Friday, March 24, 2006

Struggling U.K. pupils lose share of 'sprayed around' 700 million pounds

Some secondary schools get more money than they need at the expense of others with children who are struggling, the leader of a head teachers' organisation said yesterday. The Government "sprayed around" more than 700 million pounds a year to raise standards in areas of low achievement, instead of concentrating it on schools in greatest need, said John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders.

He told the association's annual conference in Birmingham that the money should be redirected to help children who had fallen furthest behind in their studies. The 300 secondaries in greatest difficulty should be funded at the same level as private schools. "Resources must be targeted accurately and without waste - not the inchoate mixture of government initiatives that have sprayed funds around in recent years like Dick Cheney on a quail shoot, but targeted on students with the lowest prior attainment, wherever they are at school," he said. "This is a direct challenge to central government to look at the 702 million pounds that it currently spends on Excellence in Cities, Leadership Incentive Grant, Fresh Start, the Secondary Performance Project and the Key Stage 3 national strategy, and reallocate it more precisely to reflect low prior attainment in both urban and rural settings."

Mr Dunford said that there should be a "special focus" on the 300 schools that had "the greatest distance to take their pupils from their attainment on entry to a respectable clutch of qualifications at the age of 16". They should have the same funding per pupil as independent schools so that they could hire more and better teachers, and reduce class sizes from an average of 17 to 10 students. Initiatives such as Excellence in Cities, which aims to boost urban achievement, had spread money across whole areas such as Birmingham or Manchester instead of responding to the needs of individual schools. "Because the area covered by any one Excellence in Cities grant is drawn so widely there are inevitably some schools in that area that need additional funding a lot less than others," Mr Dunford said. There are some high-performing schools in Excellence in Cities areas that would be the first to admit that they are not as much in need of additional funding as other schools.

"The Leadership Incentive Grant is another example. I recall a head coming to me quite embarrassed that they were going to get this extra 115,000 pounds a year in their school because they happened to be in an area where there were other schools in difficulty. We ought to look at whether we are spending this money as efficiently as we could and whether we ought to target this money better on schools of maximum disadvantage."

Reform was particularly important because the Government's next Comprehensive Spending Review in 2008 was unlikely to be as generous to education as the previous two. Redistribution of funding would have to take place over time to prevent some schools falling into difficulties.

Heads at the conference said that government rules on grants often took little account of individual circumstances. For instance, schools with 20 per cent or more pupils eligible for free school meals, a measure of poverty, received an extra 120,000 pounds a year. But those just below this threshold got nothing, while schools with far more pupils on free meals received no extra money to reflect the increased challenges they faced.

Mr Dunford also demanded radical cuts in the amount of examining in schools. Spending on exams had risen to 600 million pounds annually, he said, adding: "Our bloated examination system is a waste of scarce national resources, teachers' time and students' opportunities." Many public exams could be replaced by assessments within schools carried out by specially trained teachers whose judgments would be checked by external monitors. League tables should also be reformed to show results for schools that worked together rather than for individual secondaries competing with each other

Source






Kids must learn spelling, grammar and punctuation

An editorial in "The Australian":

That Australia's educationalists are in thrall to some pretty daffy ideas is nothing new. This newspaper has for years defended proven teaching methods such as phonics while exposing the depredations of programs like "critical literacy" and other attempts to politicise and discard the bedrock of our culture in favour of "texts" that are "more relevant". Indeed, last year Queensland's Education Minister vowed to reform English education in his state after being shown examples of students' work by The Australian - including a child's feminist critique of the fairytale Rapunzel.

Horrifying as that is, in Western Australia it's about to get worse - to the point where calculation errors won't matter in maths class, and where spelling, grammar and punctuation will be tossed out the window in English and media classes. It's called "outcomes-based education" and, once implemented in Western Australia, Year 12 English students may pass their final exams without ever reading a book; analysing TV ads and film posters will do. Students will even be allowed to draw their answers, if they are able to figure out the mind-numbingly complex exam instructions.

Like "critical literacy" before it, with its emphasis on finding hidden racism and sexism in great works of literature, outcomes-based education is little more than a jargony post-modern scam foisted on an unsuspecting public by folk-Marxist educationalists. It is the pedagogical equivalent of the Australian Institute of Sport abandoning their world's-best practices for training elite athletes to tell runners that their times don't matter and swimmers that "wetness" is just a Western cultural construction. And Australian educators and politicians are taking young people down a path just as radical under the guise of OBE.

