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30 September, 2005

THE DECAYED AND CORRUPT NEW YORK SYSTEM

(Explanatory note for the poor benighted folk who don't live in NYC: Chancellor Klein is in charge of the New York City public school system. He is the former Clinton-era Justice Department federal prosecutor in the Microsoft case. He is the first chancellor to have absolute and total control of the system through the Mayor, Bloomberg)

When all is said and done, nothing useful has been said or done unless criticism has given way to constructive suggestion. New York City’s public school system, once the jewel in America’s educational crown, has in recent years been hit hard by backfiring reforms, and is very much in want of healing. If there can be no gain without pain, then agony will at least be a beginning. Here is one prescription:

Meritocracy must be restored. The title of “principal” comes from “principal teacher.” Principals are now commonly appointed after having had no supervisory or teaching experience. They start at the top simply because a superintendent has ensconced them there by fiat. That superintendent often has no familiarity with the needs and character of the school, having hardly visited it, and may himself be scarcely more qualified than his protégé. Until Chancellor Klein’s regime, prospective supervisors submitted resumes that were screened by parents, teachers, and practicing supervisors who then formally interviewed the candidates.

There should be rigorous exams for supervisors as there were during the glory days of the New York City school system. These tests should be written and scored, in rank order, by a Board of Examiners that is entirely independent of the Department of Education. Identification of applicants should be coded to obviate any charge or risk of cronyism, nepotism, or ruses that substitute for merit.

When the school system was at its peak, it was mandated that applicants for assistant principal positions had taught for at least five years. An additional five years were required to rise from assistant principal to principal. People were hired in order by grade on promulgated lists. It was impossible to pass any test, even as a teacher, unless your speech was up to snuff, as a member of the Bureau of Speech could fail a candidate just for possession of an accent or a lisp. Perhaps it is as well that this is no longer the case.

Principals should have doctoral degrees in legitimate academic areas beyond theoretical education. They should be published and continue to publish throughout their careers.

Eligibility for leadership positions should strictly require legal certification without loopholes to accommodate aspirants with connections. People still in the midst of their schooling are being awarded leadership posts for which they are studying. A prominent superintendent in the Bronx was in fact hired while she was “going for her certification.”

If a qualification is vital to perform a job, there should be no monkey business to get around it. If it is not relevant, then it should be abandoned. Chancellor Klein himself was reportedly granted a “waiver” because he lacks both a State Certificate in Administration and Supervision and a New York City license

Quite apart from the potential impact on children of having their educational path paved by unfit authorities, consider the demoralizing effect on educators who see this abuse all around them perpetuated by the same people who rigidly demand that they meet all their expanding requisites in timely fashion.

A genuine meritocracy would make moot the debate over whether the schools should again be centralized as they were decades ago, because localized political machinations would be stanched and the duties of teaching and learning would take care of themselves.

Money is a food of meritocracy. Teachers are more likely to volunteer their time when they aren’t forced to watch the clock to get to their second and third jobs on time. But while holding out for what is materially due them, they will continue to be subsidized by that miracle called the psychic wage. But it is rapidly being spent.

Post lifted from Red Hog



DUMBING DOWN DEFEATED BY PUBLIC PROTEST IN AUSTRALIA

In the Australian State of Victoria. The VCE is the High School graduation exam

A controversial proposal requiring students to read only one book in year 12 English — labelled "English Lite" by its critics — has been abandoned by the authority responsible for the VCE. The about-face dumps a Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority proposal under which year 12 English students would have studied two texts instead of four, with one of those texts allowed to be a film. The changes, revealed by The Age, sparked heated community debate and were condemned by the State Opposition.

Last week Education Minister Lynne Kosky said she was not convinced by the authority's proposal, saying it had failed to make the case for changes to the VCE. The VCAA's acting chief executive, John Firth, said the authority had listened to the community and ensured that studying books remained central to VCE English. Mr Firth said English students would continue to study a minimum of four books or three books and a film in year 12. "Substantial consultation with teachers and the community indicates that central prescription of literary texts is valued because it ensures quality and common expectations for all students," Mr Firth said. The review of VCE English sought to improve the course, he said.

The changes, proposed in a VCAA draft discussion paper, would also have seen year 11 English students study two texts instead of three. The draft paper discusses a move away from written responses, with at least one oral assessment task. Books on the current VCE English list include Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Films listed include Gattaca and Breaker Morant.

Opposition education spokesman Victor Perton said the backdown was a victory for the "decent teachers and parents" who thought it was obscene to have one book as part of year 12 English. "(The proposal) made Victoria a national laughing stock. There were editorials around the country," he said.

Tony Thompson, an English teacher at Princess Hill Secondary College and vocal critic of the changes, said the backdown came as a great relief because the proposal ripped the heart out of VCE English. The main problem with the changes, he said, was that literature would have become a secondary part of the English course. "An English course is as good as the books that are included on it," Mr Thompson said. "A lot of students have good memories of studying English and the part of the course that stays with people is studying and discussing a good text."

A spokesman for Ms Kosky said the minister welcomed the recognition of the importance of books in VCE English. The Victorian Association for the Teaching of English said while the number of texts had become a hot issue, it was important to question the balance and accessibility of VCE English. Association president Greg Houghton said more information was needed on the proposed new focus areas in the VCAA draft such as "sustainable futures" and "citizenship and globalisation".

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

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29 September, 2005

Soak the Rich! (Colleges)

University and college faculties are overwhelmingly liberal in their politics. The faculties of Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley were large contributors to John Kerry’s Presidential campaign. The Berkeley faculty gave six times as much to Howard Dean as to George W. Bush. Campus liberalism is particularly pronounced at the most elite and wealthy institutions.

A core value of American liberals is the importance of redistributing wealth from the prosperous to others, through highly progressive taxes and transfer payments. Which leads to a question: If redistributing wealth is a good idea for workers, companies, individuals, and families, then intellectual consistency suggests it should be equally valid for institutions like colleges and universities. Right?

Why should students at Princeton, where economist Paul Krugman teaches when he is not thundering against the “well off ” on the New York Times editorial page, enjoy income from huge endowments, while students at poorer institutions have far fewer educational resources? How unfair! Worse, the extreme inequality of colleges is subsidized by the government. Gifts to rich schools are tax deductible for the donors. Universities and colleges pay no taxes on their capital gains, dividend, and interest income. This is an outrage against liberal principles! Remedial legislation is clearly needed!

These are no small matters. The disparities in college endowments are enormous. As of mid 2004, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had average endowments of $14.9 billion, while three private institutions of similar size, George Washington University, Georgetown, and American University, averaged $543 million. That is a ratio of 27:1—about the same difference in income between a successful investment banker and a Wal-Mart clerk.

The numbers are even more striking in small liberal arts colleges. Grinnell, the richest of those that report data publicly, had an endowment of $1.2 million per student. Annual earnings of just 4 percent would produce more than $46,000 per student in yearly interest. Why does Grinnell charge tuition? Bates College had only $106,000 in endowment per student, less than one tenth of Grinnell’s. Gettysburg had $85,000 per student; Pitzer College $56,000; and Sarah Lawrence, only $38,000. That’s about 3 percent of Grinnell’s wealth.

It’s time for an egalitarian revolution. Liberal professors at Harvard, Princeton, Amherst, and Williams should follow the principles they proclaim and strongly support action to end campus disparities by redistributing educational wealth. Congress should pass, and President Bush should sign, a hefty and progressive tax on large per student endowments. The funds should be transferred to poorer schools. The same tax should apply to future gifts from alumni.

And why stop there? If redistribution is good, the same concept should apply within universities. Why should the law schools at George Washington and Georgetown live in splendor just because their alumni make more money than theology or economics or anthropology majors? The wealth of these law schools should be transferred to poorer departments. Particularly economics!

Professors at rich schools will splutter that such taxes will sharply reduce incentives for alumni to make gifts. Are we to believe that graduates of Yale are so narrow-minded and selfish that they only want to help Yalies? Surely Yale, Princeton, Williams, and Grinnell alums will give just as freely knowing that their gifts are helping students at poorer schools, particularly since they were taught primarily by liberal professors devoted to income redistribution.

Administrators at rich colleges will claim they raised their money through great effort, that it is unfair to take it away, and that this transfer would eliminate the incentive for poor schools to do a better job of fundraising. We won’t take those arguments any more seriously than liberals take the similar arguments conservatives make about income taxes and death taxes.

So when members of the classes of 1956 and 1981 gather next June at their 25th and 50th reunions in the tony precincts of New Haven, Cambridge, Princeton, and Williamstown, they should expect to see 35 to 40 percent of their gifts whisked away to poorer schools. That should improve their feelings of virtue. In fact, they should increase the size of their gifts to make up for the tax. That’s the least they owe us all.

Source



V.D. HANSON SINKS THE BOOT INTO AMERICA'S UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS

Just some excerpts. In case "sinks the boot in" is a purely Australian idiom, it refers to a hefty kick in the nether regions of the anatomy

Over the past year, four university presidents have been in the news--from Harvard; the University of California, Santa Cruz; the University of Colorado; and the University of California, Berkeley. In each case, the curtains have briefly parted, allowing the public to glimpse the campus wizards working the levers behind the scenes, and confirming that something has gone terribly wrong at our best public and private universities.

Hypocrisy, faddishness, arrogance and intellectual cowardice are among the ailments of the American university today, and it is hard to say whether even a great president could save higher education from its now institutionalized vices. Amid the variety of scandals afflicting the campuses, the one constant is how the rhetoric of "diversity" trumps almost all other considerations--and how race and gender can be manipulated by either the college president or the faculty in ways that have nothing to do with educating America's youth, but everything to do with personal aggrandizement in an increasingly archaic and unexamined enclave.

At Harvard University, beleaguered President Lawrence Summers challenged notions of "diversity" and paid a steep price. He suggested--off the record, at a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research--that factors other than institutional prejudice and cultural pressure might help explain the relative dearth of women faculty in the hard sciences at Harvard and other elite universities. If the intent of that mildly provocative, off-the-cuff exegesis was to jumpstart debate among serious thinkers, it proved a big mistake. Within seconds, one tough-minded feminist was reduced to bouts of nausea and swooning, and within hours many were calling for Mr. Summers to apologize, if not resign.....

