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30 November, 2005

Government education: Road to hell?

Good intentions will surely be the downfall of individual liberty and personal freedom. The greatest motivation that mankind has to abandon the principles of freedom is simply being afraid. And, fear plays right into the hands of legislators that use good intentions, whether quite sincere or merely conjured, to usurp individual freedoms and parley them into collective power. The consequences of this exchange is a bloated beast called Bureaucracy controlled by a tyrant, or group of tyrants, that seek to enslave the masses for their own good. In other words, Freedom dies. Remember my personal credo, "More government ALWAYS translates into Less freedom." In no area is this more evident than the realm of government education.

Education is only one of the areas where good intentions have proven less than sufficient to cure the ills of society. It was with the very best of intentions that legislators decided to take upon themselves the responsibility of providing a free education to every child in America. Has a nobler thought ever been conceived in human mind than the desire to see America's offspring properly prepared to face an ever-changing world? However, the consequence of such feel-good philosophy is a false sense of security, born in the supposition that the State can do something, anything, better than the individual. Freedom is relinquished willingly for nothing more than a promise that government can provide something to individuals that the individuals themselves cannot procure on their own. And the children suffer the most.

The worst consequence of passing responsibility of educating young minds from personal to collective is the task is botched so horribly. Some children are educated quite well in a state-supported system but most barely receive an average level of education. And, far too many fall through the expansive cracks of society that are the floorboards of a bloated bureaucracy grown so large it has become impossible to keep track of everyone. The result of all the good intentions of providing adequate education to children is a twelve-year factory system that produces more than its fair share of functional illiterates. Why do you think the majority of congressmen/women have their children in private institutions? These children are not trained to take charge of governing themselves; but rather, they are almost programmed to be willing taxpayers that obey a ruling elite. Seems we have been there before and it required armed revolution to free an oppressed people. Sound familiar?

So, which is better? Giving your precious children to the State and expecting something you are not likely to receive; or, taking back the responsibility of educating your own young, making sure YOU are satisfied that your loved ones are properly equipped to face the cold, cruel world? Nothing as important as educating a child should be left to government agencies that only have a mandate to provide minimal education to the children whose minds they are charged with filling. The State has no incentive to educate children other than to ensure the perpetuation of governmental power. Willing subjects are much easier to rule, after all. By giving into the good intentions of supposedly well-meaning elected representatives we allow the State to churn out generation after generation of willing slaves that will worship at the altar of the false-deity Security, and believe the lie that the State can provide them their necessities. The consequences again are just too great to ignore. Slavery is unacceptable even if it is of the subtle sort!

When we allow the responsibility of educating our beautiful children to be assumed by the State, we contribute to the agonizingly slow death of Freedom by allowing the government to control the path of each new generation. Good intentions have created a system that takes in free individuals and renders dependent servants of them. Good intentions that have allowed our children to be poorly educated.

There are no easy answers to all of life's problems, but we should not allow that to become sufficient reason for believing the lie that the State can handle any problem better than individuals. There is simply no evidence to support the claim. We must stop allowing good intentions to be used to justify every great debacle while ignoring the cost in taxpayer's dollars and human lives. We must learn from our mistakes and start thinking more about the consequences before we allow ourselves to be swept away by the tsunami caused by the sudden social shifts born in good intentions. Perhaps there is no truer adage than the one that cautions: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Source



Chicago Mayor Loves Socialist Education

For years now Richard Daley, Mayor of Chicago has enjoyed a growing reputation among the political Leftists in this country. He has been one of the leading local and national proponents of "victim disarmament" (he calls it gun control). Daley's rationale seems to be that if only the honest people would all just turn in their firearms then the gangbangers would not have to worry about shooting them when they committed robbery or mayhem because they would all know that none of the honest people had anything left to defened themselves with. Cuts down on the murder rate, you know.

I doubt if Mr. Daley really expects the gang members to dutifully fork over their illegal firearms, but then, again, he seeems more interested in keeping honest folks disarmed than he is in taking illegal weapons away from gang members. But, then, this is a mindset quite in keeping with the socialist worldview.

And Mr. Daley continues to demonstrate his socialist proclivities in other areas. A while back, he vacationed in Red China, and while there he took a look at the Red Chinese educational system--which, by the way, he was really impressed with. It seems the Reds keep their children in government schools for 250 days a year--mostly all year, and that really appealed to Daley. Mayor Daley would like to do the same thing in Chicago--make the kids go for 250 days a year, all year. Writer Jack Duggan, commenting about this on LewRockwell.com has noted: "Daley somehow thinks that six days of mediocrity would be much better than five days of mediocrity. And he wants to extend from 180 days per year to the Communists' 250. It seems the plan is to force kids to become good and obedient little robot socialists. Just imagine, publik skool not only for 6 days a week, but for longer hours each day, and then for 12 months a year. Sobering, isn't it?" Frightening would be a more apt description!

Of course the Chicago Teachers Union would be in support of such a program. And the teachers would have to get a hefty pay raise because of all those extra hours, but, then, most of them also suffer from a socialist world view as does Daley and so they are more than happy to go along. Anything to increase the amount of propaganda they can force down the kids' throats under the guise of "quality education." Duggan has it right--the aim is to create obedient little socialist robots.

And for the teachers to get more money, why, naturally the property taxes would have to be raised, but, hey, isn't that a small price to pay for getting your kid thoroughly brainwashed, er, I mean "educated"?

We should ask these folks if they know anything or are willing to discuss the real foundations of the government school system in this country. If we do they will probably speak in glowing terms about Horace Mann, the "father of the common schools." What they won't tell you is that Horace Mann was a Unitarian (one who did not accept the Deity of Jesus Christ) and that part of the reason Mann was so hot to establish statist education in New England, where he lived, was that he saw it as something to oppose the Christian schools in his area. In other words, public, or government education was a reaction against Christian education.

Another strong proponent of government schooling was Karl Marx, who advocated, in his "Communist Manifesto" that "Free education for all children in public schools" should be the order of the day. So, with the endorsement of Unitarians and Communists, our government school system has become the order of the day, and our kids have suffered under this monstrosity since the 1830s.

Mr. Duggan has stated that: "The irony of this situation is that most publik skool teachers are themselves graduates of the same system. They can't spell much better than their students. so the students will grow up dumb and dumber and not able to get a decent-paying job..." And, no doubt, those graduating from the teacher's colleges will get a diploma that reads: "Last weak I culdnt even spell teecher--now I are one."

Let us hope that someone in Chicago can find some way to get Mr. Daley's educational desires deep-sixed. If not, I can see this becoming a pilot program for government schools all across the country. Government education already has too many hours per day to brainwash children. They don't need more. Actually what we really need is for a growing number of parents to remove their children from the government schools and to begin to teach them at home, where they can get some real education rather than the cunningly devised socialist fables they are fed in government indoctrination centers we call public schools.

Source

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

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

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

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29 November, 2005

POSSIBLE HIATUS

I go into hospital for a rather large surgical procedure today. It is however day surgery so I hope to be back home by the evening and blogging away as usual. If that proves too optimistic, however, this blog may not be updated for a day or so.



CALIFORNIA EDUCATION BUREAUCRATS WOULD SURVIVE A NUCLEAR WINTER

Enrollment drops, teachers leave, but administrators stay. That's the story at most of the 25 school districts with declining enrollment in the Sacramento region, according to a Bee analysis of state education data. Just eight of those districts reported to the state that they had cut administrators between the school years 1999-2000 and 2004-2005, even though the districts lost about 5,000 students during that period. Five of the 25 districts added administrators. And although most of those districts aren't cutting administrator positions, they are employing fewer teachers. Twenty-two of the 25 districts have fewer teachers today than they did five years ago, state data show.

Some districts can justify those numbers because their enrollment dropped incrementally, said James W. Guthrie, a professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for almost three decades. But the five districts that added administrators and another five in which administration ranks remained the same while enrollment dropped by more than 10 percent have some explaining to do, he said. "If you didn't cut, why? If you added, why?" Guthrie asked. "The burden of proof ought to be on why they haven't reduced their administrative staff."

Administrators defend the numbers by pointing to new federal and state initiatives that they say create more work. They also cite the difficulty of cutting supervisory staff in small districts. "You happen to be looking at the period of time when the state is rolling out high-stakes accountability," said Bob Wells, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators. "There are in fact more things to do that are administrative in nature."

Even though California continues to grow each year, about 40 percent of the school districts in the state are losing students. The reasons vary. In some places, high urban home prices cause young families to head for the suburbs. Rural districts often shrink as residents move to places with more jobs. And some areas have static, older populations without many kids.

The amount of funding a district gets is closely tied to the number of students it teaches. So schools with fewer students usually find themselves slicing up a smaller pie. And if the number of administrators in a shrinking district grows or stays the same, a bigger piece of that pie goes toward paying supervisors. That's exactly what has happened at most of the districts that are losing enrollment, but not losing administrators, in the Sacramento region, state data show.

More here



BRITISH CONFUSION OVER RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS

Multiculturalism, for so long the mantra of the left and the government when dealing with the issue of race, seems to have run out of steam. Margaret Hodge, minister for employment and welfare reform and MP for Barking in East London, seemed to echo the sentiment of many when she said that faith schools should promote integration, not segregation.

But this comes at the moment the government seems determined to fund more and more faith schools. David Bell, the chief inspector for the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), has called for the government to fund more of the 120 independent Muslim schools in Britain, to ensure that they can be regulated. There is a growing fear that faith schools will become detached from British society and could become hotbeds of anti-Western dissent.

Of course there are those who just dismiss faith schools altogether. The British Humanist Association has welcomed Hodge's statement, which it says acknowledges what it has been saying for many years: 'faith schools are a key cause of segregation.' However, it complains that Hodge did not include atheists in her catalogue of those kept out of faith schools: 'We are, however, disappointed that Ms Hodge mentions only that children of "other faiths" should not be excluded. Sixty-five per cent of 12- to 19-year-olds describe themselves as having no religion - are they to continue to be excluded from learning with their peers?'

