No law broken but kid charged and punished

Fanaticism about drugs gets out of hand again. The slightest reference to guns or drugs causes American school administrators to lose their marbles

Denton County prosecutors decided Friday to wash their hands of a case against a Lewisville middle school student accused of trying to get high by sniffing his teacher's hand sanitizer. Three days after filing delinquency charges against the youth, prosecutors did a turnaround and decided that the common cleaning gel is not an abusive inhalant under the Texas Health and Safety Code. "It's not a crime. Hand sanitizer does not fall within that statute," said Jamie Beck, first assistant district attorney in Denton County. "The police agency brought it up mistakenly thinking it was."

Richard Ortiz, the father of the seventh-grader, welcomed the news late Friday but expressed frustration that the case, which began in October, went as far as it did. Mr. Ortiz, who asked that his 14-year-old son's name not be published, said the boy was embarrassed and humiliated by the charge. He described his son as a well-behaved teenager who makes good grades. "They were going to prosecute my son," Mr. Ortiz said. "He still has that stigma. People know him as a drug user, and he's not."

Mr. Ortiz's attorney, J. Michael Price II of Dallas, said he believes that the Denton County prosecutor's office acted quickly to drop the case once he brought the matter to the attention of Ms. Beck on Friday morning. "I told her I didn't think a law had been violated," Mr. Price said. "She made the appropriate decision without a lot of delay."

Mr. Ortiz said the family's ordeal began Oct. 19, when his son picked up a bottle of hand sanitizer from the desk of his fifth-period reading teacher at Killian Middle School in Lewisville. He rubbed the gel on his hands and smelled it. In the view of school officials, the boy "inhaled heavily," according to Mr. Ortiz, who said his son sniffed the cleanser "because it smelled good." The youth was sent to the principal's office, and the Lewisville police officer assigned to the school began investigating.

"The event happened at the campus," said Dean Tackett, a spokesman for the Lewisville Independent School District. "But once the police took it over, it was a police investigation. They decide if there are charges and what kind of charges."

The teen was required to serve a brief in-school suspension and was also fingerprinted and photographed at the Lewisville Police Department. He returned to regular classes at the school, including one with the teacher whose sanitizer he sniffed.

Mr. Ortiz said he believed the matter was over until Tuesday when he was served with a petition charging his son with delinquency for inhaling the hand sanitizer to "induce a condition of intoxication, hallucination and elation." He said he couldn't believe that his son would have to go to court for smelling hand sanitizer. "I think it's ludicrous," said Mr. Ortiz, who blames overzealous police and prosecutors for initially pursuing the case.

Joni Eddy, assistant police chief in Lewisville, said Friday that hand sanitizer has become a popular inhalant. "That is the latest thing to huff," she said. She said officers felt they were acting properly when they pursued the case against Mr. Ortiz's son under a complex state statute governing volatile chemicals that could be abused. "The charge said he was using the product other than its intended use," she said. "Huffing hand sanitizer is certainly using it for something other than its intended use." Hand sanitizers usually contain a high percentage of ethyl alcohol, a flammable liquid used in a wide range of industrial products and alcoholic beverages.

Shirley Simson, a spokeswoman for the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Washington, said in an e-mail that the agency had no data about hand sanitizers being abused as inhalants. She noted, however, that there have been news reports of some people drinking hand sanitizers for their alcohol content.

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British white working class boys failing

Government figures show only 15% of white working class boys in England got five good GCSEs [intermediate High School qualification] including maths and English last year. Among white boys from more affluent homes - 45% achieved that level of qualification. Poorer pupils from Indian and Chinese backgrounds fared much better - with 36% and 52% making that grade respectively.

Ministers say they are narrowing the gap between affluent and poorer pupils. The national average for all pupils in England achieving five good GCSEs including English and maths (A* to C) was 46% last year.

