Sunday, April 08, 2007

Surprise! "Holistic" Review Helps Blacks & Hispanics, Hurts Whites & Asians

Anything to circumvent an anti-racist law. Post below lifted from Discriminations

UCLA has just announced, with great pride and relief, that its new, "holistic" admissions procedures have resulted in an increase in the percentage of formerly preferred minorities admitted to the next freshman class.

Prior to the university's adoption of the new admissions policy last year, two application readers reviewed each prospective student's academic records while a third took into account the applicant's outside achievements and any challenges he or she might have overcome. Under the "holistic" approach, every application is read and considered in its entirety by two readers, and the readers give more consideration to the opportunities that had - or had not - been available to applicants.

Whether or not increasing the number of blacks and Hispanics was the purpose underlying the new policy, it was the effect.

The new admissions policy appears to have increased black and Hispanic students' chances of being accepted, while making it more likely that white and Asian-American applicants would be turned away.

The percentage of whites (33% of those admitted) who were admitted fell from 26.2% last year to 24.6%, but, as usually happens when factors others than academic qualifications are given more emphasis, the biggest losers were Asians. Last year Asians made up 45.6% of the admitted students; this year they are 43.1%, "with almost all of the decline taking place among two subsets whose numbers had been growing most rapidly on the campus: Chinese-Americans and Vietnamese-Americans."

Although the applicant pools from both populations grew only slightly, the share of Chinese-American applicants who were admitted declined from 35.8 percent to 31.6 percent, while the share of Vietnamese-American applicants who were admitted declined from 28.6 percent to 21.2 percent.

ADDENDUM

As the above numbers indicate, the percentage of Chinese-Americans who were admitted fell by over 11% from last year, and the percentage of Vietnamese who were admitted fell by over 25%.

It seems to me that the UCLA admissions reviewers have made a dramatic, even breathtaking, discovery that they should publish and share with the world: the nature of the heretofore unknown "opportunities" enjoyed by Vietnamese-Americans, opportunities that have obviously expanded exponentially in the space of one generation and that equally obviously served as a burden and handicap on their applications to UCLA.




Britain: Teacher dangers

The dangers resulting from indiscipline are played down below but the last paragraph lets the cat out of the bag

Teachers were awarded up to 25 million pounds in compensation last year for stress, accidents and violent attacks by parents and pupils. The highest award, of 330,000, was paid to a teacher in Birmingham who was assaulted by an intruder on school premises after hours. A female teacher in her thirties who was raped by a 12-year-old boy with severe learning difficulties received just 11,000. She was attacked in November 2004 while giving a one-to-one tutorial in English and IT at a special needs centre. The boy, who was sexually abused and is one of Britain's youngest convicted rapists, stole her car and crashed it 40 miles away.

The National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) secured nearly 6.9 million in compensation. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers won nearly 6 million for its members. The National Union of Teachers estimated its overall compensation figure last year at up to 12 million. In 2005, NUT members were awarded 7 million, but these only involved cases pursued by the union's lawyers. Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the NUT, said: "The injuries and injustices suffered by teachers can destroy their careers. It is imperative that employers recognise the positions that they can put teachers into. Teachers have a right to be treated fairly and to be protected from the dangers that can be inherent in the job."

Most of the personal injury cases involved teachers slipping up on wet surfaces, tripping over furniture or suffering other accidents on school property. Several listed involved road accidents. A teacher who was beaten up by two parents at her school received compensation for criminal injuries. Some of the payouts were more controversial. A lesbian teacher in East London, who was dismissed by a Roman Catholic school after asking for paternity leave to assist at the birth of her partner's baby, won 20,000 in compensation. Another teacher in London received 3,000 for unfair dismissal and race discrimination, although the discrimination claim was "extremely weak", according to the NUT. Graham Clayton, the NUT's senior solicitor, said that the compensation it sought was always fair. However, when he was questioned over the award to the rape victim he said that the union was often unhappy with the awards by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority. "The criminal justice tariff scheme doesn't always produce justice that it should," he said.

