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31 January, 2005

THOUGHT-CRIME RULES ACADEME (1)

Strict Leftist orthodoxy is enforced in academe

The question of whether Intelligent Design (ID) may be presented to public-school students alongside neo-Darwinian evolution has roiled parents and teachers in various communities lately. Whether ID may be presented to adult scientific professionals is another question altogether but also controversial. It is now roiling the government-supported Smithsonian Institution, where one scientist has had his career all but ruined over it.

The scientist is Richard Sternberg, a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The holder of two Ph.D.s in biology, Mr. Sternberg was until recently the managing editor of a nominally independent journal published at the museum, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, where he exercised final editorial authority. The August issue included typical articles on taxonomical topics--e.g., on a new species of hermit crab. It also included an atypical article, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories." Here was trouble.

The piece happened to be the first peer-reviewed article to appear in a technical biology journal laying out the evidential case for Intelligent Design. According to ID theory, certain features of living organisms--such as the miniature machines and complex circuits within cells--are better explained by an unspecified designing intelligence than by an undirected natural process like random mutation and natural selection.

Mr. Sternberg's editorship has since expired, as it was scheduled to anyway, but his future as a researcher is in jeopardy--and that he had not planned on at all. He has been penalized by the museum's Department of Zoology, his religious and political beliefs questioned. He now rests his hope for vindication on his complaint filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) that he was subjected to discrimination on the basis of perceived religious beliefs. A museum spokesman confirms that the OSC is investigating. Says Mr. Sternberg: "I'm spending my time trying to figure out how to salvage a scientific career."....

Worries about being perceived as "religious" spread at the museum. One curator, who generally confirmed the conversation when I spoke to him, told Mr. Sternberg about a gathering where he offered a Jewish prayer for a colleague about to retire. The curator fretted: "So now they're going to think that I'm a religious person, and that's not a good thing at the museum."...

In October, as the OSC complaint recounts, Mr. Coddington told Mr. Sternberg to give up his office and turn in his keys to the departmental floor, thus denying him access to the specimen collections he needs. Mr. Sternberg was also assigned to the close oversight of a curator with whom he had professional disagreements unrelated to evolution. "I'm going to be straightforward with you," said Mr. Coddington, according to the complaint. "Yes, you are being singled out." Neither Mr. Coddington nor Mr. Sues returned repeated phone messages asking for their version of events.

Mr. Sternberg begged a friendly curator for alternative research space, and he still works at the museum. But many colleagues now ignore him when he greets them in the hall, and his office sits empty as "unclaimed space." Old colleagues at other institutions now refuse to work with him on publication projects, citing the Meyer episode....

Intelligent Design, in any event, is hardly a made-to-order prop for any particular religion. When the British atheist philosopher Antony Flew made news this winter by declaring that he had become a deist--a believer in an unbiblical "god of the philosophers" who takes no notice of our lives--he pointed to the plausibility of ID theory.

Darwinism, by contrast, is an essential ingredient in secularism, that aggressive, quasi-religious faith without a deity. The Sternberg case seems, in many ways, an instance of one religion persecuting a rival, demanding loyalty from anyone who enters one of its churches--like the National Museum of Natural History.

More here



THOUGHT-CRIME RULES ACADEME (2)

"In the two weeks since Harvard University president Lawrence Summers suggested that innate differences between the sexes may partly account for male dominance in science and math, the ensuing frenzy of discussion has become a kind of national Rorschach test. Editorialists excoriate his sexism or applaud his candor. The National Organization for Women has called for his resignation. Academics are poring over studies that deal with nature, nurture, and gender differences. Dr. Summers's comments -- which he said were intended to provoke discussion about why women were underrepresented in top science posts -- have ended up raising an even larger question: Have universities become so steeped in sensitivities that certain topics can't be openly discussed?"

More here

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American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

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30 January, 2005

IT'S A WONDER SPELLING BEES LASTED AS LONG AS THEY DID

The reasoning given below for abandoning a spelling bee is totally specious of course. The real commandment being obeyed is the perennial Leftist one: "All men are equal"

Karen Adams always enjoyed receiving her invitation. The WPRI-TV news anchorwoman and Lincoln resident looked forward to penciling in the school district’s spelling bee in her appointment calendar. But there’s no note in her calendar this year. The Lincoln district has decided to eliminate this year’s spelling bee -- a competition involving pupils in grades 4 through 8, with each school district winner advancing to the state competition and a chance to proceed to the national spelling bee in Washington, D.C.

Assistant Superintendent of Schools Linda Newman said the decision to scuttle the event was reached shortly after the January 2004 bee in a unanimous decision by herself and the district’s elementary school principals. The administrators decided to eliminate the spelling bee, because they feel it runs afoul of the mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. "No Child Left Behind says all kids must reach high standards," Newman said. "It’s our responsibility to find as many ways as possible to accomplish this."

The administrators agreed, Newman said, that a spelling bee doesn’t meet the criteria of all children reaching high standards -- because there can only be one winner, leaving all other students behind. "It’s about one kid winning, several making it to the top and leaving all others behind. That’s contrary to No Child Left Behind," Newman said. A spelling bee, she continued, is about "some kids being winners, some kids being losers." As a result, the spelling bee "sends a message that this isn’t an all-kids movement," Newman said.

More here



A LEFTIST CHARM OFFENSIVE

They would not know how

Less than two months after Hamilton College tried to hire a former Weather Underground activist who was indicted in the 1981 Brinks murders, the Clinton, N.Y., liberal-arts college plans to showcase a cheerleader for the 9/11 attacks. Just the sort of thing parents pay nearly $40,000 a year in tuition and board to have their children hear.

At issue now is a panel set for Feb. 3 on "Limits of Dissent?" to be hosted by the college's Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture. Among the invited panelists is Indian activist Ward Churchill, who teaches ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While Mr. Churchill has caused controversy in the past--founders of the American Indian Movement denounced him as a "white" and a "fraud"--his screeds usually attract little notice outside obscure Marxist Web sites and the like.

On Sept. 12, 2001, however, Mr. Churchill performed an act of extraordinary crepitation, even for him. In "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," he saluted the "gallant sacrifices" of the "combat teams" that struck the Pentagon and World Trade Center, asserting that the people who worked there ("braying . . . into their cell phones") and died that day deserved what they got.

More here

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

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29 January, 2005

Making College More Expensive: The Unintended Consequences of Federal Tuition Aid

As Congress debates the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, it should heed Friedrich Hayek's warning that democracy is "peculiarly liable, if not guided by accepted common principles, to produce over-all results that nobody wanted." One result of the federal government's student financial aid programs is higher tuition costs at our nation's colleges and universities. Basic economic theory suggests that the increased demand for higher education generated by HEA will have the effect of increasing tuitions. The empirical evidence is consistent with that-federal loans, Pell grants, and other assistance programs result in higher tuition for students at our nation's colleges and universities.

The diversity of objectives, resources, and types of governance among the thousands of colleges and universities makes it difficult to adequately measure the exact amount by which tuitions rise in response to federal student assistance. Therefore, estimates of the amount vary in the literature. Congress can at best know that its policies increase tuitions and that some portion of the federal assistance ends up being captured by state governments and by the colleges and universities.

Also, when large numbers of students begin to rely on the federal government to fund their higher education, and the federal government uses this financing to affect the behavior of state and private institutions, we should be concerned about how the resulting loss of independence of our colleges and universities affects the ability of voters to form opinions about public policy that are independent of the government's position.

Rather than expand the current system, Congress should consider a phase-out of federal assistance to higher education over a 12-year time frame. As the federal government removes itself from student assistance, we should expect several things to happen. First, sticker tuition prices should decline. Second, the private market should respond to the phase-out of federal assistance. That response would likely take three forms: additional private-sector loans, additional private scholarship funds, and perhaps most importantly, the expansion of human capital contracts. Human capital contracts, first suggested 40 years ago by Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, would allow students to pledge a portion of future earnings in return for assistance in paying their tuition.

More here



The Leftist double standard: "It is interesting that the major supporters of government education, modern liberals, often complain when their taxes go to projects with which they disagree. During the Vietnam War era they often advocated tax resistance because their funds were being sent to support a war they found morally objectionable. And more recently some have proposed similar measures vis-.-vis Bush's war in Iraq. Yet, they see nothing wrong with forcing fundamentalists to pay for government schools that teach what fundamentalists consider an abomination. And this includes not only Darwinism but, often, sex education and other value-laden topics to which children of parents who object should not be subjected."

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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.

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

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28 January, 2005

A BLACK VOICE FOR VOUCHERS

Lee H. Walker, president of The New Coalition for Economic and Social Change, knows how important it is for children from limited environments to have a teacher or role model who can open their eyes to the breadth and freedom of opportunity available to them here in the United States. That's because Walker has lived the experience himself, growing up as a black child in the segregated Deep South of the 1940s and being inspired by the example of Booker T. Washington to pursue a successful career as a corporate executive in New York and Chicago.

Walker's own educational experiences also underlie his support for school choice, for giving children from all backgrounds the opportunity for an education to prepare them for pursuing their dreams. "Get an education," the old people used to tell him. Although the 1954 Brown decision was supposed to make that easier for blacks to achieve, Walker's views on the ruling are mixed because he sees so much effort was wasted in pursuing integration at the expense of educational excellence.

Walker speaks:

The schools became half-equal when they integrated, with blacks sitting in the same classroom as white students. That didn't last too long, and they soon had segregated classrooms, even in the North. There would be a 7A class for all the smart kids, and a 7B for the others. All the whites and maybe one or two blacks were in 7A.

My whole argument with Brown is that integration never should have been a goal, it should have been a result. A quality education should have been the goal. If it had been, we would not still be dealing with the achievement gap 40 years on. Integration isn't really the goal. A nice neighborhood is. A decent salary is. A good school is.

Watching television--and the movies--I saw that all of the successful white men lived in New York, and they worked as executives in two places: in Rockefeller Center or on Wall Street. I saw that and I said, "I want to be an executive." I didn't know what the heck an executive was. All I knew was they had white shirts and attaché cases. But I followed the Booker model. I left home, went to New York, and enrolled at a city college.