This spat over faith schools reveals the rotten core at the heart of British education. Despite the rhetoric, there is no vision for schools in this country. When the government sees it as necessary to fund more faith schools, it does so because at least such schools can unashamedly promote some values. They have an ethos and a credo that they can promote. The 'multicultural comprehensive', by contrast, is a confused place, not knowing whether Christmas is offensive or Muslims should be allowed to wear religious garments as part of their uniform. The only value it aspires to is to have no values - which it refers to as 'tolerance'. Hodge attacked religious schools for being intolerant, saying: 'We need Ofsted to ensure the curriculum and values of faith schools are consistent with the national curriculum and with promoting tolerance.'

How a set of absolute moral and religious beliefs fits in with any notion of tolerance is beyond me. Unless, of course, you adopt the multiculturalist perspective - according to which tolerance means an appreciation of 'other values', without accepting them yourself. It means denying the right to criticise believers for their values, but denouncing anyone who evangelises belief to us. It is both a separation from other cultures and a failure to define our own culture. If we were to define our culture as apart from other religious cultures we would no doubt be subject to the government's new religious hatred legislation.

As far as faith schools go, I find the arguments put forward by the secularists particularly unconvincing. By taking the stance that all faith schools should be abolished, the British Humanist Association ends up suggesting that multicultural comprehensives are better than faith schools. But a system that denies the possibility of belief to its pupils, and offers nothing but cynicism and intellectual paralysis, can hardly be said to be good. At least a child brought up in a Catholic or Jewish school has a God to rail against. All state schools offer is the certainty that there is no truth other than the impossibility of knowing - a kind of postmodern purgatory.

But for Muslims, the promise of religious schools is a trap they could well do without. The ghettoisation of Muslims into faith-based communities can only reinforce the estrangement that young British Asians already feel. Some of them turn to religion and the symbols of religion as the easy route to rebellion. But this is a script largely written for them by an establishment that avoids engagement with young Asians.

Instead of promoting values around which we can fight to build a future for all, we have collapsed into looking for enemies in every community. Some young Asians appear ready to act out the worst fantasies of Hodge and co - but the political elite must bear the bulk of the responsibility for the Islamicisation of Britain's Asian youth.

Source

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

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

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

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28 November, 2005

VIRGINIA: A NICE LITTLE WIN FOR REAL TOLERANCE

Don't expect it to extend to the Ivy League any time soon, however

Warren County Community College adjunct English professor, John Daly resigned last night before the school's board of trustees began an emergency meeting to discuss the professor's fate. On November 13, Daly sent an email to student Rebecca Beach vowing "to expose [her] right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like [Rebecca's] won't dare show their face on a college campus." In addition, Daly said that "Real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors."

School president William Austin said that he will incorporate tolerance seminars for professors during the next faculty in-service day to shield students from this type of harassment, as requested by Young America's Foundation. Rebecca Beach has called for Austin to select Young America's Foundation President Ron Robinson as the one to teach leftists how to be tolerant toward conservatives. Robinson has dedicated his career to defending free speech on college campuses. "More colleges and universities need to follow the lead of WCCC and integrate tolerance training for insensitive leftists," says Young America's Foundation Spokesman Jason Mattera. "John Daly is yet another Ward Churchill. Academia is filled with intolerant leftists who openly show hostility toward conservatism."

Daly's email to Rebecca came after she sent a note to faculty announcing the appearance of decorated war hero Lt. Col. Scott Rutter to discuss America's accomplishments in Iraq.

Young America's Foundation will continue to monitor and expose similar instances of leftist intolerance through our online service, "Activist 411 - Activism Made Easy." This resource helps students, like Rebecca Beach, by providing them with advice on how to advance conservative ideas effectively and reveal intolerant professors, administrators, and other left-wing elements who attempt to intimidate and silence young conservative activists.

As the principal outreach organization of the Conservative Movement for 35 years, Young America's Foundation introduces thousands of young people to conservative ideas through national conferences, campus lectures and activism programs, internships, and seminars at the Reagan Ranch. Young America's Foundation preserves the Reagan Ranch as a premier presidential property and living tribute to Ronald Reagan's life and ideas.

Source



CHINESE EDUCATIONAL SUCCESS IN AUSTRALIA

The immigration success story continues apace, with students of Chinese background securing one third of the places in Sydney's selective academic schools. Nine out of 10 students at James Ruse Agricultural High School - NSW's top-performing school - have a non-English-speaking background, predominantly Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean language groups. And after decades of mass migration, thousands of students in government selective schools speak more than 30 different languages at home, from Arabic to Vietnamese. Across the city, students from a migrant background - mainly from Asia - account for two-thirds of enrolments in selective schools, or 9451 out of 14,300 students.

However, the nationally agreed definition of "non-English-speaking background" is broad and includes many students whose parents were born in Australia. Students are classified as NESB if they or their parents speak a language other than English at home.

The Herald has analysed the cultural mix of students in the 19 fully selective state schools using NSW Education Department data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. More than 5000 of the 16,000 selective school students say they have a Chinese-speaking heritage and all but 100 of those students live in Sydney, where 4.9 per cent of the population speaks a Chinese language. The next largest language groups are Korean (601 students), Vietnamese (528), Tamil (436), Tagalog (284), Hindi (284), Singhalese (225), Greek (151), Russian (146) and Arabic (137). The dominance of students from non-English-speaking backgrounds ranges from 92.3 per cent of enrolments at James Ruse and 83.6 per cent at Sydney Boys High to 12.7 per cent at Gosford High.

Lynne Irving, the principal of Sydney Technical High at Bexley, said her school represented the changing demographic. "We reflect what the community looks like," she said. "Irrespective of the national background, the students all have a very high work ethic and they're very well supported by their parents."

Author Don Aitkin said the performance of many students from Asian backgrounds followed the success enjoyed by previous waves of migrant children. "It's in effect a parental sacrifice in the interests of the child," he said. The migrant parents would typically "work their butts off" so their children could get a good education. The children were aware of this and would often forgo "present gratification" like going to the beach to study hard. "And nothing has changed … What you are seeing is only the newest phase of it," he said.

More than 13,000 students this year competed in an entry test for 3308 selective school places in year 7 in 2006. As well as the 19 fully selective schools, there are another dozen schools that teach high achievers in some classes. Students must be Australian citizens or permanent residents. Newly arrived migrants often excel in the difficult test. This year 83 students who could not speak English when they came to Australia less than four years ago won a place for next term

Source

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

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

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

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27 November, 2005

IN NYC TEACHERS COME FIRST AND STUDENTS A DISTANT SECOND

Still, it must be hard to get anyone decent to teach in their shitty public schools so perhaps the principals are doing what they have to do until school discipline is reformed

"Nearly 40 percent of all public school principals in the city acknowledged "passing the lemon" - urging incompetent, tenured teachers to relocate to another school instead of trying to have them fired, according to a new study released yesterday. The practice has been a convenient way for principals to bypass the lengthy firing process for teachers outlined in state law and teachers' contracts.

According to the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit consulting firm that helps school districts recruit and train teachers, 37 percent of the 434 principals surveyed last year admitted trying to push off poor teachers to other schools. Michelle Rhee, CEO of the organization, said the practice "may be a rational response to the inability to remove tenured teachers for poor performance."

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said the findings helped shape the new teachers' contract, which was ratified this month. It eliminated the right of senior teachers to transfer to other schools - often pushing out well-regarded novice teachers in the process. The senior teachers would often exercise their right to leave - after getting a pointed suggestion from their principal. The city Department of Education estimated that about 500 tenured teachers used their seniority to transfer to another school without the approval of the new school's principal.

About 2,300 more tenured teachers last year went to new schools under different plans in which seniority was also a factor. Nearly a quarter of principals surveyed reported losing at least one handpicked beginning teacher to a senior teacher because of the transfer rules.

Teachers union president Randi Weingarten called the report "anti-teacher" and accused the organization of bias because it did not seek input from the union. "Taken out of its protective clothing, this is simply a report that shills for management's demands, not for a new teacher's needs," she said.

Principals union president Jill Levy, who's in contract talks with the city, acknowledged that principals have tried to pass off inept teachers to other schools. But she said they only did so because the system did not support efforts to fire them".

Source (Newmark compares this policy with the Catholic Church's policy of just shifting pedophile priests from place to place)



TESTING TAKING OFF IN AUSTRALIA

Five-year-old children will be tested for basic reading skills twice a year under a national plan to help struggling students. Describing the current state of early childhood and kindergarten education as "a mess", Education Minister Brendan Nelson said the literacy tests would provide parents with results while their children were still identifying words and developing reading skills. Pre-empting a national literacy report to be released soon, Dr Nelson backed the investigation's recommendation of a national testing regime for under-8s. "When a child comes into the system, you have got to have some idea of what their reading skills may be," he told The Weekend Australian. "How is a teacher to know who to concentrate on? "You worry about them all but you've surely got to identify the ones you have got to start from scratch on."

The long-awaited report, Teaching Reading, was commissioned by Dr Nelson amid fears that current teaching methods were failing Australia's children. The minister is expected to announce a shake-up of teacher training in universities when the report is released on December 8.

The report's author, Ken Rowe, said yesterday there was no national regime to test children when they first attended school. "South Australia and Victoria have been doing this for quite a few years," he said. "Some children are even tested when they are 4 1/2. "The idea is they get some sort of indication of their cognitive development - whether they can identify letters, whether they can recognise their own name. "There's currently no national consistency on this. This would give teachers the basics of what they need to know about a child's skills."

His report is expected to include an explicit warning that Australia's schools should embrace "systematic, direct phonics instruction so that children master the essential alphabetic code-breaking skill required for foundational reading proficiency". There has been a controversial debate over which of two approaches is better - the phonics instruction method or the "whole language" method, a "holistic" approach in which children are immersed in language and words, instead of learning first to break down words.

Opposition education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin said: "If Brendan Nelson is going to impose a new test on five-year-olds, he must accompany it with additional resources for teachers so that the students requiring extra help actually get it."

Dr Nelson also signalled debate over a shake-up of early childhood education. "Personally, I think that early childhood education is a mess," he said. "It's a question of luck, in many cases, as to where you live in Australia and whether your child will get access to early childhood education and, if so, what the quality will be. "Some of the parents have said to me: 'What are you going to do about children who don't know what a book is?' "I've often said to the university people, who have a voracious appetite for money: 'If you had serious new money to invest in education in Australia, would you get a better human and economic return for it if you invested it in universities or early childhood?' That's a good question."