Disturbingly, Western Australia is not the only jurisdiction tearing down proven educational methods in favour of feel-good fads. Outcomes-based education is entrenched across the country: Tasmania recently launched its own radical curriculum, Essential Learnings, which was so controversial that teachers were barred by the local union from criticising it publicly and the state Education Minister was forced to promise a rethink. In South Australia, kids are taught that "Western science . . . is only one form among the sciences of the world", as if the laws of gravity are different in Japan. And Victoria is infamous for letting English students read a grand total of one book a year. More broadly, ideas such as "edutainment" (where an episode of Neighbours is just as valid a "text" as a novel by Dickens) are gaining increasing currency.

The war on excellence being waged in our classrooms is not just a matter of concern for parents and pointy-heads. When Australian students score well behind their foreign counterparts in maths and science exams, or employers find graduates are unable to write a proper sentence, it becomes a matter of vital concern to all Australians. OBE backers say that students will be better equipped for the real world under their regime; in fact, they will learn little more than how to use Google and calculators and to tear down a culture whose roots they have never been taught. This is hardly a recipe for literate and competent citizens who can go on to nourish and transmit all that is great about Australia to their descendants.

Certainly, parents and teachers have the greatest role to play in challenging these fads; in Western Australia, the recently formed PLATO (People Lobbying Against Teaching Outcomes; http://www.platowa.com) is doing an admirable job of raising the alarm. Especially when politicians have lost their senses (to say nothing of their nerve) someone has to stand athwart brewing disasters such as WA's new curriculum and yell, "Stop!". The feral postmodernism and hyper-relativism that is "outcomes-based education" has no place in Australia's classrooms.

Source






Australian Federal government to smarten up teaching



Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop will consider a major scholarship program to attract some of the best and brightest Year 12 students into maths and science teaching. Ms Bishop was commenting on the revelation that students with Year 12 scores as low as OP19 - the bottom 20 per cent of students - were gaining entry to teaching courses in Queensland.

A Department of Education, Science and Training spokesman said the Federal Government had funded 18,500 more university places in all disciplines nationally this year than in 2004, and another 39,000 places would be allocated by 2009. The growth of Queensland's population meant many of those would be allocated for teaching in this state.

Ms Bishop said that while standards had to be maintained, it was also important to ensure enough teachers were trained to meet demand. "We have to maintain that balance," she said. "I think we should be doing more in terms of encouraging teaching as a career of choice."

Teaching, like nursing, is a national priority area, so students incur the lowest HECS fees. But Ms Bishop said a more targeted approach, such as maths/science scholarships, also would be considered. She said teachers needed good nurturing, social and communication skills, and academic ability alone did not guarantee a good teacher.

While research is limited on how well low-score entrants perform in teaching courses, preliminary data gathered by the University of Southern Queensland suggests students with entry scores below OP15 are struggling. USQ associate dean of education Peter Cronk said: "The data is all over the place, but the preliminary stuff suggests that once you go below OP15 they start to find things more difficult." He said the university was well aware of the need to avoid first-year attrition in courses and had put support programs in place to bolster students' literacy, numeracy and assignment-writing skills. "Someone who has done science at school, for instance, may not be used to writing the kinds of assignments that are expected at university," he said.

While USQ has some of the lowest entry scores at its Wide Bay and Toowoomba campuses with OP19, its new Springfield campus has a teaching cut-off of 15, two places higher than that of the nearby University of Queensland Ipswich campus.

Under the OP system, no student "fails" outright, but scores in the range of 16 to 19 would suggest students scored in the low to middle ranges (low achievement and satisfactory achievement) in their Year 12 subjects.

Griffith University vice-chancellor Professor Ian O'Connor, whose institution's scores have remained in the middle ranges, believed Griffith was attracting better-calibre students because it had invested heavily in its education courses and they had a good name among schools.

Queensland University of Technology vice-chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake, who has promised to maintain entry scores at the state's biggest university for training teachers at their present levels, said it worried him that no students from leading private schools with high percentages of OP1s and 2s had opted for teaching. "We need to recognise that teaching is a traditional and noble profession, and that it is vital to our economic and community interests in the Smart State era that its value is recognised," he said.

Source

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

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

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


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

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

No comments: