Tuesday, May 06, 2008

McCain's School Choice Opportunity

If only Jeremiah Wright had got the right conspiracy. When Barack Obama's pastor was caught on tape accusing the government of inventing HIV for "genocide against people of color," it was dismissed as another crazy conspiracy theory - which of course it was. But what if the Rev. Wright had used his pulpit to direct a little fire-and-brimstone against a very real outrage: a public-school system that's depriving millions of children of the education they need to compete in the 21st century economy?

Scarcely half of American children in our 50 largest cities will leave their public schools with a high-school diploma in hand, according to a study released by America's Promise Alliance. These children are disproportionately African-American. Their homes are disproportionately located in our largest public school districts. And the failure is a scar on this great land of opportunity.

Alma and Colin Powell, leaders in the alliance that produced this report, spoke about the human blight that can follow the lack of a basic education in an op-ed in the Washington Times. "Students who drop out," they wrote, "are more likely to be incarcerated, to rely on public programs and social services and to go without health insurance than their fellow students who graduate."

That isn't the intent of those who administer this system. But that is the result. And only a latter-day Bull Connor could be happy with the way our inner-city public schools are consigning millions of African Americans to the margins of American opportunity and prosperity.

And it gets worse. One of the few hopeful alternatives in these cities are the Catholic schools, which take the very same students and show that they can learn if given the chance. One University of Chicago researcher found that minority students at Catholic schools are 42% likelier to complete high school than their public school counterparts - and 2 1/2 times more likely to earn a college degree. In difficult circumstances, and for an increasingly non-Catholic student body, these schools are doing heroic work. Unfortunately, another study released this month, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, reports that Catholic schools are closing at an alarming rate: More than 1,300 since 1990. Most are located in our cities.

These numbers were behind the special White House summit on Inner-City Schoolchildren and Faith-Based Schools convened last Thursday. The emphasis on faith-based schools is a reflection of practicality, because turning around a failing public school or starting up a new one is difficult, costly and takes time that these children can't afford. "Many of the parents I know in D.C. are looking for a safe place for their children," says Virginia Walden-Ford, a summit participant and leader with the Black Alliance for Educational Options. "Their children can't afford to wait - they need a place now."

That's the education problem. The political problem has three parts. First, though polls show that African Americans generally favor school choice, they tend not to vote for pro-school-choice candidates who are mainly Republican. Second, suburban voters of both parties are not enthusiastic about school choice. Many of these voters see increasing options for inner city kids as enabling blacks and Latinos to find their way into their children's schools. And of course, the teachers unions devote their considerable resources to fighting any measure that increases accountability or gives parents more options.

So when politicians have to choose between a teachers union and some African-American mom who would like to take her son out of a failing public school, guess who usually wins?

This system has had remarkable staying power; but the cracks are appearing. In cities like Washington, D.C., and Newark, N.J., African-American mayors like Anthony Williams and Cory Booker - Democrats both - have taken courageous stands to offer children more and better school options. And these brave souls are being joined by a growing number of parents, pastors and advocates who recognize that the status quo is cheating their children out of a chance at the American Dream.

There's a good opening here for John McCain. As a senator, he has been a forceful voice for giving lower-income moms and dads the same options for their children that wealthier parents already enjoy. What if he took this campaign into the heart of our cities - and gave a little straight talk about the scandal that their public-school systems represent in this great land of opportunity?

Hillary Clinton can't do it for the same reason that Barack Obama can't: They cannot offend the teachers unions that are arguably the most powerful constituents in their party. John McCain can. Will he?

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Can schools teach kids to think?

The introduction of `thinking skills' in British schools treats educational thought as a learned behaviour. But children are not dogs to be trained.

From September 2008, pupils starting secondary school in England are going to be taught to think. This begs the question, what have schools been doing up until now? Nevertheless, from now on young people are to be explicitly taught thinking skills. It is tempting to believe that this will result in the opening up of a new world of intellectual possibilities for young minds. but paradoxically, it is more likely to convince teachers and pupils alike that thinking is a conditioned reflex that just needs to be trained.

The promotion of the teaching of thinking skills is not new to education. The UK government has been encouraging the uptake of these ideas in secondary schools, as part of its attempt to drive up standards, for the past five years (1). But now the skills-based approach to learning has taken centre stage with the launch of the new national curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds. The UK Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) published a `framework of personal, learning and thinking skills'. As the QCA says, this will give young people the skills `to enter work and adult life as confident and capable individuals'. According to the framework, pupils are to be encouraged to become `reflective learners', `creative thinkers', `team workers', `self-managers', `independent enquirers' and `effective participators'. This is the language of management training, not education. Deriving from the government's obsession with making education relevant to the perceived needs of business and society, the introduction of the explicit teaching of `thinking skills' is a political project.

The new national curriculum presents school education as a series of outcomes (2). Each outcome is explicitly a vision of the type of young people the QCA thinks society needs and wants. The actual subject matter of education only comes as an afterthought, hidden as a set of abbreviations in a minor strap line under `statutory expectations'. Clearly, according to the QCA, education is not about the transmission of knowledge. In fact, knowledge either gets in the way of learning transferable skills, or subjects are included only because they allow skills to be developed.

But surely introducing the teaching of thinking skills in the curriculum will improve pupils' chances of a good education? I beg to differ - for two reasons. First, the attempt to train pupils to think is based on a cognitive model of the human being as a biological machine. The attempt to teach thinking skills implies that thought is a learned behaviour, like a dog learning a trick. Once the trick is learned, apparently it happens automatically and, by definition, needs no further thought. The promotion of thinking skills is an attack on intellectual life, on thought itself.

Secondly, the promise of thinking skills is a hollow one. Even in its own terms, the development of thinking skills is about conditioning individual behaviour. It reduces the scope for creativity, the very thing it aspires to promote. We can't conjure up good ideas just by sitting down for half an hour and thinking about creating new ideas. The best that the thinking-skills approach has to offer is the illusion that good ideas are already there, just waiting for us to find them. This traps thought in our own heads. Creativity, like thought, is the result of an active engagement with society and with ideas themselves, not the action of a single mind trained inside a classroom environment.

During a recent training day for schoolteachers, I was asked to take part in an exercise based on (3) the approach to problem-solving developed in the book Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono, a well-known British physician, author, inventor and consultant. For this exercise we were given a problem and a card with one of the six hats explained on it. Each hat involves taking a different perspective (not necessarily your own) when discussing the problem at hand. The perspectives ranged from emotional, critical, objective, positive, creative to organisational. By discussing a problem from all these different perspectives, we are meant to arrive at `the answer', if it exists, in a faster, more systematic fashion.

The exercise was trivial, but what struck me was the introduction of de Bono into the classroom. Again, this is explicitly the language of management training rather than education. From this management perspective, knowledge is not considered to be very important. After all, business and management decisions are not made in the pursuit of knowledge - rather they are made in order to develop a position that can be defended and acted on. In the business world, once a decision is taken it must be transparent and accountable. Above all, decisions must be taken positively and leave no room for criticism. That is fine for management circles - but it is the very antithesis of the intellectual pursuit of knowledge, which must be more open-ended, more falsifiable, more open to continuing debate and development. De Bono made his name in the field of management consultancy - and what does that have to do with education?

De Bono himself is explicit about his suspicion of intellectualism. He says: `A true intellectual has as deep a fear of simplicity as a farmer has of droughts.' (4) His approach is the solution of problems in simple terms in the here and now. His approach is completely divorced from the intellectual tradition of human thought. In fact, argument and criticism - the tools of philosophers and thinkers in any serious field of knowledge - are to be dispensed with in the de Bono outlook, since they apparently lead to a `dangerous arrogance'. Instead, de Bono wants us to focus on positive, creative thinking and, as he calls it, `operacy'. By `operacy', he means `the skills of doing'. He warns us: `On a personal level, youngsters who do not acquire the skills of operacy will need to remain in an academic setting.'

It is no surprise, then, that de Bono is a fervent critic of school-based education. His books on education stress that his methods and not formal academic education are the real key to success. As he says in Teach Your Child How To Think, `Do not wait for school to do it. Where is "thinking" in the curriculum?' (5) He will be pleased to see that thinking is now included in the new national curriculum, and it's the kind of thinking he will approve of - a pared-down, simplistic view of thinking as a means to solving problems and `being creative'. In other words: anti-intellectual thinking.

Why are explicitly anti-intellectual thinkers like de Bono being included in school-training exercises and the development of the new curriculum? Why is thinking being taught as a skill separate and distinct from the pursuit of knowledge and education more broadly? These are worrying developments indeed, which are likely further to corrode excellence and ambition in British schools, and churn out children who are `skilled' but not very thoughtful or truly reflective. The paradox is that now, when we have all become obsessed with education, formal education is being torn down brick by brick. Learning about the intellectual tradition from which this society emerged is the best way to give young people a sense of where and who they are. This in turn will give them the basis upon which to struggle for a better society. No amount of empty-headed `brainstorming' sessions is going to bring about those kinds of ideas.

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Homeschoolers in court: We're constitutional

'Parents have a protected liberty interest to direct the education of their children'

An amicus brief has been filed in a California court case that at one point threatened homeschooling by hundreds of thousands of people statewide, and it argues the U.S. and California Constitutions both recognize the fundamental rights of parents to direct the education of their children. WND broke the story at the end of February when a ruling concluded parents in the state held neither a statutory right nor a constitutional right to provide homeschooling to their own children.