Dr Nelson also revealed that preliminary results from a controversial tutorial voucher scheme for children have shown a rapid improvement in their reading age of between 12 and 18 months after one-on-one help. Outlining a timetable to work towards a national Year 12 system, known as an Australian Certificate of Education, by 2007, Dr Nelson also indicated that his reform agenda was beginning to secure the support of previously hostile states. The proposal would build on the existing state-based exams, rather than force students to sit more tests. But it would deliver a national approach on key subject areas such as maths, chemistry, physics and English.

Parents forced to move interstate for work could be confident under the new system that their child would have a better chance of settling in, without the stress and upheaval of a different curriculum, Dr Nelson said. "Why can't we have common language, common units of assessment, common standards in core areas?" Dr Nelson maintains that the changes, which would require the agreement of the states, would not require a rigid, inflexible national curriculum across all subjects. "But in some areas, surely, elements of mathematics, physics and chemistry are common to everyone," he said

Source

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

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

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

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26 November, 2005

ATTEMPT TO ERASE AMERICAN HISTORY FROM AMERICAN SCHOOLS

The Carson City (NV) school district says 11th-grade history teachers should start teaching American history at the Civil War period and move forward. But one experienced, award-winning teacher is standing up to this History-Lite policy and is insisting on teaching about our nation's colonial and Founding eras. And he might lose his job over it. Citizen Outreach is asking people to sign an online petition to save his job.

What is the historian's version of the Hippocratic Oath? Herodotus as "The Father of History" has not left us one as far as I know. Given the disturbing trends towards disparaging the teaching of historical facts in public schools, we may want to consider writing such an oath regarding the sacred duty history teachers have to impart our heritage to the next generation. Perhaps it could read, "I will not water down history content or the methodology of teaching history to conform to any given educational fad or political correctness that slashes and burns through our subject. Our foremost duty is to the integrity of history facts and the best interests of our students."

In addition to our new oath, we could consider forming the history police to investigate pressures put on history teachers in public schools to cut corners lest they rock the boat. I am only half joking. One has only to watch The Tonight's Show "Jaywalking" where Jay Leno asks people on the streets the most basic of history questions to concur our graduates of public schools do not know historical facts.

In reality and to the astonishment of many, teachers are told not to be "fact-fixated" when teaching of history. The word "facts" is almost used as an expletive in modern education. We are told students need to have a "feel" for the period and jump right into critical thinking and dialog with each other. "Facts" we are told only promote lower order thinking and are a waste of time as facts change in an ever changing world. Wow! What nonsense.

Whisper the nonsense part if you are a history teacher in a public school. Those of us fixated on facts are labeled "Neanderthals" and "dinosaurs" in American public education's version of the Cultural Revolution. Today's educational Young Turks are taught to look with disdain on the factual dinosaurs by the schools of education that control the licensing of teachers.

Another disturbing trend in modern education is the focus on social history to the point that students can receive good grades on a historical topic and never learn or cover the major events. Jay Matthews, in the Washington Post (May 28, 2004) article: "Students Don't Know Much About WW II Except the Internment Camps," gave such an example. Teachers are pressured to cover these issues at the expense of the dates, battles, and leaders to the point that many of the history teaching staff have weak backgrounds in these basics. This in turn reinforces the trend not to cover the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact, Pearl Harbor, and Stalingrad in any detail or with real meaning.

I currently find myself in a rather interesting predicament of resisting the cutting of U.S. history content and being forced to apply questionable educational methods. I have been told to "play ball or else" by school district authorities. I rock the boat of public school history education in my little part of the world because I know how to swim. I understand others in the boat resent it being rocked, but wonder where compromise begins and selling out ends. We all have different beltlines. Mine has been reached.

I pointed out serious errors of my school district in addressing the state history standards (which I helped author) . In retaliation school officials have rated me unsatisfactory and are intent on making me an example of what happens when a teacher steps out of line. My years of experience including being a Fulbright teacher and Madison Fellow have been denigrated by district administration as not relevant to being a good teacher in their attempt to marginalize me and my objections. The two history textbooks I have written in the last two years are dismissed as simply having to do with "content" and are also considered irrelevant to what they call education.

While this appears backwards and rather confusing to most, it makes perfect sense in the minds of too many in public education. It is a fundamental ideological struggle for the control of the teaching of history, a struggle between content-oriented historians versus the educational methodologists that are set to apply their process style of teaching that manipulates content at will. They have the tail wagging the dog with the allure of not having to bother with the years of historical study required to be (formerly) fully competent to teach history.

The premise of traditional historical education is to learn the key people, places, and events and only then build upon these solid foundations toward "real" critical thinking regarding the topic. This teacher-centered model of instruction is considered "bad" teaching by student-centered theorists. With student-centered teaching, students "share" their ideas and feelings in groups, as Heather MacDonald wrote in her 1998 work, The Flaw in Student-Centered Learning:

In such a classroom, the teacher is not supposed to teach, since teaching is considered too hierarchical and authoritarian. Worse, traditional lecturing presumes that the teacher actually knows something the students don't, an idea that is anathema to ed-school egalitarianism. The ideal student-centered classroom lacks a fixed curriculum. The student's own interests determine what he or she learns, with the teacher acting as mere "facilitator."

The use of the word "facilitator" exposes the key ideological difference of the methodology. While states still issue "teaching" licenses, the new teachers are not being trained to teach, rather facilitate. I can assume the people on the streets interviewed by Jay Leno were facilitated and not taught history.

Admittedly, forming a history police may be too far-fetched. They would be unnecessary if we had historical ethics and stood by them. Let's toy with the idea of a historian's oath. We should definitely look towards taking the power of licensing history teachers from schools of education and require them to obtain the stamp of approval from hard core history Neanderthals like us, assuming there are any of us left.

Source



BRITISH GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS CANNOT PROPERLY EDUCATE EVEN THE BRIGHTEST KIDS

The educational apartheid dividing state and independent schools was laid bare yesterday by new research into the achievements of bright children. The most able children are only half as likely to achieve top grades at A level in state schools as they are in the fee-paying sector, a government adviser told head teachers. Pupils in private schools who were among the country's brightest 5 per cent at age 11 were virtually certain to get three A grades in their A levels at 18, putting them in contention for places at Oxford and Cambridge. But only a third of the most able 5 per cent went on to achieve the same results in state schools.

The research was presented by David Jesson, an education evaluator based at York University, who said that the state system was suffering a "severe talent drain". He told heads at the annual conference in Birmingham of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT), which represents 2,422 state secondary schools, that Britain's future economic success depended on identifying and nurturing such children.

The findings present a huge challenge to Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, as she fights to win Labour support for reform of secondary schools. Many backbench MPs are suspicious that plans to turn comprehensives into independent trust schools will lead some to introduce "backdoor selection" of bright children.

Professor Jesson's findings came from research that tracked the progress of the brightest 5 per cent of pupils between 1999 and 2004, based on scores in national curriculum tests of English, mathematics and science at age 11 in primary schools. He was given access to the data by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). Professor Jesson said that it was a myth that the brightest children attended private schools. In fact, of the 37,500 children in the top 5 per cent, 30,000 went on to state secondaries and 7,500 were educated privately. By the age 16, all 7,500 in fee-paying schools had achieved at least five GCSE grades A* or A. But only 20,000 of the original cohort in state schools reached this standard.

The professor said that 13,000 students in state schools achieved three A grades at A level. In independent schools, the number was 7,600. "At age 11, 7 per cent of all pupils are in independent schools. By age 16, 25 per cent of those achieving five A* or A grades are in independent schools. At 18, 33 per cent of those with three As at A level are in independent schools, and 44 per cent of Oxbridge entrants," Professor Jesson said. "There is the evidence not merely of a state-independent school divide, but of a state-independent divide on pupils who are similar. This is evidence of a severe talent drain."

Oxbridge admitted 3,500 candidates from the state sector in 2004 and 2,600 from independent schools. Bright children in independent schools therefore had a 1-in-3 chance of getting into Oxbridge compared with a less than 1-in-8 chance for students in the state sector

Source



Australia: Music plays second fiddle to other subjects

The majority of Australian children are deprived of adequate music education at school, according to a damning national report that political leaders say reveals a crisis in music teaching. The National Review of School Music Education found that two-thirds of schools rate their music classes as variable to very poor, and about one in 10 schools - or more than 900 across the country - offer no formal music classes at all. The review, commissioned by the Federal Government last year, also reported that a third of schools had great difficulty finding teachers who were properly trained in music. Only 6 per cent of schools made any effort to nurture students gifted in music.

The federal Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, conceded yesterday that his Government was partly responsible for the "inconsistent and inequitable" way music was taught to young Australians. But he also hit out at states and universities for treating music as "some kind of desirable add-on in school education rather than being a foundation of it". Dr Nelson, who described the review as "disturbing at best", will convene a national music education summit early next year to debate recommendations in the review, which calls for strict benchmarks in all school music curriculums. "There will also be major reform in the way in which Australian teachers are trained in universities," he said. Dr Nelson said he would refer the report to Teaching Australia, which is developing an accreditation system for education faculties.

The chairwoman of the review's steering committee, Professor Margaret Seares, who is also deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Western Australia, lamented the fact that governments had been ignoring reviews of music education since the 1970s. She said that for too many years schools had been allowed to treat music as a diversion for tired teachers and bored students. Research cited in the review showed that music tuition engaged all students, lifted their self-esteem and improved their academic achievements, she said.

But a spokeswoman for the NSW Education Minister, Carmel Tebbutt, cited a 20 per cent rise in enrolments in HSC Music 1 since 2001 as evidence that the state was taking music seriously. "All students between kindergarten and year 6 do it and high school students must study 100 hours of music above the national average," the spokeswoman said. "Education in music is no less important than learning how to read, write, count and communicate."

The Federal Opposition spokeswoman for education, Jenny Macklin, and the Opposition spokesman for the arts, Peter Garrett, said Dr Nelson should stop blaming the states and work with them. "The federal Education Minister's response to this $346,000 report is to organise a summit next year to discuss the issues in music education. Nearly 1200 submissions and 4700 petitions should be enough for Brendan Nelson to take action now," the pair said in a statement.

Dr Nelson, a Slim Dusty devotee and amateur guitar strummer, declared that every Australian child should have an opportunity to learn an instrument and be given the "courage to express [their] emotions". "It is extremely important that all of us appreciate that [this is] the way in which we will pass the soul from our generation to the next." Dr Nelson has allocated $400,000 to the Australian Society for Music Education over four years to set up an award system for outstanding music teachers. A further $500,000 will be committed to improving curriculums.

Source

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

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

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

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25 November, 2005

BURY THE PROBLEM, APPOINT A COMMISSION

Some straight-shooting comments on American higher education lifted from Stephen Karlson, who is in a position to know. Lots of links worth following

University Diaries recommends this Neal McCluskey column in National Review. Mr McCluskey is skeptical about the Spellings Commission on Higher Education doing anything substantive.

In September, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced the formation of a commission tasked with designing a "national strategy for higher education" to prepare us for the 21st century.

The commission is composed entirely of people in academia, government or big business, all of whom benefit when taxpayer money is shoveled into higher education. Its recommendations are therefore almost a foregone conclusion: The federal government should spend more on student aid supposedly to ensure, as Spellings demands, that we have a workforce for the 21st century, and on "basic" research that businesses want done but on which they would rather not risk their own money.

Of course, with a unified national strategy two more things will come: federal control of academia and an end to the competition for students that has driven innovation in American higher education and made it the envy of the world. It's the worst thing we could do according to a recent analysis by The Economist, which concluded that for a higher education system to succeed, it must "first: diversify [its] sources of income" and "second: let a thousand academic flowers bloom. Universities. should have to compete for customers."

Unfortunately, we are heading in the opposite direction. Think No Child Left Behind for the Ivy League. "Many people don't realize that federal dollars. make up about one-third of our nation's total annual investment in higher education," Secretary Spellings declared as she announced the formation of her commission. "By comparison, the federal government's investment in K-12 education represents less than 10 percent of total spending. But unlike K-12 education, we don't really ask many questions about what we're getting for our investment in higher education."

If the commission is going to be anything other than an exercise in public choice, it behooves interested parties to suggest courses of action and point out omissions.

The academy is broken, and the commission ought to understand why.

The commission ought to know, for example, about universities diversifying their sources of income by rescheduling football games to suit the broadcasters at ESPN and competing for customers with climbing walls, coreless curricula, and nonexistent admission standards. A post at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni lays down a marker.

As part of her ongoing investigation into American higher education, Margaret Spellings ought to consider the incuriousness of contemporary college students alongside the decline of liberal education and the spiralling costs of a bachelor's degree. It's a difficult, perhaps impossible, thing to quantify, but it is nonetheless a phenomenon that is every bit as current as the declining quality of higher education, and every bit as troubling. If we are to reform American higher education in a meaningful way, it will not be enough simply to reshape curriculum and costs along idealized lines. It will be necessary to envision this reshaping in the context of the modern undergraduate's intellectual sensibility. It cannot be taken for granted that this sensibility is inherently curious, inherently interested in learning, or inherently responsive either to the spirit of inquiry or to the more mundane spirit of intellectual respectability. Liberal education, in its tradition conception, is predicated on the idea that those engaged in it care deeply about questions, about exploring ideas, about discovery; it also presumes that those engaged in it want very much to acquire a breadth and depth of general knowledge that will save them from personal and professional embarrassment later on; it also assumes implicitly that a desire to avoid shame animates on some level students' quest for cultural literacy. Students must bring a certain type of determination, as well as a certain horror of ignorance, to their studies if liberal education is to be successful. In the absence of that determination, it's a real question whether liberal education may properly be said to exist.

The commission ought to know that a conclusion satisfactory to everybody may not be possible. There are two posts at SCSU Scholars that bear on workforce preparation and the future of higher education. One focuses on the continuing difficulties businesses face in finding skilled workers.

Firms are spending more in making investments in their own workforce. This demand for skilled labor will quite possibly also lead to increased demand for older workers, which would soften the blow raising retirement ages or the age at which one qualifies fully for Social Security. Indeed, what sense does it make to give skilled labor an incentive to not work?

What does that say about the academy's efforts at workforce development, all those business majors notwithstanding?

Another post links to a temporarily free Chronicle of Higher Education article on the battle between the University of Wisconsin System and the Wisconsin Legislature.

Along with paying a price for some political and management decisions that its own administrators concede were ill advised, the Wisconsin system appears to be feeling a backlash from broader higher-education trends. Those include rising tuition and admissions requirements, which have left many Wisconsinites feeling shut out of the system; tight state budgets and escalating costs, which have brought its expenditures under intense scrutiny; and a growing divide between the culture of colleges and the way the rest of society thinks and operates.

You think?

Much of the article touches on Culture Wars topics where the university appears to have done everything possible to be as transgressive as possible. But focus on this:

The system's enrollments from working-class and poor families have dropped substantially, and both Republican and Democratic lawmakers say taxpayers complain that many campuses have shut out their children by raising their tuition and admissions standards too high.

Herein lies a conflict the commission ought to be aware of. To the extent that university degrees augment human capital, those degrees are private benefits, and it makes economic sense for the beneficiary to bear the burden. To the extent that more rigorous curricula augment human capital, it makes economic sense for the university to avoid enrolling "clients" whose primary interest is getting wasted. And perhaps the local common schools have failed at their job of preparing Wisconsin's children for college.

Finally, the commission ought to know that the academy's common practice of admitting the unprepared and calling it "access" is sapping the morale of the faculty. Although each of the following sites is anonymous, allowing the poster to get away with characterizations of students that I consider impolitic, the frustration, irritation, and attempts at grim humor brought about by the antics of the unprepared, who nonetheless consider themselves entitled, are clear enough



EVEN BIG BRIBES DON'T MAKE MANY BRITS WANT TO TEACH IN BRITAIN'S "SINK" SCHOOLS

If it weren't for brave teachers from overseas -- particularly Australia -- lots of London schools would be very short of teachers

The Government has missed its target for the recruitment of trainee teachers in priority subjects despite millions of pounds spent on "golden hellos" and other incentives. Graduates in modern languages, science and mathematics are continuing to reject teaching as a career, according to official figures released yesterday. The target set by the Department for Education was missed by nine per cent in the seven subject areas designated as "priority" because too few young people were willing and qualified to teach them.

The least successful recruitment was in modern languages, where the target was missed by 17 per cent, or 323 trainee places. In maths, the target was missed by 12 per cent, 292 recruits, and in science it was missed by seven per cent, 214 recruits. Trainees in these priority subjects receive special payments of between o2,500 and o5,000 after their first year and can command higher salaries.

Competition from other sectors for a dwindling number of graduates in these key areas was a factor, said the Teacher Training and Development Agency, which oversees recruitment and training. In addition, the trend towards "studies" and combined degrees, such as French with business studies or degrees in forensic science instead of chemistry or physics has led to fewer graduates with sufficient knowledge to teach the subjects, the agency says.

It is to provide 14-week "booster" courses next year for a total of 700 graduates with science and language-related degrees where the amount of subject knowledge required is insufficient to meet the entry requirements for post-graduate teacher training courses.

Ed Davey, for the Liberal Democrats, said young people were being discouraged from teaching by Whitehall's "micro-management" of the classroom. "This Government spews out initiatives, strategies and White Papers but can't get the basics right," he said. "More teachers in maths, science and modern languages are critical to improving secondary education. "This ought to be a far higher priority than structural change."

Source



Disillusioned Australian mother opens own school

A mother of four disillusioned with the Victoria's primary schools has opened her own. Elisa Russell began the primary school, called Hypatia, last month after being unhappy with her children's progress. "We have had experiences with alternative and mainstream education but it just didn't work for us," Mrs Russell said. "We pulled the kids out and I home-schooled them as we started looking around, but we just didn't find anything that suited us as a family. "So we decided we would open a school and try a pilot program with our kids."

Mrs Russell said her three eldest children - Eleanor, 6, Fionnbarr, 5, and Greer, 4 - are the school's only students and are taught by one teacher. But she is hoping to enrol another 15 students next year and hire another two teachers. Mrs Russell said the school is based on Socratic education - treating children as thinkers rather than empty vessels, and allowing them to find the truth for themselves. "The most ground-breaking thing about the school is that it is one teacher to five students," she said. Mrs Russell, 33, also said the school would group students and teach them based on academic level, not age.

Annual fees would start from $9000 for three days a week and $12,000 for five days a week. Mrs Russell said the school was also family friendly, with more flexible hours than traditional schools. She said she has had huge interest in the school, with more than 50 calls from interested parents. The school is renting classrooms from Alia College's secondary campus in Hawthorn.

Mrs Russell said her children were loving it. "For the children it is going fantastically," she said. "Academically they are doing very well, but any child would excel in that environment where there is one-on-one learning with teachers."

Mrs Russell said she was applying to register the school with the Registered Schools Board of Victoria but it was expected to take some time. She said until the registration came through they could teach up to 15 students because it was classed as a home schooling environment.

Source

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

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

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

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



24 November, 2005

GIFTED CHILDREN GETTING RECOGNIZED

It is the Davidsons' other, related aim that calls forth a different kind of fervor. Authors (with Laura Vanderkam) of a book called "Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Minds" (2004), they are on a mission to remedy what they are convinced is a widespread neglect of exceptionally talented children. That means challenging the American myth that they are weirdos or Wunderkinder best left to their own devices or made to march with the crowd. "By denying our most intelligent students an education appropriate to their abilities," Jan Davidson warns a nation in the midst of a No Child Left Behind crusade, "we may also be denying civilization a giant leap forward." Precocious children are not only avid learners eager for more than ordinary schools often provide, the Davidsons emphasize; they are also a precious - and imperiled - resource for the future. The Davidsons, joined by many other advocates of the gifted, maintain that it is these precocious children who, if handled right, will be the creative adults propelling the nation ahead in an ever more competitive world. As things stand, the argument goes, the highly gifted child is an endangered species in need of outspoken champions like the Davidsons, who are role models for the "supportive, advocating parent" they endorse.

