest that children today are overfed and under-exercised, I could be writing the new policies, procedures, and guidelines that mandate each child eat nothing but organic carrots at lunch and perform sets of jumping-jacks at their desks on the hour, every hour.
Sound far-fetched? Well, its not. Every crazy idea has both advocates and enablers. The advocates push the issue while the enablers nod their collective heads in approval. It really does not matter if the enablers truly agree with the advocates since the enablers will never call the advocates into question. The lovers of Liberty try to make a stand but find their voices lost in the sea of feel-good, collective consensus-building. The crazy idea then ends up before the board and I get to decide. Will whim and fancy, or research and reason, be my guide? You never can really tell.
So I get to decide on the issue while you get to fear the results as the occasional band of roaming morons spray paint SUVs, demand that KFC play Mozart in their slaughterhouses yes, the chicken we eat must be slaughtered somewhere, and protest McDonalds and Wal-Mart as evil incarnate. These are products of a system that I get to run based on my world-view, or the world-view that piques my interest at any given time.
And I get to change with the winds, not so much based on political pressures, but based on the ideas or ideals that I believe today that all children must believe tomorrow. As my views flutter in the wind, new advocates arrive on the scene and the increase of crazy ideas reaches hurricane speeds while the enablers bob their heads in accelerating unison.
The problem is that local government is simply comprised of friends, neighbors, community members, who you generally appreciate but whose views on very personal matters, such as parenting, are not always the same as yours; just as you do not always agree with the parental decisions of those closest to you your parents and siblings. In fact, one of the easiest ways to end a family reunion in anger is to begin telling siblings how to raise their children.
In addition, even if I possessed the latest research on education and had advanced reasoning skills, as an elected official, a member of government, the best I can offer is my opinions and beliefs, and I am wrong more often than right. Education research is based on standards that can never match consumer desires, and all opinions and beliefs of that research are nothing more than an individuals bias. Without a free market and real consumers driving the education system, expect waste and inefficiencies; failures. But give us, your school boards, power and we will decide; we will indoctrinate as we see fit, based on our own biases or those biases fed to us by educationist organizations.
But society must allow parents to raise and indoctrinate their children as they see fit, not as the unionized wing of government sees fit. Thomas Jefferson believed that it was far better to suffer the occasional fool than to create a school system that offends fathers, and mothers. I assume that the majority of parents would opt for their own decision-making skills if pushed to decide, but I may be wrong.
Why do so many people have such little faith in their own parenting, and their neighbors' parenting, that they truly believe that without a unionized labor force inculcating children, nothing of value will ever be learned? Are we really at the point where the future of civilization is in the hands of the public school education monopoly? Maybe preschool should start right after birth so that parents have no adverse influence on their children. And, why do residents feel that I can make the decisions for their children that they would not allow to be made by members of their own family?
The answer is that they have accepted collectivism in the form of government as the solution. Whereas our forebears rebelled against such paternalism or do-gooder nanny-ism the current generations have come to accept government in all facets of their lives. We allow the schools to dictate our childrens future and simply assume that the schools are always rights. We allow the local health department and schools to decide what goes in our childrens lunch boxes and accept that mandate as correct.
How in the world did my election to the board cloak me in the cape of omniscience and allow me to be more enlightened than regular folks? Karl Marx and the other socialists and communists saw little need for the family and other institutions; they believed that they knew better. Gramsci, the Italian socialist, believed that socialism would win in the end if it based its means on a strategy of long-term goals; a Fabian approach. Why fight in the streets when the damage can be done by destroying families and institutions?
In many ways, we have allowed socialist collectivism to be the main outcome of public education. The schools create the environment that nurtures the advocate and encourages the complacency of the enabler. It is really no wonder that the collective body, the school board, is assumed to be omniscient while the individual board member, in his non-board role, is simply considered one in the crowd.
Don't simply sit back and be a silent enabler, stand for freedom against the aggressions of the advocator. And remember, if this is so, that the schools and all other local governments are always right, that simply means that I am always right. And even I do not agree with that.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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23 July, 2006
HOLIDAY CONFUSION
Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, and Christian each faith has its holy days. Schools across the country are asking how to respect them all. Consider the University at Albany, which canceled classes on major Muslim holidays. Faculty wanted the move out of concern for Muslim students after the Sept. 11 attacks. But then came the questions: What about Hindus? Buddhists? President Kermit Hall last fall decided to return to the original calendar. "Can you operate a university and give each religious group an accommodation? I think the answer is, 'No,'" he said.
Make that "maybe." School administrators across the country are rethinking their calendars as their student bodies become more diverse. In May, Muslim parents asked New York City's education department for days off on two major Muslim holidays, which some districts in Michigan and New Jersey already have granted. In January, a Long Island mosque petitioned New York Gov. George Pataki to consider the holidays when scheduling mandatory statewide testing. Last month, the state Legislature passed a bill that would take all religious holidays into account when scheduling the mandatory tests. The Council on American-Islamic Relations called it the first step toward recognizing Muslim holidays in public schools.
But also last month, despite a Muslim group's lobbying at every board meeting, the Baltimore County district in Maryland approved a calendar with a day off for the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashana, but none for Muslim holidays. The group had hoped the district's growing diversity 47.8 percent of students last year were minorities would be persuasive. "Either I go against my faith, or I miss my schoolwork and have imperfect attendance," said 15-year-old Kanwal Rehman, who will enter 10th grade in Baltimore this fall. In January, her midterm exams fell during Eid al-Adha, one of the two most important holidays in Islam.
It can get complicated. When Muslims in the Tampa Bay region of Florida asked for a day off to celebrate the end of Ramadan, another local religious group perked up. "There was discussion in the Hindu community if we should also push for a holiday," said Nikhil Joshi, a board member of the national Hindu American Foundation. The Hillsborough County school board responded by ending days off for all religious holidays. The move inspired more than 3,500 e-mails. Christian leaders pleaded for the Muslim holiday. Finally, the district restored this fall's original calendar, with days off for Good Friday, Easter Monday and the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. The Muslim community was relieved it hadn't hurt other faiths. The Hindu community decided not to ask for days off. "You would hope in a country of religious freedom all would be recognized, but we know that's not practical," Joshi said.
School districts say they can't take days off for purely religious reasons, but they can act if they think operations are affected by students or staff taking the day off. That practice gives school holidays a certain regional flair. Some schools close for the beginning of hunting season. San Francisco schools have Cesar Chavez Day on March 30 to celebrate farmworkers, and Chicago schools have March 5 to honor Casimir Pulaski, a Polish count who helped the American side in the Revolutionary War.
Religion is more sensitive. Some districts mark "special observance days" when no test or exam can be scheduled. Other districts find inspiration in the business world each student gets a number of "floating" days to celebrate his or her own holidays with an excused absence. "'Choose your own holiday' has become more popular," said Kathryn Lohre, assistant director of Harvard University's Pluralism Project, which studies diversity in religion. "It takes pressure off the school boards."
New Jersey's board of education now lists 76 excused religious holidays, from Russian Orthodox to Sikh. New York City schools are even more flexible. Students with a letter from parents get an excused absence for a holiday in any religion. Some have tried the traditional route of schoolwide holidays, and failed. In Ohio, the Sycamore Community School District once canceled classes on the Jewish High Holy Days after some parents asked why schools closed on Good Friday. Muslim and Hindu parents then asked why they didn't get days off. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the district. The case was settled in 2000, and the High Holy Days became school days again.
Source
ADDLED VISION OF FUTURE COLLEGE EDUCATION
What will higher education look like in 50 years? If you weren't in Honolulu a couple of weeks ago, you might not know. Alas, I wasn't there either. But a glance at the panels of a conference convened there--called "The Campus of the Future"--offers a clue: College in the coming decades will have even less to do with learning than it does now. Of the conference's almost 200 offerings--e.g., "Responding to Climate Change," "Branding Your Identity" and "Takin' It to the Streets"--none seemed to have even a tangential relation to the idea that, in college, teachers are supposed to impart knowledge to students.
The organizers, in their defense, are not academics and probably don't consider it their jobs to think about what goes on inside classrooms. (The sponsoring groups included the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers and the National Association of College and University Business Officers.) But they were interested enough in classroom life to ask Thomas Friedman to lecture on the topic. The New York Times columnist obliged, offering his thoughts on what colleges can do to keep America competitive in a global economy.
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mr. Friedman "urged educators to focus less on concrete outcomes like grades and test scores and more on teaching students how to learn, instilling passion and curiosity in them and developing their intuitive skills." To anyone who has followed the rhetoric of educationists in recent years, these bromides will sound familiar. Suffice it to say that if colleges take up Mr. Friedman's suggestions, they will move further away from their academic mission, and the kind of student who thrives in a university environment will change.
Mr. Friedman suggested to his audience of 4,000 that preparing students for an uncertain future was akin to "training for the Olympics without knowing which sport you will compete in." This blustery overstatement is also painfully familiar: Change is so rapid, we are told, that we can't even imagine what the future will look like. I recently found myself at a "career night" at my old high school in Worcester, Mass., where I heard ideas similar to Mr. Friedman's. An alumnus on my panel advised students that "the job [you] will hold probably doesn't even exist today."
One has to wonder whether such claims will become, for students, an excuse for laziness. Remember the young Alvy Singer in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall"? Upon finding out that the universe will eventually come to an end, he decides to stop doing his homework. In such a way, students today--hectored about the hyper-changing world they are in--may decide that there is no point in traditional learning since the future will be so very different. Why read Gibbon when only "intuitive skills" are going to be worth anything?
But for all the anxiety of education experts, it may well be that the skills that were useful to our parents and grandparents will be useful for years to come. People who edit Web sites, after all, still have to know grammar. Biologists who manipulate DNA still have to know the phases of meiosis. Businessmen--who, Mr. Friedman suggests, now need to be "synthesizers," and "adaptors"--still have to know how to calculate the bottom line. Even columnists may find that the history they learned in school comes in handy (though perhaps not often enough).
A few years ago, David Brooks wrote a piece for The Atlantic called "The Organization Kid," in which he described the harried life of a college student today. At Princeton, Mr. Brooks recounted, he "asked several students to describe their daily schedules, and their replies sounded like a session of Future Workaholics of America: crew practice at dawn, classes in the morning, resident-adviser duty, lunch, study groups, classes in the afternoon, tutoring disadvantaged kids in Trenton, a cappella practice, dinner, study, science lab, prayer session, hit the StairMaster, study a few hours more."
Perhaps, as Mr. Brooks concluded, students are amazingly diligent these days. Perhaps they are more serious about college than, say, the baby boomers were. But study after study has shown that less and less of their time is devoted to academics. It is given over instead to "leveraging," "synthesizing" and other Friedman-ite activities, often aided by handy electronic organizers.
Some might say that a palm-piloted life is exactly what a young person will need for the 21st century. But not everyone is suited for it. We've been reading a lot recently about boys falling behind girls in school. You don't have to hang around teenagers for long to realize that girls are much bigger fans of to-do lists and neat calendars than boys. They are more adept at "multi-tasking," too. Meanwhile, boys throw themselves into one or two subjects, keep messy notes and need to be reminded where they have to be next.
Some dean may chalk these proclivities up to immaturity, but there is a reason to value the kind of academic single-mindedness that male students often bring to an educational environment--the kind of thing that pushes up those old-fashioned test scores. Even on the campus of the future.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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22 July, 2006
GOP floats voucher proposal
Congressional Republicans yesterday proposed a $100 million plan to let poor children leave struggling schools and attend private schools at public expense. The voucher idea is one in a series of social conservative issues meant to energize the Republican base as midterm elections approach. In announcing their bills, House and Senate sponsors acknowledged that Congress likely won't even vote on the legislation this year.
Still, the move signals a significant education fight to come. GOP lawmakers plan to try to work their voucher plan into the No Child Left Behind law when it is updated in 2007. "Momentum is on our side," said Rep. Howard McKeon, a Republican of California, the chairman of the House education committee.
The Bush administration requested the school-choice plan, but yesterday's press event caused some awkwardness for the Education Department. The agency just released a study that raises questions about whether private schools offer any advantage over public ones. Under the new legislation, the vouchers would mainly go to students in poor schools that have failed to meet their progress goals for at least five straight years. Parents could get $4,000 a year to put toward private school tuition or a public school outside their local district. They could also seek up to $3,000 a year for extra tutoring.
Supporters say poor parents deserve choices, like rich families have. When schools don't work, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said, "Parents must have other opportunities."
During President Bush's time in office, Congress approved the first federal voucher program in the District of Columbia, and private school aid for students displaced by Hurricane Katrina. So far, Congress has refused to approve Mr. Bush's national voucher proposals.The new one is the first to target money for children in schools that have fallen short under federal law.
Critics dismissed it as a gimmick. "Voucher programs rob public school students of scarce resources," said Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, a teachers union. "No matter what politicians call them, vouchers threaten the basic right of every child to attend a quality public school."
Meanwhile, Ms. Spellings faced questions about her department's handling of a new study comparing students in public and private schools that had been quietly released on Friday. The study found that overall, private school students outperform public school children in reading and math. But public school students often did as well, if not better, when compared to private school peers with similar backgrounds. The study had many caveats and warned that its own comparisons had "modest utility."
Source
Academe loves the loony Left
In the jungle of today's political scene, there has been a lot of shrill, intemperate, and vicious rhetoric from the right directed at liberals, leftists, and, particularly, liberal academics. In the rhetoric of people like talk show host Sean Hannity or activist and writer David Horowitz (to use just two examples), liberals are portrayed as fuzzy-headed nafs at best and terrorist sympathizers at worst, as people always ready to believe the worst about the United States and the best about its enemies.
It's too bad that, at times, some on the academic left seem determined to live up -- or down -- to this stereotype. The latest in the academic follies comes from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where the administration has cleared the way for an instructor to teach his belief that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were plotted by the US government to create an excuse for war. There's nothing new or surprising about Sept. 11 conspiracy theories. E-mails with ``conclusive proof" that the attacks were an inside job land regularly in my mailbox. They are subject to automatic deletion, right along with ``proof positive that evolution is a fraud" and invitations to collect $150 million from a Nigerian bank.
As a rule of thumb, conspiracy theories are bunk. People are not smart enough to carry out their scenarios, and not discreet enough to keep their secrets. It is particularly a stretch to believe that the Bush administration, given its track record in managing things like the Iraq War and the Hurricane Katrina response, could have pulled off a conspiracy so immense.
Kevin Barrett, an instructor at the University of Wisconsin and the head of something called the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, thinks otherwise. On the group's website, he claims there is ``compelling evidence" that the attacks were planned by the United States. This fall, Barrett is going to teach ``Islam: Religion and Culture," a course in which he plans to present his theories to the students (along with the ``official" version, which he calls a ``big lie"). After he shared his views on the radio and in a newspaper interview, a controversy ensued, with some politicians demanding Barrett be fired.
University provost Patrick Farrell and two other officials have reviewed the course as well as Barrett's past record, and have given him the green light. In an official statement, Farrell declared, ``There is no question that Mr. Barrett holds personal opinions that many people find unconventional. These views are expected to take a small, but significant, role in the class." He added that Barrett has assured him that students will be free to challenge his viewpoint.
Defenders of the course say that academic freedom is at stake. But does academic freedom really protect the teaching of what Farrell politely calls ``unconventional" views? How about a course expounding on Flat Earth theory and presenting ``compelling evidence" that the moon landing was faked? Or, better yet, how about a course called ``Germany: History and Culture," in which the instructor presented his ``unconventional" view that the Holocaust is a myth and Hitler was a misunderstood great leader?
According to Farrell, ``We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas." Would he use the same kind of reasoning to defend a Holocaust-denying course or a course in ``creation science"? When it comes to those issues, it is widely understood that even to open up an academic ``debate" about certain crackpot theories is to give them a legitimacy that will be corrosive to genuine scholarship. It is one thing to say that professors should not be penalized for whatever views they preach outside the classroom; it's quite another to say that they have the right to poison the well of the college curriculum.
Mir Babar Basir, a recent University of Wisconsin graduate and former president of the Muslim Students Association, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that Barrett had many supporters, which was not surprising since ``Madison is fairly liberal." But what exactly is ``liberal" about the belief in bizarre conspiracy theories? If one wants to promote tolerance toward Muslims and counter the stereotypes that equate all Islam with terrorism, denying the link between Islamic fanaticism and Sept. 11 is hardly the way to go about it. No one knows if Barrett's nonsense will persuade any of his students. One thing, however, is clear: His course, and the university's lame defense of it, are a gift to all those who want to malign liberals as America-haters and to portray the academy as a hotbed of left-wing lunacy.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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21 July, 2006
U.K.: PHASING OUT SELECTIVE SCHOOLING WAS A DUMB IDEA
The British Left hates Grammar schools but they were the best highroad to better things for poor kids with brains
The proportion of state school pupils and those from low- income families at university has dropped to its lowest level in three years, despite government pressure to increase their numbers. And, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency figures released today, the worst performer is Oxford. The agency said that 320 fewer state-educated pupils went to university in 2004-05, down 0.1 of a percentage point from 86.8 per cent the previous year. The percentage of students from low-income families dropped from 28.6 per cent to 28.2 per cent.
Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, told The Times that he was disappointed by the figures and that he had asked the Higher Education Funding Council to audit university programmes aimed at admitting more state pupils. Im reasonably confident these [programmes] will work but to be 300 per cent sure, I have asked [the council] to do a widening participation audit and report back to me by October, he said. The Government wants half of young people to go to university by 2010.
The proportion of students from state schools was down in 14 of the countrys 19 leading universities, with Oxford still the most elite 53.4 per cent of it students in 2004-05 were from state schools, a drop of 0.4 percentage points on the previous year, and the second fall in two years. Cambridges state admissions dropped by 0.1 percentage points to 56.8 per cent.
While many top universities complained of being set impossibly high intake targets, admissions of state pupils rose at UCL and Liverpool, Newcastle and Edinburgh universities. Malcolm Grant, chairman of the Russell Group of universities, said that he wanted to see more state pupils at university, but that it was important to maintain standards. Were not saying that children from working-class backgrounds are less able, just less well prepared, he said. The figures also showed a rise in drop-out rates.
Source
Leftists attack school choice in Australia too
A school voucher system would cost at least $5 billion more than present Federal Government funding, widen inequality among students and potentially lower average results, a study has found. Its discussion paper, which evaluated school vouchers overseas, concluded that introducing the system here would give parents a greater choice of schools. But this benefit would be largely confined to those on middle and high incomes and outweighed by negative effects on educational achievement, equality of opportunity, social cohesion and social capital.
Andrew Macintosh and Deb Wilkinson, of the left-wing think tank the Australia Institute, argue in the paper that a voucher system for all students could lower average results and widen social inequality. "The positives of greater choice must be weighed against the financial costs and risks associated with voucher schemes," their report said. "Universal voucher schemes would direct more resources to wealthy private schools at the expense of public schools and poor private schools, thereby reducing the opportunities available to children from low socio-economic backgrounds. "The redistribution of students and resources under a voucher scheme could result in sink schools that offer services that are vastly inferior to those available in the rest of the school sector. Public schools could ultimately become nothing more than a safety net for those who cannot afford to send their children to private schools."
The report concluded that a system that would provide a voucher of $8675.80 for each primary school student and $11,072.50 for a secondary student would cost the Federal Government about $32 billion - $5 billion more than it spends now (based on 2002-03 figures).
Yesterday, the federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop, reinforced her support for a broader voucher system, which would give parents government funding for each child so the money could be spent on a public or private school of choice. She has commissioned a study of a possible voucher system for students with disabilities, which would enable those in public schools to attend private schools and take their government funding with them. Ms Bishop has given a favourable assessment of a national pilot program which offered $700 vouchers to parents of children who failed to meet year 3 reading benchmarks. "I am supportive of the principle of funding following students: for example, the reading tuition vouchers for students who have not met year 3 literacy benchmarks, which will be continued this year," she said. A spokesman for Ms Bishop said the minister was keen to look at the broader application of a voucher system for all children.
The Australia Institute's report said that a voucher system would increase subsidies to wealthy non-government schools and disadvantage or provide little benefit to poor private schools. Schools in rural and remote areas with special needs would be particularly at risk of losing a substantial proportion of their government funding. Vouchers could also cause greater segregation on the basis of race, religion, academic ability and socio-economic status.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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20 July, 2006
The Associate Vice Chancellor of White Guilt
By Mike Adams
My university recently announced the appointment of Dr. Tamra Minor as our new Associate Vice Chancellor of Institutional Diversity. Dr. Minor said her appointment illustrates that the entire university leadership is now serious about the commitment to diversity and the promotion of a "culture of inclusiveness" at UNC-Wilmington.
I respectfully take issue with her socially constructed interpretation of reality. As a preliminary matter, this Associate Vice Chancellor of Institutional Diversity position is not actually a new position at all. The name of Dr. Minor's old position of Director of Campus Diversity was simply changed to sound more important. Her previous salary of $84,000 hasn't changed either. She'll do the same job for the same money despite making this grand statement in a university press release:
"My major focus will include identifying strategies to enhance the culture of UNCW by assisting students in developing the intellectual, social, emotional, cultural and civic capacities essential to lead in a global economy."
