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31 January, 2008

Gay Policy in Brit Schools Announced

As a timely warmup to next month's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month celebration, the British Department of Children, Schools and Families has issued a new policy to combat homophobia in the education system. Homosexuality apparently now is considered a race and homophobia is racism.

Announced today by Schools Secretary Ed Balls, the new policy includes the following:

1) Teachers don't assume that students have a "mum and dad,"

2) Teachers indoctrinate students on the idea of same-sex couple,

3) "Parents" should replace "mum and dad" in correspondence to students' homes,

4) Classes on marriage should include civil unions and gay adoption rights,

5) Children who call classmates "gay" are to be tagged as racists under the zero tolerance crackdown.

More.




THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT EMBRACE OF McDONALDS

Below are two responses to a story I covered yesterday

Realistic education priorities

The online forums were afire. "Thought this was an early April Fool... McEducation... lowering standards... glad I have left the UK... how on earth can a qualification in basic shift management at mcdonalds which will involve taking payment, flipping burgers and making children obese be equilavent [sic] to an a level?"

It doesn't take much to rile the education harrumphers, but their barks are directed up the wrong tree this time. They'd do better to join the outcry against the sneaky plan to close village schools. For, of all the educational faffs and fiddles we have suffered, the latest is the most sensible. This is the decision to let companies - starting with Flybe, Network Rail and McDonald's - award nationally accepted qualifications, of GCSE and A-level standard, to those they train.

The harrumphers should calm down. This is about teaching employees: nobody is suggesting that schools will promptly offer their best and brightest a chance to do A2 burger-flipping instead of Further Maths. Given that you can already get national vocational qualifications from a holiday pottery course or a scuba-diving week, it is not so big a jump.

Note also that the body that is ceding this tiny bit of power is the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), which some may mischievously argue does not boast an immaculate track record itself. It is responsible for accrediting exams and regulating awarding bodies, and quite apart from the dog's breakfast of AS/A2 levels and the scandals of doctored A-level results, we have had plenty of concerns about its fiefdom. There have been questions about coursework marking, leaked papers, howlers embedded in questions and unqualified teachers working as markers. It is perfectly well known in the education world that large numbers of GCSE and even A-level papers are marked at high speed by people who are not specialists in the subject, and that when schools appeal against grades, one in four GCSEs and one in ten A levels prove to have been wrongly assessed. Some of the multiple-choice questions have also been dumber and more agenda-laden than would be tolerated by anyone struggling for profits in a real marketplace.

I would rather my offspring could name safe cooking temperatures for burgers or maintenance intervals for rails than merely decode questions like this one from a GCSE physics paper. A newspaper cutting is shown saying: "A recent report said that children under the age of 9 should not use mobile phones except in emergencies"; and the question is: "Below which age is it recommended that children use a mobile phone in emergencies only?" Doh!

I am not out to rubbish the QCA and exam boards. Plenty of good work is done and properly marked. I am just pointing out that hard-headed training executives with beady-eyed shareholders may prove more focused than some exam boards. If a failure in your pupils' procedures and understanding causes rails to break or customers to keel over with E.coli, expensive trouble ensues. Whereas if an Eng Lit exam goes dumb and trendy or a history paper is marked by someone who only knows the set answers, it doesn't create real-life chaos. Or not right away.

In other words, a McQualification, Rail-Level or FlybeCertificate might be more respected than some of the subjects and examiners that already have the blessing of the QCA. This might not be exactly the message that Gordon Brown wants us to take from the initiative, but it might cheer up the doubters.

Academically capable children will (if properly guided by their schools, which is another story) always go for more universal and theoretical academic subjects. Meanwhile, the crying need of drifting youth is to learn things that they can associate with real pay, responsibility and results. There have always been young people who longed to get out of the schoolroom's vapouring cloud of formulae and theories and lists. Some became apprentices, some took menial jobs and after looking around with sharp ambitious eyes simply worked their way up. Others hated their first jobs, yet learnt routine and thoroughness from them and carried them into a better field. I was probably classifiable as academic, but when I started my first dream job as a BBC studio manager, I mainly used the skills I had acquired as a barmaid. Not those that got me D in Latin.

The fact is, some thrive better in work than school. We all know children who groaned through A levels - or dropped out - only to find new vigour in a job. I can think of one right now who, to his parents' consternation, abandoned the sixth form after a period of feeling constantly ill and tired, took a counter job in a bank and is now being rigorously trained, forming high ambitions, and feeling physically well.

But workplace training - with allied certificates and grades - does matter. It removes the dead-end quality from a job, proves that the employer believes in you and, incidentally, reduces the likelihood that supervisors' strictures will be wetly interpreted as "bullying" or victimisation. Equally, in an uncertain economic world it matters that workplace qualifications should be portable.

Professor Alan Smithers of Buckingham University (itself, ironically, a private company that gives highly valued degrees) has cast doubt on the idea that the new qualifications will be valid outside the company that gives them. He fears that employees might get "locked in" to McFlybeRail. I doubt it. Business people may not be saintly educationists, but they are practical. They'll soon get to know which of their rivals' certificated staff are worth poaching.

Source




Flipping burgers taught me more than A levels

Anyone who believes that a McDonald's A level is an easy option should come to the Friar Street branch on the third day of the Reading Festival. I worked there for two summers during my sixth form. It was dirty and tiring, at times humiliating, but it taught me more about how to work and how to deal with people than all my A levels combined.

On festival days the first order of battle was to secure the toilets. Two employees were posted at each door where, mustering all the authority of their checked shirt and golden arches hat, they collected receipts before letting people use the lavatory. A third employee policed the cubicles themselves: no alcohol, no sex and no drugs. By evening the latter would be relaxed to just Class A substances. Meanwhile the kitchen was frying a burger a second, struggling to cope with the demands of the nation's rockers. Under those conditions if you slacked off, or decided that a task was beneath you, you were out of a job.

McDonald's should not just be allowed to give out A levels, they should become a full degree-accrediting body. It is not that I do not value my A levels. Intellectually, they were thrilling. It is just that, in contrast to my Saturday job in McDonald's, it would be difficult to argue that they were useful. At sixth form I studied maths, maths and extra maths, with a little bit of English for balance. Such a rigorous grounding in the foundations of calculus prepared me for my degree, an advanced grounding in the foundations of calculus, and then perhaps for a master's. But I didn't do a master's. The ability to shovel s***, whether literally (the day the plumbing broke, my worst McDonald's shift) or metaphorically, is, however, a skill that stays with me to this day.

Source




Australia: Bigoted far-Left educational "resource"

Hate-speech against those evil white people again

A taxpayer-funded program suggests Barbie may be Italian and asks whether she likes Spider-Man in a bizarre bid to tackle racism in childcare centres. But the move may have backfired with the radical blueprint telling teachers the Government itself is a racist institution run by white Anglo-Saxon men. The federally funded childcare resource warns early childhood teachers to be wary of "government policy" that expect "all cultures to conform to a white Anglo Australian way of living".

The book even compares citizenship to the White Australia Policy and attacks the Australian Government whose policies have "been formulated by political parties who historically and even today are in the majority white Christian Anglo middle class men". "Like the White Australia Policy, current government policies of 'citizenship' set out an official framework of what it is to be Australian," it reads.

The 'Exploring Multiculturalism, Anti-Bias and Social Justice in Children's Services' project is funded by the Federal Government and put out by Children's Services Central, a network of children service bodies in NSW. Designed to assist early childcare workers in NSW, the document gives advice on dealing with racism.

It comes after The Daily Telegraph revealed the State Government has funded an anti-racism program in a NSW pre-school for the first time. The pilot scheme at the Auburn Long Day Care Centre involves teaching children the national anthems of different countries and celebrating ethnic festivals such as Chinese New Year and Muslim holidays.

In contrast, the wacky teaching resource uses the Cronulla riots as a case study in an anti-racism lesson entitled "All the Lebs Are Bad Guys". Excerpts from another lesson relays a conversation about Barbie's ethnic origins between a group of young children from different cultural backgrounds.

A spokeswoman for federal Early Childhood Parliamentary Secretary Maxine McKew did not comment on whether the Government would consider withdrawing the resource.

Source





30 January, 2008

Locking a nation into permanent childhood

By Vin Suprynowicz

A letter-writer recently objected that I used great libertarian Rose Wilder Lane as a "sole source" for the fact that American schooling was taken over, in the late 19th century, by statists enamored of the Prussian compulsion model, aiming to create a docile peasant class by crippling the American intellect -- making reading seem real hard, for starters, by replacing the old system in which delighted kids learned to combine the sounds of the Roman letters, with a perverted "whole word" method better suited to decoding hieroglyphics.

In July 1991, John Taylor Gatto, New York's Teacher of the Year, quit, saying he was tired of working for an institution that crippled the ability of children to learn. He explained why in an essay published that month in The Wall Street Journal. Let's look at that essay, and see if we can find our "second source":

"Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history," Mr. Gatto begins. "It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.

"Socrates foresaw if teaching became a formal profession, something like this would happen. Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs-project, contract giver and protector of the social order to allow itself to be 're-formed.' It has political allies to guard its marches, that's why reforms come and go without changing much. ...

"David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can't tell which one learned first -- the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel 'learning disabled' and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, 'special education' fodder. She'll be locked in her place forever. "In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths. ..."

These are not the words of some sour-grapes loser who "couldn't make it" as a teacher. Testimonials from Gatto's former students fill a whole book. Citing the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey, Gatto in his book "Underground History of American Education," reports only 3.5 percent of Americans are literate enough today "to do traditional college study, a level 30 percent of all U.S. high school students reached in 1940, and which 30 percent of secondary students in other developed countries can reach today." This month, that majority is choosing our presidential candidates based on who looks better on TV.

"During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years," Gatto's research shows. "Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race." This "infantalization" continues, as "Child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. ..."

"After I spoke in Nashville, a mother named Debbie pressed a handwritten note on me which I read on the airplane to Binghamton, New York," Gatto continues: 'We started to see Brandon flounder in the first grade, hives, depression, he cried every night after he asked his father, "Is tomorrow school, too?" In second grade the physical stress became apparent. The teacher pronounced his problem Attention Deficit Syndrome. My happy, bouncy child was now looked at as a medical problem, by us as well as the school. 'A doctor, a psychiatrist, and a school authority all determined he did have this affliction. Medication was stressed along with behavior modification. If it was suspected that Brandon had not been medicated he was sent home. My square peg needed a bit of whittling to fit their round hole. ...

'I cried as I watched my parenting choices stripped away. My ignorance of options allowed Brandon to be medicated through second grade. The tears and hives continued another full year until I couldn't stand it. I began to homeschool Brandon. It was his salvation. No more pills, tears, or hives. He is thriving. He never cries now and does his work eagerly.' "

You can read John Taylor Gatto's entire "Underground History of American Education," detailing just how Mann and Dewey and their gang imposed on us a Prussian system of coercive schooling, so ill-suited to a free people, at www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/.

Source




A rather stunning move from the British Left

Anything to minimize academic knowlewdge and critical thinking, I guess

McDonald’s and other big businesses will award their own qualifications equal to GCSEs, A levels and degrees, in subjects such as fast-food restaurant management, the Government will announce today. Network Rail, Flybe and McDonald’s will become the first companies to be given such powers by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA). Gordon Brown will announce the move today as he seeks to regain the initiative over the issue of the unskilled unemployed from the Conservatives. “The biggest barrier to full employment now is not the shortage of jobs, but the shortage of skills among the unemployed and inactive,” he will say.

The QCA announcement gives the three companies official “awarding body” status, allowing them to confer nationally accredited certificates. The qualifications will not be finalised or fully endorsed until the autumn, but some trials are beginning this month. McDonald’s will train employees for a certificate in basic shift management, recognised by the QCA as equal to an A level. Trainees will learn about the day-to-day running of a restaurant, including finance, hygiene and human resources.

The budget airline Flybe will be able to award certificates up to the equivalent of degree level. Its airline trainer programme will confer qualifications from level 2 (GCSE at A*-C) to level 4 (degree) on its cabin and engineering staff.

Network Rail will introduce track engineering qualifications as high as PhD (level 8), covering technical issues and health and safety. It said its entire 33,000-strong workforce would take the course eventually, as well as contractors. Most trainees would receive certificates at level 2 and level 3. The company was criticised for its standards of track maintenance in a report into the Cumbrian train crash last February in which an elderly passenger was killed. It described the failures of Network Rail’s maintenance operation, with some track inspectors having lapsed accreditation, meaning that they were not certified to carry out such work.

Critics question the worth of “McGCSEs”, claiming that they could devalue academic qualifications and casting doubt on whether they would be recognised outside the companies concerned. Educational experts said that it would become increasingly common for private institutions to award qualifications, rather than it being the preserve of publicly funded colleges and universities. In September a private outfit, BPP College, became the first allowed to award law and business degrees. John Denham, the Universities Secretary, wants to introduce the scheme in companies in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. He said: “This is an important step towards ending the old divisions between company training schemes and national qualifications, something that will benefit employees, employers and the country as a whole.”

The move was welcomed by business leaders. John Cridland, the CBI’s deputy director-general, said: “Today marks a significant milestone on the road to reforming qualifications so that they better reflect the skills employers and employees need.”

But Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the centre for education and employment research at the University of Buckingham, cast doubts on the validity of such qualifications outside the companies in question. He said: “Employees may find they are locked into that business because these awards don't have credibility outside the company, like GCSEs, A levels or NVQs do. The qualifications would be more valuable to holders if they were awarded by an independent body.”

Source




Australia: Setting standards in schools

The details are not ideal but more attention to standards is welcome -- and long overdue



CHILDREN will be taught essential subjects such as English, Maths and Science no matter where they are enrolled in the state when they start a new school year today. The Bligh Government yesterday unveiled details of its new "essential learnings" program, aimed at ensuring greater consistency in the subjects Queensland children are taught. The program, which cost more than $8 million to develop, will specify what all students need to know and be able to do at key points in their school lives.

Other milestones for the state's school sector this year include the first full intake of prep children and the introduction of the Queensland Certificate of Education for senior students. Premier Anna Bligh said the program would especially benefit the thousands of students and a quarter of the state's teachers who change schools every year. It will specify the things that all students - whether they go to public or private school - need to learn and will be assessed on.

For example, under the new system, students at the end of Year 5 would be expected to know about the colonisation of Australia including the concept of terra nullius [Leftist crap. The doctine of terra nullius had never been heard of when Australia was colonized by the British], the basics of physics and biology and how to read a map. By the end of Year 7, they would be expected to understand how gravity affects the Earth and other planets, the different roles of local, state and national governments and how to represent and compare data in pie charts and graphs.

The new program will use an "A to E" system of reporting and assessment, where an "A" means a student has demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of a subject and "E" means they have only a basic knowledge of concepts and facts related to a subject.

Ms Bligh said the program heralded a "new era" in school education in Queensland. Education Minister Rod Welford said it still allowed schools the flexibility to organise their curriculum while setting out those things all students needed to learn.

About 480,000 students are expected to enrol in government primary, secondary and special schools this year, while the Catholic and independent student body in Queensland is expected to number about 220,000. About 54,000 children will enrol on the first full intake of prep. Mr Welford will also introduce a scheme which requires all primary school children to take part in physical activities for at least an average of 30 minutes a day.

Source





29 January, 2008

Arizona Illegals Denied In-State Tuition

(Phoenix, Arizona) I almost became weepy after reading this soap-opera reporting by the New York Times. It's the boo-hoo story about Mexicans and other foreigners not getting cut-rate tuition and financial aid because of Arizona Proposition 300.

One of several recent immigration statutes passed by Arizona voters and legislators frustrated by federal inaction, the law also prohibits in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. Administrators at several campuses fear that the provision has priced some out of their classes, particularly at the state's popular community colleges.

The worry is that illegal aliens won't be able to afford a college education without financial aid and in-state tuition. Apparently some students are even thinking of returning to Mexico for college but, "It's expensive going to school in Mexico," said one student.

And now the option of sneaking into the U.S. to get a cut-rate education is being denied by Prop. 300. "I see it as a very cruel law," said Teresa Guerra, a student at Phoenix College.

It's difficult to comprehend the attitude of the illegals and their supporters. Apparently, the U.S. is viewed as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and people from any country who successfully jump the border are automatically entitled to all the benefits of being American citizens. Jumping the border is a criminal act. Giving benefits for a criminal act doesn't make sense.




Backing the Wrong Horse: How Private Schools Are Good for the Poor

Last fall the High-Level Plenary Meet-ing of the UN General Assembly brought together more than 170 heads of state-"the largest gathering of world leaders in his-tory"-to review progress toward the Millennium Devel-opment Goals. It was, we were told, "a once-in-a-gen-eration opportunity to take bold decisions," a "defining moment in history" when "we must be ambitious." One of the internation-ally agreed-on development goals the heads of state reviewed was the achieve-ment of universal primary education by 2015. The UN was not happy with progress. There are still officially more than 115 million children out of school, it reported, of which 80 percent are in sub? Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. But even for those lucky enough to be in school, things are not good: "Most poor children who attend primary school in the developing world learn shockingly little," the UN reported.

Something had to be done. Fortunately, the UN could call on Jeffrey D. Sachs, special adviser on the Mil-lennium Development Goals to Secretary-General Kofi Annan and author of The End of Poverty. He's also director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He proposed as the way forward "Quick Wins," which have "very high potential short-term impact" and that "can be immediately implemented." Top of his list is "Eliminating school fees," to be achieved "no later than the end of 2006," funded through increased international donor aid. To the UN it's as obvious as motherhood and apple pie.

But the UN's "Quick Wins" are backing the wrong horse. For the past two and a half years I've been directing and conduct-ing research in sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana) and Asia (India and China). And what I've found is a remarkable and apparently hitherto unnoticed revolution in education, led by the poor themselves. Across the developing world the poor are eschewing free disturbed by its low quality and lack of accountability. Meanwhile, educational entrepre-neurs from the poor communities themselves set up affordable private schools to cater to the unfulfilled demand.

Take Kibera, in Nairobi, Kenya, reportedly the largest slum in Africa, where half a million people live in mud-walled, corrugated iron-roofed huts that huddle along the old Uganda Railway. Kenya is one of the UN's showcase examples of the virtues of introducing free basic education. Free Primary Education (FPE) was introduced in Kenya in January 2003, with a $55 million donation from the World Bank-apparently the largest straight grant that it has given to any area of social serv-ices. The world has been impressed by the outcomes: Former President Bill Clinton told an American prime-time television audience that the person he most want-ed to meet was President Kibaki of Kenya, "because he has abolished school fees," which "would affect more lives than any president had done or would ever do." The British chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, visiting Olympic Primary School, one of the five gov-ernment schools located on the out-skirts of Kibera, told the gathered crowds that British parents gave their full sup-port to their tax money being used to support FPE. Everyone-including Sir Bob Geldof and Bono-raves on about how an additional 1.3 million children are now enrolled in primary school in Kenya. All these children, the accepted wisdom goes, have been saved from ignorance by the benevolence of the international community-which must give $7 billion to $8 billion per year more so that other countries can emulate Kenya's success.

The accepted wisdom, however, is entirely wrong. It ignores the remarkable reality that the poor in Africa have not been waiting helplessly for the munificence of pop stars and Western politicians to ensure that their children get a decent education. The reality is that private schools for the poor have emerged in huge numbers in some of the most impoverished slums in Africa and southern Asia. They are catering to a majority of poor children, and outperforming their government counter-parts, for a fraction of the cost.

I went to Kibera to see for myself, with a hunch that the headline success story might be concealing some-thing. In India I had seen that the poor were not at all happy with the government schools-a recent study had shown that when researchers called unannounced on government schools for the poor, only in half was there any teaching going on at all-and so were leaving in huge numbers to go to private schools set up by local entrepreneurs charging very low fees. Would Kenya be any different? Although the education minister told me that in his country private schools were for the rich, not the poor, and so I was misguided in my quest, I perse-vered and went to the slums. It was one of Nairobi's two rainy seasons. The mud tracks of Kibera were mud baths. I picked my way with care.

Within a few minutes, I found what I was looking for. A signboard proclaimed "Makina Primary School" outside a two-story rickety tin building. Inside a cramped office Jane Yavetsi, the school proprietor, was keen to tell her story: "Free education is a big problem," she said. Since its introduction, her enroll-ment had declined from 500 to 300, and now she doesn't know how she will pay the rent on her buildings. Many parents have opted to stay, but it is the wealthier of her poor parents who have taken their children away, and they were the ones who paid their fees on time. Her school fees are about 200 Kenyan shillings (about $2.80) per month. But for the poorest children, including 50 orphans, she offers free education. She founded the school ten years ago and has been through many difficulties. But now she feels crestfallen: "With free education, I am being hit very hard."

Jane's wasn't the only private school in Kibera. Right next door was another, and then just down from her, opposite each other on the railway tracks, were two more. Inspired by what I had found, I recruited a local research team, led by James Shikwati of the Inter-Region Economic Network (IREN), and searched every muddy street and alleyway looking for schools. In total we found 76 private schools, enrolling over 12,000 students. In the five government schools serving Kibera, there were a total of about 8,000 children-but half were from the middle-class suburbs. The private schools, it turned out, even after free public education, were still serving a large majority of the poor slum children.

Was Jane's experience typical since the introduction of free primary education? Most of the 70- odd private-school owners in Kibera reported sharply declining enrollment since the introduction of FPE. Many, however, were reporting that parents had at first taken their children away, but were now bringing them back-because they hadn't liked what they'd found in the government schools. We also found the ex-managers of 35 private schools that had closed since FPE was introduced, 25 of whom said that it was FPE that had led to their demise. Calculating the net decline in private-school enrollment, it turned out that there were many, many more children who had left the private schools than the 3,300 reported to have entered the government schools on Kibera's periphery and who were part of the much celebrated one million-plus supposedly newly enrolled in education.

