Sex Education Contributes to Delinquency

(Juneau County, Wisconsin) Here's a case where the law is at odds with progressive sexual attitudes in schools.

A district attorney is telling Juneau County schools to abandon their sex education courses, saying a new curriculum law could lead to criminal charges against teachers for contributing to the delinquency of minors.

Starting in the fall, the new law requires schools that have sex education programs to tell students how to use condoms and other contraceptives. Juneau County District Attorney Scott Southworth said such education encourages sex among children, which is illegal, and could lead to charges against teachers.

The new law "promotes the sexualization - and sexual assault - of our children," Southworth wrote in a March 24 letter to officials in five school districts. He urged the districts to suspend their sex education programs and transfer their curriculum on anatomy to a science course.

"Forcing our schools to instruct children on how to utilize contraceptives encourages our children to engage in sexual behavior, whether as a victim or an offender," he wrote. "It is akin to teaching children about alcohol use, then instructing them on how to make mixed alcoholic drinks."

It will be interesting to follow this case. Both sides have legitimate arguments but the law, obviously, has the upper hand. I suspect it will end up in court real soon.

Banning prayer in schools hurts public morality

I got the most pleasant of surprises at a funeral. The service had reached the point where an Old Testament passage had to be read. The one selected was the 23rd Psalm. As the woman reading it pronounced each word, I found myself following along. I didn't remember each and every sentence, but I remembered most of it.

I said along with the woman as she read, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

As the reading concluded, I sat in the pew and asked myself, "How did I remember that after all these years?"

My first memory of the 23rd Psalm is not from hearing it in a church, but in school. I distinctly remember hearing a Miss Pemberton in my kindergarten class. The year must have been 1956, maybe 1957. The 23rd Psalm was the Scripture reading of choice for most days; somehow, the repeated readings must have been ingrained in me.

Sitting in that pew earlier this year, I marveled at how I was able to remember the passage, and I pondered this question:

What harm did the reading of all those passages of the 23rd Psalm do to me? The answer is none at all. But one day past Easter in the year 2010, all of us -- even the ones who don't consider ourselves very religious -- might ask ourselves what harm has come from the 1962 Supreme Court decision that banned prayer and Scripture reading from the nation's public schools.

Now before you dismiss me as some born-again nut job on a religious rant, some clarification is in order. I'm a Roman Catholic, but not a very good one. I haven't been to confession in years and I attend Mass only sparingly. But I've listened to black senior citizens for years who swear that America went to hell in a handbasket once God or any mention of God was kicked out of public schools, with condoms being let in a short time later.

Ordinarily I would dismiss such talk as typical "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" (after the fact, therefore because of the fact) reasoning. This line of thinking is often flawed, but I believe the elders may be onto something this time.

They're not the only ones who've noticed. In late 2007, a group of black men traveled from Baltimore to Philadelphia to hear the lame-duck mayor and police commissioner of that city talk. Both cities were trying to solve frighteningly high homicide numbers, with the victims mainly being young black men.

Both the then-mayor and then-police commissioner told the group that they'd been hearing from black Philadelphians that maybe the time had come to allow prayer and Scripture reading back in public schools. And these were two Democrats speaking, mind you. It's amazing what a high body count will do.

Those elderly black folks remember what America's black communities were like back in the days when we had school prayer. Yes, there was segregation. But there was also some kind of moral center.

Never would there have been a situation where a young mother could murder her 1-month-old son, bury him in a park, and some members of the community threaten the father for reporting the mother to police. That's exactly what happened to the father of the late Rajahnthon Haynie in Baltimore last month. There were actually people out to get the father for "snitching" on the mother.

It doesn't quite sound like a generation inculcated with values of "goodness and mercy," does it?

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The Wall of Hate

by Mike Adams

This week, April 5th through 8th, my university is doing something really neat. A bunch of organizations – including the NAACP, PRIDE, and the Black Student Union – are sponsoring a “Breaking Down Hate” week. Since the planned events only run Monday through Thursday it isn’t really a “week”. Despite the preponderance of white people on our campus there doesn’t seem to be enough hate to keep the anti-hate people busy all the way through Friday.

The printed flier for the “Breaking Down Hate” almost-week talks about a thing called the “Wall of Hate,” which has been a part of our campus diversity movement for three years. The flier invites students to “share insensitive, intolerant, and hateful words that (they) feel should no longer be accepted in (the campus) community with the WALL OF HATE.” After students write down the words, they spray paint over them as a symbol of the eradication of hate.

I’ve made fun of the wall of hate in the past. But I’m not making fun of it anymore. That’s just hateful. This year, I’m going to the “wall of hate” all four days of “Breaking Down Hate” almost-week. In fact, I’m going twice each day to write down a hateful word. My “Great Eight Words of Hate” are listed below. Each is followed by the reason why I chose to write each word before covering it with spray paint:

Colored. Few people realize that the “C” in “NAACP” stands for “colored.” Where I come from, the term “colored” is racially insensitive and hateful. Therefore, I think anyone who uses that term is a hater. In fact, I think the NAACP is potentially a hate group in need of a close second look by the IRS. I’m even considering writing the Southern Poverty Law Center to put them on notice of another potential hate group.

PRIDE. I read somewhere that pride cometh before a fall. And this group – People Recognizing Individual Differences Exist (PRIDE) – is a very proud bunch. They think it’s a great idea that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) declassified homosexuality as a mental illness (many years ago). But they celebrated the victory by coining the term “homophobia.” This was meant to say that everyone who disagrees with them on the issue of homosexuality has a phobia, or irrational fear. Could it be that PRIDE has an irrational fear of intellectual diversity? Why can’t they just recognize that individual differences of opinion about homosexuality exist?

Black. I really don’t like the term “black.” It’s so antiquated. Someday it will be considered as hateful as “colored.” I prefer the term “African American.” And I think the Black Student Union should change its name to something not only more sensitive but more accurate. Personally, I prefer the Union of African Students for Segregation (U-ASS). In my view, if you need to segregate yourself on the basic of race U are an ASS. And you are probably a racist.

Hate. I really hate the word “hate.” Whenever I hear that word it is coming from someone who is full of hate. For example, I was greeted by a thirty-foot sign last year at UMass (The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which is not to be confused with U-ASS). When I asked who made the sign – which spelled my name with a “Z” – I was told it was the “Coalition Against Hate.” I rest my case. And I propose a coalition of un-bathed communists who are so stoned they can’t spell “Adams.”

Gay. Let’s just use the term “sodomite.” They are way too angry to be called “gay.” Plus, I’d like to be able to once again use the term “gay” without having people think about sodomy. For example, “Writing down a word and then immediately spray-painting over it? That’s gay!”

Choice. When I hear the word “choice” I know some feminist is about to kill a baby so she can increase her sex partners without decreasing her income. So I choose not to hear that word anymore.

Communism. The communists killed over 100,000,000 people in the 20th Century. That’s a big number. In fact, it’s 1/15,000 as big as this year’s federal budget deficit measured in dollars. So let’s replace this word with something else like “Social Justice.”

Tenure. Tenure is a really ugly word. After professors get it they aren’t as nice and spend most of their time sitting around and thinking of things to do, which are not related to the reason they were hired in the first place. Like writing down “hateful” words, spray painting over them, and calling it “progress.”