Liberal Democrat spokesman David Laws said: "We should be ashamed to live in a country where there is such a huge gap between rich and poor children. "To have 85% of white boys from poor families failing to achieve five good GCSEs including English and maths is truly shocking. "The government has failed to tackle the chasm that exists between the opportunities of most of the poorest and the richest in our society. "We need a massive targeted increase in funding for deprived young people, to allow more catch-up classes and additional support to give every child a chance."

Shadow children's secretary Michael Gove said: "The government's failure to improve standards in education has hit the poorest hardest. We need a school system that allows bright children to succeed regardless of their economic background. "We can only achieve this by focusing on the basics like getting all children reading after two years of primary school. Instead we still have a system where the achievement gap between rich and poor pupils grows as they progress through their school careers."

GSCE performance data released by the government in November did not include details of pupils receiving free school meals - an indicator of poverty. Those details have now been published.

Schools Minister Jim Knight said: "Closing the attainment gap in education remains a top priority, and we have made encouraging recent progress. "There has been good news on our efforts to address social mobility, with pupils eligible for free school meals improving faster than average. "Between 2003 and 2007, pupils eligible for free school meals who achieved 5 good GCSEs rose 11.1 percentage points from 24.4% to 35.5%. For non-free school meals pupils, the increase was 7.6 percentage points, from 55.2% to 62.8%. "Alongside pupils on free school meals, previously disadvantaged groups are also doing better. Over the last four years, black pupils have made the biggest improvement, at almost twice the national average." Policies had been introduced to try to help underachieving boys, he said.

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The ability to look at pictures is just as good as being able to read

That seems to be the nutty idea of education put forward by a very mixed-up Australian Leftist below -- as far as one can tell

An academic and former high school teacher has returned fire in the literacy wars, claiming that universal skills tests advantage "certain groups of students and marginalise others". Monash University's Ilana Snyder accuses The Australian of running an ideological campaign against outcomes-based education. In a new book, The Literacy Wars, Dr Snyder questions the motives of those favouring a return to a more rigorous and literature-based senior English curriculum. And she questions this newspaper's advocacy of correct grammar and basic literacy skills, labelling it as a push to restore "something resembling the cultural heritage model associated with Matthew Arnold at the end of the 19th century".

"Some students possess the cultural and social capital that helps them to understand the particular language associated with testing and to decode the questions, but for others there are no such advantages," Dr Snyder argues. "As a result, differences in literacy achievement as measured by standardised tests need to be approached with caution." If a test measures print-oriented skills, for instance, this might disadvantage children "who prefer digital forms of literacy". [Meaning pictures? Or does she mean that reading words in a book is different in kind from reading the same words on a computer screen? Wacky, however you look at it] Dr Snyder goes on to argue that literacy itself is a "highly contested word". It is not a notion like 'car' or 'holiday' which demand a reasonable level of agreement about their meaning," she writes.

Macquarie University Professor of Education Kevin Wheldall said such theories were "barking mad". "Many middle-class children will learn to read and to appreciate literature in spite of what happens at school," he said. "I am concerned about the children who are not surrounded by books at home and whose parents are not able to help them with reading and writing. "If I was cynical, I would say those who oppose teaching phonics and giving all children the chance to appreciate literature are out to keep Aboriginal children, poor white kids, and migrants for whom English is a second language, in their place. To use the awful jargon, the current approach privileges those who have help at home.

"I come from a working-class family in England and had it not been for the 11-plus exam (a test taken at the end of primary school in England) getting me into a grammar school I would probably be a baker like my father rather than a professor of education."

Dr Snyder, an associate professor of education who taught high school English for 10 years, repeatedly singles out this newspaper's reports, editorials and columnists -- including Kevin Donnelly, Luke Slattery and Christopher Pearson -- for her criticism. She admits it was "the Murdoch paper's crusade against contemporary approaches to literacy education" that motivated her to write the book. "It is time to hold them to account."

Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of The Australian and The Weekend Australian, said he was more than happy to be "held to account" and the literacy wars were not about a conservative versus leftist political agenda. "A good grounding in reading, writing and maths, followed by a broad, traditional liberal education gives children, especially the poor, the best chance to do well in life," Mr Mitchell said. "Dumbing down the curriculum hurts everyone, but it hurts disadvantaged children the most." He said The Australian had run a wide-ranging debate on a very important subject, covering all points of view.

Yesterday, Dr Snyder said that she had written the book because she was "irritated by the polarisation of the debate" and by what she regarded as "misrepresentations of what is taught in English and in teacher education at universities". In the book, she is critical of The Australian for embracing the findings of the Teaching Reading report from the national literacy inquiry, which called for a return to phonics as part of the mix in teaching reading. The inquiry, headed by Ken Rowe, found that trainee teachers needed to be taught how to teach reading through phonics as well as whole-word recognition.

Yesterday she said that, like the inquiry, she favoured students being taught to read with a combination of phonics and whole word recognition. "It's not a case of either/or," she said.

Describing herself as a "book lover", Dr Snyder -- who enjoys Philip Roth, Ian McEwan, Shakespeare and the Greek playwrights -- said she had no objections to students studying Shakespeare from modern perspectives such as Marxism. She also said it was essential that students studied popular culture such as teenage magazines and films so they were able to be critical of it. "Fights over a Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare or a text message on an exam miss the point," she writes. "At their core, the literacy wars are the result of competing views and beliefs about society -- what it is, what it has been, and what it should become."

Dr Snyder now wants the debate to move to the issue of extra funding for state schools. In her book she accuses The Australian of a "particularly ferocious campaign" against outcomes-based education, introduced as "a way of increasing social justice" and in response to the quest for greater accountability. Dr Snyder says the push by "conservatives" for a return to more traditional English literature in secondary school is "related to deeper political discussions about the moral ordering of life and the regulation of people".

Ensuring students study "books from the Western canon" can "also train students to be governed by an aesthetic and moral code associated with the cultural heritage model, an approach that originated in Victorian England with little relevance to Australia at the beginning of the 21st century."

Dr Snyder said research showed that working with computer games in literacy classrooms "provides students with additional means of expression and communication to those dependent on print skills". [So kids need to go to school to learn how to play computer games? The woman really is barking mad]

University of Queensland professor Ken Wiltshire said the critical literacy movement offered nothing positive to the education debate. "It seeks to destroy the fundamentals and principles of sound curriculum development as practised in all countries of the developed world and most emerging ones as well," he said. "Make no mistake, this author is part of a sinister assault on Australia's educational standards and values. Her approach, like the movement she represents, is an elitist one, since the only students who are really competent to handle critical literacy are the ones who already have an excellent grounding in the basic literature."

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Australia: "Expert" on America not Leftist enough

A POLITICAL scientist who insists that globalisation is not the enemy of the Left will be the first leader of the controversial United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Geoffrey Garrett, an Australian-born academic who has made his mark in the US as an analyst of global politics and economics, is expected to take up the post as chief executive inMarch.

The centre's stated rationale is to remedy a lack of serious study of the US at a time of rising anti-American sentiment. Critics on the Left dismiss it as a propaganda vehicle. Former prime minister John Howard and News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, whose company owns The Australian, were both instrumental in setting up the centre.

Professor Garrett, president of the Los Angeles-based Pacific Council on International Policy, said the Sydney centre offered "an almost unique opportunity" to study the overlapping roles of Australia and the US as "the Asia-Pacific century" unfolded.

He said globalisation was more complex than implied by leftist critics and boosters on the Right. For example, in the developing world, globalisation had helped China but not Latin America. "Twenty years ago, everyone on the Left believed that globalisation was the death knell of traditional Left intervention in the economy," he said. "(Yet) there is smart government involvement in the economy, which helps you compete. A classic example of that would be education, where the market tends to undersupply." [The man is a fool if he believes that. The world is suffering from OVER-credentialization. And that has been known for years to be so.]

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