LEFTIST RACISM RETREATING

Facing threats of litigation and pressure from Washington, colleges and universities nationwide are opening to white students hundreds of thousands of dollars in fellowships, scholarships and other programs previously created for minorities. Southern Illinois University reached a consent decree last month with the Justice Department to allow non-minorities and men access to graduate fellowships originally created for minorities and women. In January, the State University of New York made white students eligible for $6.8 million of aid in two scholarship programs also previously available just for minorities. Pepperdine University is negotiating with the Education Department over its use of race as a criterion in its programs.

"They're all trying to minimize their legal exposure," Susan Sturm, a law professor at Columbia University, said about colleges and universities. "The question is how are they doing that, and are they doing that in a way that's going to shut down any effort or any successful effort to diversify the student body?"

The institutions are reacting to two 2003 Supreme Court cases on using race in admissions at the University of Michigan. Although the cases did not ban using race in admissions to higher education, they did leave the state of the law unclear, and with the changing composition of the court, some university and college officials fear legal challenges. The affected areas include programs for high schools and graduate fellowships.

It is far too early to determine the effects of the changes on the presence of minorities in higher education and how far the pool of money for scholarships and similar programs will stretch. Firm data on how many institutions have modified their policies is elusive because colleges and institutions are not eager to trumpet the changes. At least a handful are seeking to put more money into the programs as they expand the possible pool of applicants.

Some white students are qualifying for the aid. Last year, in response to a legal threat from the Education Department, Washington University in St. Louis modified the standards for an undergraduate scholarship that had been open just to minorities and was named for the first African-American dean at the university. This year, the first since the change, 12 of the 42 first-year recipients are white.

Officials at conservative groups that are pushing for the changes see the shift as a sign of success in eliminating race as a factor in decision making in higher education. "Our concern is that the law be followed and that nobody be denied participation in a program on account of skin color or what country their ancestors came from," said Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which has been pressing institutions on the issue. "We're not looking at achieving a particular racial outcome," Mr. Clegg added. "And it's unfortunate that some organizations seem to view the success or failure of the program based simply on what percentage of students of this color or that color can participate."

Advocates of focused scholarships programs like Theodore M. Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., challenge the notion that programs for minority students hurt whites. "How is it that they conclude that the great evil in this country is discrimination against white people?" Mr. Shaw asked. "Can I put that question any more pointedly? I struggle to find the words to do it because it's so stunning." Mr. Shaw said protecting scholarships and other programs for minorities was "at the top of our agenda."

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AUSTRALIA'S ANTI-PHONICS CHILD ABUSERS

Diane Philipson is a former primary school teacher who spends her days at home in Newcastle coaching children who are struggling to read. This week she had phone calls from two desperate mothers who say their sons, one aged 12 and one aged eight, feel life isn't worth living. "The eight-year-old told his mother he'd rather be dead than have to struggle so much with reading," Philipson said yesterday. Philipson is one of a number of backyard operators across Australia to whom anxious parents have turned to teach their children to read when school has failed. They invariably use a method that involves direct, explicit, systematic phonics. This is the inexplicably politicised way of teaching children that letters in our alphabet are associated with sounds.

There is a pharmacist in a country town in NSW, for instance, dismayed by the number of parents coming to her to fill scripts for attention deficit disorder medication, when all that was wrong with their children was they couldn't read. With a little research, she discovered a phonics-based course which she is agitating for the local school to use to further train reading teachers.

In Newcastle, desperate parents found out about Philipson, 63, by word of mouth, or through informal referrals from a learning disorders clinic at the hospital, which, according to one mother, "doesn't want to be seen to be helping Diane's business but they know what she does works".

Philipson has devised her own system of teaching, a systematic phonics program in which children hear a sound, say it, then read it and sound it out. "I've never had a child I couldn't teach to read," she says. Some of the children she coaches have specific learning disorders. Others, mostly boys, just haven't been taught how to read in a way that suits the way their brain works. She has had 10-year-olds unable to read a word.

No one blames the teachers, most of whom do a tremendous job, and the best of whom are saints. But as the committee of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (of which I was a member) pointed out last year, as many as 30 per cent of children are leaving school functionally illiterate. The report of the inquiry, released in December, finds that most teacher training institutions aren't giving graduate teachers the repertoire of skills they need to teach all children to read. Less than 10 per cent of course time in university teacher education departments is spent training teachers how to teach reading.

The former education minister, Brendan Nelson, set up the inquiry in response to an open letter from 26 of Australia's literacy researchers, cognitive scientists, psychologists and speech therapists warning of the crisis facing large numbers of children who were failing to learn to read. The scientific verdict was in, they said, and it was overwhelming: phonics was a necessary foundation of reading. But from the start the inquiry was bedevilled by the belief within education circles, and even among some on the committee, that there was no literacy problem, that phonics was already being taught and that our students were superior to those of every country except Finland.

Nelson's concern was dismissed as pandering to right-wing extremists who were committed to imposing "boring phonics" on children as a form of ideological control. One leading educationist even drew a link between the teaching of phonics and the Iraq war. Try as it did to base its findings on the best evidence-based research, the inquiry never managed to escape the whole-word-versus-phonics wars which have been raging for almost 40 years. The attack on its report was led by the popular children's author Mem Fox, a whole-word devotee who seems to think if parents read enough of her books aloud their children will automatically learn to read.

Some might, but at least 25 per cent of children won't, according to Kevin Wheldall, director of Macquarie University's Special Education Centre, and one of Australia's leading literacy experts. Anyone who thinks we do not have a literacy problem should visit Aboriginal students on Cape York. Or perhaps doubters could spend an hour in Wheldall's classroom at the Exodus Foundation in Ashfield, where underprivileged children in years 5 and 6 are given remedial reading instruction. There you will meet children who have spent five years going to school and haven't a clue what those black marks on the page mean.

And as many of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy committee discovered, the effect on little boys and girls of not being able to read is devastating. The Reverend Bill Crews set up the Exodus program because, he said, he was "sick of burying kids". Normal, bright children who weren't being taught to read soon grew into sullen pre-teens who felt worthless and preferred to get into trouble than go to school where their "stupidity" was on display.

Nelson, who often visited the Exodus classroom as a backbencher, said when he launched the inquiry's report: "I ask myself, as a layperson, how is it we can live in a country where a boy at the age of 12, with neither a physical nor intellectual disability, can seriously [say], 'I didn't realise it's the black stuff that you read. I didn't realise you start on the left hand side and work to the right.' "

Literacy was a pet project for Nelson and he warned he would withhold funding from states which resisted the recommendations of the inquiry's report, which included systematic phonics teaching, improving teacher education, and testing children regularly. But Nelson has moved on, as politicians do, and his replacement, Julie Bishop, has yet to prove herself. We will know, soon enough, when the federal budget is released in May, how much Nelson's fine words really meant.

Source

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

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

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