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Pre-election turnaround by the Leftist government: British teachers 'should use force to control violent pupils'

Teachers should use force to break up fights, stop pupils wrecking classrooms and prevent children disrupting sporting events, according to the Government. Guidance issued to schools in England warns them against having “no contact” policies, despite fears staff can be sued for restraining children.

It said the use of physical force was vital to keep order in lessons and stop the most unruly pupils running amok.

The document said that schools did not need parents’ permission before employing force or searching pupils for banned items such as weapons, alcohol, illegal drugs and stolen property.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, presented the guidelines at the NASUWT annual conference in Birmingham on Monday. It will be seen as an attempt to present Labour as the guardians of traditional discipline in schools. The move follows recommendations last week that headteachers should take parents of unruly pupils to court if they repreatedly fail to keep children in line.

But the Conservatives insisted the Government had eroded teachers’ powers to enforce good behaviour since 1997, suggesting as many as half of schools now had some form of “no contact” policy.

Mr Balls said: "Teachers have the powers they need to manage bad behaviour but I am aware that many fear retribution if they were to forcibly remove an unruly pupil. This guidance aims to stop teachers being afraid of using the powers they have when necessary.

"Myths that schools should have 'no contact policies', that teachers shouldn't be able to protect and defend themselves and others, will be dispelled by this new guidance which makes clear that in some situations, teachers have the powers and protection to use force."

The guidance provides teachers with a list of situations where physical force may be necessary. This includes when pupils are:

* *Attacking a teacher or classmate

* *Fighting and causing risk of injury to themselves or others

* *Committing – or on the verge of committing – deliberate damage to property

* *At risk of injury through “rough play” or misusing dangerous materials

* *Attempting to leave class or school at unauthorised times

* *Persistently misbehaving in a way that disrupts sporting events, school trips or lessons.

Teachers are told to first “engage the pupil in a calm and measured tone”, making it clear that behaviour is unacceptable.

It said “reasonable” physical force should be used as a last resort to control escalating bad behaviour.

Teachers should be trained in retraining techniques and adapt them to individual situations, the guidance said.

But it warned schools against employing certain moves that presented an “unacceptable risk” of injury, including the “nose distraction technique”, which involves a sharp jab under the nose, and the “double basket hold”, where pupils' arms are held across their chest.

Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, said; ““Ed Balls is wrong to say we don’t have a discipline problem in our schools – over 1,000 pupils a day are being excluded for assault and abuse.

“A key reason for this is teachers are afraid to tackle violence and disruption in the classroom – one study found that over half of schools now have some form of ‘no touch’ policy that prevents teachers from restraining troublemakers.

“Republishing existing guidance is not going to solve this problem.”

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Post Racial "affirmative action"?

Perhaps it was unfair to expect that the election of Barack Obama would “bend the curve” on hundreds of years of racial attitudes and the politics that developed around those attitudes. Then again, for a man that entered office with a promise to calm the seas and heal the sick doing “post racial” should have been a piece of cake.

Moreover, with all the talk of “hope and change” it was not outrageous to imagine that there might be some positive change in the tone surrounding discussions of race. Certainly it was not unreasonable to imagine that at the very least this President- who was going to win back the worlds respect -- would not stoke the fires of racial enmity here at home. Well, as my mother used to say: “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Instead of bringing Americans together, this President is proving to be the most divisive and racially polarizing president in recent memory. And France still isn’t all that crazy about us....

Now comes news that the Obama Justice department has filed an amicus brief supporting a return to the use of racial preferences at the University of Texas at Austin.

Following the 1996 decision in Hopwood v Texas the University of Texas was forced to find race-neutral means to increase the enrollment of minority students on its campus. The school began granting automatic admissions for students graduating in the top 10% of their high school senior class.

In 2003 the Supreme Court in Grutter v Bollinger held that some use of race is permissible only if race neutral methods fail and then they must be narrowly tailored. The University of Texas chose to hold onto the top 10% program and return to the use of race preferences for students falling outside that percentage.

In 2008 Abigail Fisher, the lead plaintiff in Fisher v University of Texas, graduated in the top 12% of her high school class and was denied admission to the university. Her lawyers argue that the race-neutral 10% plan has been successful and therefore any use of race preferences oversteps the dictates prescribed by the Supreme Court and is unlawful.

What is of particular interest is that the administration has gone beyond simply filing a brief in support of existing law. The President has extended the argument beyond what The University of Texas applies and the Supreme Court envisioned in Grutter and endorses the use of racial preferences in all "educational institutions"---K-12, undergraduate, and graduate. As Roger Clegg, president and general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity points out, “The Supreme Court has never found there to be a compelling interest in the former instance---nor, for example, in post-doctorates for chemistry---and it is aggressive and wrong to argue that, because the Court found there to be compelling educational benefits in diversity at the University of Michigan law school, therefore any educational institution can make that claim.”

In the battle against discrimination Obama seeks to take us backward. This administration does not envision an America moving away from preferences, but a nation of increased preferences based on race! Just as unfounded cries of racism lead to an increase in racial enmity, racial preferences create racial hostility.

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British teachers threaten industrial action (walkout) to keep troublemakers out of class

Long overdue

School teachers have threatened industrial action to keep dozens of “unteachable” children out of the classroom, The Daily Telegraph has learnt. Staff across England and Wales have refused to teach troublemakers after they were allowed to remain in school despite brandishing knives, attacking staff and disrupting lessons.

In most cases, teachers threaten to take legal action after attempts to expel yobs were overturned by governors or independent appeals panels. Dossiers published by the two biggest classroom unions show staff refused to teach pupils on 37 occasions over a 12 month period.

In one case, a 12-year-old boy was permanently barred from a school in Essex for carrying a knife, but was allowed back into lessons by an appeals panel. Members of the National Union of Teachers balloted for industrial action – refusing to teach – and he was eventually moved to another school.

A seven-year-old in East Sussex was expelled for assaulting a member of staff – the latest in a string of “violent and dangerous behaviour” reported by teachers – but governors refused to ratify the decision.

Staff at a Gloucestershire school threatened to walk out after an 11-year-old accused of “intimidating” pupils with a butter knife was allowed to remain in school by the governing body.

The NASUWT union refused to teach a 14-year-old boy after he sexually assaulted a classroom assistant and attacked a teacher. Governors overturned the head’s attempt to expel the pupil.

Union leaders said the cases constituted a “deeply worrying” assault on teachers’ authority.

It comes as Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, prepares to outline new rules on Monday giving teachers more power to physically restrain violent pupils.

Christine Blower, NUT general secretary, said: “If a child has really crossed the line, it is very difficult to accommodate them back in school as it is seen as a challenge to the whole institution. “This is a serious problem because it undermines the authority of a school and potentially harms the education of other children.”

Chris Keates, NASUWT general secretary, said: “Governors seem to be taking the line of least resistance to placate the minority of parents rather than to protect the majority of pupils and their staff. “If governors do not back headteachers' professional judgment in these matters then staff and school leaders cannot manage behaviour with confidence.”

The issue represents the latest in a series of concerns over teachers being undermined. At the weekend, unions warned that pupils were regularly being allowed to rate their own teachers in the classroom and interview staff applying for jobs.