Then I discovered corporate America didn't choose their important employees from the city colleges, and so I left Brooklyn College and went to New York University. But when I got to NYU, they tested me and told me I needed to take six months of reading and writing comprehension, and six months of college algebra. Now, before 1964, no one was talking about diversity at NYU. If you didn't score high enough, you had to take remedial courses whether you were black or white. But after taking the courses, as I did, you entered the regular program. Everybody in the regular program knew you had to pass the test to get in and so you didn't go in with any stigma, as blacks do now with affirmative action.....

I held my first meeting on school vouchers here in Chicago in 1984 with the help of Sears and The Heritage Foundation. We had a seminar on vouchers and Marva Collins was the keynote speaker. I'm for school choice for two reasons. Number one, the present system is failing. Number two, school choice would give parents the opportunity to put their children in an environment that is better than the one they've been assigned to by the school district. I don't think choice is a panacea, but you have to be out of your mind to want to stay in a burning house. With choice, at least you can get out.

I think the system itself is the problem. It's not a school system, it's a bureaucracy. And for low-income children, this bureaucracy perpetuates low expectations. Teachers need to broaden the horizons of opportunity for students and encourage self-sufficiency. One way to do that would be to give families some say in where their children go to school. The money should follow the child.

Education has always meant a lot to black folks. Black Americans understand the true value of education because they know their individual freedom depends on it.

More here



POLITICALLY CORRECT BOOKS TURN BOYS OFF

When the National Endowment for the Arts last summer released "Reading at Risk: a Survey of Literary Reading in America," journalists and commentators were quick to seize on the findings as a troubling index of the state of literary culture. The survey showed a serious decline in both literary reading and book reading in general by adults of all ages, races, incomes, education levels and regions. But in all the discussion, one of the more worrisome trends went largely unnoticed. From 1992 to 2002, the gender gap in reading by young adults widened considerably. In overall book reading, young women slipped from 63 percent to 59 percent, while young men plummeted from 55 percent to 43 percent......

Although one might expect the schools to be trying hard to make reading appealing to boys, the K-12 literature curriculum may in fact be contributing to the problem. It has long been known that there are strong differences between boys and girls in their literary preferences. According to reading interest surveys, both boys and girls are unlikely to choose books based on an "issues" approach, and children are not interested in reading about ways to reform society -- or themselves. But boys prefer adventure tales, war, sports and historical nonfiction, while girls prefer stories about personal relationships and fantasy. Moreover, when given choices, boys do not choose stories that feature girls, while girls frequently select stories that appeal to boys.

Unfortunately, the textbooks and literature assigned in the elementary grades do not reflect the dispositions of male students. Few strong and active male role models can be found as lead characters. Gone are the inspiring biographies of the most important American presidents, inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs. No military valor, no high adventure. On the other hand, stories about adventurous and brave women abound. Publishers seem to be more interested in avoiding "masculine" perspectives or "stereotypes" than in getting boys to like what they are assigned to read.

At the middle school level, the kind of quality literature that might appeal to boys has been replaced by Young Adult Literature, that is, easy-to-read, short novels about teenagers and problems such as drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorced parents and bullying. Older literary fare has also been replaced by something called "culturally relevant" literature -- texts that appeal to students' ethnic group identification on the assumption that sharing the leading character's ethnicity will motivate them to read.

There is no evidence whatsoever that either of these types of reading fare has turned boys into lifelong readers or learners. On the contrary, the evidence is accumulating that by the time they go on to high school, boys have lost their interest in reading about the fictional lives, thoughts and feelings of mature individuals in works written in high-quality prose, and they are no longer motivated by an exciting plot to persist in the struggle they will have with the vocabulary that goes with it.

here

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

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

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27 January, 2005

STOP THE ROT

There is no question that leftist views have infiltrated our colleges and universities. But what most people may not know, is just how far left the pendulum has swung. Ben Shapiro is a recent graduate from UCLA. He is also the youngest syndicated columnist in the United States. What he says has crept into American universities is astonishing. Sharpiro said, "You go on campus, you pick up the campus newspaper and see editorials comparing Ariel Sharon to Adolf Eichmann. And then you walk outside class and you see the Muslim Student Association handing out pamphlets actively fundraising for Hamas and Hezbollah, and you figure, boy, I better do something about this."

When he tried to do something, he was fired from the UCLA Daily Bruin, the campus' newspaper. Shapiro commented, "It had something to do with insensitivity, they actually later would claim that I was a racist for attempting to expose the fact that student dollars were going to the promotion of terrorism."

So how did our colleges and universities become havens for anti-American thought and rhetoric? Some say the Leftist agenda that is running rampant today got its roots in the 1960s. The radicals of the Sixties Revolution are the same men and women at the head of our educational institutions and are in charge of shaping the minds of our young people today. And it is not just anti-Americanism that has escalated. Just look at this list of courses taught at some of America's top universities:

At Columbia, Sorcery and Magic
At Dartmouth, Queer Theory, Queer Texts
At Cornell, Gay Fiction
At Swarthmore, Lesbian Novels Since World War II
At the University of Wisconsin, Goddesses and Feminine Powers
And, at the University of Pennsylvania, Feminist Critique of Christianity,
to name just a few.

In his new book, Freefall of the American University: How Our Colleges are Corrupting the Minds and Morals of the Next Generation Jim Nelson Black says it will take a massive uprising of concerned citizens, students, parents and allies to turn the situation around

More here



FAILED EDUCATION SYSTEM DESTROYS AMERICAN DREAM

Once upon a time, education was a way to rise out of a poor background. No longer. Public education is now so useless that family background is again the big determinant of life success.

Today, for example, we may still believe American society is uniquely dynamic, but we're deceiving ourselves. European societies, which seem more class riven and less open, have just as much social mobility as the United States does.

And there are some indications that it is becoming harder and harder for people to climb the ladder of success. The Economist magazine gathered much of the recent research on social mobility in America. The magazine concluded that the meritocracy is faltering: "Would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap."

Economists and sociologists do not all agree, but it does seem there is at least slightly less movement across income quintiles than there was a few decades ago. Sons' income levels correlate more closely to those of their fathers. The income levels of brothers also correlate more closely. That suggests that the family you were born into matters more and more to how you will fare in life. That's a problem because we are not supposed to have a hereditary class structure in this country.

But we're developing one. In the information age, education matters more. In an age in which education matters more, family matters more, because as James Coleman established decades ago, family status shapes educational achievement.

At the top end of society we have a mass upper-middle class. This is made up of highly educated people who move into highly educated neighborhoods and raise their kids in good schools with the children of other highly educated parents. These kids develop wonderful skills, get into good colleges (the median family income of a Harvard student is now $150,000), then go out and have their own children, who develop the same sorts of wonderful skills and who repeat the cycle all over again. In this way these highly educated elites produce a paradox - a hereditary meritocratic class.

It becomes harder for middle-class kids to compete against members of the hypercharged educated class. Indeed, the middle-class areas become more socially isolated from the highly educated areas. And this is not even to speak of the children who grow up in neighborhoods in which more boys go to jail than college, in which marriage is not the norm before child-rearing, in which homes are often unstable, in which long-range planning is absurd, in which the social skills you need to achieve are not even passed down.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush is no doubt going to talk about his vision of an ownership society. But homeownership or pension ownership is only part of a larger story. The larger story is the one Lincoln defined over a century ago, the idea that this nation should provide an open field and a fair chance so that all can compete in the race of life.

More here

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

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

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26 January, 2005

UNBALANCED APPROACH TO EDUCATION ABOUT HOMSEXUALITY

Attempts to discourage bullying and abuse in schools are important if not essential but stigmatizing dislike of homosexuality as bullying is surely not. If homosexuality is to be discussed at all, teachers need to acknowledge that many normal people find it disgusting or immoral and that dislike of it or its practitioners is NOT bullying or ipso facto abusive

"Using a young readers' novel called "The Misfits" as its centerpiece, middle schools nationwide will participate in a "No Name-Calling Week" initiative starting Monday. The program, now in its second year, has the backing of groups from the Girl Scouts to Amnesty International but has also drawn complaints that it overemphasizes harassment of gay youths. The initiative was developed by the New York-based Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, which seeks to ensure that schools safely accommodate students of all sexual orientations. GLSEN worked with James Howe, the openly gay author of "The Misfits" and many other popular children's books. "Gay students aren't the only kids targeted — this isn't about special rights for them," Howe said. "But the fact is that 'faggot' is probably the most common insult at schools." ... "The Misfits" deals with four much-taunted middle schoolers — one of them gay — who run for the student council on a platform advocating an end to nasty name-calling.

GLSEN is unsure how many schools will participate in this week's event, but says 5,100 educators from 36 states have registered, up from 4,000 last year. Participation in a related writing-music-art contest rose from 100 students last year to 1,600 this year; the winning poem was written by Sue Anna Yeh, a 13-year-old from Sugar Land, Texas. "No Name-calling Week" takes aim at insults of all kinds — whether based on a child's appearance, background or behavior.

But a handful of conservative critics have zeroed in on the references to harassment based on sexual orientation. "I hope schools will realize it's less an exercise in tolerance than a platform for liberal groups to promote their pan-sexual agenda," said Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute. "Schools should be steering kids away from identifying as gay," Knight said. "You can teach civility to kids and tell them every child is valued without conveying the message that failure to accept homosexuality as normal is a sign of bigotry." In Iowa, complaints by scores of parents about the gay themes in "The Misfits" prompted the Pleasant Valley School Board to rule that teachers could no longer read it aloud to elementary school classes, although it could remain in school libraries....

One of GLSEN's most persistent critics is Warren Throckmorton, director of counseling at Grove City College, a Christian school outside Pittsburgh. His skeptical comments about "No Name-Calling Week" have been widely circulated this month on conservative Web sites. "There's no question middle school can be a difficult place — I'm not advocating that any group gets mistreated," Throckmorton said in a telephone interview. "But it will definitely make traditionally oriented teachers and parents and kids feel very uncomfortable, if they happen to object to homosexuality on moral grounds," he said of GLSEN's program. "If you disagree, you're hateful, you're bigoted, you're a homophobe. They're using name-calling to combat name-calling." "

More here. For more on "homophobia", see here.



BRITAIN ATTEMPTS TO RESTORE EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS

A LEVELS and GCSEs would remain the gold standard in education, Ruth Kelly said yesterday, dealing a blow to the most ambitious education reforms to secondary schooling in 60 years. Days before the Government officially responds to the proposals, the Education Secretary clearly indicated that the exams would not only remain in place but would be built upon to stretch the most able pupils.

In her first policy announcement, Ms Kelly also pledged to stamp out low-level classroom disruption with a new zero-tolerance policy. Ms Kelly said: "We have got to build on GCSEs and A levels, which after all are recognised as very important and good exams out there by the general public and by employers. So, yes, as we go forward and, as we widen opportunities and bring in a range of vocational options for students as well as academic options, we really do need to make sure that we have GCSEs and A levels remaining in place and build upon that."

In October Sir Mike Tomlinson, the former chief inspector of England's schools, proposed a ten-year programme of reform that envisaged a four-level diploma with literacy, numeracy and information technology at its core, to replace GCSEs and A levels by 2014. An extended personal project would replace existing coursework and a programme of "main learning" would allow students to follow both vocational and academic courses. Last night Sir Mike said he agreed that A levels and GCSEs should be the building blocks of any future educational framework. "I always envisaged they would remain in content and assembly, and would look, if not exactly the same, similar to what we have now," he said, adding that he did ultimately see the end of the exams in their current form.

John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, insisted that the comments did not indicate the end of the radical reforms. He said: "The question remains open as to when the names disappear, as they assuredly will do eventually, but she is correct to say they are a proven system and must form a large part of the building block of the new system."

Ms Kelly also made it clear that after two months in office she had put improving classroom discipline at the top of her agenda. She said: "I would like to see the teacher being able to remove disruptive children from the classroom completely and have either alternative provision within the school or indeed off the school, and may be working together with other schools in a particular area to provide that."

More here

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

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

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25 January, 2005

DECEPTIVE OPPOSITION TO EDUCATIONAL OUTSOURCING

As the private sector offers services in more segments of the $500 billion K-12 education sector, special interest groups are working to discredit not only private-sector involvement in public education, but also the private sector as a whole. Two recent examples illustrate how teacher unions and other education advocacy groups often present their members with a negatively biased view of the private sector and its involvement in education. This approach leaves educators unexposed to the larger body of evidence that shows competition and privatization have improved service in almost every business sector, including education.

In the September 2004 issue of NEA Today, the monthly organ of the National Education Association, a series of articles collected under the title "Cash Cow" highlights privatization failures and gives union members advice on how to fight privatization initiatives. The report fails to mention the hundreds of case studies showing benefits to children and the public from school privatization. The NEA Today series argues that when "private profits outweigh public accountability, educators and kids pay the price." As evidence for the failure of privatization initiatives, the articles offer stock horror stories of privatization missteps and selected studies showing privatization is more expensive than traditional public-sector operation.

The series fails to mention the large body of research that shows substantial cost savings and improvements in service quality from privatization of school support services. According to the most recent school privatization survey conducted by American School & University magazine, 32 percent of the nation's school districts outsource transportation and about 17 percent outsource food service. Extensive literature reviews of cost savings have found between 20 and 40 percent savings from school outsourcing. For example, in 2002, the Philadelphia school district faced a $28 million deficit. By turning to privatized transportation, custodial, food service, and other support services, the district saved $29 million over two years and erased its deficit--while running a robust teacher recruitment program and without firing any teachers......

The NEA position on outsourcing was echoed in a September 2004 report on commercialism in education from Arizona State University's Alex Molnar, who negatively portrays private-sector involvement in education as exploiting children. Even sponsorships, such as corporate support of the National Merit Scholarship Program, are dismissed as programs that "often serve the donors' commercial purposes." The report, Virtually Everywhere: Marketing to Children in America's Schools, measures what Molnar views as the evils of commercialism in schools by counting the number of media references to private-sector involvement in education. Those references include not only privatization but also corporate sponsorships, exclusive licensing agreements, sponsored educational materials, and fundraising. Molnar reports that media references in five out of eight categories of schoolhouse commercialism increased between July 1, 2003 and June 30, 2004. Overall, he finds media references to commercialism increased 9 percent as compared to the 2002-2003 school year.

Molnar and his Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State are affiliated with the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), a national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups, and concerned parents. CCFC's mission is "countering the harmful effects of marketing to children through action, advocacy, education, research, and collaboration among organizations and individuals who care about children. CCFC supports the rights of children to grow up--and the rights of parents to raise them--without being undermined by rampant consumerism.".....

Molnar's report offers no evidence of corporations limiting curriculum or blocking participation in the democratic process. His report and the recent NEA Today demonstrate the need for a more balanced presentation of private-sector involvement in education for the benefit of administrators, teachers, and parents.

More here:



ALMOST ANYTHING IS BETTER THAN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Several days ago, I ran across an article about a 52-year-old man who had lived with his 12-year-old daughter in a tent in a Portland , Oregon park for four years. When they were discovered, the girl was described as "well-spoken beyond her years." Actually, this girl, who would have been in the seventh grade, tested at the 12th grade level. And what did her educational materials consist of? A set of old encyclopedias and a Bible. A few days ago, in one of those odd synchronicities that happen to all of us, I ran across another article about a father encountering three high-school girls who were talking about a party they had attended. He writes:

"Seemingly still semi-drunk from the party, the 16- and 17-year-old girls began to recount how much coke, weed, vodka, guys and girls they did the night before. Listening to the F-bomb riddled report of the previous night's peccadilloes left me thinking, how sad . . . and . . . what a waste . . . ."

He recounts how he and his wife pulled their daughters out of the public schools: "It's been eleven months since we pulled our teenage daughters out of the public school system and started to home school them, and I could kick myself for waiting so long. The educational, emotional, spiritual and physical progress they have made has been amazing."

I'm certainly not defending an obviously extremely eccentric father raising his daughter in a tent from the ages of eight to 12. But I am sympathetic to his reasons. It's entirely possible his daughter might have turned into one of those bragging 16- and 17-year-olds. I find it bizarre that I am sympathetic at all to a man raising his daughter in a tent in a park. But I am. It's because of what the public schools have finally, after all these years, created: kids whom I wouldn't want for my own.

When I ask myself if I would like to be raised like that, of course I say, "No." But then a little voice says, "Remember seventh grade?" When it comes right down to it, in some ways the tent in the park would have been better. When a girl raised in a tent in a park, with only a Bible and an obsolete set of encyclopedias, turns out so much better than kids from the public schools that a comparison isn't even close, it shows the public school are now beyond repair.

I'll bet this 12-year-old isn't damaged at all. In ten years, I'll bet she'll be just fine. She certainly will have some interesting stories to tell. As for the three girls soused on the coke and booze and weed? Well, who knows? Only time will tell. But I've met these people, lots of them, and so have you. Not all of them make it out okay.

I'm sure those who support the public schools are having a conniption fit over this fundamentalist Christian father raising his daughter in a tent. Oh, the horror or it all! Yet, when it comes to those three girls and others like them, all we hear are excuses. And, of course, the eternal whining that more money is needed.

The public schools have been going bad for a long time. They were going bad when I was in them. Even with all the partying we did, we would have thought those three drunken and stoned girls were nuts, the kind almost all of us would have stayed away from. They were the exception then. Now it looks as if they are becoming the norm.

Some people claim we need the schools to "socialize" kids. Schools don't socialize kids; they traumatize them. I am reminded of the popularity of Stephen King's first novel, Carrie, which was about the shark pit that high school can be. And King, who obviously based the novel on his time in school, went to high school in the '60s. Now it's 40 years later, and worse, not better.

More here

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

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24 January, 2005

EVOLUTION WARS

There IS a fair solution

Last week, a federal judge ruled on a nationally-watched Georgia case, in which the Cobb County school board had ordered warning stickers to be placed on the outside of biology textbooks. The stickers indicated that evolution is "a theory, not a fact." The decision to add labels to the textbooks sparked controversy. A group of parents who opposed the policy filed a lawsuit against the school board on the grounds that the stickers are an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper agreed with the challengers, saying that the labels send "a message that the school board agrees with the beliefs of Christian fundamentalists and Creationists." (The school board is appealing the ruling.) The judge's decision is a little ridiculous, based on the text of what the school board-supported stickers say. The entire disclaimer reads: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

The statement does not mention God or religion. It is hardly an endorsement of a belief that the world was created in six literal days. And if there is one thing progressive educators usually endorse wholeheartedly, it is "critical thinking."

However, the sticker itself is not the real issue. Nick Matzke, a spokesman for the National Center for Science Education, identified what would have happened if his side had lost this court battle: "We would have seen it pop up all over the country." What is the "it" to which he referred? "It" is creationism itself. Lynn Hogue, a Georgia State University constitutional law professor, made clear that the issue is bigger than just a "critical thinking" controversy. "Anti-evolutionists can take their case to the pulpit, but they have no business making it in public school classrooms through stickers in textbooks paid for by taxpayer dollars."

Of course, a very large percentage of the people living and paying taxes in Cobb County are Christians. Why is it acceptable to force them to use their tax dollars to teach their children something to which they strenuously object, but unacceptable to place a sticker on textbooks that asks other people to consider, even for a moment, beliefs contrary to their own? That question gets to the crux of the problem: No matter how divergent their views and values, all Americans are forced to pay for public schools, no matter what the educators teach. But how can millions of people get what they want out of a one-size-fits-all-so-deal-with-it system? The answer is that they cannot. And the fight over evolution is just one of numerous struggles precipitated by a system for which all must pay, but only a select few control.

This past December, for instance, a lawsuit was narrowly averted when a Wisconsin school district lifted its ban on students distributing Christmas cards with religious messages. Last May, a Kentucky girl was barred from attending her high school prom because she was wearing a dress styled after the Confederate flag. She is currently suing the school district for violating her right to free speech. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, parents and educators warred over whether phonics should be the basis for how schools taught reading.

Thankfully, there is a way for all parents -- the phonics crowd, whole language enthusiasts, creationists, defenders of Darwinian dogmas, etc. -- to get their way: privatization. If governments were to let parents choose their children's schools, then fights over educational standards would disappear, becoming matters of consumer choice, not political power. If the state of Georgia decided tomorrow to disband its public schools, divide the funds that it currently spends on education equally among school-age children, and issue a voucher to every child, we would see a lot of positive things happen. Educational controversies would be resolved between parents and educators, not by court order, parents would no longer be set against each other in a struggle to determine what their children are taught. And schools could get on with the business of educating children.

Source



CALIFORNIA: POLITICALLY CORRECT EDUCATION AT WORK

California legislators in recent years have concentrated on ensuring that no-one is forced to learn English and ensuring that it is great to be "transgendered" etc, but what about getting some education into the kids?

California's public school system lags behind most of the nation on almost every objective measurement of student achievement, funding, teacher qualifications and school facilities, according to a new RAND Corporation analysis that is the first comprehensive examination of measurable dimensions of the state's education system. The study issued today chronicles how the state's K-12 school system has fallen from a national leader 30 years ago to its current ranking near the bottom in nearly every objective category. It was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which is working to build support for improving California schools.

While the assessment of California schools is generally negative, researchers also note several positive trends, including significant improvement in student math achievement in recent years, and funding increases for school construction and repair. "A lot of people have expressed concern about the state of K-12 education in California," said Stephen Carroll, a RAND senior economist and lead author of the report. "We found that those concerns are well placed. California schools are lagging behind most other states and these findings suggest policymakers need to make major changes in order to repair the problems. Despite some improvements, the state has a long way to go to reclaim its standing as a national leader in K-12 education."

"This report makes the scope of the California education crisis crystal clear," said Marshall S. Smith, director of the Hewlett Foundation's education program. "We need so much more than short-term Band-Aids - we need long-term solutions that deal with the system's underlying problems. To secure California's future, we need serious school finance reform to ensure that all children have the educational resources to achieve high standards." California currently spends more than $50 billion each year to educate about 6 million elementary and secondary students - about 12.8 percent of the nation's school-age population.

RAND researchers examined the status of K-12 education in California across several broad measures, including student academic achievement, teacher qualifications, school facilities and non-educational benchmarks such as teenage pregnancy rates. Among the findings:

* California student achievement on national standardized tests is near the bottom of the 50 states, ranking above only Louisiana and Mississippi. California's low scores cannot be accounted for by a high percentage of minority students, who generally have lower scores because many come from low-income families and sometimes must learn English as a second language. Controlling for students' background, California's scores are the lowest of any state.

* California students have made gains on national achievement tests in both math and reading. In particular, the improvement seen among 4th graders in California in the past seven years has been greater than their peers in other states.

* California has the second highest ratio of students per teacher in the nation, even after a major effort began in 1996 to reduce ratios for K-3 and 9th grade. California K-12 schools have an average of 20.9 students per teacher, compared with a national average of 16.1.

* California school districts' teacher standards are generally lower than in other states. Just 46 percent of school districts in California require teachers to have full standard certification in the subjects they teach, compared with 82 percent nationally.

* The real average annual teacher salary in California during the 2000-2001 school year was about the same as it was in 1969-70, when adjusted for inflation. The adjusted annual average salary of about $39,000 (in today's dollars) places California last among the five largest states and 32nd nationwide.

* While California spent less per pupil on school facilities than other states during the 1990s, progress has been made in recent years with passage of both state and local bond measures. However, schools in central cities and in rural areas still have a high number of inadequate facilities.

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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.

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23 January, 2005

DIPLOMA MILLS FOOL THE FEDS OVER AND OVER AGAIN

What does it say for America's "real" educational qualifications when nobody can tell the holders of them from diploma-mill frauds? It sure looks like America's whole education system is not far short of being one vast diploma-mill

Laura L. Callahan was very proud of her Ph.D. When she received it a few years ago, she promptly rewrote her official biography to highlight the academic accomplishment, referring to it not once or twice but nine times in a single-page summary of her career. And she never let her employees at the Labor Department, where she served as deputy chief information officer, forget it, even demanding that they call her "Doctor."....

One employee was skeptical of Callahan's qualifications, however, and began quietly asking questions. The answers worried him, especially after Callahan was hired in 2003 as the Department of Homeland Security's deputy chief information officer. His concerns and the resulting investigation ultimately revealed a troubling pattern of r‚sum‚ fraud at federal agencies, including several charged with protecting Americans from terrorism. The scandal raises serious doubts about the government's ability to vet the qualifications of public employees on whom the nation's security depends.

"When she was running around telling people to call her 'Dr. Callahan,' I asked where she got her degree," says Richard Wainwright, a computer specialist who worked for Callahan at Labor for two years. "When I found out, I laughed." It turns out Callahan got her precious sheepskin from Hamilton University. Not Hamilton College, the highly competitive school in Clinton, New York, but Hamilton University, the unaccredited fee-for-degree "distance learning" center in Evanston, Wyoming, right on the Utah border. Such diploma mills frequently use names similar to those of accredited schools.....

To get her Ph.D., Callahan merely had to thumb through a workbook and take an open-book exam. The whole correspondence course-which includes instruction on business ethics-takes about five hours to complete. A 2,000-word paper (shorter than this article) counts as a dissertation. In short, Callahan's diploma isn't worth the paper it's written on. Though there is that nice leather-bound holder. It gets worse. Callahan owes her entire academic pedigree to Ham U. The bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science she lists on her r‚sum‚ were also bought at the diploma mill.....

At the time, Callahan had applied for an important high-level position at the Department of Homeland Security. The job was deputy chief information officer, similar to the post she held at the Labor Department. But this new job required integrating and managing some of the nation's most sensitive databases in a time of war. Callahan clearly wasn't qualified, no matter what her r‚sum‚ said. Wainwright wondered if she could even be trusted with a top-secret security clearance.

After Callahan landed the post in April 2003, Wainwright anonymously tipped off a Beltway trade journal about her phony degrees and fraudulent r‚sum‚. Government Computer News broke the story about Callahan, triggering an 11-month congressional investigation that culminated in government-wide reforms meant to curb the use of diploma mills by federal employees, whose tuition is often financed by taxpayers.

"She was in a position where she could cause$)A!-damage to the United States," Wainwright says, speaking publicly for the first time about the case. "And that's why I did what I did." Callahan's fraud was exposed in May 2003. Curiously, she wasn't forced to resign until March 26, 2004, after being placed on administrative leave-with pay-the previous June. That means she continued to draw her Department of Homeland Security salary of between $128,000 and $175,000 for nearly 10 months while under a serious ethical cloud. Misrepresenting qualifications on a r‚sum‚, an official bio, or an application-including submitting false academic credentials-is grounds for immediate dismissal, according to federal rules written by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).....

After Callahan's phony degrees were exposed, Congress asked its investigative arm, the GAO (recently renamed the Government Accountability Office), to audit other federal agencies to find out how widespread the problem of bogus academic credentials is inside the government. Congress also wanted to get a sense of how much, if any, federal money pays for tuitions at diploma mills.

Looking at the personnel of eight federal agencies chosen at random, the GAO found that 463 employees showed up on the enrollment records of just three unaccredited schools. (It actually looked at four colleges, but only three responded to its request for information and only two fully cooperated.) This was merely a sampling of the dozens of mills operating nationwide, not an exhaustive audit; given the limited nature of the GAO's investigation, the true number of federal employees who are academically unqualified to fill the positions they hold could be in the thousands.

Agencies tasked with defending America from terrorism were among the top employers of workers with phony diplomas identified by the GAO. The Department of Defense employs 257 of them. Transportation has 17. Justice has 13; Homeland Security, 12; Treasury, eight.

The GAO also found that two diploma mills alone have received a total of nearly $170,000 in payments from a dozen federal agencies for tuition for 64 employees. Hamilton University refused to cooperate with the GAO in its audit of federal payments for student fees, so it remains unclear whether Callahan's tuition was subsidized.

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BRITISH STATE SCHOOLS WERE DESIGNED TO HELP THE MILITARY, NOT THE POOR

Yet systematic education was introduced into England by the Church, not the state. And the education was indeed systematic, with each parish having access to a church school. There were more than 12,000 elementary church schools by 1891, and the Church's enterprise in mass education was so successful that, throughout the 19th century, British literacy rates exceeded those on the Continent... Only in 1870 did the Lords pass the famous Act to create state schools. Between 1870 and 1891, the state and church schools competed levelly - and the state schools lost: practically nobody attended them, and their over-provision created more than a million empty school places.

It was the Conservatives under Lord Salisbury who nationalised the church schools. The Tories, worried by the German threat, wanted the schools to teach military drill, but the church schools refused to become Prussian academies. So, in 1891, Salisbury made the state schools an offer: he would abolish their fees if they taught military drill.

Fees were then 10 shillings a year (except for the children of the poor who, at both state and church schools, were educated free) but, Salisbury suggested, if their fees were abolished, the state schools might attract pupils. To pay for the "free" state schools, Salisbury did not double the income tax of the rich; instead he doubled the domestic rates, the tax that preferentially hit ordinary people.

Under this double whammy of targeted taxes and "free" schools, a third of all parents had, by 1902, transferred their children from church to state schools. The church schools thus found their margins so squeezed that they had to apply for government grants - which were provided only if they accepted local authority control and if they introduced . . . military drill.

More here

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

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22 January, 2005

BRITAIN'S UNIVERSITES BECOMING FEMINIZED

I know it is AWFUL of me to mention it, but would it have anything to do with the "dumbing down" of British university courses in recent years? Could universities have become a new, easier version of the old "finishing schools"?

The increasing dominance of young women at university was revealed yesterday in a report examining social class differences in higher education. Teenage girls of all social classes entered university in much greater numbers than boys, with the rate of increase greatest among those from the poorest backgrounds. They were only 6 per cent more likely than young men to go to university in 1994 but the advantage tripled to 18 per cent by 2000, research by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) showed. Once drop-out rates at university were taken into account, women were 27 per cent more likely than men to get a degree.

The growing inequality of the sexes was most stark in the poorest areas, where working-class girls were 29 per cent more likely than boys to enter university. The findings emerged from a study by Hefce that showed that Tony Blair has failed to narrow the class divide at university. Youngsters from the wealthiest 20 per cent of homes were six times more likely to go to university than those from the poorest 20 per cent. The gap between the classes remained “deep and persistent” despite major expansion of higher education and government demands for universities to accept a broader range of candidates. Working-class boys, in particular, formed an increasingly isolated rump with little prospect of a degree. “If you want to go to university, choose your mother carefully,” Sir Howard Newby, the chief executive of Hefce, said. “This report highlights just how entrenched the divisions are between advantaged and disadvantaged areas.”.....

Children in low-participation areas typically lived in rented council homes with parents on benefits or in poorly paid manual jobs, who did not have a car and were unlikely to have taken a foreign holiday. The nearest secondary school had only a small proportion of pupils passing five good GCSES. Those from the highest- participation areas were “frequently near schools, often fee-paying, where very nearly all the pupils gain these grades”. They lived in large detached and semi-detached homes in affluent areas, with parents who had professional careers and had usually been to university themselves

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WHAT GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS CANNOT TEACH

This was written a long time ago by an opponent of government schooling but is still pretty right

Now, what are the things that government schools dare not teach?

They dare not teach the spirit of the Constitution as set forth in the first official document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence. They dare not teach it because it says that all men, not just the majority, are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A man isn't free to pursue happiness when the majority in any school district, state or nation can coerce him to pay for a school that he believes violates the principles upon which this government was formed. The school teachers dare not emphasize this part of the Declaration of Independence. They dare not explain the true meaning of this statement. If they were successful in explaining and teaching the true meaning of these ideologies, there would be no gun-run schools.

Again, they dare not teach that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed. They have to completely repudiate the ideas of the American way of life. They have to teach the old-world philosophy of the divine right of governments, only now they call it the divine right of the majority rather than the divine right of kings.

They dare not teach in government schools the meaning of liberty. It is doubtful whether any teacher in gun-run schools dares define the kind of liberty the Founding Fathers mutually pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to support. If the government schools successfully taught the meaning of the liberty our Founding Fathers had in mind, there would be no government schools that starve the intellects of our children.

The government schools dare not teach the meaning of the Golden Rule. If they were successful in getting their pupils to understand that they should not force other people to pay for something they did not want, then they could see that it was a violation of the Golden Rule to force others to pay for their schooling.

They, of course, dare not teach their pupils to believe that if it is wicked and a violation of the Golden Rule for one man to do a thing, it is still wicked and a violation of the Golden Rule if 49 per cent or 99 per cent of the people do the same thing. They, thus, dare not teach the youth that the ideal government, the only kind of government that can be of value to mankind, is one that is limited to the use of defensive force and never has a right, under any circumstances, to initiate force.

They dare not teach the First Commandment: "Thou shalt have no other Gods before me" because they are bowing down and worshipping the will of the majority rather than the eternal laws of God that no man made and no man can unmake.

They dare not teach "Thou shalt not covet," because they are violating the Coveting Commandment.

They believe they do not need to teach well enough that people will voluntarily pay their salaries. They get their pay by violence rather than by rendering service well enough so that those who pay them believe they are benefited by their employment.

They dare not teach discipline and self-reliance because they are not disciplining themselves enough to render such service that they can be paid voluntarily. The teachers take the shortcut and use a police club to get their money. That certainly is not discipline, nor is it self-reliance.

They dare not teach thrift and the harm that comes from getting into debt. They dare not do this because the government burdens every child and every person in the United States with a monstrous debt.

They dare not teach respect for individual initiative because government schools are based on lack of respect for other people's initiative. They are based on the theory that "We've got the power and the individual is helpless and we're going to make him pay for anything our agents think is education."

They dare not teach humility and meekness because the means used by government schools are the exact opposite of humility and meekness. Are believers in tax-run schools so sure they are right that they are willing to initiate force to make people support their ideas of education? They see themselves as so exalted that they have lost all humility and meekness. And remember, "He who exalts himself shall become abased."

They dare not teach children to reason. They have to teach them not to recognize a contradiction or a dilemma. If the pupils were taught to reason, they would recognize the tyranny that is bound to follow making people pay for things and ideas they abhor.

They dare not teach the harm that follows socialism, communism, collectivism and fascism for to do so would let pupils realize that aggressive force is part of socialism, communism, collectivism and fascism.

They dare not teach that what man wants must be obtained on a voluntary basis. They dare not teach this because they get what they want on an involuntary basis.

They dare not teach the difference between socialism and private ownership of property. They dare not explain that under socialism the only way a man can benefit is by injuring another, as in the case in compelling people to pay for schools they think will destroy the country.

They dare not explain that in free enterprise, including free enterprise in education, the gain of one is the gain of all.

Tax-run schools dare not teach love and charity because they are using aggressive force. They seem to think that aggressive force is better than persuasion by love and charity.

They cannot teach patience because they are so impatient about getting what they seem to believe is an education that they dare not wait to persuade those who should employ them to pay their salaries.

They cannot teach peace and goodwill because they are an example of the opposite of peace and goodwill. They are an example of initiating force, of threatening to get from others by aggressive force what they think they should get.

They cannot teach that the government is a servant of individuals because they believe it should be supported by giving it a monopoly to use aggressive force to make people pay. They can only teach that it is a master of the individual.

They cannot teach justice because their method of supporting the schools is based on injustice - arbitrary, initiated force.

They cannot teach that each man is responsible for his own life because they deny that by using force to take part of man's energy against his will, and man cannot be responsible for his life unless he has the right to choose.

There is nothing more important for parents than their duty to see that their children are treated fairly and have an opportunity to learn from schools that can teach these great moral principles and axioms. It is not the money we're wasting in our tax-run schools that is so important, but it is that our children are not being taught the moral laws that tax-less schools can teach.

It is because children can be taught what is right in tax-less schools and they cannot be so taught in tax-run schools that I am obliged to do what little I can to get parents to see that they are not doing their duty to their children by sending them to tax-run schools.

What we need above everything else is more people devoting more time to seeing that the youth of the land are instilled with belief in the great moral laws, the Golden Rule, and the Declaration of Independence. Government schools cannot teach successfully the will to learn. The best way to teach anything is by example. But the superintendent and managers of the schools themselves are not enough interested in the will to learn to be willing to answer questions as they would before a court to determine whether what they are doing is in harmony with what they profess to believe. If there is anything a man of integrity should want to learn, it is whether what he is doing is in harmony and consistent with what he says.

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.

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21 January, 2005

MAGNET SCHOOLS DISADVANTAGE HISPANICS

the Los Angeles school distict has a population that is three quarters Hispanic. It also has some special high-quality schools called magnet schools. The whole point of these schools is to give a better education to minorities. So those schools are full of Hispanics, right? WRONG! Less than 50% of the students are Hispanic. Instead the magnet schools have disproportionate numbers of whites, Asians and blacks. How come? It seems to be an outcome of all the twists and turns they need to do in order to get blacks in. So favouring one minority disadvantages another. What a surprise! An excerpt from a recent report below:

"Thousands of parents vying to get their children into some of Los Angeles' most sought-after public schools find themselves caught in a byzantine bureaucratic process with strict racial quotas and almost insurmountable odds.

The Los Angeles Unified School District's 162 magnet schools, designed to be among the best campuses in the district, mostly are as competitive for applicants as any popular private school. Of the 66,000 applications last year, only about 16,000 new students were admitted. Applications for next year are due Friday.

The district advertises the program in a 12-page booklet called "Choices." In reality, however, L.A. Unified allows parents to select just one school. Most parents barely have a chance, let alone a choice.

"We tell parents it's a little bit of the lottery," said Sue Becker, the magnet coordinator of 32nd Street/USC Performing Arts Magnet. More than 4,000 students applied to the school last year for about 100 spots, making it by far the most popular school in the district.

The magnet program was established in 1977 as Los Angeles Unified's court-sanctioned answer to forced busing and a way to prevent racial isolation in the district. Designed to better integrate district schools, the magnet program sought to move white children into schools in predominantly minority neighborhoods, and vice versa, by luring them with specialized classes in science, communications and the arts, among other subjects.

Because of high demand, the district selects students by computer, using a complicated points system that awards more points to students whose neighborhood schools are overcrowded or located in predominantly minority neighborhoods. Under stringent racial guidelines, each magnet school should be 60% to 70% minority and 30% to 40% white.

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SOCIAL PROMOTION: REALITY BITES

Bolstered by statistics showing students who are held back benefit from remedial education, the Florida Board of Education decided to ask lawmakers to end "social promotion" at all grade levels. Board officials said Tuesday it would be an important step in ensuring students are prepared when they are promoted to the next grade. However, details of how the state would handle the tens of thousands of children who wouldn't advance have not yet been worked out.

Right now, only third-graders in Florida have to show they read at the appropriate skill levels before they are promoted to the fourth grade. Those who are held back can attend summer reading camps or repeat the third grade.

The issue is a touchy one for parents, who often fight having their children held back. It also would require the state to adopt a more widespread, and likely expensive, system of providing remedial education throughout public schools. But board Chairman Phil Handy said ending social promotion is necessary to ensure that children graduating from Florida's public schools have mastered basic academic skills. Students who get to high school with only elementary reading skills have no real chance of success, he said. "That's not right," he said. "We need to find an alternative to that."

Last year, almost 39,000 of the nearly 190,000 third-graders failed to meet state reading standards . More than a third were sent on to the fourth grade anyway because they qualified for an exemption, including spending less than two years studying English as a second language or demonstrating reading proficiency in other ways. Of those held back, 60 percent brought their reading skills up to par. The others either needed additional help, or eventually were promoted because state policy allows a child to be held back only two years.

Education Commissioner John Winn said if lawmakers adopt a policy ending social promotions, the board would phase it in over several years.

Source



Teachers with a graduate degree are no better: "Although Linda C. Cavalluzzo's recent study of teacher-student data from the Miami-Dade County School District was designed to throw light on the value of certification by the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, her study inadvertently exposed how little value graduate degrees add to teaching performance. While teachers with National Board certification had a size effect on student achievement of about 7 percent, teachers with a major in the subject they were teaching -- in this case, math -- showed a much larger size effect of 11 percent. Teachers with graduate degrees had a size effect of only 2 percent. In other words, teacher graduate degrees -- which are rewarded with much higher pay -- make virtually no difference to student achievement."

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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.

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

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20 January, 2005

HERE IS SOME OF THE EVIDENCE THAT LEFTIST "EDUCATORS" IGNORE IN FAVOUR OF THEIR PET THEORIES

Project Follow Through was a research project started by the Johnson administration. Its goal was to find the best educational methods for breaking the cycle of poverty. Still today, Project Follow Through remains the world's largest scientific education-research experiment. Despite not officially ending until 1995, by 1976 it had produced exceedingly clear findings.

The project worked like this: Architects of various educational approaches were invited to submit applications and serve as sponsors for model projects. After some 22 educational approaches were selected for testing, parent groups from schools that served kids from poor families were allowed to select the model that their school, for the next several years, would follow. Eventually, more than 70,000 kindergarten through third grade students from some 180 American schools, both rural and urban, participated in the project. The students learned to read through the various educational approaches being tested, then were followed through succeeding years with additional tests and measurements.

The final Follow Through report showed that 20 of the models were outright failures. Virtually all of those approaches to teaching reading were developed by university education/school academics and based on the educational dogmas of John Dewey and Jean Piaget.

The one clear winner of the trial -- the only model that brought children close to the 50th percentile in all subject areas -- was a model called Direct Instruction. Developed by a preschool teacher from Illinois, it was subsequently sponsored by the then-tiny University of Oregon.

Although the results of Project Follow Through were clear, the U.S. education establishment fled from those results in conspicuous panic. The Ford Foundation hastened to do an evaluation suggesting it was inappropriate to even ask which model worked best. Then a co-author of that particular white paper wrote another report, this one for the then-Carter administration. He argued -- bizarrely, given the quantitative scientific underpinnings of the entire Follow Through project -- that "The deficiencies of quantitative, experimental evaluation approaches are so thorough and irreparable as to disqualify their use." Finally, the Carter administration, deep in political hock to the National Education Association and eager to retain its support through the coming Democratic primaries, chose to not even disseminate the results of Project Follow Through. This, even though the federal government had paid some $40 million to learn precisely what the project had proven, and though the quality of life of millions of youngsters was at stake.

Today, new research projects continue to show that Direct Instruction and phonics produce results far superior to those of the Deweyite and Piaget-ish ed-school theorists. Yet the education establishment remains deeply wedded to its failing methodologies and openly hostile to those ratified by scientific measurement. To justify such hostility, the educational bigfeet extend their antagonism to objective science itself, opting instead for subjective and "descriptive" studies. It's a ploy that allows them to willfully ignore results that do not flatter the methodologies their ideologies may anoint.

The University of Oregon's Douglas Carnine sees this as symptomatic of a field that has not yet matured into a true profession. From his post at the National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators, he notes a parallel between education today and medicine before outside pressures compelled doctors to adhere to rigorous science. "In education, the judgments of 'experts' frequently appear to be unconstrained and sometimes altogether unaffected by objective research," writes Carnine. "Many of these experts are so captivated by romantic ideas about learning or so blinded by ideology that they have closed their minds to the results of rigorous experiments. Until education becomes the kind of profession that reveres evidence, we should not be surprised to find its experts dispensing unproven methods, endlessly flitting from one fad to another. The greatest victims of these fads are the very students who are most at risk."

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"ETHNIC STUDIES" AT A BERKELEY HIGH SCHOOL

Berkeley High is among the most racially diverse public high schools in the nation, and one of few that offer an ethnic-studies course. In 2003, 42 percent of its students were white, 31 percent African American, 13 percent Hispanic or Latino, and 10 percent Asian, according to California Department of Education data. The requirement, however, has been controversial since its student-driven creation in the early 1990s. While school administrators and some students, parents, and faculty have been staunch ethnic-studies supporters, others have tried to do away with it over the years. In 2003, more than one thousand students, about one-third of the school, signed a petition to abolish the class.

Because the course lacked a set curriculum, many students griped that it varied wildly according to who taught it. At best, it was viewed as less than academic. "I didn't find the class very helpful," sophomore Julia Brady says. "There were a lot of things about making posters of your identity and writing poetry and things like that." At worst, current and former students say, teachers brought their personal biases into the classroom and created a divisive atmosphere. One instructor reportedly taught that the Holocaust didn't happen; another, that the US government developed AIDS to kill Africans. "It was insensitive, not politically neutral, and lots of indoctrination," says Bradley Johnson, the 2003-2004 student director who represented Berkeley High students on the school board. "It was not even a mainline liberal point of view." Johnson, now a freshman at Claremont McKenna College, adds that he surveyed students last year and found the majority wanted ethnic studies eliminated.

Some teachers left whites feeling villainized and everyone else feeling victimized, according to Johnson, who is black. "You would think it would be more a study of black culture," he recalls. "It was only referred to in the context of it being oppressed, never of it succeeding." White kids, meanwhile, reported that they were made to feel like the oppressors. "It was a recap of random events in history that were supposed to be linked, but they weren't linked except that they were all about how bad white people were," says Ellie Lammer, who took the class in 2000 and is now a freshman at Tufts University....

Then, last March, the school board approved the latest name change and a new course outline. Administrators hired an outside consultant to help create curriculum guidelines, and Freshman Seminar teachers convened in planning workshops over the summer. Among other things, the resulting proposal called for a more standardized and rigorous curriculum. "I love the program," says Freshman Seminar teacher James Dopman, who helped lead the redesign. "I have a solid curriculum, it's very dynamic, and it's very rich." .... A key component in Dopman's curriculum is teaching students how they can become active on the social issues discussed in class. "Effecting change can range from actively working in your community with volunteer work to calling attention to a friend's racist or homophobic comments," one assignment reads.

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19 January, 2005

SUNDAY SCHOOL NOW TEACHING ENVIRONMENTALISM RATHER THAN CHRISTIANITY

In spite of the "school wars," parents have felt safe taking their children to Sunday School to help build a solid moral foundation. But, have you looked at your church's Sunday School curriculum lately? You may be shocked to find tree-hugging, earth-worshipping paganism intermixed in the Christian lessons. Many churches are now using a Sunday School curriculum created by an organization in Colorado called "Group." There is nothing in Group's publications that tells who they are, what they believe in, or anything about the backgrounds of the creators of the materials. But Group curriculum is now sold in most Christian bookstores. The Group material offers "Hands-on Bible curriculum" and advocates a "new approach to learning."

A close inspection of Group's materials and teaching methods, however, shows it bears a close resemblance to the behavior-modification techniques of OBE. For example, under the sub-head "Successful Teaching: You can do it!" the teacher's manual asks the question - "What does active learning mean to you as a teacher? It takes a lot of pressure off because the spotlight shifts from you to the students. Instead of being the principle player, you become a guide and FACILITATOR." This is basic OBE classroom organization where students are not taught by a teacher, but are guided to learn on their own, as the class FACILITATOR simply suggests and gently directs toward a pre-programmed, psychology-driven lesson plan.....

And how about that pagan earth-worshipping? In a Group lesson entitled "hug a tree" students are led outside to an area with trees. A child is blindfolded and led to a tree where he/she is to hug it, and then feel the tree very carefully. "Try to learn everything about the tree that you can without looking at it." The student is led back to the group, spun around three times and the blindfold is removed.

The Group tree-hugging lesson goes on to instruct the facilitator "after everyone has hugged a tree, been spun around and sat down, remove the blindfolds and find out how many kids can identify the trees they hugged. If it's a nice day, sit down on the grass and discuss the experience." Questions for the "facilitator" to ask:

* How did it feel to hug a tree?
* How did you feel when you recognized the tree you hugged?
* What do you like about trees?

Here's another part of the lesson called "Life Applications." Children are to be taken on a walk around the outdoor area of the church. Once back inside "ask about the natural surroundings and human-made sounds. Talk about natural beauty and human-made pollution. If you want, have the kids go back outside and pick up any trash they saw on the walk." Question to ask: "How do you think God feels when he sees how people have messed up the beautiful world he created?" Children are then given a game to play to simulate pollution.

In a Group Workbook entitled: "Sunday School Specials" a chapter tells students that "real conservation means remembering to turn off lights, hiking or biking instead of hitching a car ride, and cooling off in the shade instead of in the air conditioning. Kids are often tempted to do things the easy way instead of the 'green' way. They need lots of encouragement and affirmation to develop and stick to an environment-conscious lifestyle..." That one line demonstrates an important key to the purpose of Group's Sunday School curriculum-to promote a political agenda based on pagan earth worship rather than Christian values.

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CAMPUS BREAKTHROUGHS UNDERWAY -- THANKS TO THE STUDENTS, NOT THE TEACHERS

Throughout 2003 and into 2004, a surge of protests roiled American campuses. You probably think the kids were agitating against war in Iraq, right? Well, no. Students at UCLA, Michigan and many other schools were sponsoring bake sales to protest . . . affirmative action. For white students and faculty, a cookie cost (depending on the school) $1; blacks and Hispanics could buy one for a lot less.

The principle, the protesters observed, was just that governing university admission practices: rewarding people differently based on race. Indignant school officials charged the bake-sale organizers with "creating a hostile climate" for minority students, oblivious to the incoherence of their position. On what grounds could they favor race preferences in one area (admissions) and condemn them in the other (selling cookies) as racist? Several schools banned the sales, on flimsy pretexts, such as the organizers' lack of school food permits.

The protests shocked the mainstream press, but to close observers of America's college scene lately they came as no surprise. For decades, conservative critics have bemoaned academe's monolithically liberal culture. Parents, critics note, spend fortunes to send their kids to top colleges, and then watch helplessly as the schools cram them with a diet of politically correct leftism often wholly opposed to mom and dad's own values.

But the left's long dominion over the university--the last place on earth that lefty power would break up, conservatives believed--is showing its first signs of weakening. The change isn't coming from the schools' faculty lounges and administrative offices, of course. It's coming from self-organizing right-of-center students and several innovative outside groups working to bypass the academy's elite gatekeepers.

Today's right-leaning kids sure don't look much like the Bill Buckley-style young Republicans of yesteryear. "Conservative students today will be wearing the same T-shirts, sneakers and jeans that you find on most 19-year-old college kids," says Sarah Longwell of the Delaware-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which promotes the Western intellectual tradition on campuses. Jordana Starr, a right-of-center political science and philosophy major at Tufts, tartly adds that you can spot a student leftist pretty fast: "They're the ones who appear not to have seen a shower in some time, nor a laundromat."

The new-millennium campus conservative is comfortably at home in popular culture, as I've found interviewing 50 or so from across the country. A favorite TV show, for instance, is Comedy Central's breathtakingly vulgar cartoon "South Park." "Not only is it hilariously uncouth, but it also criticizes the hypocrisy of liberals," explains Washington University economics major Matt Arnold. "The funniest part is that most liberals watch the show but are so stupid that they're unaware they're being made fun of," he adds, uncharitably. The young conservatives, again like typical college kids, also play their iPods night and day, listening less to Bach and Beethoven than to alt-rock, country-and-western and hip-hop.

Yet the opinions of these kids are about as far from the New York Times as one gets. Affirmative action particularly exasperates them. Chris Pizzo, a political science major who edits Boston College's conservative paper, the Observer, points to wealthy Cuban-American friends from his native Florida, "raised with at least the same advantages and in the same environment that I was," yet far likelier to get into the top schools. Where's the justice in that?"

Worse still, many students argue, preferences carry the racist implication that blacks and Hispanics can't compete on pure merit--an implication that holds minorities back. "Affirmative action has a detrimental effect on the black community, whether or not we're willing to admit it," says Jana Hardy, a biracial recent Claremont McKenna grad now working in urban planning.

The war on terror, including in Iraq, drew strong support from most of the students. Typical was Cornell classics major Sharon Ruth Stewart, mildly libertarian--except when it comes to fighting terror. "We have to use any and all means to defend ourselves from the terrorists, who hate the American way of life even more than the French and Germans do," she says. "That means bunker-busters, covert ops--whatever ensures America is safe." University of Maryland junior Nathan Kennedy is just as tough-minded. "I am full-fledged on board with the Iraq war," he says. "We've brought the fight to the terrorists' door, dealing with the radical fundamentalist Arabs who want us all dead."

What accounts for the growing conservatism of college students? After 9/11, many collegians came to distrust the U.N.-loving left to defend the nation with vigor. As of late 2003, college students backed the war more strongly than the overall American population. Notes Edward Morrissey, "Captain Ed" of the popular conservative blog Captain's Quarters, these kids "grew up on . . . moral relativism and internationalism, constantly fed the line that there was no such thing as evil in the world, only misunderstandings." Suddenly, on 9/11, this generation discovered that "there are enemies and they wanted to kill Americans in large numbers, and that a good portion of what they'd been taught was drizzly pap."

Yet a deeper reason for the rightward shift, which began well before 9/11, is the left's broader intellectual and political failure. American college kids grew up in an era that witnessed both communism's fall and the unchained U.S. economy's breathtaking productivity surge. They've seen that anyone willing to work hard--regardless of race or sex--can thrive in such an opportunity-rich system. "I'm only 20, so I don't remember segregation or the oppression of women--in fact, my mother had a very successful career since I was a kid," one student observed in an online discussion. "I look around and don't see any discrimination against minorities or women." Left-wing charges of U.S. economic injustice sound like so much BS to many kids today.

The destructive effects of "just do it" values on the family are equally evident to many undergrads, who have painfully felt those effects themselves or watched them rip up the homes of their friends. They turn to family values with the enthusiasm of converts. Even their support of homosexual civil unions may spring from their rejection of the world of casual hookups, broken marriages and wounded children that liberalism has produced. "Heterosexuals have already done a decent job of cheapening marriage on their own," observes Vanderbilt's Miss Malinee.

The leftism that so angers these students includes the hey-ho-Western-civ-has-got-to-go theories that inform college courses from coast to coast. "In too many classrooms," says former education secretary William Bennett, "radical professors teach their students that Western thought is suspect, that Enlightenment ideals are inherently oppressive and that the basic principles of the American founding are not 'relevant' to our time."....

Conservatives still have a long, long way to go before they can proclaim the left's control over the campus broken. The professorate remains a solidly left-wing body, more likely to assign Barbara Ehrenreich than Milton Friedman, Michel Foucault than Michael Oakeshott, and nothing, not even David Horowitz's indefatigable activism, is going to change that soon.

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TEACHER MOTIVATION

More so than in most professions, teachers don't particularly like teaching. Consider this: an astonishing 20 per cent of Australian teachers leave teaching within their first three to five years. In some parts of Australia, 50 per cent leave. The University of Sydney's Dr Jacqueline Manuel describes teaching as "the profession that eats its young".

Some of those who leave come back later. In fact, leaving, trying something else, and then returning is common in teaching. Some leave to start families, some leave to broaden their experience, and others treat teaching as a job of last resort.... If only there was a way to make teachers more serious about staying teachers. The Teachers Federation suggests higher salaries. Surprisingly, it's a proposition not strongly supported by evidence.

Melbourne University's Dr Michael Shields has examined the movement of teachers in Britain. He finds that most teachers who leave go to jobs that pay less than they got teaching, typically 22 per cent less expressed as an hourly wage. The new jobs have longer hours as well. Teachers are prepared to give up money and work longer hours in order to get out. Shields has modelled the effect of a boost in teacher salaries of 10 per cent. He finds it would cut resignations by less than 1 per cent.

That isn't to say that higher salaries might not be important as part of a broader package of measures designed to get teachers to feel better about teaching. The 2001 Vinson report into public education described higher pay as a "gesture" and said that morale among teachers was so low that no other gesture could substitute for improved salaries.

But by itself higher pay would be wasted. There is something fundamental about the job or the way we ask people to do the job that makes teaching unsustainable for so many of our teachers. For some it's a love-hate thing. Teachers report both greater levels of job satisfaction than other people and higher levels of stress. My father told me that teaching was the only job he knew in which every day he faced people trying to stop him achieving what he was employed to achieve. They were called students.

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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.

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18 January, 2005

TEACHERS WHO CAN'T READ

Can American education go any lower?

More than half a million Florida students sat in classrooms last year in front of teachers who failed the state's basic skills tests for teachers. Many of those students got teachers who struggled to solve high school math problems or whose English skills were so poor, they flunked reading tests designed to measure the very same skills students must master before they can graduate.

These aren't isolated instances of a few teachers whose test-taking skills don't match their expertise and training. A Herald-Tribune investigation has found that fully a third of teachers, teachers' aides and substitutes failed their certification tests at least once. The Herald-Tribune found teachers who had failed in nearly every school in each of the state's 67 counties.

But it is the neediest of children who most often get the least-prepared teachers. Students in Florida's rural outposts and inner cities, those from housing projects and migrant camps, and those from black and Latino families were far more likely to have a teacher who struggled. An analysis of the test scores of nearly 100,000 teachers found that children from Florida's poor neighborhoods were 44 percent more likely than their wealthier peers to have a teacher who failed the certification tests.

The findings raise questions about Florida's education reforms, which require students to pass standardized tests to advance, yet allow teachers to fail exams dozens of times and still stand at the front of a classroom. And they highlight challenges that have dogged public schools across the country for years: How to attract more of the nation's top minds into a profession where salaries are low, and how to steer those teachers into inner-city and rural neighborhoods where children need the most help.

A state education official said Friday a recent study confirms that student learning suffers under teachers who repeatedly fail the tests. The Department of Education study, the first of its kind, found that students learn less under teachers who had failed more than three times, said DOE spokesman MacKay Jimeson. Nine percent of teachers failed portions of the tests at least four times, according to the Herald-Tribune study.

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THE SOLUTION TO AMERICA's INCOMPETENT TEACHERS:

Import Indian teaching over the net

Twice a week, Ann Maria, a sixth grader at Silver Oak Elementary School, California, logs on the Internet from home. She's not chatting up with friends, but connecting to her personal tutor-already online, armed with a headset and a pen mouse-in a cubicle almost a timezone away in Kochi. Your neighbourhood tuition teacher, riding on the Information Technology Enabled Service (ITES) wave, has now gone global and his monthly pay packet has turned meatier-anywhere between $10 and $40 an hour. ``We started last year with three teachers and around 10 students. There are 17 teachers now and around 160 students,'' says Bina George, manager, HR and Administration of the Canadian subsidiary.

What Bina adds up in numbers is actually a business model which is slowly transforming neighbourhood classroom models across India into global education outsourcing hubs. As the education season goes into the second leg across US and Europe, the demand for tutorial assistance only stands to increase, say industry observers. And with schools recommending additional training for students performing below-average, tutors across Asia stand to gain. Says Shanthanu Prakash, CEO, Educomp Datamatics Ltd, a company which tutors students from the Santa Barbara school district in the US: ``The demand abroad is growing as there is a huge dearth of tuition teachers, especially in the USA, UK and Middle East.''

Around a year old in India, more players are in the line to pick up this model in 2005, coinciding with new outsourcing contracts from foreign shores. And investments for an organised set-up-infrastructure, networking and brainbank - could be around Rs 4 to 5 crore. ["crore" is an Indian number meaning 10 million so "Rs 4 crore" is 40 million Rupees] Satya Narayanan, chairman of Career Launcher says the time has finally come for India to emerge in this domain. ``This year and the next will see a lot of action in terms of new contracts between international education companies outsourcing tutorial teaching contracts to India, more so from the US market.''

His logic: superior intellectual power compared to competitors like China, Phillipines, Singapore and other Asia Pacific countries, and a huge English-speaking teachers community. Says Kiran Karnik, president, National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM): ``Foreign countries today acknowledge India's intellectual brand thanks to efforts of institutes like IIMs and IITs. This model could be one of the best service exports which could finally globalise the education industry.''

Says 20-year-old Ruchi Dudeja, one of the 10 online brains who guide the school district of Massachusetts at Career Launcher: ``Tutoring Americans on their own syllabus is never tough as we Indians are easily intellectually superior.''

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THE TEACHERS' UNION PROBLEM

The teachers unions have more influence over the public schools than any other group in American society. They influence schools from the bottom up, through collective bargaining activities that shape virtually every aspect of school organization. And they influence schools from the top down, through political activities that shape government policy. They are the 800-pound gorillas of public education. Yet the American public is largely unaware of how influential they are -- and how much they impede efforts to improve public schools.....

The sources of their power are not difficult to discern. With three million members, they control huge amounts of money that can be handed out in campaign contributions. More important, they have members in every political district in the country, and can field armies of activists who make phone calls, ring doorbells, and do whatever else is necessary to elect friends and defeat enemies. No other interest group in the country can match their political arsenal. It is not surprising, then, that politicians at all levels of government are acutely sensitive to what the teachers unions want. This is especially true of Democrats, most of whom are their reliable allies.

When the teachers unions want government to act, the reforms they demand are invariably in their own interests: more spending, higher salaries, smaller classes, more professional development, and so on. There is no evidence that any of these is an important determinant of student learning. What the unions want above all else, however, is to block reforms that seriously threaten their interests -- and these reforms, not coincidentally, are attempts to bring about fundamental changes in the system that would significantly improve student learning.

The unions are opposed to No Child Left Behind, for example, and indeed to all serious forms of school accountability, because they do not want teachers' jobs or pay to depend on their performance. They are opposed to school choice -- charter schools and vouchers -- because they don't want students or money to leave any of the schools where their members work. They are opposed to the systematic testing of veteran teachers for competence in their subjects, because they know that some portion would fail and lose their jobs. And so it goes. If the unions can't kill these threatening reforms outright, they work behind the scenes to make them as ineffective as possible -- resulting in accountability systems with no teeth, choice systems with little choice, and tests that anyone can pass......

If we really want to improve schools, something has to be done about the teachers unions. The idea that an enlightened "reform unionism" will somehow emerge that voluntarily puts the interests of children first -- an idea in vogue among union apologists -- is nothing more than a pipe dream. The unions are what they are. They have fundamental, job-related interests that are very real, and are the raison d'etre of their organizations. These interests drive their behavior, and this is not going to change. Ever.

If the teachers unions won't voluntarily give up their power, then it has to be taken away from them -- through new laws that, among other things, drastically limit (or prohibit) collective bargaining in public education, link teachers' pay to their performance, make it easy to get rid of mediocre teachers, give administrators control over the assignment of teachers to schools and classrooms, and prohibit unions from spending a member's dues on political activities unless that member gives explicit prior consent.

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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.

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17 January, 2005

EDUCATION TAKES ANOTHER HIT IN CALIFORNIA

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger lamented, during his State of the State address this month, that California's political system "is rigged to benefit the interests of those in office, not the interests of those who put them there," he might have been referring to the Borking of Reed Hastings.... Hastings was Borked in the state Senate Rules Committee this week after Schwarzenegger reappointed the high-tech entrepreneur to the state Board of Education. Hastings - a Democrat, incidentally - drew vitriolic opposition from advocates of bilingual education who accused him, preposterously, of having, in the words of one, "bias against English learners ... and bias against their parents."

Hastings' crime: He favored more emphasis on English instruction, which put him not only in the political mainstream, as evidenced by voter approval of a ballot measure to that effect, but also on the side of common sense. Children who lack English proficiency are disadvantaged not only in school, but in life, as their dropout rates and test scores indicate.

Hastings, however, has not been a single-issue advocate, unlike his critics. He has devoted his adult life and much of his personal fortune to improving a public education system that, by all measures, is shamefully inadequate. And he made enemies on the right when he advocated lowering the voting margins for school bond issues. Jack O'Connell, the one-time teacher and Democratic state legislator who now serves as state schools superintendent, and Republican Schwarzenegger offered remarkably similar evaluations of Hastings. "This is the kind of person you want in public service," O'Connell told the committee. "He's a true public servant (and) on behalf of 6.2 million kids I'm asking for his confirmation."

"It is always unfortunate when political litmus tests are put before what is in the best interest of our children," Schwarzenegger said later. "What signal do you send to parents and children when a qualified and well-respected community leader like Reed Hastings is sacrificed to advocates of a narrowly focused agenda who wield power in Sacramento?"

Blocking Hastings' confirmation became a cause for the Legislature's Latino Caucus ...... In the Hastings case, events were driven by the most extreme liberal position that bilingual education should he maintained even though voters, in Proposition 227, declared that English should be taught to students as rapidly as possible - as Hastings reminded the committee.....

The victims of these ideological jihads are common sense, the public interest - and students, whose interests always seem to come last when ideology and public education collide.

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SCHOOL SCIENCE "UNSAFE"

Who can fault the teachers for playing it safe with all the crazy regulations around and all the rush to blame someone if anything goes wrong?

Health and safety concerns are putting a dampener on school science practicals. A survey of teachers and scientists finds that everything from keeping snails to swabbing for cheek cells, running model steam engines to burning peanuts, is now being avoided because it is seen as too risky. The result is that children are being turned off science - with experts fearing for the next generation of chemists and physicists. Julian Wigley, who has taught science at a Birmingham comprehensive for the past decade, says that he has noticed a 'move away from experiments considered too risky'. When practicals are carried out, they tend to involve kids observing the teacher rather than doing it for themselves. According to Tony Ashmore, head of education at the Royal Society of Chemistry, 'experiments are more often demonstrated than carried out - and teachers are more cautious about what they might demonstrate'.

The Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) has noted a decline in science practicals, and an increasingly 'narrow and mechanistic' approach, with teachers doing the bare minimum to fulfil national curriculum requirements (1). Risk assessment procedures encourage teachers to stick to standardised experiments rather than try anything a bit different. Children's curiousity is curtailed, says Wigley. 'In the old days, when kids asked "what happens if...?", teachers could often say "try it out". Now they might say "I will tell you what happens", and draw a diagram on the board.'

Jack Pridham, emeritus professor of biochemistry at Royal Holloway, University of London, says it was the 'smells and flashes and bangs' that drew him to chemistry as a boy. 'Now all the exciting stuff has gone out of the window.' Teachers say that they are increasingly cautious about old explosive favourites - burning hydrogen gas in air to create water, the thermite reaction (producing iron from a mix of iron oxide and aluminium), or the reaction between phosphorous and oxygen. The fractional distillation of crude oil (to show its different components) is avoided, because crude oil is considered carcinogenic (cancer-causing) - apparently some schools use ink and water instead. Others have replaced mercury with spirit thermometers, although spirits are not generally as accurate.

In physics, there is a wariness of anything involving high pressures, and even model steam engines are seen as risky. Meanwhile many biology teachers steer away from dissections, worrying about BSE and other infections. Taking blood from a finger prick is generally avoided on the grounds of AIDS risks, as is taking cells from a cheek swab. Sampling spit - to develop bacteria, or demonstrate the activity of saliva enzymes - is viewed with caution.

Yet most of these fears are groundless. Peter Borrows, director of the Consortium of Local Education Authorities for the Provision of Science Services (CLEAPSS), says that in fact 'almost the safest place for any child to be is the school laboratory'. According to Borrows, statistics going back to the 1960s show that science contributes a steady 0.8 per cent of all serious pupil accidents in schools, compared to 60 per cent in PE and one percent in toilets and cloakrooms. Given that there are generally between 4000 and 5000 serious accidents per year, this means that only around 35 take place during science lessons, even though millions of pupils spend several hours of every week in science classes.......

Whoever is responsible, kids are definitely the losers. Science becomes about dead facts learnt out of a textbook, rather than live conclusions derived from testing and experiment. Peter Atkins, professor of chemistry at Oxford University, says that 'if you treat chemistry as a theoretical subject it becomes very dry - some of its pleasures were its stinks and bangs'.

Today's top scientists say that (official and unofficial) practicals sparked their interest in the subject. One talks about his experiments 'in the kitchen at home, doing all sorts of things with chemicals that you can no longer obtain'; another confesses: 'I spent a lot of my youth making explosives.' Today's young people are turning cold on science, with universities closing their chemistry departments and falling numbers of pupils opting for science A-levels. Pridham, who runs the website Chemophilia to promote interest in chemistry, believes that 'the serious decline in interest in chemistry could be partly rectified by an improvement in practical work'.

The demise of the practical bodes ill for the next generation of scientists. Atkins worries that 'chemistry is a very practical subject - if that skill isn't developed early, there is a risk that children won't go on to become great chemists'. His antidote? 'Teachers should go back to doing the things that they used to do, which captured the imagination of their kids.'

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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.

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16 January, 2005

COMPULSORY LEFTIST INDOCTRINATION ON THE WAY AT UNIV. MICHIGAN

If parents and students are right to be alarmed by the results of recent national tests that show U.S. schoolchildren falling behind Latvia in math scores and doing even worse in science education, then they will really be puzzled by the latest initiative at the University of Michigan: requiring that all students take a mandatory course on gender and sex. The same people who brought you racial preferences in college admissions, "hate speech" codes and mandatory courses in race and ethnicity now want another official captive audience so they can hector their charges about "oppressive" heterosexual dominance, homophobia, male harassment, "antiquated" religious beliefs about sex, and the usual laundry list of liberal enthusiasms. Students who might refuse to take the course cannot graduate.

Behind this effort is a small group of students who call themselves the "Gender and Sexuality Requirement Committee," who gathered about 1,000 signatures over the past year. A proposal was then presented to the University's College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA), with the idea that the course would be taught primarily by the faculty of the women's studies department. The next hurdle involves making a formal pitch to the LSA curriculum committee later this semester, the first step to getting approval by the entire LSA faculty.

Proponents of this scheme tip their hand when they indicate that their preferred faculty to teach such a course would be that of women's studies, possibly the most politicized department at the university. A haven for "feminist scholarship," women's studies course descriptions make no bones about where their objectives and politics lay: "The course does not merely provide analyses of women's oppression, however, but suggests strategies for ending that oppression." Or "This course will also encourage students to consider ways in which [the] texts both reflect and participate in the construction of sexuality, sexual identity, gender, and desire." The proposal declares that such a course "will create new dialogues, challenge hegemonic discourse, break taboos and stigmas, and open up realms of communications among all students."

Given that 60 percent of Michiganders voted to ban gay marriage in the recent referendum, it would seem that courses that tub-thump for liberal sexual mores would go against popular opinion. Not to worry, says the student committee co-chair Catherine Malczynski, "We think [these things] are very important today and that people should be educated on, [sic] like they are educated on race and ethnicity." But after the gay marriage vote, striking a note of pessimism, she added, "it showed a lot of homophobia and that people might not be willing to do this."

If Tom Wolfe's scathing indictment of out-of-control sex on college campuses in his new book, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," is close to the truth, it would seem that the kind of course recommended by the student committee might make the problem worse, since conventional morality doesn't seem to be part of the approach. Rather, course advocates seem transparently only to want to shape student attitudes about gender and sex issues, to get them to think like they do. They assume, mistakenly, that because some might not, then they are wrong. Making such a dubious course mandatory is just a more convenient yet heavy-handed way to wield their ideological club.

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