Dr. Minor's statement that she will help students develop the "emotional capacities" that are "essential" to lead in a "global economy" could not be further from the truth. Directors of "diversity" - or even "institutional diversity" - always have the opposite effect on minority students. Without fail, they encourage minority students to be hypersensitive and, thus, deprive them of the emotional maturity needed to function in any economy, global or otherwise.
In my experience, the more money a school spends on "diversity initiatives" the more minority students complain. And, sadly, this also causes non-minority students to walk on eggshells around them. This, in turn, produces a form of accidental segregation, which only serves as a supplement to the university's intentional segregation. In fact, this intentional segregation is one of exactly three unstated goals of the diversity movement:
1. To promote racist discrimination.
2. To promote non-racist discrimination.
3. To promote racial separatism.
I am fairly certain that every reader knows the meaning of racial separatism. But the distinction between racist and non-racist discrimination is not widely understood. The former is any initiative that seeks to increase minority presence on campus by lowering standards for minorities, usually blacks. For example, in a recent press release, UNC-Wilmington made reference to Dennis Carter - an associate vice chancellor for Academic Affairs - who has been instrumental (in the school's opinion) in supporting efforts on behalf of minority students at UNCW through programs such as "Great Expectations."
Often, when diversity initiatives make mention of "great expectations" they are simply concealing the fact that the initiative actually sets lower expectation for minorities. I classify these initiatives as "racist" forms of discrimination because they so often reinforce notions of black intellectual inferiority. This is both tragic and counter-productive.
But other forms of discrimination have nothing to do with racism in the purest sense. For example, initiatives that seek to retain minority faculty members - by paying them much more than whites - do not reinforce truly racist stereotypes. But this minority hush money does prove that affirmative action is no longer necessary.
Remembering these three goals of diversity helps achieve insight into why Dr. Minor was hired for this "new" position. It wasn't because she is bright (though she is). It wasn't because she is a nice person (though she is). It wasn't because she's attractive and skilled socially (though she is both). She was given this job simply because she is black.
Put simply, the diversity movement at UNCW, which advances racism, discrimination, and segregation, is there for the benefit of white college administrators who are seeking career advancement. But, since their agenda so closely resembles the agenda of the racist opponents of the civil rights movement in North Carolina fifty years ago, these white opportunists must find a black person to oversee the operation. That is another way of saying that the new Associate Vice Chancellor really was not hired to promote institutional diversity. She was hired to expunge white guilt and to deflect potential accusations of racism.
I predict that under the protection of Dr. Minor, UNC-Wilmington will expand drastically upon at least two of their three unstated goals of diversity in the coming year. First, I predict that they will further their agenda of racial separatism by applying it to the ever-growing population of Hispanics in the Wilmington community. Within the next year, I expect UNC-Wilmington to break ground on a new Hispanic Student Center. The prediction isnt that bold, given that the university has already started to write separate university brochures written in Spanish, of course for potential Hispanic Students.
Second, I expect that in the next year UNC-Wilmington will significantly lower admissions requirements both SAT scores and Grade Point Averages for incoming Hispanic students. And they will continue to do so every year to try to keep the universitys Hispanic population proportionate to Wilmingtons Hispanic population.
I also predict that after taxpayer-supported segregationist and racist policies grow out of control for a few years, the sensibilities of the public will finally be offended. When this happens, the university will finally have to reverse direction and undo some of the damage created by funding a movement based upon a notion (diversity) that no two people seem to be able to define the same way.
Since the diversity movement had to be implemented by a black PhD, maybe a white PhD will have to dismantle it. If Im right, some day Ill be the new Chancellor Emeritus of Institutional Diversity. Maybe one day, Ill be tearing down colored signs that hang above water fountains. And, perhaps some day, Ill restore the legacy of a man named Dr. King.
Source
Australian teachers whine about merit pay
On the grounds that teachers don't make a difference!
Plans to reward teachers for results, rather than years in the job, have been dismissed by the national president of the Australian Education Union, who said it was "completely unreasonable to hold a teacher responsible foroutcomes". Pat Byrne disputed the idea that the teacher was more important than a student's family background in determining achievement and rejected the idea of tying pay to academic results.
She said a such system would set teacher against teacher and discourage them from helping difficult pupils. "You can only hold teachers responsible for what they can control and teachers have no control over the nature of the students they have," she said. "Classes are different, the way kids interact in a particular class is different, every subject area is different, every school is different. "All these things are variable and interchangeable and it is completely unreasonable to hold a teacher responsible for outcomes."
Ms Byrne made her comments after federal Education Minister Julie Bishop outlined a plan this week to reward good teachers with bonuses. Ms Bishop accused the states of complacency in accepting low standards, particularly in literacy and numeracy, and proposed an incentive fund as a way of keeping the best teachers in government schools.
The Association of Independent Schools of NSW is looking at introducing merit-based pay to replace the current system of incremental rises for every year of service, with the top pay rate cutting in after about eight years.
Ms Byrne's views were disputed by NSW Institute of Teachers chief executive Tom Alegounarias, who said student results were directly linked to teaching practice. Mr Alegounarias said that while a student's social background influenced their education, their social circumstances did not dictate a lower quality of teaching or expectations. "We hold the same aspirations for disadvantaged students as we hold for advantaged students. Our expectations of their achievement cannot be any less." He said public consultation revealed teachers and the community believed excellent teachers should be recognised and assessed. The debate now focused on how best to do it. "You risk, in schools that do add value, overlooking excellent teachers that get good results when the results are ultimately average," he said. "You also risk in schools like selective high schools and in high socio-economic communities believing that teachers are excellent simply because students are well-resourced and highly motivated."
But Ms Byrne said paying teachers according to an individual assessment would lead to teachers declining to work in challenging schools. She said it shifted responsibility from the government to the teacher without providing any support that might help students improve. Ms Byrne also said it was difficult to define the term "better teacher" and it was "extremely insulting" to say they had to be encouraged into state government schools because it implied that good teachers worked only in private schools.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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19 July, 2006
What billions can buy
Warren Buffett will soon give $30 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose chief domestic priority is education. If the money is used to promote free market reforms, it could change the world. But if it is poured into the existing system, Mr. Buffett himself may well outlive its effects.
Mr. Buffett and the Gateses are not the first to invest over a billion dollars in an ambitious school reform plan. Ambassador and TV Guide mogul Walter Annenberg trod this path during the 1990s, donating $500 million of his own money and another $800 million in matching funds to the "Annenberg Challenge." Mr. Annenberg's goal was to create exemplary schools and districts that would act as models for the nation. He sought not incremental change, but systemwide transformation. He didn't get it. Though some Annenberg Challenge projects showed promise, at least for a time, their impact on the system as a whole was negligible.
Why? The Wreck of the Annenberg can be attributed to a single fundamental flaw in the ambassador's approach: he assumed that excellence, once demonstrated, would automatically be imitated. It is easy to see why people who have amassed riches in the private sector might assume that successful models are always mimicked on a broad scale. That is what happens in competitive markets including competitive education markets.
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith praised the vigorous education industry of classical Athens, noting that: "The demand for ... instruction produced, what it always produces, the talent for giving it; and the emulation which an unrestrained competition never fails to excite appears to have brought that talent to a very high degree of perfection." But the "emulation" that Mr. Annenberg was counting on never happened because there was no competition to "excite" it. Absent market forces, America's public school monopoly has no mechanism by which excellence can be routinely identified, perpetuated and disseminated. As a result, there are myriad examples of public school excellence achieved and then lost.
Many readers will remember the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, celebrating real-life Los Angeles public school teacher Jaime Escalante. Mr. Escalante painstakingly built a rigorous math program at Garfield High School, enabling an unprecedented number of its low-income, mostly Hispanic students to take and pass the Advanced Placement calculus test. His results were so good that many observers literally couldn't believe them, and his students were forced to retake the test on which they succeeded admirably once again. In a competitive industry, a star like Mr. Escalante would have been rapidly promoted. He would soon have been designing curricula and training teachers for the benefit of thousands or even millions of children. He got threats and hate mail instead.
Because he successfully taught difficult material to classrooms of 50 or more students, Mr. Escalante drew the ire of his own colleagues. The local union contract stipulated that teachers could not serve more than 35 children per class, and Mr. Escalante's achievements made that stipulation seem gratuitous and self-serving. The union balked, the threats started, and Mr. Escalante's chairmanship of the math department was revoked in 1990. He left a year later.
The dysfunctional incentive structure of our public school monopoly is not only incapable of sustaining excellence, it actually works to crush it by setting the interests of school employees against those of students and parents. Countless other exemplary teachers and model schools have failed to transform the system for this reason. So the $30 billion question is: Will Mr. Buffett and the Gateses pursue the same ill-fated course? These are brilliant people, but there is reason to worry. Echoing Walter Annenberg, Melinda Gates recently told a reporter that she "thought, if you get enough [small schools] going across the country, people will realize they're good, and more and more will pop up."
It's a promising idea. In both atmosphere and test scores, small schools often enjoy an edge over institutions enrolling thousands of students. The problem is that, without altering the dysfunctional incentive structure that produced our current low-performing, Titanic-sized schools, the Foundation's successes are apt to be isolated and short-lived. As Adam Smith argued and Mr. Annenberg demonstrated, you need competition to drive the spread of good ideas.
But if there is reason to worry, there is also reason for hope. What did the Gateses present Mr. Buffett as a thank-you for his unprecedented generosity? A copy of The Wealth of Nations. So Mr. Buffett and the Gateses have a choice of futures. They can risk frittering away the largest philanthropic donation in history on a system they know, on some level, to be bankrupt, or they can work to introduce the same market forces that are responsible for growth and innovation in every other field and that made classical Athens the wellspring of Western culture.
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It's time to give parents a chance
Post lifted from Betsy Newmark
Clint Bolick writes in the Wall Street Journal (sub ion req'd) about a suit being filed in Newark, NJ seeking to give 60,000 students trapped in failing schools by giving their parents the money to transfer their children out of the horrible schools to attend schools of their choice.Seeking to vindicate the state constitutional guarantee of a "thorough and efficient" education, the plaintiffs in Crawford v. Davy ask that children be allowed to leave public schools where fewer than half of the students pass the state math and language literacy assessments that measure educational proficiency; and that the parents of these children be permitted to take the pro rata share of the public money spent on their children, to seek better opportunities in other public or private schools. Supporting the families are three prominent New Jersey groups: the Black Ministers Council, the Latino Leadership Alliance, and Excellent Education for Everyone.Sounds like groups that care more about students' education than the public school teachers' union. Note that these parents have gone beyond what such suits normally ask for - more money for the school districts to equalize what one school district receives compared to more successful districts. Perhaps that is because New Jersey is already spending huge sums of money on their public schools and not seeing the results they desire.New Jersey courts have for their part repeatedly recognized that the state constitution's education guarantee is judicially enforceable; and the state itself has set the minimum proficiency standards to which the defendant school districts in Crawford v. Davy fall appallingly short. New Jersey is also the state that has traveled farthest down the path of pursuing educational adequacy through new school funding and programs -- starting in 1973, when the state Supreme Court first declared the state's school finance system unconstitutional in Robinson v. Cahill and again in 1985 in Abbott v. Burke. Today, dozens of schools in the so-called Abbott districts remain under court control. With abundant funding, some Abbott schools have improved, while others haven't. On balance, however, the New Jersey experience demonstrates that money alone cannot solve the ills of public education.Those are amazing numbers of per-student spending. Clear evidence that increasing spending doesn't correlate with improving student performance. As Bolick says,
One of the defendant school districts in the new suit, Englewood City, spends $19,194 per student, well over twice the national average. But at Dismus Middle School, over two-thirds of the students do not have basic proficiency in math and fewer than half are proficient in language arts literacy. Newark, a recipient of massive Abbott funding, spends $16,351 per student and pays its teachers an average salary of $76,213. Yet in 24 of its schools, fewer than half the students demonstrate basic proficiency in math or language arts. At William H. Brown Academy and at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School, fewer than one of every 10 students demonstrates basic math proficiency. It's time to try something else for these children.(emphasis added)New Jersey courts have for their part repeatedly recognized that the state constitution's education guarantee is judicially enforceable; and the state itself has set the minimum proficiency standards to which the defendant school districts in Crawford v. Davy fall appallingly short. New Jersey is also the state that has traveled farthest down the path of pursuing educational adequacy through new school funding and programs -- starting in 1973, when the state Supreme Court first declared the state's school finance system unconstitutional in Robinson v. Cahill and again in 1985 in Abbott v. Burke. Today, dozens of schools in the so-called Abbott districts remain under court control. With abundant funding, some Abbott schools have improved, while others haven't. On balance, however, the New Jersey experience demonstrates that money alone cannot solve the ills of public education.This puts the courts in a quandary. They have recognized that it is a violation of students' rights to send them to such awful schools. They've tried over and over to improve the schools by spending scads of money on them. So, clearly, more money is not the answer, but I don't expect to see the education blob to recognize that. However, Bolick is right that it is time to try something new. It's not enough for a child to say that we hope schools will improve sometime in the future. Children don't have the time to wait if they're stuck in terrible schools and every year puts them further behind. They need a change now, before it's too late and the gap in their education becomes insurmountable. This is a case to watch for what it could mean. Why shouldn't we apply competition to education just as we do in other aspects of our lives. We've tried everything else. Let schools realize that if they fail their students, they will lose the students and the funding attached to those children. But at least, let those parents who wish, get their kids out of these failed schools. Now.
One of the defendant school districts in the new suit, Englewood City, spends $19,194 per student, well over twice the national average. But at Dismus Middle School, over two-thirds of the students do not have basic proficiency in math and fewer than half are proficient in language arts literacy. Newark, a recipient of massive Abbott funding, spends $16,351 per student and pays its teachers an average salary of $76,213. Yet in 24 of its schools, fewer than half the students demonstrate basic proficiency in math or language arts. At William H. Brown Academy and at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School, fewer than one of every 10 students demonstrates basic math proficiency. It's time to try something else for these children.
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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18 July, 2006
Time to face our education crisis
By Newt Gingrich
School is out for the summer, but as a grandfather and former college professor, the education of our children is never far from my mind. My own grandchildren are young -- ages 6 and 4 -- and have their entire educational experience ahead of them. I saw a report recently that makes me worry about the education system they will inherit. It makes me worry what kind of country they will inherit. And it makes me ask this question: When it comes to educating our children, at what point are we willing to face the truth and declare that the education system created for the industrial era is failing to prepare our children for the demands of today's information age?
If a 21.7% Graduation Rate Isn't Failure, What Is?
The education bureaucracy likes to play a game with statistics. They usually publish data on educational successes or failures only on a statewide basis, so parents and teachers have no way to hold the education bureaucracy accountable where it counts -- on the district level. But a new study sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation took a different approach, and the results it reported are deeply troubling to those of us with a concern for the future of American children.
The study looked at graduation rates on a district-by-district level and found that they are shockingly lower than previously reported by the education bureaucracy. In big-city public school districts like Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas and Denver, fewer than 50 percent of high school students graduate on time. In three districts, the public schools graduate fewer than 40 percent of their students: In New York City, the graduation rate is 38.9 percent; in Baltimore, it's 38.5 percent; and in Detroit, incredibly, only 21.7 percent of students who enter public high schools will graduate.
Failing Four Out of Five Students
Consider this finding for a moment. If only 21.7 percent of students graduate from Detroit schools on time, that means that 78.3 percent of students fail to graduate. Almost 80 percent of students -- four out of five -- are failed by our educational system. Why do we tolerate this level of failure? The fact is, in most aspects of life, we don't. If a private company took the money from its customers and then failed 80 percent of them, it would be closed in a day.
I am a firm believer in establishing measurable standards of success (or failure) and constantly assessing the wisdom and workability of policies against these standards. One of the most basic measures of the success of our school system is high school graduation. A high school diploma is the minimum requirement for successful participation in American life. The failure of our schools to graduate their students isn't limited to Detroit or to our big cities. Nationwide, it is estimated that three of every 10 students who start high school won't graduate on time. For minorities, these numbers are far worse. One of every two African-American and Latino students won't graduate on time or graduate at all. So dramatic is the failure that today there are more African American males in prison than there are in college -- a fact that is a national disgrace.
First, Save the Children
We've all heard the rallying cries of "Save the Whales" and "Save the Rainforest." My view is that reports on our public schools like this latest one should have us all shouting "Save the Children." Every time we allow policies that favor the education bureaucracy over our children, we not only hurt our children, we hurt our country and our prospects for future safety and prosperity.
Here's a case in point. One of the favorite talking points of the left-liberals is that more money will cure what is wrong with our education system. But here is just one of the facts that exposes this for the lie that it is. Nationally, our education bureaucracy is receiving more than $440 billion a year of our tax dollars to fund our schools, but only about 61 percent of this is actually spent in classrooms. In a state like Michigan, that number is even lower -- only 57 percent of education funds are actually spent on teachers and teaching. The rest goes to the bureaucracy for undefined, unaccountable "overhead." It cannot be overstated, that unless and until we make it a priority to put the welfare of our children over the welfare of the education bureaucracy, our education bureaucracy will continue to consign our children to future poverty and our nation to future failure.
The Valedictorian Who Flunked Out
America has many great public schools and many, many dedicated teachers. And we have more than our share of education success stories. The problem is that too often these successes are achieved in spite of our current education system, not because of it.
I am reminded of a tragic story I heard about the valedictorian at a high school in New Orleans who couldn't graduate because she had failed the math portion of her graduate exit exam five times. She had a near-perfect grade point average -- and had even received an A in an advanced math class her senior year. But when she took the test required of all Louisiana students before graduation, everything her school system had supposedly done for her was exposed as a lie. She hadn't been educated -- she had merely been processed, passed up the line from grade to grade in order to avoid exposing the failure of the very institutions and officials that were entrusted with her future.
Had this story ended here, it would have been just one more tragic tale of how our education system is cheating kids and lying to their parents. But thankfully, the story of this young woman didn't end in failure. Even though she had been humiliated in front of her peers and the nation when the press picked up the story, she didn't give up. She persevered and, on her seventh try, passed the state graduation exam and received her diploma.
America abounds with more energy, resourcefulness and innovation than any nation in the history of mankind. We deserve an education system that nurtures and develops these qualities. I've said it before and I'll say it again: We owe our children and grandchildren an America at least as prosperous and secure as the one our parents and grandparents fought and worked to give us. "Save the children" isn't just a slogan, it's a call to win the future for all Americans, starting with our children. Let's not wait to get started.
Source
Australia: Muslim schools bad for integration
Pupils taught in Brisbane's Islamic schools may struggle to integrate into Australian society, a leading Muslim has warned.
The number of parents choosing an Islamic education for their children has soared in the past five years. More than 750 pupils are now taught in the city's two Muslim schools and the number is set to pass 1000 when the next academic year begins. But Abdul Jalal, president of the Islamic Council of Queensland, says more should be done to integrate Muslim and non-Muslim children. "Segregation is not healthy and I'm totally opposed to it," he said. "The schools have to look at which direction they are taking our young people. How will this generation integrate if not at school?"
Mr Jalal said he supported religious schools in principle, but was concerned about the lack of non-Muslim pupils attending the Islamic College of Brisbane and Brisbane Muslim School. "It's a concern to me and I have made it known to the college's authorities that they have to get non-Muslim students into our schools," he said. "Unless schools integrate with the wider community, bringing people from different races together, then I'm afraid. We are trying to seek ways of ensuring another Cronulla doesn't happen here."
A recent British report on the aftermath of the London bombings said Christians and Muslims should be encouraged to integrate, claiming that the two communities lead "parallel lives". Co-author Asaf Hussain said: "Multicultural policies saved no lives in London on July 7. Britain's population has to become more integrated."
The Islamic College of Brisbane has 550 pupils and next year hopes to enrol 700. But Islamic College principal Dr Mubarak Noor said the school regularly hosted visits from non-Muslim schools and took part in inter-school sport contests. The school has three non-Muslim pupils - two boys and a girl, who has to wear a headscarf in line with the school's uniform policy - and is trying to enrol more. Pupils are taught the standard syllabus, as well Arabic and Islamic studies.
Shahid Khan, principal of Brisbane Muslim School, said it was founded in 2002 with 19 pupils, but today it has 233 and next year will have at least 300. He stressed that his school also took part in inter-school sport contests and visits and is now setting up a scholarship scheme to encourage local Aboriginal children to attend the school. More than half of his staff are non-Muslim. "We haven't closed the doors to others and are actively seeking Aboriginal participation in our school," he said. "We are not isolated in any way. We are trying hard to create good citizens and teach them Australian principles and to be proud of their country."
Mohamad Abdalla, head of Griffith University's Islamic Research Unit, said many Muslim parents opted for Islamic education because of a perceived lack of "ethics and morality" in state schools. "There are arguments back and forth on this subject," he said. "Some experts claim Islamic schools seclude students from the mainstream, but others say Jewish and Christian schools show pupils from religious schools can integrate without any problem."
State Education Minister Rod Welford declined to comment on the issue, but National MP and state opposition schools spokesman Stuart Copeland said: "I don't have a problem with religious schools, but they have to make sure they are producing well-rounded young people. I don't want any school to be too narrow in its focus."
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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17 July, 2006
Learning the lessons of small schools
From their creation two years ago, three small, independently run schools in the Alum Rock Union Elementary School District have been a source of interest and resentment. The schools have butted heads with the teachers union and run into space and logistics conflicts with the sister schools whose buildings they share. School trustees and administrators have alternated between cutting them slack and reining them in. Meanwhile, the three schools have produced impressive results, as measured in test scores and parent and teacher approval.
A recently released independent evaluation of the schools won't end debate over their value, but it dispels misconceptions and provides evidence for keeping them alive and learning from them.
Small start-up schools with control over budgets and curriculum have had considerable success in New York City, and in Oakland under state-appointed administrator Randall Ward. Alum Rock is the first district locally to create small schools; Franklin McKinley will open one in the fall. Each of Alum Rock's small schools is distinct. Adelante Academy is the district's only English-Spanish dual-immersion program. LUCHA is a K-4 school that strongly encourages parent participation. Renaissance Academy is a middle school that stresses leadership with a theme of social justice.
LUCHA's and Renaissance Academy's API scores are among the best in the district, although the evaluator, R.E. Castro, found no definitive reason why. (Adelante's students weren't old enough yet to take the tests.) Teachers in the sister schools charged that small schools recruited good students, but Castro found no evidence of that. What may be true is that active and involved parents, frustrated by the pace of change, choose schools where reforms are happening.
Castro also examined the rates of academic improvement among a cluster of students in the small and sister schools, and found no big difference. However, it was only a one-year look at a small number of students. What Castro did find was intense collaboration among teachers at the small schools -- a solid indicator of a successful school -- and high rates of parent participation and satisfaction.
Small schools can foster close-knit student and teacher relationships. By controlling discretionary money, they also can experiment with scheduling and the curriculum. The district's challenge is to figure out how to better define the role of the smaller schools and, if results warrant, to create more of them.
Instead, there has been more tension than cooperation. Friction has grown between the administration and PACT, the church-based citizen group that has been the small schools' patron. The district also has started charging 25 percent of the small schools' tuition revenue as overhead -- an excessive amount. Nonetheless, before he retired this month, Superintendent Tony Russo took some steps to provide stability. LUCHA will move to the former Miller Elementary, where it will share space with KIPP Heartwood, a terrific charter middle school. Renaissance Academy will move to Fischer Middle School, where Nancy Gutierrez, Renaissance's principal, will be Fischer's principal and appoint her successor.
In the small schools, Alum Rock has talented teachers and engaged parents. The district should do no harm: Let them innovate and thrive
Source
Best way to teach English skills argued in California
A high-decibel debate among education officials, politicians and advocates of bilingual schooling that led to the recent yanking of funds from the state Board of Education boils down to one difficult question: How should California teach roughly a quarter of the state's public school population -- students who are not native English speakers -- how to read and write? The persistent issue moved into the spotlight last week when former governors Gray Davis and Pete Wilson urged Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to resist bilingual activists and stick with California's current approach to teaching English learners how to read and write.
There is no argument that a solid grounding in those skills is essential to success; they open the gate to almost everything else students will learn. And both sides agree that students must learn to read and write in English, as mandated by Proposition 227 in 1998. But even in English-only public schools, there's controversy over how best to reach students who are typically among the poorest-performing in the state.
One side insists students new to English should learn to read and write in a way that's geared toward non-native English speakers. They've yet to develop specifics, but advocates say the approach would incorporate more pictures, written passages with simple syntax, common vocabulary and less academic English.
The other side demands all children learn to read and write the same way, whether English is native to them or they're just learning the language. They argue that reading and writing lessons geared for English learners would amount to state-sanctioned segregation. "Why would we then give them something different from, less than, what native English speakers get? It's an equity issue," said Dale Webster, a policy consultant with the state Board of Education.
He helped develop an approach the Board of Education approved in April that calls for first- through fifth-graders to learn reading and writing the same way during 2 to 2 1/2 hours a day. The program includes an extra 30 minutes of instruction, tailored to non-native speakers, to learn English.
But advocates of an approach rejected by the Board of Education say non-native speakers should be taught English while taking lessons on reading and writing. They say dividing the English-learning time from other courses doesn't make sense and takes too much time. Under the method approved by the Board of Education, said Maria Quezada, executive director of the California Association for Bilingual Education, students new to English must sit through a two-hour reading lesson they don't understand before they get a 30-minute lesson that's comprehensible. "Why are we using an English-language arts program that's made for English speakers, not English learners?" she asked.
The approach bilingual advocates prefer -- known as Option VI -- was supported by the Legislature's Latino caucus and the Association of California School Administrators, which represents principals and superintendents. The approach would be used only in classrooms dominated by immigrant children. And it would be a choice for districts, not a requirement. There is no need to worry that the approach would segregate schools, advocates say. "This segregation business -- that's baloney," said Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles. "The only districts that would buy these materials are the ones that are overwhelmingly English learners."
But creating equality among schools was the whole point behind academic standards in the 1990s, said Marion Joseph, a former Board of Education member. She was on the board when it approved standards meant to raise achievement and expectations. "The commitment that those standards would be for every child, that's the No. 1 piece," Joseph said. "That's a commitment that had never been made before, and taking that very seriously and making sure it's not just hypocrisy took a lot of thought and research." In her eyes, a reading and writing curriculum that's different in an immigrant community than it is in an affluent white community defeats the whole point of standards.
Others say the state can uphold the same standards for all children but permit them to reach those standards along different paths. As an example, they point to an elementary school book that tells the story of a friendship between two girls, Chrysanthemum and Delphinium. "For a second-language learner, those names are almost impossible to say and the fact that their names are flowers is completely lost on the kids," said Shelly Spiegel-Coleman of the Los Angeles County Office of Education. She would prefer a book that tells the friendship story whose characters have easier names.
Webster, of the Board of Education, said it's important to expose children to academic English and sophisticated vocabulary from an early age to prepare them for the upper grades when they are expected to understand history and science texts.
The fight now turns to the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Senate Bill 1769 by Sen. Martha Escutia, D-Whittier, would require the Board of Education to develop an approach to teaching reading and writing that incorporates English instruction for non-native speakers. The bill would restore funding to the state Board of Education. Democrats said they pulled the funding from the state budget in retaliation for the board's rejection of the proposed English learner curriculum. A Schwarzenegger spokeswoman said he had not yet taken a position on the bill
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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16 July, 2006
NEA Union Spending Millions on Groups Opposing "No Child Left Behind" Law
Analysis of disclosure reports exposes financial relationships between union and wide array of groups:
The National Education Association's funding practices came under scrutiny this week as USA Today ran with the story of the over $8 million the NEA has spent paying for groups to create an artificial echo chamber of opposition to President Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education law as it comes up for reauthorization next year.
While the national education union has made its opposition to NCLB no secret even since before the law was enacted, the union?s massive funding of a wide array of civil rights, education and left-leading policy groups that have opposed or criticized the law makes clear the union's strategy to give the impression that opposition to the law is more widespread and more intense than would otherwise be the case.
USA Today's story is based on a report produced by Joe Williams, senior fellow with Education Sector.
Among the groups opposed to NCLB receiving handouts from the NEA:
Political and advocacy groups including Ameri cans for Democratic Action, the National Conference of Black Mayors, and Communiti es for Quality Education.
Union-funded "think tanks" including the Keysto ne Research Center and Great Lakes Center for Education Research.
Civil rights groups including the League of United Latin American Citizens and the National Indian Education Association.
Interestingly, the NEA's funding of alliances and front groups to oppose NCLB might not have been discovered without another Bush Administration initiative: improving the accuracy and detail of financial disclosure reports required of big national labor unions.
During President Bush's first term, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and her staff worked to reform the financial reports which the federal Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) requires of large labor unions with at least some private sector members. The reformed LM-2 forms require the unions to disclose information on membership, income and expenditures with a level of detail sufficient for union members, the news media, and watchdog groups to have an understanding of unions are spending their members' compulsory dues. The new reports began to be filed last year.
Not surprisingly, national unions led by the AFL- CIO aggressively fought the new disclosure rules, taking the matter to court (where they lost) and resorting to such outlandish claims that compliance would cost "a billion dollars." In realty, the Labor Department made compliance with the law far easier than, for example, the IRS makes filing one's federal income taxes.
While nothing in the NEA's funding of other groups is illegal, the funding scheme reveals a coalitions strategy aimed at raising the volume of voices of groups supported by the union in an effort to steer the public debate over education reform as Congress takes up the law again next year.
The impact of this echo chamber strategy is no doubt amplified when the financial relationships between the union and the recipients of the union's largesse is not known to policymakers and the press.
Members of Congress, staff, and the media deserve to know when a group comes before them to advocate in opposition to the federal education reform law the nature of their relationship to the labor union that may be funding their activity.
Source
College Goes to Court: Universities practically employ their own law firms these days. Little wonder
At one point a couple of weeks ago, during the annual conference of college and university lawyers, I found myself seated next to Glynne Stanfield, who, as an Englishman, was an outsider to this club. A partner with the London firm Eversheds, Mr. Stanfield represents many English universities in their partnerships with American schools, study-abroad programs and the like. He was astounded by the sheer number of conference attendees--over a thousand. "The similar association in England has about 40 lawyers," Mr. Stanfield said.
That the U.S. is more top-heavy with legal minds than the rest of the Anglophone world is hardly a fresh insight. But why are so many of them, these days, devoting their careers to the legal ordeals of campus life? Of the 1,040 attendees this year, the vast majority are now in-house counsels, full-timers employed by schools, whereas years ago most colleges hired outside lawyers on occasion, as needed. Large universities now employ the equivalents of small law firms on staff, and it's worth pondering what this Perry Masonification of our schools says about how they operate.
In the case of higher education, litigiousness is driven less by ambulance-chasers' advertisements on television than by deeper, structural changes in how we relate to our alma maters. As Ed Stoner, a retired Pittsburgh lawyer who, over a 30-year career, represented numerous schools in Western Pennsylvania, told me: "People [today] are much less inclined to think, 'I wouldn't sue the university, it'd be like suing my mother.' People tend to look at the university as one more institution that might have a lot of money." And the people are right--more than 50 colleges and universities have endowments of $1 billion, not just Harvard and Yale but also Grinnell, Pitt and Case Western.
Changes in American law have encouraged that attenuation of loyalty. The expansion of Title IX rules for athletics, the constantly evolving rules about gender equality and sexual harassment and, lately, the practice of holding schools accountable for students' mental health--suing M.I.T. for not preventing a beloved daughter's suicide, to take a recent example--mean that there are ever more reasons to sue. On-staff lawyers are thus needed as prophylactics, advising faculty and staff on how to ensure themselves against liability. After all, as Mr. Stoner explained: "In-house lawyers are a lot cheaper. There's a lot of specialized knowledge that you don't want to pay $300 an hour to have someone read up on."
Universities have been growing--adding new majors, opening graduate schools, absorbing local hospitals into their medical schools. Colleges are almost all co-educational, and many of them run what amount to professional sports teams. In this new world, there are always new precedents for school lawyers to master.
At one panel I attended, San Francisco lawyer Zachary Hutton explained Williams v. Board of Regents, a recent case in which a University of Georgia student alleged having been raped by two student-athletes while a third student watched. The police charged the athletes with rape, and the university decided not to conduct its own investigation until the criminal case was resolved. That turned out to be a mistake. The plaintiff then sued the university for sexual harassment, and the 11th Circuit held this year that the university could be liable because, by waiting to conduct an independent investigation until the criminal case was resolved, it had exhibited deliberate indifference to the alleged rape. "The court emphasized," Mr. Hutton told the college lawyers, "that the pending criminal trial . . . did not affect the university's ability to institute its own proceedings, and the criminal charges would not have prevented future attacks while the charges were pending."
To those who believe courts are over-reaching, the decision in Williams may seem absurd. But it actually recognizes a central fact of academia today: Large universities are basically cities unto themselves, with tens of thousands of students and employees. With responsibility for so many people, it can be foolish to rely on police and prosecutors for protection.
There's a downside to this reality: Student courts and disciplinary committees are not necessarily qualified to pass judgment on accused criminals. And civil courts (to take another example) have been more vigorous defenders of free speech than schools with speech codes. At the same time, many universities are much larger and more powerful than the polities they inhabit. Purdue University (one of the schools with over $1 billion) has more resources than the municipal bureaucracy of West Lafayette, Ind.
And it's a sign of how powerful higher education has become that schools are being asked to police themselves. At a panel called "Students with Criminal Backgrounds," the moderator asked how many of the 75 lawyers present came from schools that asked students on their applications if they had criminal records, and about a third of the audience raised its hands. Since universities are involved in certifying teachers and licensing nurses, academia must involve itself even in criminal investigation. In training the professionals who nurse us, teach us history and repair leaky heart valves, large universities have no choice but to consider themselves agents of the law.
What's more, universities are home to the people most likely to be at the frontiers of law, where Congress and the courts have yet to venture. Professors, increasingly working in concert with industries like biotech, are developing new technologies, and schools are thus tackling a host of novel legal questions. A knowledge of copyright law, several lawyers told me, has become the most important part of their job.
The most entertaining discussion I heard at the lawyers' convention centered on what to do about facebook.com and myspace.com--how to prevent slander, harassment and rumor-mongering on these online communities popular with undergrads. The room was evenly divided: Some lawyers recommended ignoring the students' Web sites unless something offensive was brought to administrators' attention, while others suggested taking aggressive action. "If you can't beat them, join them," said Debra Wood, a lawyer who is dean of students at Scripps College in California. "I've registered my name, so the students know that I'm there, watching, and I will call them in to discuss their conduct on facebook."
But despite all they have to worry about, including a regulatory state that makes their job more complicated all the time, this was the happiest bunch of lawyers I have ever met. Their caseload is varied and interesting: negotiating patent agreements for drugs their schools' scientists invent, obtaining post-9/11 visas for foreign students and scholars, defending against harassment claims.
And they are, it occurred to me, important guarantors of the academic ideal of freedom; they negotiate an increasingly complex modern world so that students and teachers don't have to. This protective shield does, of course, allow the sophomore to focus on facebook.com with a worrisome devotion, living in an extended adolescence. But it also allows the same singularity of purpose to the Sanskrit scholar, who, keeping her head in her books, leaving politics and legal matters to the school lawyers, may win the admiration of some of her students, facebook.com be damned.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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15 July, 2006
IT NOW NEEDS HIGH SCHOOL TO TEACH THE "3Rs" IN THE USA
With good teaching, some kids learn to write intelligible sentences by the end of Grade 1! I have seen it. But in American public schools today an entire Grade school education often does not suffice. And in California, of course, even a High School education does not always suffice -- as the new High School exit test there has recently revealed. When will people realize that Leftist educational theories are abject failures in practice?
Teaching reading has long been considered the job of primary grade teachers. But some educators are calling for more attention to be paid to the reading needs of middle and high school students, many of whom are struggling to master this critical skill.
The Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based education policy research and advocacy group, estimates that as many as 6 million middle and high school students can't read at acceptable levels. It's an issue for students well above the bottom of the class. A report released in March that looked at the reading skills of college-bound students who took the ACT college entrance exam found that only 51 percent were prepared for college-level reading.
"That is what is the most startling and troubling," said Cyndie Schmeiser, ACT's senior vice president of research and development. "The literacy problem affects all groups -- not exactly in the same ways, but it's affecting all groups regardless of gender, income or race." Though struggling students might be able to read words on paper, experts said, they lack the ability to explain or analyze what the words mean. In the past two years, at least a half-dozen major education associations have released reports on adolescent literacy, including the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the National Association of State Boards of Education. State and national test scores also paint a troubling picture of the reading skills of older students.
In Maryland, 33 percent of incoming high school freshmen will need extra help in reading, according to results from the 2006 Maryland School Assessments released last month. In Virginia, 24 percent of last year's freshmen needed additional support. And according to 2005 test results in D.C. public schools, 71 percent of middle and high school students needed special help with reading.
The National Governors Association has offered states grants to develop programs targeted at older students. And school systems faced with significant numbers of middle and high school students unable to read well enough to keep up with their peers already have begun investing more dollars into programs to aid students.
Starting this fall, educators in Montgomery County will spend $1.2 million to place reading coaches at its 25 high school campuses -- more than tripling the number the system had last year. In Anne Arundel, officials will launch a course targeted at high school students who have difficulty reading. In Virginia, state education officials have formed a task force that will examine, among other issues, why so many of its high school students are struggling to read. Fairfax County schools already offer special courses for high school students who have difficulty reading.
Last year, the Bush administration launched the Striving Readers program, a $24.8 million effort that targets middle and high school readers. In the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, the administration hopes to almost triple the program's funding to $70.3 million. But educators said that is a drop in the bucket compared with the nearly $5 billion the federal government has spent to help younger kids read since 2002. "This assumption that students master all the reading skills they need by the end of third grade just doesn't fly," said Beth Cady, spokeswoman for the International Reading Association.
Educators said older students struggle for many reasons. The U.S. school population has rapidly diversified over the past few decades. The number of students who are learning English has more than doubled, from 2.03 million in 1989-90 to 5.01 million in 2003-04, according to the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition and Language Instruction Educational Programs. A decade ago, students who were learning English made up 6.1 percent of the student population in Montgomery; today, the figure is almost 10 percent. But it's not just immigrants. A breakdown of test scores in Maryland, for example, shows that black students, those enrolled in special education and those who come from poor families are most likely to lack strong reading skills.
Educators said it's difficult to pin down one cause. Bad teaching, chaotic home lives, low expectations for some students, cultural bias, the fact that older students simply don't read enough -- all have been faulted. And student attitude can be a factor. "By late elementary school, kids who are struggling readers have developed strategies to avoid reading," said Sylvia Edwards, a reading specialist with the Maryland State Department of Education. "They are under the radar, scraping by."
Even in such affluent, high-achieving counties as Montgomery, one in five kids reaches high school reading at a basic level. When broken down by race, the numbers are even more startling, with 42.1 percent of black students and 47.8 percent of Hispanic students reading at only a basic level when they reach high school. In Fairfax, about 15 percent of students who entered high school last year had difficulty reading. But among black students, 32 percent were not reading well; among Hispanic students, 33 percent were struggling.
Timothy Shanahan, president of the International Reading Association and a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said many school systems stop emphasizing formal reading instruction once children leave primary grades. "It's not like a polio vaccine -- a couple of shots when you're a little kid and then you're done," he said.
And often, if older kids are having difficulty reading, their middle and high school teachers lack the training to intervene. "It's a lot easier in grade school to talk about learning to read, but if you're talking about it when you get to high school, then you're acknowledging that we've somehow slipped up," said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and a former governor of West Virginia. Shanahan and others said the key to helping older students is less about the mechanics of reading -- phonics and such -- than about the nuances of reading, that is, teaching students how to understand and explain what they read.
Patricia O'Neill, who represents Bethesda and Chevy Chase on the Montgomery school board, said she fears that if more isn't done to help kids catch up, they will not be able to graduate from high school, noting that statewide tests that students must now take to receive their diplomas include significant amounts of reading and writing. Wise and others said that unless more is done, school systems will be forced to spend millions on remediation programs. And efforts to close the achievement gap between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian counterparts could be stymied. "The focus of state and federal efforts has been on the early grades, and it needs to start there," Wise said. "K-3 is necessary for building a strong foundation, but I wouldn't be much of a carpenter if I build a foundation but not the rest of the house."
Source
Australia: Merit wins in private teacher pay offer
Government school teachers fight this sort of thing tooth and nail. I wonder why? Is it because many of them could not withstand scrutiny?
Teachers will be rewarded for merit and professional competency, rather than years in the job, in a new salary deal at private schools. A draft agreement for NSW independent school teachers, obtained by The Australian, proposes restructuring the salary scale from 13 levels into three bands, with pay rises of up to 11per cent next year in return for meeting professional standards. The agreement proposes a hefty starting salary for graduate teachers, who would earn almost $55,000 next year, and almost $76,500 by 2010 - more than fledgling lawyers on an average $40,000 - and potentially enables independent schools to lure the brightest graduates away from public schools. Existing awards covering teachers in the government and non-government sectors give pay rises every year, regardless of performance.
The proposal also strips back existing conditions by funnelling annual-leave loading and some long-service leave into superannuation, reducing the accrual of long-service leave and the amount of informal holidays. Teachers now accrue long-service leave at the rate of 1.3 weeks a year for the first 10 years of service and two weeks a year thereafter. The proposal would bring the rate in line with that of the rest of the community, at 0.866 weeks a year. The amount of time teachers must spend at school will increase by two working weeks and they will be required to attend organised professional development activities during school holidays, rather than term-time. While teachers have four weeks of annual leave a year, the amount of time they are not required to spend at school, called non-term time, can reach 12 weeks a year.
The agreement, developed by the Association of Independent Schools of NSW, is being sent this week to the principals of independent schools that fall under federal Work Choices laws, with a planned July 24 presentation to teachers, before a vote is taken later this year. The AISNSW represents about 300 independent schools employing more than 12,000 teachers. About 70 per cent of schools are expected to fall under federal industrial relations laws.
The package for principals includes a suggested presentation for staff, which says the new pay structure is intended to recognise quality teachers. "Good teachers will continue to be good teachers and this proposed agreement is designed to recognise good teaching and remunerate staff according to good practice and the attainment of professional standards," the package says. "One of the most attractive features is the provision for ambitious teachers to move through the bands according to the level of competence achieved. "You will not be constrained by the 'years of service salary scale'. If you are prepared to put in the effort, you can reach the top of the scale more quickly than you can with the current system."
The draft agreement provides pay rises of between 6 per cent and 11 per cent next year, which would make independent school teachers' pay up to 11 per cent - and an average of 7 per cent - more than teachers in government and Catholic schools. Under the state award, government and Catholic school teachers in their first year will receive about $49,000 from February 1, rising to $69,000 for the top rate. By comparison, independent school teachers next year will receive $54,652 in their first year, rising to $76,729 for the top rate.
More than 70 per cent of all teachers in independent schools are paid at the top rate and about 90 per cent are paid at the top three rates, with few teachers starting their careers at an independent school. The agreement also introduces a new allowance for "classroom excellence", worth $6100 a year, for the most accomplished teachers already on the highest band, enabling them to stay in the classroom rather than have to "move along the more traditional promotions pathway in order for their excellence to be recognised". Professional competency, accomplishment and excellence will be determined by standards set by the NSW Institute of Teachers and the Independent Schools Teachers Accreditation Authority. AISNSW executive director Geoff Newcombe stressed that the agreement was a work in progress, with all options still up for negotiation with the unions and teachers.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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14 July, 2006
UC discriminated against Christian schools
A Los Angeles federal judge has issued a tentative ruling to allow a Christian school in Riverside County and six of its students to proceed with a discrimination lawsuit against the University of California over its admissions policies.
In a case that has drawn national attention, the plaintiffs, including Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murrieta and a group representing 4,000 Christian schools nationwide, filed a suit last summer accusing UC of discriminating against them by setting admissions rules that violate their rights to freedom of speech and religion.
The case is being closely watched by Christian educators, free speech advocates and higher education officials who say it could affect admissions policies throughout the country. Specifically, the schools contend that UC is biased in its admissions standards against courses taught from a Christian viewpoint, while generally approving those from other religious and political perspectives.
The university has denied the charge, saying schools are free to teach whatever they wish but that UC must be able to reject high school courses that offer more religious than academic content or that do not meet its standards.
U.S. District Judge S. James Otero, in comments from the bench after a short hearing Tuesday, said he had tentatively decided to allow Calvary Christian and the other plaintiffs to pursue their claim against the public university system, according to lawyers for both sides.
The judge did not say when he would issue his final ruling, but the attorneys said they expected it within a few weeks.
Attorney Robert H. Tyler, who represents the Murrieta school, said Wednesday that his clients were pleased by the ruling. "The court has clearly indicated that substantial parts of our case, concerning viewpoint discrimination, free speech and equal protection, will go forward," Tyler said.
"It's a first hurdle for a plaintiff in any lawsuit," said Wendell R. Bird, an Atlanta attorney who represents the Assn. of Christian Schools International.
UC counsel Christopher M. Patti said the judge appeared to be leaning toward granting a UC motion to dismiss one claim in the case but appeared likely to allow most of the lawsuit to proceed. Patti said Otero also made note of the fact that other types of religious schools, including Jewish and Muslim schools, had not joined Calvary's suit.
The lawsuit charges that UC violated the students' and the school's rights by rejecting certain courses as not meeting the university's admissions standards. Last school year, for instance, UC said it would not give Calvary students admissions credit for an English class, Christianity and Morality in American Literature; a history course, Christianity's Influence in America; and a government class titled Special Providence: Christianity and the American Republic.
Source
One Australian State (New South Wales) has high education standards
The Federal Government wants to introduce an Australian certificate of education, to ensure a nationally consistent credential which, it claims, will raise standards of education across the country. To do so, it will identify common curriculum essentials from all the states, set common standards, administer common tests, and then allow work to be added by each state to reflect local needs and interests.
Why would we, in NSW, want this certificate? NSW has a rigorous, highly regarded curriculum. It's not perfect, but it is the best in the land: syllabuses which tell teachers what to teach, are creative and up to date, explicit in their definition of standards, specific in identifying content yet flexible enough to give teachers the ability to react to the needs of their classes.
The syllabuses cover the curriculum for every stage of schooling, from kindergarten to year 12. In some other states, the curriculum is written for only the last two years of schooling - when a public examination is to be held. There are other examples in which the curriculum is less than specific - even waffly and imprecise, where the curriculum does not set the same high standards for students as does the NSW curriculum. In other examples, the standards are manifestly lower than ours.
There is proof. In nearly every national test I have seen, NSW does better than other states. In the scholarship examination for year 7 run by the Australian Council for Educational Research, NSW students do better than their Victorian counterparts. For example, 1 per cent of NSW students this year gained a score of 205, whereas a mark of only 198 put Victorian students in that state's top 1 per cent.
Some years ago, when I taught mathematics, NSW always had one of the highest cut-offs for distinction certificates in the Australian Mathematics Competition. The cut-offs for each state are no longer published, because, it is claimed, they may be prone to misleading interpretation. My bet is that NSW continues to outdo the other states, and education chiefs are no longer prepared to say so.
That NSW does so well is no accident. NSW schoolchildren are among the best educated in the world and we should fight to protect that at all costs. If we are going to identify common curriculum elements around Australia, what are we going to get? A lowest common denominator. To ensure that all states feel they have some ownership of the curriculum and some stake in its establishment, it will need to include elements from these inferior syllabuses. NSW students will lose in this exercise.
More here
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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13 July, 2006
THE MALE/FEMALE GAP AT COLLEGE
The article excerpted below only hints at it, but it would seem that a lot of the differences in male/female motivations referred to are in fact the well-known differences between BLACK male and female motivations. As the article is from the NYT, we cannot expect the data to be disaggregated by race but failure to do so is very poor and potentially misleading scholarship
A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are trailing them in more than just enrollment. Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees - and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women. And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates.
Small wonder, then, that at elite institutions like Harvard, small liberal arts colleges like Dickinson, huge public universities like the University of Wisconsin and U.C.L.A. and smaller ones like Florida Atlantic University, women are walking off with a disproportionate share of the honors degrees. It is not that men are in a downward spiral: they are going to college in greater numbers and are more likely to graduate than two decades ago. Still, men now make up only 42 percent of the nation's college students. And with sex discrimination fading and their job opportunities widening, women are coming on much stronger, often leapfrogging the men to the academic finish. "The boys are about where they were 30 years ago, but the girls are just on a tear, doing much, much better," said Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington....
The gender differences are not uniform. In the highest-income families, men 24 and under attend college as much as, or slightly more than, their sisters, according to the American Council on Education, whose report on these issues is scheduled for release this week. Young men from low-income families, which are disproportionately black and Hispanic, are the most underrepresented on campus, though in middle-income families too, more daughters than sons attend college. In recent years the gender gap has been widening, especially among low-income whites and Hispanics. When it comes to earning bachelor's degrees, the gender gap is smaller than the gap between whites and blacks or Hispanics, federal data shows.
All of this has helped set off intense debate over whether these trends show a worrisome achievement gap between men and women or whether the concern should instead be directed toward the educational difficulties of poor boys, black, white or Hispanic. "Over all, the differences between blacks and whites, rich and poor, dwarf the differences between men and women within any particular group," says Jacqueline King, a researcher for the American Council on Education's Center for Policy Analysis and the author of the forthcoming report.
Still, across all race and class lines, there are significant performance differences between young men and women that start before college. High school boys score higher than girls on the SAT, particularly on the math section. Experts say that is both because the timed multiple-choice questions play to boys' strengths and because more middling female students take the test. Boys also score slightly better on the math and science sections of national assessment tests. On the same assessments, 12th-grade boys, even those with college-educated parents, do far worse than girls on reading and writing.
Faced with applications and enrollment numbers that tilt toward women, some selective private colleges are giving men a slight boost in admissions. On other campuses the female predominance is becoming noticeable in the female authors added to the reading lists and the diminished dating scene. And when it gets to graduation, differences are evident too. At Harvard, 55 percent of the women graduated with honors this spring, compared with barely half the men. And at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, a public university, women made up 64 percent of this year's graduates, and they got 75 percent of the honors degrees and 79 percent of the highest honors, summa cum laude.
Of course, nationwide, there are young men at the top of the class and fields like computer science, engineering and physics that are male dominated. Professors interviewed on several campuses say that in their experience men seem to cluster in a disproportionate share at both ends of the spectrum - students who are the most brilliantly creative, and students who cannot keep up. "My best male students are every bit as good as my best female students," said Wendy Moffat, a longtime English professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. "But the range among the guys is wider." [Which mirrors what a century of IQ testing has shown]
From the time they are young, boys are far more likely than girls to be suspended or expelled, or have a learning disability or emotional problem diagnosed. As teenagers, they are more likely to drop out of high school, commit suicide or be incarcerated. Such difficulties can have echoes even in college men. "They have a sense of lassitude, a lack of focus," said William Pollack, director of the Centers for Men and Young Men at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School. At a time when jobs that require little education are disappearing, Mr. Mortenson predicts trouble for boys whose "educational attainment is not keeping up with the demands of the economy."
In the 1990's, even as women poured into college at a higher rate than men, attention focused largely on their troubles, especially after the 1992 report "How Schools Shortchange Girls" from the American Association of University Women. But some scholars say the new emphasis on young men's problems - recent magazine covers and talk shows describing a "boy crisis" - is misguided in a world where men still dominate the math-science axis, earn more money and wield more power than women. "People keep asking me why this is such a hot topic, and I think it does go back to the ideas people carry in their heads," said Sara Mead, the author of a report for Education Sector, a Washington policy center, that concluded that boys, especially young ones, were making progress on many measures. It suggested that the heightened concern might in part reflect some people's nervousness about women's achievement.
"The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a crisis for boys," Ms. Mead said. "I'm troubled by this tone of crisis. Even if you control for the field they're in, boys right out of college make more money than girls, so at the end of the day, is it grades and honors that matter, or something else the boys may be doing?"
What is beyond dispute is that the college landscape is changing. Women now make up 58 percent of those enrolled in two- and four-year colleges and are, over all, the majority in graduate schools and professional schools too. Most institutions of higher learning, except engineering schools, now have a female edge, with many small liberal arts colleges and huge public universities alike hovering near the 60-40 ratio. Even Harvard, long a male bastion, has begun to tilt toward women. "The class we just admitted will be 52 percent female," said William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions.
While Harvard accepts men and women in proportions roughly equal to their presence in the applicant pool, other elite universities do not. At Brown University, men made up not quite 40 percent of this year's applicants, but 47 percent of those admitted. Women now outnumber men two to one at places like the State University of New York at New Paltz, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Baltimore City Community College. And they make up particularly large majorities among older students...
Still, the gender gap has moved to the front burner in part because of interest from educated mothers worrying that their sons are adrift or disturbed that their girls are being passed over by admissions officers eager for boys, said Judith Kleinfeld, a University of Alaska professor who has created the Boys Project (boysproject.net), a coalition of researchers, educators and parents to address boys' troubles. "I hate to be cynical, but when it was a problem of black or poor kids, nobody cared, but now that it's a problem of white sons of college-educated parents, it's moving very rapidly to the forefront," Dr. Kleinfeld said. "At most colleges, there is a sense that a lot of boys are missing in action."
On each campus, the young women interviewed talked mostly about their drive to do well. "Most college women want a high-powered career that they are passionate about," Ms. Smyers said. "But they also want a family, and that probably means taking time off, and making dinner. I'm rushing through here, taking the most credits you can take without paying extra, because I want to do some amazing things, and establish myself as a career woman, before I settle down."
Her male classmates, she said, feel less pressure. "The men don't seem to hustle as much," Ms. Smyers said. "I think it's a male entitlement thing. They think they can sit back and relax and when they graduate, they'll still get a good job. They seem to think that if they have a firm handshake and speak properly, they'll be fine."
At Greensboro, where more than two-thirds of the students are female, and about one in five is black, many young men say they are torn between wanting quick money and seeking the long-term rewards of education. "A lot of my friends made good money working in high school, in construction or as electricians, and they didn't go to college, but they're doing very well now," said Mr. Daniels, the Greensboro student, who works 25 to 30 hours a week. "One of my best friends, he's making $70,000, he's got his own truck and health benefits. The honest truth is, I feel weird being a college student and having no money."....
Creating a balance of men and women is now an issue for all but the most elite colleges, whose huge applicant pools let them fill their classes with any desired mix of highly-qualified men and women But for others, it is a delicate issue. Colleges want balance, both for social reasons and to ensure that they can attract a broad mix of applicants. But they do not want an atmosphere in which talented, hard-working women share classes with less qualified, less engaged men....
In the Dickinson cafeteria on a spring afternoon, the byplay between two men and two women could provide a text on gender differences. The men, Dennis Nelson and Victor Johnson, African-American football players nearing the end of their junior year, teased each other about never wanting to be seen in the library. They talked about playing "Madden," a football video game, six hours a day, about how they did not spend much time on homework...
Still, men in the work force have always done better in pay and promotions, in part because they tend to work longer hours, and have fewer career interruptions than women, who bear the children and most of the responsibility for raising them. Whether the male advantage will persist even as women's academic achievement soars is an open question. But many young men believe that, once in the work world, they will prevail. "I think men do better out in the world because they care more about the power, the status, the C.E.O. job," Mr. Kohn said. "And maybe society holds men a little higher."
More here
Illinois university must reinstate Christian group
A federal appeals court ruled Monday that an Illinois university must reinstate a student group that had its status revoked over its requirement that members pledge to adhere to Christian beliefs. The ruling reverses a lower court decision that denied the group a preliminary injunction re-establishing its status while the lawsuit proceeds.
The Christian Legal Society sued Southern Illinois University in 2005 after the school revoked the group's registered status, meaning it no longer could use the university's facilities or name and was ineligible for school funding. The group claimed the university's decision violated its First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise of religion.
The university said the society's requirement that members adhere to basic Christian beliefs violates the school's affirmative action policy as well as a Board of Trustees policy stating that student organizations must follow all "federal or state laws concerning nondiscrimination and equal opportunity."
But in its ruling Monday, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said the university "failed to identify which federal or state law it believes (Christian Legal Society) violated."
Messages seeking comment were left after business hours Monday for university general counsel Jerry Blakemore and Christian Legal Society attorney Casey Mattox. Mattox has said the university began looking into the chapter's requirements after a student who never attended a Christian Legal Society meeting read about its policies in a law journal and brought them to administrators' attention. No student was denied a membership or leadership position within the group because of his or her religious beliefs, he said.
Christian Legal Society, based in Annandale, Va., is a nationwide association of more than 3,400 Christian lawyers, law students, law professors and judges with chapters in more than 1,100 cities across the country, according to its Web site. The university's chapter had fewer than 12 members, Mattox said.
Source. More commentary here
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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12 July, 2006
On classic consciousness
Critics of English lite - where literary classics are on the same footing as SMS messages, graffiti and movie posters, and students are made to deconstruct texts from Marxist, feminist, class and postcolonial perspectives - are regularly attacked, including by Elizabeth Butel in this space on June 24, as overly conservative and out of touch with developments in postmodern theory.
Ignored is that giving students a weak and insipid gruel, represented by present approaches to teaching literature, not only denies them entry to their cultural heritage, but an uncritical commitment to theory, where all texts are treated as socio/cultural artefacts and reader response is defined as being subjective and relative and also undermines the ethical and moral value of great literature.
During the 1960s, growing up in a Housing Commission house in Melbourne's Broadmeadows and attending the local government school, if the new approaches to literature had applied, I would have been fed an impoverished diet of magazines, comics and the odd film; the internet had yet to be invented. Thankfully, that never happened. Strangely enough, the '60s was a time when teachers knew that working-class kids could think, and that education needed to be challenging and introduce students to unknown worlds and new experiences and emotions. Each year we studied such classics as Shakespeare, Henry Lawson and Dickens on the assumption that one of the redeeming features of great art, whether music, ballet, painting or literature, is that it speaks across the generations and can never be restricted in time or place.
Forget the tyranny of relevance, where education is chained to the here and now as represented by SMS, blogs and television shows such as Australian Idol. Years before the multicultural industry established itself, we read works such as The Merchant of Venice and learned about intolerance and bigotry. Years before Luke Skywalker and Star Wars, we read the Iliad and the Odyssey and learned about emotions such as bravery, hubris, sorrow and loyalty. No amount of analysing a film can fire the imagination or awake the psyche as does following in the footsteps of Odysseus as he battles against all odds to return home.
On graduating, my first job involved teaching migrant children from Melbourne's western suburbs. As English teachers, we faced the same debate that is now being played out. One year we ditched Shakespeare in favour of Puberty Blues, a book about two teenage girls and their adventures in Sydney's surf culture. The argument was that the book was contemporary and exactly what young students would want. After several weeks discussing the book, our classes switched off. Not only was it poorly written and the characters superficial, but there was nothing challenging or profound about the plot or the issues raised. As one of the students said to me: "Why study in class what most of us can see on the weekend?" Given that many of the children's parents had emigrated from Greece, I tried a different tack and introduced the class to Greek tragedy, beginning with Medea.
The benefit? Not only did those students with a Greek background take pride in an aspect of their culture previously unknown, the class also enjoyed the challenge of reading a complex and difficult text. Many learned that education required concentration and that it could not be acquired in a 30-second sound grab.
One of the more insidious arguments against teaching literary classics is that they are of no immediate value or use. Ignored is the reality that what we learn in school, while sometimes of little practical use, may touch us in later life.
Four years ago our son, James, was killed in a hit-and-run accident. On seeing him in the hospital, the first words that came to our daughter's lips were: "Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." Not only did her words reinforce my belief that literature, more so than an SMS text or an internet blog, deals with human experience in a profoundly moving way, I also realised Amelia was only able to draw on Shakespeare's words because, years before, Hamlet had been taught.
As Umberto Eco argued in On Some Functions of Literature, the value of literature can never be restricted to what is utilitarian or what theory decides is politically correct. Literature survives because of its intangible power. As Eco wrote: "The power of that network of texts which humanity has produced and still produces not for practical ends but, rather, for its own sake, for humanity's own enjoyment - and which are read for pleasure, spiritual edification, broadening of knowledge, or maybe just to pass the time, without anyone forcing us to read them (apart from when we are obliged to do so at school or in university)."
The above article by teacher Kevin Donnelly appeared in "The Australian" newspaper on July 8, 2006
DIFFERENCES IN ABILITY MUST NOT BE RECOGNIZED
The state Civil Rights Association called Orange County's Edgewater High School a school that promotes racism. Members of the group marched at district headquarters to make their point and to file a formal complaint. They're filing a racial discrimination complaint based on former Edgewater English teacher Latasha Farmer, WESH 2 News reported.
Farmer said the high school principal promotes racism. "Edgewater has created separate academic programs inside of an integrated school," Farmer said. "One where the majority of its white students are in advanced classes and the majority of its African-American and Latino students are in remedial courses." Farmer also said that when she tried to set up a student chapter of the NAACP, the principal never answered her request. "Even though we are supposed to have formal multicultural programs in our schools, we don't have a formal multicultural program at Edgewater," she said.
After Farmer's request, she said her contract was not renewed with the principal saying she didn't match the needs for the school. In her opinion, Farmer said it was a veiled way to get rid of her because she wanted to start the club.
No one from Edgewater was available to respond to the reason why Farmer's contract was not renewed, but the district office did. It said it's quite a different reason than what Farmer said. "Ms. Farmer, I think, is a disgruntled employee that we have had here in the district," Orange County Public Schools spokeswoman Grace Lias.
Farmer said she still wants to teach, but she thinks she'll never get a job in Orange County because of coming forward with the complaint. Ultimately, the civil rights association wants the U.S. Department of Education to hold money back from Orange County until it changes what the group calls its "racist ways."
Source
Another report about the above matter: School says a dumb black teacher was the problem
A civil rights organization is accusing an Orange County high school of racist practices. Members of the Florida Civil Rights Association delivered a discrimination complaint to the Orange County school board building Thursday. The group alleges segregation in the school district, discriminatory FCAT enrollment practices and the school's failure to comply with a multi-cultural curriculum mandate.
Latasha Farmer was a teacher at Edgewater High School. She said her contract wasn't renewed partly because she tried to start a student civil rights club. "Yes, I did think it was racially motivated," she said.
Orange County schools said there is a multi-cultural curriculum in place and two African-American student clubs were in the works for next school year. As for Farmer's claim of discrimination, in a legal memo, the school's principal said Farmer struggled with communication, teamwork and following directions.
Source
Gifted children should be put in higher grades
Years ago it was routine practice in Australia and worked well but the equality mania of the '60s put a stop to it
Miraca Gross, director of the University of NSW's Gifted Education Research, Resource and Information Centre, said teachers were unwilling to accelerate academically advanced children or were unaware that it was possible. "Most of these kids would be topping the class if they went up a grade. They don't realise that," Professor Gross said. "They're just cruising by at the moment. "Teachers equate acceleration with pushing the child. Teachers are afraid of hurting a kid by pushing them, so they feel better doing nothing -- but that can in fact do more harm."
How Australian schools deal with gifted children is the focus of a national study to be undertaken by Professor Gross and her colleague, GERRIC director of research Karen Rogers, over the next three years. The study will examine state and private schools and investigate different procedures that allow academically gifted students to move faster through their schooling. Professor Gross said teachers' attitudes and practices regarding acceleration would be a particular focus. The study is funded through a $500,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation, based in the US.
Professor Gross has previously investigated the use of acceleration in the US and expects the Australian results to similarly show an under usage of academic acceleration. "What we found in America, and what I'm betting will be the case in Australia, is that teachers are not aware that they are allowed to accelerate kids ... they aren't aware of the policy," she said. Professor Gross said gifted children who were not accelerated could be socially isolated, acting out and underestimating their own abilities. "They get enormously frustrated," she said. "Bad behaviour can sometimes be a camouflage so the other kids look at them and think, 'They're all right'. "It's not cool to be academically talented."
Josh Croke, 11, from Kawana, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, attends a Year 7 maths class, the only sixth-grader at his school to do so. He said he would be happy to move up a grade if offered the opportunity. "It's boring when I have to wait for the other kids to finish something," he said.
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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11 July, 2006
THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY DISCOVERS MERIT
Ministers will tell schools this week that they must identify the brightest children in their classrooms and do more to nurture their talents. A new national register will track 11-19 year-olds who come in the top 5% in England for academic test results. Schools minister Lord Adonis will write to every secondary school with details of the register when he launches the new drive on Tuesday.
The campaign is designed to target bright children from poor families and ethnic minorities who too often fall behind at school. Some bright children are at risk of being left to fend for themselves at school because teachers do not think they need extra help, according to officials.
Lord Adonis said: "The register is a key part of our education reforms to ensure that we build a school system where every child can reach their full potential. "The new register will ensure that these children are spotted early and don't slip through the net. "It will also step-up efforts to find those pupils whose ability may have been masked by social disadvantage, low aspirations or lack of opportunity."
The Department for Education will encourage schools to use a range of methods for identifying the brightest children. These include making more use of teachers' judgements and direct "observation" of children's work, as well as data from national tests and cognitive tests.
Source
Best Australian teachers and schools to get Federal cash bonus
Individual teachers and schools who turn out high-achieving students will receive cash bonuses directly from the Federal Government under a plan that could help keep the best teachers in public schools. The proposal from Education Minister Julie Bishop is designed to make state governments and public school teachers accountable for their performance. But she said yesterday it could also address the loss of good teachers to private schools that offer better pay and conditions.
Ms Bishop yesterday accused the states of complacency in accepting low standards, particularly in literacy and numeracy, and proposed an incentive fund that would bypass the state and territory governments to lift educational standards. "I'm looking at ways of rewarding individual schools and teacher performance, to shift the balance away from the state bureaucracies and state teachers unions and try to get accountability through an incentive-based approach," she told The Australian. "I'm concerned there's an acceptance of lower expectations, particularly in literacy and numeracy."
Ms Bishop said teachers were one of the few professions not accountable for their performance and it was "high time" they were not only held responsible for their students' achievements but also recognised for outstanding results. In state schools, teachers are generally remunerated on the grounds of seniority.
She said every classroom in the nation should have a highly qualified teacher, particularly in those schools where the need was greatest, which are generally state schools. "We don't serve teachers or students well by putting the least experienced teachers in the most challenging schools," she said. "We need to encourage better teachers into state government schools, have them performing well and then reward them for their results."
Under Ms Bishop's plan, existing federal school funding would be broken into base funding, paid to the states, with a percentage set aside for an incentive fund. Ms Bishop said the reward scheme would form part of the next round of funding negotiations with the states and territories, which start next year. The Howard Government, under the previous education minister, Brendan Nelson, tied federal funding to key policies, such as the introduction of simpler A to E report cards and a common national test for literacy and numeracy benchmarks.
But keen to stamp her own style on the portfolio, Ms Bishop wants to break away from threats to withhold funding, preferring to offer rewards for high-performing teachers and schools. "I'm not talking about rewarding people for what they should be doing, but rewarding them for outcomes that are over and above expectations," she said. Ms Bishop has set national consistency and high standards as a priority for schools, but earlier yesterday she ruled out the federal Government taking over control of schools. "I believe the commonwealth has a significant role to play. After all, we invest some $33 billion over a (four-year) funding period in Australian schools so the states must be accountable for that money," she said on Network Ten's Meet The Press. "At the end of the day I think public education should be in the hands of the states ... but harmonisation of standards is a good thing." Ms Bishop pointed to Belfield Primary School in Melbourne's eastern suburbs as proof that extraordinary results were possible.
Belfield was one of the lowest performing schools in literacy and numeracy, with a high proportion of disadvantaged students from low socioeconomic backgrounds - unemployed, single-parent, indigenous and non-English speaking families. In 1998, only 35 per cent of Belfield's Year 1 students had 100 per cent accuracy in literacy and numeracy tests. Five years later, 100 per cent of the school's Year 1 students had a perfect score, while in similar schools to Belfield, only 26 per cent achieved the top score. Ms Bishop said the tragedy was that the principal who oversaw the change in Belfield's students had since left for a non-government school.
Teachers in the bigger independent and Anglican schools are paid between 3 and 8 per cent more than a teacher at a state school, as well as having access to better facilities and resources, support networks and professional development. Students are also choosing non-government schools in greater numbers.
Source
Your government will educate you: Sort of
Many public high schools in Australia are in such a state of disrepair that they should be bulldozed or rebuilt, an education expert says. Professor Brian Caldwell, former dean of education at Melbourne University and author of a new book, Re-imagining Educational Leadership, warns that the drift towards private schools will continue. Professor Caldwell outlined issues facing the nation's secondary school system, saying many problems are being "hushed up". He conducted 14 workshops in Australia, Chile, England and New Zealand last year, and begins a seven-week tour of Australia tomorrow.
Professor Caldwell said private schools would continue to take in more students unless state governments addressed teachers' pay, building refurbishment, literacy and innovation. He said the problems with teachers' pay, building refurbishments, literacy and innovation were so serious that most high school students would be in the private system within the next 10 years. "The fact is the public is being duped," he said. "Many government schools now simply have to be bulldozed or rebuilt. We have teachers working in government schools based on the factory model of schooling from the 19th century."
Highlighting a recent study, which showed 70 per cent of parents would prefer their children were educated in private schools, Professor Caldwell said high fees were the main reason why more students were not already in the private system. About 40 per cent of senior secondary students, 37 per cent of junior secondary children and 30 per cent of primary school children were in private schools, he said.
He said teachers were avoiding public schools, and he knew of cases where senior teaching jobs carrying a salary of more than $90,000 had attracted only a handful of applicants.
Professor Caldwell believes secondary schools in Australia should follow models of countries such as England, with only 8 per cent of children are in the private system, where the government is planning to rebuild or refurbish 85 per cent of secondary schools during the next 10 to 15 years. Partnerships with business, better pay for teachers and giving schools more autonomy to hire staff would help state schools improve, he said. Professor Caldwell noted that NSW had gone some way to rectify the problems, with 19 schools built through public private partnerships.
Among his other key ideas for reform are for low-performing schools to be paired with high-performing schools to boost their achievements, and for schools to specialise in areas such as science, technology or music.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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10 July, 2006
FREE SPEECH FOR HOMOSEXUALS ONLY AT GEORGIA TECH
Mike Adams is really angry about how an Asian student has been victimized in the name of "tolerance"
When I began the process of looking for a plaintiff to sue the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), I had hoped to see the day that a federal court would throw out the university's unconstitutional speech code. The code went so far as to prohibit any speech that would "malign" another individual -- whatever that means. Now, three months after a suit has been filed against Georgia Tech, the school has enacted a new speech code. This one prohibits any speech that is threatening, harassing, intimidating, or "otherwise injurious." The new code is entirely too broad. That is why the suit will proceed as planned.
Under their first illegal speech code, Georgia Tech created a remarkably poisonous atmosphere for free expression by punishing two students -- Ruth Malhotra and Orit Sklar, the co-plaintiffs in the case -- for engaging in constitutionally protected political protest. But now Georgia Tech officials are making matters worse by standing aside as their students create entire organizations designed to malign individual students; namely, the two aforementioned co-plaintiffs. For example, Georgia Tech students have formed "Conservatives and Liberals Against Malhotra (CLAM)" -- a group comprised solely of gays and their allies. Here's how they describe themselves:
"This is a group and forum for students in any political sphere who see what Ruth Malhotra is doing on campus as divisive and degrading to our Georgia Tech community."
And here is a further explanation of the group's mission:
"It is important that we respond to Malhotra's bigoted blather. This fat ugly b****** is getting so desperate (not to mention the fact that she badly needs plastic surgery). Malhotra has a record of fighting Georgia Tech to advance herself, and this isn't the first time she has taken legal action against the school. Just try googling her name. Everyone knows that Malhotra and her ilk are a complete freak show -- setting up tables on Skiles Walkway and ranting against whatever strawman or other minority they decide to hate today. Even the Republicans on campus are embarassed [sic] by their crap. Malhotra wants the right to follow gay students around campus and yell obscenities at them, and now she is forcing the Institute to spend its money to defend against her bull**** lawsuit. Malhotra needs to shut the f*** up and realize that the point of Georgia Tech is to be the best research and engineering school in the country, not to advance her dead end political `career.'"
Of course, CLAM offers no facts to support the contention that Republicans (note: they say "plural" but only one effeminate Republican male seems to be opposed) are embarrassed by Malhotra. They can't even spell the word "embarrassed" and don't seem to be embarrassed about it. Furthermore, they believe that they are able to read Ruth's mind and discern a secret desire to scream obscenities at gay people.
And, of course, members of CLAM were also among those responsible for passing out Hostess Twinkies in the dorms at Georgia Tech. This was accompanied by suggestions that Ruth (a student of Asian descent) is "yellow on the outside, white on the inside" and a "Twinkie b****." These liberals are hardly in a position to call anyone a "racist" or "intolerant." But they can freely express themselves at Georgia Tech -- even holding rallies on campus -- for two reasons:
The constitution allows these gay activists to be intolerant racists even when they are ostensibly fighting for "civil" rights. The constitution does not protect a gay activist from showing his, her, or its ass.
The other reason is that the habitually dishonest and racially insensitive Georgia Tech president applies the speech codes selectively at his school. Despite their valuable contribution to Georgia Tech, Asians are not protected by the speech code until they commit their first act of sodomy. Nonetheless, some people are confused about Georgia Tech's rapid decline since Wayne Clough took over in 1994. And they can't understand why the campus gets more hostile the more they pander to the sodomites.
Source
Teachers: Too bad about the kids
Our teachers' unions love to tell us that their unstinting concern is for the children. Yet, like teachers' unions the world over, their policies hurt children and serve only to entrench the comfort levels of teachers. That much becomes obvious at school report time. Which is right about now.
Under threat of financial sanction from the federal Government, schools will soon be forced to provide more comprehensive reports in plain English, telling you how your child is travelling and then ranking them. Compared with the piffle that most parents received in the past, it's tempting to think we've come a long away. But, boy, have we got a long way to go if we are serious about improving the social mobility of children, especially the most disadvantaged.
For too long, the social engineers in charge of teaching used the classroom as a leveller, where no one failed and no one excelled. Or, if a student was failing or excelling, you wouldn't know it from the school report dropped on the kitchen bench. In the weird world of educrats, the focus on outcomes-based education is code for hiding the real outcomes of students. That information under-load promoted mediocrity for students and teachers alike.
Protecting their own backsides from a caning for poor performance, that is just the way the teachers' unions want it. Greg Combet may daydream about unions one day running the country again, but in our schools unions still rule. Indeed, nowhere is the power of unions more pernicious than in our schools. Unions have been dragged kicking and screaming to the table on the issue of transparency and accountability in our schools. Last year, when former federal education minister Brendan Nelson suggested that schools start delivering meaningful information to parents, unions and their supporters defaulted into hysteria.
NSW Teachers Federation president Maree O'Halloran started waving around the teachers' industrial award that prevents the public release of comparative data on school performance. This information would lead to school leagues tables and we - meaning union members - don't want that, she groaned. Other teachers' unions also preferred the report that doesn't report. With unions as their paymasters, state Labor governments also resisted even these modest reforms. As Nelson said at the time: "Money is the only thing that brings them to the table."
Just how meek those reforms are becomes obvious when you look at what's happening in some American states. In the US a few weeks ago for the American Australian Leadership Dialogue organised by businessman Phil Scanlan, I learned about real education reform. And it's all happening in Florida. With textbooks such as Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by Numbers - which includes chapters on Multicultural Math - the US is home to the same sort of politically correct gimcrackery that infects our schools.
In 1999, Florida decided to see how its students were doing. Governor Jeb Bush introduced the nation's most far-reaching and controversial reforms premised on three ideas: testing, transparency and accountability. For a quick comparison of where we're at compared with Florida, click on the state's Department of Education website (www.fldoe. com). The wealth of information you'll find there puts the information void on our own state education websites to shame.
Bush's A+ program involves so-called high-stakes testing of all students from grades three to 10. It's high stakes because consequences flow from the results. Schools are graded between A to F depending on the performance of their students and, hold on to your seats, in those schools that attract two F-grades in any four-year period, students are given vouchers to attend private schools. As one pundit wrote, it was "the first money-back guarantee in the history of public education".
That the brother of George W. Bush is driving these education reforms will have left-wing union folk frothing about right-wing conspiracies. But the results prove that sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant. In a nutshell, once Florida started testing their students and making schools accountable for the results, student achievement levels kept rising. Released last month, the latest report from Florida's education department reveals record numbers of the state's students in grades three to 10 are reading at or above grade level: 223,000 more students than was the case in 2001. That's a 10 per cent jump on the 2001 results. In maths, 62 per cent of students in grades three to 10 are performing at or above achievement level, up from 50 per cent in 2001. Importantly, the traditional underachievers, African-Americans and Hispanics, have made the biggest gains.
The results for schools are equally remarkable. Putting pressure on F-graded schools was the most contentious part of Jeb Bush's reforms. In an analysis of Florida's failing schools, Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, point out that the theory behind the A+ program is that "chronically failing schools will have an incentive to improve if they must compete with other schools for students and the funding they generate". Their research finds that F- graded schools facing competition from vouchers made the biggest improvements when compared with other low-performing schools. So the theory was spot-on. In other words, Florida's willingness to penalise failing schools debunks the myth that economic forces stop at the classroom door.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Florida School Recognition Program awards funds to schools that receive an A grade or improve at least one grade category in any year. Each recognised school gets $100 for each full-time student and can use the money to award bonuses to teachers, buy educational equipment or material and employ additional staff to improve student performance. While there is a penalty for failing, there are also substantial incentives to achieve. Maybe that explains why, since 1999, the number of A-graded schools has jumped 500 per cent. In another radical move to align teaching with the real world, Florida is also awarding teachers performance-based bonuses.
And the reason Florida has been able to reform education to consistently deliver better outcomes for students brings us back to unions. In Florida, the education unions are much less powerful. Although they suffer the American disease of running off to court to complain, in Florida - unlike Australia - they don't have a state government in their back pockets. Our unionistas, dedicated to bankrolling the re-election of politicians who shaft children by cocooning teachers, have much to learn from Florida. For starters, the classroom is no place to be frightened of information if in fact you care deeply about children
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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9 July, 2006
UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS: FOR A "MODERN" EDUCATION
During the man's stay in the restroom, several other men entered and exited in 20 to 30 minute intervals. The men's ages appeared to range from 20's to 50's. After the men left, condom wrappers were found on the floors of the stalls. "It was creepy," said anthropology major Eric Gamble.
To verify that the men's presence in the restroom was not coincidental, the next day the reporter called one of the numbers on the wall to set up a meeting with a man. A man answered his phone and said he would arrive shortly after 4 p.m. wearing a white T-shirt, khaki shorts and New Balance tennis shoes. He agreed to charge $15 for his services.
A reporter, photographer and two other students positioned themselves around The University Center to see if the man would show up. At 4:10, a man, considerably younger than the man seen the previous day and matching the de ion given on the phone, was spotted walking from Walker Avenue toward The UC He went down the stairs, walked through the camera-monitored hallway and entered the bathroom. Forty-five minutes later he exited the bathroom, walked to his Jeep Grand Cherokee parked on Walker and drove off campus.
The bathroom in question is adjacent to the Judicial Affairs office and near post office boxes and the Side Pocket game room, which is described on The University's Web site as "a safe social gathering place for U of M students, faculty and staff." However, children and teenagers also use The UC while attending various camps on campus during the summer. "I think The University should fix the hole and inspect what's happening down there," said the English major.
According to Derek Myers, deputy director of The U of M's public safety, they have addressed the situation in the past, but nothing has stopped it. "We have had this problem for at least the past 13 years," Myers said. "We send in a work order to physical plant to repair the hole, but the hole keeps coming back." Myers said there have been numerous arrests for public indecency in the past, and the individuals involved are usually not affiliated with The University.
However, because it is hard to catch the violators in the act, the police usually attempt to scare off suspicious looking people, by asking for identification. Myers said no complaints of the hole or suspicious activities taking place have been filed during the past year. Myers said people who use The UC facilities often, should have notified the authorities, because the police depend on the campus community to report things that are not out in the open.
The "glory hole" has caused concern for at least one upset student. "We pay a lot of money to go here," said the English major. "I don't want a prostitution ring on campus."
Source
Priest claims religious discrimination at community college
WATERBURY, Conn. --Officials at Naugatuck Valley Community College are being sued by a Catholic priest, who claims religious discrimination. The Rev. James A. Crowley, a business professor, has filed a federal lawsuit along with his immediate supervisor, who claims officials retaliated against him for backing the priest. The federal lawsuit claims that a promotion for Crowley was delayed after a superior ed to his clerical clothing and use of "Catholic examples" in business ethics classes. The lawsuit claims that after Crowley complained about the delayed promotion, he was moved to an inferior office and given a harsh work schedule. Crowley's classes were also subjected to more than two years of surveillance by campus police, the suit alleges.
The lawsuit also claims that Crowley's supervisor, Dennis E. Spector, who supported the priest's claims, was wrongfully accused of workplace violence and moved to the same windowless office.
The lawsuit was filed in January against the college and eight officials, including three campus police officials. It seeks unspecified damages for numerous alleged constitutional and legal violations, including Connecticut's libel and slander laws, federal law barring retaliation and constitutional guarantees of academic expression and freedom of religion.
NVCC President Richard L. Sanders, a defendant, declined comment this week. Assistant Attorney General Eleanor M. Mullen has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, citing flaws related to legal jurisdiction, statutes of limitations and other grounds.
Source
Education "outcomes" we can do without
Confused about the conflict that is raging between traditional and student-centred teaching in schools? Kevin Donnelly offers an Australian guide
In publicly condemning the widespread influence of outcomes-based education, NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt should be congratulated. Along with the federal Opposition's move to drop Mark Latham's hit list of wealthy non-government schools, which was taken to the last election, it is obvious the Labor Party has finally realised that aspirational voters want choice in education and a curriculum based on high standards.
Tebbutt's recent conversion to the anti-outcomes-based education brigade follows last year's de ion by Brendan Nelson, then federal education minister and now Defence Minister, of the practice as a cancer and his initiative to force states to introduce plain English report cards, in which students are graded A to E, instead of using vague and feel-good de ions such as established, consolidation and emerging.
Outcomes-based education shifts the emphasis from what is taught and can be tested fairly ively to whatever students eventually learn. The ACT curriculum says "curriculum documentation has until recently concentrated on subject matter and teaching methods ... The move to an outcomes approach attempts to recognise the importance of what students know and can do."
Tebbutt's comments, reported in The Australian on Thursday, that "there are great pieces of literature and they should be studied as such" mirrors Prime Minister John Howard's comments earlier this year that there is no place for postmodern gobbledygook in the curriculum and schools need a more academic and rigorous approach to teaching history and the classics.
Victorian Liberal senator and the Government's backbench education committee chairman Mitch Fifield argues against outcomes-based education on the basis that "not all texts, not all works of literature are of equal merit. There is a right way and a wrong way to learn. There are right and wrong answers in exams. OBE is a failed experiment that should be declared DOA."
Why is outcomes-based education under attack from both sides of the political spectrum? It embodies a dumbed-down and politically correct approach to education and it is increasingly obvious that Australia's adoption of the approach has allowed standards to fall and put generations of students at risk.
That outcomes-based education has been forced on teachers and schools is made worse by the 1995 Eltis report in NSW in which University of Sydney professor Ken Eltis could find no evidence that the approach has been successfully implemented anywhere in the world and there appears little, if any, research proving that it is superior to what is being replaced.
A former head of the federal-state-owned Curriculum Corporation, Bruce Wilson, who was closely involved in introducing outcomes-based education into Australia during the 1990s, now describes it as an "unsatisfactory political and intellectual exercise". Wilson argues that "it is difficult to find a jurisdiction outside Australia which has persevered with the peculiar approach to outcomes that we have adopted".
A number of recent state and territory government-sponsored reports also conclude that there are serious flaws in outcomes-based education and, as a result, that teachers have suffered. A 2001 West Australian report concludes that teachers have been let down by an ineffective bureaucracy and that "many schools and teachers are experiencing significant difficulty in engaging with the requirements of an outcomes approach". In Queensland, the educrats in charge of the system candidly say in a 2005 report that the outcomes-based education framework forced on teachers lacks "clarity (on) what must be taught across schools and what standards of students achievement are expected". After reviewing Victoria's implementation of its curriculum and standards framework, a 2004 report says: "The current ways in which ... authorities have conceived the curriculum for schools resulted in poor definitions of expected and essential learning and provides teachers with insufficient guidance about what to teach."
Late last year, as a result of a second Eltis report, the NSW education department, which never adopted outcomes-based education in as pure a form as other states and territories, agreed that curriculum documents should be simplified, focus on essential academic content and give teachers a clear road map detailing what should be taught.
Those familiar with education debates in the US during the past 10 years will know that the adoption of outcomes-based education there faced similar criticisms. As a result, the practice is considered a failed and largely irrelevant experiment, and all American states have moved to a more academically based, year-level specific, detailed, unambiguous and teacher-friendly model of curriculum development.
Based on research associated with the federally funded primary curriculum benchmarking report completed last year, it is also obvious that most Australian curriculum documents in mathematics, science and English, as a result of outcomes-based education, are not as academically strong and teacher-friendly as the syllabuses developed in those systems that generally outperform Australia in the Trends in International Maths and Science Study tests.
Given the increasing belief that outcomes-based education is inherently flawed and impossible to implement usefully, it is hard not to think that the educrats responsible for inflicting it on Australian schools would admit their mistakes and move on to a better alternative. Such is not the case. On evaluating curriculum development across Australia, it is obvious that most systems, while rhetorically agreeing that all is not well, are pushing ahead with a more extreme form of the approach, described by the father of outcomes-based education, American educator William Spady, as "transformational outcomes-based education". "Transformational OBE is future-oriented," Spady says of the new age approach. "It exists to equip all students with the knowledge, competence and orientations needed for them to successfully meet the challenges and opportunities they will face in their career and family lives after graduating. It focuses on students' lifelong adaptive capacities. It is focused more on the broad role performance capabilities of young people and their ability to do complex tasks in real settings, in real situations, relating more directly to life. Transformational OBE is concerned solely with students' success after they leave school."
Those states and territories that are adopting transformational outcomes-based education in its pure form include the ACT, the Northern Territory, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia. NSW and Victoria, along with Queensland, appear to be adopting a hybrid approach, combining aspects of outcomes-based education with the more academic syllabus approach.
In Tasmania, instead of basing the curriculum on academic subjects such as English, mathematics and science, the curriculum is organised in terms of thinking, communicating, personal futures, social responsibility and world futures. The NT curriculum adopts a similar approach and argues that learning is developmental (students learn in different ways), constructivist (teachers facilitate instead of teach and children take control of their learning) and futures-oriented. Essential learning is defined as the inner, the creative, the collaborative and the constructive. The SA curriculum is based on "constructivist theories of learning", adopts a student-centred view of education and, again, emphasises what are termed essential learnings: futures, identity, interdependence, thinking and communication. Similar to Spady's approach, the emphasis is on "understandings, dispositions and capabilities" and the world outside the classroom is given priority. The WA Curriculum Framework says it is not a syllabus as such and that its primary focus is on outcomes. Once again, the focus is on developing new age attitudes, dispositions and values, such as inclusivity, collaboration and partnership, flexibility and environmental responsibility to the detriment of giving students a solid foundation in academic subjects. The ACT is adopting transformational outcomes-based education in its most extreme form and the curriculum is defined in terms of 36 essential learning achievements. Students must know how to learn, use problem-solving strategies, demonstrate intercultural understanding and appreciate diversity in human society.
For a variety of reasons, including public criticisms of outcomes-based education and the realisation that teachers and schools have experienced significant problems with implementation, Victoria, NSW and Queensland are taking a more balanced approach to curriculum development. NSW, in particular, as a result of the two Eltis reports, is resisting the move to transformational outcomes-based education and the curriculum, instead of being defined in terms of broad competencies and generic skills, is grounded in traditional subjects and, thankfully, teachers are to be given clear and succinct road maps.
Since the Keating government's national curriculum statements and profiles were developed in the early '90s, most criticism of outcomes-based education has been characterised as coming from cultural conservatives. Now ALP politicians such as Tebbutt are voicing concerns that, in a bipartisan spirit, could give young Australians precedence over political point-scoring.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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8 July, 2006
Union take over of LA schools almost complete -- no need for parents or School Board
A.J. Duffy's support of the mayor's plan to reorganize the management of Los Angeles' schools hardly qualifies as news. Duffy is president of the school district's teachers union, which would gain even more power under the plan. But Duffy did propose a novel argument Wednesday in Sacramento, testifying in support of the bill that would authorize the restructuring.
He downplayed criticism that the bill fragments power and blurs accountability. It is "precisely the genius of this legislation," he said, that it assigns "clear and responsible roles" to the superintendent, the mayor, the school board, teachers and parents. "We are building in the collaboration and shared accountability that will give schools what they need," he said.
United Teachers Los Angeles opposes merit pay for top-performing teachers. It makes the firing of bad teachers almost impossible. It's against allowing administrators to assign teachers to the schools where they are needed most. It's sharply critical of charter schools. The union doesn't like having a unified curriculum, and it thinks that teachers shouldn't have to put up with training from coaches.
In other words, the union is largely opposed to most reforms that demand more of teachers. (Individual teachers, many of whom applaud changing the schools to benefit students, are another matter.)
One of the biggest criticisms of the school board has been that the union wields too much power over its decisions because the union is by far the biggest donor to board candidates. Mayoral control of schools, in theory at least, dilutes that power because mayoral candidates draw from a larger pool of donors, and a mayor's decisions receive more public scrutiny.
So much for theory. As it turns out, a mayor eager to work out a legislative compromise - and who has a long history with the teachers union - can hand far more to the union than the school board has ever agreed to.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's agreement would allow schools a greater say in deciding their curriculum and whether to let coaches for teachers on campus. It would essentially give schools the same freedoms charter schools have but without the accountability. The bill also would severely limit the school board's power to carry out most of its current responsibilities, save one: negotiating the teachers' contract.
A weakened school board, as beholden to UTLA as ever, makes an ideal negotiating partner for a powerful union. A superintendent who isn't answerable to the board gives the union enough wiggle room to continually challenge district policy. A situation in which no one is dominant provides a perfect opportunity for the strongest player to emerge as the leader of the district. And UTLA is a strong, well-financed player. No wonder Duffy likes this deal so much.
Source
Australian history portrayed by schools as shameful
Textbooks give school students a one-sided account of our national history and Aboriginal culture, argues Kevin Donnelly
Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop is right. It's about time school students were taught traditional Australian history. For too long, teachers have downplayed - even, at times, denigrated - our nation's achievements. Pointing out past sins is one thing; making ourselves ashamed to be Australians is another thing altogether. Consider the way indigenous history and culture are taught in Australian schools.
Beginning with the Keating government's Studies of Society and Environment curriculum, students are told to celebrate Aboriginal culture uncritically and to recognise the worth of individuals such as Pat O'Shane and Eddie Mabo. European settlement is described as an invasion and there is little, if any, recognition that Aboriginal society may be dysfunctional. The Northern Territory Studies of Society and Environment document also presents Aboriginal culture in a blinkered way.
In the NT, students are told to "celebrate the survival of indigenous Australian cultural heritage" and to "learn from members of indigenous Australian communities as often as possible". Once again, no mention of the dark side of Aboriginal society, especially those elements that are misogynist and patriarchal.
One of the more extreme examples of a biased interpretation of indigenous issues is the Jacaranda SOSE Australian History textbook written for Victorian Year 10 classes. To be sure, some of the problems faced by Aboriginal communities, such as petrol sniffing, are acknowledged. But the dark side of indigenous culture represented by domestic violence is ignored. Of greater concern is the way problematic issues are presented as beyond dispute.
Take terra nullius. While some academics argue that the expression was not in use when the First Fleet landed, the Jacaranda text is in no doubt. In describing the High Court's 1992 Mabo judgment, the statement is made that the High Court decision "overturned the legal fiction that Australia had been terra nullius (land belonging to no one) when the British took possession of it in 1788".
The expression black armband provides another example of bias. Much of the Jacaranda textbook criticises the effect of European settlement. On two occasions it does briefly mention that historian Geoffrey Blainey and Prime Minister John Howard hold a different view. According to history teacher John Cantwell in the text, black-armband critics are motivated by the desire to "leave out certain parts of the human story because they are painful". In fact, Blainey, like Howard, acknowledges that history teaching during the 1970s and '80s was too congratulatory and what is needed is balance, not ignoring past sins.
The textbook's coverage of the 1997 report Bringing Them Home provides a further example of misleading students. Removing indigenous children from their parents is painted as genocide and the statement is made: "The motives for taking children were underpinned by racism." Never mind that many children benefited in later life from being removed from dysfunctional families.
It gets worse. The textbook writers argue that Australia's legal system fails "to cater for the cultural differences of Aboriginal Australians". (Is this code for arguing, as several judges do in interpreting tribal law, that Aboriginal elders should be treated leniently after raping underage girls?) The Jacaranda textbook condemns Australia's 1988 bicentenary celebrations. Most Australians, the argument goes, believe "the history being celebrated was only a small part of Australia's story and that the nation's history began thousands of years before 1788".
Mining companies and governments are not immune from criticism. "Mining companies and some state governments," the text reads, "have often shown little appreciation of indigenous land rights and even less concern for the protection of sacred sites." Never mind that mining giants liaise with Aboriginal communities and jointly determine the best practices to suit all parties involved in the process. Rio Tinto, for instance, employs anthropologists to work with indigenous communities to carry out cultural heritage studies before embarking on any developments and plans to double the number of indigenous workers employed at the Argyle diamond mine in Western Australia.
A second Jacaranda textbook, Humanities Alive 2, also adopts a simplified view of teaching history. Australia's settlement, the logic goes, is the same as the Spanish invasion of South America. Students are asked about similarities between what happened to the Aztecs and to Australian Aborigines. The suggested response is: "In both cases the invaders were after territory (and its resources) and set out (consciously or otherwise) to subjugate and/or destroy the indigenous population, should it stand in their way."
Education should be disinterested and give students a balanced understanding, free from ideology or cant. When it comes to teaching indigenous history, that means examining the full story and acknowledging the good with the bad. Over to you, minister.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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7 July, 2006
The famous rise -- and shameful fall -- of Jaime Escalante, America's master math teacher
Thanks to the popular 1988 movie Stand and Deliver, many Americans know of the success that Jaime Escalante and his students enjoyed at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. During the 1980s, that exceptional teacher at a poor public school built a calculus program rivaled by only a handful of exclusive academies. It is less well-known that Escalante left Garfield after problems with colleagues and administrators, and that his calculus program withered in his absence. That untold story highlights much that is wrong with public schooling in the United States and offers some valuable insights into the workings -- and failings -- of our education system.
Escalante's students surprised the nation in 1982, when 18 of them passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam. The Educational Testing Service found the scores suspect and asked 14 of the passing students to take the test again. Twelve agreed to do so (the other two decided they didn't need the credit for college), and all 12 did well enough to have their scores reinstated. In the ensuing years, Escalante's calculus program grew phenomenally. In 1983 both enrollment in his class and the number of students passing the A.P. calculus test more than doubled, with 33 taking the exam and 30 passing it. In 1987, 73 passed the test, and another 12 passed a more advanced version ("BC") usually given after the second year of calculus.
By 1990, Escalante's math enrichment program involved over 400 students in classes ranging from beginning algebra to advanced calculus. Escalante and his fellow teachers referred to their program as "the dynasty," boasting that it would someday involve more than 1,000 students. That goal was never met. In 1991 Escalante decided to leave Garfield. All his fellow math enrichment teachers soon left as well. By 1996, the dynasty was not even a minor fiefdom. Only seven students passed the regular ("AB") test that year, with four passing the BC exam -- 11 students total, down from a high of 85.
In any field but education, the combination of such a dramatic rise and such a precipitous fall would have invited analysis. If a team begins losing after a coach is replaced, sports fans are outraged. The decline of Garfield's math program, however, went largely unnoticed.
Most of us, educators included, learned what we know of Escalante's experience from Stand and Deliver. For more than a decade it has been a staple in high school classes, college education classes, and faculty workshops. Unfortunately, too many students and teachers learned the wrong lesson from the movie. Escalante tells me the film was 90 percent truth and 10 percent drama -- but what a difference 10 percent can make. Stand and Deliver shows a group of poorly prepared, undisciplined young people who were initially struggling with fractions yet managed to move from basic math to calculus in just a year. The reality was far different. It took 10 years to bring Escalante's program to peak success. He didn't even teach his first calculus course until he had been at Garfield for several years. His basic math students from his early years were not the same students who later passed the A.P. calculus test.
Escalante says he was so discouraged by his students' poor preparation that after only two hours in class he called his former employer, the Burroughs Corporation, and asked for his old job back. He decided not to return to the computer factory after he found a dozen basic math students who were willing to take algebra and was able to make arrangements with the principal and counselors to accommodate them. Escalante's situation improved as time went by, but it was not until his fifth year at Garfield that he tried to teach calculus. Although he felt his students were not adequately prepared, he decided to teach the class anyway in the hope that the existence of an A.P. calculus course would create the leverage necessary to improve lower-level math classes.
His plan worked. He and a handpicked teacher, Ben Jimenez, taught the feeder courses. In 1979 he had only five calculus students, two of whom passed the A.P. test. (Escalante had to do some bureaucratic sleight of hand to be allowed to teach such a tiny class.) The second year, he had nine calculus students, seven of whom passed the test. A year later, 15 students took the class, and all but one passed. The year after that, 1982, was the year of the events depicted in Stand and Deliver.
The Stand and Deliver message, that the touch of a master could bring unmotivated students from arithmetic to calculus in a single year, was preached in schools throughout the nation. While the film did a great service to education by showing what students from disadvantaged backgrounds can achieve in demanding classes, the Hollywood fiction had at least one negative side effect. By showing students moving from fractions to calculus in a single year, it gave the false impression that students can neglect their studies for several years and then be redeemed by a few months of hard work.
This Hollywood message had a pernicious effect on teacher training. The lessons of Escalante's patience and hard work in building his program, especially his attention to the classes that fed into calculus, were largely ignored in the faculty workshops and college education classes that routinely showed Stand and Deliver to their students. To the pedagogues, how Escalante succeeded mattered less than the mere fact that he succeeded. They were happy to cheer Escalante the icon; they were less interested in learning from Escalante the teacher. They were like physicians getting excited about a colleague who can cure cancer without wanting to know how to replicate the cure.....
Unlike the students in the movie, the real Garfield students required years of solid preparation before they could take calculus. This created a problem for Escalante. Garfield was a three-year high school, and the junior high schools that fed it offered only basic math. Even if the entering sophomores took advanced math every year, there was not enough time in their schedules to take geometry, algebra II, math analysis, trigonometry, and calculus. So Escalante established a program at East Los Angeles College where students could take these classes in intensive seven-week summer sessions. Escalante and Gradillas were also instrumental in getting the feeder schools to offer algebra in the eighth and ninth grades.
Inside Garfield, Escalante worked to ratchet up standards in the classes that fed into calculus. He taught some of the feeder classes himself, assigning others to handpicked teachers with whom he coordinated and reviewed lesson plans. By the time he left, there were nine Garfield teachers working in his math enrichment program and several teachers from other East L.A. high schools working in the summer program at the college....
Of course, not all of Escalante's students earned fives (the highest score) on their A.P. calculus exams, and not all went on to receive scholarships from top universities. One argument that educrats make against programs like Escalante's is that they are elitist and benefit only a select few.
Conventional pedagogical wisdom holds that the poor, the disadvantaged, and the "culturally different" are a fragile lot, and that the academic rigor usually found only in elite suburban or private schools would frustrate them, crushing their self-esteem. The teachers and administrators that I interviewed did not find this to be true of Garfield students.
Wayne Bishop, a professor of mathematics and computer science at California State University at Los Angeles, notes that Escalante's top students generally did not attend Cal State. Those who scored fours and fives on the A.P. calculus tests were at schools like MIT, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, USC, and UCLA. For the most part, Escalante grads who went to Cal State-L.A. were those who scored ones and twos, with an occasional three, or those who worked hard in algebra and geometry in the hope of getting into calculus class but fell short.
Bishop observes that these students usually required no remedial math, and that many of them became top students at the college. The moral is that it is better to lose in the Olympics than to win in Little League, even for those whose parents make less than $20,000 per year.
Escalante's open admission policy, a major reason for his success, also paved the way for his departure. Calculus grew so popular at Garfield that classes grew beyond the 35-student limit set by the union contract. Some had more than 50 students. Escalante would have preferred to keep the classes below the limit had he been able to do so without either denying calculus to willing students or using teachers who were not up to his high standards. Neither was possible, and the teachers union complained about Garfield's class sizes. Rather than compromise, Escalante moved on.
Other problems had been brewing as well. After Stand and Deliver was released, Escalante became an overnight celebrity. Teachers and other interested observers asked to sit in on his classes, and he received visits from political leaders and celebrities, including President George H.W. Bush and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. This attention aroused feelings of jealousy. In his last few years at Garfield, Escalante even received threats and hate mail. In 1990 he lost the math department chairmanship, the position that had enabled him to direct the pipeline.
When Cal State's Wayne Bishop called Garfield to ask about the status of the school's post-Escalante A.P. calculus program, he was told, "We were doing fine before Mr. Escalante left, and we're doing fine after." Soon Garfield discovered how critical Escalante's presence had been. Within a few years, Garfield experienced a sevenfold drop in the number of A.P. calculus students passing their exams. (That said, A.P. participation at Garfield is still much, much higher than at most similar schools. In May of 2000, 722 Garfield students took Advanced Placement tests, and 44 percent passed.)
This leaves would-be school reformers with a set of uncomfortable questions. Why couldn't Escalante run his classes in peace? Why were administrators allowed to get in his way? Why was the union imposing its "help" on someone who hadn't requested it? Could Escalante's program have been saved if, as Gradillas now muses, Garfield had become a charter school? What is wrong with a system that values working well with others more highly than effectiveness?...
Before passing another law or setting another policy, our reformers should take a close look at what Jaime Escalante did -- and at what was done to him.
More here
Australia's classrooms need to make a date with the facts
School students should be taught traditional Australian history, insists federal Education Minister Julie Bishop
The time has come for a renaissance in the teaching of Australian history in our schools. By the time students finish their secondary schooling, they must have a thorough understanding of their nation's past. It makes young people more informed citizens and better able to appreciate where our nation has come from and how we have arrived at our place as a modern liberal democracy.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister John Howard said he believed that the time had come for "root and branch renewal of the teaching of Australian history in our schools, both in terms of the numbers learning and the way it is taught". The Prime Minister said "too often, Australian history is taught without any sense of structured narrative, replaced by a fragmented stew of themes and issues". This highlights the two glaring problems with regard to the teaching of Australian history: the quantitative problem and the qualitative problem. Not enough students are learning Australian history; and there is too much political bias and not enough pivotal facts and dates being taught.
Every schoolchild should know, for example, when and why the then Lieutenant James Cook sailed along the east coast of Australia. Every child should know why the British transported convicts to Australia and who Australia's first prime minister was. They should also know how and why Federation came about, and why we were involved in the two world wars.
Indigenous Australian history is also an important part of the Australian narrative and must form part of a basic understanding of Australian history. So is the history of our parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, and the Enlightenment, which were all aspects of our nation's past, bequeathed to us as part of our European inheritance.
The principal quantitative problem with the teaching of Australian history in most states is that it has fallen victim to a crowded curriculum that has squashed the discipline together with other social and environmental studies, and which has seen students learning less history and more themes and political science masked as history. This is a trend that must be reversed.
In 2000, the federal Government commissioned a report into the state of Australian history teaching in our schools that identified the gradual disappearance of history as a discipline in classrooms across Australia. To illustrate the point, as one columnist pointed out in The Australian in 2000: "In a recent national test, students were asked to name a political leader of this country who was famous in the period 1880-1901. Most were unable to name one. Among the names they did suggest were Arthur Phillip, (Robert) Menzies and Ronald Reagan".
In NSW, former premier Bob Carr deserves to be commended for taking steps during his premiership to ensure that the tide was turned in his state's classrooms and more Australian history was taught; but more needs to be done on a national scale. I welcome the support of the president of the History Teachers Association of Australia for the quantitative aspect of my concerns. Although the association may not fully agree with my criticism of what is being taught as part of Australian history, we agree on the need for more Australian history in classrooms.