In one case, it was claimed children at a school in Kent had been handed iPhones to enable them to pass instant judgments on teachers' performance to senior staff.

A head's decision to expel pupils is reviewed by governors at each school. If the decision is upheld, children and parents can also appeal to an independent panel formed by the local council. The Conservatives have promised to scrap appeals panels which they claim undermine the authority of schools.

The NUT’s latest annual report – published at its annual conference in Liverpool – show that members refused to teach children on 28 occasions in 2008.

Attempts to expel children were overturned by governors 10 times and by an independent panel on nine occasions. In other cases, the union suggested that headteachers themselves failed to take a firm line against troublemakers. The situation was usually resolved without taking formal action, normally with a “managed move” to another school.

Figures published by the NASUWT show nine children were the subject of a ballot for industrial action in 12 months. Five were expelled by heads only to be reinstated by governing bodies.

On one occasion, the NASUWT said a five-year-old boy threatened to stab a member of staff with a pair of scissors and threw chairs in his reception class.

Incidents reported by the NUT included a 10-year-old expelled from a school in Manchester for a “serious assault” on another pupil, only to be reinstated by an appeals panel.

In another case, teachers at a Cardiff comprehensive threatened to walk out after a 15-year-old was expelled for making false allegations against a colleague, but was allowed back into school following an independent appeal.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: “We are absolutely clear that heads should not hesitate to permanently exclude the worst-behaved pupil, when other sanctions have failed. "The vast majority of exclusions don't even go to appeal and where they do, it's clear independent panels are backing heads taking tough action.

"It's difficult to argue that schools are being undermined when just 60 out of over 8,000 pupils permanently excluded in 2007/08 were reinstated to their original schools following appeal - with the proportion halving in the last six years.

"No appeal will make a substantial difference where heads have gone through the proper process. No exclusions should be overturned purely on technicalities and we've told panels that no pupil expelled for violence should ever win an appeal, without very robust reasons.

"We make no apology for having independent appeals panels. Heads associations and our chief behaviour expert, Sir Alan Steer, are clear that heads would end up being dragged through the courts, if parents weren't given a fair right of appeal."

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A tribute to many years of "look and see" literacy education in Australia

Phonics was abandoned decades ago -- in a typical act of Leftist destructiveness -- but very recently seems to have staged a partial comeback

An astonishing four million Australian workers [Note: the total Australian population is around 22 million, of whom roughly half would be workers -- so the percentage involved here is enormous] have poor language, literacy and numeracy skills and cannot understand the meaning of some everyday words.

And their inability to following basic instructions and warnings is causing a safety and productivity nightmare. Most are in labour-intensive and low-level service jobs.

Among the terms that are too difficult for some workers are "hearing protection" and "personal protective equipment is required", according to a report by Skills Australia for the Rudd Government.

The words that many do not understand include: immediately, authorised, procedure, deliberate, isolation, mandatory, recommended, experience, required and optional.

Australian Industry Group chief executive Heather Ridout told the Herald Sun 46 per cent of workers had substandard literacy skills and 53 per cent had numeracy below the expected benchmark.

"It's really worrying when people can't read or write," Ms Ridout said. "It contributes to workplace safety problems. You've got to have a lot of pictures to promote safety and it contributes to inefficient practices and mistakes. That means time is wasted and work has to be repeated."

Ms Ridout, a board member of Skills Australia, said some workers could not read and understand standard operating procedures, which led to incorrect use of machinery. They could not read drawings and were drilling the wrong-sized holes or cutting steel incorrectly.

"These people are not able to function successfully in a modern workforce," she said. "But it is not just the workers. One company found a supervisor couldn't read or write properly and got a big shock," she said.

Ms Ridout called on the Government to introduce a national adult literacy and numeracy scheme in next month's Budget to provide resources and teaching support. "This problem is caused by bad education," she said. "These people haven't been picked up when they've fallen."

Other terms that were too difficult for some workers included sheeted material, company policies, gross misconduct and disciplinary action.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has nominated improving productivity as a crucial plank towards coping with the pressures of an ageing population. Ms Ridout said poor workplace literacy and numeracy was a roadblock to that goal.

The Government recently provided $50 million to create more training places for businesses to increase skills that are in high demand.

But Ms Ridout said it did not help workers who had trouble with the basics. "We can't lift skills if some workers don't have the basic skills to build on," she said. "All these people should be given a chance to participate but if they can't read and write and add up, it's going to be very tough for them."

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Vouchers Do Not Harm Public Schools

Opponents of school choice worry that public schools will suffer when competition is introduced. They cite the diversion of money away from public schools and the “creaming” of the best students into private schools, leaving the neediest children even worse off than before. But how realistic is this scenario?

A new report from the National Center for Policy Analysis marshals powerful evidence that school voucher programs do not hurt students who remain in public schools, and they may even help.

From 1998 to 2008, the Edgewood Voucher Program (EVP) offered private school tuition support to all families in the Edgewood school district, which is located in a low-income section of San Antonio, Texas. Since EVP was privately funded, no government money was diverted from public schools. However, large numbers of students did leave the public schools for private ones. EVP serves as a case study, therefore, on whether public school students suffer when some of their peers transfer away.

The answer is a firm “no.” Test scores and graduation rates went up in the Edgewood school district during the course of EVP. Whether these gains were directly caused by EVP is difficult to ascertain, since vouchers were open to all comers rather than subject to a randomized lottery that would have provided the “gold standard” experiment.

Nonetheless, the empirical debate is over whether EVP’s effect on public schools was zero or positive. When the progress of Edgewood public schools is compared to similar districts that had no voucher program, the data do not plausibly support any negative effect of EVP.

With school choice increasingly looking like a “no lose” proposition for private and public school students alike, will the Obama administration take notice?

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Britain: Children running the schools?

Pupil 'spies' are attempting to rid schools of strict teachers by sabotaging their promotions and snitching on their lessons, it has been claimed. They are being allowed to rate members of staff through observing their teaching, filling in anonymous questionnaires and even sitting on interview panels.

The Government has put greater emphasis on schools allowing the 'voice' of youngsters to be heard in recent years. In Ofsted forms, school heads need to illustrate how the views of pupils are taken into account. From September, headteachers will have a legal duty to consult pupils on major changes to school policy.

Now teachers say that increased pupil power means youngsters 'seem to be running schools' and feel no guilt about 'putting the boot in'.

Some pupils are complaining about strict teachers and ruining their chances of internal promotion by sitting on interview panels. They are also using their positions on these panels to humiliate staff by asking silly questions such as: 'If you could be on Britain's Got Talent, what would your talent be?' Headteachers stress that pupils only make recommendations on interview panels and their views are useful.

But the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers has warned of widespread abuse following a survey of more than 200 members. At its annual conference in Birmingham today, teachers will call for ballots of industrial action to stop 'inappropriate use' of the 'student voice'.

One teacher told how he was 'culled' from the interview process for a new job because the pupils on the panel thought he was 'too strict'. The teacher said: 'I felt upset that two out of three of the adults liked me enough but that the pupils had that much sway.'

Another claimed: 'Before you know it, students are choosing to keep "easy-going" teachers who let them do as they like and getting rid of the more strict ones.'

Other teachers complained about the unprofessional questions that pupils ask on the interview panel. They included: Can you sing your favourite song? What fancy dress character would you dress up in to go to school and why? What rewards/trips would you provide for pupils?

The survey also found some bizarre reasons why pupils voted against teachers on interview panels. One teacher took a snowboard along to impress a group of five to seven-year-olds as part of the interview but failed to get the job. The youngsters preferred two other applicants who brought in balloons and a didgeridoo. Another teacher lost out for supposedly looking like 'Humpty Dumpty'; another because he didn't allow the pupils to email him at home.

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said: 'Children are not small adults. They are in schools to learn, not to teach or manage the school.'

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Student arrested over desk doodle to sue

No school discipline so police have to be used -- in a gross misuse of authority and resources

A 12-year-old New York schoolgirl who was arrested and handcuffed for doodling on her classroom desk is suing police for US$1 million, the New York Daily News reported. Lawyers for Alexa Gonzalez claim police used excessive force and violated her rights in the February incident at Junior High School 190 in the Queens neighbourhood.

Alexa's mother, Moraima Camacho, told the newspaper the schoolgirl scribbled "I love my friends Abby and Faith" - in washable green ink when teachers pounced on her and dragged her to the dean's office.

Police were called and officers cuffed and arrested the girl. At the police station she was handcuffed to a pole for more than two hours, according to the lawsuit against the police and education departments.

Miss Gonzalez said she broke down as she was led out of the school in handcuffs. "I started crying, like, a lot," Gonzalez told the New York Daily News. "I made two little doodles... It could be easily erased. To put handcuffs on me is unnecessary."

New York City officials have agreed better judgement should have been used by the arresting officers but could not be reached immediately for comment.

"The whole situation has been a nightmare," Camacho said.

Alexa was also was suspended from the school when an offending item - Wite-Out - was found in her pockets, but the suspension was later lifted.

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Opposition to tough education reforms in Florida

Teachers who don't get results will be fired -- as employees in any other field would be

Sweeping education changes including a plan to end tenure for teachers and enact merit pay may have won approval in the Florida Senate, but it hasn't won lead sponsor Sen. John Thrasher points with educators and school advocates in his home county. The word "frustrating" comes up a lot when talking to people about the education changes.

Two weeks ago Senate Bill 6 whipped through the Senate. This week a similar House bill is set for debate on Monday and passage is expected.

However, Thrasher didn't campaign on the school issue, hold town meetings or talk with St. Johns County school board officials, teacher unions or education advocate groups to get input on the issue and that's left many feeling blind sided. It's also a surprise for a county whose schools are ranked first in the state and whose school leader was named superintendent of the year.

Thrasher has said anyone who wanted to have input got the chance. Others disagree. "This was never discussed with the superintendent, the staff or anyone on the school board," said St. Johns County School Board chair Bill Mignon, who sees the bill as one that will "pit teachers against the school board."

Like others Mignon finds the bill "political" and worries what it will mean for public education and local control. "I think the biggest frustration I and others educators face is that we weren't part of the plan; we were never asked to provide any input. It's almost like we didn't have the ability to make rational decisions," he said. "But we're the ones in the trenches, the people who have to make this work."

St. Johns County School Superintendent Joe Joyner said Thrasher never contacted him. "I think there is some room for discussion about merit-based pay, but I'm more talking in terms of enhancement as opposed to making it 50 percent of a teacher's pay," he said. Like others he has a number of questions about the bill and what the long term costs and effects including fairness and assessments will be.

District 1 school board member Bev Slough, former head of the state school board association, echoes those concerns. Thrasher, she said, "talked to nobody locally." Among the problems is that the bill "effectively does away with collective bargaining" and "really strips local control."

While she doesn't like the bill or what it will do, she will be "real surprised" if it doesn't clear the House because "there is so much pressure from House leadership to pass it."

But, Slough said, grassroots efforts have made a difference in the past. Teachers statewide turned out for rallies on Friday, waving protest signs and seeking to increase public awareness. The Florida Education Association is rallying efforts statewide to take the fight to Tallahassee for hearings on Monday.

Debby Etheredge, president of the St. Johns Education Association, wasn't consulted about the bills, but she's hearing plenty from local teachers who are concerned about what the evaluations and tests will mean. "It's not really based on what the teacher is doing, it's based on what the children are doing," she said.

The plan means more tests and more pressure, she said. "(Some students) have enough on them, they're about to explode," she said.

Teachers argue time in school is just part of what is involved in children learning. There is also the home life. Broken homes, family arguments and financial pressures all can contribute to potential learning problems. There's also the question of whether a family considers education important and how supportive it is.

Leadership in the Florida Legislature has made the bills a priority. In an interview last month, Thrasher said the issue didn't just come out of nowhere as many have said. It was brought up in last year's session, but didn't get anywhere. In October of last year, it was among the items Florida legislative leaders decided they wanted passed, he said.

More here





British politicians warn over ‘shocking decline’ of school trips

Pupils have increasingly been denied the chance to visit museums, galleries, theatres and the countryside in recent years, it was claimed. In a damning report, the Commons schools select committee warned that the likelihood of children enjoying any green space at all had “halved in a generation”. One expert told MPs that the drop – combined with parental fears over child safety – meant many young people were becoming “entombed” in the home instead of being allowed out to play.

The conclusions were made despite a Government drive to increase the number of school trips. Recently, ministers have issued new guidance to teachers attempting to cut health and safety red tape as well as launching a kite mark to accredit organisations hosting school parties.

But MPs insisted that the measures had failed to increase the take-up – suggesting that a sharp drop reported five years ago had continued. In a document published on Thursday, they said that each pupil should have an entitlement to at least one school trip every term.

Barry Sheerman, the committee’s Labour chairman, said: "The steep decline in the amount of time children are spending outside is shocking. “Research has shown that the likelihood of a child visiting any green space has halved in a generation. "It is vital for the Government to make a commitment to a serious funding increase to ensure that all children have opportunities to visit the wealth of museums and galleries, and the natural environment of the English countryside, which are at our disposal. “

MPs quoted a recent survey by the Countryside Alliance that showed only around half of six- to 15-year-olds go on a trip to the countryside with their school. This has been coupled with a more general decline in the amount of time that children spend outside, the committee said.

Other research by Natural England has found that the likelihood of a child visiting any green space at all has halved in a generation. Almost two-thirds of children played indoors at home more often than any other place, it found.

MPs cited a number of reasons for the decline in school trips. The report said that that funding to support education outside the classroom had been “derisory”. Since 2005, just £4.5 million has been allocated, including £2.5m on a single residential initiative, it was claimed. By comparison, MPs found that £40m has been spent on one scheme to boost the amount of singing in schools.

The report also said that teachers' fears over “health and safety litigation, making them reluctant to offer trips and visits, have not been effectively addressed”.

In a further conclusion, the study said that teacher training continued to pay “scant attention” to giving new staff members the skills and confidence to lead outings.

MPs also blamed rules that effectively barred heads from asking teachers to cover for absent staff. Schools are supposed to pay for supply teachers instead of ordering existing staff members to step in when colleagues are leading trips. The move was introduced in September to ease teachers’ workloads.

But the select committee was told that many schools are simply cancelling outings altogether instead of raiding stretched budgets to pay for supply staff.

Attractions and study centres reported a “significant reduction” in the number of bookings following changes to teachers’ contracts imposed last year.

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Teachers Unions: Don't Work Too Hard!

Jaime Escalante -- the math teacher who became famous for teaching even the poorest kids calculus in a failing Los Angeles school -- died this week at age 78. His story shows not just what can be accomplished by great teachers, but also what damage unions can do.

Escalante got national attention when 14 out of 15 of his students at a low-ranking Los Angeles school passed the Advanced Placement Calculus exam. By 1987, 73 students from the school passed the AP calculus exam -- more than all but six other schools in the country. After a movie about his success, called "Stand and Deliver", was released in 1988, Escalante became an icon for showing that even the most disadvantaged kids could learn complex subjects if given the right instruction.

I would think that any reasonable education system would reward Mr. Escalante. But this is a unionized public school we're talking about. As Reason Magazine reported several years ago:

One assistant principal threatened to have him dismissed, on the grounds that he was coming in too early (a janitor had complained), keeping students too late, and raising funds without permission.

Can you imagine if a private school operated like that? Sadly, the story gets worse.

After Stand and Deliver was released, Escalante became an overnight celebrity... This attention aroused feelings of jealousy. In his last few years at Garfield, Escalante even received threats and hate mail. In 1990 he lost the math department chairmanship, the position that had enabled him to [teach students from 9th grade on, so that they would have adequate preparation once they got to his calculus class.]

But Escalante kept teaching, sometimes with classes of 50 students or more.

Calculus grew so popular at Garfield that classes grew beyond the 35-student limit set by the union contract. Some had more than 50 students. Escalante would have preferred to keep the classes below the limit had he been able to do so without either denying calculus to willing students or using teachers who were not up to his high standards. Neither was possible, and the teachers union complained about Garfield's class sizes. Rather than compromise, Escalante moved on.

School officials were unapologetic. One official said: "We were doing fine before Mr. Escalante left, and we're doing fine after." The result? Over the next five years, the number of students at the school passing AP calculus tests plummeted from 85 a year to just 11.

It is impossible to record all the innovations that unions have destroyed. But unions are clearly one reason that even though America spends more money on education than other countries, American students score near the bottom on international tests.

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British children in crowded classes

This is just the usual teacher nonsense. Good teachers can easily handle much larger classes than what teacher unions push for. There is a case for small classes among the very young but not otherwise

Children are still being taught in “hideously overcrowded” classrooms after 13 years of Labour, according to teachers. Some pupils are being asked to share classes with 35 other children in a move that threatens to undermine education standards, it was claimed. The National Union of Teachers said “reducing class sizes” should be the number one priority for any incoming Government.

In 1997, ministers pledged to cut classes for five- to seven-year-olds. Under current legislation, schools are banned from teaching infants – Key Stage 1 pupils – in lessons of more than 30.

Speaking at the union’s annual conference, Christine Blower, NUT general secretary, said it was hoped that cuts to classes for the very youngest pupils would filter through to older year groups. But she said many children were stuck in lessons of “34, 35, or 36”.

“There are still classes that are hideously overcrowded,” she said. “We cannot say [ministers] have not fulfilled their pledge on Key Stage 1 classes, but that was never enough and the aspiration that this would simply roll on through has not happened.”

Almost six in 10 NUT members responding to a union survey said that reducing class sizes should be the top priority for the Government – irrespective of the outcome of the general election. Kevin Courtney, deputy general secretary, said that cuts to school budgets in some areas meant primary school classes were being merged.

He cited one school in Gloucestershire that had been forced to put children in a lesson of 36. “Pupil numbers have been falling so they have had to combine two smaller classes into a class of 36 because they have not got the money,” he said. “Clearly that damages the education of those children.”

The union has already launched a campaign demanding that the average class size is cut to 20 by the end of the decade.

Figures last month showed at least 210 state primary school teachers were regularly leading lessons of at least 41 children last year. In addition, around one-in-eight pupils in England were in classes of more than 30, it was revealed.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: "Over the last 10 years we have massively increased the number of adults teaching children. “Over 98 per cent of infant classes are under the statutory limit and the average size is 26.2.

“We expect local authorities and schools to take their legal responsibility to limit class sizes very seriously. There can be no excuses for any infant class that is unlawfully over the legal limit.”

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Helicopter parents not doing enough to let children fail

Comment from Australia

THE belief that regular praise will improve the self-esteem of students has backfired, with educators urging over-anxious parents to let their children fail so they can learn from their mistakes.

Parents were also doing too much for their children who were becoming less resilient and unable to cope with failure. Some were even too scared to put up their hand in class and risk giving the wrong answer.

As new research shows that members of Generation Y are entering the workforce with an inflated sense of their abilities, principals are warning "helicopter parents" against putting too much pressure on children to be successful, which could discourage them from risking failure.

Rod Kefford, the headmaster of Barker College, has warned: "We are creating a generation of very fearful learners and the quality of our intellectual life will suffer as a result."

Today's students are let down lightly by teachers and wrapped in cotton wool by some parents. But in the 1960s, it was not uncommon for teachers to tell students bluntly that they had given a wrong answer. "Then someone invented the concept of self-esteem," Dr Kefford said. "In some ways it has been the most damaging educational concept that has ever been conceived.

"We couldn't do anything that would upset or harm the self-esteem of students, which was very fragile, we were led to believe … That is when we stopped our proper work in the character formation in young people. If we are serious about building resilience, we have to let them fail. It is only through our failings in the learning process that we learn anything." He said schools needed to give children the confidence to risk failure to encourage more creative thinking.

"[Through] this fear we have of ever allowing them to fail, we are selling them short as human beings and as future adults," he said. One of the first empirical studies on generational differences in work values shows Generation Y or the "millennials" (born between 1982 and 1999) are entering the workforce overconfident and with a sense of entitlement. The research, led by Jean Twenge at San Diego State University and published in the Journal of Management, shows this generation wants money and the status of a prestigious job without putting in long hours. When they do not get the marks they expect at university or rise quickly enough in their jobs, they turn into quitters.

"More and more students are reaching university not knowing how to do things for themselves. Parents think they are helping young people by doing things for them but they are actually making them less independent," Professor Twenge said.

"It is now common for parents and teachers to tell children, 'you are special' and 'you can be anything you want to be'." While such comments are meant to encourage students and raise their self-esteem, experts say they can inflate students' egos.

"Feeling special often means the expectation of special treatment," she said. "Your parents might think you're special but the rest of the world might not. This can be a difficult adjustment."

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Is our children learning?

Excerpt from a very pessimistic REVIEW of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education" by Diane Ravitch. Review by Peter Wood. The reviewer seems to ignore that kids DID once learn more than they do today.

I graduated in the late '50s from a small and undistinguished Australian country school with a knowledge of Latin grammar, German Lieder and a nodding acquaintance with poets from Homer through Chaucer, through Tennyson to G.M. Hopkins. I also learnt enough physics to see how transparently false Al Gore's global warming scare was. My son graduated from a good private school recently knowing virtually nothing of that. But he is now working on his Ph.D. in mathematics so it is not a shortage of ability that left him so uneducated.

Most children take education seriously when they see that it has some urgency in the larger culture. In America today, no one feels particularly abashed by not knowing stuff. “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” asks the popular Fox TV show. “So what if I’m not?” is the implied answer. It is OK for adults not to know the difference between the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Battle of the Bulge. We know that’s just “book knowledge” and could Google it if we really needed to find out.

Mark Bauerlein struck this chord in The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (2008), but he may have been too generous to generations past. America has a long tradition of adult dumbness, or at least numbness to the kinds of knowledge that don’t bear directly on earning a buck. “History is more or less bunk,” Henry Ford told the Chicago Tribune in 1916.

Our whole land-grant university system is laid on the foundations of a Civil War congressman, Justin Morrill of Vermont, who saw no need to teach the liberal arts. America’s most distinctive contribution to philosophy is the get-to-the-bottom-line school called pragmatism. Huck Finn was not alone when he reflected on the prospect of being “sivilized” by Aunt Sally and chose instead to “light out for the territory.”

If we chose to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into schooling, America might well do a much better job of it—but that is a highly unlikely choice for Americans to make. As a people, we are just not that interested in the tedious work of learning or teaching things that don’t appear to have direct application. We expect from schools more in the way of affirmation of popular conceits than the slow building up of knowledge.

A great many Americans actually want schools that promote faddish ideologies, though, of course, dressed up as cutting-edge insights. Right now, one of the most popular teaching videos in the country is a crudely anti-capitalist, pro-sustainability video, The Story of Stuff. We want schools that promote equality, which has come to mean mingling as much as possible the talented with the untalented and the enthusiastic with the bored. We want diversity. We want creativity. But we have never been of a single mind whether we actually want education.

Ravitch offers some terrific chapters on school-reform efforts in New York City and San Diego. These alone make the book worth reading, for they dispel forever the idea that well-meaning businessmen with all the institutional freedom and funding they could dream of can actually make much of a dent in America’s educational lassitude.

Ravitch’s critique of NCLB mostly hits home, too. President George W. Bush won support for his signature program by decoupling “standards” from content. States were required to test students frequently and report their progress, but individual states were free to establish their own standards. This became an invitation to aim low: you can’t miss when you are shooting at the ground. Schools also quickly figured out that the way to deal with a regime of testing was to establish their own counter-regime of “teach to the test.”

Hence, as Ravitch and many before her have pointed out, schools across the country sacrificed a balanced curriculum and thoughtful pedagogy to concentrate on teaching students how to score well on multiple-choice exams in reading and math. Ravitch is especially deadly on the rank impossibility that NCLB supporters had to profess: that by 2014 all students in all schools will be “proficient in reading and mathematics.” Or else what?

Ravitch remains, as she has always been, a good advocate of her ideas. She is least convincing, however, in her newfound defense of teachers’ unions and her turnabout on charter schools, which she now sees as draining away the more talented and motivated students from public schools. They may well do that. But I don’t see a compelling case that the students should sacrifice their only opportunity to get a halfway decent education just to advance the cause of classroom equality with kids who don’t care, kids who lack ability, and kids who haven’t been able to surmount the disorganized homes and culturally impoverished backgrounds that life has dealt them. We do indeed need to help these kids, but a one-size-fits-all public-school system hardly seems the answer.

“Accountability” has been the watchword of a reform movement centered on the not implausible idea that at the root of school ineptitude are many teachers, principals, and other administrators who do poor work year in and year out without ever facing significant professional consequences. They are protected by unions, by bureaucratic inertia, and by a school culture that fosters intellectual laziness.

The accountability movement attempts to rescue schools from this miasma by rewarding teachers whose students excel and punishing those whose students don’t. Ravitch’s most dramatic reversal is her change of heart on accountability, which she now sees as essentially a business concept misapplied to schooling. Students are not products to be quality-controlled, and teaching cannot be stuffed into accountability formulas without destroying the fabric of education.

There is certainly something to this. The widget-factory approach of some accountability-inspired reformers is deeply unappealing. Moreover, schooling really is a distinctive human activity with its own logic. Conflating it with other institutions inevitably leads to confusion. But the accountability mavens with whom Ravitch now parts company do have some powerful points of their own.

Our schools are chockfull of teachers who, as graduates of ed schools, possess thin knowledge of the subjects they teach, are hostile to the civilization they are supposed to transmit, and are steeped in the nonsense of progressive pedagogy. It was bad enough when this meant teachers earnestly believed children are natural-born dynamos of intellectual inquiry. These days it means something even worse: that teachers should be eagerly promoting race and gender politics and the claptrap of leftist “social justice.” If accountability is a deadening doctrine in one sense, it is in the eyes of many Americans a way to constrain teachers from doing still worse. Ravitch is silent on this score.

Ravitch at several points smiles on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as the one great exception in an era of educational incompetence. In the 1990s, Massachusetts developed and implemented school curriculum frameworks that were far and away the most rigorous in the country and that vaulted the state to the top of national standards.

I’ll immodestly own that I played a small part in writing those frameworks. But it is more to my point that Massachusetts now has a governor elected with the support of the teachers’ unions who is doing everything he can to compromise and eliminate that reform. At some level, Americans just can’t stand to have excellent schools; when we get too close to having them, we come up with an excuse for undoing them. As Kipling reminds us, “The burnt fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the fire.”

It is not that we want to relax into a state of complete natural ignorance. We just value some things more than we value schooling. The reformers are to be honored for wanting to change the equation in favor of more people knowing more important stuff. Many of the reformers, as Ravitch shows, have blind spots. All of them underestimate the difficulty. Ravitch herself, I suspect, still does. But she has made a useful reality-based contribution to the conversation.

My own view is that America will never be as good at schooling as some other nations that are more profoundly attached to learning for its own sake and have the benefit of being proud rather than ashamed of their cultural inheritance. We would do better for ourselves if we chose to emphasize a little more the thrill of outstanding intellectual ability and a little less the solace of multiculturalism and leveling equality.

We do breed a certain kind of exceptional student in our public schools—usually one who is ill at ease with the school itself and has by an early age diverged into lonely or geeky individualism. Our future scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and culture creators typically shape themselves against what the schools have to offer. I suspect we could do better by them—but then, we might have to give up some of that utopian dream in which all students can be proficient, and everybody gets to dance.

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The profit motive has a place in the classroom

If businesses can help more children to learn we should let them make money – and hire and fire teachers

During a particularly fractious debate about schools reform, a Gordon person once said to a Tony person: “Delivering an education isn’t like delivering a pizza, you know.” “Ah no, it’s not,” replied the Tony person, sagely, “but it might be rather like making one.”

Actually, education isn’t remotely like either making or delivering a pizza. You could go so far as to say that education has got nothing to do with pizzas at all. The exchange does, all the same, contain two insights into education policy, one about the past, the other about the future.

What a tragedy that two intelligent people could have such a stupid conversation in public. This is the standard of argument you get when the two principals, for whom the pizza warriors were agents, are having an altogether more fundamental fight — a fight for control.

I was thinking of the pizzas during Tony Blair’s deft critique of the Tories at Trimdon Labour Club. It was a clever speech; whoever writes his stuff these days is a lot better than the last guy. But to hear Mr Blair heap praise on Gordon Brown was deeply frustrating for anyone who wishes their party well. As Mr Blair left the stage in Sedgefield, it was impossible not to recall the moment he shared an ice cream with Mr Brown during the 2005 campaign and wonder how much more might have been done, if only the pair of them had managed to make their extraordinary, and complementary, talents point in the same direction.

They might have averted the charge that their progress was bought at too great a price. They might have had a leaner State that bought more services and ran fewer. They might have built a system in which improvement was organic and therefore much more recession-proofed. The three sorriest examples are education, education, education.

There might, by now, have been many different types of school, catering for pupils with different aptitudes. The lines between public, private and voluntary sector would mean less. Private money and expertise would be common in state schools. Federations and school chains would be the norm. New schools would have sprung up, established and run by entrepreunerial teachers. Schools would all be independent entities, with the right to hire, fire and vary pay. They would use data to track their progress, like the pioneering Michelle Rhee in Washington DC.

There is some evidence of all of these things. The Prime Minister endorsed most of them in a speech on education two weeks ago. But it is far, far too late. It is the 59th minute of the 11th hour of a day in which your protaganists have been disrupting a conference saying that reforming schools is the equivalent of setting up a pizza parlour.

What the long scream between Brown and Blair has left undone, it will fall to the Conseratives to complete. Schools reform may yet become this generation’s utilities privatisation. Opposed all the way by the Labour party, selling the utilities — transport apart — worked. Nobody now wants to go back in time. Parties sometimes need to be taught a lesson by their opponents. If the Tories manage a revolution in schools, this attempt to change their party brand would be the tribute that Tory vice has paid to Labour virtue.

There is a serious risk that it might not happen, for the reason contained in the pizza row. We are unconcerned when wicked pen-pushers make a dirty profit from supplying our children with writing implements. But woe betide any company that offers to teach kids to read while turning a profit. I know, I know. Pens are not books and being able to write is not the same as learning to read. But we already permit companies such as EdisonLearning to manage schools. VT Group makes a living training school staff. Serco makes a healthy return managing the facilities. All of this is profit that comes out of the public grant.

And yet, if a company wins a contract in which it promises, on pain of no payment, to teach children to read, the politicians — Tory as well as Labour — think that a principle of scholarly detachment is being breached. But is there really any vital violation if, in return for the gift of literacy, a company gains a capped profit, just like a utility? Electricity companies keep the lights on, partly because keeping the lights on is what they do and partly because a regulator is checking up on them. As long as the standards demanded are clear and rigorously policed, the existence of profit is not the difference between good and evil.

It might, though, be the difference between present and absent. There is not an infinite supply of public-spirited parents, teacher buyouts and philanthropic capital. Charities that run schools cannot be expected to stump up the capital, and it is obvious that the supply of public money has dried up. It is only if a firm can expect a profit that it can be told to provide the start-up capital itself.

Even if enough providers can be found, there could be serious trouble ahead with the workforce. If you don’t do Easter or if you decide to cancel it, try to catch the proceedings of the teacher union conferences, which may be playing on an obscure cable channel. Some of the leaders are ready to add their weight to the industrial militancy of Unite and the RMT. The cocktail of cuts to existing budgets and encouragement of competition could easily lead to a serious breakdown of communication between a Conservative government and the teaching unions.

There will be a lot at stake for the Labour party in these circumstances. The quality of education at the bottom of the pile needs new schools, new teachers, new ways of working, underpinned by strong government — audit, inspection and a tough failure regime. The paradox of market reforms to the public sector is that they create a new, but extensive, role for the State. It is to be hoped that the Conservatives don’t think the Big Society (answers on a postcard) can step in here.

If the Conservatives do fail, the cause of public service reform on the Left will dwindle. It is hard for people with a partisan leaning to wish success on their oppponents. It’s harder still when you know you ought to have done this yourself. It’s yet harder again to know you might have finished by now if you’d only been capable of avoiding those silly arguments about delivering pizzas, which you knew, even then, were a surrogate for a much bigger dispute that would go on and on and on, until both of them were gone.

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"Nothing can be done" about sexual abuse in British grade school

An education authority took two years to investigate claims that a six-year-old girl had been sexually abused by classmates, it was alleged yesterday.

The girl, who claimed that she was being stripped and abused on a daily basis by up to 23 tormentors aged between 6 and 10, has since been moved to another school. No action has been taken against the other children involved.

Keith Towler, the children's commissioner for Wales, described the delay as a "shocking failure" and said: "The bottom line is the family will never know what happened to their child."

The claims were made by the girl’s mother, who told BBC Wales that she found out that her daughter was being abused from the mother of another child who was also being bullied. She said: "I said. 'It's OK, you can tell mammy' and then it all started to come out. Her eyes were like marbles of fire.

"She was telling me things I think every mother dreads to hear from their daughter. It was horrendous what she'd gone through. Every day she was being stripped. She was being physically and sexually abused every day and every day she cried out for help and nobody ever came."

The mother said that the school was sympathetic but claimed that the bullies' ages and a lack of evidence meant that no action could be taken. The mother added: "They said the children couldn't be suspended. Because they had sexually abused my daughter and they were only six years old, they were victims themselves and wouldn't be suspended."

No details of the school or the education authority have been revealed to protect the girl's identity, however it is understood to be in South Wales.

It was only when the girl was moved to another school and her mother began legal action against the local education authority, which cannot be named, that the serious case review was ordered. The review claimed that it was "very difficult to establish the extent, degree and involvement of specific children" and that they were all "under the age of criminal responsibility". The inquiry recommended changes to anti-bullying policies and the way incidents were recorded.

Mr Towler said: "Clearly there are issues with the serious case review system and there is consensus the current serious case review arrangements are not working effectively. "The Welsh government has heard those calls for change and is responding." He said that the Assembly had set up two bodies to improve procedures.

Mr Towler added: "The establishment of the Welsh Safeguarding Forum aims to ensure that safeguarding is achieved at a national, regional and local level. "This forum’s work is critical in ensuring the system is strengthened and that joint working is improved to safeguard our children. "This forum and the advisory group must address the ineffective system which will result in change in practice.

"We cannot find ourselves in the same position again where the system is failing some of our most vulnerable children. "Clearly there are issues with the serious case review system and there is consensus that the current serious case review arrangements are not working effectively.

"The Welsh government has heard those calls for change and is responding. I will not yet be undertaking a review but instead will be working with practitioners and other relevant officials on two groups which the deputy minister for social services has convened.

Neelam Bhardwaja, president of the Association of Directors for Social Services in Wales, said: "If there are these number of children involved, it begs the question where did that behaviour arise from? Why are these children behaving in this way and are they from abusive situations themselves, which they need protecting from?"

A Welsh Assembly government spokesman said that it took "its roles and responsibilities around the safeguarding of children very seriously". [Utter bulldust!]

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Academic says Scotland's schools are producing a generation of illiterate scientists

Scottish secondary schools are producing a generation of illiterate scientists unable to write clearly and accurately about their subject, according to a senior academic at the University of Glasgow. In an article for the journal of the Queen’s English Society – which champions the proper use of the English language – Emeritus Professor of Marine Biology Geoff Moore said both undergraduate and postgraduate papers were strewn with inaccurate punctuation, grammatical errors, and fundamental confusion between terms such as ‘proscribe’ and ‘prescribe’, and ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.