The youths have their chance to engage in advocacy, too, and the Davidsons had selected very personable prodigies to visit Washington to publicize the don't-hold-children-back message. (Video presentations are part of the fellowship application process.) "Rounded like an egg" is the simile John Zhou used in the SAT-prep classes he taught (though he himself, a perfect scorer, didn't take any), where he recommends blending a well-honed talent with other interests to "erase the image of the nerd or the geek" - a balanced profile the Davidsons would surely endorse. Their fellows fitted it and proved ideal ambassadors of well-tended youthful brilliance. Admirably poised, they were getting precocious practice for the future eminence that, they were told more than once that day, awaits them.

The Davidsons are not the first Americans dedicated to cultivating early promise and dismantling the popular image of highly gifted children as misfits, an affront to a nation founded on egalitarian principles. More than three-quarters of a century ago, the Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, armed with his newly minted I.Q. test, set out to challenge the myth that unusually intelligent and talented children are "puny, overspecialized in their abilities and interests, emotionally unstable, socially unadaptable, psychotic and morally undependable." His longitudinal "Genetic Studies of Genius" aimed to prove the opposite: highly gifted youths tended not only to enjoy more wholesome childhoods than ordinary kids but also to become extraordinary adults. His labors have since helped spawn a rich field of research and outreach devoted to exceptionally gifted children - though you might not guess it from the embattled rhetoric employed by gifted-child advocates in general, not just the Davidson Institute.

The lament uttered half a century ago that in philistine America "there are no little leagues of the mind" could not be made in our turn-of-the-millennium meritocracy. Thanks precisely to programs like those run by the Davidson Institute, there is what you might call a farm system devoted to finding talent and developing it, and though the process isn't streamlined, it has become ever more extensive. You merely have to look at the r‚sum‚s of the Davidson Fellows, which list a stunning array of distinctions - from music and Intel competitions to math and science olympiads to participation in highly selective summer programs. Even as they sound the alarm, prominent advocates themselves celebrate the widening span of resources. Consider, for example, "A Nation Deceived," the Templeton National Report on Acceleration issued last year and subtitled, "How Schools Hold Back America's Brightest Students." In its brief for more grade skipping and subject acceleration, it indicts an educational system that indeed gives talented students short shrift. (Federal money for the "gifted and talented" is minuscule compared with the quarter billion in this year's No Child Left Behind budget, and state and local efforts, though often better, are uneven.) Yet in the course of promoting the benefits of leaping ahead, "A Nation Deceived" also extols "a whole host of outside-of-school opportunities, including award ceremonies, summer programs, after-school or Saturday programs, distance-learning programs and weekend workshops and seminars," to which the talent search serves as a "gateway" for the topmost students, who also have a variety of early college options to consider, like California State University at Los Angeles's lively early-entrance program. Julian Stanley, a Johns Hopkins psychology professor and a pioneer of the gifted-child movement, marveled not long before he died last summer at age 87 at how a dearth of opportunities had given way to a "wealth of facilitative options."

More here



Cash incentives for university study in Australia

And I know it's true: My son got a small scholarship to study mathematics at university level after he got good grades in an advanced placements class during his final High School year

Thousands of university scholarships are on offer to this year's Queensland school leavers as the wheel turns full circle. Scholarships were last offered on a large scale in the early 1970s before the Whitlam Labor Government abolished university fees. While a record number of students have nominated for full-fee courses next year, thousands of others will apply for financial-hardship scholarships offered by the Federal Government and individual universities to defray costs for lower-income families. Students can also apply for an increasing number of academic excellence scholarships offered by universities and industry this year.

Since the introduction of financial hardships scholarships last year, the Federal Government has awarded in Queensland more than 1850 Commonwealth means-tested Education Costs Scholarships worth $2080, and almost 1600 Commonwealth Accommodation Scholarships, valued at $4161 open to rural and remote students. Applications for next year's Commonwealth scholarships close in February. A University of Queensland spokeswoman said yesterday the university offered additional needs-based scholarships under the same criteria as the Commonwealth. "We are recognising the fact that with the increase in costs in attending university, more and more students are requiring assistance," the spokeswoman said.

The University of Queensland will offer for the first time Fee-Pay Scholarships to offset the new Student Contribution, formerly known as HECS debt. It also offers means-tested Excellence Scholarships, valued at $6000 a year, UQ Link Residential Support Scholarships for students nominated by their school, as well as scholarships offered by individual faculties and schools.

For the first time, the Queensland Resources Council will offer four $40,000 scholarships to entice school leavers into an approved engineering, earth science or environmental science degree at any Queensland university. At the Queensland University of Technology, OP1 and OP2 students can apply for 50 new Vice-Chancellor Scholarships, worth $5000 a year. In the QUT Science Faculty, a Dean's Scholars Accelerated Honours Program, valued at $9000, will be open to OP1 students. Engineering scholarships for high achievers and law scholarships for financially disadvantaged students are among 90 different scholarships and bursaries being offered at QUT next year. Griffith University will award 15 Academic Excellence Scholarships and six sports scholarships, each valued at $15,000 to $25,000, as well as hardship and faculty scholarships. The University of Southern Queensland is offering accommodation scholarships, at $1000 a semester, to students attending its new Springfield campus near Ipswich.

Source



PHYSICS DYING IN BRITAIN

And this in the country where Rutherford first split the atom

Physics is fast disappearing from schools in England and Wales, with only a quarter now having a teacher with a degree in the subject, according to a study. The number of pupils taking physics has fallen by almost 40 per cent in the past 20 years. To make matters worse, almost half of the country's physics teachers will be retiring in the next decade. As a result the Institute of Physics is preparing to offer 300 bursaries to prospective students of the subject.

The findings, from the University of Buckingham, have alarmed academics and scientists. "The science community is in danger of sleep-walking into the loss of one of the greatest branches of knowledge that we possess," Alan Smithers, one of the report's authors, said. "The challenge is to secure physics for the future and educate everyone in science as a whole." Professor Smithers says that the dramatic decline in physics is directly linked to the introduction of the national curriculum in 1988. Since then pupils at state schools have had to study all three sciences at GCSE or take the combined science exam, which imparts only a little of chemistry, biology and physics. In independent schools, where pupils do not have to follow the national curriculum, they may choose to study only one science.

While 60 per cent of biology students are women, they comprise only 20 per cent of physics students. However, with more women than men attracted to teaching, science teachers are frequently not experts in physics. As a result they have less enthusiasm for the subject. The study also shows that a teacher's expertise in a subject is the second most powerful predictor of pupil achievement in GCSE and A level physics, after pupil ability.

"Independent schools have the freedom to offer any combination of sciences and that should be extended to maintained schools," Professor Smithers said. "But many physics graduates don't want to teach biology." The result is that the number of pupils taking physics A level has fallen from 46,606 in 1985 to 28,698 last year. Professor Smithers also says that better-qualified teachers are attracted to working in independent schools. That claim has been borne out in his latest research, with the disclosure that nearly a quarter (23.5 per cent) of 11 to 16-year-olds have no teacher who has studied physics at university, while two thirds of physics teachers at independent schools have a joint honours in the subject.

He concludes that "pupils from low-income homes tend to be concentrated in those schools least likely to offer GCSE physics and with the least well-qualified teachers". Robert Kirby-Harris, the chief executive of the Institute of Physics, blames part of the decline on league tables, and the tendency for some schools to pick only the brightest to study physics, in the fear that others may fail. "Physics is seen as a hard subject so average students are often dissuaded from taking it. I really think the dysfunctional element of league tables is a factor in putting young people off studying physics," he said.

Between 1994 and 2004, more than 30 per cent of the physics departments in Britain disappeared. Last year Newcastle became the first member of the elite Russell Group of universities to announce that it would no longer accept applications to study undergraduate physics. In order to boost the number from lower income backgrounds, the Institute of Physics is offering 300 bursaries of 1,000 pounds each next year to budding physicists.

More here

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

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

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

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



23 November, 2005

California: Contracts hold back schools

Imagine you're a manager and you have to fill two of every five openings with specific candidates or candidates from a predetermined pool, regardless of their qualifications and fit for the job. That's what principals in the nation's public schools are asked to do, according to a new report that faults union contracts for preventing administrators from hiring the best teachers.

The San Diego Unified School District was one of five studied by the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit organization that works with urban districts to improve teacher recruitment, training and support. The report was praised by California Secretary of Education Alan Bersin, San Diego Unified's former superintendent, for bringing to light a bureaucratic issue that he said hurts student achievement. But it also drew fierce criticism from union leaders, who see it as another attempt at union bashing. They contend that the report unfairly blames teachers for failures in public schools, when many other factors are responsible for student achievement.

"I know what we need. We need smaller class sizes. We need safe working conditions in urban schools. We need to make sure we have abundant supplies, materials, and microscopes for our students, and we need strong administrators who are supportive of learning environments," said Barbara Kerr, president of the California Teachers Association. Terry Pesta, president of the San Diego Education Association, agreed. And San Diego school board member John de Beck said principals sometimes are the problem, not teachers. He has heard of cases where principals harass or arbitrarily remove teachers. "You can't fix something wrong by giving the principal more power to do wrong," he said.

Union contracts in urban districts commonly include seniority provisions that guarantee incumbent teachers first dibs on job openings. In San Diego, for example, teachers who lose their jobs when low enrollment or academic underperformance prompts a campus closure are guaranteed placement elsewhere. Contracts also typically give teachers who are cut from their campuses because of an enrollment drop or budget reductions high priority to fill vacancies. Teachers who voluntarily seek transfers are also given priority over outside candidates, regardless of their qualifications. These contract provisions, the report says, hurt students, principals and fellow teachers by forcing teachers onto campuses that may not be right for them.

Robin Stern, principal of Hearst Elementary School in Del Cerro and president of the Administrators Association of San Diego, said that this year she was assigned two teachers from King Elementary, a school that closed because of underperformance and reopened as a charter. Stern said she did not have a chance to interview the teachers. Fortunately, she said, the teachers turned out great.