One of President Summers's chief critics, Denice Denton, the newly appointed chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, heralded Mr. Summers's public humiliation as a "teachable moment." As one president to another, she objected: "Here was this economist lecturing pompously [to] this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues in science and engineering, and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day."

But Chancellor Denton has her own shortcomings. They do not revolve around mere impromptu remarks, nor have they been trailed by public apologies and task forces. Yet in its own way her controversy goes to the heart of the same contemporary race-and-gender credo that governs the university, enjoying exemption from normal scrutiny and simple logic. Before her arrival, Ms. Denton arranged the creation of a special billet--ad hoc, unannounced and closed to all applicants but one: Ms. Denton's live-in girlfriend of seven years, Gretchen Kalonji. Most recognize this as the sort of personal accommodation--old-boy networking, really--that Ms. Denton presumably wishes to replace with affirmative action, thus ending backroom deals and crass nepotism.

But if race and gender--what we now refer to as "diversity"--are to be taken seriously, one wonders whether there was not a qualified African-American or Latina woman who could at least have been interviewed for the lucrative UC position. After all, Chancellor Denton herself praised UC Santa Cruz for its "celebration of diversity." And earlier, she insisted that "it is really shocking to hear the president of Harvard make statements like that," i.e., statements that ever so gently questioned the diversity shibboleth. Consider the reaction had President Summers arrived at a public, tax-supported university and arranged for his live-in girlfriend to have lifelong employment in a specially created job, complete with a subsidized move into a rent-free home....

Now we come to the third case: University of Colorado President Elizabeth Hoffman. She recently resigned, ostensibly following athletic scandals, but more likely as a result of the uproar over Ward Churchill. We remember him now as the strange professor who compared the 3,000 murdered in the Twin Towers and Pentagon to "Little Eichmanns," supposed cogs in the military-industrial wheel who deserved their fate. The public grudgingly accepted that Mr. Churchill's wartime praise for the 9/11 murderers ("combat teams" rightfully avenging America's murder of "500,000 Iraqi children") is protected free speech. But it could not quite fathom why Mr. Churchill was not summarily dismissed for other sins.

And they were legion. He had fabricated a Native American heritage, lying on affidavits about his ethnic identity to help make up for his lack of credentials and suspect work. Mr. Churchill had been promoted to full professor at a major research university without the requisite Ph.D. degree, enjoying apparent ethnic immunity from a series of old allegations involving theft of intellectual property, plagiarism and academic misrepresentation. Most people outside the university were amazed not so much that Mr. Churchill was not immediately terminated as that he had been hired and promoted in the first place. To them he seemed like a swerving drunk driver, who when pulled over is found to have a long rap sheet.....

So Mr. Churchill keeps on touring and speaking to audiences about American culpability for September 11, praising those who murder Americans and vowing hostility to the very idea of America. President Hoffman announced her resignation in March, and Mr. Churchill's lawyer now negotiates the promised buyout with her successor.

Finally, there is Robert J. Birgeneau, the new chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. Upon arriving in the Bay Area, he quickly vowed to solve the problems he had found. Surprisingly, these had nothing to do with a decline in academic standards, deterioration in the quality of Berkeley's key departments, or a state funding crisis. Instead, the chancellor complained that Berkeley has fewer Native American, Hispanic, and African-American students enrolled than it should--the campus was only 3% black, 9.5% Hispanic, and 0.4% Native American, in contrast with about 45% Asian-American and about 33% white. (The California population comprises 6.5% blacks, 33% Hispanics, 0.92% Native Americans, 11% Asian-Americans, and 45% whites.) Mr. Birgeneau is obsessed with racial diversity, as determined by percentages and quotas. But as we shall see, the numbers, under closer examination, may make him regret pandering to the diversity industry.

Chancellor Birgeneau blames the apparent statistical injustices on Proposition 209, the 1996 California ballot initiative that forbids the use of racial criteria in state hiring; it passed with the support of 55% of the electorate. In his view, however, democracy ought to defer to elite opinion; thus, to this Canadian academic the state's voters were obviously misguided: "I personally don't believe that most of the people who voted for 209 intended this consequence."

One can learn a lot about the pathologies of the contemporary university from what its presidents say--and don't say. A close look at the data suggests a different picture from the one implied by Mr. Birgeneau's gratuitous lamentations about the lack of diversity. Whites, for instance, are underenrolled at Berkeley: They amount to around 35% of undergraduates versus 45% of the state's population. Given this fact, why doesn't the Chancellor complain about the shortage of whites on campus?

He is oddly quiet, too, about the more explosive issue of the Asian-American presence. This group constitutes almost half the Berkeley student population, even though Asians make up only about 11% of California residents and 4% of the general U.S. population. Why doesn't Mr. Birgeneau admit that achieving his racial utopia would require deliberately reducing the enrollment of Asian-American students--presumably by discounting meritocratic criteria and test scores and instead emphasizing "community service" or other nebulous standards designed to circumvent Proposition 209? But because the new chancellor is obviously a sensitive sort, he cannot say what he apparently means: something like, "We have too many Asians, almost five times too many, and I am here to impose a quota on them and other suspect races." Instead, he worries about "underrepresentation" of some, while denying the logical corollary of "overrepresentation" of others. The same logic applies to gender, by the way. UC campuses enroll thousands more women than men, very much out of proportion to the general population, and yet Mr. Birgeneau does not decry the "overabundance" of women.....

We are quickly reaching the stage where the chancellor's pie graphs evoke the racial categories of the Old Confederacy, as he tries to ascertain whether Jason Martinez, one-fourth Hispanic, or Na Wilson, half Cambodian, should be counted as a minority.

For some two decades, I often watched entire departments of 50-something white male philosophy and English professors, themselves often hired ABD ("all but dissertation": a graduate student who hasn't finished his thesis) in the booming job markets of the 1960s--and who subsequently became mostly unpublished and undistinguished classroom teachers--take it upon themselves to hire only minorities and women, lecturing passed-over young white males about the need for diversity. These entrenched and often mediocre senior professors did everything for the cause except take early retirement, though many advised the perennially exploited part-time instructors to "move on" or "get a life." ...

The signs of erosion on our campuses are undeniable, whether we examine declining test scores, spiraling costs, or college graduates' ignorance of basic facts and ideas. In response, our academic leadership is not talking about a more competitive curriculum, higher standards of academic accomplishment, or the critical need freely to debate important issues. Instead, it remains obsessed with a racial, ideological, and sexual spoils system called "diversity." Even as the airline industry was deregulated in the 1970s, and Wall Street now has come under long-overdue scrutiny, it is time for Americans, if we are to ensure our privileged future, to re-examine our era's politicized university

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

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28 September, 2005

Kozol's crusade

Post lifted from Powerline

In tomorrow's New York Times Book Review, Nathan Glazer reviews Jonathan Kozol's latest rewrite of the one-note books he has been writing on the subject of the public education of black and minority children since 1967: "Separate and unequal." Glazer notes that in his current book Kozol widens his focus from the inadequacy of the education of minority students to include the "presumed educational effects" of increasing de facto "resegregation" of the public schools.

Offhand, I can't remember ever reading a more devastating review of a serious book by a respectable leftist in the New York Times. On the basic question of how "desegregation" would improve the academic achievement of minority students, Glazer observes that there isn't much analysis of the questioin whether greater "integration" would make any difference:

Quoting The New York Times, Kozol notes that parent groups are asking school officials in New York City to exclude from their local schools "thousands of poor black and Hispanic students who travel long distances." The parents want more room for their own children so that they can attend schools in their own neighborhoods. Desegregation efforts, The Times notes, "produced lackluster academic results," and the schools "lost their distinct neighborhood character." One would think it would be important to consider whether the results were indeed lackluster, and whether retaining the neighborhood character of schools is a value. But for Kozol the overriding issue is integration. It is, after all, the promise of the 1954 Brown decision, and the difficulties - one might say the impossibility, in many large cities - of implementing desegregation do not moderate his insistence that we must place black children in schools with more whites. He does not go into great detail as to how this might now be done. Orfield and Kozol do point out that more is possible in small cities.

Neither does Kozol spend much time on the question of whether desegregation would have the positive educational effects he hopes for. In fact, it would be difficult for him to do so because he is skeptical about the tests we depend on to determine just what the educational effects of various interventions are.

What about the alleged effects of the financial disparity between urban and suburban per pupil expenditures? Glazer writes:

There has been research using the standard tests that questions whether greater expenditures on schools and students produce better educational results, but that research does not discourage Kozol. He expresses outrage at inequities in expenditure, pointing out that New York City in 2002-3 spent $11,627 on the education of each child, while Manhasset spent $22,311, Great Neck $19,705 and so on. There are comparable disparities in other metropolitan areas.

Hasn't government spending on public education in city schools increased? Doesn't it have some bearing on Kozol's argument? Glazer writes:

Expenditure per student in New York City has risen by two-thirds since 1991, when Kozol dealt with this issue in his book "Savage Inequalities," an increase considerably more than inflation, with no obvious educational effects. One can argue that regardless of specific measurable educational effects, the poor deserve whatever benefits - in class size, better-paid teachers, more supplies, larger playgrounds, cleaner restrooms - that an increase to the Manhasset level would make possible. But the litigation in many states now attacking these disparities, litigation reviewed by Kozol, is based not on the argument that the children in the big cities deserve to have as much spent on them as is spent in well-to-do suburbs, but on a different proposition - namely, that the expenditures of the big cities do not provide an "adequate" education, as prescribed in the state constitutions. "Adequacy," one assumes, will in time be judged by the same kind of tests we are using today.

In New York State the litigation has now resulted in a judicial requirement that school expenditure in New York City be increased by something like 40 percent. Clearly such an increase would make life pleasanter for teachers and students. There is no strong evidence it would do much for the test results. One suspects the "adequacy" argument will eventually wind up in the same black hole that now accommodates arguments for desegregation.

Glazer concludes with a reflection on considerations near the heart of Kozol's ideological enterprise:

TO be sure, the case for both integration and equality of expenditure is powerful. But the chief obstacle to achieving these goals does not seem to be the indifference of whites and the nonpoor to the education of nonwhites and the poor, although this is what one would conclude from Kozol's account. Rather, other values, which are not simply shields for racism, stand in the way: the value of the neighborhood school; the value of local control of education and, above all, the value of freedom from state imposition when it affects matters so personal as the future of one's children.

