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31 March, 2005

WHEN ANY REAL DISCIPLINARY MEASURES ARE FORBIDDEN.....

THe UK disaster continues

Teachers across the country are enduring a daily diet of verbal and physical abuse from children as young as 5 as discipline in schools worsens across the country, the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers heard yesterday. Voting unanimously to expel violent and disruptive pupils permanently from schools, the NASUWT members said that being sworn at, punched, stabbed with compasses and breaking up fights were now the stuff of daily life in many schools. The vote, by the country's second-largest teaching union, came after David Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools, gave warning last month of a growing discipline crisis in schools.

David Ward, a teacher from Sheffield who moved the motion, painted a picture of worsening discipline in schools up and down the country. In one school, children were spitting at teachers from the third floor, while at another, he said, the fire alarm had been set off 40 times in one day. "There is a picture of an increasing amount of ill- discipline, sometimes low-level, often not, of ineffective school policies and of unsupportive school management teams," Mr Ward said.

Members said that the abuse was not restricted to secondary schools and that some primary school heads were appearing to reward unruly behaviour. Ralph Robins, a primary school liaison officer in Cornwall, said that one pupil who had consistently verbally abused staff and refused to follow orders had been given alternative activities, such as model-making and playing on the computer.

Source



AMERICAN KIDS NEED INDIAN TEACHERS

If the schools did their job properly in the first place there would be no need for it

The failure of some American students to master math is adding up to big bucks for tutoring companies in India. A little-known provision in the federal No Child Left Behind law allows federal taxpayer dollars to flow to online tutoring services several time zones away in places such as New Delhi and Calcutta. Those services typically contract with U.S. tutoring companies, which provide them the computer software and set the lesson plan.

Few would begrudge using public money to give struggling students extra help. But some U.S. teachers decry the offering of instruction to Indian firms that pay full-time, college-educated tutors as little as $230 a month. They also complain that while the law requires teachers to be fully certified, private tutors have no such requirement. "We are seeing teachers being laid off," said Nancy Van Meter of the American Federation of Teachers. "Given that situation, it's hard to understand why our tax dollars are being used to create jobs overseas."

The Indian tutoring companies say they are simply filling a market void by providing after-hours services with which some U.S. teachers don't want to be bothered, said Anirudh Phadke, an official with New Delhi-based Career Launcher. The firm, which also serves students in the Middle East, tutors about 1,500 American students in math alone. "We have a lot of good teachers over here willing to do this full time," Phadke said during a telephone interview. "It's a good opportunity."

Because well-known online tutoring services, such as Sylvan Online, subcontract with firms such as Career Launcher, it's hard to say how many students are spending their money on Indian tutors.

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.

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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30 March, 2005

No Cop-Out Left Behind

The federal No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to improve public schools by setting clear performance standards and enforcing meaningful consequences if those standards went unmet. This was such a wonderful-sounding idea that the NCLB was ushered into law with unprecedented bipartisan support.

Another reason for the law's broad appeal is its lack of specificity. The federal government demands that states set standards, but doesn't dictate their content. The feds insist that schools make "adequate yearly progress," but leave the definition of that term to the states. In other words, NCLB is a politician's dream: It provides an opportunity to be seen as doing something, without necessarily having to do anything.

Michigan is living that dream. Earlier this month, the state Board of Education voted unanimously to redefine the term "adequate yearly progress" so that only 762 schools will be expected to fall below the standard next year instead of the 1,444 expected to fail under the current definition. The state board must now seek approval of their change from the U.S. Department of Education, which they are likely to get.

The official justification for lowering Michigan's education standards is to allow for "statistical error" in the determination of which schools are failing. In other words, if there is a slight chance that a borderline school could be considered "adequate," the Board wants to exempt it from having to follow the improvement measures required under the NCLB. Acting State Superintendent of Schools Jeremy Hughes told The Ann Arbor News, "For the purposes of meeting AYP, we're going to give schools the benefit of the doubt."

Rather than giving children the benefit of the doubt, by insisting on NCLB remedies whenever schools seem to be failing, Michigan's top public school officials want to give schools the benefit of the doubt.

If the education feds approve Michigan's plan, it won't be the first time the state will have redefined "adequacy." In the summer of 2002, 1,513 schools failed to meet Michigan's standards. Notwithstanding federal assurances that states couldn't just dumb-down their standards to circumvent the NCLB, Michigan did just that. It lowered the bar, requiring as few as 38 percent of students to pass the MEAP in order for a school to be considered "adequate" (in place of the original 75 percent requirement). Under this new definition, the number of "failing" schools dropped from 1,513 to just 216.

Consider what might happen if McDonald's followed the Michigan Board of Education's management model. It could lower its standards for the definition of an "adequately cooked" burger, with ample allowance for "culinary error." If it looked like a patty showed some sign of having been exposed to heat, then McDonald's would give itself "the benefit of the doubt," slap it on a bun and right into your hands. Mmmmmmmm.

Given the lengths to which the state Board of Education is going to circumvent NCLB's remedies, or at least to minimize the number of schools to which they are applied, you might imagine that those remedies are truly Draconian. Hardly. Schools that fail to make AYP must simply come up with and implement an improvement plan, and allow students to attend other public schools. Not private schools, mind you, just other public schools. If the school still fails to perform in subsequent years, it can theoretically be restructured, and its staff reassigned.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of the NCLB saga is that even if states were not doing their best to elude its consequences, it would still do next to nothing to improve public education. Getting schools to write up improvement plans? How much difference will that make? The Soviet Union had more "Five Year Plans" than you could shake a stick at, but that didn't prevent the collapse of its government-run economy.

As for restructuring, it is nothing more than a game of musical chairs. Even in the most recidivistically deficient schools, NCLB never calls for a single employee to be let go. They'll just get plunked down in other schools. Maybe in your school.

And public school "choice"? Breaking a monopoly requires more than allowing consumers to move to another of the same monopoly's outlets. When the Supreme Court ruled that Microsoft was a monopoly, what would the public have said if the court's remedy was for consumers to simply switch to buying different Microsoft products?

Though setting real standards and implementing real consequences in education truly is a wonderful idea, federal intervention is a misguided and embarrassingly anachronistic way of going about it. Rather than taking our cue from the government-devised Five Year Plans of a now-defunct communist state, perhaps there is another model for creating healthy incentives for effective, efficient, responsive service. Wasn't there another economic system that went up against communism back in the 20th century? And didn't it seem to work out pretty well by comparison?

Source



Why not a free market in education? "After more than a century of existence, public schooling is an abject failure in terms of educating children and inspiring a love of learning among them. While many people have been able to survive the public-schooling ordeal, many others have been severely damaged by the process, even to the extent of having their pre-school awe of the universe and thirst for knowledge pounded out of them by time they graduate 12 years later. Gates sees the problem. When it comes to the solution, however, his mind remains mired within the public-school paradigm, leading him to fall into the same reform trap that bedevils so many others."

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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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29 March, 2005

NCLB REQUIREMENTS BEING EVADED -- VOUCHERS NEEDED INSTEAD

As President George W. Bush began his second term, education policy-makers were wondering whether he would spend some of his political capital on further expanding school choice or instead invest it wholly on extending the testing regimen of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) into the nation’s high schools. During his first term, Bush used federal power and his bully pulpit to advance parental choice more than any previous president had done. The president championed a pilot program of vouchers to enable children in some of Washington, DC’s worst public schools to transfer to private schools; backed Education Savings Account tax breaks for families saving for children’s K-12 tuition; and pushed for NCLB-mandated public school choice or free tutoring for children stuck in low-performing schools. In his second Inaugural Address, on January 20, Bush vowed to “bring the highest standards to our schools and build an ownership society.”

However, Bush’s early emphasis since the election appeared to be more on toughening standards than on stressing ways for families to take ownership of their schools through choice. At a pre-Inaugural talk at a public high school in northern Virginia, the president unveiled a proposed $1.5 billion initiative to beef up reading and math standards in high schools. Bush told J.E.B. Stuart High School students, teachers, and staff his initiative would enable high school teachers to analyze test data and determine which ninth-graders were at risk of falling too far behind to graduate. To ensure the intervention is successful, Bush said, he wants to test ninth-, 10th-, and 11th-grade students in reading and math, as NCLB now requires in grades 3-8. “Listen, I’ve heard every excuse in the book not to test,” Bush commented. “My answer is, how do you know if a child is learning if you don’t test? We’ve got money in the budget to help the states implement the tests. There should be no excuse saying, well, it’s an unfunded mandate. Forget it--it will be funded.”

Nevertheless, expanding NCLB-required testing will not be an easy sell on the political left or the right. Teacher unions continue to attack testing as part of their strategy of opposing greater accountability and NCLB in particular. Several state legislatures, some of them Republican-controlled, also have balked at current federal requirements, threatening to pull out of NCLB and forfeit federal aid or to seek exemption from testing. For education reformers leery of increased government involvement, NCLB’s boosting of choice could be seen as a positive trade-off. As Bush told his Stuart High audience, “Accountability systems don’t work unless there are consequences. And so in the No Child Left Behind Act, if a school fails to make progress, parents have options. They can send their child to free after-school tutoring, or they can send their child to a different public school.”

Unfortunately, the public school choice option remains more of a promise than a reality. In December, a 55-page General Accounting Office (GAO) report found less than 1 percent of students eligible under NLCB to transfer to better-performing public schools actually did so. The GAO said thousands of students were denied choice because their districts determined there was no space for them, even though federal education officials had said claims of limited capacity could not be used to deny students choice. The GAO also found many local school bureaucracies failed to inform parents of their educational options until after a school year had begun.

Bush’s original blueprint had a far more robust choice mechanism: converting NCLB aid to school systems into vouchers enabling students in deficient public schools to select private schools. However, prominent members of Congress from both parties insisted the voucher provisions be eliminated at the start of NCLB deliberations early in 2001. Early signs are that the Bush administration currently values bipartisan support for NCLB over a tough fight for vouchers.

More here



TEACHER AT FAMOUS BRITISH PRIVATE SCHOOL DOWNPLAYS EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT

It may indeed be true that school marks are not the best predictor of success at university. IQ and similar tests do seem to be the best predictors of subsequent educational achievement (as Eton itself has found) -- so why not use such tests to determine university entry if "potential" is to be assessed independently of school performance? Since minorities mostly do badly on IQ tests that won't happen -- showing that it is not really an assessment of "potential" but rather social levelling that is the aim of the exercise

All universities should require significantly higher grades from applicants from leading independent schools because of the quality of education they receive, a senior teacher at Eton said yesterday. It would be unjust if parents were buying entry to elite universities for their children rather than the opportunity for their children to reach their academic potential, he said. "I would feel it totally wrong if an independent school were getting a higher proportion of pupils into Oxford and Cambridge than their real ability merits," said David Townend.

Mr Townend, 58, an assistant master, admitted that his remarks would be unpopular with some parents. They would also be controversial at a time when the heads of independent schools feared that their students could miss out as universities strive to meet the Government's targets for increasing the number of state school entrants. But Mr Townend, who has taught chemistry at the Berkshire school for 37 years, said social justice demanded that universities follow Bristol's example of taking school background into account when sending out their offers of places. He proposed a motion which was overwhelmingly passed by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers at its annual conference in Torquay committing it to campaign for entry to higher education to be on potential alone. The union voted to encourage universities to make allowance in the selection procedures for a variety of educational provision experienced by individual candidates at school or college. "It must be right that pupils from Eton should be required to achieve significantly higher grades than someone who has not had the benefits we at Eton can provide," Mr Townend said.

Universities have been given "benchmark" targets by the Higher Education Funding Council for increasing the proportion of state educated pupils they admit. The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service is also changing the application form to include questions indicating a candidate's school and social background. This month the London School of Economics admitted that it sets aside 40 places which are available only to applicants from low-achieving state schools.

Mr Townend told the conference of teachers from state and independent schools that he would not want to see universities set quotas for state school pupils, which would be unfair. However, research had shown that teachers in the independent sector tended to overestimate the grades their pupils would achieve at the end of their courses while those in the state sector underestimated them. It would be much fairer for pupils to apply to university only after they had received their results, argued Mr Townend, who said that he believed passionately in social justice. "I emphatically state that entry to university should be on potential alone. "Oxbridge asks for three As and many good universities from the Russell group ask for 3 Bs from Eton. I see no reason why they should not offer much lower grades from schools without such good results."

Last year Eton introduced psychometric tests designed by Durham University for all applicants at the age of 11 and they had been used to measure the potential of junior scholars. Early indications were that the tests were a good measure of ability and potential, he said.

Source

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

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 March, 2005

A GLIMMER OF SENSE FROM CALIFORNIA

News reports point to CSU forum this week with African-American leaders, in which they try to figure out why a disproportionately small percentage of African-Americans attend the university system. This comes against the backdrop of a Harvard report showing that only 57 percent of African-American students graduate with their class. I wasn't at the conference, and am relying on news reports. But the quotations from some leaders suggesting that the problem is, in essence, a marketing one is delusionary. It's not a matter of insufficient scholarships, as one CSU official told the Times. The problem is a massive failure of the public education system, a system that is more committed to the interests of union members than to providing quality education.

When I debated the OC school superintendent at a Center Club luncheon, I made an admittedly radical and ideological argument: Why not shut down the public schools and let the marketplace provide education? We don't let the government build our cars (i.e., Yugo), but rely on the private sector (i.e., Toyota). Why should we be surprised that government creates mediocrity at best, and horrors at worst? The usual retort is that this would be unfair to poor kids. Yet it's the inner city and poor kids who suffer the most under our one-size fits-all, government monopoly. Most of us in the middle class can afford to move to neighborhoods with decent schools, so most of us are oblivious to how bad the education system is at many levels. But even the schools we think are good would no doubt be shamed if a true competitive marketplace was developed. The big policy question is whether school vouchers offer real hope for moving in that direction.

Source



DO LITTLE KIDS NEED TO LEARN ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY?

The Australian State of New South Wales is as bad as California these days

Children as young as six are being taught about same-sex parents in books about "Jed and his Dads" distributed in state primary schools. The books -- now the subject of an investigation ordered by Premier Bob Carr yesterday - are being used as a "learning aid" for kindergarten and early primary school students. The taxpayer funded books -- written by Brenna Harding, 8, and her lesbian mother Vicki -- who featured in the My Two Mums segment on Playschool -- are aimed at students in kindergarten, Year 1 and Year 2.

Nationals leader Andrew Stoner yesterday said the books are another example of "political correctness gone mad". Earlier this month it was revealed the term "Before Christ" (BC) was removed from literacy test history books and replaced with "Before Common Era" (BCE). Mr Stoner said the two books robbed parents of their right to choose when they wanted their children to be "exposed to this sort of material".

The books were produced by Learn to Include -- a non-profit program run by the Gay and Lesbian Counselling Service of NSW -- and funded by the NSW Attorney-Generals Department, which provided $33,000 over two years. They are also accompanied by a teacher's manual, developed with the assistance of the NSW Department of Education. The books were launched last month at a party hosted by the Teachers' Federation and the NSW Anti-Homophobia Interagency, with entertainment provided by Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Big Band.

Mr Stoner yesterday called on Premier Bob Carr to immediately ban the books being used in primary schools. "The books are clearly inappropriate for young children and are an outrageous attempt to brainwash our kids," Mr Stoner said yesterday. [Parents] want their children to be allowed to grow up at their own pace and find out about same sex relationships at a more appropriate time. This is not the sort of stuff that young five and six-year-old children ought to be exposed to."

According to latest census figures, fewer than 40,000 Australian gay and lesbian couples have children.

Christian Democrats MP Reverend Fred Nile said yesterday the books are nothing more than "homosexual propaganda aimed at brainwashing children at such a sensitive age". "It's a disgrace," Mr Nile said. "Kids at that age are innocent until you start putting these ideas into their heads."

Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt said yesterday the books are not part of the official school syllabus and it was up to the school and parents whether they wanted them used in the classrooms. The Parents and Citizens Association said any parent offended by the books' content should speak to their school's principal.

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.

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 March, 2005

CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE JUST GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS

To me, learning is one of the more exciting aspects of life. That interest has been a handicap because I have difficulty working with stiff, bureaucratic organizations and putting up with politically-afficted decisions. Unfortunately, almost all of American education is controlled by such organizations.

Last week, with my naivet‚ in hand and my skepticism on hold, I attended a meeting about charter schools. I guess that I had some blind hope that charter schools might have the freedom to be able to avoid the constrictions that teachers and students face in traditional public school systems. The session was organized by a non-profit group that acts as a paid consultant to help charter schools get organized, approved, and hopefully, become successful. Their consulting contract is available for about $100,000 over a 5-year period. I suspect their help is well worth that cost. They have a staff of people who are experienced in starting charter schools... people who have successfully navigated through the process. They assist about a half-dozen new schools each year. That there is such a consulting group, and that their guidance is worth $100K toward getting a charter school going is, in itself, pretty revealing...

Let me make my attitude very clear. Children are going to learn if they're given half a chance. They're going to learn from whatever they're exposed to, and they'll hunt for such exposure. Learning is as natural to kids as crawling, then walking, and then running. Learning is easy... education isn't.

Charter schools ARE public schools. They get federal financing and get paid like any other public school, and operate by much the same rules. They cannot choose their students, but must convince parents to move their kids from some other school. They have somewhat more autonomy in the way they run their school, but are still subject to the education bureaucracy.

One of the meeting participants seeking to start a charter school said that she had been home schooling her children. I asked her why she wanted to move from home schooling to opening a charter school. Her response was that other parents were asking her to teach their children too. Consider - this mother, teaching her own children, is deemed, by some other parents, to be an educator preferred over the public schools already paid for and available to them. She must be doing something right... something that is obvious to those who know her and her children. What a condemnation of our public schools... that an untrained parent can be preferred over the government schools that have been in full operation for decades, touting their expertise and caring professionalism. In case you're not aware, home schooling is growing rapidly, and with demonstrated success.....

Starting a charter school is NOT like starting a typical small business. It has most of the difficulties of a small business start-up, plus the bloating and constrictions typical of making something happen THROUGH government rather than AROUND it....

Minnesota had the first charter school legislation in the nation, and the first charter school, City Academy of St. Paul, is in its 12th year of operation. There are 104 Minnesota charter schools, with about 17,000 students. There are over 3,000 charter schools nationally. There is little doubt in my mind that the presence of charter schools is an improvement over having just traditional public schools. They add choices to the mixture. Unfortunately, charter schools also add to the monopoly of government-controlled schools. The growth of charter schools does prove one thing... there is no shortage of people who are dissatisfied with the current schools and are willing to start new schools to compete with them.

If the government education monopoly ever became courageous enough to be willing to compete with private schools on a level playing field, all of those inspired, determined people working hard now to open charter schools would be able to open private schools and really educate the way they WANT TO, without jumping through the governmental hoops. At that point, education might again become more synonymous with learning.

More here



MERIT PAY NEEDS A FREE MARKET TO WORK

It should surprise no one that Gov. Schwarzenegger wants to pay California teachers based on job performance. He has firsthand experience with merit pay, having earned millions for muscular box office appeal in his former career. Merit pay is a simple and sound idea. Reward people for teaching better, and you will have better teachers. It seems to work in other professions.

But public school teachers are the only professionals whose customers cannot leave without great effort. Certainly, they cannot take their education dollars with them. Measuring merit without a competitive market is like landing a plane in a snowstorm without instruments. What makes a teacher good, and who should decide? In the film industry, moviegoers decide which actors are entertaining. And when agents scout new talent, their choices are informed by recent successes. Clients decide which lawyers are effective. The strongest cases find their way to the best attorneys, who then hire associates and train them similarly.

But with parents' hands tied and checkbooks hijacked, public schools can't consult their preferences when they decide which teachers have merit. Political determinations of "merit" can easily go astray. Other states' experiments with teacher merit pay show how quickly such efforts may lose their bearings. Merit inflation is one common problem. Decades of union pay scales and job security have engendered an A-for-effort and cookies for everyone teaching culture. When Texas and Tennessee adopted merit pay, principals insisted that all their teachers were above average, which forced those states to shut down their programs as too expensive. On the other hand, capping awards would invite administrators to hand out the bonuses to their favorites. It would be ironic, but not unlikely, if merit pay became another opportunity for political patronage.

To avoid such pitfalls, the governor suggested tying merit pay to student performance on standardized tests. But this is both more complicated and less objective than it sounds. The system can't simply reward high scores. If it did, it would favor teachers in wealthy neighborhoods whose students came to school with excellent skills. Nor can the system reward only improvement. If it did, it would unfairly penalize teachers whose students were already scoring too well to post large gains. Moreover, any money for test results scheme will worsen the problem of teachers cheating on standardized tests to avoid the consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act. Teachers willing to erase wrong answers on exams to avoid having their school labeled "needing improvement" will also be tempted by the thought of a personal raise.

But the governor should not give up on merit pay. Instead, he should tie his merit pay proposal to the expansion of school choice in California. School choice and merit pay are the twin beacons of market-based reform. Schwarzenegger has already proposed expanding California's charter school system. If he wants his reforms to succeed, these two proposals should not be separated. Merit pay will prod teachers toward excellence, and parents, through their choices, will show school administrators what merit should mean. A school voucher program would be even better for this purpose. "The governor feels that unless you hold people accountable in the public sector the way you did in the private sector, you're not going to get very far," Education Secretary Richard Riordan has said.

The governor is right. But merit pay works in the private sector because companies are accountable to their customers. If parents remain consigned to tourist class, a new merit pay system in public schooling may do little to smooth a bumpy ride.

More here



Idealistic Berkeley teachers: "Berkeley teachers, demanding a pay raise after two years without one, are refusing to work any more hours than their contract requires, and the impact is being felt throughout the school district. Kids within the Berkeley Unified School District are not being assigned written homework because teachers won't grade papers on their own time. A black history event was canceled Friday evening. And parents had to staff a middle-school science fair one recent night. 'I find it depressing,' said Rachel Baker, whose 5-year-old son attends kindergarten at Emerson Elementary School. 'Teachers do a lot with a little. All of a sudden, a lot of things that they do are just gone. It's demoralizing.' Baker said her son's teacher stopped sending home reading assignments and notes to parents. Last week, Emerson canceled its black history month celebration. Teachers said it is difficult to give less to their 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.

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 March, 2005

GREAT NEWS FROM FLORIDA!

Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities. The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, passed 8-to-2 despite strenuous objections from the only two Democrats on the committee. The bill has two more committees to pass before it can be considered by the full House. While promoting the bill Tuesday, Baxley said a university education should be more than “one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,” as part of “a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.”

The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative “serious academic theories” that may disagree with their personal views. According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities. Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class – would also be given the right to sue. “Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,’” Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue.

Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, warned of lawsuits from students enrolled in Holocaust history courses who believe the Holocaust never happened. Similar suits could be filed by students who don’t believe astronauts landed on the moon, who believe teaching birth control is a sin or even by Shands medical students who refuse to perform blood transfusions and believe prayer is the only way to heal the body, Gelber added. “This is a horrible step,” he said. “Universities will have to hire lawyers so our curricula can be decided by judges in courtrooms. Professors might have to pay court costs — even if they win — from their own pockets. This is not an innocent piece of legislation.”

The staff analysis also warned the bill may shift responsibility for determining whether a student’s freedom has been infringed from the faculty to the courts. But Baxley brushed off Gelber’s concerns. “Freedom is a dangerous thing, and you might be exposed to things you don’t want to hear,” he said. “Being a businessman, I found out you can be sued for anything. Besides, if students are being persecuted and ridiculed for their beliefs, I think they should be given standing to sue.”

During the committee hearing, Baxley cast opposition to his bill as “leftists” struggling against “mainstream society.” “The critics ridicule me for daring to stand up for students and faculty,” he said, adding that he was called a McCarthyist. Baxley later said he had a list of students who were discriminated against by professors, but refused to reveal names because he felt they would be persecuted.

Rep. Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood, argued universities and the state Board of Governors already have policies in place to protect academic freedom. Moreover, a state law outlining how professors are supposed to teach would encroach on the board’s authority to manage state schools. “The big hand of state government is going into the universities telling them how to teach,” she said. “This bill is the antithesis of academic freedom.”

But Baxley compared the state’s universities to children, saying the legislature should not give them money without providing “guidance” to their behavior. “Professors are accountable for what they say or do,” he said. “They’re accountable to the rest of us in society … All of a sudden the faculty think they can do what they want and shut us out. Why is it so unheard of to say the professor shouldn’t be a dictator and control that room as their totalitarian niche?”

In an interview before the meeting, Baxley said “arrogant, elitist academics are swarming” to oppose the bill, and media reports misrepresented his intentions. “I expect to be out there on my own pretty far,” he said. “I don’t expect to be part of a team.”

Source



HUGE EDUCATIONAL NON-PERFORMANCE IN CALIFORNIA

Despite ever lower standards, minorities cannot pass

Only about half of California's African American and Latino ninth-grade boys graduate from high school within four years, a new study reveals. The report, "Confronting the Graduation Rate Crisis in California," is being issued today at a conference in Los Angeles where civil rights advocates and education researchers will present findings on racial disparities in high school graduation. It's part of a national campaign that has led to legislative changes concerning high school graduation reporting in Illinois and Ohio.

Researchers at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, which produced the report, are hoping for stronger results in California. They say the state's high overall dropout rate and even higher dropout rate for most nonwhite students amounts to an "educational and civil rights crisis" that will cost billions in lost wages, more prisoners and greater dependence on public health care. "If students don't make it through high school, they really don't have any kind of chance in our economy," said Gary Orfield, author of the report and director of the Civil Rights Project. "And if communities don't make it through high school, their future is very severely threatened."

Across the state in 2002, the report says, 57 percent of African American students and 60 percent of Latino students graduated on time, compared with 78 percent of white students and 84 percent of Asian students. Among all racial groups, the graduation rate for boys was several percentage points lower than for girls.

The Harvard report examines graduation rates by racial group, something the California Department of Education does not do. State figures show only that 87 percent of all students are graduating. The Harvard report disputes that figure - and the method the state uses to calculate it, saying that 71 percent of California students are making it through high school. Harvard's numbers are worse in urban school districts that serve large proportions of nonwhite students.

For instance, in San Juan Unified - where enrollment is largely white - Harvard shows a higher graduation rate than that reported by the state. But the report says that in the Sacramento City Unified School District, 53 percent of all students graduate in four years. When broken down by race, 41 percent of Latino students and 38 percent of African American students graduate on time. "It is a scary epidemic that's happening with our African American children," said Jacqueline Webb, whose son attends Florin High. "It really needs to be looked at deeply." .....

The California Department of Education calculates dropout rates based on individual schools' accounting of how many students leave their school, and where students say they're going. Harvard researchers criticize this method, saying the information rarely is verified. Students might say they are leaving one school to transfer to another, but there is no way to know if they enroll or leave the education system altogether. "There are many ways you can not be counted as a dropout and not graduate high school," Orfield said. For example, he said, students who go to jail are not counted as dropouts.

The Harvard report calculates the graduation rate by counting the number of students who move from one grade to the next and then on to graduation. Discrepancies exist between graduation rates calculated by the Civil Rights Project and education departments in all of the states they examined, Orfield said. North Carolina reported that 97 percent of its high school students graduate, but the Harvard study showed 64 percent. In Texas, the state reported a graduation rate of 81 percent, and Harvard researchers said it was 65 percent. The state-by-state reports are part of a larger effort to highlight the racial inequities in the American education system so that policy-makers can eliminate them, Orfield said.

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25 March, 2005

PARENTS DESPERATE TO ESCAPE LOS ANGELES PUBLIC SCHOOLS

About a year ago, along with a million other parents in Los Angeles, I was anxiously waiting to hear whether my 13-year-old son got into private school. We had applied to two Catholic high schools, and the process had been sufficiently grueling as to make me want to skip college applications altogether. There were open houses to attend, letters of recommendation, transcripts and test scores to collect. We could also write a letter pleading our son's "special circumstances." In other words, if he didn't have a 4.0 and the musical gifts of Yo-Yo Ma or the footwork of David Beckham, what did he have to offer that might win him one of those sacred slots? We wrote the letter.

And then there was the religion issue. My son had to go through interviews, but equally nerve-racking, so did his father and I. Would we pass? Would they care that my husband is Jewish and that I'm Episcopalian? It was no small point, we thought. Applications to private schools in and around Los Angeles have soared, making the schools even more selective. Everyone we knew, it seemed, was applying where we were applying: boys on my son's soccer team who not only were bona fide Catholics but had Parents Who Knew People; most of his public school friends, including one whose siblings had already graduated from one of the schools, thus scoring legacy points.

On the morning of one interview, we sat in the school's beautifully refurbished Craftsman-style library along with half a dozen other parents. We smiled at each other, but no one talked. My son, who had been opposed to this school before he'd set one skateboard-shoed foot on its serene campus, now was on board. He loved its neat classrooms, its manicured grounds, its state-of-the-art track. Even seeing an occasional Roman-collared Jesuit and imposing religious statuary didn't put him off. As we waited, he sat quietly in his white dress shirt, dark slacks and tie, glancing around the book-lined room. "I really want to go here," he finally whispered.

I think part of what he was responding to was a seriousness lacking in his own dispirited school, with its trash-strewn campus, bulging classrooms and harried — and often lousy — teachers.

And yet I was full of conflict. What kind of socially responsible parent was I, bailing out of public education? My son was supposedly in one of the "good" schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Since third grade he'd also been in its highly touted and absurdly mercurial magnet program. If I was standing in line at Trader Joe's and the name of his school was mentioned, parents would appear and fall on me like suitors. We were so lucky, they'd swoon.

I didn't feel lucky. After nine years of constant fundraisers and fractious school politics, I was fed up. I know, I know — it's easy to get fed up with the LAUSD. The boondoggle school construction projects. The dirty bathrooms. The implacable resistance to change, including principals who claim to embrace parental involvement and then turn around and accuse parents of meddling.

But the real force compelling me out of public education was my son. The system I had always defended was failing him miserably. What "magnet" meant was plenty of homework but a dearth of teacher support. We were hardly alone — nearly half the students in his grade fled the magnet that June. I knew we'd made the right decision when, just days after mailing off his applications, a gang shooting erupted yards from the school swimming pool.

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ANOTHER QUALITY PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER

And the failing one had a Bachelor's degree! Obviously a black degree

A Bronx teacher who repeatedly flunked his state certification exam paid a formerly homeless man with a developmental disorder $2 to take the test for him, authorities said yesterday. The illegal stand-in - who looks nothing like teacher Wayne Brightly -- not only passed the high-stakes test, he scored so much better than the teacher had previously that the state knew something was wrong, officials said. "I was pressured into it. He threatened me," the bogus test-taker Rubin Leitner told the Daily News yesterday after Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon revealed the scam. "I gave him my all," said Leitner, 58, who suffers from Asperger's syndrome, a disorder similar to autism. "He gave me what he thought I was worth."

Brightly, 38, a teacher at one of the city's worst schools, Middle School 142, allegedly concocted the plot to swap identities with Leitner last summer. If he failed the state exam again, Brightly risked losing his $59,000-a-year job. "I'm tired of taking this test and failing," Brightly told Leitner, according to Condon's probe. "I want you to help me."

Along with being much smarter than Brightly, Leitner is 20 years older. He also is white and overweight while Brightly is black and thin. Yet none of those glaring differences apparently worried Brightly. "He said no one would ever know," Leitner said outside the Brownsville, Brooklyn, building he has called home since briefly living on the streets.

The two men met years ago at Brooklyn College where Leitner earned bachelor's and master's degrees in history in the late 1970s, and Brightly got a bachelor's degree in 1992. After meeting in the alumni office, Leitner began tutoring the teacher as he struggled to pass the state exam, officials said.

Brightly has been charged with coercion, falsifying business records and other crimes. He has been taken out of his Baychester classroom pending the outcome of the case. About 19,000 teachers across the state take the certification exam each year and roughly 95% pass. Teachers are required to be certified - but the city has a temporary waiver from the state because the Education Department has not been able to find enough qualified instructors.

More here

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24 March, 2005

TEACHERS WHO CHEAT

Nearly all of the Houston elementary schools being investigated for possible cheating on the state's standardized achievement test produced sharply weaker exam results this year. Passing rates at all but one of the 18 schools under scrutiny dropped at a greater rate than the overall Houston Independent School District passing rate on the third-grade Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS, reading exam. Overall, the passing rate for the 14,751 HISD students who took the reading test that's used to determine whether they move on to the fourth grade fell 5 percentage points to 82 percent. Passing rates at the 18 schools in question fell an average of 19 percentage points. In addition, average scale scores, which measure the number of correctly answered questions, increased 10 points for HISD's English-speaking students but fell an average of nearly 70 points at the 18 schools under suspect.

Last year, 13 of the schools suspected of cheating had average scale scores that ranked in the top half of all HISD schools on the English exam. This year, that fell to four. Houston school district spokesman Terry Abbott cautioned against reading too much into the poorer results by the 18 schools. In an e-mail, Abbott pointed out that some of the 170 elementary schools that have not been suspected of cheating also posted scores substantially lower than last year's. Also, the cheating investigations at most of the schools are focusing on score anomalies at other grade levels and subjects, he said.

The sharp decline in scores is not direct proof of cheating or wrongdoing, but adds to suspicions, said Thomas Haladyna, an Arizona State University professor specializing in standardized test research. "You wonder about the validity of scores when they jump around like that," he said. Factors such as teacher turnover rates and changing student populations could cause major score changes, but that doesn't explain why virtually every suspected school regressed more than the typical campus, Haladyna said.

The questions of cheating arose after an investigation by The Dallas Morning News last year found strong evidence that educators were helping students cheat at nearly 400 schools statewide, including Houston. Last month, two Houston fifth-grade math teachers were fired and the school principal was demoted after determining the teachers gave answers to students and the principal should have known about the cheating. The teachers have denied any wrongdoing.

Source



U.K.: COMPUTERS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR REAL TEACHING

The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today. The findings raise questions over the Government's decision, announced by Gordon Brown in the Budget last week, to spend another £1.5 billion on school computers, in addition to the £2.5 billion it has already spent. Mr Brown said: "The teaching and educational revolution is no longer blackboards and chalk, it is computers and electronic whiteboards."

However, the study, published by the Royal Economic Society, said: "Despite numerous claims by politicians and software vendors to the contrary, the evidence so far suggests that computer use in schools does not seem to contribute substantially to students' learning of basic skills such as maths or reading." Indeed, the more pupils used computers, the worse they performed, said Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Wossmann of Munich University. Their report also noted that being able to use a computer at work - one of the justifications for devoting so much teaching time to ICT (information and communications technology) - had no greater impact on employability or wage levels than being able to use a telephone or a pencil.

The researchers analysed the achievements and home backgrounds of 100,000 15-year-olds in 31 countries taking part in the Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) study in 2000 for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Pisa, to the British and many other governments' satisfaction, claimed that the more pupils used computers the better they did. It even suggested those with more than one computer at home were a year ahead of those who had none. The study found this conclusion "highly misleading" because computer availability at home is linked to other family-background characteristics, in the same way computer availability at school is strongly linked to availability of other resources. Once those influences were eliminated, the relationship between use of computers and performance in maths and literacy tests was reduced to zero, showing how "careless interpretations can lead to patently false conclusions".

The more access pupils had to computers at home, the lower they scored in tests, partly because they diverted attention from homework. Pupils tended to do worse in schools generously equipped with computers, apparently because computerised instruction replaced more effective forms of teaching.

The Government says computers are the key to "personalised learning" and computers should be "embedded" in the teaching of every subject. Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, has said: "We must move the thinking about ICT from being an add-on to being an integral part of the way we teach and learn."

Source

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23 March, 2005

Top marks for U.K. sect schools that shun the modern world

Funny that! Education is one thing the modern world seems to be very bad at

A secretive religious sect that bans children from using computers or reading fiction has won praise from Ofsted for the quality of education provided by its schools. The Exclusive Brethren, which also believes that members should not go to university because it is too "worldly", runs 43 private schools educating 1,400 children.

The group, an offshoot of the Evangelical Protestant Plymouth Brethren, cuts itself off from the outside world, which it regards as evil. Members are not allowed to have friends from outside the Brethren. They work only in Brethren-owned businesses, and their meeting halls have no windows. They must follow a rigid code of behaviour set down by their leader, known as the "Elect Vessel". Television, radio, mobile telephones, newspapers and going to places of entertainment are all banned. Computers and the internet are regarded as tools of the Devil.

All private schools are now required to register either with Ofsted or the Independent Schools Council to show that they satisfy minimum criteria for education, although they are not required to follow the national curriculum. Ofsted has already accredited six of the Brethren's schools through the Focus Learning Trust, an educational group established by the church. A spokesman for the trust said it hoped to have all of them registered by the summer. He said that the schools observed the same rules as the Brethren on the use of computers and modern technology. "We don't have such things in our homes, we don't have them in our businesses and we would not have them in our schools," he said. "Children were educated extremely well, some would say better, before such things were dreamt up. There is a general perception in the educational world that the teacher who needs to employ such gimmicks to get their message across is clearly not the most committed teacher."

David Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools in England, praised the Exclusive Brethren in his annual report last month, in which he also criticised Islamic schools for teaching a narrow curriculum that posed a potential threat to Britain's sense of national identity.

The sect, which adheres to a strict interpretation of biblical teaching, has most of its schools in the South of England. They were set up to keep children "away from damaging influences" in the state system.

Mr Bell said in his report that teaching in the Focus Learning schools visited so far by inspectors was generally good. He went on: "Focus Learning provides good support to its schools and has developed a number of common policy documents that are of very good quality . . . The quality of teaching, most of which is done by experienced practitioners, is generally good."

Most of the schools, which cater for pupils aged 11 to 17, had operated previously as tuition centres for children who were otherwise taught at home. They rely on fees from parents or donations from the Exclusive Brethren. Pupils are entered for GCSE and vocational qualifications.

The Exclusive Brethren was founded in the mid 19th century. It believes the world is the domain of the Devil, and members spend most of their time in "safe places" such as meeting rooms and their own homes.

Ofsted's praise of education standards at its schools has drawn criticism. Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, said: "Denying children access to knowledge that would help them to cope in the modern world is tantamount to abuse. "It will leave them ill-equipped to cope if they later decide that life inside the Brethren is not for them. It is alarming that Ofsted, in its keenness to accommodate religion, appears to have suspended its critical faculties." Doug Harris, director of the Reachout Trust charity, which provides support for former members of religious sects, said: "The basis of Exclusive Brethren belief is separation from the rest of the world. It can be distressing for them if they try to leave."

Source



FAR-LEFT IN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES TOO

They even regard Ward Churchill as an authority!

A university education in the humanities was once supposed to be a civilising experience. But just how antiquated are the traditional advocates of this ideal - such as Charles Badham, professor of classics at the University of Sydney from 1867 to 1884 - can be seen from two new developments at Badham's old institution.

The first is the university's invitation to Antonio Negri to speak at a conference from May 4 to 6 on Physiognomy of Origins: Multiplicities, Bodies and Radical Politics, hosted by the University of Sydney's Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and funded by its school of languages and culture. And who's Negri? Well, he was one of the organisers of the Red Brigades, the terrorist group responsible for several political assassinations in Italy, the most notorious of which was the 1979 kidnapping and murder of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. At the time, Negri was professor of political science at the University of Padua. He was arrested and charged with 17 murders, including that of Moro, as well as armed insurrection against the state. The Italian public was shocked that an academic could be involved in such events but most astonished by one bizarre detail. Forty-five days after the kidnapping, someone sounding like Negri telephoned Moro's wife, taunting her about her husband's impending death. Nine days later his body, shot in the head, was found dumped in a city lane.

In 2000, he became an academic celebrity in the US as co-author with Duke University literary theorist Michael Hardt of the book Empire, a Marxist-postmodernist thesis arguing that, despite the fall of the Soviet Union, a worldwide communist revolution is still on the political agenda. Part of the book's appeal on campus lay in the radical glamour of Negri's terrorist past and the cover note biography recording him as an inmate of Rebibbia prison, Rome.

The second development is a new book out of the same university's history department that celebrates, in part, the work of Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado. The book describes Churchill as a "Native American activist and scholar". Last month, Churchill briefly became the most famous, and most reviled, academic in the US. Shortly after September11, 2001, he wrote an essay saying those who died in New York's World Trade Centre deserved their fate. They were "a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire" who were at the time "busy braying incessantly into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions". Churchill added: "If there was a better, more effective or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."

Churchill's "little Eichmanns" comment became public and he was excoriated not only for his offence to all of those who died but also for his implicit anti-Semitism. The governor of Colorado called for Churchill's dismissal but only succeeded in forcing his resignation as head of the university's ethnic studies department. He remains a tenured professor. During the media furore, other aspects of Churchill's background quickly became public. He was accused of academic misconduct, both in misrepresenting himself as a Native American to gain his university post and in his writings about American history.

Meanwhile in Australia, Churchill is being presented as a scholarly authority on the Aborigines. In the newly released anthology Genocide and Settler Society, editor Dirk Moses of the University of Sydney's history department quotes Churchill's 1997 book A Little Matter of Genocide as one of his main sources on the Tasmanian Aborigines. Churchill compares the fate of the Tasmanians with that of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

Moses contrasts this thesis with what he calls the "naive paean to British expansion" of Hannah Arendt, who denied the Nazi comparison and commended the British for bringing civilisation to the indigenous people of the US and Australia. Arendt was one of the most formidable intellectuals of the 20th century who wrote a widely admired book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's project to exterminate the European Jews. To Moses, however, she is no match for Churchill. Another essayist in the same book, Henry Reynolds, also cites Churchill as one of the academic authorities who argue that what happened in Tasmania amounted to genocide. A third contributor, Paul Bartrop, quotes Churchill as a reliable source on the massacre of Native Americans in Colorado.

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22 March, 2005

MARKET-FORCES NEEDED

First, and most obvious, universities operate, for all functional purposes, outside the market. They trumpet their "competitive" positions, but in fact most of them are immune to any real market influences. For example, they don't respond to price, because there is absolutely no price competition among universities. Oh, you see some differential among "tiers" of providers---much the way you'd see a difference in price between a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and one in Cincinnati---but among the major state schools and the large non-Ivy privates, virtually all of the so-called "competition" comes in the form of "student support" that they provide. This "support," of course, is no different than what happens in jewellery stores in malls, where the prices are jacked up double or triple, then prices "slashed" back to where they would normally be. Universities overprice themselves by 30%, then essentially rebate to a majority of students some form of "support" that is already built into the pricing structure.

Second, a corollary of the pricing system is that it has reshaped the way students and parents see costs at the university and the way legislatures fund schools. When you talk to anyone in university advancement, or development, or enrolment, and you argue for cutting tuitions, they all say the same thing: "Students expect support. It's part of our marketing and advertising." Again, that might be well and good in a normal functioning market, because there would always be a high-quality, low-cost alternative that would attract large numbers of top students. But a two-fold "snob" factor is at work:

1) students judge their worth on how much (largely bogus) support they get from a school, and

2) universities measure their success largely by how many top students they attract, regardless of what they have to give away to get them. My own midwestern university just revels in the fact that it is recruiting actively in Florida and Puerto Rico---when kids right here in Dayton might otherwise be able to afford to attend school here if the prices were lower. I think it is fruitless to be concerned about what is taught on university campuses unless or until we can somehow make schools once again sensitive to costs that are substantially borne by the majority of the consumers.

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ANOTHER COLLAPSE OF STANDARDS -- IN AUSTRALIA

The nation's most prestigious academic institution, Sydney University, has been shaken by more than 300 students being investigated for cheating in their studies. The problem of "academic dishonesty" was most acute in the veterinary faculty where 73 students were suspected of cheating in one subject - more than 10 per cent of faculty enrolment. A The Daily Telegraph investigation into plagiarism in universities shows cut-and-pasting from the internet has become so widespread that spy software such as Turnitin is now used routinely to catch cheats. Sydney University faculty reports on student dishonesty, obtained under Freedom of Information laws, show the sandstone institution is struggling with a rash of cheating in some areas.

In the veterinary science faculty, the 73 students faced an inquiry over copying or fabricating assignments in the animal husbandry subject VETS 4331. The number under suspicion represents a large chunk of the entire faculty enrolment of 628. The subject required students to submit reports based on field visits to properties detailing their experiences managing animals. "All markers expressed concern about apparent plagiarism in some reports and nominated 73 reports as contained identical or very similar material," an internal inquiry concluded. Following an investigation many students were given the benefit of the doubt and 23 students faced interviews with an external review panel to explain anomalies. Many had to resubmit work although only one was ultimately failed by the faculty, reputedly the nation's best in its field.

Sydney University's faculty of health sciences, which offers courses in physiotherapy, occupational therapy and radiotherapy, was another problem area, registering 80 cases of cheating. Of these, 29 were failed as a result while 31 were given written warnings and 17 were counselled. The faculty of agriculture, food and natural resources reported 39 investigations. There were another 29 in economics and business.

But Sydney is not alone in battling the problem. The University of Western Sydney investigated 39 cases last year. Plagiarism problems at the University of Newcastle involving full-fee paying students at a partner Malaysian institution developed into a full-blown scandal in 2003 and a ICAC inquiry.

The ease of plagiarism from the internet has prompted universities to go to extraordinary lengths to catch the cheats. Licences to use anti-plagiarism system Turnitin have now been purchased by 25 Australian universities to catch students who cut-and-paste from the internet. In NSW, these universities include Macquarie and University of Technology and Newcastle.

Source



What once was: "I don't know whether or not I should admit this, but here goes: I'm a product of the public school system. Of course, public schools not so very many years ago were quite different than the public schools we see today. I can read and write proper English (I can even speak it when I've a mind to do so) because failing in those endeavors meant, well, failing. I can balance my checkbook and make change for a twenty because math teachers didn't allow calculators in classes until we were advanced enough for algebra. And I can find Iraq on a map because my geography teacher wouldn't let any of us move in the direction of the 8th grade until we learned in 7th grade how to read a typical map. Unfortunately, things have changed since I was a student."

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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 March, 2005

LAST CHANCE FOR STANDARDS NOW LOST IN CALIFORNIA

California's lowered-expectation Democrats have embarked on a pleasantly foul strategy to cope with the state's horrific national ranking of 48 out of 50 states in K-12 academic performance - cancel entirely the already-tabled high school exit exam required to receive a diploma. The exam has become a public relations nightmare for the ruling leftists who dominate both bodies of the legislature in Sacramento.

Ironically, Democrats can't seem to escape the responsibilities and consequences of some of the good decisions made by other Democrats. The high school exit exam, the brainchild of one-time Democrat state senator, now Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O' Connell, and the mantelpiece of former "education governor" Gray Davis, was enacted into law in 1999, and scheduled for first use with the state's graduating class of 2004. However, in July 2003, the California State Board of Education issued a memo titled "State Board of Education Delays Consequences of California High School Exit Exam. Decision postpones exit exam as graduation requirement to class of 2006." The critical portion of the memo reads as follows:

The action means students in the classes of 2004 and 2005 are no longer required to pass the exit exam as a condition of earning a high school diploma. Instead, the class of 2006 will be the first class that must pass the exit exam as a requirement of graduation. The State Board delayed the exit exam in the wake of a recent independent external evaluation that found the test has been a "major factor" in boosting standards-based instruction and learning but that many students, for different reasons, may not have benefited from courses of initial and remedial instruction to master the required standards.

Translated - the state was worried that an estimated 30-40 percent of 2004 examinees would have failed the test, resulting in thousands of lawsuits filed by angry parents.

This type of exam is nothing new. High school exit exams are now required in 19 states. So, a pioneering "Queen Bee of Self Esteem" has arrived to save the day. Her name is Karen Bass, a newly elected assemblywoman from Los Angeles. According to Jim Sanders of the Sacramento Bee Capitol Bureau ("Activist takes office, comes out swinging," March 14, 2005):

"Bass, the state's only African American female legislator, is a former nurse and physician's assistant with brown belts in tae kwon do and hapkido martial arts.

"The freshman Los Angeles Democrat is likely to need both skills; toughness and compassion, in tackling one of California's most controversial education issues: the high school exit exam.

"Shortly after unpacking her bags at the Capitol, Bass launched a bid to eliminate the requirement that no diploma be given to high school students who fail the exam, beginning next year.

"If you begin taking the test in the 10th grade and you're not passing it, what's your incentive to finish high school?" Bass asked. "The last thing in the world we want to do is increase the dropout rate."

How inspiring! Just what every ambitious kid needs.a mentor in calling it quits. Here is the key language of her proposal (AB 1531):

Existing law requires, commencing with the 2003-04 school year and each school year thereafter, each pupil completing grade 12 to successfully pass the exit examination as a condition of graduation from high school. Existing law requires the board, in consultation with the Superintendent, to study the appropriateness of other criteria by which high school pupils who are regarded as highly proficient but unable to pass the exit examination may demonstrate their competency and receive a high school diploma.

Is she serious? "High school pupils who are regarded as highly proficient but unable to pass the exit examination?" What is a high school senior "highly proficient" at if they can't pass a test that educators rate as equivalent to 10th-grade standards? Maybe this language is only an invitation to lawyers to start feeding at the public trough...

It would seem that Ms. Bass should be more focused on content, aptitude and qualifying students for advancement, and less on doctrinaire liberalism, mediocrity, and self esteem. What is more expensive to the child and the state as a whole? An uneducated dropout, or a valuable contributing individual who works hard in school, sees the value of academic success, and prepares themselves for a lifelong competitive world? The dropout rate is already a huge problem. Ms. Bass's "solution" will only make it worse.....

Parents who continue to vote Democrat over progressive policies like these should realize that they are being victimized by deceitful politicians who purport to help their families......

Not a single parent should be satisfied if their undereducated child ends up with backbreaking menial work washing dishes and cleaning houses because nothing more was expected of them, when they could have become doctors, scientists, accountants, and engineers. The "activists" in control have decided that educational excellence takes a back seat to the raw pursuit of political power on the back of innocent kids.

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STUDENTS LEAD THE WAY IN DEFENDING FREE SPEECH

It isn't often that a group of college professors is soundly and thoroughly embarrassed by a collection of mere students in an intellectual arena. But that's exactly what happened at the end of February, when the University of Alabama's Student Senate passed a sharp resolution directly opposing a heavy-handed, short-sighted and illiberal "hate speech" resolution that their Faculty Senate had already passed. The Faculty Senate's original resolution called for the creation of a series of new regulations which threatened to drastically curtail First Amendment rights at their public university. With their remarkably independent and sophisticated response, UA's students have schooled their teachers with a much-needed lesson in the fundamentals of a free and open society.

The Faculty Senate's original "hate speech" resolution came down after an incident that smacks of tired familiarity to any casual observer of campus political correctness. UA hired a comedian who came and made some offensive remarks to a gay student. Like clockwork, with factory-produced fervor and indignation, the college administration put out a statement condemning this "shameful incident" of "bigotry and malicious aggression" which was a "personal attack" on a student. Everyone sat around rubbing their temples, bemoaning oppression and intolerance for a few days, until some towering, renaissance-minded enthusiasts were struck with the brilliant and novel idea to finally put an end to hate speech, once and for all. It just can't help but make your heart warm....

Now, it's not clear whether they stopped to ponder the fact that Christians and conservatives happen to be individuals with group affiliations and personal characteristics that have historically made for some pretty good satire. Nor has it been reported whether or not whatever was left of the faculty's liberal souls shriveled up and died immediately upon seeing themselves approve the words "control behavior" and "standards of civility" in the same sentence, advocating censorship of words and ideas.

But imagine the professors' shock and inner turmoil when they received an open letter from a civil liberties watchdog group, with Stanford and Harvard law credentials, accusing them of trampling on the First Amendment. The letter, from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, stated: "The United States Supreme Court has consistently held that empowering public officials to ban speech based on its content will naturally result in the silencing of dissenting viewpoints." The letter also demonstrated that the spirit of the "vague and dangerously overbroad restriction" proposed by the Faculty Senate clearly served to undermine the values of free inquiry and open discussion that are at the heart of any healthy university.

Picking up on FIRE's message, the members of UA's Student Senate laid out their obvious case. First, they argued, "The right to free speech is an inalienable human and civil right that is protected by the United States Constitution and the Constitution of Alabama." They continued, "Free speech is absolutely vital to the mission of any university, where new and often controversial ideas must be discussed openly and rationally in order to make advances in knowledge." And as they also pointed out, "Speech codes have been used by other colleges and universities to silence dissenting speech, not merely so-called 'hate speech,' and to persecute those with unpopular opinions." Finally, they used a Thomas Jefferson quote to demand that UA should explicitly protect, not reject, the individual rights of free expression that the First Amendment guarantees.

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Rules and regulations are paralyzing US schools: "A new study from the bipartisan legal reform coalition Common Good found U.S. schools are greatly over-regulated, in many cases to the point of paralysis. The study details thousands upon thousands of laws and regulations that apply to public schools in New York City. The study was released on November 29 as an interactive Web interface. ... The study, titled 'Over Ruled: The Burden of Law on America's Public Schools,' found more than 60 separate sources of laws and regulations governing the operation of a typical public high school in New York City, imposing thousands of specific obligations on school officials."

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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 March, 2005

A FURRY BRAIN

An obscure professor at a minor university spends class time telling students that America is the world's biggest oppressor and greatest terrorist state. He urges them to "work for communism." The same professor, presenting himself as an expert on communism, scours internet academic forums in defense of Josef Stalin, calls the fall of the Soviet Union a moral outrage, implies that Israel is a fascist state and encourages his students to utilize an anti U.S., anti-capitalist and pro-communist website he publishes as a study resource.

Grover C. Furr is this little-known professor, and if you think that American college students should be educated and not indoctrinated then you should know what he's been up to.

For more than twenty years, Furr has been an English professor at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey where he drenches his classes in Marxism and advocates the destruction of America's existing government and social structures.

Professor Furr employs a simple ploy in ramming Marxism, glowing accounts of communism and anti-U.S. propaganda down his student's throats-- he packs his courses' required reading lists with books and papers reflecting Marxist viewpoints. The majority of these books are written by authors who are or were themselves Marxists, or Communists. Most of the remaining books on his course reading lists relate to violent revolution, or glowing accounts of lower classes overthrowing ruling classes.

A "General Humanities" course Furr teaches provides a good example of his method of cloaking political indoctrination as legitimate teaching. On his Montclair-provided website, Furr describes his General Humanities course as being "an introduction to Western European culture and society from the Ancient World through the Middle Ages." But it is actually a vehicle which he uses to spread his fringe leftist ideas and beliefs. A sampling of the course's reading list provides overwhelming evidence to support this contention. Required reading for students taking Professor Furr's General Humanities course includes the following authors:

James Axtell, whose "The White Indians of Colonial America" (required course reading) implies that Native American culture was better than European culture in colonial America; Ronald Takaki, a prominent multicultural advocate whose works take a hard anti-Anglo slant; Alan D. Winspear, whose "Who was Socrates?" is a Marxist analysis of the great thinker; Moses I. Finley, a Marxist and member of communist Karl Polanyi's leftist think-tank at Rutgers University; Rodney Hilton, a British Marxist, G.E.M. de Ste Croix, whose "The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World" is often praised for its contributions to Marxist theory and I.F. Stone, a fellow traveler if not Soviet agent and life-long hater of Israel, a communist apologist who once commended the Soviet Union for "steadily expanding democracy in every sphere."

After completing Furr's skewed course on Western European culture, students are assured of viewing the West with disdain while gaining no true understanding of greater Western culture.

More here



AN OLD-TIME PROFESSOR LOOKS AT THE ACADEANICS

Some excerpts from an article by Fred Siegel

Back in the fall of 2003, when Dr. Dean was still riding high in the Presidential primary, I'd listened in on a conversation among undergraduate Deaniacs outside my office at Cooper Union in the East Village. "This just doesn't feel like America any more," one of them said to a friend, who replied, "Fuck Bush," and pointed to a button on his jacket bearing the same slogan.

It's an old professor's habit, but I had to engage them. "What does that mean?" I asked the fellow with the button. "Bush is bullshit," he replied, "the most evil man in the world." When I said that wasn't an argument and pressed him, he acknowledged that "Saddam isn't a good guy," but "who are we"-he pointed both to me and his like-minded friend-to "judge Saddam Hussein?"

"Why not?" I asked. He replied with an answer right out of the postmodern playbook. Americans can't judge another culture, he insisted, because there is no common morality. But if that's the case, I asked, why then was George Bush "undoubtedly the most evil man in the world?" He seemed puzzled by the idea that his version of an emotional truth might seem incoherent to others.

Recently, the professoriat has been embarrassed by a series of dustups exposing the irrationalist underside of academic life. After Hamilton College invited a former Brinks holdup terrorist to take a faculty position, it compounded its problems by asking "Indian" poseur Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado to speak, only to back off when he was found to have delivered a rant about how the people killed in the World Trade Center were "little Eichmanns." Columbia's alumni, if not its administration, has been discomfited by the ravings of Joseph Massad, a professor so extreme in his support of Palestinian terrorism as to have labeled Yasir Arafat a collaborator with Israel. Harvard president Larry Summers has been forced to don the sackcloth and ashes after he commented reasonably that the differences between men and women might-and his stress, the transcript shows, was on might-be one part of the reason why there are fewer females in the sciences....

But then again, academia has been getting it wrong over and over again. Criminologists, as a group, were convinced that crime couldn't be cut; sociologists were sure that welfare reform couldn't work because it didn't go to the root causes of poverty; and Sovietologists were certain that the USSR of the 1980's had matured into a successful, even pluralistic society. As for radical Islam, the consensus view of the Middle Eastern Studies Association was that the danger to America came from a "terror industry" which conjured imagined threats in order to justify American aggression.

But even as academia's batting average has declined, its claim to superior knowledge has expanded. The old ideal of disinterested scholarship, or at least the importance of attempting to be objective, has been displaced. In 2003, the University of California's Academic Assembly did away with the distinction between "interested" and "disinterested" scholarship by a 45-3 vote. As Berkeley law professor Robert Post explained, "The old statement of principles was so outlandishly disconnected to what university teaching is now that it made no sense to think about it that way."

The reality, as Professor Post recognized, is that many professors now literally profess. Far from teaching the mechanics of knowledge, they are in fact preachers of sorts, spreading a gospel akin to that of Howard Dean. And if they are part of grievance-studies departments, like Ward Churchill or Joseph Massad, there never was any expectation of objectivity: They were knowingly hired as activists and are now puzzled as to why this has become a problem for some of their students and the larger public. After all, what they preach is built into the very orientation students are given when they arrive on campus. New students at many schools are quite literally given a new faith in which the world is divided into victims and victimizers, with little room for common ideals of citizenship or rationality, and no basis for debates that approximate the give-and-take of politics.

This appeal to tribalism was nearly summed in a popular T-shirt of the mid-1990's. It read in large print: "If you're not black, you wouldn't understand."

The effect of victims-studies departments, in which intellectual standards are ignored-the personalization of the political by way of feminism, and the epistemological nihilism of postmodernism-has cut much of academia off from its lifeblood of free and open debate. Like the Deaniacs, who wrote off the success of the Iraqi elections, they never need to refine their arguments in light of new evidence, since criticism can be written off as "Republican," or "racist," or "sexist," or "Islamophobic," or just plain "bullshit."

It has gotten so bad that philosophers at a prestigious university have asked to be detached from the humanities department because the English and history departments are so mired in subjectivity that faculty members in the same department can barely speak with each other, let alone across disciplines.

Postmodernism is the Indian rope trick of academia; it's an intellectual illusion that collapses before even slightly skeptical scrutiny. The postmodern game consists of an insistence that objective judgments are impossible, since all knowledge is riddled with prejudice, power considerations, ethnocentric assumptions and so on. The trick is that these prejudices infect only those who differ from the (almost always left-wing) positions of the professors. Its triumph on campus after campus-where the tenure system ensures that only like-minded scholars are accepted and deters those with different ideas from even considering the academy as a career choice-means that the postmodern academy speaks largely to itself and its offspring. In the absence of truth, there's little reason to try and persuade people. Instead, performance replaces plausibility and persuasion as the coin of academic success, giving rise to percussive performers like Ward Churchill and Joseph Massad.

If the Democratic Party comes to be dominated by angry ill-informed activists who believe that George Bush is more evil than Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, it will have a bleak future. It's time for Democrats, if only out of their own self-interest, to start paying attention to the tragic decline of our college and universities. If they don't, the party's future will be in the hands of the acadeaniacs.



CATHOLIC SCHOOLS NEED PAYING CUSTOMERS

The news had spread quickly: The south Sacramento Catholic parish will close St. Peter's School to merge it this fall with All Hallows School in Tahoe Park. All Hallows will have a new name. The decision was formally announced in a letter to parents sent Tuesday. Parish and school officials did not return phone calls or declined to comment to The Bee. "It really could be a very exciting time. And perhaps a lot of new energy will surround that," said Lynette Magnino, Catholic Diocese of Sacramento spokeswoman. "We're just very pleased that they've come to a point where they've addressed their needs."

Separately, St. Lawrence Parish has announced it will consolidate the classes at its North Highlands school in the fall. Eight grades will be combined into four classes with four teachers, said the Rev. Joe Ternullo. St. Lawrence, St. Peter's and All Hollows face declining enrollment, making them more financially dependent on subsidies and loans from the parish and diocese. With the potential cost to the diocese of settling clergy sexual abuse lawsuits, parish officials wrote All Hallows and St. Peter's parents that the diocese can no longer provide subsidies for schools and may cut back on scholarships.

Outside St. Peter's brick school building Tuesday, on a residential street near Stockton Boulevard and Fruitridge Road, students scanned the grass for four-leaf clovers. Parents in the parking lot were reacting to the impending changes with dismay. Many said they wouldn't send their children to All Hallows, based in an area they consider unsafe. They worried about higher tuition costs at other schools and said their children shouldn't have to suffer for the abuse lawsuits.

Some parents at All Hallows and St. Peter's said they felt their schools - less than three miles apart - were targeted for restructuring because they are in low-income neighborhoods. "They were the poorest of schools. They're not as economically advantageous," Hagemann said. "They're just treating us as second class," said Steve Ramirez, picking up his fifth-grade son from All Hallows. "The majority of the people that go here are Mexican American, and look who goes to the other schools, like El Dorado Hills."

Holy Trinity Parish opened a $4 million school in El Dorado Hills in 2003 - the same year Immaculate Conception School in Oak Park was closed.

School closures in inner-city neighborhoods and openings in more wealthy suburbs are part of a national trend over the last five years, said Michael Guerra, president of the National Catholic Educational Association. It is a "crisis" that pits changing demographics and finances against the mission of the church to serve the poor, Guerra said.

In Sacramento, an endowment provides scholarships to urban schools like All Hallows and St. Peter's but it provides money for fewer than 10 students to attend each school every year. "It is absolutely still a value of the church to serve those that are in need, and there will be new ways of doing that," Magnino said. "But it just may not look the way it used to."

The market for schools is clearly in the suburbs, said Dean Hoge, professor of sociology at Catholic University of America. "The future of Catholic schools is generally a big issue of social justice versus playing to the market," he said. "The question is, we as a Catholic Church, is that really our business? Why should we be in the private school business? Why shouldn't we have an option for the poor?"

Source



Princes steal from paupers: "Thousands of dollars in federal funds intended to assist poor District of Columbia schoolchildren appear to have been spent instead by school administrators on retreats and unapproved travel. DC auditors are looking into the public school system's use of these federal funds. 'You had at least principals and some other managers participating,' Deborah K. Nichols of the Office of the District of Columbia Auditor says. 'No cost was spared.' Nichols disclosed the inquiry at an oversight hearing by the DC Council's Committee on Education, Libraries and Recreation. DC public schools received more than $10 million in 2004 for after-school programs, according to city documents. Under the proposed fiscal 2006 budget, the programs would receive more than $13 million, which includes federal money and private donations."

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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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19 March, 2005

ENVY-FILLED LEFTIST IDEOLOGOUES MASQUERADING AS TEACHERS

The huge success of Wal-Mart is its real offence. Tearing down the successful is infinitely more important and satisfying to Leftists than helping the unsuccessful. If you doubt it, judge them by what they are good at. With their socialist ideas, they create poverty: they don't alleviate it. When did you see a welfare client get rich?

When it's time to pick up supplies for her third-grade classroom, Jennifer Strand would prefer to steer clear of Wal-Mart. The teacher is convinced the retail giant isn't paying workers a fair wage, but in the northeastern Washington town of Colville -- population 5,000 -- the only other option is a small stationery section in the local grocery store. So Strand became a reluctant Wal-Mart shopper -- venturing in from time to time to pick up supplies and emergency items for disadvantaged students, such as coats and shoes. She'd get reimbursed through the Washington Education Association's Children's Fund, a decade-old charity that provides up to $100 per student each year.

Not anymore. Taking a bold political stand, the state teachers' union last week declared the fund off-limits to Wal-Mart purchases. In a newsletter distributed to teachers, association President Charles Hasse cited Wal-Mart's "exploitative labor practices (that) have added to public assistance burdens in our state and across the nation." Hasse said yesterday that the action followed repeated suggestions from teachers to either change the policy or distribute information about the company's labor practices. Hasse said he's received more than 200 responses from teachers around the state, who were 20-1 in favor of eliminating Wal-Mart reimbursements. "It was interesting to see the intensity of feeling around this," he said.

Objections to the change stemmed primarily from concerns that teachers in rural areas would have no alternative to Wal-Mart. In the absence of other shopping options, Hasse said, exemptions will be considered on a case-by-case basis. "We're not going to have some student go without a coat if that's the only place it could be purchased." The Children's Fund provides about $50,000 a year to teachers around the state, according to Hasse.

Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman yesterday refuted the unfair labor practice accusations. He said 86 percent of Wal-Mart hourly employees have medical insurance, and more than half of them are covered by the company. The company's average wage for hourly "sales associates" is $10.14 in Washington state, Fogleman said, compared with the national average of $9.68......

Roger Kinney, a marketing and business teacher at Burlington-Edison High School in Skagit County, said he's angry with the association for "dishing around in areas that they don't belong." Kinney believes the association's opposition is a show of solidarity for other unions that have so far eluded certification at any Wal-Mart store. "I think the unions know that Wal-Mart is a huge market for them, and there's a lot of money to be tapped from that market," he said.

More here



A SUPERFLUOUS BUREAUCRACY

"One complete waste of taxpayer money is the Department of Education: "Unlike the educational system of many other countries, education in the United States is highly decentralized, and the Federal government and Department of Education are not heavily involved in determining curriculum or educational standards. Rather, the primary function of the United States Department of Education is to administer federal funding programs involving education and to enforce federal educational laws involved with privacy and civil rights. The quality of educational institutions and their degrees is maintained through an informal process known as accreditation which the Department of Education has no direct control over."

So essentially we've created a bureaucracy that funds institutions across the states but does not have the ability to hold said institutions accountable. This is the same sort of thing that defined welfare for far too many years. The Democratic Party preyed upon people's impressions of poverty and demanded obscene amounts of money to fund programs that didn't work and would never work from what must have seemed like an infinite well of taxpayer dough. That same mentality is what has defined funding of our public schools.

The fact of the matter is that every year that passes the Department of Education along with the school boards and the Teachers Union continue to invalidate the role of the parent and the parent in turn gladly removes themselves from their role in guiding their children's education. In short, the federal government is attempting to become more of a parent to the nations children while the parent takes a siesta. In the end this arrangement is sending the performance and intelligence of our children down the toilet.

I see it everyday when I go to work. I see parents, single mothers mostly, attempting to raise their children and reconcile their mistakes as best they can. They rely heavily on the schools to co-parent with them and the schools are only too happy to oblige. However, that's not the role of school. Parents have to do the work themselves and stop relying on the federal government via teachers, social workers, police officers, etc., to be the parent they can't bring themselves to be. The kind that takes an interest in their child 24 hours a day instead of whenever the mood suits them.

Meanwhile, as stated above, the Department of Education and public schools in general need to be mothballed. They have outlived their usefulness. There are several alternative solutions that every member of society can utilize if we'd only stop reinforcing this co-dependant behavior. I think the rules of the marketplace should absolutely be applied to the education system. First, get the federal government out of it entirely. Life works much better when local governments work directly with their constituents rather than invoking this big hulking mammoth of a disconnected bureaucracy to settle issues it cannot possibly comprehend or do anything constructive about.

With the DOE unable to muck things up, you have the option of employing several ideas. Obviously the most talked about strategy for improving education is the school voucher program. Parents have to take a direct interest in where their children go to school and they should be given the opportunity to shop around for competent districts rather than be herded into failing ones. Again, we should let the marketplace decide which schools stay and which ones go instead of subjecting ourselves to the tyranny of the Teachers Union. Funding for the school vouchers should come in the form of tax-credits or negative income for parents who don't make enough money to send their children to private schools on their own. We don't need a new bureaucracy for that and not having to pay for the old one would free up plenty of money.

Part of "No Child Left Behind" allows for the conversion of charter schools from public schools that have failed their students. While I think said Act is ridiculous and misses the larger point of what is going wrong in public schools, this idea of school conversions needs to be implemented across the board. Every school (except elementary schools) should be a charter or private school, which would command the rules of the business world thus ultimately being better, as capitalism usually is, for our children. This would also effectively kill the Teachers Union, which in my opinion has done more damage to the profession than it has benefited it. Having been a teacher myself in the Los Angeles Unified School District for a period of time, believe me, I saw this nonsense first hand.

For those of you that cannot imagine a world where the federal government doesn't insert itself where it truly doesn't belong, there is another suggestion. I am aware that even with tax-incentive vouchers, scholarships, etc., many students will not make it to a private institution for a variety of reasons. Programs such as the ones I'm describing would have a difficult time penetrating the lowest-income sections of our cities and rural areas. Here I would suggest letting the federal government do what it does best and allow the armed forces to set up training academies in place of public schools. Essentially it would be sleep-away private school with all the benefits getting kids out of the environments that aren't conducive to learning in the first place. If certain parents are going to drop their kids on the steps of City Hall and say that the "government" should parent for them then let the best institution have a crack at it. Military institutions are the only federal programs that can parent effectively when the parents themselves simply cannot function in that capacity.

In my opinion, these are the choices in front of today's American parents; step up and become invested in your child's education or stand back and let the military have them. Either way, the system we have now isn't helping anyone. We continue to burn money on a failed system while our children become less educated and more obstinate".

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TOM BARRETT ON EDUBABBLE

"We all laugh when we hear people talk about "psycho-babble." The "edu-babble" that is spouted by education professors is less funny and a lot more dangerous. It's dangerous because students leave these colleges and become school administrators and officers of the NEA (the national teachers union). In these positions they are able to influence what and how our children are taught. As a result, schools are de-emphasizing traditional learning, and placing emphasis on feel-good liberal favorites such as "discovering one's self" and "constructing one's own knowledge." Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but it seems to me that the world would be a better place if we all worked off the same knowledge. It's a lot less confusing that way. Even when real subjects are discussed, they are couched in Ed-speak: one doesn't just write, one is "given permission to think on the paper"; one doesn't converse, one "negotiates meaning."

What have all these "improvements" to the educational process brought us besides our student's miserable performance in math and science? According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (see LINK below), reading is also a serious problem area. Less than half of children in grades four, eight and twelve read at a proficient level. Only 31% of all fourth-graders, and 12% of black fourth-graders read at their grade level.

By the end of fifth grade, poor children are two and a half years behind wealthy kids in all subject areas. Behind by fifty percent! A big part of this problem is our antiquated nine month school schedule. When public schools got their start, children were needed three months of the year to harvest crops. Today less than two percent of school-age children live on farms. Yet this ridiculous system is as revered as if it were one of the Ten Commandments. There have been attempts at reform, but the teacher's union, supported by the Democrats, has beaten them all down. Children of wealthy families continue their education during mentally stimulating summer vacations. Poor kids are left to fend for themselves. If Democrats cared for "the children" as much as their political ads claim, they would support these reforms to give poor kids more and better education, instead of fighting them.

Dr. Jay Wile, PhD., a Professor of Nuclear Chemistry at the University of Rochester, in a lecture in Orlando about the crisis in our schools, noted that his students who came from home-school backgrounds consistently out-performed both public and private school students in every type of standardized testing. For instance, home-schooled students average 67 points higher on the SAT's than the national average; about 10% better than traditionally-schooled students. He wanted to find out why parents, most of whom have no training in education, could teach their children so much better than certified teachers. So he started studying teacher's colleges.

Dr. Wile found that students in the Schools of Education on university campuses have SAT scores which are on average 100 points lower than those of the general student population. In other words, the brighter students are going into other fields. This is a reflection of the small value our society places on education. If teachers were paid as much as the garbage collectors in most cities, we could attract better qualified applicants. He also found that grading standards for education students were much more lax than in other disciplines. For example, at his own University in Indiana, the College of Arts and Sciences gave "A's" to only about 18% of students. The College of Education's percentage of "A's" was 62%.

But the problem is not only the low standards in teacher's colleges, and the pap that they teach in place of real educational principles. Teachers have also been very resistant to any form of accountability. They fight teacher testing, perhaps with good reason. A recent study showed that many New York City teachers could not pass the exams they were giving to their students. In Massachusetts 59 teachers failed an 8th grade test in writing and math.

Teachers also oppose merit-based pay increases and promotions. These policies, successful in the few school systems that have used them, reward teachers who teach well. Like all unions, the teacher's union wants everyone to be treated the same in pay and promotions regardless of whether or not they do their jobs.

Many teachers love their work, and spend their own time increasing their knowledge and abilities by taking continuing education courses and obtaining advanced degrees. But the average school teacher in the United States get only eight hours of training each year. Barbers and hairdressers are required to get more continuing education than that, and they only take care of the few hairs we have left. These people are influencing our children's minds and morals!

One last thought. Public school students attend four years of school, nine months each year, to obtain their high school diplomas. They could take a twelve week prep course and receive a GED (high school equivalency diploma) which certifies that they have learned the same material. What takes place in the 36 months of high school that is left out of the three month GED training? Well, they miss out on a lot of "fluff": socialization, pop psychology, and indoctrination in areas that most parents prefer their children not receive (such as anti-American propaganda and "sensitivity" training by homosexual activists).

They might miss valuable training on how to cook or hammer nails, things which their parents have normally taught them at home. And they don't experience the joys of running around and around the track during PE. Then there's the prom, football games, and pep rallies. Have I mentioned anything that is worthwhile? What they DO learn is math, writing and other skills that will make them employable, subjects that SHOULD be the emphasis in four-year high schools. Oh, I almost forgot. Students must be able to READ to take the GED. That is not required to graduate from most high schools.

Parents and grandparents, you had better get involved before it's too late. Don't just sit back and wait for someone else to do something about this sorry state of affairs. YOU are the "someone else." The Bible says that if a father doesn't take care of his family, he is worse than an infidel. Taking care of your family involves a lot more than just providing for them financially. If you don't get involved, your child may be one of the millions of functionally illiterate students who graduate from our high schools every year."

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Home schoolers save the government big money: "What's the effect of home-schooling and private-schooling on the cost to taxpayers of financing government schools? A new study by John Wenders and Andrea Clements, who looked at data from Nevada, finds that home-schooling and private schooling save that state's taxpayers big money. Here's a quotation from the executive summary of their study: "Based on 2003 data, the analysis shows an annual potential cost savings to Nevada taxpayers ranging from $24.3 million to $34.6 million attributable to homeschool students, and another $101.9 million to $147 million attributable to private school students, for a combined total of $126.2 million to $181.7 million".

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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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18 March, 2005

DUBIOUS DOCTORATES

Parents and boards of education probably feel comforted when they see the title "Dr." preceding the name of the superintendent of schools. Knowing your district is in the hands of a highly trained professional adds peace of mind.

Unfortunately, though, "doctorates of education" are relatively lightweight degrees. The dissertation and research expectations are far lower than those required for a Ph.D. in other fields. And that master's degree on the wall of the principal's office? The lectures the principal sat through were probably taught by someone who knows little about running a school in today's world, where principals are responsible for far more than making buses run on schedule. Credentialing programs for school leaders range from "inadequate to appalling," and the coursework required is only marginally related to on-the-job skills, according to a report released Monday by the president of the Teachers College at Columbia University.

So why are education colleges filling classrooms with candidates seeking these marginal degrees? Because of a cozy system that rewards everyone except students, who don't get the school leaders they need. The degrees are cash cows for the colleges that offer them. While a university might take in $8,000 a year in tuition for one of these degrees, the program costs only about $6,000, according to the report. That spillover money gets sent to other departments, such as chemistry or physics, which have expensive labs to maintain.

As for the principals and superintendents, they win the credential they need to help land their next job or pay increase. Knowing that the degrees are useful only as a symbol, they seek out the least demanding programs offered in the most convenient locations. Too many weak principals and superintendents emerge from this pipeline. That creates problems in the classrooms. Studies of why some schools are more successful than others have arrived at the same conclusion: Successful schools require strong leaders.

Frustrated with the status quo, some school districts are hiring outsiders, especially former generals, who lack a background in education. The KIPP Academy Charter Schools, which are succeeding with inner-city children, train their own principals. One solution, the report concludes, is eliminating the doctorates and master's degrees and replacing them with a new master's degree that focuses on needed skills. That's worth considering. Unless changes are made, those impressive looking diplomas should be eyed with skepticism.

Source



SURPRISE! CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOLS CROWDED

I sent my son to a Catholic High School for similar reasons. And he did very well

Long Island's Catholic high schools are booming as fall enrollments continue to climb, a striking contrast to the diocese's elementary schools, which are struggling in many places to fill seats. In September, there will be about 13,400 students in the 11 high schools within the Diocese of Rockville Centre, an increase of more than 9 percent over last year. "The demand is there. Many more students would go to Catholic high school if they could afford to go," said Joanne O'Brien, the diocese's associate schools superintendent.

The increased high school enrollments come as the student population is on the decline at the diocese's 57 parish and regional elementary schools. For the past eight years, the lower-grade population has slipped almost 10 percent, while high school enrollment has risen more than 12 percent. A recent diocese survey of families with children in religious education programs found that cost was the primary reason for the empty seats. Priests, principals and parents say that, while Catholic families may want to do both, they often choose to bypass lower-grade parochial education to save money for high school.

At the same time, the competition for space in most Catholic high schools has frustrated some parents who have paid tuition bills since kindergarten only to find that 40 percent of high school students cross over from public schools. The average annual high school tuition is about $6,000, although it varies by school and does not include as much as $3,000 in private busing for some students. About 9 percent of Long Island high school students attend Catholic institutions, and slightly more than 3 percent attend other private schools.

While strong academics and an emphasis on religion have always been the draw of parochial schools, the increased demand seems to extend from the perception that Catholic high schools, with their dress codes, behavior codes and emphasis on traditional values, offer a more structured environment. "For many it is a faith-based decision; others are looking for a better environment or a different environment for their child. The atmosphere is what makes the education," said Brother Ken Hoagland, principal of Kellenberg Memorial High School in Uniondale, which had a record 2,200 applications this fall and admitted 586 more students for its incoming freshman class than it planned.

Parents said they see Catholic schools as a place where their teenagers won't be exposed to drug sales and sexually suggestive clothing. "I thought Catholic school would be raising the bar for my child and what I expected of them ... There are rules and expected codes of behavior," said Rick Sacco of Farmingdale. Sacco, an administrator for New York State, said he gladly pays the $1,000-a-month tuition for both his son Richard, a sophomore at Holy Trinity Diocesan High School in Hicksville, and daughter Annemarie, a senior at Our Lady of Mercy Academy in Syosset.

The fall's islandwide ninth-grade class of 3,562 students is likely to grow because some schools still have empty seats, including St. Dominic's in Oyster Bay, where the parish is struggling to overcome deep divisions from the clerical sexual abuse crisis. There is also room at Academy of St. Joseph in Brentwood and McGann-Mercy Diocesan High School in Riverhead, which the diocese is rebuilding after it took over the school in 2002 from the Sisters of Mercy.

The other schools have waiting lists. "I get phone calls every day from principals and then parents get every priest they know to call," said the Rev. James Vlaun, the chaplain at St. John the Baptist High School in West Islip, describing the ongoing lobbying to secure seats in the freshman class that already is at a high of 520.

Forty percent of incoming ninth-graders in Catholic schools will come from public schools. Parents who made the switch said their teenagers are getting more individual attention than in public schools. Just as important in their decision making is how the other students dressed and acted. Joanne Lauro of Yaphank said her son John is "blossoming" since he left public school for McGann-Mercy. "The attention and praise they get makes them succeed at a higher level," Lauro said.

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