Other principals are not so lucky. According to the study, 26 percent of San Diego principals surveyed said that all or almost all of the surplus teachers foisted on them have been unsatisfactory. Twenty-one percent reported that more than half of the voluntary transfers were unsatisfactory. The reason, the report said, is some principals get rid of undesirable teachers by putting them on transfer and surplus lists to avoid the time-consuming process of terminating them. Last school year, 880 San Diego teachers were on the voluntary transfer and surplus list. This year, there were 1,615. In San Diego, a quarter of the principals reported that they either had encouraged a poorly performing teacher to transfer or placed one on the surplus list.

Firing a teacher can take a few years because a principal must document deficiencies and provide opportunities to improve. A teacher can contest the dismissal at a trial-like hearing. From 2003 to 2005, only six San Diego teachers were dismissed out of 38 recommended for removal, mostly because of professional incompetence. Those not dismissed either resigned, retired or settled with the district. Nearly half of San Diego principals also reported that they tried to hide vacancies from the district's human resources department to avoid filling them with voluntary transfers or surplus teachers.

Stern of Hearst Elementary believes it's rare for principals to try to circumvent contract provisions, but she acknowledges they do limit hiring choices. "We are very much bound by the contract," she said. A particular concern, she said, is when declining enrollment and budget reductions force teacher cuts. Principals are required to remove the least senior teacher, regardless of their performance, unless someone else volunteers to leave. "Schools all over the district are suffering from declining enrollment, and they are losing wonderful teachers they'd love to keep," she said.

The contract provisions are unfair to principals, because they are held accountable for student achievement when they don't have full control over hiring, said Julie White, director of communications for the Association of California School Administrators. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, principals can be removed if their school consistently fails to make adequate progress. "Today's principal is not like today's CEO," White said. "They don't have the discretion to come into a situation, rearrange and reconfigure. It's not like that in public education, and it never has been."

However, some school districts across the nation are beginning to negotiate changes to their teacher contracts for more staffing flexibility. The New York City public school system recently adopted a contract that eliminates seniority transfer rules and the placement of surplus teachers into jobs without a school's consent.

The report noted that principals need to be held accountable if they are given more hiring power. It recommends that a formal process be created so teachers can provide annual feedback to the district's superintendent about their principal's performance. Another recommendation is to involve teachers and other school staff in hiring decisions. The report further acknowledges that fixing staffing problems will not by itself cure all the ills in public education. But they believe it will go a long way toward improving teacher quality.

Research has consistently shown the quality of instruction determines to a large extent whether students succeed or fail. "The fact of the matter is kids who have three or four strong teachers in a row will soar no matter what their family background is, whereas kids who have two weak teachers in a row never recover," said Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, which has done studies on how teacher qualifications affect student achievement.

Source



WHOLESALE CHEATING IN BRITISH "COURSEWORK": BACK TO EXAMS?

As if already low standards were not enough

Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, demanded a wholesale review of coursework in A levels and GCSEs yesterday after the examinations watchdog found evidence of widespread cheating. A two-year review of more than a dozen subjects carried out by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has revealed a virtual free-for-all among students, teachers and parents in carrying out assignments. Coursework is an integral part of A levels and GCSEs, making up between 20 and 60 per cent of the marks allocated. The revelations cast doubt on the continually rising grades for both sets of exams and raise questions about the credibility of vocational qualifications.

In one of the most fundamental rethinks to public examinations in a generation, Ms Kelly has called for the QCA to reconsider coursework on a "subject by subject basis" and for it to be used only "where it is the most valid way of assessing subject specific skills". In a letter to Ken Boston, chief executive of the QCA, Ms Kelly clearly hinted it should be dropped from maths and science GCSEs, saying coursework should not be "the favoured approach where its primary purpose is to assess knowledge and skills which can equally well be assessed in other ways".

During the review, two thirds of maths teachers told the QCA that coursework - which is often done from home - was "sometimes problematic" as students could easily find answers on the internet or get siblings and parents to do the work for them. The in-depth investigation into subjects from English to history, maths and religious studies, revealed that plagiarism via the internet, collusion and "coursework cloning", where teachers give students too much help, were some of the ways pupils attempted to improve their grades.

At GCSE level, one in 20 parents admitted to doing their children's coursework, with fewer doing the same at A level. But it was the use of the internet that posed the greatest threat, according to Dr Boston. "In a very small proportion of cases there is deliberate malpractice," he said. "The availability of the internet is a powerful aid to learning but carries risks of plagiarism."

As well as issuing advice to exam boards, the QCA has appointed a taskforce to clear up confusion about how much help is allowed. Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, which has been a strong critic of coursework, said that Ms Kelly's decision was "a step in the right direction". "Coursework is obviously open to cheating and there should be much more emphasis, and more marks, on proper invigilated exams. Most youngsters can get well on the way to achieving a decent pass before they even take an exam, so coursework must have played a part in grade inflation over the years," he said. Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said the review was very sensible

Source



MODERN EDUCATION DESPISES OUR OWN CULTURE

American institutions - documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the concepts of checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism and subsidiarity - make the United States a novus ordo seclorum, new and a perpetual source of renewal, precisely by conforming to the great tradition of political philosophy. Our culture is rooted in a realization that history is a conversation in which not only are we but one voice, but in which we are obliged to earn our right to speak. This requires that we listen and then, since silence means death to a culture, contribute something of value. It is this outward focus, this adherence to tradition, that is the lifeblood of our culture. And to be traditional is essentially to look beyond the given moment - not only to learn from the past, but to plan for the future.

This is why each generation must conserve those things that are essential - for us, the institutions that define our nation - and pass them on to its youth. A culture must continually unfold, as it were, to impress each subsequent group of people who are to become responsible "carriers" of the nation's symbols and so the preservers of true American culture. This unfolding and passing on is our charge - it is the charge to educate our youth.

Liberal education, a philosophy of education interested in objective and abiding truths about mankind that attempts, essentially, to teach the student how to learn, battles the propensity a culture has to turn in upon itself by drawing the student out of himself. Liberal education strives to free the student of that which is unecessary - to free him from the trite, the perverse, and the banal. This is an emptiness most readily found by measuring the world, not by standards set by objective reality, but by man's own ego. And yet, this is the emptiness found in most universities - indeed, it is occassionally their ideal. Behind the veil of self-discovery and multi-culturalism, as well as the lure of various student activist organizations and extra-curricular activities, all most run-of-the-mill universities seem to offer students today is the opportunity for the student to discover that his opinions bear as much weight, not only as those of his fellows at university, students and professors alike, but as all the great tradition of thinkers, most of whom he may never confront in his studies, as they've been replaced in the curriculum by the opus of a twenty-four year old feminist vegan who just last week won the Nobel Prize for Multi-Diverse Cultural Sensitivity. And why? It would seem to be because she's so "outside the box," but the truth is, it's because she spouts the exact same thing that everyone else does. She's what you read when you lack boldness as a student - she's for the comfort seekers who want nothing more than to rail against traditionalists while staring in the mirror.

It is this incestuous tendency toward narcissism that threatens the American ideal, and its destruction is nowhere more apparent than in our colleges and universities - places of learning through which our culture is meant to be preserved. The belief that there is no greater moment than the present spoils the mind of the student more than almost any other, by shutting the student off from the past and so making it impossible for him to contribute to the future. To be enamored of only the present moment is truly a fruitless enterprise, and yet it is the narcissism of the "given moment" that is passed on in university today.

Milan Kundera lends us a great term to describe this sterile egotism: kitsch. Kitsch is the essence of the modern crisis of narcissism. It is "the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one's own reflection." This, too, is the narcissistic plight of Tate's Alice, an image of modern man plunging into himself, to the abandonment and denial of the objective and transcendent reality of the cosmos - that is, anything and everything that is other than himself.

University students need not, contrary to popular belief, be learning to more fully appreciate themselves and value their own opinions. They require, rather, to be free of themselves and their own opinions for a time in an attempt to inform themselves - not only to amass information, since, indeed, that is not really what is important anyway, but to learn how to view the world, how to view reality. They ought to be receiving that education that will allow them to be worthy carriers of our culture's symbols, and more practically and to the same end, able participants in the political community.

More here

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

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

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

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



22 November, 2005

ANOTHER POLITICAL ATTACK ON A CONSERVATIVE TEACHER

Post lifted from Anti-Protestor

Political writer, blogger and Rockville High School Teacher Michael Calderon has apparently declared war on Justin Raimondo and his gaggle of neo-fascist pseudo-intellectual hacks at Antiwar.com.

Calderon recently set up a new feature on his blog called Guttersnipe Alley and it appears that the ever-entertaining Raimondo is its main topic.

Earlier this year, Raimondo defamed Calderon by repeatedly misrepresenting a provocative piece Calderon had posted on the now-defunct Moonbat Central blog run by Raimondo's nemesis, David Horowitz.

Raimondo penned a misleading response to Calderon's article and posted Calderon's employer's phone and email numbers on the Antiwar.com website. He then urged Antiwar.com's readers to contact Michael's employer to voice displeasure with the Moonbat Central article. When, according to Raimondo, people had trouble contacting Calderon's employer, Raimondo then posted additional contact numbers to Calderon's employer. (Can you say deliberate tortious interference?...)

As a result of the controversy caused by the barrage of phone calls and emails sent by Antiwar.com readers at Raimondo's direction to Calderon's principal, Dr. Debra Munk, Calderon was recently suspended without pay from his teaching position in the Montgomery County, Maryland school system.

A recent article in the school newspaper, The Rampage, describes Calderon as a popular and exemplary History teacher. "I felt he was an excellent teacher...he always encouraged his students to express their point of view," said retired Rockville High School social studies teacher Rita Brill in defense of Calderon.

In spite of Calderon's competency and popularity, Rockville High School has apparently taken the cowardly route by suspending him due to the controversy caused by Justin Raimondo. For what it's worth, based on Calderon's political writing, it's obvious that he's a Conservative. The Montgomery County School Department is considered by many to be among the most left-wing school districts in the country.

A Dope-smoking mullet afficianado edits Antiwar.com and it's normally a very strange scene at the Antiwar.com fun-house, as a graphic, in-depth San Francisco Weekly article shows. Justin Raimondo has a well-deserved reputation as a mendacious, petty jerk--a kind of prissy miscreant who delights in personally attacking and throwing low blows at his intellectual superiors, which are everyone and every thing above the planaria on the intellectual food chain.

Nevertheless, the Montgomery County School Board has seen fit to punish one of its star teachers based on attacks that emanated from the disreputable Raimondo and the nutters orbiting him.

The SF Weekly, a paper normally sympathetic to anti-Bush anti-Israel types like Raimondo, portrays him as a power-mad attention freak, and a blog comment on the Protein Wisdom website implies that Justin was once a gay prosititute. An anonymous source personally acquainted with Raimondo confirms this to be a well-known fact within the San Francisco area, where Raimondo lives. That bit of information is significant because Raimondo once actually had the nerve to publicly excoriate "outed" journalist Jeff Gannon for having once worked as a gay prostitute.

What I'm hearing through the blog grapevine is that, this time, Raimondo has bitten off more than he can chew by directly messing with Rockville High School teacher Michael Calderon's livelihood. As a result, for Justin Raimondo, it looks like a new and exciting career might just be in the works.



The New White Flight: In Silicon Valley, two high schools with outstanding academic reputations are losing white students as Asian students move in. Why?

By most measures, Monta Vista High here and Lynbrook High, in nearby San Jose, are among the nation's top public high schools. Both boast stellar test scores, an array of advanced-placement classes and a track record of sending graduates from the affluent suburbs of Silicon Valley to prestigious colleges. But locally, they're also known for something else: white flight. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of white students at Lynbrook has fallen by nearly half, to 25% of the student body. At Monta Vista, white students make up less than one-third of the population, down from 45% -- this in a town that's half white. Some white Cupertino parents are instead sending their children to private schools or moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young white families in Silicon Valley say they are avoiding Cupertino altogether.

Whites aren't quitting the schools because the schools are failing academically. Quite the contrary: Many white parents say they're leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests. The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian.

Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class." All of Ms. Gatley's four children have attended or are currently attending Monta Vista. One son, Andrew, 17 years old, took the high-school exit exam last summer and left the school to avoid the academic pressure. He is currently working in a pet-supply store. Ms. Gatley, who is white, says she probably wouldn't have moved to Cupertino if she had anticipated how much it would change.

In the 1960s, the term "white flight" emerged to describe the rapid exodus of whites from big cities into the suburbs, a process that often resulted in the economic degradation of the remaining community. Back then, the phenomenon was mostly believed to be sparked by the growth in the population of African-Americans, and to a lesser degree Hispanics, in some major cities. But this modern incarnation is different. Across the country, Asian-Americans have by and large been successful and accepted into middle- and upper-class communities. Silicon Valley has kept Cupertino's economy stable, and the town is almost indistinguishable from many of the suburbs around it. The shrinking number of white students hasn't hurt the academic standards of Cupertino's schools -- in fact the opposite is true.

This time the effect is more subtle: Some Asians believe that the resulting lack of diversity creates an atmosphere that is too sheltering for their children, leaving then unprepared for life in a country that is only 4% Asian overall. Moreover, many Asians share some of their white counterpart's concerns. Both groups finger newer Asian immigrants for the schools' intense competitiveness.

Some whites fear that by avoiding schools with large Asian populations parents are short-changing their own children, giving them the idea that they can't compete with Asian kids. "My parents never let me think that because I'm Caucasian, I'm not going to succeed," says Jessie Hogin, a white Monta Vista graduate.

The white exodus clearly involves race-based presumptions, not all of which are positive. One example: Asian parents are too competitive. That sounds like racism to many of Cupertino's Asian residents, who resent the fact that their growing numbers and success are causing many white families to boycott the town altogether. "It's a stereotype of Asian parents," says Pei-Pei Yow, a Hewlett-Packard Co. manager and Chinese-American community leader who sent two kids to Monta Vista. It's like other familiar biases, she says: "You can't say everybody from the South is a redneck."

Jane Doherty, a retirement-community administrator, chose to send her two boys elsewhere. When her family moved to Cupertino from Indiana over a decade ago, Ms. Doherty says her top priority was moving into a good public-school district. She paid no heed to a real-estate agent who told her of the town's burgeoning Asian population. She says she began to reconsider after her elder son, Matthew, entered Kennedy, the middle school that feeds Monta Vista. As he played soccer, Ms. Doherty watched a line of cars across the street deposit Asian kids for after-school study. She also attended a Monta Vista parents' night and came away worrying about the school's focus on test scores and the big-name colleges its graduates attend. "My sense is that at Monta Vista you're competing against the child beside you," she says. Ms. Doherty says she believes the issue stems more from recent immigrants than Asians as a whole. "Obviously, the concentration of Asian students is really high, and it does flavor the school," she says.

When Matthew, now a student at Notre Dame, finished middle school eight years ago, Ms. Doherty decided to send him to Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Jesuit school that she says has a culture that "values the whole child." It's also 55% white and 24% Asian. Her younger son, Kevin, followed suit. Kevin Doherty, 17, says he's happy his mother made the switch. Many of his old friends at Kennedy aren't happy at Monta Vista, he says. "Kids at Bellarmine have a lot of pressure to do well, too, but they want to learn and do something they want to do."

While California has seen the most pronounced cases of suburban segregation, some of the developments in Cupertino are also starting to surface in other parts of the U.S. At Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Md., known flippantly to some locals as "Won Ton," roughly 35% of students are of Asian descent. People who don't know the school tend to make assumptions about its academics, says Principal Michael Doran. "Certain stereotypes come to mind -- 'those people are good at math,' " he says.

In Tenafly, N.J., a well-to-do bedroom community near New York, the local high school says it expects Asian students to make up about 36% of its total in the next five years, compared with 27% today. The district still attracts families of all backgrounds, but Asians are particularly intent that their kids work hard and excel, says Anat Eisenberg, a local Coldwell Banker real-estate agent. "Everybody is caught into this process of driving their kids." Lawrence Mayer, Tenafly High's vice principal, says he's never heard such concerns.

Perched on the western end of the Santa Clara valley, Cupertino was for many years a primarily rural area known for its many fruit orchards. The beginnings of the tech industry brought suburbanization, and Cupertino then became a very white, quintessentially middle-class town of mostly modest ranch homes, populated by engineers and their families. Apple Computer Inc. planted its headquarters there. As the high-tech industry prospered, so did Cupertino. Today, the orchards are a memory, replaced by numerous shopping malls and subdivisions that are home to Silicon Valley's prosperous upper-middle class. While the architecture in Cupertino is largely the same as in neighboring communities, the town of about 50,000 people now boasts Indian restaurants, tutoring centers and Asian grocers. Parents say Cupertino's top schools have become more academically intense over the past 10 years. Asian immigrants have surged into the town, granting it a reputation -- particularly among recent Chinese and South Asian immigrants -- as a Bay Area locale of choice. Cupertino is now 41% Asian, up from 24% in 1998.

Some students struggle in Cupertino's high schools who might not elsewhere. Monta Vista's Academic Performance Index, which compares the academic performance of California's schools, reached an all-time high of 924 out of 1,000 this year, making it one of the highest-scoring high schools in Northern California. Grades are so high that a 'B' average puts a student in the bottom third of a class. "We have great students, which has a lot of upsides," says April Scott, Monta Vista's principal. "The downside is what the kids with a 3.0 GPA think of themselves."

Ms. Scott and her counterpart at Lynbrook know what's said about their schools being too competitive and dominated by Asians. "It's easy to buy into those kinds of comments because they're loaded and powerful," says Ms. Scott, who adds that they paint an inaccurate picture of Monta Vista. Ms. Scott says many athletic programs are thriving and points to the school's many extracurricular activities. She also points out that white students represented 20% of the school's 29 National Merit Semifinalists this year.

Judy Hogin, Jessie's mother and a Cupertino real-estate agent, believes the school was good for her daughter, who is now a freshman at the University of California at San Diego. "I know it's frustrating to some people who have moved away," says Ms. Hogin, who is white. Jessie, she says, "rose to the challenge."

On a recent autumn day at Lynbrook, crowds of students spilled out of classrooms for midmorning break. Against a sea of Asian faces, the few white students were easy to pick out. One boy sat on a wall, his lighter hair and skin making him stand out from dozens of others around him. In another corner, four white male students lounged at a picnic table.

At Cupertino's top schools, administrators, parents and students say white students end up in the stereotyped role often applied to other minority groups: the underachievers. In one 9th-grade algebra class, Lynbrook's lowest-level math class, the students are an eclectic mix of whites, Asians and other racial and ethnic groups. "Take a good look," whispered Steve Rowley, superintendent of the Fremont Union High School District, which covers the city of Cupertino as well as portions of other neighboring cities. "This doesn't look like the other classes we're going to." On the second floor, in advanced-placement chemistry, only a couple of the 32 students are white and the rest are Asian. Some white parents, and even some students, say they suspect teachers don't take white kids as seriously as Asians. "Many of my Asian friends were convinced that if you were Asian, you had to confirm you were smart. If you were white, you had to prove it," says Arar Han, a Monta Vista graduate who recently co-edited "Asian American X," a book of coming-of-age essays by young Asian-Americans. Ms. Gatley, the Monta Vista PTA president, is more blunt: "White kids are thought of as the dumb kids," she says.

Cupertino's administrators and faculty, the majority of whom are white, adamantly say there's no discrimination against whites. The administrators say students of all races get along well. In fact, there's little evidence of any overt racial tension between students or between their parents. Mr. Rowley, the school superintendent, however, concedes that a perception exists that's sometimes called "the white-boy syndrome." He describes it as: "Kids who are white feel themselves a distinct minority against a majority culture." Mr. Rowley, who is white, enrolled his only son, Eddie, at Lynbrook. When Eddie started freshman geometry, the boy was frustrated to learn that many of the Asian students in his class had already taken the course in summer school, Mr. Rowley recalls. That gave them a big leg up.

To many of Cupertino's Asians, some of the assumptions made by white parents -- that Asians are excessively competitive and single-minded -- play into stereotypes. Top schools in nearby, whiter Palo Alto, which also have very high test scores, also feature heavy course loads, long hours of homework and overly stressed students, says Denise Pope, director of Stressed Out Students, a Stanford University program that has worked with schools in both Palo Alto and Cupertino. But whites don't seem to be avoiding those institutions, or making the same negative generalizations, Asian families note, suggesting that it's not academic competition that makes white parents uncomfortable but academic competition with Asian-Americans.