States could probably see to it that local school districts received uniform sums for the education of each child (with perhaps a supplement for those from difficult circumstances), but how could politicians prevent well-to-do or knowledgeable parents from adding more on their own, or from leaving the state system entirely? It is factors like these - which add up to nothing less than a commitment to individual freedom - that make it so difficult to achieve the obviously desirable goals of integration and equalization.

It is at least worth noting that Kozol opposes the liberation of minority children from the public schools via vouchers for the standard leftist reasons:

I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education. If we allow public funds to be used to support our relatively benign, morally grounded schools, we will have to allow those public funds to be used for any type of private school. Vouchers can also be used for a David Duke school or a right-wing militia school or a Louis Farrakhan school -- any type of ethnically or ideologically extremist school with a hateful and divisive agenda. This would rip apart the social fabric of already fragile cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, with their multiplicity ofethnic, political and ideological groups. It would be the last nail in the coffin of public education.

Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don’t think it works that way, and I’ve been watching this for a long time. What tends to happen is that the families that are drawn off into private schools tend to be the more sophisticated, even among the poor. Or the more aggressive among the poor. Even when these schools are not consciously selective, they tend to be self-selective and drain off not only money from the public schools, but also strong parental activism. The private schools take away the very parents we need most as passionate PTA leaders. What happens to the children who are left behind?

For a bracing corrective to Kozol's "weepy Marxist" crusade, see Peter Wood's FrontPage review of Sol Stern's book on the imperative of school choice: "Exit ahead."



BRITISH SCHOOLS GIVE UP ON SCIENCE

The dumbing down of Britain continues apace

Pupils at GCSE are to be allowed to abandon learning traditional “hard” science, including the meaning of the periodic table, in favour of “soft” science such as the benefits of genetic engineering and healthy eating. The statutory requirement for pupils to learn a science subject will be watered down under a new curriculum introduced next year. There will be no compulsion to master the periodic table — the basis of chemistry — nor basic scientific laws that have informed the work of all the great scientists such as Newton and Einstein.

The changes, which the government believes will make science more “relevant” to the 21st century, have been attacked by scientists as a “dumbing down” of the subject. In June the government had to announce financial incentives to tackle a shortage of science teachers. Academics have estimated that a fifth of science lessons are taught by teachers who are not adequately qualified.

Most children now study for the double-award science GCSE, which embraces elements of biology, chemistry and physics. This GCSE will be scrapped and ministers have agreed that from next year all 14-year-olds will be required to learn about the general benefits and risks of contemporary scientific developments, in a new science GCSE. A harder science GCSE will also be introduced as an optional course.

One expert involved in devising the new system believes it will halve the number of state school pupils studying “hard” science. Independent schools and more talented pupils in the state sector are likely to shun the new papers in favour of the GCSEs in the individual science disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology. These will continue to require pupils to achieve an understanding of scientific principles. The new exams were devised after proposals by academics at King’s College London, who told ministers that science lessons were often “dull and boring” and required pupils to recall too many facts. Their report said: “Contemporary analyses of the labour market suggest that our future society will need a larger number of individuals with a broader understanding of science both for their work and to enable them to participate as citizens in a democratic society.”

However, Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council, warned that reducing the “hard” science taught in schools would create problems. “I can understand the government’s mot- ives,” he said. “There is a crisis of public confidence in science which is reducing the progress of policy on such issues as nuclear energy and stem cell research. But sixth-formers are already arriving at university without the depth of knowledge required.”

Others endorse the new approach. Results at North Chadderton upper school in Oldham — one of 80 schools piloting the new “softer” GCSE, named Twentyfirst Century Science — have improved. Martyn Overy, the head of science, said: “The proportion getting higher grades in science went up from 60% to 75%. The course kept their interest, had more project work and was more relevant.” As part of their course, the pupils studied what kind of food they needed to keep fit and healthy. Critics say it is only marginally more demanding than following the advice of Nigella Lawson, the television chef, who promotes the benefits of eating proper meals instead of snacking from the fridge.

Some science teachers are sceptical. Mo Afzal, head of science at the independent Warwick school, said: “These changes will widen the gap between independent and state schools. Even the GCSE that is designed for those going on to A-level science is not as comprehensive as the test it replaces.”

John Holman, director of the National Science Learning Centre at York University, who advised the government on the content of the new system, said: “The new exam is not dumbing down. The study of how science works is more of a challenge than rote learning

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

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



27 September, 2005

AN ENCOURAGING LETTER FROM A CALIFORNIA TEACHER:

I put up a post recently about how useless teachers' colleges tend to be. One reader (a California teacher) responded by saying that not all of them are hopeless. What she says may be a useful guide to other Califonians who are brave enough to be thinking about taking up teaching there. And it sounds like Chapman University might be a good choice for any Southern Californian wishing to minimize the politically correct drivel that infests most university education today

"I feel I had to respond to this, because I am currently going through an education school in So. Cal. (US) to get my credential to teach mathematics. I'm currently in my first semester of a 4-semester program (with student teaching as the last semester) at Chapman University, in Orange County. I am also teaching world history and BASIC mathematics as a long term substitute at a continuation high school in L.A. county until the end of the school year.

As a bit of background: Chapman is a private university, with all the credential programs being held at night. A continuation H.S. is a school where all the students are placed when they don't work out in the regular high schools. (There are a number of behavioral problems, drug/alcohol abusers, and students who flunked out of the 'normal' high schools. I have several who are also under house arrest - wearing the anklets - and who are on 'independent study', because of pregnancies.)

Regarding the uselessness of teacher training... I feel that by and large there are a NUMBER of 'fluff' courses we are required to take, either by the school or by the state. I used to think all teacher courses fell into this category, but my mind was quickly changed when I found out I had gotten the substitute position 4 days before school started! My methods classes have been VERY helpful so far, and my teachers have been very good about working with me in regards to my homework, and in supporting me as a teacher. I now just as firmly believe there are some courses which really are necessary for a beginning teacher to have already taken. (Especially those covering classroom management, and plotting out lesson plans. Telling the kids to stop talking may work well for the younger students, but my kids'll just laugh at you.. or worse if they're having a bad day! As for trying to keep their attention long enough to get the basic information across... that's also a challenge! Especially on Fridays.)

I believe that my university would qualify as exemplary. It's one of the reasons I chose to attend it, even though it is quite a bit more expensive than several other local universities. It has a minimal number of 'fluff' courses, and the teachers are extremely supportive and knowledgeable. In addition, the whole staff has the children's best interest at heart - and they apply rational & critical thought to what is best, instead of just jumping on the 'for the children' bandwagon.

Amazingly enough, it's a school that I, as a conservative libertarian can feel comfortable in, and can express my beliefs in without worrying about getting stomped on for it. That in itself is unusual in my experience! I had a teacher ENCOURAGING us to have different views, instead of toeing the PC line, as it causes debate and understanding of all sides of the issues!"



UNIFORM TYRANNY AT AUSTRALIAN PRIVATE SCHOOLS

Are American private schools this bad?

Students are being clad in expensive school uniforms created by top Australian fashion designers that can lead to a bill of more than $1500 for parents. Even kindergarten pupils are being decked out in the fashionable outfits, designed by the likes of Jodie Boffa, Robert Burton and Jonathan Ward. Some parents say the prices are too high and dry clean-only instructions lead to a yearly cleaning bill of $700 for a school jacket alone.

One mother whose children needed the designer uniforms said she paid more than $1500 for one full winter and summer uniform set. She said one of the worst features of the uniform was the stipulation that it was dry clean-only. "Children are naturally grubby and to have dry clean-only fabrics is crazy," said the mother, who did not want to be named for fear of offending her child's North Shore school uniform committee. "It's not only the cost, but what dry cleaners will do the job on a Saturday ready for school again on Monday? "The number of elements that make up a full school uniform now is unbelievable and the cost phenomenal."

The uniform cost for a student at Loreto Kirribilli is $1275, not including sports uniform, and more than $830 is typically spent at St Andrew's Cathedral School in the city. NSW Parents and Citizens Association president Sharryn Brownlee said uniforms were big business for the designers and the schools. "Some schools make tens of thousands of dollars from school uniform contracts," Ms Brownlee said. "For the designers it is lucrative and is about stamping their brand name on a younger generation. Young people are very tuned in to fashion design. But the designers have to remember to be practical and sensible and remember the role of the uniform."

Mr Ward, a leading Sydney fashion designer who has dressed the likes of Elle Macpherson and Kylie Minogue, has just put the finishing touches to a new summer uniform for Meriden School at Strathfield. He said it was a refreshing and smart update. "Girls are a lot more developed at the age of 12 and 13 years now and need more room," Mr Ward said. "They are also more conscious about their figure types. They should like their uniform and not feel it is something their mother wore.

"Boys are a lot leaner and taller. The climate has also changed in the last 20 years." He said modern fabrics were being used that had plenty of stretch in them, allowing students to move freely.

Designer touches may be as simple as adding a coloured button to a white shirt or lining a blazer with striped material. Mr Ward said: "There is a sensitivity of detail. It is a mix of the classic with a slight edge." Meriden School principal Carolyn Blanden said: "It has taken us 12 months just to design the new dress, blazer and hat. "We went to great lengths to design something students would feel good wearing. The girls should go out into the world feeling they look nice."

More here



Local school, with the backing of parents and teachers alike, tries to keep its doors open, in the face of educrats trying to slam them shut: "The state education commissioner, faced with a defiant charter school that has refused an order to close, yesterday asked the attorney general what action the state can take to force the closing of the small Roxbury school. The Roxbury Charter High Public School was supposed to close last Friday, but opened its doors yesterday, ignoring state education officials who said the tiny, financially troubled high school could not stay open. Officially, a state education spokeswoman said, the students are truant because they are not in an approved school."

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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

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26 September, 2005

THIS SOUNDS GOOD BUT THE DEVIL WILL BE IN THE DETAILS

As Virginia Tech takes steps to become a more diverse campus, administrators and faculty members refuse to allow political correctness stand in the way of their goals. “I think the whole discussion of political correctness is non-democratic. It carries with it so much baggage that it keeps people from saying what they think and we can’t fully explore the real issues,” said political science professor Karen Hult.

She said diversity issues are particularly important because Virginia Tech is a public land grant institute representing Virginia. As a land grant institute, Tech has always been responsible to the public of Virginia. This responsibility to the state is what now compels the administration to deal with diversity. It is a concern that the university is not characteristic of the same diverse population that lives in the state. “We need to make a public-funded university more like the state in which it is located. It’s a big concern, and a genuine concern. Being politically correct would not allow us to address it. When questions are raised in public, people tend to speak what other people want to hear instead of what they think. To be politically correct is to not talk about the problems,” said Hult.

Provost Mark McNamee sees the university’s situation as ideal for making changes. Instead of being stubborn about change or maintaining a traditional image, Tech’s loyalties lie in what it has always done, provide a service to Virginia. “It is not a limitation. It creates a community that includes all the fundamentals of a university. We have a good reputation in what we do and maintain a balance between cutting edge research and socially important issues. We currently want to make the education that Tech provides, more realistic of what people will experience in the real world,” he said.

McNamee said the administration expects faculty and students to talk about issues of controversial importance. It also puts a great deal of trust in students and professors to be professional. Creating a comfortable campus climate for all students is the goal of diversity and while political correctness should be avoided, common sense and courtesy should accompany any discussion. “I would hope that faculty members want to challenge students to think about things in a different way. A university is a great place to bring up any issue in full open discussion. We certainly don’t have any guidelines that would censor academic freedom but expect everyone on campus to uphold the principles of community,” McNamee said.

According to the online version of Virginia Tech’s diversity strategic plan, creating a diverse campus is about making fundamental changes, not using political correctness to fabricate fake diversity. Tech’s new harassment policy is a first step and shows that the goal of the university is to make the necessary changes. Focusing on political correctness instead of change would only create a public relations campaign that covers up the problems. The commitment to ignore political correctness and promote open dialogue will create a more diverse society within the university that continues to focus on quality education.

“I have never felt pressure by the administration to change what I teach. I think the quality would suffer if I simply replaced the classics with other songs just so every concert had recognizable diversity,” said Virginia Tech choral director Brian Gendron.

Source



ONLINE TUTORING FROM INDIA COMES TO AUSTRALIA

First it was call centres that outsourced to India. Now private tutoring for Australian students will be available over the internet, with Indian teachers answering questions about secondary science and mathematics. The online coaching college Growing Stars will launch in NSW in coming weeks. It will be the first Indian-run tutoring company to establish here, after its incursion into the US last year. Gautam Chattopadhyay, who has the Australian and New Zealand licence for Growing Stars, said tuition by qualified teachers in Cochin, southern India, would cost about $33 an hour. Face-to-face coaching by Australians costs between $20 and $70 an hour.

In the past two years, Growing Stars and other online tutoring companies employing Indian teachers have won market share in the US and Britain. Growing Stars, set up in California by an Indian-born software engineer and a venture capitalist, has 350 US students and 40 tutors in India. Dr Chattopadhyay expected a backlash to offshore tutoring in Australia, based on consumer resistance to Indian telemarketers. "My philosophy is if you come up with a product that delivers value, the backlash will eventually die," he said. "Electronic learning is going to be the next big thing."

His plan to establish Growing Stars for Australian students has alarmed the Australian Tutoring Association, which represents a quarter of the domestic businesses selling private tutoring. In NSW alone there are 500 registered businesses. Nationally, the sector has an estimated turnover of $1 billion a year. The association's public officer, Mohan Dhall, said Growing Stars and other tutoring "call centres" revealed a trend of "commercial principles subverting educational principles". "This takes the outsourcing of call centres to a new level," he said. "Education is not something that can be effectively delivered by people trained in different systems and living offshore, providing advice from remote locations."

Dr Chattopadhyay, a chemical engineer and laboratory manager at the University of NSW, said students in the "virtual classroom" would have lessons devised from the NSW syllabuses for year 7 to 10 maths and science and year 11 and 12 maths, physics and chemistry. The University of NSW has no association with Growing Stars, which Dr Chattopadhyay said he would operate through his private company. The students would log in to the Growing Stars website and be assigned lessons by Indian tutors, to whom they could talk on a voice-over internet link. Both student and tutor use a digital whiteboard to write on screen or draw lines and circles, for example.

Mr Dhall said the rate charged by Growing Stars was not a bargain. Australian online tutorial businesses charged "as little as $4.25 per hour". Dr Chattopadhyay said the university-trained Indian tutors were "much cheaper" than Australians. Growing Stars pays them $US230 a month, double the Indian rate for beginning teachers. To counter concerns about the Indian tutors' accents, they are given English language speech training before they go online with students, he said. A Growing Stars tutor, Savio D'Cruz, said the NSW secondary maths syllabus he will teach was "a little bit different" in content to US courses. "In America there is more direct application. In Australia, the topics are introduced in a much deeper 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

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25 September, 2005

HOORAY! U.C. FUNDING BEING REDUCED

They just MIGHT get around to sacking all the propagandists and hiring some real teachers

UC administrators gave the long-term financial rundown to the system's governing Board of Regents at their meeting Wednesday, saying the need and demand for a UC education is going up at a time when state funding continues to decline. Since 1984, California has increased spending for prisons by 126 percent and boosted spending on K-12 education by 26 percent. But spending on higher education dropped 12 percent, said Bruce Darling, UC senior vice president for university affairs.

Early signs of trouble include a student-faculty ratio that has risen above the goal of 17.6:1 to roughly 19:1 and staff and faculty salaries that have fallen behind comparable institutions, said Larry Hershman, UC's budget director.

Meanwhile, student fees have increased sharply in recent years, now approaching $7,000 a year including various campus fees. However, UC is still cheaper than other major public institutions and increases in financial aid have kept percentages of low-income students high, Hershman said.

Some regents were frustrated by the presentation, saying they're familiar with UC's state funding slide and want to see more solutions. "Our plan, it appears, is that we whine a lot about the inability of the Legislature to fully fund," said Regent John Moores, who questioned whether UC's long-term strategy is "hoping that something magic is going to happen."

"We cannot rely on the state as we have in the past," said Darling. "We're going to face some very stark policy choices."

More here



USELESS TEACHER TRAINING INSTITUTIONS

Post lifted from the Barone blog. See the original for links

American society has many islands of excellence—and many islands of mediocrity. Some of them can be found on the same turf, the campuses of our hundreds of colleges and universities. Among the islands of excellence are the mathematics and physical and biological science departments—the best in the world. Among the islands of mediocrity, or worse, are the schools of education, the institutions through which most of our public school teachers go.

Don't just take my word for it. Take the word of Arthur Levine, dean of Columbia University's Teachers College since 1994 (he's retiring next July), and of Al Sanoff, a former colleague at U.S. News & World Report, who is now the project manager of Teachers College's Study of Schools of Education Project [PDF]. Here's an article that describes the gist of Levine's first report, on the preparation of principals and administrators, issued last March. Money quotes:

"Arthur Levine is president of Teachers College at Columbia University and author of the report. He says graduate education programs suffer from irrelevant and incoherent curriculum, low admissions requirements and academic standards, weak faculty, and little clinical instruction. In fact, Levine adds, many programs are doing little more than dishing out higher degrees to teachers who are trying to qualify for salary increases.

"According to Al Sanoff, the study's project manager, even at elite universities across the U.S., colleges of education need to improve significantly. While he and the other researchers were able to identify some strong graduate education programs around the country, he notes, none that they found in America could be described as exemplary."

"None that they found in America could be described as exemplary." That's dynamite. I haven't gone through the full report yet, but I plan to do so. I have long suspected that education schools do more harm than good, and I have been fortified in my suspicions by reading Rita Kramer's Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers, E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them, and Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform. When I have asked teachers of my acquaintance what they gained from education school courses, the most positive response I've gotten was, "It wasn't a total waste of time." But all this came from people outside the education school establishment. Arthur Levine is at the center of this establishment. Teachers College is ranked number four on U.S. News's survey of graduate schools of education, behind only Harvard, UCLA, and Stanford.

Do we need education schools at all? That is a question I've been asking for some years, and I'm going to look at the Teachers College reports with that in mind. The 1910 Flexner Commission, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, called for closing most American medical schools and for organizing the rest along the lines of rigorous scientific principles. Over the following decade or so, its writer Abraham Flexner, financed generously by John D. Rockefeller, put its recommendations into practice, and American medical schools are clearly the best in the world. (See pages 491-93 of Ron Chernow's splendid Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. for a brief account.) Are Arthur Levine and Al Sanoff laying the groundwork for a similar restructuring of our schools of education?

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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

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24 September, 2005

THE ARTICLE REPRODUCED BELOW IS UTTER RUBBISH

The lack of boys on campus just means that boys are wising up faster than girls to the uselessness of many degrees. And none too soon. Ivar Berg demonstrated the uselessness of most tertiary education 30 years ago -- and educational standards have certainly not risen since then. Unsurprisingly, the article also fails to mention race differences. It notes the large male population in jails as if it were a problem for all males when in fact it is mainly a problem for black males. The article is basically a sanctimonious attempt to scare young males back into college by way of gross misrepresentations of what a lack of college education generally leads to. Read Berg's book (now out in a 2003 edition) for the real facts of the matter

"Currently, 135 women receive bachelor's degrees for every 100 men. That gender imbalance will widen in the coming years, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Education. This is ominous for every parent with a male child. The decline in college attendance means many will needlessly miss out on success in life. The loss of educated workers also means the country will be less able to compete economically. The social implications - women having a hard time finding equally educated mates - are already beginning to play out.

But the inequity has yet to provoke the kind of response that finally opened opportunities for women a generation ago. In fact, virtually no one is exploring the obvious questions: What has gone wrong? And what happens to all the boys who aren't in college? Some join the armed forces, but the size of the military has remained steady, at about 1.4 million, for the past decade. For the rest, the prospects appear dark:

The workforce. Thousands of young men find work as drywallers, painters and general laborers, but many have troubling landing jobs. The unemployment rate for young men ages 20-24 is 10.1%, twice the national rate. As for earnings, those who don't graduate from college are at a severe, lifelong financial disadvantage: Last year, men 25 and older with a college degree made an average of $47,000 a year, while those with a high school degree earned $30,000.

Prisons and jails. Nearly as many men are behind bars or on probation and parole (5 million) as are in college (7.3 million).

"Lost." Young people who aren't in school or the workforce are dubbed "non-engaged" by the annual Kids Count report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. But "lost" sounds just as accurate. About 3.8 million youth ages 18-24 belong to this group, roughly 15% of all people of that age. Though there are no gender breakdowns for this group, the pathways leading to this dead end - dropping out from high school, emerging from the juvenile justice system - are dominated by boys.

While demographers and economists have a pretty good idea where the boys end up, educators are largely clueless about the causes. Some say female teachers in elementary and middle schools, where male teachers are scarce, naturally enforce a girl-friendly environment that rewards students who can sit quietly - not a strong point for many boys, who earn poor grades and fall behind. Others argue that a smart-isn't-cool bias has seeped into boys of all racial and ethnic groups.

Solutions are just as uncertain. Hiring more male teachers would likely help, as would countering the anti-intellectual male code. But it's not that simple. Many boys leave middle school with pronounced shortcomings in verbal skills. Those lapses contribute to the low grade and high dropout rates. Surely, a problem that creates crime, increases unemployment and leads to hopelessness deserves attention. Where are the boys? Too often, going nowhere".

Source



SOCIALIST EDUCATION IDEAS NOT WORKING

Tony Blair's crusade to raise education standards was dealt a triple blow yesterday with figures showing soaring school truancy levels, a student drop-out rate of nearly 25 per cent and a surprise fall in state school entries to top universities. Truancy jumped by almost 10 per cent last year to its highest level, despite almost £1 billion in government spending since 1997 to tackle the problem. At the same time, figures from the Higher Education Funding Council indicated that more than 71,000 first-year students would fail to graduate, wasting around £500 million a year.

The proportion of candidates from state schools rejected by top universities also rose, as admissions tutors increased recruitment from fee-paying schools. The decline in state school entry to 16 of the 19 universities in the Russell Group reversed the trend in admissions for the first time since Gordon Brown, in 2000, attacked the “old school tie” at Oxford over its rejection of Laura Spence, a Tyneside comprehensive student with five A-grade A levels.

Universities are spending more than £300 million of government funding this year on “widening participation” initiatives to encourage applications from state schools. The setbacks for two of the Government’s key objectives raise troubling questions for ministers about the massive levels of public spending on programmes to cut truancy and attract more state school students into higher education.

David Cameron, the Shadow Education Secretary, said: “These figures are dreadful. The Government has spent nearly £1 billion on tackling truancy and it is getting worse.” Jacqui Smith, the School Standards Minister, announced a crackdown on the “stubborn minority” of 8,000 students at 146 schools who were responsible for a fifth of all truancy. Teachers will be required to identify the most persistent offenders and their parents will be threatened with jail if attendance does not improve. [Note the Leftist reliance on coercion. Coercion is about the only idea Leftists have]

Professor Michael Sterling, chairman of the Russell Group, said that there was no evidence of a “systematic approach to decrease state students” among admissions tutors. “It may be just one of those things. The best students happened to fall in a different area this time,” he said. Professor Sterling, the Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham University, suggested that a reluctance to admit extra students above the number for which the institutions received government funding may have contributed to the decline in state entrants.The rise in entrants from private schools was evidence that universities were choosing the most able, regardless of government pressure. “We must not deviate from taking the best. It would be indefensible to take students who were not as good simply to make that ratio ever increasing,” he said

Source



BIG INCREASE IN BRITISH SCHOOL TRUANCY

Most of the truants are probably only marginably educable anyway so truancy probably makes little difference to anything. For many truants, staying away is probably a rational decision. They can make more money by drug-dealing etc. that way

The number of children playing truant has risen by more than a third to 1.4 million since Labour took office, according to official figures published yesterday. The Department for Education and Skills revealed that more than 55,000 pupils skipped class every day in the past school year; a rise of 4,500 since 2003-04 and the biggest jump since the figures were first recorded in 1994.

In spite of the Government spending 1 billion pounds on initiatives tackling absenteeism since 1997, the annual number of pupils playing truant from school has soared by 43 per cent. Jacqui Smith, the Schools Minister, said that school attendance was higher than ever, with fewer children going sick or taking term-time holidays, but said that she was disappointed that a "stubborn minority" of teenagers were skipping school. "Schools are treating absenteeism more rigorously, challenging questionable reasons for absence and cracking down on unnecessary time out of school," she said.

But she added: "It is disappointing that a stubborn minority of pupils, estimated at 8,000 in just 4 per cent of secondary schools, remain determined to jeopardise their education and their futures." Officials at the Department for Education and Skills claim that these serial truants, who miss up to five weeks of class at a time, account for a fifth of all truancy figures. Ms Smith declared that 146 schools would now be forced to identify their most persistent truants and place the parents on a "fast track to attendance" scheme.

The parents would be assigned a truancy officer and receive support from social and youth services to help to tackle issues such as drugs, parenting skills or mental health problems. If there were no serious improvements within three months, the parents would face a court appearance, which normally results in a 2,500 pound fine or three months in prison. Since September last year, more than 18,000 parents have been placed on such schemes. The Government's new target comes after an initiative with the travel industry to allow parents discounts for making early holiday bookings, to cut term-time holidays.

Of the 1,381,458 truants, almost two thirds, or 793,628, are teenagers. As in previous years, the highest number of truants are in the North East and West, Yorkshire and Humberside, followed by London. While the percentage of truants from private schools was just 0.13 per cent, in city academies [charter schools] the average pupil absence was estimated to be 2.84 per cent, more than double that of state secondary schools, at 1.25 per cent. At the City Academy Bristol, Ray Priest, the principal, has presided over an 11 percentage point drop in truants from 15 to 4 per cent in two years.

He credits a liberal interpretation of the curriculum, a positive school atmosphere and an "attendance team" of three, which works with both the families and his 1,300 pupils. "They are the real key," he said, "because people need to be in the school and building relations with families and 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

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23 September, 2005

LUDICROUSLY LOW STANDARDS STILL TOO HIGH FOR MANY CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS

Gosh! A whole 23% of students have to be competent at the "3Rs"!

More California schools are now facing the consequences imposed by the federal No Child Left Behind education law. Nearly 200 schools across the state have been added to the list of schools failing to meet the benchmarks on test scores set by President Bush's signature education law, according to figures released Tuesday by the state Department of Education. That brings to 1,772 the number of California schools in "program improvement" - the process required by the law when test scores do not meet targets for two consecutive years.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell attributed the increase to the ratcheting up of performance standards under No Child Left Behind. Last year the law required that about 12 percent of students score proficient or better on math and language arts tests for a school to avoid program improvement. This year, the law requires about 23 percent hit that mark on the tests students took last spring. "The growth targets by the federal government have doubled," O'Connell said in a phone interview.

In the Sacramento region, 69 schools are in program improvement. They now face a series of interventions and sanctions spelled out by No Child Left Behind for each year a school does not meet the federal standard, known as "adequate yearly progress." At the first stage, schools must inform parents that they can send their children to a different school in the district. In Year 2, schools must offer students extra tutoring. By Year 4, the school must start planning a complete overhaul. The law's consequences apply only to schools that receive Title I money, the federal program that aids schools with large numbers of poor children. California has 5,887 Title I schools, and 30 percent of them are now in program improvement.

O'Connell said he expects the portion of Title I schools facing the law's consequences to rise each year as the federal performance target goes up. In 2007-2008, No Child Left Behind will require that about 34 percent of students test proficient. The increase continues until 2014, when 100 percent of students are supposed to be proficient in math and English.

More here



BRITISH UNIVERSITIES BIASED AGAINST THE POOR?

You would think so from the Leftist clamour but "A total of 86.8 per cent of entrants in 2003-04 came from state schools". Only when NO private school students get to university will the British Left be happy

Top universities are rejecting more students from state schools in favour of rivals from the fee-paying sector, new figures showed yesterday. Sixteen of the nineteen universities in the Russell Group took a smaller proportion of entrants from state schools last year despite government pressure on them to admit more. The figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency threw into reverse the trend towards greater admission of state school candidates by leading universities since Labour took office.

They emerged as ministers prepare a campaign to persuade teenagers not to be deterred from applying to university next year by the introduction of 3,000 pounds-a-year tuition fees.

The "performance indicators" from the agency showed that Oxford admitted 53.8 per cent of students from state schools in 2003-04, against 55.4 the year before. Admissions at Cambridge also fell from 57.6 per cent to 56.9 per cent. The proportion of state students admitted by Newcastle and Nottingham fell by more than 5 percentage points to 68.6 per cent and 67.4 per cent respectively. At Imperial College, London, and King's College London the drop was about 3 percentage points to 59.6 and 67.3 per cent. Only Birmingham, Bristol and Sheffield in the Russell Group increased their share of state students. However, there were declines at other leading universities, including Durham, Bath and York.

The drop in admissions came as new figures from the Higher Education Funding Council showed that almost a quarter of first year students fail to graduate from the university or college where they enrolled. The figure, which represents nearly 70,000 students, could be costing as much as 500 million pounds a year. Not included in the total are those students who leave before December 1 in their first term after the frantic rush through clearing.

The overall proportion of state candidates accepted at British universities fell for the first time since 2000, the year Gordon Brown attacked the influence of the "old school tie" at Oxford over its rejection of the Tyneside comprehensive student Laura Spence. A total of 86.8 per cent of entrants in 2003-04 came from state schools, compared with 87.2 per cent in 2002-03.

The Independent Schools Council welcomed the increased success of fee-paying students. Jonathan Shephard, its general secretary, said: "All the evidence is that universities are putting their academic reputations first and recruiting the best candidates, regardless of means and regardless of social background."

Officials at the Higher Education Funding Council for England sought to dismiss the findings as a "blip", but acknowledged that there were deep-rooted problems in persuading more state school students to aspire to university. John Rushforth, the funding council's director of widening participation, said: "We know that this is a problem that comes through in the schools. It comes through in some cases, research suggests, at a very early age in terms of aspiration, seven and eight-year-olds. "Any changes are going to take a long time. We are clear this is something we have to stick at and all of us - institutions, the funding council, government and other people - have to keep working hard."

