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29 February, 2008

No existing U.S. program approximates a free market in education

In a new City Journal essay, prominent school voucher advocate Sol Stern declares that competition and choice "may not be a panacea," and recommends that choice supporters shift emphasis to standardizing the curriculum. He's not alone.

Conservatives have long championed central planning in addition to parental choice, but in recent years centralization has been ascendant. Department of Education alumni William Bennett, Chester Finn, and Diane Ravitch, all appointed under Republican administrations, now place greater emphasis on national standards than on choice. Last month, Mr. Finn faulted Ohio's charter school system for placing "too much trust in market forces."

Their faltering support stems from disappointment with the impact of existing U.S. charter school and voucher programs, and what they think it says about market reform in general. Stern, for instance, laments that while Milwaukee's voucher program has benefitted the low income students who gained access to private schools, it has not dramatically improved the city's public schools.

But criticisms such as those of Finn and Stern don't reveal any failure of market education, because existing U.S. "school choice" programs do not constitute, or even closely approximate, free markets. That anyone imagines otherwise shows how poorly markets are understood, even among conservative education reformers.

Do charter schools really rely too heavily on "market forces"? Consider some key elements of free markets: prices determined by supply and demand, private ownership of businesses, low or no barriers to the creation of new businesses, few or no barriers to workers entering the profession, minimal regulation, the ability of owners and investors to profit from their efforts, and payment by consumers rather than a third party. With charter schools, these features are either grossly hobbled or absent. Yes, charter schools produce some attenuated competition and parental choice, but to imagine that those two diluted ingredients are sufficient by themselves (or even excessive!) suggests a badly mistaken notion of what a market is.

Milwaukee's voucher program has indeed helped many children, but it also falls far short of a market. First, it is capped at 22,500 students. That's too little to justify large-scale R&D investment by education entrepreneurs. If the market for computers were limited to 22,500 customers, Microsoft, Apple, and Dell would cease to exist. Private schools must also accept the voucher as full payment, but such price controls are almost universally derided by economists as counterproductive. If it were not for the fact that electronics manufacturers could once charge $1,000 for a DVD player, it would never have become possible for the units to sell for $30 today.

The initially high prices of innovative new products and services are what encourage the R&D that eventually brings down their cost.

Even if Milwaukee's voucher program were big enough and free enough to create a vigorous marketplace, the public schools still might not improve dramatically. The most significant advances in market economies generally occur when better products or methods replace old ones. The loom did not improve hand-weaving, it supplanted it. Even in the highly regulated and not especially market-like school choice programs of Chile and the Netherlands, private schools already enroll most students.

Though markets have been marginalized by "free" public schooling, they still thrive in niches such as tutoring, where programs like Kumon and Sylvan Learning show their effectiveness and responsiveness to consumer demands.

In many slums and villages across the developing world, where state-run school systems are particularly dysfunctional, majorities of poor parents are currently paying for their children to attend ultra-low-cost private schools - though free government schools are available. These education markets, as researchers such as Orient Global Education Fund president James Tooley and Oxford professor Geeta Gandhi Kingdon have shown, outperform state-run schools at a fraction of the cost, and they teach what families want. The vast international research literature on school governance and funding systems strongly favors competition, minimal regulation, private ownership of schools, parental choice, and some level of direct payment of tuition by parents.

It is possible to give all families access to a free education marketplace - by dramatically expanding and liberalizing existing choice programs, or adopting new ones, like Cato's public education tax credit proposal. But you can't expect current programs to produce free-market results in the absence of free markets.

Source




Detroit schools

Expensive and terrible. It’s time to offer vouchers

A new report shows that less than 1 in 3 ninth-graders in the Detroit city schools will graduate from a Detroit school in 4 years, a federally funded study by Michigan State University found. The official state figure is a graduation rate of 66.8%.

Poor underfunded Detroit city schoo … Wait. Detroit spends $11,112 per student. The statewide average in Michigan is $9,340. Inefficient and expensive.

Board President Carla Scott does not believe the results of the Michigan State study. “It doesn’t seem credible to me,” Scott said. “You can make data for anything you want it to say, but (they) should have factored in the reasons why they left. “If you look at children moving out of the city, of course you’re going to see a decrease. There are all kinds of reasons why children leave the city, that doesn’t mean they’re dropouts.”

That’s a good point. But it underscores how terrible — and expensive — Detroit schools are. Kids are moving out to graduate. They give up on Detroit schools. If that indeed is the explanation. The answer? The Detroit News reported:

Gov. Jennifer Granholm has proposed increasing the dropout age to 18 and creating smaller high schools to boost graduation rates. “Governor Granholm recognizes that we must provide a quality education for every child and provide them with the tools they need to be successful in the 21st century,” Liz Boyd, Granholm’s press secretary, said in a statement. “She has called on education leaders and lawmakers from both parties to join her in solving the dropout problem.”

More money. How trite. Hmm, if this were health care, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would be decrying those “greedy” teachers and bureaucrats and would be calling to slash spending and use more technology.

The simpler solution is to give them vouchers for $5,000 a year each and let them attend parochial schools.

Source




Australia: Better teacher selection needed

Elements in the NSW Teachers Federation have strongly resisted the mild proposals put forward by the NSW Director-General of Education, Michael Coutts-Trotter, to improve the processes of selecting teachers for our public schools. Principals of NSW secondary public schools have for years been seeking a more effective system of staffing their schools, and see the latest proposals as a small step in the right direction. A balance between local selection by school-based panels and statewide staffing processes would bring NSW into the 21st century, as well as ensuring students were being taught by teachers who really wanted to be in their school.

The NSW Secondary Principals' Council, the professional association that represents the vast majority of principals in the government sector, has developed a position paper that calls for just that: a balance. The SPC would like to have 50 per cent of staff chosen through local selection, with the remainder determined by state needs. Principals are rightly held more accountable than they used to be for the educational outcomes of students in their schools, but have very little say over the selection of their teachers. Greater authority to do this would lead to a better match of teachers for every school, and teachers would be able to make more informed decisions about where they might like to teach.

Schools in all parts of NSW would benefit from the adoption of the principals' position paper, as it calls for improved incentives to attract and retain teachers in rural and remote areas. Salary increases and termination bonuses after five years' service might well attract more teachers to these schools. Students in isolated areas deserve experienced teachers just as much as students in coastal and metropolitan schools do, and genuine incentives would make this possible.

The current transfer system works against the interests of many teachers who don't attract enough points to be able to move to a school that they would like to be in and to which they could make a great contribution. Some of our really great young teachers resign after a few years and either travel or work in the private sector once they realise that the present selection process is an impediment to them. More Generation Y teachers are teaching in our schools and they have a much more flexible approach to work. They don't want to be locked into a system that sees them as points on a scale rather than as a teacher who wants to work in a variety of locations. A young teacher told me a couple of weeks ago that this would be one issue he wouldn't take industrial action on. He wants the option of seeing what is available in a school before applying. He is not alone in thinking like this.

Parents want the best for their children. Knowing that the teachers of their children want to be in their school, have been selected through proper, fair processes to be there, and will be professionally developing themselves to enhance their future prospects should give parents much more confidence in their local public school.

Let's hope that NSW schools can move into the 21st century, and that the proposal by our school leaders for an improved staffing process will influence both the department and the Teachers Federation.

Source





28 February, 2008

Crazy U.S. science education

Amazingly inflated credentialism. A REDUCTION in government funding is needed

Recently, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) wrote an editorial titled "'Global' Science Advocacy." He calls for scientists to be advocates not only on Capitol Hill through their professional societies, but also by recruiting friends, neighbors, city council members, etc., to the cause of science advocacy. This is written in response to the proposed FY2009 budget request Bush made to Congress in which some agencies "such as the NIH, are slated for flat funding or worse." After reading this, I decided I must heed the call and do a little science advocacy.

Before I go on, there is an interesting aside. Mr. Leshner (the CEO of AAAS) states that "US research will see its fifth consecutive year of decreased support (in inflation-adjusted constant dollars)." Basically, US research hasn't received a cost-of-living raise in 4 years: it's feeling the inflation tax, and it hurts!

From 1998-2003, the NIH budget was doubled. I started graduate school during this time period, and things were booming. The way I heard it, Bill Clinton doubled the budget, but Mr. Leshner writes that John Porter, Arlen Specter, and Tom Harkin led the effort. Regardless, a lot of this doubling actually went to Big Science - large budget, long-term projects usually requiring a lot of infrastructure. This is as opposed to individual scientists (called Primary Investigators, or PI's) at universities receiving the money through research grants. In fact, the fraction of money going to PI's fell during this period.

Since 2003, however, the funding has remained stagnant in terms of actual dollars, and has decreased in terms of what those dollars can buy. But the Big Science research centers haven't been closed, of course, so PI's and universities have had their funding cut. Actually cut. Not just "not increased at a fast enough rate." Grants are not getting renewed, or are getting renewed at a lower level than before.

It makes things tough. Stress is high and scientists are pessimistic. To add to the woes, this large influx of money between 1998-2003 had to be spent. So universities built new buildings, hired new faculty, and recruited more students. The buildings will require continuing revenue to maintain and the new faculty are applying for their own grants (in competition with the existing faculty). So it's been a typical Boom-and-Bust (the bust is still forthcoming...I'd say we're in a science-recession).

My incoming class to the Berkeley biology program was the largest class to date. And all of the ones that followed my class were even bigger. In my view, this was incredibly irresponsible, although unavoidable when grants are inflated. Thousands of biologists are graduating with PhD's every year and they need jobs. But, we've all just been kicked out of the nest and told "Good luck. You'll need it."

Over the course of the last 30 years, a PhD has become essential to climbing the ladder at a pharmaceutical company. And now, one or two postdoctoral fellowships (2-4 years each) are needed to land almost any job in biology. This is inflation of education. Try getting a job doing completely mindless work at your neighborhood biotech with a high school diploma. Those jobs are reserved for people with Bachelor's degrees from good universities. Do you want to actually apply the knowledge you learned in your senior-level lab course and develop an experimental plan? You'll need a Masters or PhD for that. From Harvard.

At the AAAS national meeting last week, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sent representatives to address the scientists that had gathered. Not surprisingly, they call for "big boosts to research funding." This sounds a lot like a stimulus package, and it's typical pandering to a special interest group by promising more money and everything will be free. Of course, this is welcomed by many scientists: the outgoing President of the AAAS reportedly stated that Congress has passed "a budget that does not meet the needs of American Science." An NIH budget that is 100% higher than the one ten years ago does not meet our needs. Whoops! I mean: A budget that is 0% higher than last year does not meet our needs.

If you watched the MTV presidential candidate forum last month, you'll recall that students are all going to get a lot of federal money from Hill-bama to pay for college (you'll also recall that the entire studio audience was college students, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence).

I think we already have too many college graduates in this country, but soon there will be more. Then they, too, will get PhD's when they find out that their B.S. is just that. At some point, 15 years as a postdoctoral fellow will be the norm, which means scientists will start their first job at age 42 (as opposed to 30 currently: diploma at 18 + 4 years for college + 5 years for grad school + 3 years for postdoc).

This is a terrible system, and inflating it with evermore funding is not going to fix it. Last year, the NIH funding was not increased (3.8% cut accounting for official inflation). We need more of this, and by "this," I mean NIH budget cuts. That means universities will have to train fewer PhD's, and they will be hiring fewer research professors. Private industry as well as academia will have to start giving people with less education more responsibility. It will be painful, but healthy. Who knows: maybe the next biotech innovation will be that they will start promoting people with good college educations (but no additional letters behind their name) to managerial positions, allowing them to increase expenditures on capital (instead of letters) and really take medicine into the future.

So call your city council member and get them to resolve that this madness must stop. Write your representative in DC and tell them that private industry and charities will best be able to fund the future of medicine. Advocate for the future of science in America!

Source




Dumb students "out" themselves

The controversy over electives in the Albuquerque Public Schools curriculum heats up. Should students who do poorly on state tests be forced to take remedial classes and not allowed to take electives? Wednesday, students themselves responded in the Albuquerque Journal newspaper -- but may not have proved the point they intended. The Journal said the letters are from students at Jefferson Middle School. Of eight letters published, seven of them are full of grammar and spelling mistakes:

"I know I wont wont my eletive tooken away. wht about the sped kibs? Hae you thought about that!"

The students are responding to the possibility of APS taking electives away from students who fail state tests for math and reading.

Another student writes, "I dissagree with your oppion. If students dont have there electives we will have no reason to come to school. And if kids start not coming to school it will be your fault."

Melissa Armijo has a child at Jefferson. She agrees with the statement, but said the mistakes in the letter are scary. I think that they should have a medium of being able to still give a child an elective and also having that child learn how to read and write correctly,"Armijo said.

The Albuquerque Journal is a partner with KOAT. The Journal said the letters that were published were representative of the letters they received. Many of the letters came from an e-mail sent by their teacher and then a few from the students themselves. The Journal said they confirmed every letter that ran in the paper but chose not to run the students' names. There were several letters the Journal did not run that had even more serious grammatical and spelling errors.

Jefferson students did well on last year's math and reading tests but the school did not meet Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP. More than half the APS high school students tested last year did not pass the math or reading sections of the standard tests. APS said those students may soon have to replace electives with remedial classes in those subjects. The district is waiting for guidelines from the state before implementing any new policy.

Source




Australia: Literacy taught by illiterates

By Christopher Bantick

It is not just this newspaper that is questioned by Ilana Snyder over its position on literacy. In her book The Literacy Wars: Why Teaching Children to Read and Write is a Battleground in Australia, I am cited several times, and not because I have written on this page. I do hold the view that literacy can be taught with rigour and tested for performance. Snyder suggests: "It was the Murdoch paper's crusade against contemporary approaches to literacy education that motivated me to write the book. In recent years, The Australian's in-house opinion shapers have been accorded astonishing privilege and power. Their goal has been to dictate a reactionary model for the secondary-school curriculum. It is time to hold them to account." But while Snyder can attempt to marginalise The Australian's role in the literacy debate, this is misleading.

It is not my intention to examine and dismiss Snyder's often fatuous, niggardly arguments in her intemperate book. The point here about Snyder and fellow travellers who endorse the view that literacy is an experience rather than a learned discipline is that opposition of any kind - call it conservatism - is ridiculed. It is a neat ploy to say that the so-called Right, for which this newspaper is supposedly a mouthpiece, is narrow and prescriptive in its appreciation of literacy. The enemy has been identified. Meanwhile, those on the Left are expansive, welcome new ideas, are progressive and embrace theory. But this is a deceptive argument.

Literacy transcends the Right or Left positions. It is critics such as Snyder who wish to reduce it to the old Left-Right debate. Moreover, if opinion is even marginally conservative, it is immediately treated as suspect. The problem with Snyder's reductive argument is that she denies the reality that literacy education in Australia is in serious trouble. There are many children who cannot read, write, spell, understand grammar, construct a clear sentence and punctuate with meaning. The reason is palpably obvious.

The students accepted into university teaching courses are often simply the leavings, the lees if you like, after the better students have opted to undertake more prestigious and ambitious degrees. One has only to look at the entrance scores for teaching, some as low as 56, to see that high-flyers are not entering the classroom. The result is teachers who are not proficient in literacy are teaching children. Is it any wonder that Australia is producing illiterate children when they are taught by illiterates? It is for this reason that the NSW Government has introduced tests for five-year-olds in literacy and numeracy from this year in an attempt to head off early learning difficulties. It makes sense.

The reality is that literacy instruction in Australia has been of questionable quality for decades. It is also easy to trace the decline in proficiency to the introduction of progressive, child-centred, jargon-based theory that took over many Australian classrooms during the 1970s. What Snyder and the strident voices of the Left do not grasp, or seem to care about, is that if children are not taught literacy, then they are effectively disenfranchised for life.

Recent research by Australian National University economists Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan, entitled How Has School Productivity Changed in Australia, points out that today's teenagers are less literate than those of the '60s. The reason is simple: poor teaching.

While Kevin Rudd makes much of his so-called education revolution, which is supposedly going to leap off a laptop keyboard, he has been noticeably silent on the much harder question: will the federal Government be insistent that schools lift their literacy standards? Before the election, Rudd promised to publish primary and secondary school results in reading and writing and numeracy in years three, five and nine. Earlier this month Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Julia Gillard, when referring to the national action plan for literacy and numeracy, said: "The Rudd Government understands that literacy and numeracy are the building blocks of a good education." Well, prove it.

The Rudd Government needs the will and preparedness to take on the entrenched interests in university education departments that work against structured, phonetically based language instruction. It should expose where literacy instruction is deficient and take necessary remedial action. This can be measured by a published state-by-state, school-by-school comparison. But these results should not ossify hidden in some departmental journal but be published in newspapers, much as the Year 12 results and school rankings are done in Victoria. It will soon become evident why it is that some schools in the same socioeconomic band, with the same cohort of children, are doing better than others. This does two things: expose the schools and expose deficient teachers.

While Snyder's book will be welcomed by the literacy luvvies as a justification for their failure to instruct children properly, the truth is that the Left resists accountability. Do parents really care about the literacy wars? Hardly. They just want their children to learn to read and write.

Source





27 February, 2008

"Moderates" and conservatives in college

Post below lifted from Newsbusters. See the original for links. Reporting on endeavours to deny that it is Leftist bigotry that chases conservatives away from higher ed.

Rush Limbaugh fans have often heard the conservative talk radio host suggest that people who consider themselves politically moderate just can't make up their minds on important issues of the day. A recent study about ideological differences which drive more liberals to seek Ph.D.'s than conservatives might offer some answers as to why that is. Published by the American Enterprise Institute, "Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don't Get Doctorates" presented some pretty compelling ideas about what's causing the liberal bias problem at America's colleges and universities:

Every year, self-identified liberals apply to Ph.D. programs in far greater numbers than do conservatives. However, the reasons for this ideological imbalance are far from clear. Those on the political right tend to regard academia's liberal slant as evidence of discrimination against conservatives. By contrast, those on the political left may conclude that their overrepresentation in the academy is due to superior intelligence and abilities....

The ideological imbalance among college students is evident immediately in figure 1. The graph reveals that self-identified liberals outnumber conservatives by a substantial margin. Additionally, the figure shows that those on the political left are more likely to express an interest in pursuing a Ph.D.

Interestingly, the authors of the piece, Dr. Matthew Woessner and Dr. April Kelly-Woessner, are a married couple with disparate political views themselves. As the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote on Friday:

During a recent Thursday-morning get-together over scrambled eggs and toast, the conversation at Kuppy's [diner in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania] focused on the U.S. presidential election. As usual, Mr. Woessner's colleagues were taking shots at him. Why did he originally favor Rudy Giuliani? one [sic] of his colleagues wanted to know. "I really want to make sure I have a president who is going to bomb more countries," Mr. Woessner quipped.

It is the kind of over-the-top statement Mr. Woessner is famous for. The young professor relishes the role of conservative contrarian inside the liberal academy, a role that puts him in a distinct minority not only here but in higher education generally.....

In fact, Mr. Woessner gets along so well with Democrats that he married one. Ms. Kelly-Woessner teaches a course on women and politics, among others, at Elizabethtown College. She and Mr. Woessner didn't like each other at all when they first met at Ohio State. She even once told her future husband that she could never date a conservative. So when the couple announced their engagement, the director of their graduate program at Ohio State was stunned. "They really were opposites," says Herbert F. Weisberg, chairman of the political-science department at Ohio State. "They were always debating each other."

Regardless of their political differences, the couple produced excellent work in this paper:

There is reason to assume that liberals and conservatives have different experiences in college. If critics of the academy are correct, the liberal enclave provides a chilly environment for conservatives. This may not even be the result of intentional discrimination. Rather, conservatives may simply find themselves to be in the minority and disconnected from the rest of the campus. This minority status may affect their assessments of the educational experience and their overall satisfaction with college. According to previous research, satisfaction with the college experience does help to predict whether a student will complete an advanced degree.

And here's the part Rush Limbaugh and his fans will love:

Variations in reported grades do not vary as a function of conservatism, but rather as a function of moderation. Moderates consistently report lower grades than do their liberal and conservative counterparts. Concerned that less intelligent students might have self-identified as moderates, simply because they did not comprehend the ideological classifications used in the survey question, we reclassified the respondents based on their answers to a battery of political questions included near the end of the student survey. We found that students who take objectively moderate positions on important political issues do earn lower grades than their ideological classmates do.

Interesting, wouldn't you agree? Maybe this suggests an errancy in the debate concerning intellect and ideology always centering on liberals and conservatives whilst typically ignoring moderates. As this election might be decided by folks not committed to one of the major political parties, maybe greater focus should be given to what makes a moderate tick rather than the inner-psychological workings of liberals and conservatives. Of course, that wasn't the point of this paper:

Whatever the basis of ideological identification, however, the differences between liberals and conservatives translate into differences in policy attitudes, behaviors, and dispositions, not all of which have direct political implications. For example, liberals and conservatives tend to differ on measures of the widely-used NEO Personality Inventory. Liberals tend to score higher in creativity and excitement seeking, while conservatives outperform in orderliness and striving for achievement.

It is reasonable to assume that these differences in personalities and values translate into differences in career goals. For example, if liberals and conservatives have different notions of authority, this would theoretically translate into liberals selecting careers that are less hierarchical and that allow greater personal autonomy. In fact, Lindholm argues that the need for autonomy, independence, and intellectual freedom is the most cited reason college professors give for choosing academic careers.13 These career goals would appear to be more commonly associated with liberal ideologies. Similarly, if liberals are more likely to value creativity, as Carney et al. suggests, they may be more likely to self-select into the arts and humanities, with the more practical conservatives opting for professional fields. ...

Only 9 percent of the far left and 18 percent of liberals major in professional fields, as compared to 33 percent of conservatives and 37 percent of the far right. Since liberals already outnumber conservatives among college students, this tendency for conservatives to congregate in professional degree programs means that liberals outnumber conservatives two to one in the humanities and social sciences - fields most associated with doctoral degrees.

The professors offered some suggestions for academia:

First, in light of our prior research, which shows that students react negatively to overt partisanship, professors within the social sciences and the humanities should make a special effort to depoliticize their classroom.18 This does not suggest that political science or history courses should be bland or noncontroversial. Rather, striving to present both ideological perspectives on contemporary issues and debates would likely reduce the conservatives' relative dissatisfaction with their social science and humanities classes. If conservatives enjoyed these courses more, we might see a rise in conservative majors and in Ph.D. candidates.

Second, since conservatives place an especially high priority on financial security and raising a family, the academy needs to make efforts to adopt more family-friendly policies....

While a host of concrete indicators (overall satisfaction with college experience, grade point average, contact with faculty, etc.) do not tend to support the assertion that conservatives are frequently the victims of discrimination, academia may create an environment that appears hostile to young conservatives. Just as academic institutions have, in the pursuit of racial and ethnic diversity, taken great care to foster a climate of tolerance, so too, academic programs might consider how their doctoral programs might be made more inviting to ideological conservatives. Ultimately, the academy's relevance is dependent on its ability to recruit and retain scholars from every intellectual tradition.

Great points all. Unfortunately, not everybody agreed with the Woessner's conclusions. Ilya Somin over at the Volokh Conspiracy blog wrote Friday:

I am somewhat skeptical about the particular variables emphasized by the Woessners. If interest in making money were a crucial variable in steering conservatives away from academia, one would expect their representation to be much higher in high-paying academic disciplines such as law, where faculty members routinely make six figure salaries and often have extensive consulting opportunities. Yet the ideological imbalance in legal academia is very large and fairly similar to that in other academic fields.

In my view, a focus on raising a family should make academia more attractive to conservatives rather than less. Relative to other professional jobs, academic careers are actually quite family-friendly. Unlike most other professionals, professors have a high degree of control over their schedules. They can also do a much higher proportion of their work at home, which makes it easier to spend time with kids. Universities also tend to have extremely generous family leave policies for faculty. Moreover, universities often give substantial tuition discounts to children of their faculty - an important benefit for social conservatives with large families. Some schools even subsidize private secondary school tuition for faculty children.

Somin raised another issue that might be particularly relevant to libertarian readers:

Like other studies of academic ideology, the Woessner and Kelly-Woessner paper also suffers from the failure to consider libertarians separately from conservatives. As I discuss in this post, libertarians are about 10-15 percent of the general population and are likely to be disproportionately represented among non-liberals likely to be interested in pursuing academic careers. Relative to conservatives, libertarians are about 20% more likely to be college graduates (see Table 10 in the linked paper) and threfore more likely to be potential candidates for academic jobs.

Although I'm not aware of survey evidence on this point, I strongly suspect that libertarians are closer to liberals than to conservatives in their interests in doing research, developing a philosophy of life, and raising families. Yet libertarians are almost as underrepresented in academia as conservatives are. Certainly, they are nowhere close to constituting 10 percent of faculty in any field other than economics. It is possible that libertarians are more interested in making money than liberals are; the claim is often made, though I have yet to see any systematic study that proves or disproves it. But even if this stereotype is true, it doesn't explain why they aren't better represented in law and other high-paying academic fields.

Maybe after they read this piece the Woessner's will comment on how libertarians impact this equation. Stay tuned.




Australia: Faddish educational experimentation condemned

It is time to stop introducing change in the nation's classrooms without discovering whether students' learning improved as a result. In an interview with The Australian just before stepping down as president of the NSW Board of Studies, Gordon Stanley also questioned whether school curriculums contained too many subjects, making it difficult to sustain quality across the board.

He said school systems had placed a premium on innovation for its own sake, without evaluating what worked. "The people most opposed to the collection of evidence hold a strong philosophical position, and they're not interested in any challenges to that position," he said. "But one needs to support those belief positions. It's unfortunate if you just want to have debates about philosophical positions without coming down to an analysis of what the implications of these are for learning. "When you're focused on evidence-based practice, you keep focus on the question of what really works instead of having a debate about the philosophy you hold."

Professor Stanley is stepping down after 10 years to become the Pearson professor of educational assessment at Oxford University, and the founding director of the Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment. During his tenure, the NSW Higher School Certificate has been held up as the gold standard for the nation and is recognised internationally.

While Professor Stanley nominates the integration of vocational courses in the HSC as one of his biggest successes, he questioned the range of subject choices facing students. "I suspect we have too much choice, and too much choice can be confusing for students," he said. "It's worth asking the question whether we've gone too far in differentiating the curriculum. "The more offerings you have, the harder it is to provide well-trained teachers in all these areas. At an individual school level, it's hard to provide all those options for students. And the more differentiated the curriculum, the more expensive it is to deliver."

NSW has also been more successful than other states and territories in withstanding the fads that pass through education, such as integrating history and geography into Studies of Society and the Environment, as occurred elsewhere in the nation. Professor Stanley said NSW "connects with (educational fads) but we don't yield to them without trying to get an understanding of whether in balance they're the appropriate direction to go".

Source





26 February, 2008

US School Districts Cover Up Teacher Sex Abuse with Confidential Agreements and Payouts

An expose by the Oregonian daily newspaper shows that US teachers who sexually abuse their students are often given a pass into other teaching jobs as a cost-saving measure. A search for the phrase "sex abuse cover-up" in the Google internet search engine produces news reports almost exclusively focused on the Catholic Church. But advocates for sex-abuse victims have long known that the problem of persons placed in authority abusing minors is far from being restricted to clergy.

The Oregonian reported yesterday that in some US school districts teachers found to be abusing students are being paid off with letters of recommendation, cash settlements and health insurance in confidential agreements, in return for a quiet immediate resignation. In the agreements, district officials promise not to tell potential employers of the teacher's past misconduct.

Kenneth John Cushing was a recipient of one of these pacts, and left Claggett Creek Middle School in 2004 after allegedly molesting some of his female students. The Oregonian obtained a copy of the deal in which school officials promised not to reveal Cushing's behaviour to prospective future employers.

The paper says it has obtained 47 similar confidential settlement agreements between district officials and teachers. The document said school officials would mention "personal reasons" for Cushing's resignation and make "no reference to this agreement". Cushing's license was eventually revoked in 2005 by the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission.

Another teacher, Stephen John Koller, who left his job at Illinois Valley High School, was found to be living with a 17 year-old student. Three Rivers School District offered Koller $10,000 in severance, six months of health insurance and a letter that said, "He is personally committed to his work and will work extra hours to be successful."

The paper reports that in the past five years, "nearly half" of Oregon teachers disciplined for sexual misconduct left their schools with such pacts. The practice is well known throughout the country, with officials nicknaming it "passing the trash". Out of 767 cases of teacher misconduct over the past ten years 165 cases were sex-related offences, making them the most common.

The Oregonian writes that confidential agreements came into use because of economic pressure, and officials admit that the agreements are the cheapest and fastest way of getting a problem teacher out of a particular school. One of the deterrents to firing teachers who are caught molesting students outright is expensive court battles with the unions. Keeping a teacher on paid leave while the teacher is under investigation can also be costly. Hillsboro Superintendent Jeremy Lyon told the paper, "The whole world of reference checks has become a legal arena. You are in a precarious place if you say anything positive or negative about a past employee."

The paper cites several systemic reasons for the problem of teachers abusing students, including enormous backlogs of investigations that can extend up to a year, inconsistent reporting methods, inadequate background checks on potential teachers, and the fact that older teens are not protected under state laws.

But victims' rights advocates say that such agreements undermine the ability of victims to come to terms with abuse, and perpetuate the problem. The Oregonian quotes Mary Jo McGrath, a school law attorney and sexual abuse expert in Santa Barbara, California, who said, "The secret deals are one of the main things that keep the wheels greased on the machinery that keeps passing around the molesters."

The secret deal solution may be short lived, however, as victims sue. Similar deals in California were dropped by school boards when the state Supreme Court ruled that districts can be sued for having them. In the 1997 case of a 13-year-old student who was sexually molested by a middle school vice principal in Livingston Union School District, the Court ruled that the girl could sue the three districts who had previously employed the man for fraud and negligent misrepresentation after all three districts had offered him confidential agreements.

In 2004, a report from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights revealed that teachers are more likely than priests to sexually abuse minors. The report said that previous studies from the early 1980's to 1991 showed that one in four girls and one in six boys is sexually abused by a teacher by age 18. Another revealed that 17.7 per cent of males who graduated from high school and 82.2 per cent of females reported sexual harassment by faculty or staff during their years in school.

Source




Australia: Muslims want university classes to fit prayer times

They will push and push for more and more special treatment until someone says No

MUSLIM university students want lectures to be rescheduledto fit in with prayer timetables and separate male and female eating and recreational areas established on Australian campuses. International Muslim students, predominantly from Saudi Arabia, have asked universities in Melbourne to change class times so they can attend congregational prayers. They also want a female-only area for Muslim students to eat and relax. But at least one institution has rejected their demands, arguing that the university is secular and it does not want to set a precedent for requests granted in the name of religious beliefs.

La Trobe University International chief executive director John Molony said several students had approached the Bundoora institution about rearranging class times to fit in with daily prayers. Mr Molony said the university was attempting to "meet the needs" of an increasing number of Muslim international students, including doubling the size of the prayer room on campus.

La Trobe University International College director Martin Van Run said that although it was involved in discussions with the Muslim students who had made the requests, the university was not planning to change any timetables. "That would seriously inconvenience other people at the college and it is not institutionally viable," he told The Australian. "We are a secular institution ... and we need to have a structured timetable." Mr Van Run said that Saudi students were fully aware that the university was secular before coming to study there. "They know well in advance the class times," he said.

A spokesman for RMIT University would neither confirm nor deny reports that Muslim students had requested timetable changes.

One university source told The Australian that the requests by Muslim international students for timetable changes included a petition. "Some of the students would prefer that lecture times were organised so it would be easy for them to attend prayers," he said. "But it wouldn't be a good precedent to set."

Islamic leaders yesterday backed the push by Muslim students to have their lectures arranged to accommodate prayer sessions, but said such a move would be essential only for congregational Friday prayers. Female Muslim leader Aziza Abdel-Halim said yesterday it was a religious duty for those who followed Islam to preach with their fellow believers on Fridays. But the former senior member of John Howard's Muslim reference board said there was nothing in Islam that indicated men and women be segregated when it came to educational activities. "There's nothing in Islam that says there should be complete segregation, especially in educational institutions," said Sister Abdel-Halim.

She said afternoon prayers for Muslims - Zhohor, at 1.10pm, and Asr, at 4.50pm - could be performed until 10 minutes before the following daily prayer, so it was more appropriate to alter prayer times than lecture schedules. "It's reasonable to ask for the lectures to be shifted around on Friday," Sister Abdel-Halim said. "But if it's going to cause havoc with the timetable, I don't think it's really feasible to ask for every single prayer to be catered for

Source





25 February, 2008

The dumbing down of America

The article below highlights disturbing social trends but fails to lay the blame where it overwhelmingly lies: In dumbed-down education. Blaming computer games is a cop-out in my view -- blaming a symptom rather than the cause

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.

I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

Source




A realistic solution to the British school mess

You read stories to your children every night when they were young. You racked your brains trying to understand the mysteries of modern methods of teaching maths and you did not miss a single parents’ evening. You spent hours studying inspection reports and the league tables before you decided on the secondary school you wanted them to attend. Now you learn that their names are to be put into a hat. Egged on by a government obsessed by the wickedness of pushy middle-class parents who want the best for their children, your local education authority (LEA) has decided to substitute the vagaries of a lottery for the ideal of parental choice.

Lotteries, ministers tell us, are one of the fairest ways to allocate places at oversubscribed secondary schools. They want, in other words, to spread the misery. They seem to think that if every school has equal numbers of disadvantaged and/or difficult children, every school will be equally successful. The possibility that successful schools will be dragged down to the level of the rest has not, it appears, crossed their minds.

If everyone cannot be educated in a successful school, nobody will be. Old Labour, red in tooth and claw, reeking bitterness and envy, is creeping centre stage. You care about your children’s education? You want them to have the best possible start in life? Forget it. The politicians and their bureaucrats know best, and if they have their way no parent will be able to manipulate the system in order to secure, as some see it, an unfair educational advantage for their child.

At present, grammar schools are allowed to select pupils on grounds of academic ability, city academies can admit up to 10% of their intake on the evidence of “aptitude” in a particular subject, such as music or technology, and faith schools can still take into account a family’s commitment to a particular religion.

But those freedoms are under ever fiercer attack. Changes to the admissions code that dictate what teachers can and cannot do make the exercise of individual professional judgement more and more difficult.

Many in the world of education want schools to be forced to admit certain percentages of children from different social backgrounds and I have no doubt that ministers are attracted to the idea. Parental choice now risks becoming an evil that will have to be stamped upon in the name of equality of opportunity.

The truth, of course, is that successful schools are successful because they are in control of their own destiny. Crucially, they can decide the pupils who are likely to benefit from the kind of education they offer and they can expel pupils who cannot or will not conform. They respect the aspirations and concerns of parents who have decided that this is the right school for their child. In education, as in any other market, those who deliver what the customer wants will prosper.

Northern Rock, the prime minister told us last week, is in “temporary public ownership”. Not so state schools, which, whatever the colour of the government, seem set to remain the property of the state for ever. This is why standards in so many state schools are so low. The sooner these schools are freed from state control and allowed to compete one with another for the custom of prospective parents, the better.

Would this mean that every school would immediately try to turn itself into a grammar school? Well, not if they all wanted to survive. As in any other market, the challenge is to identify and meet the needs of different customers. Some schools would certainly transform themselves into highly academic institutions; others would be equally effective, but would educate children with, say, emotional and behavioural difficulties. It happens now in the fee-paying sector. Why not in the state?

The state would continue to fund education but would abandon its hopeless attempts to micro-manage every aspect of school life. Funding would follow the child, and children who for whatever reason are more difficult and therefore more costly to educate than others would attract more funds; schools would therefore have an incentive to cater for their needs. Schools that failed to attract enough pupils would close. Their pupils would – as, again, happens now in the fee-paying sector – move to other schools, or a new operator would take over the running of the school.

There is no reason a market of this kind could not operate efficiently. Equally, there is no reason to believe that the current centrally managed system of admissions will ever deliver anything approaching equality of opportunity. Lotteries may be considered a solution by some LEAs because, nationwide, demand for good secondary education outstrips supply. In many parts of the country there are not enough credible schools and so provision has to be rationed. So much for a centralised system that tells schools and parents what they can and cannot do.

The freedom to choose the kind of education you want for your child is a fundamental democratic right. We need to liberate schools from the tyranny of social engineering, and we must allow every school to define its ethos and educational approach in response to market demand and to set an appropriate admissions policy. The only real solution to the crisis in secondary admissions is to create more good schools, and top-down reform has failed to do this. So, the way forward could not be clearer; the tragedy is that none of our politicians can see it.

Source




Shockingly low levels of literacy in Australia

AUSTRALIANS are putting their lives at risk because they can't understand medical prescriptions or basic health information, a new study has revealed. The Adult Literacy and Life Skills survey, conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, found six in 10 people aged between 15 and 74 do not have the basic knowledge and skills to take care of their health and prevent disease. The findings reveal too many people are:

* Unable to perform basic health checks for diseases such as breast, skin or testicular cancer.

* Not aware when they need to contact a doctor.

* Unable to understand instructions on prescribed medication.

* Unable to interpret food labels in order to follow a special diet, such as low fat or low sugar.

The survey, the first of its kind in Australia, has alarmed health experts, who are calling for the Federal Government to introduce a national focus on "health literacy". Prof Robert Bush, director of Queensland's Health Communities Research Centre, said people were putting themselves in danger. "This information should send alarm bells ringing," he said. "Many of our health-promotion initiatives assume a basic level of literacy, such as reading a prescription label so people don't overdose, following a basic health promotion guide, or deciding when it's time to consult a doctor. "Without this basic knowledge then people are putting their lives at risk."

Prof Bush urged the Government to launch a health education program to run in schools, workplaces and aged care homes. "Achieving even a basic level of health literacy to join in ways to better health would seem a fundamental aspiration for Australia," he said. The Adult Literacy and Life Skills survey was completed by 9000 Australians living in urban and rural areas across all states and territories.

Source





24 February, 2008

Higher Education Gap and Economic Mobility

The story below is from the NYT so it takes a bit of unspinning but, if you just look at the facts reported and ignore the pontifications, it would seem that the declining influence of affirmative action has meant that fewer blacks are going to college and more whites are. Not exactly a surprise.

It is also not a surprise to hear that the children of blacks who have got into good jobs with the help of affirmative action are falling back down the income scale -- to about where their innate ability places them -- more evidence that IQ really is hereditary. An artificially affluent environment did not help the children concerned

Economic mobility, the chance that children of the poor or middle class will climb up the income ladder, has not changed significantly over the last three decades, a study being released on Wednesday says.

The authors of the study, by scholars at the Brookings Institution in Washington and sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, warned that widening gaps in higher education between rich and poor, whites and minorities, could soon lead to a downturn in opportunities for the poorest families.