Some of Cupertino's Asian residents say they don't blame white families for leaving. After all, many of the town's Asians are fretting about the same issues. While acknowledging that the term Asian embraces a wide diversity of countries, cultures and languages, they say there's some truth to the criticisms levied against new immigrant parents, particularly those from countries such as China and India, who often put a lot of academic pressure on their children.

Some parents and students say these various forces are creating an unhealthy cultural isolation in the schools. Monta Vista graduate Mark Seto says he wouldn't send his kids to his alma mater. "It was a sheltered little world that didn't bear a whole lot of resemblance to what the rest of the country is like," says Mr. Seto, a Chinese-American who recently graduated from Yale University. As a result, he says, "college wasn't an academic adjustment. It was a cultural adjustment."

Hung Wei, a Chinese-American living in Cupertino, has become an active campaigner in the community, encouraging Asian parents to be more aware of their children's emotional development. Ms. Wei, who is co-president of Monta Vista's PTA with Ms. Gatley, says her activism stems from the suicide of her daughter, Diana. Ms. Wei says life in Cupertino and at Monta Vista didn't prepare the young woman for life at New York University. Diana moved there in 2004 and jumped to her death from a Manhattan building two months later. "We emphasize academics so much and protect our kids, I feel there's something lacking in our education," Ms. Wei says.

Cupertino schools are trying to address some of these issues. Monta Vista recently completed a series of seminars focused on such issues as helping parents communicate better with their kids, and Lynbrook last year revised its homework guidelines with the goal of eliminating excessive and unproductive assignments.

The moves haven't stemmed the flow of whites out of the schools. Four years ago, Lynn Rosener, a software consultant, transferred her elder son from Monta Vista to Homestead High, a Cupertino school with slightly lower test scores. At the new school, the white student body is declining at a slower rate than at Monta Vista and currently stands at 52% of the total. Friday-night football is a tradition, with big half-time shows and usually 1,000 people packing the stands. The school offers boys' volleyball, a sport at which Ms. Rosener's son was particularly talented. Monta Vista doesn't. "It does help to have a lower Asian population," says Homestead PTA President Mary Anne Norling. "I don't think our parents are as uptight as if my kids went to Monta Vista."

Source

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

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

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

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



21 November, 2005

CALIFORNIA HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION TO BECOME EVEN LESS MEANINGFUL?

Hard to believe it's possible

At their Dec. 14 meeting, Merced Union High School District trustees will have a tough decision to make: How will seniors who fail the California High School Exit Exam be treated at graduation time. Trustee Cappi Quigley, on her final night as a trustee after 20 years of service, does not want students who have worked hard at school and satisfied district course requirements but still fail the exit exam to suffer. The state says no diplomas without passing the test.

Quigley favors giving these students a certificate of completion allowing them to participate in June's commencement ceremonies. District Superintendent Robert Fore also favors "erring on the side of the kids where we can."

On the exit exam issue, Weimer said the board's direction must be clear-cut and precise to avoid future nightmares. State education officials leave graduation participation and certificate decisions to local districts and Weimer doubts if the state will intervene.

Golden Valley High School Principal Ralf Swenson said the state exit exam is insensitive to the needs of special education students, many who have failed it several times. He said there are ways at graduation rites to handle issuance of both certificates of completion and diplomas gracefully.

Assistant Superintendent Sylvia Smith said 223 students at six district schools failed the exit exam last March. Some of these students took the test again earlier this month and Smith is working to get the test given next February instead of March so results will be known by April.

Counselor Wayne Denno said the Merced High counseling staff does not believe students should take part in graduation if they don't satisfy all requirements, including passing the exit exam. He said there ultimately would be consequences if the graduation ceremony is perceived as less meaningful.

Source



Calls for overhaul of Australian State-run preschool systems

Preschools should operate under a national system to ensure uniform standards, parents should be issued with vouchers and social workers should be on hand to help those mothers who are dumping their children in childcare because they cannot cope. The demands have been made by Liberal backbenchers who say some state-run preschool systems are so poor that parents opt for long daycare, which fails to provide children with the basic literacy skills they need for primary school. The MPs claim the problem is exacerbated by subsidies which are provided for the commonwealth-run childcare system, but not preschool, which is operated by the states. "That preschooling year is so critical for a child's development ... so they can start their first year in primary schooling not having those early social adjustments," Liberal MP and Parliamentary Secretary Sharman Stone told The Weekend Australian. "A voucher system would mean that the parent would make a choice. "We give subsidies to childcare for a four-year-old but we don't for the same four-year-old in preschool." Ms Stone said the subsidy issue was having a "perverse outcome", with parents opting for childcare and children not receiving crucial education.

Former Howard government minister and western Sydney MP Jackie Kelly has also entered the debate, suggesting a large number of women who are not working are using childcare. She has called for social workers to help those mothers who see childcare as little more than respite. "Why is a mother at home not coping and needing respite from her own children? If it's respite childcare that you're seeking then let's include into those childcare centres some intervention, some parenting guidance and skills." She backed Ms Stone's call for a national approach to preschooling. "Long daycare basically makes sure your kid's fed, clothed and his nose is wiped but it isn't preparing them for school," Mrs Kelly said. "We need to look at a national preschool program because while in some states they have a very vibrant preschool program, in other states it's absolutely woeful so everyone opts for long daycare. "Some deal should come together at COAG about how we are going to progress in the future with the zero-to-fives in a more comprehensive Australia-wide system. "Childcare is national and that's why it's really taken off, but the preschool program, there's huge disparities between the states."

A spokesman for Family and Community Services Minister Kay Patterson said preschool education was being reviewed. "The minister is currently reviewing what access families have to preschool education. She believes that families should expect to receive the same access to preschool care wherever they live," he said. Mrs Kelly last week told the Liberal partyroom the Government needed to look at more innovative ways to provide care. She said the federal Government should provide more incentives, including tax deductions, for employers to set up childcare centres in workplaces. "I don't think we are being as innovative as we can be if the reality is, with an ageing population, we are going to need more women in the workforce for longer."

Source

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

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

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

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

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



20 November, 2005

UNWISE GENEROSITY TO UNIVERSITIES

Students at Yale University's School of Music--and aspiring musicians hoping to go there someday--must have been jumping for joy two weeks ago when the school announced that it had received an anonymous $100 million endowment gift that would guarantee them all free tuition. A few days later Tufts University, not to be outdone, announced that it had received its own $100 million gift. This one was from Pierre Omidyar, alumnus and founder of eBay, who did not specify how his money was to be used, only that the principal must be invested in "micro loans" to small business enterprises in poor countries in Asia and Africa.

It all sounds high-minded and worthy. But is it a good idea? Foundations, corporations and rich individuals have long given generously to colleges and universities. Some of our most distinguished--Duke, Vanderbilt, Stanford and the University of Chicago--were originally endowed by entrepreneurs or wealthy families. In a recent study, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research reported that nearly 60% of all gifts of more than $10 million are donated to academic institutions. And the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Americans last year contributed some $25 billion to colleges and universities. Is it any wonder that many academic institutions are sitting on vast repositories of endowed wealth? Today there are more than 50 institutions with endowments exceeding $1 billion.

Yet this explosion of money has been accompanied by a steady erosion in the quality of education, especially in the humanities. Many research organizations, including the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the National Association of Scholars, have documented the elimination of the traditional core curriculum at most of our leading universities. We can no longer assume that college graduates possess even a rudimentary knowledge of history, for instance, or that they understand basic concepts like federalism or the separation of powers or, indeed, that they know about the ideas and events that have shaped our institutions. All this great wealth, donated with the best of intentions, appears to have had the perverse effect of liberating academic institutions to do a less than admirable job of educating the young.

And what do the young learn when they do learn? Entrepreneurs may give generously, but college faculties are today awash in antibusiness and anti-free-market prejudices, with scholarly publications beating the drum against globalization and the supposed depredations of capitalism. Not many faculty members would agree precisely with Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who said that the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center deserved their fate because they were working on behalf of the capitalist system. But, terrorism aside, his low opinion of America's economic system does not wildly diverge from that of professors everywhere. Meanwhile the diversity ideology so common on campuses today holds that the history of the U.S. is primarily one of exclusion and oppression, another Ward Churchillian theme.

All this is roughly quantifiable. A recent national survey of college faculty showed that 72% of professors held liberal and left-of-center views, while just 15% held conservative ones. This imbalance, surveys show, has grown worse since the early 1980s. It is a strange paradox indeed that academic opinion should have moved so far to the left in a period of unprecedented wealth and prosperity for colleges and universities themselves--let alone in a period of capitalism's triumph and communism's defeat.

Here is where the charitable giving comes in. These trends have taken hold in academia in part because too many donors have failed to exercise appropriate care when signing over their funds. Most donors have little understanding of the intricate workings of academic budgets or of the subterfuges that permit money to be spent on programs unrelated to intended purposes. (A little Economics 101 might help.) The anonymous donor to Yale earmarked the income from his gift to support student tuitions, but of course money is fungible: The gift will have the unintended effect of allowing Yale to move the substantial funds it now devotes to financial aid and to spend them on other purposes, possibly unrelated or antithetical. Many gifts to universities have this money-shifting effect.

Donors are often unaware that they are entitled to set aside their money for purposes of their own choosing, not just established categories. As former Yale provost Frank Turner has said: "Donor restrictions can call institutions of higher education to fulfill their highest ideals." A few diligent philanthropists, like publisher Philip Merrill and investor Sir John Templeton, craft careful agreements with universities before any checks are signed and then monitor their gifts regularly.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has published a short book, "The Intelligent Donor's Guide to College Giving," that lays out some basic ground rules for donating to higher education. These include placing clear restrictions on gifts, working with a particular professor (and, if possible, bypassing the development office) and avoiding endowments in perpetuity. As Sir John Templeton wisely said: "If you're giving while you're living, you're knowing where it's going."

Obviously, this sort of due diligence does require time and effort on the part of the donor, But if even a few more philanthropists were watching where their funds ended up, college officials would surely monitor their programs more carefully. There have been a few celebrated cases in recent years in which donors have asked for their funds to be returned after discovering that they were misused, and these cases have sent a shudder though the academic community.

In 1991, for example, Lee Bass donated $20 million to