In terms of the qualitative problem, it is my observation that there has been a tendency to downplay the overwhelmingly positive aspects of the Australian achievement. We need to find a balance that constitutes an understanding of our nation's past and is made up of the essential facts, dates and events that every student should know when they finish their secondary schooling. This must include an embrace not only of our European inheritance and our Aboriginal history but also post-war immigration from every corner of the globe and the other aspects of our nation's history that have made ours one of the most open and tolerant societies on earth.
Also, it is important for students to develop a body of knowledge that is rich in dates, facts and events, and from which students can then draw their own opinions about historical events. Without learning these primary ingredients of history, students are less able to form valuable conclusions. My concern is that in the social and environmental subjects that are supposed to teach history, students are missing knowledge about key historical events and their influence on our nation's development. Students should be encouraged to develop opinions about the different parts of Australia's history, but those opinions should be buttressed with an evidence base.
I intend to explore ways for the federal Government to encourage the state education authorities and all schools to make the teaching of Australian history a critical part of their jurisdictions' syllabuses. I want the states to embrace this agenda, and not succumb to pressure from various interest groups that see the rebirth of Australian history teaching as a threat to political correctness.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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6 July, 2006
CALIFORNIA'S "PROGRESSIVE" EDUCATORS SHOW THE WAY
Senior classes in the Sacramento region shrank 11.6 percent during the school year that ended in June
More than 2,800 Sacramento region 12th-graders who started the 2005-06 year with their class disappeared from public schools by June. Every year some seniors move, some graduate early and others are held back to 11th grade. But the vast majority of students who leave during their senior year are essentially dropping out, according to area educators.
Most seniors who leave school do so because they're so far behind in credits they won't be able to graduate with their class, school officials said, explaining the 11.6 percent drop in 12th-grade enrollment in Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer and Yolo counties. The numbers emerged from public records act requests from The Bee.
Senior class attrition is one slice of the dropout problem facing high schools throughout California and the nation. The attrition rate is much larger when the count considers how much a class shrinks through four years of high school. From the fall of their freshman year to the end of what should have been their senior year, 28,509 students in the class of 2006 disappeared from the public schools of Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer and Yolo counties, according to state and district enrollment data. That works out to a 51 percent drop in class size in the Grant Joint Union High School District, a 39 percent drop in the Sacramento City Unified School District and a 23 percent drop in the San Juan Unified School District over the four-year period. Overall in the four-county region, the class of 2006 decreased by 24 percent over the last four years. "We do have students who you just lose. You don't know why they leave," said Linda Martin, an associate superintendent in the San Juan district. "I really wish we could have an exit interview with every student to understand why they're leaving."
Local educators said the new exit exam graduation requirement this year didn't make much difference in the number of dropouts -- seniors left school at the same rate this year as they have in the past, they said. "I don't think it's anything different than 25 years ago," said Bob Mange, who just retired from a 35-year career in the Folsom Cordova Unified School District. "Kids do move and some drop out; I'm not debating that issue."
California has not completed a data system that follows students throughout their education. So when students leave school, officials can't accurately track whether they enroll in another school, take a high school equivalency exam or discontinue their education. The lack of reliable data has led researchers and state officials to different conclusions about how many students finish school. A Harvard University study last year reported a 71 percent graduation rate in California -- far lower than the 87 percent graduation rate reported by the state. The study's figures were even dimmer for Latino and African American students, who graduate at a rate of 60 and 57 percent, respectively, according to the study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project.
A study released earlier this month by Education Week says that the graduation rate nationwide is 70 percent, meaning 1.2 million students who started high school as part of the class of 2006 did not toss graduation caps with their peers this spring. Nationwide, most students who drop out do so in the ninth grade, according to the Education Week report. In California, however, most dropouts leave during 11th grade, said Christopher Swanson, author of the Education Week report. By the time students start their senior year, most of their peers who were likely to drop out already did. Still, attrition doesn't stop during 12th grade. Some schools in the Sacramento region -- including Luther Burbank and Sheldon high schools -- lost more than 100 seniors during the 2005-06 year, according to data The Bee collected from area school districts.
And every district in the region -- except the tiny districts of Esparto in Yolo County and Center in Sacramento County -- lost seniors this year. That was true even in high-growth areas like Folsom, Elk Grove and Natomas, where new home construction brings hundreds of new families into the schools each year.....
Sacramento county chief Gordon said many students who leave because they're behind in credits have not put in the effort necessary to succeed. California's high academic standards have led to tough courses that require students to work harder, he said. "It's there because we want the kids to be successful, not because we want to kick them to the curb and make them dropouts," Gordon said. He added that many who leave school without graduating go on to take the General Educational Development test or the California High School Proficiency Exam.
But for researchers and advocates, those students still reflect a failure of the education system. "If a student is leaving high school without a credential and going to get a GED, they would be a dropout," said Swanson, the Education Week researcher. "We have to be careful when we talk about GEDs," he said. "They're not as beneficial as regular credentials."
Source
Make history study compulsory: PM
Australian history should be compulsory in the nation's schools, Prime Minister John Howard said today. The Federal Government is pushing the states and territories to reinstate the study as a stand-alone subject, and may force the issue in the next round of schools funding. Mr Howard said he was not expecting opposition from the states and said Australian history should be compulsory for at least part of the curriculum. "I would like to see it compulsory at certain stages," he told Southern Cross Broadcasting. "The detail of that can be worked out by the different education departments. "I'm not trying to write a course, I'm just wanting to establish the priority. "And I cannot understand how anybody in a government could to Australian history being for some period of time a compulsory, stand alone subject."
The study should include European and Aboriginal history, Mr Howard said. "It's got to include some understanding of British and European history, an understanding of the enlightenment, an understanding of the influence of Christianity, of Western civilisation, all of those things that shaped Australian society have got to be included," he said. "But very particularly, we've got to have a proper narrative of what happened to this country both before 1788 ... and onwards. "Now that includes, obviously, some reference to indigenous history."
Mr Howard said it was essential to move away from studying history "as part of an examination of issues, an examination of cultural drifts". "I want history to be Australian history in all of the manifestations I've described," he said. "I want it to be a stand alone subject, it deserves that treatment. "I want Australians in future to understand the scale of the Australian achievement." The Government has commissioned two studies to assess the status of Australian history in schools and is planning a summit involving historians, teachers, commentators and community representatives.
The Australian newspaper reported today that if the states refused to reinstate Australian history as a subject, the Federal Government would consider making it a condition in its next $40 billion, four-year school funding agreement.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
***************************
5 July, 2006
NCLB FLAWS
State tests of student achievement are so prone to change, and seemingly so inconsistent with federal tests and with each other, that it's tough for the public to tell whether the controversial No Child Left Behind Act has made good on its promises. Such is the finding of a new study by researchers at the University of California and Stanford University. The study, "Is the No Child Left Behind Act Working?" doesn't purport to answer the question in its title. But it does suggest that states and the federal government apparently obtain radically different results with different tests, leaving the public without a clear way to judge the effect of the 5-year-old federal law.
"We're left with this murky reality of not knowing whether No Child Left Behind is adding anything," said said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at UC Berkeley and co-director of Policy Analysis for California Education, the consortium that issued the study. "The architects of NCLB promised more transparency but this is a pretty bewildering rendition of transparency."
The law, which requires every state to test students annually in math and reading and make them all proficient by 2014, is up for reauthorization next year in Congress. Some researchers say the study highlights how hard it will be for the public to sift through the law's pros and cons. "You definitely have multiple accountability systems going, and I think it is confusing to people," said Ron Dietel, a spokesman for the National Center for Research, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA.
The yearlong study examined several years of test scores in 12 states, including California, and compared them to the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- the "Nation's Report Card" -- during the same years. The study turned up three major barriers to understanding the law's effects. For one, every state defines "proficiency" differently. For instance, Illinois reported in 2005 that nearly 80 percent of its fourth-graders were proficient in math, while California, with more rigorous standards, reported only about 50 percent.
Meanwhile, about the same proportion of fourth-graders in both states -- roughly 30 percent -- were proficient on the national assessment, which was the same in each state. Worse, in some states, there seemed to be virtually no link between reading performance on state tests and on federal tests. Ten of the 12 states reported annual increases in the percent of fourth-graders scoring proficient in reading between 2002 and 2005, while national results actually dropped in four of those states. In two more that reported improvement -- California and Nebraska -- the national results were flat.
The researchers also found that states rejigger their testing systems so frequently that there's no way to judge how students have improved over time. California saw two major shifts in recent years: one in 1999, when it started matching its tests to educational standards, and another in 2001, when it employed a new company to write test questions. "If parents were to only look at the state story about achievement trends, they would be bewildered as to how their kids were learning over the past 10 years," Fuller said.
Officials at the state Department of Education took issue with some of the study's findings, saying it examined an inadequate portion of the student population and underestimates recent progress. If the entire student population had been considered, rather than just those deemed proficient, the researchers would have found a tight relationship in California between state and national tests, officials said.
Fuller, however, said he focused on the top range of students because that's the range for which states are accountable under federal law. Rick Miller, an education department spokesman, said the state tests, aligned to local standards, offer a more sensitive measure of whether kids are learning than the national test does. However, Miller said he was glad the study pointed out that some states, wary of federal sanctions for inadequate progress toward their goals, have set far less ambitious targets than California has. "That's the perverse nature of NCLB -- it actually incentivizes states to lower their standards," he said.
There's little consensus among researchers about how the law has affected education, and some observers say it'll take longer than five years to create strong tests in each state that will yield consistent results. "It's a little premature to judge the global impact on our standards system," said Jim Lanich, president of California Business for Education Excellence and a longtime supporter of the law.
The study recommends several ways to make testing results more uniform. First, all states should be required to define proficiency the same way and perhaps align their targets with those of the national test. Policy-makers should consider designing more rigorous state tests, so teachers will focus more on the critical thinking skills required to do well on the national test. And finally, the federal government should consider helping states find ways to track achievement even when they switch or alter their tests
Source
RACE IN BRITISH SCHOOLS
Parental choice in schooling for their children will encourage racial segregation, says the Commission for Racial Equality. The CRE points out that in some areas of Yorkshire 99 per cent of pupils are white, while in other areas 95 per cent of pupils are non-white. These revelations from the CRE follow its chairman Trevor Phillips comments in September 2005, when he argued that Britains cities were sleepwalking into segregation. Certainly, as Kenan Maliks Channel 4 documentary Disunited Kingdom graphically illustrated in 2003, there are many racially segregated secondary schools in places such as Bradford and Oldham. But is it fair of the CRE to pin the blame on parental choice in schools? And is the solution to this problem yet more lectures on the importance of recognising diversity?
In the 1980s, the ruling Conservative Party made parental choice a key plank of its educational policies. This meant, in theory at least, that parents were given options to send their children to the school of their choice, rather than being restricted to local boundaries. Its always been the case that middle-class parents have been able to bend the education system to their benefit, whether its through private tuition or having the right social networks to find the right type of school. With the creation of Grant Maintained and Specialist Schools, the Conservatives simply made it easier for some middle-class parents to opt out of bog-standard comprehensives. And according to the CRE, it is this process that has steadily led to schools becoming racially segregated.
In actual fact, Britains inner cities and outer suburbs have long been divided between ethnic minorities and the white-middle classes. During the 1950s and 60s, immigrants were brought into London to fill the vacuum left by whites who had already moved to the suburbs. This was compounded in the 1980s by local councils that allocated social housing along racial lines.
Its no surprise, then, that the pupil composition of secondary schools mirrored those divisions. Today, what has entrenched this divide even further is the elites emphasis on multiculturalism for society and, in particular, for education. At a time when our private beliefs and customs are considered to be the basis of our public lives, is it any wonder that parents are opting out of universal state schools and going for particularistic ones instead? Above all, it is the elevation of fixed identities that influences parental decisions about education. Indeed, parents are often told that the best route to educational success for their children is to have teaching methods that are relevant to their kids ethnic background. Wasnt it Phillips himself who argued, not so long ago, that black boys would do better at school if they were taught by black teachers only?
It is little wonder, then, that parents from different ethnic backgrounds may seek out schools where their child is with others from the same ethnic background. As explored in Maliks Disunited Kingdom, some parents didnt want their children learning someone elses culture. Also, at a time when we are bombarded with scare stories about the rise of bullying in schools, it is not so surprising that anxious parents would not want their child to be the only minority in class, lest they become a target for real or imagined bullies.
All of this has coincided with a greater emphasis than ever before on how important childrens education is to their future success. When politicians and commentators constantly raise questions about the standards of education in schools, as well as over-emphasising the importance of exam success, some parents can be left in a panic about which is the right school for their child. This is one reason why faith schools are increasingly seen by some parents as the best option, with many converting to a religion in order for their child to be eligible for a place. For all their faults, at least comprehensive schools allowed kids to get on with others from all sorts of backgrounds. It is the divisiveness of todays multicultural thinking, not parental choice, that implicitly suggests that the old mixed comprehensive arrangement is either impossible or undesirable.
At first glance, it seems the CRE wants to combat the excesses of multiculturalism. In fact, it doesnt so much want greater integration as it does more diversity within schools themselves. For multiculturalists, it is hard to promote ideas of difference if children are boxed off into particular faith schools. This is why local education authorities in Yorkshire have been bussing in teenagers from racially segregated schools not so much to demonstrate commonality and common interests, but so that the children can learn about each others cultural identities. Ideally, the CRE would like a mixed bag of ethnic identities in all schools precisely to demonstrate how different we all are rather than as a means of recognising that children share common experiences and have common aspirations.
In nursery schools, for example, even toddlers are made to be aware of how different they are from other children; they are encouraged to bring in examples of their familys ethnic cuisine, for example, to show the rest of the class how exotic and distinct such food is. At a time in their lives when children just see other children, rather than black, white or brown children, multiculturalists are rushing in to underline the apparent divisions between them. The CRE wants the education system to institutionalise ethnic and cultural divisions within schools rather between segregated schools. That hardly represents a victory for re-establishing universal values in society at large.
Indeed, it is precisely the lack of universal thinking today which means that school students are seen in a tick-box, statistical way. The CRE may pay lip service to common national values, but its attempts to overcome segregation are based on percentages of different ethnic groups rather than on establishing real common beliefs about the kind of society we all want to live in. If we could establish that, and in the process create a proper colour-blind society, it wouldnt matter who went to what schools where.
It is outrageous for the CRE to question the validity of personal choice in education. What it really means is that people cant be trusted to make the right decision and not just in education but in other areas too. According to one report: The CREs view is that choice in other public services risks greater racial segregation. [The CRE has] evidence that choice in council housing may be further ghettoising communities and that even in health services, patient choice may result in ethnic segregation. For the CRE, The language of choice is about individual needs, about self-interest. The language of integration is about societys needs, about the collective interest. This is less about promoting racial integration or dubious notions of collective interest, than it is an attack on individual autonomy so that diversity and difference can be enforced from above.
There is no doubt that multicultural thinking has helped to entrench already existing ethnic divisions within society. At a time when educational learning is centred on the tyranny of relevance, the logical conclusion is for parents to send their children to schools with similar like-minded kids and teachers. Yet far from overcoming such artificial divisions, and establishing a truly universal form of education, the CRE wants the UKs schools to be laboratories of micro-diversity. Once again, by appearing to criticise the excesses of multiculturalism, and in the process blaming parental choice for segregated schools, the CRE has strengthened the dogma of diversity.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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4 July, 2006
Have we forgotten civic education?
Two centuries after Jefferson, social studies are lacking at public schools
In the early afternoon of July 4, 1776, church bells rang out in Philadelphia celebrating the official adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress. Of course, the work of establishing the republic was not finished on that July day. Indeed, the nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" - to use Abraham Lincoln's words - will always be a work in progress.
The founders knew this too. By the summer of 1818, their generation was passing away. The survivors fretted about the future of their legacy and whether the republic would endure. They believed that each new generation must be enlightened by the principles of liberty and prepared to fight for the rights that had been won. For all of the founders - and especially for the author of the Declaration of Independence - education was the key. As early as 1779, Thomas Jefferson had written a bill in Virginia proposing a system of public education and arguing that history should be studied by all citizens. In 1817, he again proposed a system of free public education for the state and the establishment of a public university....
So how is Jefferson's vision for a sound history and civic education doing today? In California, we have a comprehensive, history-driven social studies framework and standards for all grade levels. Every high school student must take three years of social studies, including a U.S. government course, to graduate. On the surface, things look good.
But in truth, social studies is no longer a priority in schools and has not been for some time. Most recently, because of the national No Child Left Behind mandates and the school accountability system, language arts, math and science are emphasized. Resources for history/social science in terms of professional development, materials and even instructional time are scarce. This is particularly true at low-scoring elementary schools serving underrepresented student populations, where instructional time for social studies has been greatly diminished. A cruel irony, really: those least empowered and most in need of the knowledge and skills of effective citizenship and advocacy are the least likely to be exposed to them.
Recent studies demonstrate that our nation and state are paying a price for this neglect. The California Survey of Civic Education conducted last year demonstrated that despite taking a course in U.S. government in the 12th grade, graduating seniors' knowledge of the structures and functions of government and of current political issues is very weak. Students averaged only a little over 60% correct on a test of their civics content knowledge, a low "D" on typical grading scales.
The survey also revealed that today's graduates are not inclined toward participatory citizenship. Less than half of high school seniors surveyed believed that "being actively involved in state and local issues is my responsibility."
Given these findings, it should be no surprise that young people's trust in government is appallingly low. Only 33% of high school seniors said they trusted "the people in government to do what is right for the country," and only 28% agreed with the statement: "I think that people in government care about what people like me and my family need."
It is difficult to fault young people for these views and attitudes, and, in truth, a survey administered to adults might well bear similar results. Given the daily fare of political scandal, partisan nastiness and negative campaigning, why would young people be inclined to trust in government or become politically engaged?
Studies such as the California Survey have brought to light the need for a renewal of civic education in our nation's schools. These days, there are groups - such as the Alliance for Representative Democracy and the Civic Mission of Schools - working in every state to improve civic education and preserve the social studies.
As you enjoy your Fourth of July activities, take a moment to reflect on Jefferson's summer long ago in Rockfish Gap. Then do what you can do make the founders' hopes a reality.
More here
CHARACTER EDUCATION
Press release from The U.S. House Committee on Education & the Workforce (Lindsey.Mask@mail.house.gov)
The U.S. House Committee on Education & the Workforce, chaired by Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-CA), today heard testimony from golf legend Jack Nicklaus and others on character-building instruction and integrating character education into school curriculum. Character education typically includes direct instruction and other efforts that promote values such as responsibility, respect, trust, hard work, and civic engagement. Nicklaus, honorary co-chairman of the character education initiative, The First Tee, joined educators in discussing the challenges and successes of character education programs.
"The First Tee uses the game of golf to teach youngsters skills that enable them to incorporate positive values into their behaviors," Nicklaus explained. "The First Tee is based upon nine core values: honesty, responsibility, respect, judgment, courtesy, perseverance, integrity, confidence, and sportsmanship; and our Life Skills curriculum ensures that every youngster who comes to The First Tee is taught more than the game of golf."
Nicklaus continued, "At a time when we need to do everything we can to promote positive values in our children, particularly thinking beyond themselves and caring for others, The First Tee has adopted that mission and is doing it effectively." The First Tee and similar programs - coupled with the work schools are doing to promote character education - are designed to expand the possibilities for personal growth in U.S. students.
"It's clear that public, private, and non-profit organizations are working each day to build character education in our nation's youth, and I'm pleased our Committee was able to provide them a platform to highlight their efforts," noted McKeon. "Far too many children throughout the United States face difficult circumstances - from poverty and violence to drugs and alcohol. And character education plays a valuable role in helping them overcome these obstacles."
Sharon Aldredge, principal of Woodley Hills Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia, discussed the success of incorporating character education into the curriculum of her school. "The one factor that changed was the implementation of a character education initiative that involved every member of the school community," Aldredge said. "The students, office staff, custodians, parents, teachers, cafeteria employees, and administrators developed a shared vision and became responsible for modeling and integrating character education into every aspect of the school environment."
Underscoring the positive results of the character education efforts, Aldredge continued, "In 2001, Woodley Hills was named a `National School of Character' by the Character Education Partnership organization. Our scores on the Virginia Standards of Learning tests are now at 80th and 90th percentile. Discipline problems are almost nonexistent in the school, with only three to five suspensions a year. Our children are happy to come to school, and they understand why we are teaching character education."
McKeon noted Congress' increased support for character education initiatives as well. This year alone, character education programs under the No Child Left Behind Act have been funded at nearly $25 million. "Through the No Child Left Behind Act, Congress has stepped forward in promoting character education," concluded McKeon. "The law establishes competitive grants for states and local school districts for character education programs that can be integrated into classroom instruction. And scores of schools also are developing character education curriculum independent of this federal program. Many schools, like Woodley Hills, who have implemented these types of initiatives have reported rising test scores and improved student behavior."
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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3 July, 2006
The hidden benefits of a private education
Even an obviously left-leaning writer can see it
When you enter a private school, both you and your parents are required to sign paperwork indicating that you have read the college or university handbook, understand it, and will abide by it. These documents are contracts; they are the rules that govern your relationships and rights at your private institution. The law of contracts forms the oldest branch of the law relating to transactions. In one form or another, it has existed from the beginning of organized and primitive societies. Just as the safety of persons and/or property depends upon the rule of criminal law, the security and stability of the business world is dependent upon the law of contracts. The law of contracts is one of the main structural supports with the right to acquire and dispose of property. A contract in the modern sense has been defined as an agreement containing a promise enforceable in law.
One important distinction between a private institution and a public institution is that there is much more room for change at a private institution. Lets face the facts: Its easier to change the policies at a private university than to change the policies of the federal government. For example, private schools have more leeway to set their own rules on free expression than public schools do because private schools are covered by something called contract law. Contract law is said to be a part of private law because it does not involve or bind the state or persons that are not parties to the contract.
Private schools, partly due to their expense, handle education under unique circumstances. Privately schooled pre-adults feel pressure to perform, in part because of high tuition; there is a lot of money riding on these students. Whether paid by loans, parents or scholarships, the tuition provider acts as an overseeing force, continually checking on progress. These private schools sometimes integrate religion, have low student/teacher ratios and at times practice extreme educational standards that cannot be duplicated in the public sector.
Those who can afford the specialized services offered by private schools should be entitled to them. Paying roughly $11,000 each year more than public four-year universities may provide benefits such as solitude due to , extreme rigor, and the stigma of having attended a private institution. The only money that private institutions gain from the government is minor grants and financial aid.
In a Supreme Court case called Tinker v. Des Moines, Justice Abe Fortas ruled that, In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are persons under our Constitution. In spite of the Supreme Courts ringing endorsement of students rights in the landmark Tinker decision, constitutional violations are far too common in public schools across the country.
Articles about controversial subjects written for student newspapers are censored. Lockers and backpacks are searched without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. Minority students are disproportionately shunted in lower track programs. Majoritarian religious practices are officially sanctioned by teachers and school administrators. Female students are excluded from certain extracurricular activities; gay students are intimidated into silence.
Both private and public institutions are far from being educational panaceas. From grade inflation to policy enforcement, both private and public schools have their work cut out for them in the future.
According to National Center for Education Statistics, during the 1993-94 school year, private schools in the United States accounted for 24.4 percent of the total number of schools in the United States. These schools enrolled 10.7 percent of the students enrolled in kindergarten through grade 12. The same report reveals that nearly one-third of private schools required some kind of community service before graduation, as compared with only three percent of government schools that have a like requirement.
Clearly, there exists an additional ive of private school leaders more than of government school leaders to focus on issues that go beyond academic achievement (and) which serve to strengthen the community and uphold societys moral values. The government schools continue to consider such goals inappropriate, but the private schools can deal effectively with the students academic and moral development.
The biggest and best benefit of a private school is simply that it is not a public school. Students are often shut down by the system that is supposed to be helping them succeed as individuals. Government-run education doesnt work because it stifles creativity and individual initiative in a multitude of areas. The hidden benefits of a private education are many: more creativity, less propaganda, more learning, less obedience, more responsibility. Hopefully Americans will come to a similar conclusion; then and only then can the complete separation of school and state be brought to a reality.
Source
HOMESCHOOLING IN BRITAIN
A loophole ("or otherwise") deliberately built into the law to protect the privately-tutored children of the gentry has now become widely used
A quietly spoken grandmother in her mid-sixties, Iris Harrison lives with her husband, Geoff, in the isolated Worcestershire farmhouse where she brought up her four children. A handmade trunk full of legal papers and a constantly ringing phone provide the clues to her more radical past.
Three of the Harrisons' children had such profound dyslexia, they were told they would never learn to read or write. In 1970, when their eldest daughter, Wanda, then five, began to hide rather than go to school, Iris decided to keep her at home. To escape the authorities, the family fled to a remote Scottish island, to a hut with no running water. The nearest shop was a boat ride away. Iris recalls Wanda learning to read from old copies of Exchange & Mart. "In the end we decided we couldn't keep running. We came back, hoping we'd be forgotten."
They weren't. They were threatened with legal action and told that the children, including six-month-old Newall, would be taken into care. "The children were so afraid, I barely left them," Iris recalls. "The LEA [local education authority] were like the Gestapo. I remember once having to go out to get petrol and telling my eldest son, Grant, that if the authorities arrived, he should load his air rifle and aim at their feet." The Harrisons instructed a lawyer and bought a flock of geese to keep the LEA inspectors away, while they and a handful of supporters fought their way through the courts for the right to educate their children autonomously at home.
Autonomous learning is child- rather than teacher-led. Parents become facilitators, providing resources and assistance, allowing children to follow their own interests. "We played games, we researched every question they asked," says Iris. "We didn't have a TV. It was a talking, living education." Iris's diary around this time reads: "AJ's violin lesson went on all day today. Newall worked on his model farm, working out the grazing required per animal. He then calculated the cereal crop requirement, hay for fodder and allowed an amount for sale. He and Grant have been researching ancient weapons using the World of Knowledge. They made a replica of a Roman weapon and set up a battle in miniature."
Iris felt "the deepest certainty" that they were doing the right thing. Her husband had spent his school days truanting in museums, remembering everything he saw. "I trained purely to take exams and immediately forgot everything," says Iris. "It was obvious that he was the one who was truly educated."
Today their children, now in their thirties, still love learning, and continue to study - though not, says Iris, to take exams. AJ trained in alternative medicine, Wanda has worked teaching new skills to young people, and Grant runs a workshop making ironwork with Newall, who also renovates classic cars.
The 1944 Education Act states that the parent of every school-age child should ensure he receives full-time education suitable to his age and ability, "either by regular attendance at school or otherwise". It is the word "otherwise" that provided the Harrisons' legal loophole and opened up home education as an option for all.
In 1977, so few families were educating their children at home that nobody bothered to count them. By 1978, Education Otherwise (EO), the support group Iris Harrison co-founded, had 400 member families. The figure is now 4,183, and EO's helpline receives 700 calls a month.
The Department for Education and Skills estimates that up to 150,000 children in Britain may be home-educated. The exact figure is impossible to calculate since, if their children have never been registered at a school, parents have no legal duty to inform the authorities. But we do know that profile of the modern home educator has changed. Many parents who opted out of mainstream education in the 1970s were exploring an alternative lifestyle. Nowadays, large class sizes, bullying, failing to get a child into a school of their choice and the relentless pressure of exams have led many parents who wouldn't consider themselves remotely radical to remove their children from the system.
When Rowan Hillier, 13, didn't get into her first or second choice of secondary school near Tunbridge Wells, her parents ignored the third, "the kind of school where the kids beat the teachers up". Rowan has been learning at home for nearly two years. "I was certain I could do better," says her mother, Jane Brenan. One hour's tutoring a week in maths, science and French has kept Rowan on top of the national curriculum.
"At first I found being together all day oppressive," says Jane. But Rowan quickly saw the advantages: "Once I'd done my work, I could play my guitar all afternoon."
She kept in touch with her old schoolfriends and fell in with a local group of "home eds". Her only problem was distinguishing their tribe. "In school you go, `Okay: pikey, goth, chav and emo.' With home eds you can't tell."
A place has become available at a local school for September and Rowan has decided to take it. "The past two years have been a good experience," says Jane. "I'm all for structured learning, but my experience with my eldest daughter, now 21, made me realise that children have very little choice over how and what they learn. Holly did very well, but she worked out that by the time she'd finished her A-levels, she'd taken 160 exams."
An apparent prickliness among home educators makes collecting information difficult. When Mike Fortune-Wood of the Centre for Personalised Education Trust began researching home-based education in 2002, only 263 families replied to a widely distributed questionnaire.
While home educators meet socially and to share skills, more formal networks seem to be hampered by differences between home educators themselves. A minority use national-curriculum textbooks and invent their own timetables; others are free to choose what and when to learn. This may involve long hours watching MTV as if in a coma. In HE parlance, this is called detoxifying from school.
Leslie Safran-Barson runs the Otherwise Club in London, a community centre for home educators. She recalls her son Louis, who this year gained a first in philosophy from King's College, London, lying on the floor staring at the ceiling for hours, and spending whole days superglued to his PlayStation. Clearly, home educators need to have nerves of steel. Safran-Barson, who rejected school for imposing "too much structure, too soon" believes that laziness is a reaction to not being listened to, and that eventually even the most disaffected child will get off the sofa and discover a passion for something, because children are hard-wired to learn.
When Louis declared an interest in science, she found a medical student who spent a few hours a week talking human biology. History was studied by getting a group of local children together and researching different periods, finishing with a play they wrote and performed themselves.
Christopher Ford's mother, Helen, admits to panicking when he could barely write at 11: "He went to school for one term, hated the narrowness, left and we didn't look back." Chris took his first GCSE when he was 13, started a biology degree at Sheffield University at 17 and took his finals this year. He is predicted to get a 2:1 or a first and is applying to do a PhD at Edinburgh.
Ruth Charles, 21, is taking a degree in community and youth work at Durham University. She and her sister Ann, 19, have never been to school. "My parents just didn't think any of the schools locally were good enough," says Ruth. "Mum thought, `I've already taught them to walk and talk. Why can't I teach them the rest?'"
In the Forest Row area of East Sussex, 30 families have opted out of formal education. Every Monday, parents and children get together to socialise. The noise is appalling. Girls charge in and out, someone is playing an electric guitar and two boys thwack billiard balls round a table. The girls swiftly dispense with the old chestnut that home-educated children have no friends. Isabella, 12, tells me she hated school. "I never felt clever enough. It made me feel small and undermined. Here we're all good at something."
Anna Durdant-Hollamby, 16, and her sister, Sophie, 13, have been learning at home for seven years. "All my friends who have been taking GCSEs at school have been ill and stressed," says Anna. "They're smoking, they're drinking, one has glandular fever. There's academic pressure, there's peer pressure. They're a complete mess." Last year, Anna gained a B for her GCSE in English. But it's not an experience she wants to repeat, she says, because the course was so narrow. She is now studying journalism online. "So many people take exams out of fear, because they feel their life will be a failure if they don't take them," she says.
Nothing would induce Anna back to school, but Sophie gets "bored and self-critical" and asks: "Is my life rubbish?" "Potentially we could be making a ghastly mistake," admits her mother, Winnie. "But we're trying to teach them responsibility for their own happiness."
Joanne McNaughton home-educates her five children as well as running a smallholding in Crowborough, East Sussex; she describes her family as "the nearest thing to the Waltons". She admits it's tough, both emotionally and financially, but has no regrets: "Whether you're living in a council flat or on a 200-acre farm of organic wheat, you can make it work for your children and yourself and that's the power of it. I'm pro-choice. One system doesn't fit all." Her eldest, Barnes, 12, started at the local village school at five. "The teaching was fragmented into 15-minute or half-hour slots for reading, writing and number work, and I couldn't see how children could learn like that.
A child doesn't want to learn about numbers because it's 2pm on Thursday, when he might still be thinking about an earthworm he saw at lunchtime. The curriculum doesn't allow time for his interests to be explored. Dedicated teachers' jobs have been made impossible."
Haig McNaughton, 7, is fascinated by Egyptology; his brother, Forbes, 9, by poultry. Barnes is doing a project on Admiral Nelson; Hamilton, 11, on the trees in Ashdown Forest. They don't have a computer but they go to the library and source information there. All the Forest Row parents are passionate about the importance of family life. "Education isn't just about absorbing facts," says Joanne. "My children are learning to be happy people. Nothing gets to crisis point now, because we've all got time to talk and to express our feelings."
Paula Rothermel, who lectures at Durham University's School of Education, spent five years studying 419 home-educated families and found that they significantly outperformed their school-going peers throughout primary school, both in terms of academic potential and social skills. She found 64% of home-educated five-year-olds scored over 75% on their Pips (performance indicators in primary schools) baseline assessments, as opposed to 5.1% of primary-school children nationally.
Surprisingly, Rothermel found that few parents were home-educating in order to hothouse their children towards glittering GCSE results. Only 14% of families followed the national curriculum; 58% didn't use it at all. Older children tended to bypass GCSEs, moving straight on to A-levels at 16.
More here
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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2 July, 2006
U.K.: School swimming lessons dropped -- apparently for cost reasons
Those pesky school pools cost too much to run. Who cares if a few kids die?
Swimming has been dropped from the list of sports that pupils are expected to practise in PE lessons at secondary school. New guidelines published by the Governments curriculum watchdog omit swimming in favour of fitness and health activities for pupils. Officials at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) said that they wanted schools to have more freedom to offer activities that suited the interests of individual pupils; but safety campaigners said that the downgrading of swimming lessons would have potentially fatal consequences.
Children who had met the requirement at primary school to be able to swim 25 metres would have misplaced confidence in their abilities unless they continued to practise at secondary level. Seventy children drown each year and five had been killed in the past month alone.
The QCA published the draft programmes of study as part of proposed reforms to the national curriculum for pupils aged 11 to 14, known as Key Stage 3. They will be put out for consultation next February for introduction in schools in September 2008. The new guidance makes no mention of swimming, but tells schools that the PE curriculum should enable all pupils to enjoy and succeed in physical activity. It sets out a list of desirable skills for pupils to learn and recommends that schools develop at least three through participation in games, gymnastics, dance, athletics, outdoor adventure activities or fitness and health activities.
A QCA spokesman said that swimming would fit into the last category if schools chose to offer it, but he acknowledged that it would no longer be listed specifically in the secondary curriculum. The context of this is that we are designing a curriculum that creates more space for individualised learning, the spokesman said. This is about looking at the principles that we need to think about in providing these subjects while schools decide how what is taught fits in with other aspects of what they do. One of the key things to motivate kids to get involved in physical activity is to find things that they enjoy doing and getting better at. We want schools to look at facilities and build a curriculum that is much more localised and personalised.
The move appears to contradict a 5.5 million pound government initiative announced last month to ensure that all pupils left primary school able to swim. The national curriculum requires that pupils can swim 25 metres by age 11, but one in five currently fails to meet this target. Jim Knight, the School Standards Minister, launched the two-week programme of intensive top-up lessons for children who had not met the standard. He said then: Every child should learn to swim. It is an essential skill and is a fun way to exercise. We want to give as many pupils as possible confidence in the water.
Officials at the Department for Education and Skills are known to be concerned about the QCAs decision and are likely to press for an explicit commitment to swimming to be restored in the curriculum; but the move to downgrade it won support from the Association of School and College Leaders, which represents most secondary heads. John Dunford, its general secretary, said: Heads would much prefer a Key Stage 3 curriculum that is much more flexible. While it is widely accepted that children should learn to swim for their own safety, I dont think that necessarily means that it should be part of the curriculum every year in schools. It should be left to the head teacher to decide.
The English Schools Swimming Association estimated last year that the number of school pools had fallen from 5,000 in 1972 to just 2,000 now. A growing number of local authority baths have either shut or face the threat of closure, leaving schools in many areas unable to find a pool within reasonable distance. Peter Cornall, head of water and leisure safety at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, said that on average about 70 children drown in inland waters, especially in the summer and during the May and August bank holidays. He said that the requirement for pupils to leave primary school able to swim 25 metres was inadequate to ensure their safety in water.
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Creation gets a mention in British university
No such thing as bad publicity?
Creationism is finding its way into university lecture halls, raising concerns with some academics that the biblical story of creation will be given equal weight to Darwins theory of evolution. Compulsory lectures in intelligent design and creationism are going to be included in second-year courses for zoology and genetics undergraduates at Leeds University, The Times Higher Education Supplement (June 23) reveals.
But theres a twist: lecturers will present the controversial theories as being incompatible with scientific evidence. It is essential they (students) understand the historical context and the flaws in the arguments these groups put forward, says Michael McPherson, of Leeds University.
Despite the clear anti- creationist stance of these lecturers, the move has set warning bells ringing across the UK science community. It would be undesirable for universities to spend a lot of precious resources teaching students that creationism and intelligent design are not based on scientific evidence, says David Read, the vice- president of the Royal Society.
Yet other academics are keen to see evolutionary theory challenged in university lecture halls. The scientific establishment prevents dissenting views, says Professor Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. I have a lot of respect for those who have true scientific credentials and are upfront about their views.
Students, though, seem open to creationism. One study, carried out by Professor Roger Downie, of the University of Glasgow, found that one science student in ten did not believe in evolution. This gives a very poor prognosis for their understanding of what science is and their ability to be scientists, Prof Downie says.
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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1 July, 2006
More schools ban games at recess
Some traditional childhood games are disappearing from school playgrounds because educators say they're dangerous. Elementary schools in Cheyenne, Wyo., and Spokane, Wash., banned tag at recess this year. Others, including a suburban Charleston, S.C., school, dumped contact sports such as soccer and touch football. In other cities, including Wichita; San Jose, Calif.; Beaverton, Ore.; and Rancho Santa Fe., Calif., schools took similar actions earlier.
The bans were passed in the name of safety, but some children's health advocates say limiting exercise and free play can inhibit a child's development. Groups such as the National School Boards Association don't keep statistics on school games. But several experts, including Donna Thompson of the National Program for Playground Safety, verify the trend. Dodge ball has been out at some schools for years, but banning games such as tag and soccer is a newer development. "It's happening more," Thompson says. Educators worry about "kids running into one another" and getting hurt, she says.
In January, Freedom Elementary School in Cheyenne prohibited tag at recess because it "progresses easily into slapping and hitting and pushing instead of just touching," Principal Cindy Farwell says. Contact sports were banned from recess at Charles Pinckney Elementary early this year, says Charleston County schools spokeswoman Mary Girault, because children suffered broken arms and dislocated fingers playing touch football and soccer. Some schools that ban games at recess allow children to play them in gym class under supervision.
Critics of the bans say playing freely helps kids learn to negotiate rules and resolve disputes. "They learn to change and to problem-solve," says Rhonda Clements, an education professor at Manhattanville College. Joe Frost, emeritus professor of early childhood education at the University of Texas-Austin, sees playground restrictions as harmful. "You're taking away the physical development of the children," he says. "Having time for play is essential for children to keep their weight under control."
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Neglected government school suddenly noticed
If it had been a private school in such a state, there would have been lawsuits left, right and centre
Parents at this Brisbane primary school battled for years to get the State Government to fund an urgent upgrade to the school's crumbling electrical system. Despite the wiring being so bad that students at Darra State School in the southwest suburbs risked a blackout every time they turned on a computer, and despite warnings of an extreme fire risk, their desperate pleas were refused. Then they contacted The Sunday Mail.
Within hours of this newspaper asking Education Queensland for a response, the school was told it would get $25,000 towards the upgrade. Darra State School P&C president Tania Schott was amazed by the development. "They couldn't find the money on Tuesday when I was told there would be no funding for this," she said. "Then, all of a sudden, they've found $25,000 worth of upgrade a few hours after the media called them."
But the money is not enough. Ms Schott, a mother of two, said the school still needs another $55,000 to ensure the electrical system is safe. "You never know when you flick a switch if it is going to short the whole system out," she said. Ms Schott said the school was operating on single-phase power, the same system used in a normal domestic home. "Electricians have told us we should be running on nothing less that phase-three power," she said. Funding is available for a new airconditioning system but there is no point in installing it because the electrical system could not provide enough power.
When more than six PCs in the computer lab are turned on, it causes a short. "It is so outdated we cannot even put an oven in our tuckshop because it is in the same building block as the computer lab. If we use an oven, the computers shut down," Ms Schott said. Electrical experts say the system is a fire hazard and would most likely be illegal if it were in an industrial building of the same size. "Any system which cuts out regularly because it can't handle the power is inherently dangerous," an electrician, who asked not to be named, told The Sunday Mail. "In this day and age every school should be on at least a phase-three system."
Queensland Teachers' Union representative Marion James said the school needed an urgent upgrade of the electrical system. "We need it to be able to install airconditioning, which has been made available through a Federal Government grant, but more importantly to run our computer lab," she said.
Opposition education spokesman Stuart Copeland demanded Education Minister Rod Welford explain why the electrical system had been allowed to deteriorate so badly. "So much for Peter Beattie's Smart State. When our kids can't use the school's computers, when the tuckshop can't feed our kids, it's an appalling indictment of the Beattie Government," he said. "A good education and safe school is one of the basics. "The Coalition calls on the Education Minister to explain why his department refuses to provide adequate funding - particularly when there is a danger to children at this school."
The Sunday Mail was refused an interview with principal Warren Beetson but an Education Queensland spokesman denied parents' claims that they were ignored. "An audit needed to be carried out to determine precisely what work was required. That audit was completed recently and arrangements have been made for an upgrade to occur during the school holidays," the spokesman said. "The main switchboard will be upgraded to provide three-phase power for the school's computers and resolve electrical issues in the tuckshop."
But the department still refuses to completely upgrade the school to the phase-three level. "The electrical capacity provided to schools is determined by the electrical load within the school. On this basis, it is not necessary to have three-phase power in all schools," the spokesman said. Education Queensland declined to answer a request for information on the number of schools in Queensland suffering from the same problem.
Source
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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here
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