Thursday, January 20, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More here






"ETHNIC STUDIES" AT A BERKELEY HIGH SCHOOL

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

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

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

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

More here

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

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