That ruling from the California Court of Appeal for the 2nd Appellate District was vacated when the court granted a petition to rehear the case, and the new filing is from the Pacific Justice Institute on behalf of Sunland Christian Academy, the private school that offers the independent program in which the family's children were enrolled. The father in the case is represented separately by the United States Justice Foundation and the Alliance Defense Fund, which have been working on the case's main arguments to the court.

"The Fifth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, as well as Article 1, [paragraphs] 1 and 7, of the California Constitution, protect the fundamental due process and privacy liberties of Californians," according to the Pacific Justice brief which cited court cases addressing the right to marry, establish a home and bring up children, the right for parents to educate children as they choose, the "private realm of family life," and others. "The areas represent 'a realm of personal liberty' which the government may not enter," said the filing.

"Our legal team has put in many long hours to ensure that the voice of homeschooling families is heard clearly and persuasively in the Court of Appeal," said Brad Dacus, president of PJI. "It is absolutely essential that our judicial system continues to recognize parents' age-old rights to determine how best to raise and educate their own children."

The original opinion, written by Appeals Court Judge H. Walt Croskey, said: "We find no reason to strike down the Legislature's evaluation of what constitutes an adequate education scheme sufficient to promote the 'general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence. . We agree . 'the educational program of the State of California was designed to promote the general welfare of all the people and was not designed to accommodate the personal ideas of any individual in the field of education.'" The appeals ruling said California law requires "persons between the ages of six and 18" to be in school, "the public full-time day school," with exemptions being allowed for those in a "private full-time day school" or those "instructed by a tutor who holds a valid state teaching credential for the grade being taught."

Homeschool advocates immediately expressed concern the original ruling would leave parents who educate their children at home liable criminally as well as open to civil charges for child neglect that could create the potential for fines, court-ordered parenting classes or even the loss of custody under extreme circumstances. But the appeals court vacated the opinion, ordering a new hearing. Sunland had asked for permission to participate formally in the case, since the children involved were registered in its program, but the court declined. It did grant Sunland, which is represented by Pacific Justice, permission to file an amicus brief on the issues.

The Pacific Justice brief notes the state already recognizes private schools including those with independent study programs, and Sunland has been approved by the formal regulatory procedures in the state. "Parents have a constitutionally protected liberty interest to direct the upbringing and education of their children," the brief said. "Thus to avoid finding the compulsory education laws unconstitutional, the courts should seek to interpret the statutory scheme in a manner that does not intrude upon this fundamental right."

The argument continued, "The Supreme Court of the United States has long held that the interest of parents to direct and manage the education and upbringing of their children is a fundamental right protected by the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. ... California courts have also invoked the principles ... that personal liberty is a fundamental interest, second only to life itself, as an interest protected under both the California and United States Constitutions."

The appeals court also, in its order for a rehearing, expanded the case far beyond the original family situation involved to include an evaluation of whether the state laws regarding homeschooling allow that activity, and whether the state is in conflict with any U.S. Constitution provisions regrading homeschooling. Additionally, the court asked the state's superintendent of public instruction, the California State Board of Education, the Los Angeles school district, the California Teachers Association and the Los Angeles teachers' union for their opinions on homeschooling. Other homeschooling interests were told they could file briefs, and the court said they would be considered. Oral arguments are scheduled in June.

The original opinion arose from a dependency case brought in juvenile court. In the process, attorneys assigned by the court to the family's two younger children sought a court order for them to be enrolled in a public or qualifying private school. The district court denied the request citing parental rights, but the appellate court overturned the decision and granted the attorneys' request. The appeals court concluded the parents held neither a statutory right nor a constitutional right to provide homeschooling to their own children in the opinion that later was vacated. "Parents have a fundamental right to make educational choices for their children," said Gary McCaleb, a senior counsel for the ADF. "Because this ruling impacts all of Californians, we believe the case deserves a second look." "Another look at this case will help ensure that the fundamental rights of parents are fully protected," Kreep added.

Also involved in the case on behalf of the parents is the Home School Legal Defense Association, which said it would seek permission to file amicus briefs on the issues. A long list of homeschool groups working in the state previously released a statement on the issue that could affect 200,000 students. Joining were the California Homeschool Network, Christian Home Educators Association of California, Private and Home Educators of California and HomeSchool Association of California. "We are united in the goal of protecting the right of parents to teach their children private at home without additional governmental interference," the statement said. "We believe that children deserve to learn in the environment that best meets their individual needs. We support the right of parents to direct their children's education including, if they desire, teaching their children privately at home apart from any public school program and without a teaching credential."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the president has supported homeschoolers in the past.

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