In other words, the headlined increase in numbers of enrolled children was fictitious: the net impact of FPE was at best precisely the same number of children enrolled in primary school-only that some had trans-ferred from private to government schools.

I discussed these findings with senior government, World Bank, and other aid officials. They were sur-prised by the number of private schools I had found. But, they said, if children had transferred from private to state schools, then this was good: "No one believes that the private schools offer quality education," I was told. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Commission for Africa agrees: conceding that mushrooming private schools exist in some unspecified parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it reports that they "are without adequate state regulation and are of a low quality."

But why would parents be as foolhardy to pay to send their children to schools of such low quality? One school owner in a similar situation in Ghana, where we later conducted the research, challenged me when I observed that her school building was little more than a corrugated iron roof on rickety poles and that the gov-ernment school, just a few hundred yards away, was a smart, proper brick building. "Educa-tion is not about buildings," she scolded. "What matters is what is in the teacher's heart. In our hearts, we love the children and do our best for them." She left it open, when probed, what the teachers in the government school felt in their hearts toward the poor children.

Exploring further in Kenya, my team and I spoke to parents, some of whom had taken their children to the "free" government schools, but had been disillusioned by what they found and returned to the private schools. Their reasons were straight-forward: in the government schools class sizes had increased dramatically and teachers couldn't cope with 100 or more pupils, five times the number in the private-school classes. Parents compared notes when their children came home from school and saw that in the state schools pupil notebooks remained unmarked for weeks; they contrasted this with the detailed atten-tion given to all children's work in the private schools. They heard tales from their children of how teachers came to the state school and did their knitting or fell asleep. One summed up the situation succinctly: "If you go to a market and are offered free fruit and vegetables, they will be rotten. If you want fresh fruit and veg, you have to pay for them."

Perhaps these poor parents are misguided. Certainly that's what officials believe. But are they right? We test-ed 3,000 children, roughly half from the Nairobi slums and half from the government schools on the periphery, using standardized tests in math, English, and Kiswahili. We tested the chil-dren's and their teachers' IQs and gave questionnaires to pupils, their parents, teachers, and school managers so that we could control for all relevant back-ground variables. Although the gov-ernment schools served the privileged middle classes as well as the slum chil-dren, the private schools-serving only slum children-outperformed the government schools in mathemat-ics and Kiswahili, although the latter had a slight advantage in English. But English would be picked up by privi-leged children through television and interaction with parents. When we statistically controlled for all relevant background variables, the private schools outperformed the government schoolchildren in all three subjects.

But there was a further twist. The private schools outperformed the government schools for considerably lower cost. Even if we ignore the massive costs of the government bureaucracy and focus just on the classroom level, we find the private schools are doing better for about a third of teacher-salary costs: the average month-ly teacher salary in government schools was Ksh. 11,080 ($155) compared to Ksh. 3,735 ($52) in the private schools.

Free primary education in Kenya, a showcase exam-ple of the UN's "Quick Wins" strategy, has simply transferred children from private schools, where they got a good deal, closely supervised by parents, with teachers who turn up and teach, to state schools, where they are being dramatically let down. One parent was clear what the solution was: "We do not want our children to go to a state school. The government offered free education. Why didn't it give us the money instead and let us choose where to send our children?" For this parent, a voucher system was the obvious way forward, putting her right back in control.

Much more here




LA teacher battles opponent tougher than gangs

Migdia Chinea, a Cuban-American screenwriter and actress who has writing credits for the TV series "The Incredible Hulk" and "Superboy," recently documented how she was attacked and injured by students while she served as a substitute teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Now she's reporting that the students who attacked her, body-slammed her to the floor in front of witnesses who documented the attack, and left her with a concussion and possibly long-term injuries were the easy ones to deal with; the system that is supposed to provide care for injuries on the job is a harder opponent to beat. "Despite my being injured by students while working, with a teacher as a witness and a police report, Sedgwick, the LAUSD's insurance has not yet 'accepted' my disability claim, and perhaps won't pay in the end, until a deposition is taken three months from now. Meantime, as a woman alone, I wonder how am I going meet my financial responsibilities without incurring further debt?" Chinea told WND. "How am I going to pay my mortgage and eat?" she asked.

In an earlier commentary for WND, she described how, as a UCLA-educated graduate with a "Googleable" career as a professional screenwriter, economic conditions forced her to seek employment as a substitute teacher in order to obtain health insurance benefits. She described the violence in the L.A. schools, how there was no teaching at the school to which she was assigned, only "confinement." She told of the classrooms being left in shreds, teaching materials stolen, vandalism to her car, and the verbal and physical assaults.

One such school, she said, "is surrounded by criminal street gangs and is widely considered one of the most dangerous campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The South Side Village Boys, South Side Watts Varrio Grape, Grape Street Crips, East Side Village Bloods, Hacienda Bloods, Circle City Piru and Bounty Hunters street gangs all claim turf in that area, and frequent flare-ups of gang violence are common."

She also told about being hurt on the job, with witnesses and a police report that documented the circumstances. "On Oct. 5, 2007, at another notorious middle school, I was deliberately body-slammed on the head by two to three large young men in a P.E. class of 53 students, while another teacher (someone I had never met before) was decent enough to give a formal declaration to school and police authorities of what he had witnessed. I sustained a concussion and sciatica nerve damage as a result of this personal attack intended to 'terrorize [me].' I have memory lapses and continued head and leg pain. I'm told by the local police that this sort of physical abuse on teachers occurs with disturbing regularity. The LAUSD case nurse assigned to my case labeled my attack 'boys will be boys.'" she wrote.

In going through the process of seeking to have her medical claim paid and her injuries addressed by a district that lists local police station telephone numbers on its website, she has discovered something even worse than a body-slam. The district for which she worked, and left her injured, is the one deciding on her treatment and ultimate disability, since the school district is exempt from state-mandated worker's compensation requirements and provides its own coverage.

"I've been told by another teacher (still working as such) who has been through this hell, that LAUSD will be willing to 'kill me' to protect and cover-up their corruption - which is, in turn, not reported nor investigated by the press. I have reported this 'murderous intent or potential' to the LAPD and I'm supposed to get a call from their organized crime unit - but not so far," she told WND. "Meanwhile, the LAUSD continues to call me three times every morning and as I hear the names of the schools to which they wish to send me to 'substitute,' they're the worst schools in the district. Therefore, I believe they want to finish me off," she said.

Officials with the school district declined to answer messages left by WND requesting a comment on Chinea's allegations. The district now is being run by David L. Brewer III, who was appointed a little over a year ago to replace former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, who ran the district for several years. She also reported that neither school officials nor the school district's physician will have a conversation with her, even though she's continue to try to obtain information about her situation, including an unanswered e-mail just days ago.

The district had her "released" to return to work, but the doctor who made the decision didn't notify her, then "refused my phone calls," she said. "I have requested a meeting with the LAUSD Board of Education, to no avail. I have asked them to, please, explain to me what constitutes an 'act of violence' because only a small percentage of teachers who are seriously assaulted qualify under their own definition. But there's no response," she said.

"On Jan. 5, 2008, the same day that the city held a conference hailing a citywide drop in crime, an L.A. Times columnist wrote that 60 LAUSD schools were vandalized while grim-faced teachers swept up the mess," she continued. "To be in this situation, after having achieved certain things and pulled myself up by my bootstraps and have my own home, is horrible," she told WND.

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28 January, 2008

Universities overproduce Ph.Ds

College students are getting a raw deal, a recent New York report asserted. The problem is they're taking too many classes from part-time, or adjunct, professors. But that same report unwittingly revealed something about how higher education is more culpable than it likes to admit when it comes to creating the problem.

The issue is a huge one in higher education far beyond New York, with about half of the nation's college faculty now on part-time contracts. Adjuncts are cheaper for colleges, but they often lack the time and resources for focused teaching, and research shows students' performance suffers if they are taught by part-timers too often. In its report last month, a 30-member commission called for New York's state (SUNY) and city (CUNY) systems to alleviate the over reliance on adjuncts by hiring 2,000 more full-time faculty for their 87 campuses. But just one page away, the report also called for adding at least 4,000 new doctoral students.

There's a connection between those numbers that deserves more attention. In many fields, there are already too many Ph.Ds awarded for the full-time academic posts available, creating a surplus of likely jobseekers. That pool becomes adjuncts, who command wages and benefits so low that universities find them irresistible hires. "It's not uncommon to have a disconnect like this in higher education, in which people are both concerned about the difficult career prospects being faced by recent Ph.D. graduates and concerned there aren't enough Ph.D. students," said Michael Teitelbaum, of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The ideas, he said, "often don't get connected. It's puzzling."

Adds Jeff Crane, an adjunct who teaches two art courses at SUNY-New Paltz: "There's this tendency to turn a blind eye to things like that and not make those kinds of equations."

Of course, some adjuncts have other jobs and like working part-time. But many are adjuncts by necessity. Crane, an artist, says he likes working part-time so he can paint, but thinks he should be paid equitably. He earns about $5,200 per semester for teaching two courses. The national average for full-time assistant professors is about $60,000, and $100,000 once they get tenure. Crane says many of his colleagues work mostly for the health insurance, which, unlike many places, New Paltz offers to adjuncts.

Teitelbaum is quick to point out New York may have good reasons to add doctoral students. They will help improve the state's standing in the research sector, and of course, many may find work in the private sector. But if they come seeking full-time professorial jobs, some will be disappointed.

It's well known that jobs in, say, philosophy, are rare. Even at the very top doctoral programs, only one in 10 who start will end up teaching at an elite research university, according to Brian Leiter, whose blog "Philosophical Gourmet" tracks the field. In fields like history, recent numbers show the market improving, and there will be more jobs as baby boomers retire. But some fields like American and European history still have such a surplus that even community colleges now commonly look only at candidates with a doctoral degree.

It's not just humanities. Groups such as the Business Roundtable have grabbed headlines with urgent warnings about the need to ramp up production of American scientists. In fact, Teitelbaum testified to Congress last year, there is no evidence of a shortage of scientists and engineers - particularly on the Ph.D. track. In the life sciences, the U.S. is awarding twice as many doctorates as two decades ago, but has no more faculty jobs, according to one recent study that prompted the journal Nature to editorialize that "too many graduate schools may be preparing too many students." A 1998 National Research Council made much the same warning.

Nonetheless, universities keep flooding the academic pipeline. The latest federal data show about 45,600 Ph.Ds were awarded in 2005-2006, 5.1 percent higher than the year before. It was the fourth straight increase and tied for the highest percentage gain since 1971.

Faculty like having graduate students around. They're good intellectual companions, and they bolster a professor's research efforts. Particularly in the sciences, they also often come with funding from sources such as the National Institutes of Health, which doubled its budget between 1998 and 2003. But funding usually leads to more slots for graduate students, not for professors. That's why the percentage of science Ph.D.s moving on to "post-docs" (temporary university posts where they do research while continuing to apply for faculty jobs) is surging - from 43 percent to 70 percent in physics, for instance, in just a few years.

Of course, universities could cut back on using adjuncts and pony up for better wages and more full-time jobs. Some, like Rutgers in New Jersey, have agreed to add tenure-track positions, and the American Federation of Teachers is pushing for legislation in 11 states to require more teaching come from full-timers. But with universities already under fire for skyrocketing prices, it's probably unrealistic to expect most will pay more than the going rate for a captive labor pool.

Saying "no" to students definitely isn't easy. If education is good, it seems to follow more is better. And when qualified students come to a university - particularly a public one - it can be hard to justify refusing them the education they say they want. But if public universities (and really that means legislatures and taxpayers) won't pony up for more full-time faculty, higher education will have to take more responsibility for its role in creating the oversupply problem. "We have flooded the labor market with Ph.Ds who can't get jobs doing what they've been trained to do," said Cat Warren, a North Carolina State English professor and state American Association of University Professors leader, who recently gave a talk to graduate students at nearby Duke warning them to be realistic. "I think we have to think very hard about that."

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Researchers' Assessment of NCLB Shows Need for Improvement

With the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act looming on the horizon this year, the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP/PDC) at UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies recently completed a collection of essays containing several critiques of the law as well as proscriptions for change.

CRP/PDC K-12 senior researcher Gail L. Sunderman edited the 280-page book, titled Holding NCLB Accountable: Achieving Accountability, Equity, and School Reform, which was published by Corwin Press. "We not only looked at the problems with No Child Left Behind, but we came up with ways to make it better," says Sunderman, the project director on a five-year CRP/PDC study examining implementation of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and the co-author of NCLB Meets School Realities: Lessons from the Field. "It's time to reauthorize the bill, so we kind of geared the book toward coming up with research-based ideas of what needs to be addressed and what needs to be done to improve the law."

The essays were written by several noted education scholars, including Stanford University's Linda Darling-Hammond; Robert Linn of the University of Colorado; Johns Hopkins University's Robert Balfanz and Nettie Legters; Boston College's Walter Haney; Goodwin Liu of the University of California, Berkeley; and Russell Rumberger of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The collection analyzes the law's accountability and assessment system, the capacities of states to implement the law, and the impact of school reform.

Harvard University's Daniel Koretz asserts that the accountability system is not research based. "We know far too little about how to hold schools accountable for improving student performance," says the testing expert. Jaekyung Lee, an associate professor of education at the State University of New York at Buffalo, compared the nation's report card - the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) - to state assessment results. He found that, since the implementation of the law in 2001, federal accountability measures have not improved educational levels and narrowed achievement disparities. "Based on the NAEP, there are no systemic indications of improving the average achievement and narrowing the gap after NCLB," Lee says.

Three researchers from Harvard - Michael Kieffer, Nonie Lesaux and Catherine Snow - revealed what needs to be done in terms of adequately assessing English-language learners. And Mindy Kornhaber of Pennsylvania State University described how to develop a system of multiple measures. "What we have now basically relies on standardized assessment," Sunderman says.

In terms of school reform, the researchers found that many of the law's measures - such as the definition of highly qualified teachers, the design of testing and accountability regulations, and the reliance on mandates - actually retard school reform and have made it even more difficult for high schools serving low-income students to do their jobs.

In the section on the capacity of states to implement the law, Sunderman and CRP/PDC co-director Gary Orfield wrote in a chapter together about how states are responding to problems they are having due to their limitations, and University of California, Berkeley's Heinrich Mintrop looked at the ability of states to intervene in low-performing schools. "He finds that states are able to intervene in about 2 to 4 percent of the total number of schools in a state," Sunderman says. "And, if you compare that to the percentage of schools being identified as low performing under the No Child Left Behind Act, there are a lot more."

Some of the prescriptions that the researchers presented include: the creation of a fair accountability system that informs the goals of students and improves instruction; the adequate support of low-performing schools and districts; and the complementing of in-school reform in low-income schools with out-of-school reform of housing, poverty, and health care.

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Australian parents make big sacrifices to avoid government schools

HALF the Australian parents who send their children to private school are finding it a financial strain, and one in 10 families spend more than half their take-home pay on their children's education. Research has also found that about a third of parents who send their children to independent (private) and Catholic schools allocate more than 15percent of their household income to their children's education. Close to 12percent of parents with children at independent schools, and 1.3percent of Catholic school parents, reserve up to half their income for school fees, the report, commissioned by BankWest, found. Some parents - Catholic school (4percent) and private (1.3percent) - dedicate between 50 and 75percent of their household income to school fees.

The report said that 53percent of independent school parents and 47percent of Catholic school parents found paying for their children's education was financially tough. A BankWest spokeswoman said the survey dispelled the myth that only the well-off were educating their children at private schools. Figures show more than 369,000 students attended private schools in NSW in 2006. About 739,000 students attend public schools.

The report found that the average cost of sending a child to an independent school was $14,201 a year, more than double that of Catholic schools. It also found that, on average, independent school parents spend an extra $2300 a year on uniforms, extracurricular activities, textbooks and stationery. Parents had to find $1600 for Catholic schools and $1200 for public schools.

Executive director of the Council of Catholic School Parents Danielle Cronin said she was not surprised by the research, and that while Catholic schools tried to keep fees down, they were a strain on some families. "I think Catholic schools have a very diverse population in terms of socio-economic statistics," she said. "I believe that Catholic schools probably aren't enrolling financially needy families simply because the fees are prohibitive, even though some of the fees are quite low compared to independent schools."

In the report, parents cited the standard of education, discipline, better academic record and resources as the main reasons for sending their children to private schools. They also said the better focus on social values, networking opportunities for their children when entering the workforce, religious education and social opportunities for the parents were important.

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27 January, 2008

Vouchers not enough

A rigorous curriculum is more important

Looking back from today's vantage point, it is clear that the school choice movement has been very good for the disadvantaged. Public and privately funded voucher programs have liberated hundreds of thousands of poor minority children from failing public schools. The movement has also reshaped the education debate. Not only vouchers, but also charter schools, tuition tax credits, mayoral control, and other reforms are now on the table as alternatives to bureaucratic, special-interest-choked big-city school systems.

Yet social-change movements need to be attentive to the facts on the ground. Recent developments in both public and Catholic schools suggest that markets in education may not be a panacea-and that we should reexamine the direction of school reform. One such development: taxpayer-funded voucher programs for poor children, long considered by many of us to be the most promising of education reforms, have hit a wall. In 2002, after a decade of organizing by school choice activists, only two programs existed: one in Milwaukee, the other in Cleveland, allowing 17,000 poor students to attend private (mostly Catholic) schools. That year, in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Supreme Court ruled that limited voucher programs involving religious schools were compatible with the First Amendment's establishment clause. The 5-4 decision seemed like school choice's Magna Carta. But the legal victory has led to few real gains. Today, fewer than 25,000 students-compared with a nationwide public school enrollment of 50 million-receive tax-funded vouchers, with a tiny Washington, D.C., program joining those of the other two cities.

Voucher prospects have also dimmed because of the Catholic schools' deepening financial crisis. Without an abundant supply of good, low-cost urban Catholic schools to receive voucher students, voucher programs will have a hard time getting off the ground, let alone succeeding. But cash-strapped Catholic Church officials are closing the Church's inner-city schools at an accelerating rate [see "Save the Catholic Schools!," Spring 2007]. With just one Catholic high school left in all of Detroit, for instance, where would the city's disadvantaged students use vouchers even if they had them?

But sadly-and this is a second development that reformers must face up to-the evidence is pretty meager that competition from vouchers is making public schools better. When I reported on the Milwaukee voucher experiment in 1999, some early indicators suggested that competition was having just that effect. Members of Milwaukee's school board, for example, said that voucher schools had prompted new reforms in the public school system, including modifying the seniority provisions of the teachers' contract and allowing principals more discretion in hiring. A few public schools began offering phonics-based reading instruction in the early grades, the method used in neighboring Catholic schools. Milwaukee public schools' test scores also improved-and did so most dramatically in those schools under the greatest threat of losing students to vouchers, according to a study by Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby.

Unfortunately, the gains fizzled. Fifteen years into the most expansive school choice program tried in any urban school district in the country, Milwaukee's public schools still suffer from low achievement and miserable graduation rates, with test scores flattening in recent years. Violence and disorder throughout the system seem as serious as ever. Most voucher students are still benefiting, true; but no "Milwaukee miracle," no transformation of the public schools, has taken place. One of the Milwaukee voucher program's founders, African-American educator Howard Fuller, recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasn't been the deep, wholesale improvement in MPS [Milwaukee Public Schools] that we would have thought." And the lead author of one of the Milwaukee voucher studies, Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson, told me: "The research on school choice programs clearly shows that low-income students benefit academically. It's less clear that the presence of choice in a community motivates public schools to improve."

What should we do about these new realities? Obviously, private scholarship programs ought to keep helping poor families find alternatives to failing public schools. And we can still hope that some legislature, somewhere in America, will vote for another voucher plan, or generous tuition tax credits, before more Catholic schools close. But does the school choice movement have a realistic Plan B for the millions of urban students who will remain stuck in terrible public schools?

According to Hoxby and Peterson, perhaps the two most respected school choice scholars in the country, no such plan is necessary. In their view, the best hope for education improvement continues to be a maximum degree of parental choice-vouchers if possible, but also charter schools and tuition tax credits-plus merit-pay schemes for teachers and accountability systems that distinguish productive from unproductive school principals.

That "incentivist" outlook remains dominant within school reform circles. But a challenge from what one could call "instructionists"-those who believe that curriculum change and good teaching are essential to improving schools-is growing, as a unique public debate sponsored by the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education revealed. Founded in 1999, the Koret Task Force represents a national all-star team of education reform scholars.

While the arguments about school choice and markets swirled during the past 15 years, both Ravitch and Hirsch wrote landmark books (Left Back and The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them, respectively) on how the nation's education schools have built an "impregnable fortress" (Hirsch's words) of wrong ideas and ineffective classroom practices that teachers then carry into America's schools, almost guaranteeing failure, especially for poor minority children. Hirsch's book didn't just argue this; it proved it conclusively, to my mind, offering an extraordinary tour d'horizon of all the evidence about instructional methods that cognitive neuroscience had discovered.

If Hoxby and Peterson were right in asserting that markets were enough to fix our education woes, then the ed schools wouldn't be the disasters that Hirsch, Ravitch, and others have exposed. Unlike the government-run K-12 schools, the country's 1,500 ed schools represent an almost perfect system of choice, markets, and competition. Anyone interested in becoming a teacher is completely free to apply to any ed school that he or she wants. The ed schools, in turn, compete for students by offering competitive prices and-theoretically-attractive educational "products" (curricula and courses). Yet the schools are uniformly awful, the products the same dreary progressive claptrap.

A few years ago, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a mainstream public education advocacy group, surveyed the nation's ed schools and found that almost all elementary education classes disdained phonics and scientific reading. If the invisible hand is a surefire way to improve curriculum and instruction, as the incentivists insist, why does almost every teacher-in-training have to read the works of leftists Paolo Freire, Jonathan Kozol, and William Ayers-but usually nothing by, say, Hirsch or Ravitch?

For a good explanation, look to the concept of ideological hegemony, usually associated with the sociological Left. Instead of competition and diversity in the education schools, we confront what Hirsch calls the "thoughtworld" of teacher training, which operates like a Soviet-style regime suppressing alternative perspectives. Professors who dare to break with the ideological monopoly-who look to reading science or, say, embrace a core knowledge approach-won't get tenure, or get hired in the first place. The teachers they train thus wind up indoctrinated with the same pedagogical dogma whether they attend New York University's school of education or Humboldt State's. Those who put their faith in the power of markets to improve schools must at least show how their theory can account for the stubborn persistence of the thoughtworld.

Instead, we increasingly find the theory of educational competition detaching itself from its original school choice moorings and taking a new form. Vouchers may have stalled, but it's possible-or so many school reformers and education officials now assure us-to create the conditions for vigorous market competition within public school systems, with the same beneficent effects that were supposed to flow from a pure choice program.

Nowhere has this new philosophy of reform been more enthusiastically embraced than in the New York City school district under the control of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein. Gotham's schools are surging ahead with a host of market incentives, including models derived from the business world. Many of the country's major education foundations and philanthropies have boosted New York as the flagship school system for such market innovations, helping to spread the incentivist gospel nationally. Disciples of Klein have taken over the school systems in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and Bloomberg's fellow billionaires Eli Broad and Bill Gates are about to launch a $60 million ad campaign to push the market approach during the presidential election season.

Don't get me wrong: market-style reforms are sometimes just what's necessary in the public schools. Over the past decade, for instance, I often called attention in City Journal to the destructively restrictive provisions in the New York City teachers' contract, which forced principals to hire teachers based solely on seniority, and I felt vindicated when negotiations between the Bloomberg administration and the United Federation of Teachers eliminated the seniority clause and created an open-market hiring system. Similarly, the teachers' lockstep salary schedule, based on seniority and accumulating useless additional education credits, is a counterproductive way to compensate the system's most important employees. The schools need a flexible salary structure that realistically reflects supply and demand in the teacher labor market.

Unfortunately, the Bloomberg administration and its supporters are pushing markets and competition in the public schools far beyond where the evidence leads. Everything in the system now has a price. Principals can get cash bonuses of as much as $50,000 by raising their schools' test scores; teachers in a few hundred schools now (and hundreds more later) can take home an extra $3,000 if the student scores in their schools improve; parents get money for showing up at parent-teacher conferences; their kids get money or-just what they need-cell phones for passing tests.

Much of this scaffolding of cash incentives (and career-ending penalties) rests on a rather shaky base: the state's highly unreliable reading and math tests in grades three through eight, plus the even more unreliable high school Regents exams, which have been dumbed down so that schools will avoid federal sanctions under the No Child Left Behind act. In the past, the tests have also been prone to cheating scandals. Expect more cheating as the stakes for success and failure rise.

While confidently putting their seal of approval on this market system, the mayor and chancellor appear to be agnostic on what actually works in the classroom. They've shown no interest, for example, in two decades' worth of scientific research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health that proves that teaching phonics and phonemic awareness is crucial to getting kids to read in the early grades. They have blithely retained a fuzzy math program, Everyday Math, despite a consensus of university math professors judging it inadequate. Indeed, Bloomberg and Klein have abjured all responsibility for curriculum and instruction and placed their bets entirely on choice, markets, and accountability.

But the new reliance on markets hasn't prevented special interests from hijacking the curriculum. One such interest is the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project-led by Lucy Calkins, the doyenne of the whole-language reading approach, which postulates that all children can learn to read and write naturally, with just some guidance from teachers, and that direct phonics instruction is a form of child abuse. Calkins's enterprise has more than $10 million in Department of Education contracts to guide reading and writing instruction in most of the city's elementary schools, even though no solid evidence supports her methodology. This may explain why, on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests-widely regarded as a gold standard for educational assessment-Gotham students showed no improvement in fourth- and eighth-grade reading from 2003 to 2007, while the city of Atlanta, which hasn't staked everything on market incentives, has shown significant reading improvement.

One wonders why so many in the school reform movement and in the business community celebrate New York City's recent record on education. Is it merely because they hear the words "choice," "markets," and "competition" and think that all is well? If so, they're mistaken. The primal scene of all education reform is the classroom. If the teacher isn't doing the right thing, all the cash incentives in the world won't make a difference.

Those in the school reform movement seeking a case of truly spectacular academic improvement should look to Massachusetts, where something close to an education miracle has occurred. In the past several years, Massachusetts has improved more than almost every other state on the NAEP tests. In 2007, it scored first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. The state's average scale scores on all four tests have also improved at far higher rates than most other states have seen over the past 15 years.

The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credits, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers. The state owes its amazing improvement in student performance to a few key former education leaders, including state education board chairman John Silber, assistant commissioner Sandra Stotsky, and board member (and Manhattan Institute fellow) Abigail Thernstrom. Starting a decade ago, these instructionists pushed the state's board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam. In its English Language Arts curriculum framework, the board even dared to say that reading instruction in the early grades should include systematic and explicit phonics. Now a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky sums up: "The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong content-based curriculum, together with upgraded certification regulations and teacher licensure tests that require teacher preparation programs to address that content, can be the best recipe for improving students' academic achievement."

The Massachusetts miracle doesn't prove that a standard curriculum and a focus on effective instruction will always produce academic progress. Nor does the flawed New York City experiment in competition mean that we should cast aside all market incentives in education. But what has transpired in these two places provides an important lesson: education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don't produce verifiable results in the classroom. After all, children's lives are at stake.

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Britain: Parents using desperate measures to get kids into a good school

Parents who pretend that they have Christian beliefs in order to win places in church schools are doing the best for their children, David Cameron believes. The Tory leader refuses to criticise the "middle-class parents with sharp elbows". Asked for his views on the families accused of playing the system, he says: "I think it's good for parents who want the best for their kids. I don't blame anyone who tries to get their children into a good school. Most people are doing so because it has an ethos and culture. I believe in active citizens." Mr Cameron will learn this year whether his own daughter has won a place at a state-funded Church of England school in Kensington, West London.

This month The Times reported a surge in late baptisms into the Catholic Church, further evidence that some parents may be finding religion at a convenient moment in their children's education. Fears that middle-class parents are adopting religion to get their children into popular schools have led some Labour MPs to call for an end to the expansion of faith schools.

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Georgia schools to pay students to study

Sounds rather pathetic

Learning is supposed to be its own reward, but when that doesn't work, should students get paid to do it? That's the question two Georgia schools are asking in a 15-week pilot program that is paying high-schoolers struggling in math and science $8 an hour to attend study hall for four hours a week. The privately funded "Learn & Earn" initiative, an idea from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is touted as the first of its kind in the state and one of a few similar programs nationwide. "We want to try something new," said Jackie Cushman, Gingrich's daughter and co-founder of the group funding the initiative. "We're trying to figure out what works. Is it the answer? No. Is it a possible idea that might work? Yes."

Forty students at Bear Creek Middle School and Creekside High School, both in the Atlanta suburb of Fairburn, began participating in the program Tuesday. The eighth- and 11th-graders chosen had to be underperforming in math and science, and many are eligible for free or reduced-cost lunches. The hope is that the bribes will boost students' motivation to learn, attend class and get better grades. Aside from the hourly wage, eighth-graders will get a $75 bonus, and 11th-graders $125, if they improve their math and science grades to a B and achieve certain test scores. For the older kids, that adds up to $605 for a semester of studying.

Cushman said the initiative is aimed at math and science because many student struggle in those subjects even if they excel in others.

The offer could help poor students who need the money and otherwise might choose a minimum-wage job over studying, said Jerome Morris, an associate professor at the University of Georgia's College of Education. He also noted that parents who have the means to reward their children for performing well in school have done so for decades. "Poor families just can't do that," Morris said. "They have to tell their children, 'You have to go to school just to learn.'"

The director of a private center aimed at improving motivation, however, said plying kids with cash is a desperate move by school officials. "They have not figured out a way to self-motivate these kids," said Peter A. Spevak, director of the Center for Applied Motivation in Washington, D.C. "What really drives a person is the desire to do well and the good feeling you have after doing your best every day." Paying children to learn may work in the short term, but before long, the luster could wear off and they may look to up the ante, Spevak said. Ultimately, it could become a losing game. "When you take the money away, assuming it has been effective, people sometimes get angry or disillusioned," he said. "They may start to wonder where the next prize is coming from."

The $60,000 initiative is being funded by Atlanta businessman Charles Loudermilk, founder of Aaron Rents, through the Learning Makes a Difference Foundation Inc., an Atlanta-based nonprofit that funds innovative education programs and was founded by Gingrich's daughters.

Alexis Yarger, one of the Fairburn program's participants, is eager to try anything to improve her grades. The 16-year-old Creekside junior plans to attend Spelman College, and says that although she's doing OK in science, "Math is not my best." Yarger, who has a part-time job at Burger King, said she was interested in the program even before she heard about the financial incentives. She would have taken part even without the money, she said, but her father said the cash doesn't hurt. "It's a good motivational tactic," Anthony Yarger said. "Whether it's a dollar or a candy bar, if it's helpful, I support it."

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26 January, 2008

Polar Fiction: More MLA nonsense

Assuming the verifiable truth of global warming, some academics wish to circumvent the climate change debate and start teaching college students about importance of combatting this imminent disaster.

Just as some environmentalists have co-opted the polar bear as a symbol for the predicted ecological crisis, Britt Rusert, a doctoral candidate at Duke University, visualizes polar exploration literature as a new outlet for this discourse: "How, I wonder, might such a polar canon help us conceptualize and historicize ecological crises, specifically the master discourse of global warming and their contemporary moments?," she told a Modern Language Association (MLA) audience this December.

She believes that "polar fiction is a potentially exciting place" to "certify climate change." "What new types of inquiry could be activated...pedagogically to new environmental reality?," she said.

The panel's title, "Rethinking Polar Fictions in an Age of Inconvenient Truth," insinuates a desire to revise history to include "evidence" of global warming. Similarly, Rusert denied the anachronisms of her approach, telling the audience that "American literature shows, in many ways, climate change is nothing new." No historical revisionism is necessary to advance the climate change agenda.

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More corruption of what is supposed to be education

The holiday season can be filled with surprises. Of course, when it comes to the public school system, those surprises aren't always wrapped with colorful ribbons. One morning a few weeks ago, I got a frantic call from my 14-year old daughter from school. "Mom, can you bring in some canned food?" she frantically inquired. "What for?" I asked. "It's for English class. We get 10 bonus points for bringing in canned food for the poor." "What???!!" "Please Mom. I can really use the extra credit!" "I can't believe this."

So what do I do? I hate this on so many levels, but all the other students will be doing it and getting the advantage of the bonus points for something that does absolutely nothing to develop the English skills I pray my daughter is somehow acquiring in this system. So I resentfully and begrudgingly dig out some canned food out of my pantry and run on over to the Junior High building like some kind of hoop-jumping sheeple.

Of course, I immediately shoot off an email to teacher and ask if it is true that the students have been offered extra credit in Honors English class for bringing in cans of food. She confirms unapologetically that it is true. But don't worry, she responds to an additional email of clarification and complaint, 10 bonus points doesn't really amount to much in the whole grade. Then why offer it at all? Because she can, because she gets away with it, and it allows her to manipulate her students into doing what she wants with her all-powerful grade-giving authority (my response, not hers.) Later I find out that my daughter's friend's math teacher offers extra credit to the math class, also for bringing in cans of food.

Why does this bother me so much? Is it really such a big deal? Before we write this off as a fairly innocuous and forgettable act of poor judgment by a few misguided school teachers, let's take a look at what our young minds have learned from this lesson.

First the teacher asks them to please bring in canned food for the poor. Her request goes ignored, and she is annoyed that the students can be so thoughtless of others this holiday season when they themselves have so much. So if they are not going to do the right thing on their own, she is going to offer them a bribe to do the "right" thing. After all, that is how morality is learned, right? Not through reason or from ones parents, but through bribes! She is going to offer to lift their grades in English in exchange for them doing something good for the community!

So the students learn that there are ways to game the system. Don't do something because it's right or good. If you hold out long enough, someone will offer you something in return, which completely changes the nature of your so-called "donation." Now you have made a purchase - some cans for some bonus points. What could be easier or more clearly in one's self interest? And you learn that you can get credit for something, namely English class, without actually performing anything at all in that area. You can get ahead in life not by getting good at something and acquiring skills that add value, but by doing something completely unrelated for someone in power.

You learn not to differentiate between charity and service, bribery and extortion, the quid pro quo. You learn that people in power can get you to do things that you don't really want to do through manipulation and misuse of that power.

You learn to lose respect for "educators", and by association, anyone trying to teach anything. If this is what education is, let's just get it over with as quickly as possible and with as little effort as necessary, and please, don't ask me to learn anything unless you can prove to me that there's really something in it for me in the end. Because we all know it's just a game, and it's really just wasting my time. And indeed it is.

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UK POLICE WANT TO FIND CAMPUS EXTREMISTS

British police have offered to train university staff to spot extremists operating on campus despite complaints from Muslim students that they could be unfairly targeted, a government document said Tuesday. Lecturers have been urged to scrutinize both students and invited speakers for signs they could be involved in radicalizing young people, according to new government guidelines.

Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, published advice to universities Tuesday on tackling extremism, requesting institutions share information on suspected radical speakers. "There is a real and serious threat, and we must all take responsibility for protecting ourselves," Rammell said. Al-Qaida influenced terrorism was the government's primary concern, he said, warning schools of the threat posed by far-right groups, animal-rights activists, anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic speakers.

Rammell said he believed some controversial speakers should be allowed to appear at universities, to allow moderate academics to debunk their claims through debate. "We prize academic freedom and freedom of speech as ends in themselves and as the most effective way of challenging the views which we may find abhorrent but that remain within the law," he said. But staff should compile details of speakers they fear may be exhorting students to violence - even in meetings held off campus - and share their concerns with counterparts, Rammell recommended.

British government security officials said Tuesday that radicalization is now much less likely to take place in mosques or formal settings, but instead in homes, gyms or at meetings on the fringes of campus. Jonathan Evans, head of the domestic spy agency MI5, warned in November that there is evidence extremists are grooming children and teenagers for attacks against Britain.

But some students and staff argue that Rammell's guidelines could lead to the victimization of Muslim students. "There is no evidence to suggest that Muslim students at university are particularly vulnerable to radicalization," said Faisal Hanjra of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies in the United Kingdom and Ireland. "Nor is there any evidence to suggest that university campuses are hotbeds of extremist activity." Sally Hunt, general secretary of academic labor organization University and College Union, said university staff should not be expected to police their students. "No student should ever think they are being spied on and no staff member should ever be pressurized into treating any group of students differently from another," she said.

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Milwaukee Parental Choice Program Under Attack

Wisconsin state Rep. Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee) is pushing a proposal to oust 7,000 students from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP)--the nation's oldest and most successful school voucher program.

In a January 7 memorandum to legislative colleagues, Kessler said the purpose of his idea was to decrease enrollment in the voucher program by 40 percent. He says the MPCP has created a "funding inequity" in Milwaukee that could be alleviated by kicking students out of the program and returning the subsequent "savings" to Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). According to an analysis by School Choice Wisconsin, Kessler is calling for:

1) All teachers in schools of choice to hold bachelor's degrees from accredited colleges or universities. A bill passed in 2005 to lift the cap on enrollment in the MPCP imposed independent accreditation requirements on all participating schools.

2) All voucher recipients to take the same tests as MPS students, with the results "given to MPS for publication." The 2005 measure requires all MPCP schools to "administer a recognized test of their choosing" to measure student proficiency and allows for independent research that will produce reliable comparisons between MPCP and MPS students using MPS tests.

3) Parents applying for vouchers to submit tax returns as proof of eligibility. This requirement is already met by the MPCP.

4) Voucher payments not to exceed tuition charged to non-voucher students. Under current law, the maximum voucher payment is $6,501 per child. Schools that spend less per pupil receive less money. MPS spends $11,000 per pupil.

5) Schools of choice to admit special-needs siblings of students already enrolled. Schools participating in the MPCP already are prohibited from discriminating against special-needs students. The only information private schools can use to determine voucher eligibility is household income and residency.

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25 January, 2008

"Homeschooling" at college level

Online colleges are a logical extension of homeschooling. You work at home still and they offer a chance to get out from under the conventional educational system. But how good are they? How do you tell a good one from a diploma mill?

There is now an organization that gathers together a heap of information on each one and publishes an annual ranking of them all. See here for the latest rankings.

For each college, they gather data for eight different metrics: acceptance rate, financial aid, graduation rate, peer Web citations, retention rate, scholarly citations, student-faculty ratio, and years accredited. The overall ranking ranks each college by its average ranking for each metric for which data was available.




Controversy Over School-Targeted Advertising Forces McDonald's to Abandon Promotions for Honor Students in Florida

It's just the usual Mac-hatred

McDonald's has decided to stop sponsoring Happy Meals as rewards for children with good grades and attendance records in elementary schools in Seminole County, Fla. The "food prize" program, as it was called, for students of the Seminole County Public Schools in kindergarten through fifth grade was sponsored by the owners of the McDonald's restaurants in Seminole County. The decision to end the promotions for the program, appearing on children's report-card jackets, came from executives at McDonald's, the NY Times reports.

The sponsorship, between the restaurant owners and the Seminole County school board, drew national and international attention amid an outcry over childhood obesity and junk food diets because a fast-food chain was tying its products to academic performance. It also generated controversy because McDonald's had agreed to curb its advertising to children in schools, reports Times columnist Stuart Elliott.

The decision was made "because we believe the focus should be on the importance of a good education," William Whitman, senior director for communications and public affairs at McDonald's, said last week. "McDonald's, not the school district, will cover the cost to reprint the report-card jackets," he added, and "remove our trademarks," he told the Times. The reward program, called Made the Grade, will continue, Whitman said, because the local restaurant owners agreed in September that it would run through the current school year.

The sponsorship became known last month when a parent complained about it to an activist organization, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. The parent, Susan Pagan, was upset about the promotion on her daughter's report-card jacket. The jacket showed Ronald McDonald, the company's mascot for children; its Golden Arches logo; and Happy Meal menu items like Chicken McNuggets.

"Check your grades," the jacket advised. "Reward yourself with a Happy Meal from McDonald's." Because of the attention the complaint drew, the school district said last month that it would review the appropriateness of the jackets in the spring when making plans for the 2008-9 year.

Susan Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, said Thursday that she was pleased with the end of the report-card advertising. "In the absence of needed government regulation to protect schoolchildren from predatory companies like McDonald's," she told the Times, "the burden is on parents to be vigilant about exploitative marketing aimed at children."

Source

A good comment on the above below:

Exploitive? Advertising a reward for hard work exploits children? How did thinking get so twisted? We should thank McDonalds for giving away some of its profits to help motivate kids to do better. Don't worry about children being exposed to advertising - advertising is the basis of our country's success as a consumer economy. Advertising is key to our great standard of living. So what if school children get some free McNuggets for getting good grades? Kids are going to see advertising their entire lives.




Schools now bad for boys

Boys and girls should be educated in separate classes because their brains are hard-wired to learn in different ways, a controversial book says. Too many schools are creating an environment that is "toxic" to boys, turning them off learning and leaving them quite unprepared for adult life, according to Leonard Sax, a family doctor and research psychologist from Washington DC.

For the past decade parents and teachers have become worried increasingly about boys, who are now routinely outperformed by girls at every level and who show growing levels of disaffection and lack of motivation.

In his book Boys Adrift, Dr Sax argues that this yawning gender gap is the result of innately differently learning styles of boys and girls, and that most classrooms play to the strengths of girls. "In the co-educational classroom so many of the choices we make are to the advantage of girls, but disadvantage boys," he said. "The fact that girls are doing well is not the problem. The problem is, why can't their brothers do as well?"

Dr Sax, founder of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education in the United States, believes the answer lies in subtle, but important differences in the brains of boys and girls. "Until ten years ago, people said that boys are spatial and girls are verbal. That's nonsense. There is not much difference in how girls and boys think, but there are differences in how they see and hear," he told The Times at the start of a lecture tour of boys' schools in Britain.

Boys, for example, do not hear as well as girls. So a female teacher with a soft voice may believe that a boy who is not paying attention is playing up, when actually he cannot hear her properly. Her reaction may be to discipline him. But Dr Sax says that she would get better results by speaking louder and moving purposefully around the classroom. Boys' eyes also respond better to movement and direction, while girls' eyes are more affected by colour and texture. Asked to draw, five-year-old girls produce flowers, pets and people. Boys will draw a car crash, but may be reproached by teachers for producing something that is "not nice".

Similarly, he says, although most girls can sit still from a young age, most boys need to be active to discover their own pace. "Asking a five-year-old to sit still and read and write is something that many girls can do, but many boys can't. I have visited more than 200 schools. This is what I hear the teachers saying, `Jason, why are you standing?', `Gerard, are you making a buzzing noise?', `Robert, can you stop tapping?', `Look at Emily, she's sitting still and is good'. "The message that boys are getting from the age of 5 is that doing what the teacher wants is unmasculine," Dr Sax says.

One result, Dr Sax believes, is the overdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder among boys who are considered inattentive by teachers. Parents and doctors are tempted to treat this with medication, when simply putting them in a boyfriendly classroom would be far more effective.

The failure of schools to understand why gender matters means that boys very often switch off from learning from an early age and never re-engage. Long after their sisters have gone to university, they are still trapped at home suffering from "failure to launch" into adult life. The solution, Dr Sax believes, lies in single-sex education provided by teachers trained to understand the differences in brain function between boys and girls. "Let boys tap the table. Let them jump up from their seat when asked to spell a word. It won't disturb the boy next to them. Girls are bothered by extraneous noise levels 10 to 40 times lower than the levels that bother men. Girls are aware of what is going on around them. Boys are oblivious," Dr Sax says.

When such these methods were used in single-sex classes in Florida, pass rates for primary school fourth-grade boys (Year Three in Britain) rose from 55 per cent to 85 per cent.

Source




Government Schooling is Welfare

I wonder if I'll ever get to a point where I'm no longer burdened with trying to convince people that government - the State - is force. It is not voluntaryism. It is coercion. It is violence, pure and simple.

For example, if you want to send your kids to a government school, you are asking to have other people - non-parents - threatened with violence if they don't pay for what should be your responsibility. When you get a bill in the mail from the State, and you ignore it, chances are, men with guns will be knocking your door. If you try resisting their demands, they can use violent force - even lethal force, if necessary - to ensure your compliance.

And don't give me this, "I pay taxes too!" crap. All things equal, a parent pays less taxes, while consuming more government services.

Let's say me, a non-parent, and Sally Singlemom both make $40,000 year in income. When tax time comes around, not only does she get to file in a more favorable status - the "Head of Household" designation grants a larger standard deduction than does "Single" (about 7700 vs. about 5300) - but she also gets an extra exemption for her child (another 3300 per child), plus the child tax credit (up to $1000 per kid). And don't even get me started on the "Earned Income Tax Credit", which is just a wealth transfer mechanism.

The net result is not only that Sally's taxable income adjusted downward much more than mine, her tax obligation is credited by virtue of the fact that she has a kid. So she is paying less in taxes, while at the same time demanding more of the system we are both forced to pay into. That's a pretty sweet deal...for her.

So, for all you parents out there who send your children to government schools, show some respect for those individuals who are being forced to subsidize your lack of personal responsibility. Don't try to mask your willingness to steal from others by spouting off pious platitudes and false moral arguments about "the greater good", the importance of education, and "the poor". It's theft and you know it.

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24 January, 2008

On morality in literature

Comment from an Australian educationist

Is there a place for popular culture, represented by films, text messages, internet chat rooms and computer games, in the English classroom, alongside great literature? Mark Howie, the vice-president of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, believes there is. At the Senate inquiry into standards in education, Howie argued that "given the realities of the modern world (where) students are engaged with visual and electronic text every day", English teachers have to "fmd ways in the curriculum of bringing the two together".

I beg to differ: literature, especially the enduring classics associated with the Western tradition, must be given pre-eminent status, but that does not mean I do not understand the appeal of pop culture.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, every boy in my street in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Broadmeadows, including me, had a hoard of comic books ranging from the Phantom, Superman and Spider-Man to Batman and Wonder Woman. By the time I reached high school, my taste in entertainment had developed to include James Bond, Modesty Blaise and television series such as The Samurai and endless episodes of Bandstand. On Saturday afternoons I caught up with the heroic exploits of larger-than-life western heroes such as the Cisco Kid and John Wayne and classic films including Ben Hur, The 300 Spartans and Cleopatra.

The funny thing was, none of this found its way into the classroom. At Broady High, English with Mr Clayton and Mr Mackie involved Australian and English poetry, Dickens, Lawson and Shakespeare, and learning how to parse and precis and to write properly structured essays. Thankfully, I also found my way into a reading group organised by the local Anglican minister, who introduced us to books such as Erich Fromm's The Fear of Freedom and The Art of Loving, Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression as well as Plato.

Rather than the tyranny of relevance, where education relates to the world of the student, my teachers saw their role as challenging us by providing an alternative to the often materialistic and superficial cultures in which we lived. The reality is that for many of us, growing up in a housing commission [welfare] estate surrounded by a wasteland of brick and cement, often with violent, alcoholic parents, the transformative and healing power of literature provided a gateway into an imaginative world without which life may have been intolerable. Literature not only provided an escape from the often empty and repetitive day-to-day routine, it also introduced us to an unknown world of ideas, ethical dilemmas and human emotions in an insightful and compelling way.

That literature, at its best, is far superior to popular culture represented by Neighbours, Big Brother, text messages or the ego-driven, self-centred drivel found on MySpace and Facebook should be self-evident. While the texts that constitute the literary canon are re-evaluated over time, the truth is that enduring works such as Euripides' Medea, Shakespeare's King Lear and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard deal with emotions and predicaments in a profoundly sensitive way, unlike Neighbours or Jean-Claude Van Damme's action movies.

As Bruno Bettelheim and Joseph Campbell point out in discussing the importance of myths, fables and legends, literature deals with the types of heroes and archetypes that are essential for emotional and psychological wellbeing and maturity. Literature is also special in the way language is employed. American academic Louise Rosenblatt points to the unique quality of literature when she differentiates between what she terms an efferent and an aesthetic response.

The skills required to read an Ikea manual are totally different to those needed to read T. S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The first is concerned with reading in its most literal guise: to understand information as quickly and easily as possible. But reading that requires what Coleridge termed a "willing suspension of disbelief" allows a reader to enter a world that has the power to shock and to awe, and which can speak to one's inner self.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch explains to his daughter the importance of understanding and sympathising with those around us by using the metaphor of standing in somebody's shoes. Literature, unlike texts in a more general sense, is unique in its ability to engender the ability to empathise with others. While the humanising quality of literature cannot be guaranteed, the reality is that in entering into the life of characters, feeling their joy and suffering, and following their exploits and travails, one is made to lose one's sense of self and to value the worth of others.

Literature is essentially moral in focus, unlike utilitarian texts produced for commercial or entertainment reasons. It is wrong to suggest literature provides simplistic answers to complex ethical dilemmas, but fables such as The Iliad, children's stories including C. S. Lewis's Narnia books and more recent works by Patrick White and David Malouf address issues related to right and wrong and what constitutes a good life.

Contemporary approaches to English are driven by a mantra of change. Arguments in favour of dealing with new technologies, including the internet and computer games, are couched in terms of looking to the future and accommodating the demands of the information-driven 21st century. What this ignores is Eliot's point that continuity is as important as change. As such, the knowledge, understanding and wisdom represented by our literary heritage is essential in giving students an understanding of the present and the ability to deal with the future.

Eliot argues that the need is: "To maintain the continuity of our culture - and neither continuity, nor respect for the past, implies standing still. More than ever, we look to education today to preserve us from the error of pure contemporaneity. We look to institutions of education to maintain a knowledge and understanding of the past."

The article above by KEVIN DONNELLY appeared in the "The Australian" on January 19, 2008




Australia: Dumbed down teaching degrees in firing line

Even a Leftist government is perturbed! But you almost have to be a dummy to want to take up teaching in today's chaotic government schools

A SLIDE in the entry standards for students training to be teachers in Queensland universities has prompted a threat from the Bligh Government to refuse to recognise an education degree as an automatic qualification into the state's school system. Education Minister Rod Welford accused some universities of "desperation" by continuing to lower the academic bar school-leavers have to clear to be accepted in to a teaching degree course.

He said that, if the slide continued, education authorities might need to introduce extra testing and screening measures for graduates wanting to become teachers so professional standards were maintained. "I'm growing increasingly concerned at the desperation by some universities to fill their quotas by allowing what appear to be underperforming students attempting to become teachers," Mr Welford said.

He was responding to an analysis of education degrees on offer in Queensland this year, which showed that several universities were accepting some students with an OP score as low as 19 [where a top score is 1] into their teacher-training courses. The analysis of course information held by the Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre showed that it is commonplace for universities - particularly regional institutions - to offer education degree courses to school-leavers with an OP of 17 or lower.

Mr Welford said these institutions were doing a disservice to teaching as a career choice. "My fear is that by going lower and lower in the OP scale the universities are damaging the professional standing of teaching," he said. "If it's too easy to get into, people don't see it as the highly significant and noble profession that it is."

While minimum entry levels have fallen at some universities, teaching continues to attract high achievers. Mr Welford said many students with ordinary OP scores did end up being outstanding teachers, and not everyone with an exceptional academic record at school necessarily made a good teacher. But, he said, the approach of some universities to their teaching courses was "more about bums on seats than it is about quality teaching". He said it was important to ensure universities produced education graduates who were "capable and successful students". "Otherwise we will reach the point where education systems and departments will simply not be able to recognise a degree alone as a qualification for entry as a school teacher."

But university administrators defended the lowering of cut-offs for teaching degrees, insisting academic attainment was not the only indicator of to who would make a good teacher. University of Southern Queensland Dean of Education Nita Temmerman said it was important the state's teachers were made up of the best and brightest but that an OP score was "only one indicator of achievement". USQ has an OP cut-off of 19 for most of its education-degree courses, but Professor Temmerman said that once in a degree course, students with ordinary OP scores regularly did better than their more academically gifted counterparts. "Kids with an OP of 16 have outperformed academically kids that have come in with an OP2," she said.

Professor Toni Downes of the Australian Council of Deans of Education, said academic rank was an important factor for trainee teachers but not to the exclusion of other qualities in students. "What parents want most is for teachers to be passionate and committed about their childrens' education," she said. "I never graduate somebody who I would not be proud to have teach my children."

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Congress Is Getting Closer to Higher Education Reauthorization

The U.S. House Education and Labor Committee has voted unanimously to approve legislation to reauthorize federal higher education programs for the next five years. The bill includes dozens of new federal programs and new financial reporting requirements for colleges and universities. The U.S. Senate approved a similar higher education reauthorization package in summer 2007. The College Opportunity and Affordability Act (H.R. 4137), which the House panel approved in November, will create new programs, increase authorization levels for certain aid programs, and implement new federal regulations to require colleges and universities to report financial information and tuition prices.

Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA), the ranking Republican on the committee, pointed to the new financial disclosure requirements as a key reason he and other Republicans supported the legislation. “The federal government invests billions in higher education each year to ensure that all Americans are able to pursue a college education and the benefits that come with it. In exchange for that support, these institutions should be held to account for their cost increases,” McKeon explained. “If we provide a federal investment without accountability, students and taxpayers will be on the losing end of the equation,” McKeon said. “Sunshine is not the only solution, but it is a critical first step.”

Dr. Richard Vedder, a distinguished economics professor at Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, says the legislation does not go nearly far enough in making college more affordable and could cause additional problems. “The best thing I can say about the House bill on higher education is that it is not as bad as I thought it might be, and that there seems to be a bipartisan concern about soaring costs for attending college,” Vedder said. “The bill makes some modest but positive moves in the direction of promoting greater transparency in college operations.” Vedder called the regulations designed to contain college cost increases “well-intended and even mildly innovative,” but he warned they could create new problems, such as increased student fees, other non-tuition cost hikes, and possibly increased government control of higher education institutions.

McKeon likewise expressed concern about components of the legislation that will expand federal involvement in higher education. “The new programs created in this bill are symptomatic of the larger tendency by Congress to fund any and every program with an inviting name--never mind whether the federal government has any business intervening in these areas in the first place,” McKeon said. “Both parties need to take a step back and realize that when we create new federal programs, we may be worsening the very problems we’re trying to solve.”

But McKeon says the reforms initiated by the new legislation are worth the expansion of federal involvement. “While I am deeply troubled by the number of new programs created by this bill,” McKeon said, “I am mindful that it contains a number of positive reforms that will benefit students, parents, and taxpayers, and, taken as a whole, I believe its positives outweigh the negatives.”

Vedder argues more fundamental reforms are needed to address the problem of ever-increasing college tuition costs and falling college productivity. “We need to start weaning students and institutions from massive government support that invites inefficiency, rent-seeking, and a loss of intellectual independence,” Vedder said. “A good place to start would be to end institutional subsidies and concentrate support on vouchers to students--but only those with very significant financial need.”

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Turning teachers into spies and snitches

UK schools minister Jim Knight wants teachers to monitor their pupils' every antic and the behaviour of their parents. We should give his proposals a big red cross.

By 2010, all secondary schools in England will enable parents to obtain daily class reports on their child’s every move at school. Each pupil’s attendance, behaviour and academic performance will be put online by 2012, allowing parents to check their progress daily. Apparently, the idea could end parents’ evenings, with teachers instead providing daily updates on ‘real-time’ reporting systems. The schools minister, Jim Knight, insists that the daily reports ‘should not add to staff workloads’ (1). One thing is for sure – pupils, teachers and especially parents are all set to lose out by such creeping surveillance.

Although a necessary and useful feature of the school diary, annual school reports on all the pupils you teach are inevitably time-consuming. So how daily school reports on a child’s ‘achievement, progress, attendance, behaviour and special needs’ would not add to a teacher’s workload is never properly explained. More worryingly, daily reports could also be used as a further disciplinary threat against teachers in the same way that a failure to keep existing school records already is. The existence of such a scheme will also contribute to classroom disruption, as pupils will be more preoccupied by the content of a daily report than the content of a textbook.

A daily report will also erode further any space that a pupil needs away from the prying eyes of mum and dad. It is only in exceptional circumstances that parents need to be informed by the school about poor behaviour or lack-of-progress issues. A recording of every slightly cheeky comment, minor disruption or wind-up with other pupils will be counterproductive because it will inevitably undermine the development of a good working relationship with teachers. It will also undermine a teacher’s authority even further in the classroom, as they will be perceived as babysitters merely keeping an eye on kids for their parents, rather than getting on with the job of teaching knowledge and understanding. And far from creating a climate that develops mature behaviour in children, it is likely to have the opposite effect.

It is a fact of life that adolescents can be obnoxious and mean to teachers and each other. Teenagers only grow out of playground spite when they begin to have an awareness of how their actions impinge on others. That awareness can only develop via the push-and-pull of the classroom and the schoolyard. It cannot be magically switched on via a stern email home. Indeed, school pupils develop a ‘conscience’ when they’re aware they have transgressed the ‘acceptable’ boundaries that have developed between teachers and among their peers. If every minor action automatically results in a parental ticking off, pupils will never develop the skill to judge how they behave in situations outside the home. The result is to infantalise teenagers even further and, even more alarmingly, the measures will put parents on almost the same level, too.

Tucked away in the blather about ‘improving parents’ access to detailed information about their children’, Jim Knight let slip that ‘schools could also monitor how often parents checked their child’s progress’. The idea of schools monitoring parents monitoring teachers’ reports monitoring their children’s behaviour seems like something dreamt up by the Stasi in Stalinist East Germany. The obvious and creepily threatening implication here is that parents must be snooped on by schools in order to check that they’re acting as ‘responsible’ parents. As it happens, the vast majority of parents have an in-built radar regarding whether their children are progressing well or not at school and care deeply about their welfare. When they are concerned, they will simply phone up or visit the school to enquire accordingly. How dare the government imply otherwise and that it is somehow up to local education authorities to coerce parents into showing ‘concern’ about their child’s education?

Already a number of measures are in place that reveal deep contempt for parents. Increasingly, parents have to sign homework sheets to show that they’ve checked their children’s work. And in September 2007, Ed Balls gave headteachers the power to obtain parenting orders forcing them to keep their expelled children indoors and off the streets. A failure to do so could lead to prosecution, a £1,000 fine and a criminal record (2). Although the online reports are only in their initial stages, it is inevitable that they will come equipped with some draconian log-in code in the future. Is it too fanciful to suggest that a child could be suspended or expelled if parents ‘fail’ to check out the daily ‘progress’ reports? Or that fixed penalty notices could be served up by local judges if parents don’t comply with the measures?

As an indicator of where the wind is blowing on social control, it was very significant this week that while the police’s pay rise was shunned, secondary school teachers received theirs – with a bit more than expected on top. Clearly, if teachers are expected to be both social workers to children and state snoopers on parents, the government has to make sure it’s in their best interests to do so.

Leaving aside the huge waste of teachers’ time and efforts involved in this ridiculous and pernicious measure, it will also socialise future generations to see routine surveillance as normal, while tightly binding parents to the state in ways that might prove impossible to log-off from.

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23 January, 2008

Why is Public Education Failing?

Children are coming out of school dumb because they aren't taught academics. They have, instead, become experiments in behavior modification

It's a fact. Most of today's school children can barely read or write. They can't perform math problems without a calculator. They barely know who the Founding Fathers were and know even less of their achievements. Most can't tell you the name of the President of the United States. It's pure and simple; today's children aren't coming out of school with an academic education.

Colleges know it. They have to set up remedial courses for incoming freshmen just to prepare them for classes. Parents know it. Their children grow dumber everyday. The politicians say they know it. They hold hearings to grill education "experts," and they hold high-powered education "summits" to debate and discuss the "problem." And they keep coming up with more federal programs and dictate more standards and spend more taxpayer dollars to fix the problem. But the problem continues to explode. Why?

Frankly, any parent can find the answer simply by looking through their child's textbooks or taking a close look at the classroom structures that their children are forced to endure. That's just what I'm going to do for you and when I'm through, see if you still wonder why there is an education crisis. And ask yourselves why all the politicians, with huge staffs to do their bidding, can't seem to find the problem.

Restructuring the Classroom

It comes under many names; block scheduling, group learning, cooperative learning. It's all part of a radical change in the way children are handled in the classroom. Children are paired with others for group grades. Individual achievement is de-emphasized. Under block scheduling a number of subjects are tied together in one long class. For example, math, science, health and physical education have been combined in one school. Children are supposed to learn these skills by working on class projects, such as launching an imaginary rocket to the Moon.

Presumably when faced with various problems in building their rocket, students will seek out the necessary information. They'll need math to calculate the projectory, science to find where the Moon is and health to know what to feed the astronauts. Obviously health is for astronaut training. Children are not instructed on how to do the math calculations or how to find the information they need. They are to find it for themselves. And children who can't keep up are to be helped along by other children in their group. It's called "kids helping kids." That's why teachers are now called "facilitators."

"Cooperative learning" is nothing more than a classroom-management technique that provides a convenient hiding place for bad teachers and under-achieving students. The student who doesn't care to learn, or has failed to grasp a concept, allows the rest of the group to do the work and yet gets the same grade.

What students coming out of such classes cannot do is perform math problems, recite multiplication tables, conjugate a verb or structure a sentence. Random facts picked up in the rush to complete a project do not supply the proper base or structure to understand a subject.

Math

Perhaps the most bizarre of all of the school restructuring programs is mathematics. Math is an exact science, loaded with absolutes. There can be no way to question that certain numbers add up to specific totals. Geometric statements and reasons must lead to absolute conclusions. Instead, today we get "fuzzy" Math. Of course they don't call it that.

As ED Watch explains, "Fuzzy" math's names are Everyday Math, Connected Math, Integrated Math, Math Expressions, Constructive Math, NCTM Math, Standards-based Math, Chicago Math, and Investigations, to name a few. Fuzzy Math means students won't master math: addition, subtraction, multiplications and division. Instead, Fuzzy Math teaches students to "appreciate" math, but they can't solve the problems. Instead, they are to come up with their own ideas about how to compute. Here's how nuts it can get. A parent wrote the following letter to explain the everyday horrors of "Everyday Math."

Everyday Math was being used in our school district. My son brought home a multiplication worksheet on estimating. He had 'estimated' that 9x9=81, and the teacher marked it wrong. I met with her and defended my child's answer. The teacher opened her book and read to me that the purpose of the exercise was not to get the right answer, but was to teach the kids to estimate. The correct answer was 100: kids were to round each 9 up to a 10. (The teacher did not seem to know that 81 was the product, as her answer book did not state the same.)

Children are not taught to memorize multiplication tables. Those who promote this concept believe that memorization is bad. Instead, children, they say, should be taught to "discover" multiplication. Students, they say, learn to multiply over several years by "thinking about math."

Social, political, multicultural and especially environmental issues are rampant in the new math programs and textbooks. One such math text is blatant. Dispersed throughout the eighth grade textbooks are short, half-page blocks of text under the heading "SAVE PLANET EARTH." One of the sections describes the benefits of recycling aluminum cans and tells students, "how you can help."

In many of these textbooks there is literally no math. Instead there are lessons asking children to list "threats to animals," including destruction of habitat, poisons and hunting. The book contains short lessons in multiculturalism under the recurring heading "Cultural Kaleidoscope." These things are simply political propaganda and are there for one purpose - behavior modification. It's not Math. Parents are now paying outside tutors to teach their children real Math - after they have been forced to sit in classrooms for eight hours a day being force-fed someone's political agenda.

English, Reading and Literature

Conjugate a verb? Diagram a sentence? Learn to spell? This is language class. We have more relevant things to learn. In a seventh grade language arts class in Prince William County, Virginia, children are given a test entitled, "What makes you good friendship material." Children are to circle "yes," "no" or "maybe" to questions like, "Am I someone who is trusting of others; likes to have close personal friends; is able to influence others; enjoys sharing with others; can keep a secret? If you answered yes to most of these then you are really good friendship material. If not, you need to work on yourself."

One book being used in classes is called The Book of Questions. Designed around situation ethics, the authors openly admit that "this book is designed to challenge attitudes,