The researchers found that Hispanic and black Americans were falling behind whites and Asians in earning college degrees, making it harder for them to enter the middle class or higher. "A growing difference in education levels between income and racial groups, especially in college degrees, implies that mobility will be lower in the future than it is today," said Ron Haskins, a former Republican official and welfare expert who wrote the education section of the report.

There is some good news. The study highlights the powerful role that college can have in helping people change their station in life. Someone born into a family in the lowest fifth of earners who graduates from college has a 19 percent chance of joining the highest fifth of earners in adulthood and a 62 percent chance of joining the middle class or better.

In recent years, 11 percent of children from the poorest families have earned college degrees, compared with 53 percent of children from the top fifth. "The American dream of opportunity is alive, but frayed," said Isabel Sawhill, another author of the report, "Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Mobility in America." The report is at economicmobility.org. "It's still alive for immigrants but badly tattered for African-Americans," said Ms. Sawhill, an economist and a budget official in the Clinton administration. "It's more alive for people in the middle class than for people at the very bottom."

The report and planned studies constitute the most comprehensive effort to examine intergenerational mobility, said John E. Morton of the Pew Trusts, who is managing the project. It draws heavily on a federally supported survey by the University of Michigan that has followed thousands of families since the late 1960s.

A chapter of the report released last fall found startling evidence that a majority of black children born to middle-class parents grew up to have lower incomes and that nearly half of middle-class black children fell into the bottom fifth in adulthood, compared with 16 percent of middle-class white children.

The Pew-sponsored studies are continuing with the involvement of research organizations and scholars. Another report expected in the spring by the more conservative Heritage Foundation will focus on explanations for the trends described in the current report.

Stuart Butler, vice president for economic studies at the Heritage Foundation, said, "It does seem in America now that for people at very bottom it's more difficult to move up than we might have thought or might have been true in the past."

Mr. Butler said experts were likely to disagree about the reasons and, hence, on policies to improve mobility. Conservative scholars are more apt to fault cultural norms and the breakdown of families while liberals put more emphasis on the changing structure of the economy and the need for government to provide safety nets and aid for poor families.

"We may well have an economy that rewards certain traits that are typically passed on from parents to children, the importance of education, optimism, a propensity to work hard, entrepreneurship and so on," he said. To the extent that the economy rewards those traits, he added, "you'd expect the incomes of children to track more with that of their parents."

The small fraction of poor children who earn college degrees are likely to rise well above their parents' status, the study showed.

More than half the children born to upper-income parents, those in the top fifth, who finish college remain in that top group. Nearly one in four remains in the top fifth even without completing college.

Evidence from model programs shows that early childhood education can have lasting benefits, Mr. Haskins said, although the Head Start program is too uneven to produce widespread gains.

In addition, he said, studies show that many poor but bright children do not receive good advice about applying for college and scholarships, or do not receive help after starting college. "If we did more to help them complete college," Mr. Haskins said, "there's no question it would improve mobility."

Source




Black crook keeps her teaching job at Columbia



Appoint a dummy because she is black and have low expectations ever after, I guess

Robert notes that Madonna Constantine, the Columbia professor who claimed a noose was left on her door a few months ago, has been has been found guilty of plagiarizing the work of two students and another professor - in no less than two dozen cases. Sure, college administrators say Constantine has been punished, but they delicately refuse to specify how. They also make clear that, because she is tenured, she will keep her job.

The case in question involves more than a mere gaffe or slip of the memory. Serial plagiarism is word piracy and cheating, and it should disqualify professors from the high tasks of teaching on campuses and mentoring students.

Whatever sanctions Columbia has placed on Constantine, they do not fit the crime. Neither tenure nor the cowardice of administrators should be allowed to shield academics who steal the thoughts and words of others. Constantine should be fired, and students and the public have a right to be informed that they no longer need be concerned about such untrustworthy professors. As Tracy Juliao, one of the students who cooperated in Constantine's investigation, rightly stated, "You go in as a student thinking you should be able to trust your faculty."

Source. See also here




Muslim sexual hangups on campus

Amir Mertaban vividly recalls sitting at his university's recruitment table for the Muslim Students Association a few years ago when an attractive undergraduate flounced up in a decidedly un-Islamic miniskirt, saying "Salamu aleykum," or "Peace be upon you," a standard Arabic greeting, and asked to sign up.

Mr. Mertaban also recalls that his fellow recruiter surveyed the young woman with disdain, arguing later that she should not be admitted because her skirt clearly signaled that she would corrupt the Islamic values of the other members. "I knew that brother, I knew him very well; he used to smoke weed on a regular basis," said Mr. Mertaban, now 25, who was president of the Muslim student group at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, from 2003 to 2005. Pointing out the hypocrisy, Mr. Mertaban won the argument that the group could no longer reject potential members based on rigid standards of Islamic practice.

The intense debate over whether organizations for Muslim students should be inclusive or strict is playing out on college campuses across the United States, where there are now more than 200 Muslim Students Association chapters. Gender issues, specifically the extent to which men and women should mingle, are the most fraught topic as Muslim students wrestle with the yawning gap between American college traditions and those of Islam. "There is this constant tension between becoming a mainstream student organization versus appealing to students who have a more conservative or stricter interpretation of Islam," said Hadia Mubarak, the first woman to serve as president of the national association, from 2004 to 2005.

Each chapter enjoys relative autonomy in setting its rules. Broadly, those at private colleges tend to be more liberal because they draw from a more geographically dispersed population, and the smaller numbers prompt Muslim students to play down their differences. Chapters at state colleges, on the other hand, often pull from the community, attracting students from conservative families who do not want their children too far afield.

At Yale, for example, Sunnis and Shiites mix easily and male and female students shocked parents in the audience by kissing during the annual awards ceremony. Contrast that with the University of California, Irvine, which has the reputation for being the most conservative chapter in the country, its president saying that to an outsider its ranks of bearded young men and veiled women might come across as "way Muslim" or even extremist.

But arguments erupt virtually everywhere. At the University of California, Davis, last year, in their effort to make the Muslim association more "cool," board members organized a large alcohol-free barbecue. Men and women ate separately, but mingled in a mock jail for a charity drive. The next day the chapter president, Khalida Fazel, said she fielded complaints that unmarried men and women were physically bumping into one other. Ms. Fazel now calls the event a mistake.

At George Washington University, a dodge ball game pitting men against women after Friday prayers drew such protests from Muslim alumni and a few members that the board felt compelled to seek a religious ruling stating that Islamic traditions accept such an event.

Members acknowledge that the tone of the Muslim associations often drives away students. Several presidents said that if they thought members were being too lax, guest imams would deliver prayer sermons about the evils of alcohol or premarital sex. Judgment can also come swiftly. Ghayth Adhami, a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled how a young student who showed up at a university recruitment meeting in a Budweiser T-shirt faced a few comments about un-Islamic dress. The student never came back.

Some members push against the rigidity. Fatima Hassan, 22, a senior at the Davis campus, organized a coed road trip to Reno, Nev., two hours away, to play the slot machines last Halloween. In Islam, Ms. Hassan concedes, gambling is "really bad," but it was men and women sharing the same car that shocked some fellow association members.

More here





23 February, 2008

Lying journalism school head

Why am I not surprised?

Faculty at Northwestern University's journalism school said Tuesday that they "are deeply troubled" about their dean's use of anonymous sources in his alumni magazine columns and called on him to provide proof that he didn't fabricate the quotes. A statement signed by 16 Medill School of Journalism instructors, along with a letter they wrote to Medill Dean John Lavine, comes after a columnist for The Daily Northwestern, the student newspaper, questioned Lavine's use of anonymous quotes in two introductory letters Lavine wrote for the Medill alumni magazine last year.

The two-page statement, signed by tenured faculty members as well as contract lecturers, also was given to Northwestern President Henry Bienen and Provost Daniel Linzer, the letter stated. "This matter has become a crisis for the school," the statement said. "The principles of truthfulness and transparency in reporting are at the core of Medill's professional and academic mission."

Northwestern's office of the provost is reviewing Lavine's use of unnamed sources and "the veracity of the quotations," according to a statement by spokesman Al Cubbage, who declined to comment further. In addition, students and alumni joined the new "Save Journalism at Medill" group on Facebook. On Tuesday afternoon, there were nearly 90 members of the group, which was created to discuss "concerns about the issue of the dean's anonymous sourcing, as well as other recent changes in the journalism school."

At issue are two columns Lavine wrote in Medill's alumni magazine. In a column in last spring's magazine about a class in which students developed "a fully integrated marketing program," Lavine quoted "a Medill junior" saying: "I sure felt good about this class. It is one of the best I've taken." In the same piece, Lavine quotes "one sophomore" who glowingly praises a new reporting program, concluding, "This is the most exciting my education has been."

Lavine's use of anonymous quotes seemed suspicious to David Spett, a Medill senior and Daily Northwestern columnist. He said he figured out which marketing class Lavine had mentioned and then tracked down all 29 students. Each denied making the "I sure felt good" comment, his column stated.

At Medill, one of the country's premier journalism schools, professors emphasize that unnamed sources should be used sparingly, in line with professional media standards. Students routinely are required to submit names and contact information for every person quoted in their articles as a guard against fabrication.

Lavine, 67, told the Tribune last week that the quotes in his columns "came from real people," though he couldn't recall whether they were provided by e-mail or during face-to-face conversations. He said he writes student comments in a reporter's notebook he carries and also receives comments by e-mail. He said comments from that time period have been deleted.

He defended his use of anonymous quotes by drawing a distinction between a news story and a letter to alumni in a magazine. "Context is all-important. I wasn't doing a news story. I wasn't covering the news," Lavine said. "When I write news stories, I am as careful and thorough about sources as anyone you will find. . . . This is not a news story. This is a personal letter."

That argument didn't sit well with some journalism faculty members, who called the explanation "at best inadequate," according to their statement. "It is wrong to argue that the forum in which the questionable quote was used, the school's alumni magazine, is not subject to the same standards as other publication venues," according to the statement.

Medill professor Donna Leff said law and ethics instructors first broached the idea of issuing a statement. The position statement then circulated to a larger pool of professors, Leff said, many of whom felt it was important to take a public stand. "This is not something that played out in the newspaper as though it were an internal matter. It's a newspaper matter that then got played out in school," said Leff, who teaches media law and ethics, science writing and urban reporting. "We're actually asking him exactly what we would ask of any reporter if we were the editor." The faculty requested a meeting with Lavine, Bienen and Linzer.

Lavine also defended his writings in an e-mail to faculty in response to the Feb. 14 Tribune story, saying that the quotes "are what students told me." "They are real quotes, a fact that was demonstrated by my including in my letter to the alumni a link to a student video that showed students making the same kind of points," Lavine wrote. "There was no shortage of material from students for these quotes." Of the 16 instructors who signed the letter, 10 are full-time professors while the remainder are lecturers or retired faculty members. There are 51 full-time Medill faculty members.

Source




Britain: Privileged children excel, even at low-performing "comprehensive" schools

Charles Murray pointed out long ago that richer people have higher IQs and that IQ is the main factor in educational attainment. What the report below skates over is the safety concerns many British parents have about sending their children to "sink" schools

Middle-class parents obsessed with getting their children into the best schools may be wasting their time and money, academics say today. They found that children from privileged backgrounds excelled when they were deliberately sent to inner-city comprehensives by parents opposed to private schooling. Most of the children "performed brilliantly" at GCSE and A level and 15 per cent of those who went on to university took places at Oxford or Cambridge.

To give their children "the best start in life", many parents choose to live in catchment areas of high-performing schools, "find God" to gain their child a place at a faith establishment or make financial sacrifices to pay for their child's independent schooling. However, the researchers decided to analyse the progress of the offspring of "those white, urban, middle-class parents who consciously choose for their children to be educated at their local state secondary, whatever the league table positioning".

This group attended average or poorly performing schools in working-class or racially mixed areas. Here they thrived academically and were often given special attention by teachers keen to improve the school's results, according to the study by professors in education from the universities of Cambridge, Sunderland and West of England (UWE).

The only failure was in social integration, which had been the very reason most parents sent their child to the school. Most children from middle-class families mixed only with pupils from identical backgrounds. The research found "segregation within schools, with white middle-class children clustered in top sets, with little interaction with children from other backgrounds".

Professor David James, from UWE, said: "But we wanted to discover what motivates parents who instead choose to send their children to local comprehensives that appear to be performing poorly. "Most children who had this choice made for them have gone on to perform brilliantly in GCSEs, A levels and then on to university entrance, including a much higher than average entry to Oxbridge."

The researchers interviewed 124 families from London and two other cities. Eighty-three per cent of the parents had degrees and a quarter were educated to postgraduate level. They included three Labour Party activists and two who worked in a social exclusion research unit. In 70 per cent of families, one or both parents worked in the public sector. Most described themselves as left-wing or liberal.

The report found: "Some parents were motivated by a commitment to state-funded education and egalitarian ideals and many had an active dislike for privileged educational routes on the grounds that they were socially divisive. Many wanted their children to have an educational experience that would prepare them for a globalised, socially diverse world. "These parents positioned themselves in a way we termed `a darker shade of pale', as part of a more culturally tolerant and even anti-racist white middle class. "They felt strongly that higher-achieving schools would not provide the kind of experience of the `real world' that their children needed."

However, the researchers said such parents did not consider that they were sacrificing their children's education, with many seeing it as a worthwhile, if risky, strategy. "Many parents said they could and would pull out if things did not go well," the report said. Some parents who attended privileged schools made the choice as a "conscious reaction to their own schooling". Others wanted their children "to compete in ordinary circumstances". It added: "Anxiety was not absent, especially when their children were attending schools that were pathologised - or even demonised - by other white middle-class parents."

But even though those sending their children to comprehensives were open and tolerant of other backgrounds, in some cases researchers noted "elitism and a sense of intellectual and social superiority - a sense that would be confirmed by their own child's relative success".

Source




Australia: Othello becomes a tragedy of the system

LITERATURE, the soul of the English language, has been marginalised by ideology and social theory in its study in schools and universities. Reader in English at the Australian National University Simon Haines said the literature part of the subject English had been squashed and marginalised during the past 30 years, pushed aside to teach theories from other disciplines. "Literature is the heart of English and if we're not doing that, then the subject loses its soul," he said after addressing the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney yesterday.

Dr Haines said university academics in English and literature over the past two generations had "colonised" other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and linguistics. As a result, it had become the attitude in English schools to question the primacy of the text in the belief that the text should be used to illustrate theories from the other disciplines. "And so Othello has become a tragedy of race rather than a tragedy of jealousy," he said. "It hasn't always been; up until the 1960s, it was a tragedy of jealousy. "It's not the teachers' fault - they're just reflecting what they've heard for two generations in universities, which is that literature as core of the subject English is in the end dispensable and theoretical."

Dr Haines is the director for the ANU of the International Centre for Human Values, a joint venture with the Chinese University in Hong Kong. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University and is a former diplomat and analyst with the Office of National Assessments, and was chairman for three years of the OECD budget committee before pursuing a career in academia.

Dr Haines said the English syllabus in schools had become much more crowded over the past three or four decades. "It's all the more reason not to dilute English with other disciplinary or ideological approaches. There just isn't time," he said. "The best you can hope to have is an understanding of the context of the play, so you don't want to narrow it down into one ideological approach. What you get then is a teacher who doesn't understand Marxism and feminist theory as thoroughly as a university academic trying to give students a half-baked version at the same time as teaching Othello. Students end up with a mishmash.

"By all means study Marxist theory when you're at university, where you can study it thoroughly, but don't try to do it in a half-baked way at school." Dr Haines said in this way, Othello had become a tragedy of race not jealousy, which makes the play narrower, more polemical and ideological than Shakespeare intended.

Source





22 February, 2008

Teach Your Children Well

Cleon Skoussen would say, "I told you so."

With the coming general election, and the impressive youth movement within, one can only conclude Skoussen was a visionary. When watching today's young people gush over Barack Obama, pledging allegiance to the Democrat Party, the phrase "Mission Accomplished" comes to mind. The former FBI agent, in his 1958 book, "The Naked Communist", enumerated several goals the left would take to obtain, and maintain, power in the United States. Some of those "goals" included.

"Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current communist propaganda.

"Get control of the teachers associations.

"Gain control of all student newspapers."

But when it comes to today's successful infiltration into academia, the phrase "Give `em an inch, and they think they're rulers" come to mind. According to Paul Rogers of The Mercury News, "A Silicon Valley lawmaker is gaining momentum with a bill that would require "climate change" to be among the science topics that all California public school students are taught. "You can't have a science curriculum that is relevant and current if it doesn't deal with the science behind climate change," Simitian said. "This is a phenomenon of global importance and our kids ought to understand the science behind that phenomenon."

It's not enough that today's youth seem ill equipped with the basics. There is this FedEx commercial where a young employee can't find China on a map. We have another commercial where a young man completes an online stock transaction for a company in Hong Kong, and then tries to impress us with his knowledge that Hong Kong is in China. Insurance commercials targeting young buyers today use cartoons. And we wonder why Russia and China are so cocky.

While I'm only the son of an educator, wouldn't we best spend our time teaching kids the basics, instead of pumping their little heads full of science that is, despite what Al Gore says, not conclusive?

I asked Dr. Timothy Ball about his thoughts on this California curriculum proposal and he replied, "The blunt truth is if you don't understand the science you simply have discussions in ignorance. You also have the problem that teachers can push there own political agenda consciously or subconsciously. Unfortunately, most parents have no idea what is being taught in the classroom, and too often it is not education, it is indoctrination. This extends through to the university, where idealistic young minds are like a tabula rasa eager for ideas and vulnerable without experience.

Dr. Ball concluded, "So we are a science based society with only about 20% who even have a glimmering of understanding of science. As you can see, everywhere you look it is a serious problem because it is ripe for exploitation of fear and lack of knowledge. Gore's movie is a classic example. It is pure unadulterated propaganda which is why an Oscar from Hollywood, the land of make believe, was so appropriate. It employed all the gimmicks of visual and sound imagery that science and technology can provide. As you know even in the radio industry the gimmicks and techniques used to "underscore" a story. The challenge I have made to educators and others is what would you show to provide the other side of the climate issue from Gore's piece? The challenge is you have to present accurate technical boring science. As somebody said you can't spin the truth like you can its perception."

Instead of teaching "science" most of the teachers won't understand, because we're talking about something as inconclusive as the weather, maybe we should be making sure our kids can master the basics. You know, little things like Basic English so young adults can fill out a job application and read an equipment manual for a job. Little things like mastering Basic Mathematics so they can balance a checkbook and calculate how much change to give from a cash register.

Turning our kids into little, intolerant Democrats may have served a short-term goal, but mandating schools spend valuable class time "teaching" climate change that conveniently omits The Sun as a "warming" factor is a continued and dubious disservice, and waste of taxpayer money.

The basics are the basics for a reason. Using kids for political gain is a tactic not beneath the left. It is a reality. If you really care about the future, be concerned about the morons being pumped out of schools that will be the leaders of our nation tomorrow. You know, our nation. That's in North America!

Source




AN AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION ROUNDUP

Four current articles below -- no good news

Rudd's education "revolution" at work

THE Rudd Government will axe a $1.2 billion program which has allowed schools across NSW to upgrade toilets, landscape their grounds and improve facilities. The Investing in Our Schools scheme - one of the most popular policies of the former Howard government - will not be continued after the money runs out this year.

Angry primary principals are seeking an urgent meeting with new Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard at which they are expected to voice a strong complaint about the decision. A storm of protest following The Daily Telegraph's report this morning has forced Ms Gillard to defend the decision. She said the Government would continue investing in schools via other means. "The Investing in Our Schools program was only ever a four-year program," Ms Gillard said.

Ms Gillard's office earlier confirmed to The Daily Telegraph that Labor's "education revolution" - with heavy emphasis on computers and trade schools - does not extend to Investing in Our Schools. A spokeswoman said the $1.2 billion already promised to schools would be delivered, allowing schools to "build and repair vital infrastructure". "Under the previous Liberal Government there was no funding provided for the program beyond the 2007-08 Budget and therefore the program cannot be continued," the spokeswoman said.

Primary Principals' Association president Geoff Scott said schools - particularly in the government sector - were disappointed to learn the program had been dropped. "It will be a terrific shame if it is not replaced by something else that gets funds to schools," Mr Scott said. "Under this scheme a little bush school could get equal access to funds. It allowed them to get money directly for a host of things such as covered walkways, outdoor learning areas and play equipment."

One recipient of Investing in Our Schools funds has been Oxley High School at Tamworth, where students use old railway carriages as a study centre and computer room. Parents & Citizens' president Wendy Newby said the school had received $100,000 from the program which would be "put to good use". "We are very grateful for the funds . .. the P&C does as much as it can," she said.

State Opposition education spokesman Andrew Stoner said principals "could not speak more highly of the Investing In Our Schools program". "This was a $1.2 billion program making a real difference to NSW schools - often where the State Government had failed to provide adequate facilities," he said.

Source

Rudd's school computer promise comes unplugged

THE Rudd Government has backed away from an election pledge to provide every upper secondary school student with their own computer. Education Minister Julia Gillard said yesterday the Government would provide the resources but conceded it could not force schools to provide individual computers to each student.

The Opposition seized on the concession, accusing the Government of reneging on its promise and disappointing the almost one million private and public students in Years 9-12.

Mr Rudd's education revolution, including the $1 billion National Secondary Schools Computer Fund, helped him steamroll into Government last year. A 15-page policy document labelled A Digital Education Revolution said: "A Rudd Labor Government will revolutionise classroom education by putting a computer on the desk of every upper secondary student. It said: "Students will have their own computer and access to the school's extranet and classroom content - both from their desktop and remotely. Schools will be able to apply for grants of up to $1 million . . . this could include personal laptops."

But in fiery exchange in a Senate standing committee yesterday, bureaucrats told Queensland Liberal Senator Brett Mason there was never a pledge to give students their own computers. Some schools might choose to have computer laboratories on school campuses, they said. An animated Senator Mason seized on the comments, offering to read the ALP brochure to Innovation Minister Kim Carr. "Unless I'm stupid and every 9-12 student I know is stupid, every one of them thought the Government would be providing them with a computer," Senator Mason said.

During an interview later in the day, Ms Gillard argued the Government had not changed the goalposts. "There will be sufficient resources so that schools can put a computer on each child's desk for Years 9 to 12," she said. "We are leaving it to the school how they do it , we are not mandating that every desk have a computer on it but we are saying the aim of the program is to make sure every student has access to a computer."

Senator Mason also accused the Government of fudging costs because the costs of maintaining broadband connections were not included in the $100 m broadband plan. "During the election, Kevin Rudd said that the buck would stop with him. We now discover that the buck has been passed on to others, including hard-working parents trying to put their children through school," he said. "As anyone with internet knows there are monthly costs associated with maintaining a connection."

Source

Mathematics education still a low priority

CASH-STRAPPED university administrations diverted most of the millions of dollars meant to reverse the maths and statistics skills crisis to other purposes, confidential research has found. At least 50 per cent and as much as 80 per cent of new money allocated by the former Coalition government to the national priority disciplines appears to have been retained for administration, a draft report to the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute suggests.

The report on a national questionnaire of university maths departments found that despite the $2729 in extra funds for each student place in maths and statistics granted by former education minister Julie Bishop last May, there were almost 40 fewer maths teaching and research staff at the start of this year compared with 2007.

National Committee for Mathematical Sciences chairman and University of Melbourne professor Hyam Rubinstein told the HES that, based on the survey, he estimated about $25 million nationally had been allocated to universities to support the recruitment of new staff and teaching students in maths and statistics. "But we are only getting 20per cent or less, or about $4 million to $5 million actually flowing to departments nationally," he said. Professor Rubinstein said he understood that universities were in a tight financial situation. "Universities have to make money. This issue of national priorities has become secondary to what will pay the bills. That's the difficulty."

Australian Mathematical Society president and Melbourne University professor Peter Hall thought Rubinstein's estimate was generous. "I understand that some universities need the freedom to put these funds where they are haemorrhaging most seriously, but it's clear they don't see offering maths as playing a serious role in science." Professor Hall said that having a sufficient supply of maths-qualified researchers was increasingly influential in multinationals' decisions to locate significant research facilities.

Only five of the 10 universities contacted by the HES yesterday responded to queries about how much extra they earned from enrolling maths and statistics students and how much was passed on to departments. The Australian National University rejected the suggestion it had not passed on the increase, saying it had allocated 85 per cent to the relevant areas and the rest to student support. The University of NSW failed to provide figures but said it had advertised for three professorial chairs following retirements and resignations. The University of Western Australia said it had upwardly adjusted funding weightings for maths, and the University of Adelaide employed four extra maths staff.

The AMSI report said despite initial euphoria over the funding boost and high starting salaries for graduates sparked by the skills shortage, an air of pessimism had descended on many university maths departments. One respondent said that when a senior university administrator was confronted with the failure to pass on extra funding, he said the federal education department wouldn't be concerned and that the minister wouldn't get involved in such detail.

Australian Council of Deans of Science president John Rice said he was hopeful the Rudd Government's planned $111 million maths and science HECS relief plan would encourage far greater numbers of students. Australian Council of Engineering Deans president Elizabeth Taylor said universities were working with schools as hard as they could to encourage greater numbers of students. "Students see maths and science as harder options, which would come at the expense of a nicer life and their social life," she said.

A spokeswoman for Education Minister Julia Gillard said universities had discretion over the funds. The proportion of Australian school-leavers taking advanced maths fell from 14 per cent in 1995 to 10.4 per cent in 2006, according to AMSI figures.

Source

A bleak future for those with poor literacy and numeracy

No matter how much spin you put on the recent benchmark figures for Queensland's literacy and numeracy, the state is not doing well. Cold comfort though it may be, it is not alone. Victoria has one in five students falling short in maths and besides the Northern Territory, Tasmania remains the national bottom feeder. ...

What is unambiguous is that the long-term fallout of poor literacy and numeracy affects the economy. While federal Treasurer Wayne Swan can say: "Around the kitchen tables Australians understand absolutely that inflation has been rising", to do this, you need numeracy skills. In Britain, a country which has had a national curriculum for 20 years - plus entrenched and continuing low literacy and numeracy levels - the economic danger signs of what this means are evident. People who require the greatest welfare support are those with low numeracy and literacy skills.

While Australia has low housing affordability, the fact is that buying a house is the biggest financial decision we make. If we don't understand the numbers, such as interest rates and repayments, then this is potentially disastrous.

British MP Boris Johnson, a candidate for Mayor of London and former editor of The Spectator magazine, recently summed up the reality of low numeracy skills for people securing a mortgage: "It involves concepts of percentages and interest and there is abundant evidence that millions of Britons either do not care about the debt they are taking on, or do not really understand the meaning of these squiggly figures for their future prosperity. It's not that they are stupid. It's just that they haven't been educated to understand the maths."

Johnson could have as easily been talking about Australia. The key word here is education. It is something recognised by one of the country's biggest charities, The Smith Family. As from this year, the charity has stopped welfare and put its emphasis on education. The reason is that "passive assistance", as The Smith Family describes welfare services, does not support children's education.

The reality is that in Queensland, as is apparent elsewhere, the most economically vulnerable are those who have not succeeded in education. The importance of high levels of competence in literacy and numeracy cannot be stressed enough. To this end, Queensland's indifferent performance on the benchmarks is cause for concern. The long-term health of the economy is dependent on high educational standards underpinning it. Some children do not have them.

Source





21 February, 2008

Racist Harvard Affirmative Action Policy

Harvard, my alma mater, discriminates against Asians in admissions. Asians are less likely to be admitted at any GPA or SAT score than members of other races - they are vastly less likely to be admitted than blacks or Hispanics, the beneficiaries of racial preferences, and somewhat less likely to be admitted than whites.

Although the statistical evidence is overwhelming, the Harvard Crimson claims there is "no definitive proof." It speculates that that Asians are being rejected because they are grinds, not because of their race, and that that explains why Asians are less likely to be admitted than members of other races at any given level of academic achievement. People concerned about discrimination against Asians, it claims, must first take into account Asians' possibly lesser "community involvement, leadership capabililities, [and] distinction in extracurricular activities."

This is no basis for this speculation. The current crop of Asian high school students participate in extracurricular activies at least as much, on average, as students of any other race.

I don't really know how to respond to this baseless downplaying of Harvard's discriminatory and Orwellian "diversity" policy, which punishes Asians because they have the temerity to succeed in school.

My 3-year-old nephew is part Korean. Should we try to hide his ethnicity when he applies for college? Given the shape of his eyes, that may not be possible. It is a disgrace that his racial identifiability may expose this little boy to prejudice by both reactionary bigots and politically-correct college admissions staff.

We previously discussed the ridiculously racist theory of some "diversity" trainers that members of different races have inherently different ways of thinking, such as in our Supreme Court amicus brief in the Seattle case.

Source




Overworked Students?

This article in U.S. News & World Report suggests that American high-school students are having a rough time keeping up with academic requirements and suffering stress as a result. Excerpt:

Earning a high school diploma this spring is going to take just a little more effort for students in Maine. This is the first year that all public high schools in the Pine Tree State are requiring seniors to complete a college application to graduate. It's an effort aimed at boosting the number of students who attend two- and four-year colleges in the state with the lowest college degree attainment rate in New England. Already the requirement has caused some anxiety among parents of students with disabilities and other parents who are worried that applying to college could lead their kids away from home.

Another, more immediate worry for these high school students and their families: Is it one task too much? While Maine is the only state to pass such legislation requiring students to apply to college (admittedly, not the most onerous assignment), many high schools across the country are making students complete similar-and often more time-consuming-extracurricular projects in order to get their diploma. These tasks are intended to boost the teenagers' learning experiences, but they also raise the question of how much work students can handle.

Some education consultants do say that such additional requirements, particularly capstone projects at competitive high schools, make it harder for students to distinguish themselves from their peers when applying to selective colleges.... There is also a danger that struggling students will feel overwhelmed by the additional work and drop out.

On the other hand, we have the following, also from U.S. News & World Report, in a different article:

Two million minutes is the estimated time that students spend in high school. It is also the title of a new documentary film that suggests American students squander too much of that time. While their peers in China and India study longer hours to sharpen their math and science skills, top students from one of the best high schools in the U.S. are playing video games and watching Grey's Anatomy during a group study session...

...American teenagers' attitudes toward academics differ sharply from those of their peers in India and China, who seem more motivated and focused. Take, for example, 17-year-old Apoorva Uppala, who attends Saturday tutoring sessions to prepare for her university entrance exams. She wants to become an engineer, which she calls "the safest" profession in India. In Shanghai, Jin Ruizhang, 17, preps for international math tournaments. He is already the top math student at his school and hopes to get into a prestigious university offering an advanced math program.

As an educator of some thirty-five years, I can sum up very quickly what's wrong with educational practices today: (1) the concept of an integrated core curriculum, including basal readers in elementary schools, has been abandoned in favor of worshipping at the copying machine; and (2) educators' jockey to use special projects as public-relations tools and as the means to getting a positive evaluation from an overseeing administrator. Both of those mistakes also lead to disciplinary problems in the classroom, in effect making enemies of students and teachers.

In some of the most prestigious schools all over the United States, students are subjected to all sorts of activities at the expense of learning the three r's. Furthermore, many dedicated high-school students see the basic flaw and opine, "Teachers don't really care about us learning any more." Compounding the problem is the fact that schools are trying to be all things to all people, to meet all the students' educational needs--from the gifted and talent to the mentally retarded.

It never ceases to amaze me that the spartan one-room-schoolhouse education of the 18th and 19th Centuries led to the rise of some of the greatest minds and inventors in history, including various political leaders and inventors such as Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford. The old McGuffey Readers and the Blue-Backed Speller, plain as they were, worked; effective use of those textbooks, along with many parents' emphasis on their children "getting their lessons," inspired students to go beyond what was taught in the classroom! Back then, without all the bells and whistle and "experts," many students managed to learn what they needed to know--in part, because their self-esteem was not the primary concern of parents and educators.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that the homeschool movement, which harkens back to the idea of a core curriculum emphasizing the three r's, keeps catching on?

Source




Australia: Parents are too dumb to be told all the facts

That is the elitist and typically Leftist attitude we see below, anyway

EDUCATION Minister David Bartlett has rejected a call to make league tables of school performance available to parents.

Liberal education spokeswoman Sue Napier yesterday called on the Government to release more data to help parents compare schools. Her call comes after the Mercury revealed that government schools were developing a new series of key performance indicators to measure and improve their results in areas such as literacy, numeracy, attendance and retention. "This is exactly the sort of information to which parents are entitled, particularly after 10 years of a state Labor government during which time the performance of our students in many key areas has actually gone backwards," Mrs Napier said. "This is about transparency and accountability and the desperate need to boost education standards in our schools."

But Mr Bartlett said he would not allow the Opposition to use figures to stigmatise struggling schools. "Every Tasmanian school already reports directly to its parent body about its performance on literacy and numeracy and a number of other benchmarks," he said. "Every single individual school produces an annual report to its school community with relative figures of literacy and numeracy and improvement or otherwise and I think that's very important. "That data is being used already for school improvement and, as I've said, in a disaggregated fashion most of that data is already publicly available. "What I won't ever stand for is people like Sue Napier using this data for political purposes to berate or run down particular schools."

Mr Bartlett said there was already sufficient information for people who needed it. "What we're talking about here of course is my goal to empower principals to make more local decisions about their school that reflect the aspirations of their school community," he said. "The public has access to data already ... and they can research that data and compare schools as they see fit."

Mrs Napier said the current push to implement performance indicators was "hardly rocket science".

Source





20 February, 2008

The Left Wing School Agenda and the Banning of Patriotism

An article by Mark Loftin [markcloftin@yahoo.com]

When Winston Churchill was dropped from the UK school curriculum last July, one had to wonder if patriotism itself was next. Now it's official. The Institute of Education, a leading educational body, has warned teachers not to instill pride in students when speaking of great moments in British History:

"To love what is corrupt is itself corrupting, not least because it inclines us to ignore, forget, forgive or excuse the corruption. And there's the rub for patriotism."

The recommendations singled out specific moments in history that students should now feel "ambiguous" about:

1750-1830 The Industrial Revolution: exploitation of the poor versus great wealth creation and growth

1807 Abolition of the slave trade. Britons were both practitioners of the trade and responsible for abolition

1947 Indian independence and Partition. How well did Britain manage its withdrawal from the sub-continent?

2003 Iraq war: was it liberation or occupation?

This shouldn't come as a surprise. The UK schools' leftist agenda has been in full steam over the last year:

* Last month, "Mum and Dad" become forbidden in British schools because it assumes a child's parents are different genders, and The Three Little Pigs was banned so not to offend Muslims.

* Last July, as mentioned, Winston Churchill was dropped from the UK school curriculum.

* Last April, teachings about the Holocaust were dropped as to not offend Muslims.

* Last March, schools began teaching 4-years olds about homosexuality through books like "King and King," (which is about a prince that rejects three female princesses before falling in love with a prince).

* An Inconvenient Truth is regularly shown in 3400 UK schools, instilling paranoia in 7-11 year olds.

Here in the U.S., the leftist agenda is also sinking its teeth into our schools at an equally disturbing pace. Leading the charge is California:

* San Francisco is debating an anti-war textbook, which features corporate American celebrating the spoils of war and Ronald Regan hugging Osama Bin Laden. Pete Hammer of the San Francisco Unified School District, who approved the book, says "The topic is one that a lot of teachers would have an interest in bringing into the classroom."

* A current bill gaining momentum by California lawmaker Joe Simitian (D - Palo Alto) would require California schools to include climate change as part of the science curriculum

* Last October, "Mom and Dad" were banned from schools, along with "Husband and Wife." In the same bill, public schools were ordered to allow boys to use the girls' restroom or locker room, and vice versa, if they choose

* Last June the state passed a homosexual education bill SB 777, which: ".requires textbooks and other instructional resources to cast a positive light on homosexual `marriages,' cross-dressing, sex-change operations and every other facet of homosexual and bisexual lifestyles."

* More hatred of Israel, as seen by anti-Israel speakers and the atmosphere that appears on the UC Irvine, UC Berkeley and San Francisco State campuses .

While there is not a specific mandate here in the US to "ban" patriotism - or any specific heroes that defined it - with more of the left's agenda taking up course time, one must wonder what will be slighted to make room.

A 2003 poll from California's Santa Monica High School said that 1/3 of students were not proud to American and 40 percent said America itself was "unjust". One can only imagine what the numbers would look like today in the name of "progress." Of course, you can't blame young, impressionable students for not being proud to be an American if that is what they are taught. The way the left commonly twists the meaning of the word, not being proud to American could be taught by a teacher as "patriotic."

In typical Doublespeak fashion, the left has been adamant about manipulating patriotism's definition for years. The Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines patriotism simply as "love for or devotion to one's country." In 2001 Senator John Kerry redefined patriotism to mean "not drilling in the Arctic refuge." In 2006, Kerry redefined it again to mean "wartime dissent." Air America has defined it as "pointing out the flaws in your country." Entire Web blogs are dedicated to this trickery, such as US Patriots United which issued it's "10 commandments of patriotism." A few entries:

(someone who),

"respects the diversity and culture of all nations, recognizing that our continued success lay not in spite of other nations but in alliance with them in a uniform approach toward promoting the global general welfare."

"ensures that the basic rights of those we hold dear to access quality healthcare and education is steadfastly supported, uncompromisingly and without discrimination based on race, color, creed, gender, or orientation."

"offers foreign humanitarian aid unconditionally without tying it to religious dogma"

"exercises the right to openly challenge (the president) and hold accountable at all times, even and most particularly in times of war"

Multiculturalism? Socialized Healthcare? Government- administered education? Wartime dissent? If the left had their way, being a patriot would be officially redefined to mean.being a liberal democrat.

At Nathan High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a project was started in 2005 to hang a picture of George Washington in every classroom. John Pribram, chairman of Project George Washington and a member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart said:

"I'm grateful (for the success of the project). After Sept. 11, we were united at that point. Flags in front of every house. Patriotism was rekindled. George Washington does the same thing."

One can only speculate at the heated debate that would occur in California over whether George Washington - military hero and devout Christian - deserves the classroom wall. Unfortunately, with Churchill being pulled from the walls in Great Britain, there is now a precedent for more patriotic disillusionment from California's schools.

Perhaps Leo Lacayo, San Francisco Republican Party media surrogate, put it best with his response to San Francisco's anti-war book: "We're not teaching them -- we're basically washing their brains with liberal mish-mash."

FINIS




College Tuition Inflaters

Okay, Washington politicians, we get it. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are hoarding lots of money while tuition prices skyrocket, and states sometimes cut funding to public colleges. That's all very troubling, but with reauthorization of the Higher Education Act passed by the House yesterday and a final version likely to come up for approval by all of Congress soon, please stop throwing blame around and address the heart of the college cost problem: your constant lavishing of aid on students that pushes tuition up, up, up.

By now, probably everyone has heard the righteous wailing from Washington, led by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), over well-endowed institutions of higher education that don't spend their cash to keep to tuition low. "Parents and students have a right to expect these univ