After marking papers at the University of Glasgow and London University for 36 years, Professor Moore said the problem lay in secondary schools – and he expects the poor standards to get worse. He wrote: “We must anticipate that more and more British secondary-school teachers – the contemporaries of those graduates we have encountered – will not have acquired a sufficient grounding in the English language in order to teach proper grammar, spelling and punctuation to their pupils effectively.”

Speaking to the Sunday Herald, Professor Moore said that some students’ written English made him “throw my hands up in horror”. He traced this back to the move away from writing essays in the teaching of science in schools.

“A lot of assessment is done by multiple choice, ticking boxes, one-word answers, and students don’t get the experience of writing essays as they did in the old days,” he said. “Coupled with the fact that they don’t get things corrected accurately by their teachers. You sometimes wonder if they even read a book any more.”

In science accurate English is an essential, but a dying art, Professor Moore believes. “It is a question of precision,” he said. “You have to be able to express yourself exactly. If you’re using the wrong word in the wrong context – there is a great deal of difference between a prescribed and a proscribed drug. It’s important that people learn to express themselves correctly.”

In response to Professor Moore’s criticisms, the biggest teaching union for secondary teachers in Scotland, the SSTA and the national body for science teachers, the Association for Science Education, agreed with many points.

SSTA general secretary Ann Ballinger said while she did not expect pupils or teachers to use the Queen’s English perfectly she admitted that multiple choice examinations had affected the standard of written English. “It does cause difficulties,” she said. “It is less easy to use language if you are not using it regularly. There certainly is an issue here. It reduces the amount of time and effort spent on the language. Clearly that is a problem.”

Steuart Cuthbert, ASE’s Scottish field officer, said that in his classroom experience, science teachers were discouraged from correcting the grammar and English of pupils. “Although I firmly believe that every teacher should be maintaining standards across the board, there was a thought in the mind of many people that my job was to teach chemistry or physics and have nothing to do with how that was expressed,” he said.

Mr Cuthbert offered hope for Professor Moore, however. The incoming shake-up of the schools – the Curriculum for Excellence – will make literacy and numeracy the responsibility of every teacher, regardless of subject. Mr Cuthbert said: “There is a sea change in attitude. We are now teachers of children rather than teachers of subject ... Because of the current developments this sort of criticism should be minimised in future.”

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Take parents of unruly pupils to court, British schools told

The latest ruse to dodge responsibility for discipline

Schools are being told to take parents to court for failing to control their children as part of a new crackdown on bad behaviour.

Headteachers should make greater use of “parenting orders” to force mothers and fathers of the worst offenders to take more responsibility for their children, the Government said.

The civil court order requires them to attend counselling sessions and parenting classes – and can also set out strict rules on how families should deal with sons and daughters. This includes making sure children do not stay up late, ensuring they cannot get access to alcohol at home, getting them to school on time and making sure uniform rules are followed. Breach of the order can lead to prosecution and a £1,000 fine.

A report by Sir Alan Steer, former headteacher and the Government’s top advisor on behaviour, warned of a “lack of understanding” about the orders in schools. New guidance issued to heads will say that parents failing to play their part in keeping children under control “need to know that the issuing of a parenting order is a possible action by the school”.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said: “For heads to have the power to take court action against parents whose children continue to behave badly, disrupt lessons and impact on other pupils is a vital step in the right direction.”

Parents are already being asked to sign Home School Agreements – non-legal contracts setting out minimum standards of behaviour, attendance, uniform and homework – before the start of term. They are expected to sign them every 12 months. Most schools already have agreements but under new legislation it will be a legal requirement on every state primary and secondariy to issue them. Sir Alan’s report suggested that schools should apply for parenting orders when families repeatedly fail to abide by rules set out on the agreements.

Speaking at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers annual conference on Wednesday, Mr Balls said: “I want to see more schools using parenting orders when Home School Agreements fail. It is time for parents to be held accountable for their child’s behaviour.”

Parenting orders have been available to schools and local councils for six years, but only 2,000 have been issued for truancy and none have been handed out for behaviour. Mr Balls said heads had “not felt sufficiently confident legally that the courts would support them if they were apply for a parenting order for behaviour”, but insisted that new guidance handed to schools would improve their awareness of the process.

The comments come after research by the ATL found that a quarter of teachers had been forced to deal with a violent pupil in the current academic year. Many teachers blamed parents for failing to act as good “role models” for their children. More than a third of staff also said they had faced abuse from mothers and fathers themselves, often after attempting to discipline their child.

One teacher from a state primary in Essex said: “I have had a threat to my life from a parent because I told a child to complete their homework during part of their ‘golden time’. “It was threatened that they and their family would kill me when I came to or from school.”

A female secondary school teacher said: “I have been trapped in an office by a father and older brother of a student who were angry that he'd had his gold trainers confiscated until the end of the day.”

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Lunatic Leftism in Australian schools

Any intelligent teacher tries to get the kids on side but discipline is needed too

TEACHERS trying to restore order in their classrooms are being asked to ditch tough disciplinary measures for such tactics as standing on a green spot or pointing to a message on a wall.

Traditional methods for dealing with disruptive children, such as detention and loud reprimands, are being cast aside in favour of merely "hinting" at bad behaviour. The techniques are part of an Education Department program being tested at more than 100 state schools in disadvantaged areas.

Some of the methods, criticised by a family group as "pie in the sky", urge teachers to give up "power" and become "agents" of their students.

Strategies to improve class behaviour include involving students in deciding rules and discussing with them the impact of their misbehaviour.

But Australian Family Association spokesman John Morrissey, a part-time teacher, said the program sounded like a throwback to the 1970s. "A lot of this is pie in the sky stuff," he said. "If you don't have a tight ship being run at school, and some backup from home, it is very hard to achieve discipline."

Liberal education spokesman Martin Dixon said improving academic standards shouldn't mean turning classroom practice on its head.

But the scheme's facilitator, La Trobe University's Prof Ramon Lewis, said it was all about using gentle hints rather than being aggressive with unruly students. "You identify ways of letting kids know that someone's rights are being ignored without necessarily forcing them to do anything about it," he said. "So, basically, it's a skill of hinting. That can be a sign on the wall you can point to. "One teacher has got a green dot on the floor on which he actually stands to indicate that right now someone is not doing the right thing."

Prof Lewis, who has been researching classroom management for decades and has written several books, said discipline still had a place.

Some of his techniques are being used at north suburban schools, under an Education Department initiative called Achievement Improvement Zones, in a bid to lift literacy and numeracy levels and improve teachers' practices.

Acting Education Minister Maxine Morand said trials did not replace traditional classroom discipline. "Principals and teachers at Victorian government schools already have the power and autonomy to deal with students behaving inappropriately," she said.

An Education Department spokesman said Prof Lewis had more than 20 years' experience in training teachers in how to use positive reinforcement techniques to encourage good behaviour.

Broadmeadows Valley Primary School principal Andy Jones said Prof Lewis's program had been well received and had good results. "A lot of what he does is quite out there," he said. Prof Lewis's methods were also backed by youth psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg and Parents Victoria, which said fresh ideas were needed to deal with difficult children.

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