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31 October, 2006




Los Angelenos fleeing unionized schools

Los Angeles Unified opened 20 charter schools this fall - roughly one-third the total launched statewide - with most of them modeled after existing programs, the California Charter Schools Association announced Thursday. The opening this fall of 65 public charters in California brings the total to more than 600 campuses, with some 220,000 students enrolled. With that surge, one in 15 public schools statewide is a charter.

More significant, association officials noted, is that most of the new charters are modeled after existing programs. "We've created great schools and now we're building on those successes," said Caprice Young, president and CEO of the association. "In the past we had a lot of brand-new schools that were based on the ideas of individually great educators and parents," Young said. "For the first time we've seen a concerted effort to replicate great ideas and great schools, and that's an exciting thing."

LAUSD has 103 of the independent public schools, the most of any district in the nation. It has opened 40 charters since 2005. Young projects that the LAUSD will continue to add 20 to 30 charters a year. Statewide, more than 300 charter schools are in development.

Half the charters that opened this fall are in the Los Angeles, San Diego and Oakland unified school districts, underscoring the trend that charters are more popular in urban communities with high concentrations of underserved students. "It means the district and charter schools are going to be partners forever, and we're eager to have a closer relationship with the district to make the educational system great for all students," Young said.

But the explosion of charters concerns the Los Angeles Unified board. The growth in the number of charter schools has caused enrollment to drop in the nation's second-largest school district, which has to compete with the independent campuses for students - and funds. District officials, as well as the president of the teachers union, bristle at assertions by the Charter Schools Association that middle and high school charters are significantly outperforming their district counterparts.

A fairer comparison would be with the district's magnet schools, which outperform charters, school board member Jon Lauritzen said. "I think it's basically unfair to compare an entity that is able to take their entire budget and focus it entirely on their own schools," he said. "They have some real advantages over our schools in the flexibility of actually providing the type of education that a particular community wants, whereas we are trying to provide a curriculum that works for everyone all across the school district."

Earlier this year, Lauritzen was unsuccessful in his bid to place a moratorium on approving additional charters. Other board members have indicated they may support legislation that would make it easier for school boards to deny charters that would have a negative fiscal impact on the district. Contrary to Young's prediction that the charter movement will continue to grow, Lauritzen believes it will slow as enrollment in the district drops. "Initially, there were a lot of schools where there was overcrowding, where a charter fit well into the program, but as we continue the declining enrollment, there's going to be less and less room for charters and less demand for the services charters offer," Lauritzen said.

Among the 20 charters that opened in Los Angeles this year was Excel Academy, modeled after Community Charter Middle School in San Fernando, which was founded in 1999 by Jacqueline Elliot. "It was a natural progression to replicate Community Charter when there's a great demand," said Elliot, whose initial campus has blossomed into PUC Schools, which has a waiting list of more than 1,000 students.

Source



Australia: Low income students do well at university

Research has exploded some myths about university entry and performance - including the notion that richer children and students from private schools get better marks. They do not, sometimes by a wide margin. One study, based on research that examined the performance of 26,000 children, found that less well-off students often performed better at university than their richer or privately educated peers. But the truth of some perceptions was reinforced: the research shows that far fewer students from less privileged backgrounds ever make it to tertiary study, and fall dramatically behind their richer peers in the final years of high school even if they have the same measured ability in year 9.

Economists at La Trobe University and the Australian National University examined the students - 13,000 starting year 9 in 1995, and 13,000 who started it in 1998 - to shed light on why students of high ability from disadvantaged backgrounds remain badly underrepresented at university. The results of their research, which was funded by the Australian Research Council's Discovery Project, could force policymakers to reconsider how to improve access to tertiary education.

The researchers found no evidence that fear of large HECS debts discourages poorer students from proceeding to university - contrary to Labor Party rhetoric. The authors say HECS appears to have solved the problem of funding constraints for poorer students.

And the findings imply the Federal Government is wasting its money on scholarships designed to increase university participation among rural, indigenous and other disadvantaged groups. If they achieve the same entry score, students from disadvantaged backgrounds are just as likely as rich students to enter university - and they are more likely to go on and do well. "We're failing to find any evidence that money is an issue once they've finished high school," said one of the researchers, Buly Cardak, of La Trobe University. Dr Cardak and Chris Ryan, of the Australian National University, present their findings in Why are high ability individuals from poor backgrounds underrepresented at university?

A separate study, to be published by the University of Western Australia's Professor Paul Miller and Dr Elisa Rose Birch, shows students from less-privileged backgrounds get first-year university results that are more than 3 percentage points higher than rich children, for any given university entry score. Their paper, The Influence of Type of High School Attended on University Performance, shows the private school students were significantly more likely to fail.

Both studies imply that disadvantaged children smart or motivated enough to get to university may not need help from there. "But something is going on before then," Dr Cardak said. "They're not able to convert their talent into the same entry score as more advantaged kids." Dr Cardak and Dr Ryan found two out of three students from privileged backgrounds went to university; fewer than one in five disadvantaged students did so.

Having a disadvantaged background was found to weigh hugely on performance in the final years of school. If a rich student and poor student had the median level of literacy and numeracy in year 9, the rich one was likely to go on to achieve a university admission index (or ENTER) score of 77. But the poorer student was likely to have a score of just 63 - and probably miss out on university . The gap was even greater at lower levels of year 9 aptitude. "Disadvantaged students are unable to capitalise on their ability in the same way as their advantaged counterparts in terms of ENTER scores," they write.

The results were broadly unchanged even when the sample was limited to students who stated an intention to go to university in year 9 - which seems to rule out student motivation as the difference. Dr Cardak and Dr Ryan argue that "policy needs to address the schooling decisions and outcomes of these students . well before the beginning" of their final year at school.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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

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30 October, 2006

Bureaucratized Georgia public schools show typical bureaucratic rigidity and stupidity

They can only work an on/off switch once a year!

Students and teachers at one DeKalb County school say the freezing temperatures we saw overnight made it awful chilly inside their classrooms. They can’t understand why the school system wouldn’t turn on the heat. The school system says no matter how cold it gets, it’s their practice to turn the heat on in all schools on October 30. Students and teachers say when the temperatures dip into the 30’s, like it did overnight and this morning, it is hard to study without heat.

“It was freezing. We were doing testing today and I couldn’t even concentrate,” said Briar Vista Elementary School student Beleyou Leulesged. “It was like you were covered in snow,” said student Kaylah Edwards. If you thought it was cold outside overnight and at daybreak, students at Briar Vista say it was even colder inside their school most of the day. When students and teachers complained about the frigid conditions and asked for the heat to be turned on, they say they were told they were not going to turn on the heat until Thanksgiving.

A DeKalb County Schools spokesperson told Channel 2 that’s not entirely true. We found out the school district doesn’t turn on the heat system-wide until October 30. And once the heat is on for all schools – it stays on. “But I mean, what’s the problem if you turn it on now and for the rest of the months,” asked Leulesged.

The school system did tell us that principals can petition to have their heat turned on before October 30. But if it warms up, the heat won’t be turned off – so many principals choose to wait.

Kayla Edwards told us it was tough for students to take their tests because of the chill factor. “Some people only had on sweaters and they were still complaining about how cold it was,” said Edwards. Teachers say classrooms that were facing the sun were okay, but the others felt like the North Pole

Source



More Christianity coming to Australian Schools

Chaplains will be posted in schools across Australia under a federal Government plan to provide students with greater spiritual guidance. Prime Minister John Howard will today unveil details of the $90 million national chaplaincy program, which also aims to give support to students during times of grief. The initiative, which was immediately criticised for discriminating in favour of Christians, was approved by Cabinet earlier this month.

Today's announcement follows last weekend's fatal car crash near Byron Bay which killed four teenagers from Kadina High School. It also follows the tragic death of a Sydney high school student who was found dead the night before her first HSC exam.

Under the plan, government and non-government schools will be able to apply for a grant of up to $20,000 a year to employ a chaplain. The federal Government wants to encourage schools to spend more time developing the ethical and spiritual health of students. While not necessarily requiring to have a religious background, the chaplains will be expected to provide religious support. The chaplains will also be required to work with existing schools counsellors in supporting students dealing with issues such as a family break-up or the death of a fellow student. The program will leave it up to individual schools to decide on whether to employ a chaplain on a part-time or full-time basis.

Andrew Macintosh, of political think tank The Australia Institute, condemned the proposal as "ridiculous". "The money would be far better spent on teaching resources," he said. "And it is overtly discriminatory if you are only talking about Christian chaplains." It would be more appropriate to appoint professional counsellors without religious affiliations to provide support to students in times of grief, he said.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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

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29 October, 2006

Bored of education flap

The poor performance of America’s schools is front and center on just about every politician’s agenda. And whenever there are politicians involved, there is always demagoguery. The solution for almost all of them is throwing more government money at it. Of course, all money comes with strings attached and with government, you can be sure that the strings will result in accomplishing precisely the opposite of what it’s supposed to.

I’m from a generation that had the highest average SAT scores on record. I went to Catholic grammar school, public high school and private college. I’ve concluded that most, if not all, social and economic problems stem from either an obstruction to freedom or an abrogation of responsibility, at some point. You have to look back to the beginning of the process to and trace it forward to find it out but if you look long and hard enough, you will find it. The results are like an error in astronomy. A mistake of even a fraction of a degree will result in missing the target by light years. Education is no exception. So let’s look at it from the beginning.

A man and a woman get together and have a child (Now, don’t any wise guys out there bring up test tube babies and surrogate mothers, etc. Children still are overwhelmingly born through sexual actions between two people, a man and a woman). They have taken the action to bring a child into the world. They are the responsible parties. That responsibility includes the feeding, housing, clothing, health care and education of that child.

Education is one of the first functions that a family delegates to others. Throughout history, this has usually been entrusted to religious authorities. In biblical times, a man was not considered educated unless he knew the scriptures. Indeed, the gospels tell the story of how Jesus impressed the elders at the temple with his knowledge of the scriptures. This continued until very recently when education became the province of government. There is no doubt that had it not been for the tedious work of thousands of monks after the fall of the Roman Empire, much of the great works of antiquity would have been lost.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, governments began to dabble in the arenas that were traditionally the province of the religious bodies. This was part and parcel of the age of a human centered secularism, secular humanism, if you will. One of those arenas was education. The first experiment in The United States in government-sponsored education was in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Even as public education spread, though, it retained a quasi-religious atmosphere complete with prayers and even bible studies. Various civil liberties organizations, most notably The American Civil Liberties Union, have succeeded in eliminating anything religious from public education. The Supreme Court took it upon itself to outlaw school prayer in the 1962 Engel vs. Vitale decision. Interestingly, it was in 1963 that average SAT scores hit their highest point and began their long slide to where they are today. It may not be coincidental.

Of course, once government gets into anything, politics follows. Education has been no exception. Schools have become flashpoints for all types of social experiments, including integration, sex education, tolerance (whatever that means) and myriad others. This, that or the other group decides that it wants its agenda pushed in the schools. Squabbles result and are resolved either in the courts or through political pressure. In either case, a school committee administers the decisions. The pitiful results we have today confirm the old barb that the camel was a horse designed by committee.

Consequently, we have had the expenditure of, at this point, billions of dollars to enforce various agendas, some admirable, others less so. These are precious resources that should have been spent on educating our youth rather than in pointless squabbles but that’s always the way when government and politics get involved.

And all the education in the world doesn’t help society much if it produces students without some type of moral compass. Suppose we educated a generation of Charles Mansons? Now it might be possible to have a moral society without the concept of God or some higher authority to whom we are all obligated but history has not been especially encouraging in this regard. Man and state centered societies have given us the Germany of National Socialism, the Italy of Fascism and the Soviet Union, Red China and Cuba of International Revolutionary Socialism. That’s not an especially sanguine omen.

There are those who will argue that we must set standards for performance in the schools. In fact, that is the position of this Bush administration. But, whose standards? That is the exact argument that many blacks and other minorities have had over the years. They claim that the performance tests are culturally biased and maybe they are. And how do you inculcate values? And, once again, whose values do we inculcate? Yours, mine, his, society’s? Who’s to say that one set of values or one orientation is better than any other?

How about a market solution? I’m Catholic. For years, it was the policy of the Church that Catholic children should be educated in a Catholic system. The Church authorities acquiesced under the onslaught of secular education, only continuing to require that Catholic children obtain doctrinal training as a condition for the sacrament of Confirmation. As it turns out, it was a mistake for the Church to cave in. These are forces that you cannot compromise with. What is wrong with a child being educated with a Catholic understanding as a foundation for learning? It was done for centuries. For that matter, what is wrong with having children learn from a Jewish, Baptist, Episcopal or any other perspective? Who’s to say that one is right and another wrong?

Certainly, there are people who might not want their children to learn from a religious perspective. That would be fine too. Let them get together with others of their persuasion and organize secular schools accordingly. And if some blacks desire that their children be steeped in an Afro-centric tradition, then amen. It’s their responsibility.

The answer to the question of which system is the most valid will be answered when the children go out into the world and seek jobs. Would some get left behind? Undoubtedly, but many are being left behind now. Could the results be much worse than they are now? And even if some improvement in the current system occurs, as seems to be happening, there’s no doubt that the politicians will decide to intervene again and mess it up. Political systems have political results.

The first mistake, the Original Sin if you will, is the assumption by the state of parental responsibility. It’s like the error at the source that misses its target by light years. It is also the very first skirmish in the battle to replace family, God and religion with state, Man, and government.

Private and religious education have produced some awesome results over history. Even today, Catholic colleges like Notre Dame, Georgetown and Providence have acquired formidable academic reputations, rivaling the very best secular institutions (PLEASE forgive us results like Bill Clinton. Any system will have its disasters.) There are thousands of religious colleges and schools across the country that are competing successfully, on minimal budgets, because of the huge siphon that government education represents. There can be no doubt that the reservoir of resources that would become available to the private sphere would unleash a creative explosion in approaches to education that would boggle the imagination.

Source



Literacy tests dumbed down too

Grammar and spelling mistakes? No problem! Now the literacy tests are "a measure of students' ability to participate in the community". I guess even an armed robber "participates in the community", though

The international OECD test cited as proof that Australian students have one of the highest literacy rates in the world does not test spelling and grammar. The Program for International Student Assessment of 15-year-old students in more than 40 countries assesses their ability to understand written texts and apply that knowledge but fails to examine correct use of language.

"The concept of literacy used in PISA is much broader than the historical notion of the ability to read and write," the report says. "It is measured on a continuum, not as something that an individual either does or does not have. A literate person has a range of competencies and there is no precise dividing line between a person who is fully literate and one who is not." Head of the Australian Council for Educational Research Professor Geoff Masters, which leads the consortium that runs PISA, said the test was a measure of students' reading, not writing.

But reader in English and head of humanities at the Australian National University Simon Haines said a solid foundation in reading implied "a foundation of knowledge of what words and sentences are". "Spelling and grammar are part of this knowledge of what a word fundamentally is, what written construction fundamentally is," he said. "Relatively trivial one-off spelling and grammatical errors probably shouldn't be marked down, but repeated errors of the same type, or errors indicating more fundamental misunderstandings, probably should be. "This is part of teaching students how to use language."

The PISA reading literacy test is conducted every three years, with the first held in 2000. In that test, the best of Australian students scored second to Finland. The study defines reading literacy as "understanding, using and reflecting on written texts in order to achieve one's goals, to develop one's knowledge and potential and to participate in society". In its analysis of students' answers, the report says that spelling mistakes were very common but incorrect spelling had no bearing on the marking. "Answers with mistakes in grammar and/or spelling were not penalised as long as the correct point was made," it says.

Professor Masters said the definition of literacy had changed over time and once meant an inability to write one's name. But PISA took a broader attitude, saying literacy was a skill developed over a lifetime and a measure of students' ability to participate in the community.

The study also found that Australian students performed relatively poorly in their comprehension of continuous texts, such as narratives, and coped better with non-continuous texts, such as diagrams and maps. Boys in particular struggled with continuous texts, and were generally outperformed by girls. Professor Masters said the results indicated that teachers should make sure students read continuous texts such as books.

Literacy expert Bill Louden, head of the graduate school of education at the University of Western Australia, said PISA tested reading comprehension and was not a writing task, so "spelling and grammar errors don't come into it". "It wouldn't do in an English classroom, where you have continuous long works that needs to score kids on their capacity to write grammatically, write coherently and spell correctly," Professor Louden said.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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

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28 October, 2006

Germany drags homeschool kids to class

Authorities haul crying children away to avoid 'danger' from parental teachings

A Nazi-era law requiring all children to attend public school, to avoid "the emergence of parallel societies based on separate philosophical convictions" that could be taught by parents at home, apparently is triggering a Nazi-like response from police.

The word comes from Netzwerk Bildungsfreiheit, or Network for Freedom in Education, which confirmed that children in a family in Bissingen, in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, have been forcibly hauled to a public school. "On Friday 20 October 2006 at around 7:30 a.m. the children of a home educating family ... were brought under duress to school by police," the organization, which describes itself as politically and religiously neutral, confirmed.

A separate weblog in the United States noted the same tragedy. Homeschoolblogger.com noted that the "three children were picked up by the police and escorted to school in Baden-Wurttemberg, with the 'promise' that it would happen again this week." The Network for Freedom in Education, through spokesman Joerg Grosseluemern, said the Remeike family has been "home educating their children since the start of the school year, something which is legal in practically the whole of the (European Union)." "However, on this morning, they were confronted by police officials, who, in an incredibly inconsiderate manner, forced their crying children into a police car and drove them to the school. The police stated that they had been instructed to continue this measure in the coming week," the network statement said.

The network noted that the previous Minister of Education, Annette Schavan, had said such actions were not needed, because "... the children are generally not lacking in any other respects." Officials at that time, in 2002, confirmed that "forcible methods" generally are "not in the long-term interests of either the children or the police."

However, the network noted the priorities of current officials obviously are different. "The family involved emphasizes that their children are neither truant nor school deniers, which are the cases for which such measures were intended," said the network's statement, a translation from the original German. "The Remeike family is fulfilling their children's right to an education by educating them at home, with the support of teachers from a distance learning academy, which also supplies the necessary material." School arguments that homeschooling endangers the welfare of the children "lacks any factual foundation," the network statement said. "Tearing the children from the bosom of their family by forcing certainly does not contribute to their welfare. The result is more likely to be traumatisation and the development of an aversion to instruments of state authority," the statement said.

No comment could be obtained immediately from school or police officials. "The Netzwerk Bildungsfreiheit strongly empathises with the Romeike family, whom many of us know personally to be an intact and conscience-driven family. We condemn the degrading act carried out by the police as a blatant breach of the personal rights of individual family members and call for the Mayor of Bissingen, as well as the Office for Education of the District Authorities of Esslingen, to end these sanctions."

The American blog noted that several other homeschooling parents recently have been fined or imprisoned for brief jail terms for teaching their children at home. The blog reported that one mother spending a few days in jail for providing homeschooling for her child "ended up leading a Bible study for women who have begged her to come back." It reported another family was fined $2,250 and members were being attacked emotionally so that the father handed a nervous breakdown that landed him in a hospital. The family put their two children in a public school "but it was so awful, they pulled them out again . and put them in a public Catholic school."

It also contained reports that Waldemar Block, the father of nine, was arrested at his work earlier this month and jailed for 13 days, while Olga Block, his sister-in-law, was jailed for 10 days for not paying fines after she sent her children to a Christian school in Heidelberg. The Home School Legal Defense Association, the largest homeschooling group in the U.S. with more than 80,000 families, also has been working to raise attention in the international community to the plight of German homeschoolers, including several families in the Baden-Wurttemberg region. The group suggested contacting the German embassy, which had an answering machine attached to the telephone line when WND left a request for comment yesterday. The HSLDA said that contact is:

Wolfgang Ischinger Ambassador German Embassy 4645 Reservoir Road NW Washington, DC, 20007-1998 (202) 298-4000 or it can be e-mailed from its its website.

The U.S. organization also noted that homeschooling has been illegal in Germany probably since 1938 when Hitler banned it. It recently announced a campaign to address the persecution Christians in Germany are facing from education authorities. Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the HSLDA, said it was launched after a mother was arrested and jailed on criminal homeschooling counts. In that case, according to a report in the Brussels Journal, Katharina Plett was arrested and ordered to jail while her husband fled to Austria with the family's 12 children.

The latest police-state actions follow by only weeks a recent ruling from the European Human Rights Court that affirmed the German nation's ban on homeschooling. The Strasburg-based court addressed the issue on appeal from a Christian family whose members alleged their human rights to educate their own children according to their own religious beliefs are being violated by the ban. The specific case addressed in the opinion involved Fritz and Marianna Konrad, who filed the complaint in 2003 and argued that Germany's compulsory school attendance endangered their children's religious upbringing and promotes teaching inconsistent with the family's Christian faith. The court said the Konrads belong to a "Christian community which is strongly attached to the Bible" and rejected public schooling because of the explicit sexual indoctrination programs that the courses there include.

The German court already had ruled that the parental "wish" to have their children grow up in a home without such influences "could not take priority over compulsory school attendance." The decision also said the parents do not have an "exclusive" right to lead their children's education. The family had appealed under the European Convention on Human Rights statement that: "No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions." But the court's ruling said, instead, that schools represent society, and "it was in the children's interest to become part of that society. "The parents' right to education did not go as far as to deprive their children of that experience," the ruling said.

Source



GRADE-SCHOOL FAILURE IN ENGLAND

Nearly a fifth of five-year-olds cannot write their own name and fewer than half have reached their expected level of learning, official figures show. An assessment of 535,000 five-year-olds in England found that, after a year of schooling, 91,000 could not write simple words such as “mum” or “cat” or hold a pencil correctly. The number of children who had mastered basic literacy and numeracy was much lower than last year, as was the number of children who reached expected levels of physical development. Boys proved worst at completing writing tasks, with 21 per cent unable to write key words compared with 11 per cent of girls.

About 21,420 children could not count to ten and 39 per cent could not hear or pronounce the short vowel sounds in words such as “pen”, “hat” and “dog”, while 17 per cent could not recognise or name all the letters of the alphabet. Overall, 44.6 per cent of five-year-olds reached the expected level of improvement after their first year of primary school, a drop of 3.2 percentage points on 2005.

The Department for Education and Skills has defined a “good level of development” as children achieving six or more points across 13 scales in areas such as personal, social and emotional development, reading, writing and maths. However, the figures suggest that the Government will fall short of its target of 53 per cent of five-year-olds in England reaching this level by 2008. Ministers blamed the fall in attainment on tougher marking while teachers said that comparisons between years were spurious.

Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “Last year’s assessments were riddled with difficulties as teachers came to terms with the new scheme. “The assessments are qualitative judgments on such issues as a child’s personal development and cannot be presented as simple numerical results or in league table form.”

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, said in April that the new targets would mean that 30,000 more children would reach expected levels. She said that the Government would like to see “faster gains in our most deprived communities” in England, but figures for local authorities were unavailable yesterday. The Education Department said that the public reaction to its curriculum for toddlers, the Early Years Foundation Stage, had been enthusiastic. The framework has a play-based approach that is designed to integrate quality learning and care. Beverley Hughes, the Children’s Minister, said that the framework would improve the learning abilities of five-year-olds and enable “them to reach their full potential, just as any good parent would seek to do at home”.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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

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27 October, 2006

HUGE RISE IN BRITISH PUBLIC SCHOOL SPENDING HAS SEEN STANDARDS DECLINE

So proposals for vast new spending on State education are greeted with skepticism even on the Left. They rightly fear that it would discredit all government spending

Gordon Brown's pledge to raise state school funding to the same level as that enjoyed by private schools has been criticised by a committee of MPs. The Education Select Committee's investigation of public expenditure in education also condemned a lack of transparency and cautioned that taxpayers might not wish to pay for state schools in future unless ministers can demonstrate that the resources are being used wisely. This lack of information, the Labour-dominated committee said, would not only be bad for taxpayers but could also "undermine the electorate's willingness to fund public services".

But the MPs reserved their harshest criticism for the Chancellor's commitment in this year's Budget to raise the level of funding per pupil in state schools from 5,000 to 8,000 pounds, the average spending per head in independent schools. Although Mr Brown was widely praised for his pledge in March, The Times quickly established from Treasury sources that this was only an aspiration. After questioning Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, and David Bell, his top official, the MPs said that it remained to be seen how the aspiration would be backed up with funding.

The select committee said that it was hard to judge when this pledge could ever be met. "Without a timescale it is hard to be certain when the target would be met," the report stated. "The debate on what is the appropriate level of per-pupil funding is important. Future policy announcements should have a more substantial basis."

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has since estimated that it would cost 17 billion to close the gap between the public and private sectors and that this would not be achieved until at least 2014.

The MPs also warned that there was no way to demonstrate whether the Government's increased funding for schools had been effective and had succeeded in providing better education or more highly qualified students. Since Labour came into office, public spending on education has risen from 21.43 billion in 1997-08 to 34.35 billion in 2005-06. But recent figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that only 41 per cent of pupils achieved five grades A* to C in English, maths and science and only 26 per cent of pupils got good grades in English, maths, science and a language - a fall of 4 percentage points from 2002.

Last night a spokesman said that the Government had invested record amounts in education, and "as a result we are seeing more schools with more teachers and better results". "Investment in education is a key priority for the Government. As the Chancellor said in his Budget speech, the Government's long-term aim is that we raise average investment per pupil to today's private school level. That position remains unchanged."

Source



Deconstructive criticism

The evidence upholds the belief that the teaching of English has fallen victim to political correctness, writes Australia's Kevin Donnelly

Geoff Masters, head of the Australian Council for Educational Research and the person in charge of the commonwealth-funded inquiry into state and territory Year 12 subjects, argues concerns about school curriculums being politically correct are without foundation. In relation to senior school English -- in particular, the NSW Higher School Certificate course -- Masters concludes there is no left-wing bias and that federal Education Minister Julie Bishop's concerns about the cultural Left taking the long march through the education system are misplaced.

Masters is wrong. As those who have followed the articles in these pages about the effect of critical literacy on English teaching and the way the theory approach of teaching has destroyed the moral and aesthetic quality of the literary canon know, there is ample evidence of how English has been politicised.

In NSW, students are made to deconstruct texts such as Shakespeare's Othello and Tim Winton's Cloudstreet from a Marxist, feminist, postmodern and post-colonial perspective. The Board of Studies English stage 6 annotated professional readings support document, designed to tell teachers how English should be taught, is awash with the kind of gobbledygook associated with theory.

In opposition to the more traditional approach to literature, NSW teachers are urged to adopt what is termed "critical-postmodernist pedagogy'', described as: "This involves drawing on and seeking to integrate into a dynamic, strategic synthesis the currently evolving and ever mutating discourses of critical pedagogy, cultural studies and postmodernism, within which notions of popular culture, textuality, rhetoric and the politics and pleasures of representation become the primary focus of attention in both 'creative' and 'critical' terms.''

As argued by writer Sophie Masson, the result is that good students jump through the hoops as they know what has to be done, while less able students drown in the arcane and turgid jargon associated with the new English.

The Victorian and Queensland English studies are also prime examples of the impact of the cultural Left on the classroom. The Victorian study asks students to analyse texts from a range of perspectives. These include: "Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytical, reader-response, deconstructionist (and) postmodern''. In a similar vein, the Queensland literature syllabus favours an approach that argues that all texts are inherently political as "texts play their part in upholding or challenging prevailing world views and compete with one another to persuade readers to accept versions on offer''.

Western Australia, not to be outdone, in addition to making students respond to texts "using different theoretical frameworks [for example, Marxist, post-colonial, feminist, psychoanalytic]'' and checking "for consistency, contradiction and the privileging of some ideas over others'', argues that there is nothing universal or profound about classic literature.

The basis for this is that "the concept of the literary is socially and historically constructed rather than objective or self-evident'' and "texts and reading practices enact particular ideologies, playing an important role in the production and maintenance of social identities and reinforcing or contesting dominant ideological understandings''.

Within the new English, as a result of theory, William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is criticised for its emphasis on stereotypical heterosexual love and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for being inherently racist. Even worse, students' appreciation of literature is destroyed as they spend time analysing mobile-phone messages, graffiti and Australian Idol.

Evidence that senior school English courses have fallen victim to politically correct theory is easy to find. The reasons the cultural Left has targeted English are also clear. Professional associations such as the Australian Association for the Teaching of English are staunch advocates of critical literacy and theory. Both the AATE and sympathetic teacher academics such as Allan Luke, Wayne Sawyer and Bill Green argue English teaching must be used to transform society.

Says Luke: "We would argue that text analysis and critical reading activities should lead on to action with and against the text. That is, there is a need to translate text analysis into cultural action, into institutional intervention and community projects.''

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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

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26 October, 2006

U.S. LIMITS ON SAME-SEX SCHOOLS TO EASE

The Bush administration is giving public schools wider latitude to teach boys and girls separately in what is considered the biggest change to coed classrooms in more than three decades.

After a two-year wait, the Education Department issued final rules Tuesday detailing how it will enforce the Title IX landmark anti-discrimination law: Under the change taking effect Nov. 24, local school leaders will have discretion to create same-sex classes for subjects such as math, a grade level or even an entire school.

Education officials initially proposed the rules in early 2004, pointing in part to some U.S. research suggesting better student achievement and fewer discipline problems in single-sex classes including math and foreign languages. After receiving 5,600 public comments, education officials said they were moving forward with the plan with some wording tweaks and assurances from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that it was legally sound. Since current rules began in 1975, single-sex classes have been allowed only in limited cases, such as sex education courses or gym classes involving contact sports:

Under the new rules, schools could separate genders for a variety of subjects if they believed it offered educational benefits, such as promoting greater student comfort or higher attendance. In all cases, enrollment in a single-sex class would be voluntary.

If a school creates a single-sex class, it would not be required to offer the other gender its own similar class, but it would have to offer a coed version of it.

The rules also make it easier to create single-sex schools, as long as the district can demonstrate that it also provides coed schools with "substantially equal" benefits to the excluded sex.

Source



British pupils 'cannot locate UK'



One in five British children cannot find the UK on a map of the world, a magazine's research suggests. National Geographic Kids said it also found fewer than two thirds of children were able to correctly locate the US. The magazine, which questioned more than 1,000 six to 14-year-olds, said it found several London children did not know they lived in England's capital.

Teachers' union the NASUWT said the findings were "nonsense" and did not reflect staff and pupils' hard work.

National Geographic Kids also discovered 86% of the children interviewed failed to identify Iraq and one in 10 could not name a single continent. Boys seemed to show a slightly better geographical knowledge than girls, with 65% able to locate a number of countries around the world compared with 63% of girls.

Scottish children appeared to be the most geographically aware with 67% able to point out the most countries, out of England, the US, France, China and Iraq, on a world map.

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said the findings were "rather frightening". "These results underline the need for education to concentrate on the essentials. "How are children going to be able to get as much out of their life if they fail to have an understanding of the shape of the world?"

The Department for Education and Skills said geography was a compulsory subject on the National Curriculum for five to 14-year-olds. A spokesman said all 14-year-olds should be taught to use atlases and globes, as well as learning about places and environments in the world.

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said: "The constant desire for groups to produce statistics to do down the English education system is quite appalling and does nothing to recognise the excellent work of children and staff."

The magazine carried out the study to mark its UK launch and highlight "gaps in children's geographical knowledge". Environmentalist David Bellamy said the world was still an undiscovered place for many children. "Making geography fun and exciting is so important because it makes children aware of the importance of caring for the environment and, by learning about the world, it helps bring other people's worlds and cultures closer to their own."

Source



Bishop attacks British faith schools plan

Plans for new faith schools in England to admit up to 25% of pupils from other religions "must be resisted", the Archbishop of Birmingham has said. The most Rev Vincent Nichols described the plans as "insulting" and "divisive" and has urged the head teachers of Catholic schools to voice their fears.

The plans were introduced in an amendment to the Education and Inspections Bill last week. The government has said schools are in a position to prevent social division.

Education Secretary Alan Johnson met with representatives from the UK's major religious groups on Monday for a so-called "inclusion summit" to discuss the role faith schools can play in improving relations between the faiths. The Department for Education and Skills said the meeting had been productive and Mr Johnson had made it clear that the amendment would only apply to new faith schools. He also explained that where there is local opposition, a local authority will need the consent of the education secretary to approve a new faith school with fewer than 25% of non-faith admissions.

The Church of England has said its new schools will admit up to 25% of pupils from outside the faith - but said other religions should not be expected to offer the same commitment. But the amendment has met with opposition from Muslim, Jewish and Catholic groups.

Writing in the Telegraph newspaper, the archbishop said coercive measures by the government would not win co-operation and branded them "ill-thought out, unworkable and contradictory of empirical evidence". He said Catholic schools on average welcome 30% of pupils from other faiths or none, and they were likely to have better academic records and less likely to encounter bullying or racism. He added that the government appears to hold the view that, left to themselves, Catholic schools would be divisive. "Since the evidence suggests the opposite, I can only assume that this view rises from muddled thinking or prejudice," he wrote. He warned: "The introduction of 'admissions requirements' is a Trojan horse, bringing into Catholic schools those who may not only reject its central vision but soon seek to oppose it." The way forward, he said, was a "mutually respectful co-operation" between faith groups and authorities. But this amendment, he warned "seems to signal an alternative and deeply divisive step. It has to be resisted."

Last week, he wrote to the head teachers of 2,075 secondary and primary Roman Catholic schools urging them to write to their MPs to voice their concerns. He has also called for talks between the government and the Catholic church.

Rabbi James Kennard, head teacher at King Solomon High School in Ilford, Essex, shared his view, saying Jewish schools had not been able to explain their position. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, he said: "The Jewish school is the traditional institution where a youngster's Jewish identity is shaped, through an all-embracing ethos that runs alongside, and integrates with, the educational requirements of the country where Jews are living. "The Jewish community is small, needs to maintain its distinct identity and ethos and has no interest in spreading its message to others." He added that when people have a good grounding in their religion, they tend to be able to participate in wider society.

The Department for Education said it welcomed the steps faith groups have already taken to improve community cohesion and said they were talking to them about how to build on this

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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

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25 October, 2006

Teachers who raise scores may get bonuses

This may do some good but not much. It won't make dumb teachers smart or undisciplined kids better behaved

The Bush administration is handing out money for teachers who raise student test scores, the first federal effort to reward classroom performance with bonuses. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings planned to announce the first of 16 grants, worth $42 million, including $5.5 million for Ohio, on Monday. The government has not announced the other grant winners. Using the old-fashioned incentive of cash, President Bush's program encourages schools to set up pay scales that reward some teachers and principals more than others. Those rewards are to be based mainly on test scores, but also on classroom evaluations during the year. The grants are also aimed at luring teachers into math, science and other core fields.

Teachers normally are paid based on their years in class and their education. Yet more school districts are experimenting with merit pay, and now the federal government is, too. It is not always popular. Teachers' unions generally oppose pay-for-performance plans, saying they do not fairly measure quality and do nothing to raise base teacher pay. Spellings, though, says the money will be a good recruiting tool. The most qualified teachers tend to opt for affluent schools, she told The Associated Press. "These grants will work to fix this by encouraging and rewarding teachers for taking the tough jobs in the schools and classrooms where our children need them the most," she said.

One of the first grants is $5.5 million to the Ohio Department of Education, to be shared among schools in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus and Toledo. The rest of the grants will go out over the next two weeks to three weeks - falling right before the Nov. 7 elections in which a reeling Republican Party is eager for good news. The Education Department says the election had no bearing on the timing. The grant application process began in May, and the review was done in the early fall, officials said. The grants will range from about $1 million to $30 million. That is small time for the federal government, but can be enough to offer a meaningful pay bump at the local level.

Yet done in isolation, performance pay "have very little chance of having impact," said Rob Weil, deputy director of educational issues for the American Federation of Teachers. "You have to prepare teachers properly," Weil said. "You have to have mentoring and professional development and professional standards. If you don't have those things, it doesn't matter what you do with compensation." The average teacher salary was paid $47,800 in 2005.

Bush has been promoting the "Teacher Incentive Fund" in his recent speeches. "It's an interesting concept, isn't it?" he said during a school visit in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 5. "If your measurement system shows that you're providing excellence for your children, it seems to make sense that there ought to be a little extra incentive." In the Ohio districts, for example, school leaders plan to pay between $1,800 to $2,000 to hundreds of teachers. Bush, seeking $500 million from Congress, got $99 million for the program this year. More than half of that money will be carried over until next year, though, because most of the applications did not qualify. The department expects to accept applications again soon.

The agency looked for pay plans that outline how schools will get support from teachers and the broader community. That is considered essential to keeping any merit plan afloat. Schools with higher numbers of poor children get priority consideration. Joel Packer, a lobbyist for the National Education Association, said no teacher-pay plan should be best based just on the test scores of students. A one-time exam does not measure teacher effectiveness, he said, and teachers in subjects such as math may not even have testing. As for the timing, Packer said: "It's always a little suspicious when you have these things come out just before the election, allowing members of Congress in tight races to get some money for their district."

Source



Australia: History teaching replaced by lying propaganda

A federal Government senator is demanding the withdrawal of a school library book which paints his political hero and Australia's longest-serving prime minister as a tyrant. Sir Robert Menzies is listed alongside the likes of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, Cambodian ruler Pol Pot and the deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in the children's reference book 100 Greatest Tyrants, which is used by students at a Mount Isa high school. Senator George Brandis has slammed the book, by British author Andrew Langley, describing it as offensive and inappropriate for history studies in any Australian school.

"Of course it's absurd," Senator Brandis said. "It introduces students to the notion that there is a kind of moral equivalence between some of the most evil men in the history of the world and an Australian political leader who has been a beacon of liberal democracy."

The book, published a decade ago, lists Menzies among 100 so-called tyrants, right after the notorious Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. Also listed are ruthless conqueror Genghis Khan, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet. The 110-page volume is part of the library collection at Mount Isa's Good Shepherd Catholic College, where even the school's principal Bernard Durie has admitted the book is flawed. "Obviously it's twaddle to suggest Menzies was a tyrant in the same class as Attila the Hun and that crowd," Mr Durie said. But he has refused to remove the book from the library, describing it as a useful resource for generating debate and critical thinking skills among students.

The Queensland Teachers' Union has backed the school's decision, accusing Senator Brandis of stepping over the line by calling for the book to be withdrawn. "I think that what he's on about is a dangerous censorship practice," said Lesley McFarlane, the union's assistant secretary for research. "I thought the days of burning books were gone."

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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

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



24 October, 2006

DELIBERATE EROSION OF ACADEMIC STANDARDS PLANNED IN BRITAIN

Universities should drop entry requirements by up to two A level grades for students from "disadvantaged" backgrounds in order to widen participation, according to a government-commissioned study. Admissions tutors should lower the bar for pupils in care, those attending poorly-performing schools, those who suffer from long-term disability or sickness and those who have to look after sick relatives, it said. The tutors should also collaborate with each other to ensure that more deprived children enter the top universities.

Academics at Leeds University found that while most universities had a programme to encourage more applications from working-class backgrounds, systems varied and only a few hundred were recruited annually by this route.

The study, published tomorrow, follows the release of Ucas figures last week that showed that 5,400 fewer students from "lower-income backgrounds" had started university this year, amid fears of increasing debt over higher fees. The authors of the study praised those universities that chose pupils on the basis of their potential, even if their grades were lower than the entry requirements. "We know of heavily oversubscribed courses where admissions tutors have made offers of an A and two Bs to impressive applicants in disadvantaged circumstances who have demonstrated appropriate personal qualities, while rejecting other applicants with three predicted As," they wrote. "Admissions tutors prepared to do this have our strong support."

The researchers acknowledged fears that students being turned away with higher grades could mount legal challenges, but pointed out that most disadvantaged students admitted on this basis showed "no significant differences in their referral and withdrawal rates as compared with the university average".

Paul Sharp, co-author of Opportunity and Equity: Developing a Framework for Good Practice in Compact Schemes, said that universities put a lot of effort into widening participation, but needed to publicise it more and share good practice. He refused to endorse a compulsory scheme of lowering grades.

In 2003, the Government's White Paper on Higher Education pointed out that young people from the professional classes were "over five times more likely to enter higher education than those from unskilled backgrounds".

The next year, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the proportion of state students decreased in 14 of the 19 leading Russell Group universities, with only 53.4 per cent of Oxford admissions coming from state schools. Geoff Parks, director of admissions at Cambridge, said that the report set out good principles but threw up several "potential minefields". Although he supported sharing good practice, there also came a point when colleges competed for the best students, he said. Under the Cambridge Special Access scheme, the university already accepted students with lower grades, he said. "But at the moment there needs to be a very large disadvantage to make it a B rather than an A," he said. "Unless we move to a system where the offers could be more finely graduated, it would be very difficult to make those adjustments."

An aide to Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, said that he favoured the idea of universities assessing an applicant's potential and awaited the report with interest.

Source



British schools as Orwell's "Big Brother"

No matter where you are, your school will see you and punish you for deviance

Three pupils were expelled last week from St George's School Harpenden, a prestigious state boarding school in Hertfordshire, for smoking cannabis during the summer holidays. But should schools be disciplining children for what goes on beyond the school gate?

Harpenden is an affluent commuter town. Its leafy roads and traditional high street do not point to an endemic drugs problem bought on by social exclusion, especially not involving St George's pupils where `there is a sense of real purpose and harmony based on Christian principles and our traditions,' according to the headmaster, Norman Hoare.

Rumours of drug abuse surfaced this autumn and an investigation was launched by the school. The subsequent expulsions were based on interviews held by St George's. Whilst cannabis use is illegal, the police told me that they would not be taking any action after concluding that there was too little evidence to pursue the matter.

Norman Hoare told BBC News: `The school has a duty to uphold the law and protect all students but none of our investigations showed that the drugs had been on our premises. The activities took place after school or at weekends and some of it started in July. That's one of the reasons we acted very quickly.'

Hoare's ideas on the boundaries of school authority are not shared by everyone. One angry parent contacted spiked, even though his children were not involved: `At what point does the school's jurisdiction end? I am completely opposed to the control of my children outside of school hours.' When I asked Norman Hoare why he had expelled students on the basis of drug use outside of school term, he replied that `the pupils who join the school are aware of our drugs policy'. However, his actions seem to go beyond the policy stated on the school's website: `A period of fixed term exclusion [ie, suspension] from school would normally be the penalty for involvement in purchase, possession, or consumption of illegal drugs or substance of abuse while under school jurisdiction.'

Events at St George's contrast with a case heard by the High Court in September. A school in Birmingham had its decision to expel two pupils for cannabis use overturned because their expulsion contravened government guidelines on exclusion for minor drug offences. These pupils were caught smoking on school grounds and some kind of punishment by the school was to be expected. But the St George's pupils were not caught by the police or anyone from the school; they were allegedly using cannabis outside of school term and were not dealing drugs.

St George's sees the alleged minor drug use of a few of its pupils outside school hours as its responsibility - parents are not to be trusted. In doing so, the headmaster was only following the lead of the New Labour government; it does not trust private individuals. The Anti-Social Behaviour Act of 2003 gives head teachers the authority to fine parents and issue parenting orders forcing them to attend counselling. Where once schools stood for moral guidance, they are now expected to play a much more interventionist and authoritarian role. As David Perks has noted elsewhere on spiked: `the government sees schools as a blunt weapon in a war against what it sees as feckless parents and feral children. Education policy has become part of a wider attempt to control people's behaviour.'

So how should we deal with children who experiment with drugs and why do they do it? I asked Patrick Turner, writer, lecturer and former drugs worker: `The same as we have traditionally done with alcohol. A degree of indulgence towards the desire to experiment and enjoy adult pleasures seasoned with a sensitivity to the circumstances and motives of the individuals concerned. Put simply, the risk associated with a stable, self-aware young person who has lots of support messing around with dope is not the same as that posed to the young person, say, in local authority care with a history of poor mental health.'

In fact, government guidelines on expulsion seem to fit well with Turner's statement: `Exclusion should only be considered for serious breaches of the school's behaviour policy, and should not be imposed without a thorough investigation unless there is an immediate threat to the safety of others in the school or the pupil concerned. It should not be used if alternative solutions have the potential to achieve a change in the pupil's behaviour and are not detrimental to the whole school community.' So, why has this school gone further? Norman Hoare had not heard about the Birmingham case in which the High Court ruled these guidelines took precedence over school decisions. I suspect when the St George's board of governers examines the expulsion they may well overturn it in light of the Birmingham case.

This episode is indicative of the mixed messages from government about drugs, and the contradictory positions they adopt. The government's downgrading of cannabis to a class `C' drug has added to the mess since the law itself is a combination of `hard' and `soft' signals. So while the maximum sentence for possession will fall from five years to two, penalties for adults supplying cannabis will remain at a maximum of 14 years compared to the five years for other class `C' drugs.

There is no right for children to experiment with cannabis, but it would be better to have childhood experimentation dealt with in a constructive manner. That means schools should not overstep the boundaries of their authority, and government should not politicise and proceduralise matters that are best dealt with informally.

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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

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



23 October, 2006

Charter school growth after success in California?

Charter schools outperformed their traditional public school counterparts on standardized tests in 2006, and educators in charter and traditional schools are hoping they can use the results to improve education everywhere. Not only did charter schools outperform traditional schools, according to a report released earlier this month by the California Charter Schools Association, test scores among charter schools that have been in existence for five years or longer tend toward the top.

All such the "mature" charters in the county scored 800 or better out of a possible 1,000. "It's important to recognize which charter schools are mature, because we always say that it takes four or five years for a charter school to maximize its potential," said Caprice Young, California Charter Schools Association president. "And if you look at the data, you'll see that the mature charter schools are doing their job."

For San Joaquin County's 13 charter schools, the median score was 729, with nearly half of them scoring 800 or better. The goal for all California schools is 800, according to the California Department of Education. University Public School in Stockton, run by Aspire Charter Schools, scored 868 to lead the pack. San Joaquin's traditional public schools in 16 districts scored a median of 721, or eight points lower then the median of the charters, according to the Department of Education. Lodi Unified's Elkhorn Elementary School in north Stockton stood head and shoulders above charters and noncharters, with an API score of 989. Elkhorn is a Gifted and Talented Education program campus, however, where students must apply for acceptance.

Young attributes charter schools' higher test scores to their ability to be more innovative in teaching methods, she said, while traditional schools are mandated by state education officials to spend money only on state-approved curriculum and materials. Unlike private schools, charter schools must accept any interested student. If enrollment becomes competitive because of a limited number of seats, a public lottery must be conducted to fill them. "A charter does have flexibility, and it's held accountable for the results," Young said. "It's accountable, because there's always the threat that the charter can be shut down if you don't perform. The threat of closure leads to an increase of focus and accountability." Teachers at charter schools often are compensated based on their performance or their schools' performance. That trend is a stark contrast from traditional public schools, where tenure, experience and training are normal requirements for pay raises and job security.

Young suggests the success of charters has caught the eye of state education officials, and in San Joaquin County, many school superintendents agree. "Competition isn't always a bad thing," Lodi Unified School District Superintendent Bill Huyett said. "We could learn from each other. Some good, friendly competition can be good for the system." For Huyett and Lodi Unified, the relationship with several Aspire Charter Schools in north Stockton has created that feeling of friendly competition. Huyett has complimented Aspire consistently and has been a proponent of introducing some of the educational methods used by the charters in the traditional schools. "I think it would be good for the state to learn from charter schools," Huyett said of charter schools' freedom from many state regulations that strap traditional schools over curriculum and materials. "There could be some deregulation. The state can see that it's working for the charters, so why not make it available for everybody?"

Lodi Unified, for example, has started a process it calls the "cycle of inquiry." The cycle helps administrators and teachers identify students who are struggling in the classroom and in which areas of learning they are struggling. "We learned that from Aspire," Huyett said. "And we're also looking at going with smaller high school models, the way some charters do. We think they're onto something there."

Source



Researchers Say Texas Inflates Graduation Rate

Texas grossly inflates its high school graduation numbers, masking critical dropout figures, according to studies to be presented Friday at a Rice University conference. Academicians from institutions including Rice, Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins, as well as other experts in the field, say their goal is to bring clarity to the problem, explain the implications for the state and nation, and lay the groundwork for progress. Linda McNeil with Rice's Center for Education told KTRH News that problems can be seen in the numbers. "We starting noticing that the ninth grade population would be, very often, half of the student population — maybe 1,000 kids. And yet, these schools are graduating just 200 to 300 kids," McNeil said.

Many factors are responsible for the crisis, McNeil said, including an over-emphasis in the importance of test scores and rigid attendance policies, "which were meant to sort of create a more stable structure for their education ... really works against our poorest kids … who have, sort of, the most complicated responsibilities in their families." McNeil said the university is bringing education experts, superintendents, lawmakers and minority activists together at Rice to address the wide gap between the dropout numbers they've found and what the Texas Education Agency reports. The state's official graduation rate hovers around 85 percent, but the researchers note less than three in five black and Hispanic students achieve diplomas in Texas.

Chris Swanson, director of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, was part of the four-year research project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The research found Texas' graduation rate to be 66.8 percent — much lower than the 84.2 percent the state reports — and Swanson said, “The graduation crisis is much more urgent than we might understand just based on what the TEA presents.” He noted that the Lone Star state isn't the only one that exaggerates its numbers. Swanson's numbers are almost identical to what other independent researchers have found using various methodologies, the speakers said. Swanson used enrollment-based estimates; others have looked at individual student records and unduplicated data from the state. Further, Swanson pointed out that the inflation increases in larger districts. Dallas has a 46 percent graduation rate, his study found, not the state's figure of 81 percent. The inflation was also more prominent when looking at minority and poor students.

Part of the disparity lies in the differing definitions for a "dropout." The state figures mentioned, from the 2002-2003 school year, do not count as dropouts students who have enrolled in a GED program, who have passed coursework but not the required state test, who transferred to another Texas public school but never showed up for class, or who are missing.

The state will begin including the first three of those categories in its calculations, starting this school year — but not because it found fault with its previous method, a spokesperson said, but rather to align it with the definitions used by the federal No Child Left Behind law and National Center for Education Statistics.

Texas is one of the few states to have a system that tracks individual students, a resource many other states want to emulate. “The lesson for Texas is that it doesn't matter how good the data collection is. If you're not reporting in an accurate, transparent way, you wind up with very misleading information,'' said Dan Losen, a senior education law and policy associate with Harvard's Civil Rights Project.

Source

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

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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

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



22 October, 2006

BRITISH SCHOOL INCAPABLE OF DISCIPLINING A 5 -YEAR OLD GIRL

She's black, you see, so just touching her would be a huge crime

A girl aged 5 has been permanently excluded from her school for attacking a teacher and a classmate. Tamara Howard's mother has been told that her daughter cannot return to the 300-pupil Old Moat School, in Withington, Manchester, because her presence is too disruptive.

The decision to expel the child was taken after she was excluded for 15 days for an alleged attack on a teacher and classmate on September 20. The school said that she hit the teacher on the arm, leaving cuts and bruises, after she was asked to clear away some toy bricks. On an earlier occasion she was said to have assaulted six members of staff.

The education authority said that it had offered intensive help to the pupil, who joined the infants from the school's nursery in January. Angela Howard, 41, a single mother who has two grown-up children, is hoping that the decision will be reversed. She said that the school had not given her enough time to address her child's behaviour and that she was excluded before there was a chance to get any help.

Source



The long march back to honesty in Australia's schools

No ideological agenda? Just who are the education unions kidding

[Federal] Education Minister Julie Bishop's call for a national curriculum and her criticism of ideologues in the education bureaucracies met a predictable wave of outrage. "How dare she", cried the teachers unions and their friends. Concerns about curriculum being politically correct, the argument goes, are simply a ploy used by conservative governments to maintain power. Pat Byrne, the head of the Australian Education Union, reflected this view when she argued last year: "The challenge for us is to frame our position in a way that can successfully counter the culture war that is currently being fought ... This is not a good time to be progressive in Australia; or for that matter anywhere else in the world!"

Never mind students being made to deconstruct the classics in terms of "theory". Never mind Australian history being taught from a black-armband view. And never mind geography being redefined in terms of deep environmentalism and multiculturalism. The late 1960s and early '70s was not only about Woodstock and moratoriums. That period was also about the Left's decision, drawing on the works of Marxists Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu, to take control of society by taking "the long march through the institutions".

Bourdieu argues that education is a powerful tool used by those more privileged in society to consolidate their position. Based on the concept of cultural capital, the argument is that there is nothing inherently worthwhile about academic studies or the Western tradition. The Left's belief that the education system is simply a tool used by the capitalist class to reproduce itself explains much of what has happened since the early '70s. The much-criticised Victorian Certificate of Education developed during the '80s was based on premier Joan Kirner's belief that schools must be transformed as "part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change, rather than an instrument of the capitalist system".

Meanwhile, teacher education became controlled by activists such as Doug White, Bill Hannan, Bob Connell, Dean Ashenden, Simon Marginson and Allan Luke. In a textbook widely set for education courses entitled Making the Difference, the argument is put: "In the most basic sense, the process of education and the process of liberation are the same. At the beginning of the 1980s it is plain that the forces opposed to that growth (have) become increasingly militant. In such circumstances, education becomes a risky enterprise. Teachers, too, have to decide whose side they are on."

Many of those students radicalised during the '60s and '70s went on to become teachers and bureaucrats and they identify education as a key instrument in overturning the status quo. For many, such as the AEU, the Australian Association for the Teaching of English and the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, education was, and continues to be, a key instrument to change society. In 1998, ACSA published Going Public: Education Policy and Public Education in Australia, described by Alan Reid as a manifesto outlining the "political strategies that might be employed to protect and enhance the social democratic values that lie at the heart of progressive aspirations about public education".

The impact of the cultural Left on education has been profound. Competition and failure are banned. Feminists attack traditional texts such as Romeo and Juliet as enforcing gender stereotypes. In history teaching, instead of focusing on significant historical events and figures and celebrating past milestones, the focus is on victim groups, such as women, migrants and Aborigines. Over the past 30 or so years schools have been pressured to adopt a leftist stance on issues as diverse as multiculturalism, the environment, the class war, peace studies, feminism and gender studies. Worse, the idea that education can be disinterested and that teachers should be impartial has given way to the argument that everything is ideological. Meanwhile, the teachers unions deny any agenda.

Source



Suddenly, vocational training back in vogue : Christian Science Monitor "Six years ago, as his 11th-grade classmates struggled with the college-application ritual, Toby Hughes tried to envision his future. A Georgia honors student with a 1350 SAT score, he knew he wanted to go into computer science, so he went to local computer companies and asked what they wanted in an employee. 'They told me I would be more marketable if I had practical technical training as opposed to theoretical academic training,' says Mr. Hughes. He began taking specialized computer-networking classes while still in high school, landed a $52,000 job after graduating, and now, at 24, makes well past that. Similar scenarios are repeating so often that the world of career technical training -- once known somewhat disparagingly as 'vocational training' -- is experiencing a renaissance in America. Enrollment in technical education soared by 57 percent -- from 9.6 million students in 1999 to 15.1 million in 2004, the US Department of Education reported to Congress."



Strange new love for "The Blob" : "In the eighties, Republicans talked of abolishing the federal Department of Education. In the nineties, they blocked President Clinton's quest for national education standards. Former Reagan education secretary William Bennett even dubbed America's bloated school monopolies 'the Blob.' But with the election of George W. Bush and the passage of his No Child Left Behind law in 2002, the 'party of limited government' apparently decided to stop worrying and love the Blob. And its appetite for federal control over the classroom continues to grow. A chorus of Republicans -- including Bennett himself, in a recent Washington Post op/ed -- is now calling for a national system of education standards and testing."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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

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21 October, 2006

"Quality child care" unmasked in Wyoming!

Proponents of HB-92, The Quality Child Care bill will tell you that its goal is to create a "quality rating" system to allow childcare facilities to receive "incentive" payments from the Wyoming State Government. This sounds very innocent and worthy of the Wyoming Citizens' support until you truly see this program for what it is, universal preschool. The first time I read this bill, it became apparent that this was a tactic being used by the "It takes a village to raise a child" crowd, in a stealth effort to introduce universal preschool into Wyoming through deception and masking it as "Quality Child Care."

A web search on "universal preschools" yielded numerous similarities between universal preschools implemented in other states and Wyoming's HB92. A number of "battles" are currently taking place in other states over similar programs. These fellow anti-universal preschool soldiers have agreed that HB92 is universal preschool in disguise and have stated that HB92 is nothing more than an expansion of the Wyoming public schools into the preschool level. The proponents of this bill are masking their agenda of "universal preschool" because they know that the good people of this state would never stand for a Vermont/California-like universal preschool bill. Therefore their strategy is to hood-wink well intentioned legislators into believing their only concern is for the "quality" of childcare in Wyoming.

An article entitled "Universal Preschool," dated July 20, 2006 appearing on the Democratic Leadership Council web site lists the qualifications in detail for the Georgia and Oklahoma universal preschool programs. These qualifications are extremely similar to those of the Wyoming Quality Child Care Program. Both require teachers to work toward a CDA or Associates Degree in Childhood Development. Higher level "teachers" must acquire a Bachelors Degree in Education with Birth through eight year-old w/ early childhood endorsement or a Bachelors Degree in Family and Consumer Sciences w/ Childhood Development option. These CDA, Associate Degrees, and Bachelor Degrees are similar qualifications for Universal Preschool programs. This information draws only one conclusion, which is that Wyoming's "Quality Child Care" bill is indeed a masked version of Universal Preschool.

The most noteworthy member of the Democratic Leadership Council is former first lady and now Senator Hillary Clinton. Remember, she is behind the notion that "It takes a village (the government) to raise the children". The Democratic Leadership Council would have us to believe that Georgia's and Oklahoma's universal preschool programs are thriving. Yet numerous studies refute such a claim. Current studies show this type of program has not helped children gain anything beyond the third grade. Georgia and Oklahoma have had 4 year old preschools in place since 1993 and 1998 respectively. To their detriment, Quebec has also implemented universal preschool.

Georgia: Georgia's universal preschool program started out being funded by the state lottery. A Goldwater Institute report states that, after 10 years, Georgia's universal preschool program has served over 300,000 children at a cost of $1.15 billion, and children's test scores are unchanged according to the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which is considered the nation's report card.

Oklahoma: The NAEP also found that since Oklahoma implemented their Universal preschool Kindergarten that Oklahoma's test scores have not only not improved, but they have actually lost 4 percentage points and become the worst performer of all states at the fourth grade reading level between 1992 and 2005.

Quebec: According to the Reason Foundation Report, Quebec's attempt at a universal preschool program was originally supposed to cost $230 million over five years, but now gobbles $1.7 billion every year. Pierre Lefebvre, an economics professor at Universite du Quebec, has just completed a study comparing 4- to 5-year-olds in Quebec with kids elsewhere in Canada and found that Quebec kids have no better scores on the Peabody vocabulary test -- the most widely used indicator of school readiness.

The proponents of this bill are trying to implement and fund a program that has already been proven to be a failure elsewhere. Texas looked into a similar bill and requested The Texas Public Policy Foundation to do a feasibility study. This study, titled "The Early Bird Misses the Worm," January, 2006 concluded the following: "Commonly cited cost-benefit calculations result from flawed experiments that included only the most disadvantaged children, have never been replicated, and would be impractical for large-scale implementation. Positive `investment returns,' while questionable even for disadvantaged children, would be even less positive for children as a whole."

"Existing universal preschool programs have failed to demonstrate significant benefits, and some even exhibit adverse consequences." "An expanded government role would force many private providers out of the market, thereby limiting choices for consumers."

The Wyoming Quality Child Care Task Force is also basing its advocacy of their masked universal preschool program on a study prepared by the Rand Corporation. Recently the "Reason Foundation" did an analysis of the Rand Corporation's study and identified some major flaws. Quoting the Reason Foundation, "Using RAND's own data and alternative assumptions based on the studies they reference, it is easy to demonstrate that universal preschool generates losses of 25 to 30 cents for every dollar spent. And these losses are calculated before including any of the additional universal preschool program costs that RAND ignored in its analysis."

So now we have the evidence from previous attempts in other parts of the nation that implementing universal preschools or expanding public schools to 4 year olds or younger is not only not cost efficient, but is also not progressive or helpful enough beyond the third grade.

The proponents of Quality Child Care in Wyoming want the citizens to believe that their program will benefit our children well beyond the fourth grade and into their adult lives. This assumption is also based on faulty data used in the Rand Corporation's report. The Wyoming proponents fail to report that the reason the Rand's study seemed to offer such a positive result is because it was done in Chicago's inner city and included basic parenting classes. Therefore, the study does not give enough credit to the children doing well as a result of parental involvement, which in turn is due to the parenting classes provided to them. Rural Wyoming and inner city Chicago have very little in common. It is highly suspicious to use such data as validation for Wyoming's "Quality Child Care" program.

As a result of liberal social activism, the Universal Preschool trend is moving across the nation. In June of 2006 the people of California voted down Rob Reiner's Proposition 82, which was an attempt at just such a program. Recently, Massachusetts' Governor Mitt Romney vetoed a universal preschool program. And in 2002 the District of Columbia attempted to pass a mandatory pre-school bill for all three year-olds. The bill failed.

The costs of Universal Preschool are consistently and significantly underestimated, and the long-term saving "estimates" are based on irrelevant studies and purposefully refuse to take into account offsetting increased costs to the economy. It is safe to say that Wyoming should not expect to benefit at all from implementing such a program. In fact, this program for universal preschool, masked as "Quality Child Care" represents a potentially crushing, rapid expansion of the state's financial liability.

Source



HUGE BRITISH HIGH-SCHOOL FAILURE

Only a quarter of pupils obtained good GCSEs in the core subjects that many employers now regard as essential, according to figures released yesterday. The proportion of pupils achieving five GCSEs at grades A* to C this summer jumped by 1.8 percentage points to 58.1 per cent, the second biggest rise since 1997, the Department for Education said. But the figures also show that, after 11 years of compulsory schooling, just 45.1 per cent of pupils obtained five good GCSEs when English and mathematics were included, a rise of less than one percentage point on last year's figures. Only 41 per cent of pupils achieved grades A* to C in English, maths and science and just 26 per cent got good grades in English, maths, science and a language - a fall of four percentage points from 2002.

Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, conceded that more needs to be done to boost attainment. "One child not reaching their full potential in one school is one too many," he said. Mr Knight also expressed "deep frustration" that the gap in performance between boys and girls had hardly narrowed. Although exam results for both sexes had continued to improve, "boys are now where girls were in 1999", he said.

The results, published yesterday by the Office for National Statistics, show that 53 per cent of pupils failed to get good grades in maths and English at GCSE. This rises to nearly 57 per cent among boys. However, Mr Knight added that the number of schools failing to equip at least a quarter of their pupils with five good passes in any subject had been cut to about one tenth of the rate of 1997. He also said that entries for a single science were now rising, with rises of 7 per cent each in chemistry and physics.

Nick Gibb, the Conservative schools spokesman, welcomed the increase in the headline figure for five or more good GCSEs, but expressed concern that the rise was being fuelled by schools entering more pupils for easier, or "softer", subjects such as sociology. "Because they want to reach the target of getting pupils through five or more GCSEs, some schools appear to be manipulating the results by focusing less on the essential subjects such as English and maths and putting more emphasis on softer subjects, where they think they can get higher grades," he said. "Most concerning of all is the drop in the proportion achieving good GCSEs in English, maths, science and a modern foreign language for the fifth year running, a proportion which has now reached a record low of just 26 per cent."

Anthony Thompson, head of skills at the employers' organisation CBI, said that employers remained frustrated by the lack of progress at GCSE level. "The recent action to try and increase take-up of foreign languages is a positive step, but the Government must ensure the science curriculum encourages further study," he said

Source



Australian teachers to get even dumber

A bare High School pass will soon make you eligible for training as a teacher

OP entry scores for teaching courses are set to fall further with a 10 per cent drop in applications for teaching courses at universities in the past year. Interest in nursing is up, however, with a 27 per cent increase in first preference applications for tertiary places in 2007.

The Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre announced yesterday that applications were stable. Almost 44,000 people had applied for 2007 places to date, similar to last year. QTAC Public Relations and Information Services manager Pat Smith said health courses were in strong demand. First preference applications were up 8.9 per cent in professions such as physiotherapy, optometry, speech pathology, occupational therapy and pharmacy.

The message about a skills crisis in engineering also appears to be getting through, with applications up more than 8 percent. Business and architecture applications were also slightly higher, up 2 per cent and 1.8 per cent.

"The biggest downward trends so far this year, following on a fall in interest last year, has come from food and hospitality, down 20 per cent, creative industries down 15.6 per cent, information technology down 14.1 per cent, and education down 10.5 per cent," Ms Smith said. People can apply well into December, but late fees apply.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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

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20 October, 2006

Business school ethics confusion

Over the past few years, and in reaction to high-profile corporate scandals, many MBA programs have added additional courses on business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR). But for people outside of the universities, the content of these courses remains obscure. What are future corporate managers being taught under the heading of `business ethics'? In what context are students instructed on their "social responsibilities" as businessmen and women? Is a good dose of Milton Friedman all that is required or is there a need for something more?

Consider Harvard Business School. The main CSR course at HBS, "Business Leadership and Strategic Corporate Citizenship" is an optional course offered during the 2nd year of the MBA program. The syllabus for this year's version is instructive. The professor introduces CSR by explaining the three reasons why corporate leaders ought to act in a socially responsible manner: (i) it helps the world and is simply the right thing to do; (ii) corporations have an obligation to "give back" to society because it is society that has given business the license to operate and to make profits in the first place; and (iii) it increases profits in the long run. "We endorse all three reasons for corporate social responsibility," says the professor, "but we will largely ignore the first two" because, well, because this is a university, not a high school debating club.

Now consider London Business School. The United Kingdom is arguably "ahead" of the U.S. in terms of adopting CSR policies (they have their own government website and minister responsible for CSR). So how does the UK's pre-eminent business school compare to Harvard in this regard? First, the LBS course, "Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility", is a required course that one takes at the very beginning of the MBA program. Second, as the title indicates, this course combines CSR with business ethics. As outlined in a 2004 syllabus, `business ethics' focuses more on the decisions of an individual manager with respect to the corporation, whereas CSR focuses more on the relationship between the corporation as a whole and the rest of society.

Like the Harvard course, the London course asks students to examine cases in recent business history in which CSR has been front and center, such as Nike and the sweatshop debate, or Shell oil and human rights in Africa. And while the readings generally support the `doing good is good business' view of CSR, students, at both institutions, are also exposed to the Milton Friedman view, as well as the conflict between being responsible to shareholders vs. being responsible to all of "society". So what's missing?

One problem is that this type of MBA course - and there are many others out there - attempts to deal with a political subject in a non-political way. For instance, the corporate campaigns waged by non-government organizations are a key reason why corporations come to embrace CSR in the first place: think McDonald's or Wal-Mart. Yet the technocratic point of view favored by business schools does not equip students with the ideological perspective that is necessary to understanding either CSR's supporters or its opponents.

In the case of the Harvard course, the professor endorsed an ideological position - I believe CSR is good because it helps the world - but would not allow that position to be examined. Instead, a student is to assume its validity from the start, and focus on how a business leader can most effectively manage its various "stakeholders", that is, shareholders, employees, suppliers and NGOs. The usual response, then, is that the professor should offer the Friedman position - the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits - as an alternative and to stress the role of the manager as agent of the owners of the corporation (the shareholders). But this, too, is insufficient. Under the Friedman view, a corporation can use every means within the law to increase profits for its shareholders, such as lobbying the government for special favors or to support new industry regulations that will fall most heavily on the competition.

Perhaps what is needed is to rethink the way `business ethics' is taught; such that an ethical businessman is one who is responsible not to shareholders or stakeholders, but to the free market system and its components, including private property rights, voluntary exchange and competition. Generally, this is the Friedman view, but broader. It suggests that the role of business is not only to follow the rules of the game, but to not use the law to alter the rules of the game in ways that impede the functioning of the market. Isn't this the true social responsibility of business?

Source



Is diversity enough?

An interesting Marxist article below. The argument is that preoccupation with affirmative action distracts from pursuit of economic equality and that affirmative action for the poor, not blacks, is needed:

The University of Illinois at Chicago, a struggling but ambitious public university in the heart of the city, celebrates its ethnically diverse student body as a great achievement. But Walter Benn Michaels, chairman of the university's English department, is unimpressed. The commitment of universities, corporations and other institutions to such diversity is "at best a distraction and at worst an essentially reactionary position," he argues in his new book, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality.

Right-wing academics and pundits have built careers taking potshots at affirmative action, multiculturalism and identity politics-pursuits that some postmodern leftists see as the heart of radical politics. Michaels criticizes diversity politics from the left. His argument represents a fundamental and constructive challenge to conventional thinking about the most important issues facing our society. But it is also easily misunderstood. "I've been called a liberal racist more often than anything else in my life," he says, sitting in his office at the university's one towering office building, stylishly dressed in black jeans and t-shirt under a black window-pane jacket. He argues that the pursuit of diversity is based on a flawed understanding of humanity and stands as a roadblock to confrontation with the most basic injustices in society: "The trouble with diversity . is not just that it won't solve the problem of economic inequality; it's that it makes it hard for us to even see the problem."

Race, as virtually all modern anthropologists and geneticists agree, is not a scientifically valid concept. Obvious physical differences exist among humans, but the genetic variation within conventionally defined races is often greater than the variation among those races. Still, "race" is a concept that people use all the time with profound consequences, even if they can't define it. Race gets defined in ways that vary by time, geography and situation. Why, except for the peculiar American notion of blackness as being determined by one drop of "blood" of African ancestry, would a person of half African and half European genetic heritage, like Sen. Barack Obama, be called "black" rather than "white"-the latter a supposedly racial category that has grown more inclusive over many years?

People may talk instead about belonging to different ethnic cultures, borrowing the notion that anthropologists developed to describe the shared symbols and understanding of a distinct group of people, like the Navajo or Mbuti. But as valuable, if elusive, as this idea may be in studying tribal societies, Michaels contends that in our society it is another way to create biological categories that don't exist and thereby perpetuate an inaccurate and racist view of the world. In his zeal, however, Michaels unnecessarily jettisons entirely, rather than reformulates, the notion of culture.

As Michaels sees it, the social focus on achieving diversity diverts attention from the most fundamental injustice in our society-economic inequality. Moreover, the pursuit of diversity, especially in universities, gives legitimacy to the growing economic inequality of American society, because it protects the inheritance of economic privilege and does little to create opportunity for the poor, whether black or white.

Michaels, author of Our America and a writer about both literary theory and American literature, became interested in contemporary ideas of race and identity when studying American novels of the '20s. During that era, many public figures argued for the supremacy of what was seen as America's Anglo-Saxon or Nordic character. But by the '80s, Michaels notes, it was no longer publicly acceptable to advocate racial supremacy. Today, at a time when liberals and conservatives alike profess to abhor racism and prejudice, a new free-market fundamentalism-dubbed neo-liberalism-also claims that racism inefficiently interferes with the workings of a free labor market.

"The question is," Michaels says, "once we've given up the racism, and once we've given up to some degree the idea that races are a biological reality, why are we so attached to races? The first answer is that American society as a whole loves race. What I mean by that is that generally both right and left are-in neo-liberal terms-conservatives. The fundamental precepts of neoliberalism-the sense that in American society, effort and hard work are rewarded, that there's a rough justice in the distribution of wealth, and that inherited inequality is not a fundamental problem-are widely held views in American society. The two sets of ideas go together because one supports the other. "The vision that the primary problems of America are intolerance-sexism, racism-is completely compatible with the view that if we could just get rid of that intolerance and hatred and fear of the other, we'd be living in a fundamentally just society."

That has not happened. Economic inequality, increasing for decades, has accelerated in recent years. As a new edition of the Economic Policy Institute's The State of Working America points out, productivity has grown for the past four years but the median American family income has fallen. According to recent Commerce Department figures, wages and salaries (which include soaring executive paychecks) took the smallest share of national income since records started in 1929, and corporate profits took the largest share since 1950.

Blacks still fare worse on average than whites, but Michaels argues that the central problem here is exploitation of workers, not discrimination against blacks. And diversity is not the solution. He writes, "If you're worried about the growing economic inequality in American life, if you suspect that there may be something unjust as well as unpleasant in the spectacle of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, no cause is less worth supporting, no battle is less worth fighting than the ones we fight for diversity."

The obligation of diversity is to be nice to each other, Michaels writes, but the obligation of equality is to give up some money. Given the choice, diversity has the advantage of appearing to be morally righteous while at the same time preserving economic self-interest.

The notion of diversity took off after 1978 when the Supreme Court ruled in Bakke v. Board of Regents that the University of California could, as part of its legitimate interest in maintaining a diverse student body, take race into account when admitting students. According to Michaels, the response to the decision fostered the idea that universities should encourage students to appreciate the differences among races (or other identities more or less modeled on race). But it did not address the issue of economic inequality, which retards achievement for blacks proportionally more than for whites. Economic inequality makes it harder for poor (including poor black) students to be able to afford to go to college. What's more, inequality-in education or family social capital-also makes it harder for poor students, once they reach college age, to compete academically with students from affluent families.

Michaels asserts that diversity gives legitimacy to higher education as a supposed meritocracy, which is important in an era when everyone is told that a college education is the key to success. Admitting a diverse student body, especially for the most elite schools, helps to create the impression that upper middle-class and rich students have won this educational ticket to higher incomes fairly, not because they come from families that are well off.

"The problem with affirmative action is not (as is often said) that it violates the principles of meritocracy," he writes; "the problem is that it produces the illusion that we actually have a meritocracy. . Race-based affirmative action . is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality." If class-based affirmative action replaced racial affirmative action at Harvard, and its student body reflected the country's income distribution, he calculates that more than half the students would be gone, most of them rich and white.

More here



More politicized "history" teaching

A group that believes the Howard Government could have prevented the deaths of 353 asylum-seekers in the sinking of the Siev X in 2001 is on the verge of selling a case study to schools for use in modern history classes. Year 11 students would be asked to answer whether the drownings were the result of the federal Government's policies as part of the case study, prompting allegations that students were being steered towards a "politically correct" conclusion.

Modern History students would study a number of disputed claims, including whether or not the Australian navy sabotaged the boat before it left Indonesia, if the Siev X Secondary School's Case Study Committee does sell the case study to schools.

The principal of St Aloysius College in Sydney, Father Chris Middleton, told The Australian yesterday the school was considering using the program, to be launched in federal parliament today by child psychologist Steve Biddulph.

Students at schools that decide to use the case study will view primary source documents and be asked: "Was the sinking of the Siev X and subsequent loss of life preventable?" Students would also be asked to describe how statements by a former immigration officer and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer about whether the government officials sabotaged boats "contradict each other". The case study relies heavily on the documentary film Punished not Protected and two books - A Certain Maritime Incident and Dark Victory - which are highly critical of the Government, prompting criticism that the proposal is biased.

Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop said the material was "an outrageous attempt to disguise a political agenda as school curriculum". "It is a bizarre mix of unfounded allegations and rumour presented as fact, and is clearly intended to influence the opinions of school children rather than educate them with a factual version of events," Ms Bishop said. Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone said students should be "presented with the facts as we know them rather than any biased presentation".

Siev X Case Study spokesman Don Maclurcan, who is studying for his PhD in nanotechnology, said the case had polarised people and so would sharpen students' analytical skills. "I hope that students would come out of this with a greater knowledge of how government works, what our policies are in terms of immigration and refugees, and a knowledge of things that have happened in relation to our borders in the last five years," Mr Maclurcan said. He said the organising committee had "made every effort to set aside our own conclusions in order to assemble a balanced set of reading materials that present the many viewpoints offered". He said the material was developed "in consultation with the NSW Boards of Studies" but the board denied this yesterday.

The director of the National Centre for History Education at Monash University, associate professor Tony Taylor, said recent events were difficult to tackle in the classroom. "These debates can become more emotional than rational. Skilled teachers can deal with this successfully but it does take a lot of experience," he said. "As for conspiracy theories, it's always difficult to prove a negative; that is, to prove that there isn't a conspiracy."

Education critic Kevin Donnelly slammed the case study, saying it implied a "predetermined answer" about the tragedy. "Students are being directed towards a politically correct response that it could have been prevented and that the Government is responsible," he said. "This is just another attempt at an issues or theme approach to history which quite rightly has been condemned as failing to give students a comprehensive understanding of the background and overall narrative."

But Nick Ewbank, president of the History Teachers Association, backed the case study. [He would] "All history is about the weighing of evidence and the interpretation that can be placed on the given facts. Obviously, this particular case is fairly controversial but we shouldn't be shying away from controversial issues," he said.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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

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19 October, 2006

A skeptical report on charter schools

A year ago I resigned from teaching in a local high school to accept a position at a new charter school. Charter schools seemed to promise the greatest chance of fostering market reform within public education. I believed that if given the power, a few very dedicated and talented teachers and a small administrative staff could bring about innovative educational changes and create an outstanding school.

Though I have never worked with a more dedicated group of well-intentioned people, I have become skeptical that charter schools can bring systemic change to public education. While I do not claim the ability to predict the outcome of any particular charter school, I now realize that at best only marginal change within public education is possible through charter schools.

A charter school is defined as a semi-autonomous, publicly funded school operated by a group of parents, teachers, and/or community members under a charter with a local school district board of education and/or an outside group, such as a university. At present, 12 states have passed many variations of charter-school legislation, some granting more autonomy than others. Each charter sets forth the school's goals and philosophy, the basic cur