Sir Peter Lampl, a government adviser on widening participation and chairman of the Sutton Trust, an educational charity, called the figures very disturbing. "It looks like a lot of the good work that has been done over the past few years is being reversed. This is a crucial issue because our research shows there are still 3,000 students from state schools who should be going to top universities and are not," he said. Sir Peter said controversy over new "benchmark" targets for state school admissions had "taken the spotlight off this issue". Previous benchmarks were based on A-level results, but the funding council now uses the points system adopted by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas).

The benchmarks for state school entrants were previously based on A-level points, where an A grade was 120 points, a B 100 and so on down to 40 for an E. Students with three A grades were deemed to have 360 points. Under the new benchmarks, a wide range of qualifications attract points, creating a far bigger pool of students with 360. Hefce regards them all as theoretically eligible for entry to Oxbridge and other top universities, even though in practice they would not be considered.

Admissions tutors say that the targets are unattainable because they require candidates to have specific A-level grades rather than Ucas points totals. Oxford said that applications from state students had risen by nearly 40 per cent in the past five years. A spokesman said the university would continue to encourage more applicants, but added: "We will not be exercising any positive discrimination at selection stage."

The Independent Schools Council described the benchmarks as absurd. Mr Shephard said: "Compiling the benchmarks in this way has led to massive increases in the number of state sector pupils assumed to be qualified for entrance to a top university. The reality is somewhat different."

Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, said individual universities were responsible for admissions. He added: "Do we want to see more young people from state schools going to higher education? Yes we do. "Widening participation in higher education is a shared responsibility, and the challenge is for universities and colleges to reach out to communities, attract new students and offer new opportunities for everyone with the ability to participate."

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

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22 September, 2005

LEFTISTS STILL GETTING IN THE WAY OF THE BASICS

They basically don't give a damn whether poor kids learn the "3Rs" or not. It's getting the Leftist propaganda into them that matters

Two years ago, W.H. Keister Elementary School in Harrisonburg, Va., began to take the No Child Left Behind law very seriously. Intensive 120-minute reading classes were installed, along with more math. Physical education went from 150 to 90 minutes a week. Music time was cut in half. This was part of a national movement to make sure all children, particularly those from low-income families -- as were 50 percent of Keister students -- mastered reading and math skills essential to their lives and the rest of their educations.

But such parents as Todd Hedinger, whose son, Gabe, attended the school, reacted negatively, saying there was too much emphasis on a few core subjects. "The emphasis on instructional time pushes everything else out of the way," Hedinger said. Such concerns have been part of the continuing debate over No Child Left Behind. The time devoted to reading and math has increased. And in many places, the increase has brought results. Between 2002 and 2004, Keister Elementary's passing rate went from 81 to 92 percent on the state English test and from 86 to 90 percent on the math test.

But critics of the federal law say children need a more complete education. The Washington-based Center on Education Policy reported this year that 27 percent of school systems say they are spending less time on social studies, and nearly 25 percent say they are spending less time on science, art and music. "This tendency results in impoverishing the education of all students, but particularly the education of students who perform less well on the tests," said Robert G. Smith, Arlington County school superintendent, who said his schools have resisted the trend.

Many educators defend the focus on reading and math, as long as it is done properly. Lucretia Jackson, principal of Maury Elementary School in Alexandria, said that basic skills are very important and that many children need extra time to acquire them. Her school made significant test-score gains this year by scheduling after-school classes and enrichment activities three days each week. "They need to develop the quality of skills that will enable them to meet the needs of the future society," Jackson said.....

Barksdale said that among the activities teachers have told her they dropped because of test pressure were silent reading, book talks, science experiments, picnics, field trips, classroom skits and creative writing.

"The logic of the fundamental importance of reading and mathematics is universally accepted," said David P. Driscoll, Massachusetts state education commissioner. "However, the testing of those subjects leads people to spend more time out of fear. While some extra focus particularly around test-taking skills and the most common standards is appropriate, this pushing other subjects aside to concentrate on reading and math is not. A full, robust program whereby kids are actively engaged in their learning produces the best results."

At Keister Elementary, test scores are up not only in reading and math but in science and social studies, despite fears of a negative result. Hedinger congratulated the "dedicated, loving, smart and creative people" who teach at the school but said he still does not like the long reading classes and athletic and music cuts because they reduced his son's love of learning. "Is the meaning of education cramming as much knowledge in, to pass a standardized test, or is it meant to include something else -- creativity, reflection, synthesis, hypothesizing, daydreaming?" Hedinger asked. "What happens to all of that in the process?"

More here



Double standards at De Paul

Post lifted from Erin O'Connor

Last year, De Paul University suspended--and effectively terminated--adjunct professor Thomas Klocek for criticizing, and thereby offending, a group of pro-Palestinian students who were manning the Students for Justice in Palestine table at a student activities fair. Klocek stopped by the table, picked up some literature, and wound up in an argument with the students. Allegedly, one compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to Hitler's treatment of Jews; Klocek parried by observing that while not all Muslims are terrorists, most terrorists are Muslims. The offended students filed a complaint against Klocek, and he was suspended from teaching without ever seeing the complaint or having a chance to face his accusers. FIRE defended Klocek against the school's open viewpoint discrimination; he has since sued DePaul for defamation. He has refused to apologize for his statements, and as a result remains suspended without pay.

But the problem here is not just that Klocek offended some students by criticizing their views. It's also that he offended them--and the school--by having the wrong views himself. You can be offensive at De Paul as long as your offensiveness is of the accepted sort. Hence the university's invitation to Ward Churchill to speak next month. Last spring, De Paul dean Susanne Dumbleton wrote a letter to the student paper explaining that Klocek had been punished because the school felt the need to protect students from the pain of having their views rejected: "The students' perspective was dishonored and their freedom demeaned. Individuals were deeply insulted. ... Our college acted immediately by removing the instructor from the classroom." Churchill's "little Eichmanns" comment has caused similar outrage across the country. And yet De Paul does not seem to feel the need to protect its sensitive students from the incendiary insults of a man who has made a career out of angry ideological agitprop. Indeed, the school is willing to pay liberally for the privilege of having Churchill come vent his spleen on campus. Churchill makes several thousand dollars per appearance. My guess is that his fee for a single speech amounts to a substantial portion of Klocek's meager adjunct salary. But then, De Paul clearly regards the one viewpoint as more valuable than the other.

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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

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21 September, 2005

Learning sinks in a sea of claptrap

What do Education Minister Brendan Nelson and Don Watson, author of Death Sentence and Dictionary of Weasel Words, have in common? If you think it is their political affinity, you are wrong. The correct answer is that both have attacked the cliches and jargon that are drowning Australia's education system in a sea of claptrap. Nelson has been arguing against student reporting where levels of achievement are described by vacuous terms such as "beginning", "established" and "consolidated". Watson is reported as describing the Tasmanian education department's Essential Learnings pamphlet for parents as being full of buzz words such as "key element outcomes" and he tells parents: "There's absolutely no shame at all in saying you don't understand it."

Welcome to the world of edu-babble associated with Australia's adoption of what is called outcomes-based education. Even George Orwell would be surprised if he knew of the tortured language use that parents, teachers and students face.

Most parents will remember the time they went to school and, based on the belief that teachers taught and students learned, there were subjects such as English, history, geography, mathematics, science, art, physical education. Such is no longer the case. Teachers are now "facilitators" and "knowledge navigators". Children from prep to Year 12 are no longer students; instead they are described as "lifelong learners", "autonomous learners", "connected lifelong learners" and "self-directed and reflective thinkers".

In education departments across Australia, curriculum is no longer defined in terms of subjects such as mathematics, science and English. Instead, the priority is given to what are termed "essential learnings". A South Australian document describes essential learnings as: "Understandings, dispositions and capabilities which are developed through the learning areas and form an integral part of children's and students' learning from birth to Year 12 and beyond. They are resources which are drawn upon throughout life and enable people to productively engage with changing times as thoughtful, active, responsive and committed local, national and global citizens. Engaging with these concepts is crucial to enhancing the learning culture within and beyond schools/sites."

Education once focused on teaching students the content associated with particular subjects such as history or mathematics. The emphasis now is on teaching students to have politically correct "understandings and dispositions". The result? While many leave school culturally illiterate and unable to properly read, write and add up, at least they exhibit high self-esteem and are sympathetic towards the disadvantaged, the dispossessed, the environment and world peace.

The Northern Territory education department, in line with the psycho-babble reminiscent of the age of Aquarius, defines essential learnings as the "inner learner, creative learner, collaborative learner and constructive learner". Tasmania, not to be outdone, defines education in terms of "Thinking, communicating, personal futures, social responsibility and world futures".

The justification for overturning what many teachers see as a more sensible and practical approach to education is because, in case you haven't noticed, the world is changing. Phrases such as "rapidly changing world", "the world is rapidly changing", "meet the challenges of the future" and "meet the challenges of life in a complex, information-rich and constantly changing world" litter state and territory curriculum documents. The cliched nature of such phrases is cause for alarm. Repeating the mantra of change is also no substitute for acknowledging the truism that without knowledge of the past it is impossible to understand the present or to address the future.

Most parents probably expect that the curriculum is divided into year or grade levels, with students expected to learn what is taught and to show a minimum level of achievement each year. Given Australia's adoption of a developmental approach to learning, this is no longer the case. Not only does the curriculum, described in terms of standards or learning outcomes, equate to a number of year levels, but there are also few, if any, consequences for failure. To quote an SA document: "All children and students learn and progress in different ways and at different rates. Standards include specific outcomes and guide educators when tracking students to achieve a higher standard, rather than 'passing' or 'failing' at a particular point."

The NT Curriculum Framework also embraces a developmental approach: "Learning is a lifelong journey in which all learners develop at their own pace as they progress via many different pathways. Development patterns follow a broad continuum that builds on demonstrated knowledge and understandings." Although there is an element of truth in the observation that learning is a lifelong journey following different pathways, there is also the reality, especially in areas such as numeracy and literacy, that those students who have not mastered the basics at each year level are educationally at risk.

Source



Hasta la vista to literature in Australian schools

As noted in "Fahrenheit 451", one of the strategies oppressive governments use to maintain power is to destroy creativity and freedom by burning books. In a world where nobody reads, especially the classics, the culture becomes shallow and impoverished and people are easier to control. Of course, destroying books is something that only happens in Hitler's Nazi Germany or in Cambodia under Pol Pot. It could never happen in a civilised country such as Australia. Our education system ensures that students read great books, become culturally literate and sensitive to the moral and aesthetic value of good literature.

Wrong. Judged by the draft Victorian Year 11 and 12 English study design, those who should be the custodians of our literary tradition are happy to feed students a weak and insipid gruel guaranteed to make them culturally illiterate and in danger of being emotionally and morally adrift. Historically, one of the foundations of English teaching has been literature, defined as those novels, plays, poems and short stories that say something lasting and profound about the human experience and our relationship with what D.H. Lawrence terms the"circumambient universe at the living moment". In the new study design, the more traditional definition of literature is exploded to include: CD-ROMs, websites or blogs, computer games, hyperfiction and "multimodel texts which also make use of visual, auditory and digital features".

The result, the dialogue from an Arnie Schwarzenegger movie has the same value as a Shakespearean sonnet and students can spend their time watching films and giving oral reports instead of reading sustained works of fiction and having to write an essay inresponse. The situation is made worse in that, unlike the existing English study design, where students have to read at least four novels or equivalent works over the two years, in the new study design students only have to read one novel a year.

Compare the new Victorian English course, which has much in common with other English courses around Australia, with the course students have to complete when undertaking the increasingly popular and more rigorous International Baccalaureate. Not only does the IB language course place literature centre stage, there is no mention of song lyrics and videos, but students are expected to read 11 works over two years. A look at the IB English syllabus outline for Melbourne's Ivanhoe Grammar School shows works such as: Medea, Antigone, Othello, Macbeth, the Romantic poets, A Room of One's Own and The Virgin and theGypsy. Unlike the Victorian English study design, unashamedly the expectation is that students value their "literary heritage" and learn to read with discrimination and to "express ideas with clarity, coherence, precision and fluency".

Judged by the report recently released by academics at the Australian Defence Force Academy detailing the poor writing skills of many undergraduates, this is something students completing mainstream senior school English courses find difficult.

The flaws in the Victorian English study design are manifold. First, as has already been suggested, literature deals with human predicaments in a unique way. No amount of watching Neighbours, googling the internet or SMSing friends will teach about human nature as does studying Macbeth or Greek tragedies such as Oedipus Rex. Such plays reveal in an imaginatively compelling way the influence of elemental emotions such as greed, jealousy and ambition. Students also learn about the destructive influence of hubris and the fact that, being human, we are not always in control.

Information is not knowledge and understanding should not be confused with wisdom. One of the benefits of great literature is that it tells us something significant, lasting and profound about the human predicament. Especially among young children, as argued by the American psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, literature is also important in nurturing emotional and psychological wellbeing. Classic myths, fables and legends such as The Iliad and Beowulf address in an immediate and profound way many of the uncertainties and dilemmas faced in growing to maturity.

Literature, unlike the more general category of text, is also unique in the way language is used. Reading a computer manual asks for language tobe taken literally and the reader seeksinformation in its most straightforward guise. Reading literature, on the other hand, requires language to be read aesthetically, and when reading William Blake's poetry or the novels of David Malouf one encounters similes, metaphors and a musical quality in language impossible to find in an SMS message or most movie scripts.

The new study design is also seriously flawed in that one of the justifications in making English more entertaining, contemporary and relevant is the argument that not all students, especially working-class students and those from non-English-speaking backgrounds, are capable of reading theclassics. As we now live in the information age, where students spend much of their time communicating in internet chat-rooms and via SMS text, and where visual images are so pervasive, the written word is obsolete.

Ignored is that while some students, especially those labelled as disadvantaged, are denied our literary heritage, others are free to read widely and, as a result, are culturally enriched. Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism, wrote of those who argue literature is not for all: "In the name of egalitarianism, they preserve the most insidious form of elitism, which in one guise or another holds the masses incapable of intellectual exertion."

One of the defining characteristics of the draft English study design is that everything is a worthwhile text for study. Not only is literature devalued, but there is also the belief that the function of reading is to analyse texts in terms of power relationships. Ignored is the aesthetic and moral value of literature and the basic human need to find some more profound meaning in life, the type of meaning that cannot be found in a hypertext document, a blog or a multi-model text.

As argued by S.L. Goldberg: "People are more likely than not to go on being interested in people, as much as they are in abstract theories and ideologies, or impersonal forces, or structural systems, or historical information, or even the play of signifiers. "So it is more likely than not, I'd say, that people will go on valuing those writings that they judge best help them to realise what the world is and what people are, and to live with both as realistically and as fully as they can."

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

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20 September, 2005

A VERY SHORT STORY ABOUT LITERACY TEACHING

One of my friends has just retired from teaching at her local primary school. The school is a public one but is in an affluent area so there are few discipline problems. The teachers there are allowed considerable flexibility in how they teach and they have devised a system based primarily on phonetics that is very successful in rapidly teaching their grade-school kids how to read and write. I remember my friend proudly showing me a piece of work produced by a GRADE 1 student (aged about 6). It said: "I luv my ticha". The spelling wasn't very good -- it was phonetic -- but this was from a kid still in in GRADE 1. Lots of American High School graduates can do no better. In fact, from the emails I receive, I can assure you that even some American TEACHERS can't do much better. Does this or does this not show what a great sin much of the educational system commits against our children?

I hope that will leave readers thinking about what COULD be. And I think you will also now understand better why I do this blog.

As well as posting here, I also of course post on a number of other sites. One place where I have been posting a lot recently is Tongue Tied. Several of my posts there recently have been about educational matters so I am re-posting them below on the assumption that few readers of this blog also monitor Tongue Tied.



"Dual Immersion" Madness

American Leftists constantly express their anti-Americanism. Note for example this quote from the much-acclaimed Michael Moore about his fellow-Americans: "They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet... in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug pricks" . And there are few more reliably Left-leaning groups than America's teachers and educators (as we see here).

A logical corollary of being an America-hater is a hatred of America's language -- which is English. So the fact that there are now a lot of Spanish-speakers in America who need to learn English is used as an excuse to teach Spanish instead! And "dual immersion" is the fiercest form of that -- where not only Spanish kids but also Anglo kids are taught in Spanish! And it's happening. They're even trying to introduce it in Utah. Note the following report (excerpts):

"As the Washington County School District continues to explore the possibility of teaching both English and Spanish at a local elementary school, Principal Dale Porter met with Spanish-speaking parents Thursday evening at Dixie Downs Elementary to discuss the program. Called "dual immersion," the program would teach classes of evenly balanced English- and Spanish-speakers. Both language groups would learn the other language just as English is now taught in district elementary schools.... Those who live in Dixie Downs' boundaries will not be required to participate and may choose another school in the district to attend.... Porter explained how all students in the program learn a foreign language - either English or Spanish - and how both language populations benefit from each other. The languages are taught simultaneously by bilingual teachers."

Source

That report is from a few months back so here's an update from one of my readers:

"Dixie Downs elementary school has not yet been selected to be the "dual immersion" elementary school in town, because the district has not yet decided if it will try the experiment. But it began the school year with many new teachers. 100% of the teachers now speak both Spanish and English. Any teachers which did not have moved to a different school. 100% of teachers for some grades are teaching their own class for the first time. The principal has declared that he only hired the best teachers who applied (all the best teachers were bi-lingual?)

Imagine the school board's surprise recently when several parents, who don't want dual immersion, spoke at the school board meeting and asked why a common phrase, with a familiar rhythm and accompanying actions did not sound familiar when they visited the classrooms. If one listens to the rhythm and not the words one can almost hear..... "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America"...... However the children all recite it in SPANISH! Even the ones that can't trace any Spanish ancestry.

So the principal of the school is moving ahead as if the idea were already approved, which it probably will be unless some parents get very active. But it is a "poor" school (intellectuals would much rather experiment on other people's kids than on their own) -- 42% of the students are eligible for a free lunch (See here) -- so I guess the education authorities are banking on parental activism not happening. And, being poor, not many parents may be able to excercise the option of transferring to another school.

My prediction? Lots of kids subjected to such treatment will end up even more illiterate than they do now. If the schools cannot teach the "3Rs" in English properly, how the heck are they going to do it in Spanish?

But anyone who opposes the whole idea is "racist", of course.



The British Attack on "Extremism"

At first glance the news excerpt below seems reasonable:

"Extremist organisations are operating on university campuses across the country and pose a serious threat to national security, according to a new report. Yesterday the education secretary, Ruth Kelly, ordered vice-chancellors to clamp down on student extremists in the wake of the July terror attacks in London. But a report due to be published next week by Anthony Glees, the director of Brunel University's centre for intelligence and security studies, lists more than 30 institutions - including some of the most high-profile universities in the country - where "extremist and/or terror groups" have been detected. "This is a serious threat," Professor Glees told the Guardian. "We have discovered a number of universities where subversive activities are taking place, often without the knowledge of the university authorities." ... Among the universities named are Cambridge, where the BNP were detected; Oxford, where the report said animal rights extremists had been active; and the London School of Economics and Manchester University, which both had active Islamist extremist groups".

Source

But in fact there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with extremism. I am an extreme advocate of rationality and individual liberty and make absolutely no apology for that. It is advocacy of violence that should be monitored, not "extremism". Slipping in attacks on all "extremists" under the cover of preventing violence seems a very serious attack on civil liberties. And who is to define "extremism"? Will Brits soon all have to have the conformity of ants? In America, the New York Times regularly describes as "out of the mainstream" anybody they disagree with. It's not hard to envisage the ruling British Leftists doing much the same.



Figure This One

In universities and colleges, speech seems to be getting "correcter" by the day. It's no longer good enough to refer to shorties as "height challenged" or fatties as "width challenged" (or whatever) so we now have one term that seems to confer correct speech generally. The real buzz term now is "differently abled". Here is the Fort Valley State University announcing their correctness:

"The Differently Abled Services Center (DASC) is administratively a part of the Department of Student Affairs. The mission of the Differently Abled Services Center is to increase retention for students with learning disorders by ensuring equal treatment, opportunity, and access for persons with impairments and/or disorders. The center provides support services which assist students with learning disorders in the attainment of their academic as well as personal potential".

Source

First problem: Aren't we ALL "differently abled"? Don't we all have a different set of abilities? I am hopeless at catching balls. Does that make ME differently abled? If ever I am out Fort Valley way I am going to enjoy all those "services" they offer, I guess.

But here's the kicker: The page I got the above quote from was headed in large letters "Building the Fence". Isn't building fences what they are supposed NOT to be doing? Go figure.

Update

How come fatties are getting such a bum rap these days? They are not "differently abled" or whatever. They are "obese". Just another target of Leftist "tolerance", I guess (as distinct from real tolerance)



Both Free Speech and Academic Freedom Under Legal threat

Voltaire once said: "I disagree with you but I will defend to the death your right to say it". There are not many Voltaires around these days. An Australian university professor has recently come under fire for opposing the intake of refugees from Sudan into Australia. He made his comments initially in a newspaper but he has elaborated his views in a sufficiently sound way for them to be accepted for publication in an Australian academic law journal. Read on (excerpt):

"A lawyer for Australia's Sudanese community has threatened a Victorian university with legal action if it publishes an article by a controversial Sydney-based law professor. Called `Rethinking the White Australia Policy?, the 6,800-word article was written by Associate Professor Andrew Fraser, who's been banned from teaching at Sydney's Macquarie University after making racist remarks. The Canadian-born academic wrote a letter to his local suburban newspaper in July, claiming Australia was becoming a Third World colony by allowing non-white immigration.... Lawyer George Newhouse today warned Deakin University to scrap plans to publish Prof Fraser's contentious views in its next law journal. ``I am shocked that a university would even want to publish something along these lines,'' he said. ``I put the university on notice that if they repeat the racial vilification, a claim for compensation may be made against the university and the editors that publish or republish this poison.'' Mr Newhouse said he had already commenced proceedings on behalf of the Sudanese Darfurian community in the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission."

Source

The university that publishes the journal does not seem to be caving in to the threat so far but the whole thing is a good example of how only those things that accord with the official "line" can safely be said today. Stalin would approve.

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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

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



19 September, 2005

A VERY INTERESTING CONTRAST IN THE CITY OF SYDNEY

A lot of parents don't want their kids taught by whining feminists and Leftists who can't teach anyway. When lots of parents are prepared to pay twice for their child's education -- once via their taxes and again to a private school -- it is a pretty emphatic example of voting with your feet against a failed system

Public education in Sydney's inner suburbs is dying, with low enrolments threatening the viability of a number of schools. Department of Education figures reveal that at least six public schools within a five-kilometre radius of the CBD catered to fewer than 100 students last year. And at three of the schools - Fort Street at Millers Point, Plunkett Street at Woolloomooloo and St Peters Public School - student numbers are hovering around, or have dropped below, 50.

The data, obtained from the State Government by the Port Jackson District Council of Parents and Citizens Associations through freedom of information laws, shows a detailed school-by-school pattern of decline in public education over the past 17 years, with the inner west and eastern suburbs recording the sharpest drop in enrolments. Student numbers at eight primary schools and two high schools in the east and inner west have halved in the past decade, while a further six primary and three secondary schools in the area have lost at least a third of students.

Over the same time, private schools in these areas have recorded strong growth. Enrolments in non-government schools in the inner west and inner south have grown by almost 18 per cent in the past seven years, while in the eastern suburbs private schools now have a 60 per cent share of the market.

Dr Cappie-Wood said recent figures showed the decline in NSW public school participation was slowing and in some areas stopping. A range of initiatives was slowing the decline further, he said. More than $100 million had been spent on upgrading schools in inner suburbs, including more than $4 million on Dulwich and Marrickville high schools since 2001. According to the figures supplied under FoI, student numbers in both primary schools and the secondary school in Marrickville halved between 1994 and 2004.

More here



OUTSOURCING TEACHING TO INDIA

I last posted on this back in June 21st. The following is something of an update:

"When engineering student Jeff Bowman needed help in calculus last year, a professor at the University of North Dakota suggested he get tutoring. Bowman, who lives in the Caribbean and takes courses online, found a tutor - in India. A working electrician, Bowman would log on to the Internet before work, around 3 a.m., and get one-on-one help from one of dozens of overseas tutors the university hired through a U.S. company called Smarthinking. "I kind of doubt that I would have been able to pass it (calculus) without help," says Bowman, 45. "When I want help, I don't care how I get it."

Soon, help like this could come to public school students. Thanks to President Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, kids in struggling schools are eligible for free after-school tutoring in reading and math. In many schools, local teachers, non-profit groups and even churches are approved to provide it. So are for-profit companies. Many are investing in technology that allows students and tutors to communicate via special Internet chat rooms and Web-enabled telephone service. Several companies cautiously are considering the practice of "offshoring" a portion of their online tutoring to countries including India.

Despite some educators' worries that offshore tutors might not meet certification requirements, one U.S. company already has conducted a pilot program with Indian tutors. Indian firms are eager to offer - and in some cases expand - their services here. "This is a very good, upcoming field because there is a huge demand for teachers," says Basak Somit, manager of e-learning for Career Launcher, a New Delhi-based education firm. "The sort of queries which we are getting over here, it's tremendous."

Career Launcher piloted a tutoring program last year with eSylvan, a division of Baltimore-based Educate Inc., through Educate's retail operations. The sessions, staffed by five tutors, weren't part of NCLB; families paid privately. Somit says difficulties getting teacher certifications forced them to pull out of the pilot, but Career Launcher is developing its own program and hopes to launch sessions directly through schools this year.

Outsourcing long has been a contentious labor issue. U.S. teachers never have faced overseas competition, but a perfect storm of factors - better technology, rising numbers of struggling schools and millions of dollars in new federal aid - could change that, making "education process outsourcing" a reality. Indian tutors work, on average, for the equivalent of about $200 monthly, putting in six to eight hours a day, five to six days a week. That means they earn the equivalent of about a $1.40 an hour, compared with upward of $20 to $30 an hour for many U.S. tutors.

Public schools last year spent about $218 million on tutoring with an anticipated price tag of $500 million this year, says J. Mark Jackson, a senior analyst at Eduventures, a Boston market research company specializing in education. Outsourcing tutoring is "perfectly feasible," he says, but "politically it would be a disaster" for a for-profit company. "It's a very politically charged debate. The person who's not doing that work is the local teacher."

While workers in other professions suffer from outsourcing all the time, observers say it is unlikely that any community's public schools will be totally outsourced. So companies that want to peel off even a small portion of teachers' work must make the case for it locally, Jackson says. "You want the local community, where the teachers have such strong power in the political process, supporting what you want to do."

Liz Pape, CEO of Virtual High School, an online school that serves more than 6,000 students, says rural areas can benefit from online teaching. "If your child happens to be in a very rural, somewhat isolated area and is going to a high school where there are no teachers who can teach A.P. statistics, wouldn't you want your student to take a course in A.P. statistics from a teacher in Massachusetts?" she says.

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

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

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



18 September, 2005

SPOTTING MUSLIM EXTREMISTS IN BRITISH UNIVERSITIES

Maybe this will do some good

Muslim community leaders will be asked to help "identify and isolate" potential extremists on university campuses as students start their new term, the Guardian has learned. The move is among measures to be outlined today in a speech by the education secretary, Ruth Kelly, and comes amid concern that radical groups are using universities as recruiting grounds.

Yesterday the higher education minister, Bill Rammell, who has launched a nationwide programme of meetings with Muslim students and academics as part of the initiative, said the government was responding to issues raised by the Muslim community. "I am doing this because leaders of faith communities have approached me and expressed fears that their young people are being attracted to and converted to violent extremism," he said. "Community leaders say to us that they are worried about some students, a tiny, tiny minority, who are drawn to extremist ideas and this is about shifting the terms of debate."

In the aftermath of the London bombings in July, the Guardian revealed that the security services had barred more than 200 foreign scientists from studying at British universities on grounds of security. The National Union of Students has banned Hizb ut-Tahrir from campuses, accusing the group of "supporting terrorism and publishing material that incites racial hatred". The organisation denied the accusations.

Speaking ahead of Ms Kelly's speech, Mr Rammell said it was important to listen to the concerns of Muslim students but insisted the wider Islamic community had an obligation to help the authorities identify individuals or groups possibly posing a threat.

Last night Wakkas Khan, president of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, welcomed Mr Rammell's comments, but said the initiatives must not infringe the rights of Muslim students. "I think the concern revolves around the level of involvement of the universities and outside bodies in Islamic societies and activities. "We would find it very difficult if university authorities began investigating Islamic societies and searching prayer rooms as a matter of course. Where it is absolutely necessary it is fine, but it must not become the norm."

Mr Rammell said the government was planning to review the student vetting scheme, which relies on universities to refer suspect students from Islamic countries applying to do science courses. He said the government was working with colleges to complete guidelines for vice chancellors - to be published in November - on how to tackle campus extremism. But he said the crucial point was to establish a dialogue between Muslim students, universities and the government.

Source



GOOD GOD! INFORMATION FOR PARENTS AT LAST

And in California at that!

Parents of public school students are finally getting a chance to see how their kids did on tests they took last spring. School districts across the state are sending out the one-page STAR Student Report to the homes of the state's estimated 6 million public school students. Educators see the reports, all of which should be mailed by the end of this month, as a road map to improving each student's performance.

The report offers an evaluation of each child's progress, measured primarily by scores on the California Standards Tests, which kids took as part of the Standardized Testing and Reporting program. The multicolored report, printed on both sides of a single sheet of paper, includes a bar graph indicating a child's score on each subject-related test taken - English language arts, math, science and history-social science - and where that score falls on the proficiency scale: far below basic, below basic, basic, proficiency and advanced. The state's goal is for all students to be proficient or advanced in all subjects.

On the back page, each subject is broken down, with the percent of questions answered correctly by a child compared to the percent correct of students statewide. The percentages listed by each subject area give parents and teachers a chance to tailor their efforts to help the child. Another part assigns a reading list number that can be matched with a list of books appropriate for the child's reading ability. The books can be found on the California Department of Education's Web site at star.cde.ca.gov. So, for instance, a middle school student whose reading list number is