Friday, June 01, 2007

Students at UCI Fight Back Against Campus Intifada

The University of California at Irvine has earned a reputation as a campus where anti-Semitism and the vilification of Israel is welcome. In the past, for instance, UCI students have attended graduation ceremonies wearing Hamas paraphernalia. Now some pro-Israel and conservative students are fighting back by utilizing the California Whistleblowers Act.

The students' complaint centers around administrators who forced the College Republicans on campus to remove their display in a previously reserved space, in order to make room for yet another anti-Israel display on campus. According to the complaint: "On Thursday May 17, 2007, the College Republicans set up their booth in a location 46 as scheduled at 11 AM, but ten minutes later a university administrator from the UCI scheduling and Conferencing Services Department approached the CR's booth accompanied by a member of the Muslim Students Association on campus demanding the Republicans move their booth and display so the MSU could put in the same previously reserved location two large displays promoting MSU events."

Anteaters for Israel, a group of UC Irvine students who try to counteract the anti-Israel displays and activities on campus, have joined the College Republicans to complain that the MSU displays were set up specifically because they blocked the view of their pro-Israel displays, silencing the College Republicans by moving them to a less visible area on the campus. The MSU display, once assembled, required students and other passersby to walk around it to traverse that area of the campus.

Although complaints were made to the university's communications director, Leslie Millerd, who is also part of the Chancellor's Student Affairs department, she insisted that the College Republicans move -- even after being shown written proof of the advance space reservation made weeks earlier.

The students complaint charges that this is a violation of the US Constitution's First Amendment that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." In addition, they say that it violates the school's own policy, listed as Appendix C, which clearly states: "The University of California, in accordance with applicable Federal and State law and University policy, does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, pregnancy*, disability, age, medical condition (cancer-related), ancestry, marital status, citizenship, sexual orientation, or status as a Vietnam-era veteran or special disabled veteran. The University also prohibits sexual harassment. This nondiscrimination policy covers admission, access, and treatment in University programs and activities."

As the students see it, university administrators overstepped their bounds by restricting the free speech rights of two other conservative and pro-Israel organizations on campus to the benefit of the MSU.

Another legal basis for the complaint is the Unruh Civil Rights Act, California Civil Code, sections 51 to 51.3, which also provides equal protection under the law and "full and equal accommodations, advantage to facilities, privileges or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever." Another UCI Campus Policy #42.20, Section D, Paragraph 1 and other campus rules were also violated prohibiting excessively large displays and using more than one banner of an approved size at the event.

For anyone who has seen anti-Israel displays at UCI, they are enormous and designed to inundate the entire area, forcing students to be surrounded by them. Student leaders from both the College Republicans and Anteaters for Israel are demanding that the campus officials involved be investigated, prosecuted and fired.

At the last Palestine Solidarity Movement conference at Georgetown University, in February 2006, seminars were held where attendees were instructed on how to enlist campus administrators in their anti-Israel campaigns. At the University of California at Irvine, they have evidently succeeded.

Still, the question remains: Did UCI officials intentionally hinder conservative and pro-Israel organizations on campus from speaking out? If so, one can only hope that authorities step in to protect the rights that, it seems, some politically motivated faculty will not.

Source




Independent schools are the model to which state schools should aspire

By Joanna Mendelssohn, commenting from Australia

RECENTLY I had a reunion with my very first friend, Anne. Our parents had been neighbours so we were babies together. Anne is blessed with an analytical talent for numbers, yet is a born communicator. She became a maths teacher. For more than 35 years she has taught maths to generations of students in state schools, in the city and the country.

She was able to take this path because, when we left school at the end of 1967, the NSW Education Department gave her a teaching scholarship that paid all fees and a generous allowance in return for her agreement to teach. This used to be the norm across the country; bonded teaching scholarships gave ordinary Australians the opportunity for a financially comfortable university education while ensuring a steady supply of young, qualified teachers for the state system.

In the 1970s, with the baby boom at an end, the system changed. Suddenly there was an oversupply of qualified teachers, so newly qualified teachers were freed of both their bonds and guaranteed jobs. Those who really wanted to teach could find soul-destroying work as casual relief staff until a vacancy occurred, but many left teaching altogether.

Before other avenues were open to us, teaching was often seen as the ideal profession for women, but by the 1980s this was not the case; there were also problems with teacher education. Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan's research at the Australian National University has tracked the entry grades of teaching students during a 20-year period. From 1983 to 2003, the percentile rank of teaching students fell from 74 to 61, while the rank of new teachers fell from 70 to 62. The drift was to a mediocre middle.

In those years the teaching force in state schools, bulging with teachers who had qualified in the late '60s, became stagnant as few new staff were employed. When, after years of casual teaching, young teachers finally found a job, they were often already burned out by a system that had failed them.

Anne told me of the school she remembers with greatest affection. It was deep in rural NSW. Because this school was so distant from any big town, the staff had no choice. They had to live near the families of the children they taught and they had to relate to the community. Teachers also socialised with each other outside of school hours. The direct result of this physical isolation was a culture of connectedness between the staff, students and community, and they worked together for the common good. Whenever I hear politicians speak of values and education in the same sentence, I think of this country school.

Education has been dragged to the centre stage of the political debate, where it is squabbled over as some kind of trophy in an increasingly infantile battle between politicians, teachers unions and dogma-led lobby groups. Meanwhile, parents are left puzzling their way through the verbiage as they try to decide which school can possibly deliver the most appropriate education for their children.

The problem with Australian schools is not whether they are independent, state or faith-based, but the size of their governing bureaucracy and the nature of the culture within that bureaucracy. State schools, independent schools and faith-based schools all teach to the same curriculum (albeit a different one in each state). The first great advantage of independent schools is not their manicured sports grounds or sandstone buildings (some of the best schools have neither). It is that they are small, discrete entities. The bureaucracy has a human scale and an easily identified chain of command. Parents and children know where to go if they have a problem. Each school employs its own staff and is free to foster their professional development, and promote them when they excel.

It used to be the case that teachers working in independent or faith-based schools tended to be poorly qualified in comparison with those in state schools. They were also paid considerably less. As the salaries and status of state teachers sank, in a kind of seesaw effect, the salaries, status and qualifications of teachers in independent schools rose.

The way this happened is at the heart of the state of school education today. When the state systems would not employ their newly trained teachers, private and faith-based schools leapt at the chance to upgrade their staff, and many state school-trained teachers, once rejected, now hold leadership positions in elite independent schools.

In the '70s and '80s, innovative principals, including Rod West of Sydney's Trinity Grammar, went out of their way to encourage first-class scholars to think of teaching as a career. Thanks to a significant real increase in school fees and increased government support for non-state schools, teachers in these schools are paid the same or more than those in the state system. They do, however, earn their money, as these teachers are faced with far higher expectations. As well as teaching in the classroom, teachers in independent and faith-based schools are expected to become a part of the school community. They need to be available (often by email) out of school hours and, above all, to adopt the ethos of the school where they work. It is amazing what a school can achieve if the entire school community is travelling in the same direction.

The key to developing quality teachers in whatever system comes back to how they are appointed, mentored and promoted. Good schools look after their staff. Smaller, flexible administrative units make it easier for independent schools to identify the talent, mentor new staff to ease them into a career path and then promote staff or redeploy them to where they can be most useful to the school.

By contrast, state systems are still struggling to free themselves from their historic bureaucratic past. Australia's state school systems were established well before Federation, when every state proclaimed itself to be a nation. In other English-speaking countries, where the population was less sparse, schools tended to be run by local authorities. Australia is unique in the immense size and scope of our centralised education administration. There is in any bureaucratic institution a tendency to "team think". In schools, this tendency was exacerbated by a tightly controlled employment structure where, for more than a century, almost all employees had started as school-leavers and risen up a well-defined hierarchy.

Because the dominant group entering this workforce was from an aspirational working-class background, there was from the start a strong union presence. The union presence was embedded within the departmental hierarchy so the junior teacher would often discover that the person supervising her was also the union representative.

Times change, but workplace cultures change slowly. Although there have been some reforms in the way staff are appointed, it is still the case that individual state schools in Australia have less flexibility in appointing and dismissing staff than government-funded schools in equivalent countries.

The Prime Minister has recently declared that he will require a situation where principals alone have the choice to hire and fire staff. At the same time, he has declared a fatwa on bullying in schools. I'm not sure that replacing an unfeeling bureaucracy with an authoritarian hierarchy is going to change school cultures to something inclusive.

A school is a large and complex organisation. Surely the best way to build a team with the school community is to have each school appoint staff, but using a committee that includes parents and colleagues as well as the hierarchy. Bringing the community into the life of the school is a big task. Independent and Catholic schools do this well by co-opting that most effective cultural glue, Saturday sport. All students in these schools are expected to play a team sport and every Saturday, across the country, parents are car pooling and driving to ovals in distant parts of the city. At the ovals parent groups run barbecues, and cheer on their children. The teachers also participate as coaches and wise school principals call by. The schools' sense of community comes from such small weekly acts.

If sporting clubs could liaise with local state schools and be funded so that all state school children could play competitive Saturday sport, and if state teachers could also be involved with supporting their students, then more parents would be involved in the daily life of their schools. It is the kind of cultural glue our schools need to make them strong and help give them a sense of community.

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"


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 INTERNATIONAL 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.

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