At the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, lawyers secured 6,877,197 in compensation for members, which included 330,000 for the assault on the teacher in Birmingham. Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said that there had been a steady increase in the number of claims. Stress was a major factor, but she admitted that the cases were often difficult to prove. "My greatest concern is the large amounts of public money being wasted, which could be avoided if schools had proper management issues in place," she said.

Last November the Education and Inspections Act gave schools a statutory right to impose discipline on pupils, ending decades of confusion about teachers' powers. Teachers can use physical restraint, confiscate mobile phones and march an unruly child out of a classroom. An amendment to the Violent Crime Reductions Act also enables them to search children for weapons.

Source





Australia: Hire, fire power for principals coming

PUBLIC school principals will be given the right to hire and fire staff and determine how much to pay teachers based on merit under a new push to improve performance. At the annual meeting of education ministers next week in Darwin, Education Minister Julie Bishop will recommend a shift in the pay structure for teachers to align salary with the quality of their teaching rather than length of service.

Ms Bishop will also outline a plan to extend an agreement by the states to ensure school principals are granted more power over teacher appointments to expressly include recruitment and dismissal of staff and control of school budgets. Under the proposal, a new legal indemnity will be provided for principals to veto the transfer to their school of a new staff member and to sack staff for inadequate performance.

Ms Bishop will also recommend that the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs empower principals to pay teachers according to performance, based on criteria including the relative improvement in their students' academic achievement. Other measures suggested by Ms Bishop are feedback from parents and students, the contribution of the teacher to broader school life, and the attainment by the teacher of relevant academic and professional standards, including continuing professional development. Under Ms Bishop's plan, the states will run pilot programs of performance pay schemes next year, and while state governments will pay the salaries and cost of implementing any schemes, the federal Government will pay up to half of the administrative costs of conducting the pilots.

At present, teachers' pay is largely based on an incremental scale linked to years in the job, with about eight or 10 salary bands with little requirement to meet professional standards. Ms Bishop's proposal calls on the states and territories to recognise that quality teaching is the "single most important school-based factor in improving student learning" and that teacher salaries should reflect performance measures. "Yet current salary arrangements could be considered to undervalue quality teaching in the classroom," the proposal says.

School principals yesterday welcomed the proposals after years of warnings that bureaucratic red tape forced them to accept the hiring of sub-standard teachers. "There's nothing more important for a principal than having the people he or she chooses in front of students in the classroom," Australian Secondary Principals Association president Andrew Blair said. "You can't be accountable for school performance when you haven't got control over the teachers who are hired or the budget that determines how school funds are spent. If it's applied across the country, that's fantastic."

Primary control of school budgets would be devolved to principals at individual schools under Ms Bishop's plan, to ensure state bureaucrats do not continue to control the funds. Under the proposal, the states and territories would provide the commonwealth with advice on the introduction and implementation of the scheme within weeks, with the legislation to be introduced no later than next year.

"It is recommended that council agree that principals should be provided with a statutory right to veto the transfer to their school of a new staff member, appoint any registered teacher to the staff of their school, and terminate a staff member from their school on prescribed grounds, including for a lack of performance," the discussion paper states. "Primary control of school budgets should be devolved to principals at individual schools."

Primary Principals Association vice-president Colin Pettitt said research showed that where principals could select teachers they could get a better team together than those who were simply appointed.

But the Victorian Government dismissed the Bishop proposal, saying it has in place a system that rewards high-performing teachers and takes into account student achievement. "Ms Bishop is simply trying to pass the cost of education on to the states after her ideas were rejected by Peter Costello," a government spokesman said yesterday....

Kevin Rudd and Labor education spokesman Stephen Smith have embraced merit-based pay for teachers and greater autonomy for schools and principals. The ALP wants to offer top teachers up to $100,000 a year to work in the toughest schools and offer all teachers a pay rise of up to $10,000 a year if they meet rigorous standards. But performance pay advocates have criticised Labor's plan because it would not link teachers' pay to student success in exams or the views of parents and principals, but to accreditation by a bureaucratic body.

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"


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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

No comments: