Flush With Union Cash, DC Mayoral Candidate Vincent Gray Looks to Roll Back DC School Reform

The fight for the Democratic mayoral nominee in Washington DC encapsulates the national struggle for education reform. On one side you have Mayor Adrian Fenty and his appointed School Chancellor Michelle Rhee, true reformers who took on the teachers unions in hopes of improving DC’s schools.

On the other side you have Fenty’s primary opponent, Vincent Gray. Gray is your typical big city politician. He ran a dirty campaign that mischaracterized and demonized Fenty’s term, he’s owned by special interest groups (see teachers unions), and will only pay lip service to reform, something DC desperately needs.

For decades, Washington DC’s public schools were the laughingstock of the country, consistently ranking near the bottom in every education metric. Fed-up with the status quo, Fenty appointed Michelle Rhee as Chancellor of Washington’s schools giving her free rein to battle the self-serving teachers unions and implement reforms she deemed essential. So, did it work? How does DC’s education system compare to other cities, now?

A new study by AEI’s Rick Hess examines “which of thirty major U.S. cities have cultivated a healthy environment for school reform to flourish.” Hess found that DC’s education environment now ranks second in a study of major US cities, largely due to Mayor Fenty and Michelle Rhee’s reforms.

Reform is painful; Fenty bruised some egos in the process making a lot of powerful enemies. Hess writes, “Survey respondents report that Mayor Adrian Fenty is the only municipal leader willing to expend extensive political capital to advance education reform.”

Gray has capitalized on union antipathy towards Fenty and formed alliances with DC’s biggest labor unions, receiving endorsements from:

AFSCME, AFGE, AFL-CIO Washington Labor Council, Carpenter's Union, Fraternal Order of Police, Fraternal Order of Police-Department of Corrections, Fraternal Order of Police District of Columbia Lodge #1, Firefighters Local 36, Gertrude Stein Club, , National Association of Government Employees, National Association of Social Workers, Nurses Union, Teamsters Local Union 639, Teamsters Local 689.”

No wonder Fenty is trailing in the polls, all of DC’s power players have united against the mayor. Most depressing is that Michelle Rhee announced she would leave if Gray is elected; their views are incompatible--Rhee is focused on giving DC’s poorest students chance to succeed, Gray is concerned with protecting teachers unions.

Carried across the finish line by union money, Gray’s election could well nullify the education gains Fenty and Rhee made over the past three years--the last thing DC needs.

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British exams to be brought in line with world's toughest tests

Wake me up when it happens -- JR

Examinations will be toughened up to meet standards set in other countries such as Singapore, South Korea and China, according to the Coalition. Ofqual, the exams regulator, will be ordered to gather test papers from some of the world’s most respected education systems and benchmark domestic qualifications against them.

It is likely to lead to a dramatic rise in the standards teenagers will be expected to meet to gain good grades in A-levels and GCSEs.

The announcement comes amid fears that exams are becoming too easy and failing to keep pace with those in other countries. This summer almost three-in-10 A-levels were graded at least an A and the number of Cs awarded at GCSE increased for the 22nd year in a row.

Speaking on Monday, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said action would be taken to “restore confidence” to the examinations system. This includes an overhaul of Ofqual, the watchdog established by Labour to vet standards in school and college tests. It comes just weeks after the regulator admitted that this year’s GCSE science papers were too easy.

Mr Gove said: “Last month the exams regulator Ofqual acknowledged that the GCSE science exams were not set at a high enough standard. I’ve been saying this for years. “But the previous Government chose to ignore my warnings and they defended a status quo that was in their interest but was actively damaging the education of hundreds of thousands of children a year."

He said the creation of a “more assertive” qualifications regulator, with the power to order exam boards to toughen up their tests, was “critical to restoring confidence in our exams system”. “We will legislate to strengthen Ofqual and give a new regulator the powers they need to enforce rigorous standard," he said.

“We will ask Ofqual to report on how our exams compare with those in other countries so we can measure the questions our 11, 16 and 18 year olds sit against those sat by their contemporaries in India, China, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

“Our young people will increasingly be competing for jobs and university places on a global level and we can’t afford to have our young people sitting exams which aren’t competitive with the world’s best.”

The move forms part of a sweeping overhaul of the exams system. As revealed yesterday, the Coalition will also introduce a school leaving certificate to tackle a decline in the number of pupils studying subjects such as languages and science in secondary schools.

An English Baccalaureate will be awarded to pupils who gain five A* to C grade GCSEs in English, maths, a science, a foreign language and one humanities subject. At the same time, panels of academics, exam boards and learned societies will be asked to script A-level syllabuses and test papers to restore rigour to the education system.

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Australia: Health Fascism in Victorian schools

There is nothing wrong with exercise and kids run around naturally if allowed -- which they often are not in schools today -- but trying to dictate to parents and take over the parental role sounds a bit too much like the Hitler Youth to me

VICTORIAN primary school students are standing up in class for half an hour a day in a radical plan to beat childhood obesity. And they're having "activity breaks" to get them moving between classes.

Students are also set homework tasks such as going for a walk with mum and dad, and are being urged to reduce their time in front of the TV.

The pilot plan, involving 30 grade 3 classes from state schools, gives some students tokens that will restrict their TV viewing. If they go beyond their allocated time, the TV automatically turns off.

The Transform-Us! program, involving 750 students aged eight and nine, started four weeks ago and is being run by the Education Department and Deakin University.

Behavioural scientist Professor Jo Salmon from the university said the goal was not just to get kids moving more at school, but at home as well. This means parents are given information about healthy living such as the location of local walking trails and sports tracks, and encouragement to help restrict TV and computer use at home. "It's not about being a TV Nazi, but resetting and changing some habits such as kids watching whatever is on TV rather than actively choosing programs they want to watch," Prof Salmon said.

Children are given four 30-minute TV tokens each day and if they attempt to watch more, the TV turns off using smart card technology.

It comes as a Victorian Parliament committee is investigating the role schools can play in helping children lead healthier lives.

Prof Salmon said the school-based program, involving standing-up lessons, "was not about kids running amok in class, but getting them moving instead of sitting during the day". "We're not taking away the three Rs and making kids do more PE. We are modifying academic lessons to get them moving more," she said. "Sitting all day long isn't normal for kids. "If you stand rather than sit, there's evidence your brain works better and evidence that kids have better short-term recall of lessons."

Prof Salmon said teachers had been "very supportive and enthusiastic" but the response from parents had been "varied".

Gail McHardy, executive officer of Parents Victoria, said schools needed a balance between activity and academic study. "The focus always seems to be on sedentary kids, but a lot of kids are very active, and sometimes parents worry their kids do too much activity, not too little," she said. "We have to be realistic about what teachers can achieve."

Angela Conway, policy consultant from Pro-family Perspectives, said she liked the idea of kids standing in some classes. But she warned that schools should not encroach too much on family time. "It's good to educate and encourage, but schools should not prescribe what families do in private," she said.

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Unions Prevent Kids from Learning in L.A.

By Warner Todd Huston

The L.A. Times has been publishing a great series about how the city's schools have been dropping the ball on education. Specifically, the Times points out that the L.A. schools district has had at its disposal stats that could have helped it to engineer a better education policy for its students but has ignored these stats. Why have they ignored these stats? Fear of unions.

The Times has a database of the effectiveness of nearly 6,000 L.A. area teachers. These findings, the Times informs us, were based on a method called "value-added analysis. It is a method that is beginning to be used to rank teachers and help administrators design a more effective education for kids all across the country.

The Times also says that the L.A. school administrators had this info all along and never used it. Why would that be? (my bold below)

L.A. Unified has had the underlying data for years but has chosen not to analyze it in this way, partly in anticipation of union opposition. After The Times' initial report this month showed wide disparities among elementary school teachers, even in the same schools, the district moved to use value-added analysis to guide teacher training and began discussions with the teachers union about incorporating data on student progress into teacher evaluations.

That's right, fear of the recalcitrant unions that are more interested in making sure that teachers are unaccountable and cannot be questioned. Unions that are more interested in fat pensions and rich benefits and are less interested in the education of our kids.

It just goes to show that the ideals of former teacher union bigwig Albert Shanker are still ruling the roost in our system of mis-education. In 1985 Shanker said:

"When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children." -- Albert Shanker, former president American Federation of Teachers

And now our school systems and administrators are cowering in the face of teachers unions instead of sticking up for our children.

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Chicago district thinks that quantity will substitute for quality

In an effort to extend what is one of the nation's shortest school days, Chicago Public Schools plans to add 90 minutes to the schedules of 15 elementary schools using online courses and nonteachers, sources said.

By employing nonteachers at a minimal cost to oversee the students, the district can save money and get around the teachers' contract, which limits the length of the school day. Mayor Richard Daley has scheduled an announcement about the "Additional Learning Opportunities" pilot program at Walsh Elementary School in the Pilsen neighborhood. School officials declined to comment on the initiative.

The program's cost is expected to exceed $10 million, the majority of which will be spent on capital improvements like technological infrastructure, wiring and broadband, a source said. Five schools will begin the program this fall, and another 10 are expected to begin in the second semester. If the program proves successful, it could be expanded to all schools, a source said.

The extra time will be tacked on to the end of the school day. The block will be divided between math and reading, with a short break for a snack and recess, a source said. Much of the cost of the program will be covered by federal economic stimulus money, a source said.

The initiative is unpopular with leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union, who view the effort as a way to undermine their contract with the city schools. Because mostly nonteachers will be used to staff the initiative, the district will not have to pay union wages. Many of those who will oversee the classrooms will likely be either after-school providers or community partners.

"I'm not against anything that helps children," said Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. "If this is more drill and kill (testing,) then I am totally against it.

"But if it's a way to keep schools open longer and engage parents and the community, I am for it," Lewis added. "I just want to make sure that (kids) are engaged and excited and they're enjoying learning."

The district already has a stable of online initiatives, including high school credit recovery programs and summer school courses to help students advance. More than 4,000 students gained credits through online summer school, officials have said.

But the new initiative is the product of a separate online pilot program the district launched last year, which provided online math courses to certain elementary school students. In those schools, students were encouraged — but not required — to attend extended school hours. District officials say math scores increased dramatically as a result of the online classes.

Nationally, online learning is a white-hot education trend. More than a million students engaged in online learning in the 2008 school year, an almost 50 percent increase over 2006, according to the Sloan Consortium, a group of organizations that support online education.

While there is limited research regarding the effectiveness of online schools, what is out there is largely positive. In some cases, research has shown that online learning can be better than face-to-face instruction.

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British bureaucrats oppose crackdown on "Mickey Mouse" degrees

Civil servants who allocate billions of pounds to university teaching are secretly opposing moves which would ban spending on “Mickey Mouse” degree courses.

A far cry from the conventional humanities and sciences, a modern university education can involve studying subjects like pop music, puppetry, or the unorthodox combination of "waste management with dance".

An analysis of courses available through the university clearing system has disclosed that while most traditional courses are now full up, there are empty places in scores of "eccentric" degree courses. Education experts said it was unfortunate that such courses appeared to be proliferating at a time when school-leavers with good grades could not get places in core academic subjects.

The Sunday Telegraph has learned that officials who allocate billions of pounds to university teaching are secretly opposing moves which would allow spending on such courses to be cut back.

Civil servants at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) want to avoid a debate over whether to change laws which currently prohibit ministers from instructing them to award money for "particular courses of study".

When approached by this newspaper with questions about unconventional degree courses, the agency accidentally released copies of internal emails which had been exchanged between its officials as they discussed how to respond to the questions.

An email from Toby West-Taylor, the agency's head of funding, which was intended only for colleagues, said: "The risk in highlighting this to a journalist at a time when a new HE [higher education] Bill could be on the horizon, is that it might prompt a lobby for there to be change to such sound legislation."

The funding agency even referred to the questionable degree subjects in a derogative way, with one of the accidentally-released emails carrying the subject heading "Response to The Sunday Telegraph on Mickey Mouse courses." This newspaper did not use that phrase when posing the questions.

Following the revelations, David Willetts, the universities minister, predicted the end of "odd" courses as students face up to the new economic climate.

The clearing system, by which candidates who failed to get into their chosen university or college try and get places on other undersubscribed courses, began more than a fortnight ago. Yet despite record demand for places at top universities, hundreds of places are still available in less well known higher education institutions, many of them offering unconventional courses.

Northampton University initially had 250 places available through the clearing system, including such courses as Third World Development with Pop Music, Dance with Equine Studies and joint honours in Waste Management and Dance.

The clearing web-site also invites school-leavers to consider a Tournament Golf foundation degree at Duchy College in Camborne, Cornwall. The two-year course offers students the chance to "improve your tournament golf skills", and its admissions requirements indicate: "No handicap is definitive but the guide parameters are +5 to 3."

A spokeswoman for the college said: "The innovative programme gives young talented golfers the opportunity to chase their dreams whilst having the safety net of a UK university qualification to fall back on."

Glyndwr University, in Wrexham, still had 15 places available on its BSc (Hons) in Equestrian Psychology, which "investigates the unique partnership between horse and rider".

Subjects which were on offer through clearing at the start of last week, but which filled up during the week, included a degree course in Australian Studies, a joint honours degree in Criminology and Pop Music Production, and another combining Geology and Popular Culture.

Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: "It seems that many universities are going for the lowest common denominator just to get bums on seats and maximise their funding. "It seems crazy that youngsters are getting good grades in serious subjects at A-level and then being denied places, while these sort of courses are proliferating." He added: "The Secretary of State is the person democratically responsible and should be able to change things if necessary, and the law should be changed to allow him to do that."

Unprecedented demand for university and college degrees this year has left an estimated 150,000 students without a place.

Mr Willetts said: "In tough times I suspect some of these more eccentric courses, which date from the excesses of the dying days of the Labour government, will disappear because students see they are not a route into a well-paid career. "Some of them sound like very odd courses indeed.

"I think the way forward is providing students with better information about the employment outcomes from individual course at individual universities."

Farnborough College of Technology still had places available last week on its two-year foundation degree in Holistic Therapies. But if applicants find that course to be full they could turn to Warwickshire College which is offering Beauty Therapies Management, Hairdressing Management and Spa Management courses.

Writtle College in Chelmsford, Essex, offers a foundation degree in Professional Floristry which covers the "practical and theoretical aspects of floral design". There is still one place available on a three-year degree in Theatre Practice: Puppetry at London's Central School of Speech and Drama.

Jessica Bowles, the course tutor, said: "The major leads in War Horse [the successful West End play] are all from Central's Puppetry course. This leads to very concrete career opportunities."

A spokesman for the HEFCE, which allocates £4.6 billion a year for university teaching and £1.6 billion for research, said: "Universities have the discretion to spend the money according to their own priorities. "We don't stipulate which subjects universities should teach and which they should not teach. That is a matter for them. They have to make their own decisions on their own mission and their own goals."

Although the HEFCE has introduced priority funding for subjects such as sciences and modern languages, the freedom granted to universities meant that less-conventional degrees still receive funding even at a time of budget cutbacks.

When Northampton's Dance with Equine Studies was pointed out to the funding council spokesman, he said: "You are talking about some pretty out-lying courses. "They are regulated through the Quality Assurance Agency and what we can do is try to steer the sector into offering subjects that employers might value more than others.

"We do not count unfilled places in our funding allocations. If institutions cannot fill places in clearing they have the flexibility to provide additional places on other courses provided they keep within the funding agreements with us."

Asked about the use of the "Mickey Mouse" phrase, the HEFCE spokesman said: "Our use of 'Mickey Mouse' is pretty indefensible. I think the use of that phrase was a mistake, but it's a fair cop."

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TN: Lottery scholarship program prepares for cuts

The bad news is, Tennessee's lottery scholarship program is losing tens of millions of dollars a year. The good news is, at least it's not losing hundreds of millions of dollars, as originally feared.

Even so, the state is preparing for painful cutbacks in the popular merit-based college scholarship program, which offsets the cost of tuition at Tennessee colleges and universities for an estimated 100,000 students a year.

Tennessee college tuition goes up every year, and the prospect of losing any part of the lottery scholarship alarms parents such as Kim Lewis, a Nashville mother of three whose 15-year-old twins are rapidly approaching college age.

"The HOPE scholarship is the only thing that keeps us from tearing our hair out," joked Lewis, who doesn't even like to think about what happens when her 12-year-old also enters college and she and her husband will be putting three kids through school at once.

"Tell them not to touch the HOPE," she said, passing her marching orders along to the legislature. "Tell them to cut something else, but families really rely on that tuition money being there."

The cost of the lottery scholarship programs has tripled since it launched in 2004 as a pilot program only for college freshmen and sophomores. The program expenditures reached almost $302 million this year and could jump by $8 million next year.

For Belmont junior Nick Kirk, the HOPE scholarship has meant the difference between living on campus and commuting an hour each way from his home in Fairview. HOPE scholarships cover about 62 percent of tuition for students at public universities and about 20 percent of the tuition at the average private college in Tennessee. For Kirk, the scholarship offsets the steep cost of room, board and college fees.

"It was definitely worth the hard work in high school to earn the HOPE scholarship," said Kirk, a biology major with a dual minor in chemistry and music. "You don't realize how expensive things are going to be. The HOPE is definitely a good thing."

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"Diversity" takes a hit in NC

And the Left is squealing

AdvancED, a national and international education accreditation organization, plans to send a team to Wake County this fall to review planned changes to the public school system's student assignment policy.

The group sent a letter to Wake County Public School System Interim Superintendent Donna Hargens on July 28 outlining concerns and questions raised in a complaint filed in March.

School system spokesman Michael Evans said the original complaint was filed by Rev. William Barber, president of the state chapter of the NAACP.

Barber has been the leader of a vocal opposition to the school board's decision earlier this year to do away with a policy that assigns students to schools based on socio-economics.

He and others fear that ending the longstanding policy in favor for one that places students in schools closer to their homes will lead to re-segregation, high teacher turnover and poor students receiving a lower quality of education than their economically advantaged counterparts.

Five of the school board's nine members disagree and believe the move will help improve test scores and give parents more chances to be involved in their students' education.

In other words, since we can't stop you from undoing all the crap we did over the years, then we are going to try and bully you into stepping back.

Look, we the people have spoken and we want real solutions not more spreading of the disease. We wanted and voted in a school board that will do just that. The new head of the board stated that they will continue to proceed on the new policy regardless of the ongoing disruptions and protests.

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British children let down by failing schools, says CBI

Thousands of teenagers are still being “let down” by failing schools despite record investment in education under Labour, according to business leaders. In a damning final judgment on the previous government’s education record, employers said a 120 per cent rise in the amount of money spent on schools had “not delivered the returns” needed to drive the British economy.

The Confederation of British Industry warned that serious concerns still surrounded school leavers’ lack of literacy and numeracy skills combined with the relatively low number of teenagers studying vital science and maths subjects to a high standard.

Too many teenagers also entered the workplace lacking basic employability skills, such as the ability to analyse evidence, communicate with colleagues and solve problems, it claimed.

The conclusions were made in a report published to coincide with the start of the first full school year under the new Conservative-led Government.

The CBI, which represents some 240,000 British businesses, praised the Coalition’s reforms, including the expansion of independent academies, but insisted “much more” was needed to improve the education system.

It called for ministers to allow profit-making companies to take over the running of the worst schools to turnaround chronic under-performance.

New rules should also be introduced to teach a broad set of employability skills as well as encouraging the best students to take separate GCSEs in biology, chemistry and physics, it said.

Susan Anderson, CBI director of public services and education, said progress had been made over the last 13 years but “significant challenges remain”. “Too many school leavers leave education without the skills, knowledge and attitude to work [that] employers are looking for,” she said. “And too many of these young people are being let down by persistent underperformance of the education system through attending failing or coasting schools. “The link between a disadvantaged background and poor educational achievement remains too clear.”

The report said Government spending on education had more than doubled to £60 billion a year between 1996 and 2008, delivering better GCSE results and a drop in the number of schools placed in special measures by Ofsted.

This summer, almost a quarter of GCSE entries were graded an A in the 22nd straight year-on-year rise, while A-level results also soared to a record high. But the CBI said that looking “past the headline GCSE and A-level results” revealed a “more complex and concerning picture of the UK’s education system”. It said half of all 16-year-olds failed to gain at least five good GCSEs, including English and maths, last year.

Almost 250 secondary schools failed to hit the basic GCSE targets designed to ensure 30 per cent of pupils gain five A* to C grades in 2009, it said, and the UK has the third highest number of 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training in the developed world.

The CBI also said that many children lacked skills such as self-management, customer awareness, problem solving and basic communication, suggesting that schools prioritised the regurgitation of “facts” over the application of knowledge. "The decade of spending on education has not delivered the returns expected or needed,” said the study. “Neither has it delivered significant change in the systems and structures which might drive future improvement."

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The importance of history

Back in the classroom after a year-long sabbatical, I’m realizing how much I missed the direct interaction with students. For me, nothing compares to those moments when the light of understanding comes on in my students or when they face a challenge to things long taken for granted. Their faces almost proclaim that they are seeing the world in a fundamentally different way. One of the most powerful ways we can elicit those reactions — and call into question the largely statist worldview they bring to college — is to challenge what they think they know about history. There may be no more important thing for classical liberals to do than to offer counter-narratives to standard historical stories.

I’m doing this in two different classes this semester. The more historical of the two is a senior seminar on the Great Depression, which I’m teaching for the second time. (The syllabus is here). We started the class last week by walking through what I like to call the “High School History” version of the Great Depression. This is the version in which laissez-faire capitalism caused the stock market crash and Herbert Hoover stood around doing nothing (committed lover of laissez-faire that he was), allowing the crash to become a depression. Of course this version also tells us that FDR and the New Deal saved us from utter chaos and that our entry into World War II finally pulled us out of the Depression.

The students nod quietly as I repeat this narrative, only to look a little shocked when I then say, “Every piece of that story is wrong and we’re going to explore why over the course of the semester.”

In the world of liberal arts we like to talk about throwing students out of their comfort zones. That feeling of disequilibrium is the first step toward learning. And it’s one of the most powerful moments one can have in the classroom. But it’s also crucial for helping anyone, not just students, understand the classical-liberal framework.

Understanding the Present

Getting a better understanding of the history, especially of major events like the Great Depression, is so important because historical narratives and interpretations fuel our understanding of current events and how to respond to them. Just think of the ways in which the High School History version of the Great Depression has informed the national discussion of the current recession. If one really believes that story, it’s a small step to applying the same narrative to today’s situation and to believing that capitalism failed and more government is the answer.

The other course is comparative economics. We started by talking about how the West grew rich (and reading Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell’s wonderful book by that name). In the opening chapter, Rosenberg and Birdzell offer nine different commonly believed reasons the West grew rich, including three that are staples of the contemporary college curriculum: exploitation, colonialism/imperialism, and slavery.

My students who have studied First-Third World relationships in other courses nod their heads quietly until I start to explore the counterevidence Rosenberg and Birdzell offer. It’s hard to argue exploitation, they point out, when the real wages of labor have steadily risen over the last 200 years and capitalists have more or less willingly paid them. As for the other two, they offer examples of western countries that were colonial powers but did not get rich and other countries that had no colonies but did get rich. As for slavery, they make the same point: Some slave societies did not get rich, and some rich countries did not have slaves. The bottom line of their first chapter is that none of these “standard” explanations seem reliable. They argue instead that it was the unique institutions of the West (private property, limited government, freedom of thought and exchange) that generated our prosperity.

This unmasking of history is not just powerful in the college classroom; it should be one of the key ways we classical liberals make our arguments and try to persuade anyone of our views. Arguing theory is fine, but many who disagree with us often trot out historical examples they believe undermine the theory. Those examples are usually wrong, but to show it, classical liberals must have a good command of history and be prepared to offer a different narrative of the event in question. I submit that at the bottom of most disagreements with classical liberalism lies a bad reading of history.

If we want to change people’s minds, we’re going to have to start by challenging their reading of history. Learning that history is among the most important things classical liberals can do.

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Scary back to school future in California

Scary news from California's Contra Costa County — school officials there have reportedly decided to track some preschoolers with RFID chips, thanks to a federal grant supplying the funding.

According to a story from the Associated Press, the students will wear a jersey at school that has the RFID tag attached. The tag will track the children's movements and collect other data, like if the child has eaten or not. According to a Contra Costa County official, this is a cost-savings move, as teachers used to have to manually keep track of a child's attendance and meal schedule.

But of course, an RFID chip allows for far more than that minimal record-keeping. Instead, it provides the potential for nearly constant monitoring of a child's physical location. If readings are taken often enough, you could create an extraordinarily detailed portrait of a child's school day — one that's easy to imagine being misused, particularly as the chips substitute for direct adult monitoring and judgment.

If RFID records show a child moving around a lot, could she be tagged as hyper-active? If he doesn't move around a lot, could he get a reputation for laziness? How long will this data and the conclusions rightly or wrongly drawn from it be stored in these children's school records? Can parents opt-out of this invasive tracking? How many other federal grants are underwriting programs like these?

These are questions that desperately need answers. California is in the middle of a terrible budget crunch, but the solution is not federally funded surveillance of children who are too young to understand the implications.

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No room at British schools for many of the 2010 baby boomers

As thousands more are taught in makeshift class rooms

Hundreds of children have no primary school place with term already started as the recent baby boom triggers an admissions crisis. Thousands of other children are having to be taught in makeshift classrooms because of the overspill, which has been further increased by a recession-fuelled exodus from fee-paying private schools.

Councils in many parts of the country, including London and Birmingham, say applications for places are still being received. Yet even some parents who applied in good time have yet to be allocated a school for their child.

Brent, in North West London, for example, has 210 four-year-olds still without a reception class place but only 24 vacancies in schools. The council is preparing to offer places in children's centres if necessary.

Between them, councils including Ealing, Tower Hamlets, Haringey, Merton, Havering, Camden and Hammersmith and Fulham - all in London - as well as Kingston-upon-Thames in Greater London and Birmingham have hundreds of pupils yet to be placed: many of them late applicants.

Meanwhile officials in Newham, South East London, are considering putting four classes in a church hall following a sharp rise in children seeking places this year.

Hundreds of other schools across the country are using temporary prefabricated buildings on their own sites to accommodate additional pupils or are starting to construct permanent new classrooms.

In Hampshire, a school known for its eco-credentials, St Bede's Primary, in Winchester, is seeking to concrete over a pond to accommodate a temporary classroom to cope with soaring pupil numbers. Meanwhile, in Brighton, temporary classrooms are being purchased at a cost of £125,000 each.

In Leicestershire, Lady Jane Grey Primary, in Groby, gained emergency planning consent for a temporary classroom on its site. Head Michael Fitzgerald said: 'The school is facing a very difficult situation - there isn't a spare cupboard in the building.'

Leeds is increasing capacity at 16 primaries from this month while in Bristol, six schools are gaining 22 temporary classrooms. Birmingham is expanding nine schools to create an extra 330 places this month. It will need an additional 3,000 by 2020.

In many areas, schools have agreed to accept 'bulge' classes - an extra reception class which continues through the school. They are meant to be a one-off but some schools have already taken them for two or three years running.

The Coalition has acknowledged the shortage of primary places is now 'critical' and claims the previous Labour government failed to make adequate preparations for the extra pupils despite warnings. More than 1,000 primary schools have closed since 1999 amid accusations some areas have taken a 'short term' view of likely demand.

Education Secretary Michael Gove plans to move cash from frozen secondary school building projects into providing primary places.

But the Mail's survey of local education authorities reveals that many schools need huge sums of money to meet future demand. A spokesman for Kingston warned it would need as much as £70million.

Official figures show the number of babies born in 2006 - and now starting school - was the highest since 1993, with birth rates expected to continue to rise at least until 2018.

Latest projections suggest that primary school pupil numbers will rise by more than 500,000 in just eight years to 4,526,000, reaching their highest level since the 1970s.

The equivalent of more than 2,000 extra primary schools will be needed to cope, at a time of severe public spending cuts.

While classes for children in the first two years of school are limited in law to 30, teaching groups for older primary pupils could balloon as staff are diverted to teach the new influx of pupils.

In the meantime, pupils caught up in the crisis face being taught in overcrowded classes or travelling miles to their nearest school, and being split from siblings.

In Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, mothers had to mount a campaign to win an extra reception class at a popular school after being offered schools up to five miles away.

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For profit’s growing market share — market segmentation

In my last rant, I briefly mentioned the for-profit higher education sector’s enrollment growth at the expense of mainstream nonprofit and public education sectors in recent years. The references cited were not public relations’ hype from the for-profit sector’s lobbyists. The sources were the College Board and the National Center for Education Statistics— two of the higher education community’s most reliable objective data sources.

Loss of market share means loss of tuition revenue at time when it has become harder to rely upon federal and state largess. The non-profit establishment’s consternation over market share loss is understandable. Their response is not. The private non-profit and public higher education cabal with its mainstream higher education press allies have been gloating over the ethically suspect recruitment practices revealed by the GAO’s undercover secret shopper investigation. While some of the for-profit sector’s growth may be linked to questionable recruiting practices, this is also true for some of the not-for-profit institutions. The counterproductive character assassination of for-profit colleges in Congress and mainstream higher education press we are now witnessing, only serves to divert public attention from the from the more likely underlying cause of this growing shift in market preference.

The vast majority of the students electing to enroll in for-profit higher education institutions are not the gullible mass of willing victims that the non-profit higher education partisans imply. Rather they are perceptive consumers, who know what they want in educational programs and are willing to pay for the services and conveniences. Too often their needs are unrecognized at nearby public and non-profit privates.

My economist hero, Thomas Sowell has long noted that traditional higher education institutions are managed for the benefit of the administrators and faculty and not the students. Their programs are too often conceived and delivered for the convenience of the provider institution’s employees and not its customers.

College students are no longer that homogeneous cohort of 18 to 22 year olds pursuing their post-secondary education fulltime. The post-secondary market is heterogeneous. For example, data from the 2005 Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) shows that a student at a U.S. institution of higher education is as likely to be in her 30s, taking care of dependents and working full-time as she is to be 19, in a sorority, getting financial assistance from the parental unit, and taking 15 credit hours a semester. More recent CCSSE report MAKING CONNECTIONS: Dimensions of Student Engagement states, “Most community college students are enrolled part-time. Many students, even full-time students, work nearly full-time. Thus, many community college students take classes at night and online.”

The American ideal of a post-secondary education for every citizen who may benefit must be pursued with imagination and flexibly. The for-profits have gotten right. Give them credit for serving student needs that have been too often ignored by the mainstream higher education.

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Musician teaches where teachers fail



MAKING grammar fun is the ambition of Adelaide musician Shaun McNicholas, whose Apostrophe Song has become an internet sensation. Mr McNicholas wrote the Apostrophe Song when he was involved in teaching professional English and was amazed to see the film-clip race up the charts once it was posted on the internet by English writer and comedian Stephen Fry. Thousands of people have now watched the catchy song on YouTube.

Mr McNicholas now hopes to sell the accompanying iPhone application which he developed with Adelaide's Enabled Solutions. "It is a helpful and fun little tool to help people use grammar correctly," he said. The application enables people to check the rules for using apostrophes instantly.

Mr McNicholas said he was encouraging students and teachers to write their own versions of the song, which he would post on his website, coolrules.com. He is also developing other grammar programs on subject-verb agreement, the semicolon and parts of speech.

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Quarter of British primary schools have no male teachers: Fears over vanishing role models as trend worsens

More than a quarter of primary schools do not have a single male teacher, following a long- term decline in their numbers, official figures reveal today. Staff rooms at 4,700 primaries are solely populated by women - 150 more than last year.

And just one man under the age of 25 works in a state-run nursery anywhere in England, the statistics show. The trend has triggered warnings that rising numbers of boys are having little or no contact with an adult male before they reach secondary school.

And with the number of male secondary school teachers also dwindling, some could go through their entire education without being taught by a man. The figures also fuel fears of rising misbehaviour among disaffected teenage boys whose lives lack male authority figures.

Statistics released today by the General Teaching Council show that only 125,361 of 502,562 registered teachers are men - just 25 per cent - with the vast majority working in secondary schools and further education.

Two decades ago, men made up four in ten teachers. In primary schools, in 2009/10, male teachers made up just 12.5 per cent of staff, compared with 13 per cent the previous year. Some 4,700 primaries in England - 28 per cent - have no male teacher or head teacher, up from 27 per cent in 2008/09. Six secondaries have no male teachers.

The decline is thought to be linked to the attractions of other graduate jobs as well as fears over allegations of inappropriate behaviour and society's 'paranoia' concerning paedophiles.

The recession is eventually expected to lead to an increase in the number of men applying to become teachers. But experts warned that men also faced barriers to being accepted on teacher training courses - possibly because most recruiters are women.

Professor John Howson, a recruitment expert and director of Education Data Surveys, warned: 'Colleges are converting fewer male applicants into people on courses than for women.' He added that there are still elements in society which do not 'fully appreciate that men can look after younger children'.

'We probably hit a level of paranoia about four or five years ago - the question is whether we are doing enough to overcome it. 'I'm even more concerned that we are haemorrhaging men in secondary schools. We are losing men at a faster rate at secondary level than primary. 'Where do the boys' male role models come from?' he asked.

The GTC figures also show that only 44 men work in state nurseries, with just one - Jamie Wilson, 23, of Merseyside - in the under-25 age bracket.

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America's educators are holding America back

Not so much the teachers as those who teach the teachers and those who represent the teachers

No matter which societal problem we place under the microscope, the search for a solution… or the absence thereof… always takes us back to what it is that our people know and understand. It all comes back to the public schools, teachers unions, colleges and universities.

When people cannot properly read, write, and speak the English language, they are unable to take full advantage of the freedoms that are available to them. When people are inadequately schooled in mathematics and the sciences, they are unable to participate in the advancement of science and technology and it will be difficult for them to find a niche in a highly technological world. When people fail to understand the lessons of history, they are unable to make the political judgments necessary to avoid the mistakes of the past. When people have inadequate knowledge of politics and the workings of government, they are unable to make the political decisions necessary to advance the cause of freedom. And when people have an inadequate grasp of basic economics they are unable to properly assess the impact of taxes, savings, profits, and investments.

In all of these areas of physical and intellectual endeavor, our public education system is by far our greatest failing.

In an August 11, 2010 article for Townhall.com, titled “The Left’s Special-Interest Human Shields,” columnist Michelle Malkin gives us a clue as to why our public education system is the greatest failure among all our public institutions. Clearly, what has always been an important, necessary, and highly respected profession, has been transformed into just another cesspool of leftist union activism, just another mindless, lemming-like subsidiary of the Democratic Party.

Malkin’s attitude toward schoolteachers is not unlike that of most Americans. She says, “I have nothing against public-school teachers. My mother was one. My children are taught by some of the best in the nation. And over the years, I’ve reported on valiant battles between rank-and-file educators in government schools and their fat, bloated union leaders, who’ve transformed their professional organizations into wholly owned Democratic subsidiaries. My opposition to the so-called “Edujobs” bill stems not from meanness but from compassion for millions of dues-paying school employees being used as special-interest human shields.”

Looking into the faces of the teachers at your local public elementary school or high school… the “micro” view of public education… is not the same as taking a “macro” view of the teaching profession. Malkin quotes the DC-based Labor Union Report as saying that, in 2009, the National Education Association (NEA) “raked in a whopping $355,334,165 in ‘dues and agency fees’ from (mostly) teachers around the country.” And although the NEA spent close to $11 million more than it took in, it did not short-change the political parasites who rely on it for their sustenance. The NEA still found it possible to pour $50 million into “political activities and lobbying” for exclusively left-wing and partisan Democratic causes and candidates.

So, if excellence in education is not the first priority of the teachers union, what do they see as their top priority? The NEA’s retiring top lawyer, Bob Chanin, spoke to delegates at the NEA annual meeting in July. He made no bones about what is the union’s top priority. He said:

“Despite what some among us would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children, and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power. And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year, because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them, the unions that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees. . . .

“This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing dropout rates, improving teacher quality and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary. These are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights, and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay.”

Talk about upside-down priorities. As Barack Obama’s personal hero, Saul Alinsky, has said, teacher organizers must commit to a “singleness of purpose.” Not serving the needs of parents and children, but serving the “ability to build a (political) power base.” That they have done.

The Democratic Party is comprised of (in order of importance) teachers unions (NEA and AFT), trial lawyers, public employee unions, blue collar unions (AFL-CIO), radical environmentalists, minorities (blacks and Hispanics), service employee unions (SEIU), organized street agitators (ACORN), radical feminists, gays, lesbians, and the gender-confused community.

Yet, in spite of the fact that public school teachers are now ranked as the most politically powerful special interest in the nation, and in spite of the fact that we as a nation spend more on public education per pupil than any other industrialized nation, we find that among high school students in the 30 richest nations, U.S. students rank 17th in their knowledge of the sciences and 24th in their knowledge of mathematics. Clearly, our public education system is failing to prepare our children to compete in a highly technological world. It is our weakest link. It is the anchor on our Ship of State.

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Charter Schools Rise in Katrina’s Wake

Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than just buildings. Left with scarce resources and personnel, local government in New Orleans became weak and ineffective in the aftermath of the flooding. Five years later, the rebuilding of New Orleans is far from complete, but reformers can point to at least one major accomplishment: a new school system built around charter schools and parental choice.

As a recent Newsweek article explains in some detail, Louisiana established the Recovery School District (RSD) to replace the old school system in New Orleans. Eschewing centralized control, RSD officials created a plethora of charter schools throughout the city, offering far more choices to parents than they had pre-Katrina.

Charter schools receive public funding but are allowed to operate without the regulatory burden faced by ordinary public schools. They have more leeway to experiment with different teaching methods, curriculum content, disciplinary procedures, and levels of parental involvement. If enrollment is any indication, New Orleans parents appreciate the choices. Over 60 percent of the city’s students attended a charter school last year.

A rigorous evaluation of charter school impacts has yet to be conducted in New Orleans, but a recent report by the U.S. Department of Education gives us a good idea of how charter schools perform nationally. To ensure a fair evaluation, the report’s authors used a natural experiment: They compared students who attended oversubscribed charter schools through a lottery with students who lost the lottery and were denied entrance. (This method is the “gold standard” for school evaluation.)

The results are unambiguous. By large margins, parents are more satisfied with charter schools—and with the academic and social development of their children who attend—than are public school parents. For example, charter schools were rated “excellent” by 85 percent of parents, while non-charter schools received the “excellent” rating by just 37 percent of parents.

The people of New Orleans are the latest to benefit from an extensive system of charter schools, but it should not take a natural disaster to make that option available. As more states and localities nationwide adopt school choice, the more satisfied parents will be.

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British teachers’ fear of discipline holds back their pupils

A change in schools' culture is needed if bad behaviour is to be eradicated

Today, we publish the disturbing story of David Roy, a science teacher in a comprehensive in Blackpool who was sacked after he tried to impose a modicum of discipline in his classroom. An industrial tribunal has now ruled that he was unfairly dismissed and he has won compensation from the school that sacked him. But the whole charade should never have happened to begin with.

That it did so is an indictment of the terrible state into which some schools have fallen. The head teacher who believed that it was her duty to sack Mr Roy did so without hearing his version of what had happened. She accepted, with little further investigation, the allegations made by three children, who claimed they had been shouted at, or grabbed, or in some way maltreated. In following such an unfair procedure, she was doing no more than complying with what many within the state system seem to believe is “best practice”: uncritically accepting charges made by pupils and assuming the teacher’s guilt.

The result is, effectively, a charter for bad behaviour. On average, secondary school teachers lose 50 minutes of teaching time each day because of unruly and aggressive pupils, who feel they have a licence to misbehave without the threat of sanctions. This lack of discipline does not just hurt those pupils who want to learn: those who are most damaged by it are the disruptive pupils themselves. As their unacceptable behaviour is not curtailed, they never learn the elementary social skills essential for succeeding in life, never mind anything that could be described as academic knowledge. The chaos caused by this failure to impose discipline has blighted, and continues to blight, the prospects of thousands of children.

Pupils need to be in an environment where the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour is clear and unambiguous, and where the consequences for crossing the boundary are instant and undesirable. This problem cannot be fixed by legislation, for it is not so much the result of teachers not being legally permitted to discipline pupils – they are – but rather a collective failure of judgment on the part of some elements in the teaching profession.

What is required is not a change in the law but a change in the culture, one that gives teachers the benefit of the doubt and restores their authority within the classroom. This is starting to happen, as some of the new academies demonstrate – but not fast enough. Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, is right to have high hopes of his new schools. But he also needs to find a way to erase the deep‑seated hostility to discipline that still holds sway in so much of Britain’s education system.

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Leftist educators as "true believers"

Teachers College Maintains The Planet

A beautiful example of true belief in action crossed my desk recently from the alumni magazine of my own alma mater, Columbia University. Written by the director of Columbia’s Institute for Learning Technologies, a bureau at Teachers College, this mailing informed graduates that the education division now regarded itself as bound by "a contract with posterity." Something in the tone warned me against dismissing this as customary institutional gas. Seconds later I learned, with some shock, that Teachers College felt obligated to take a commanding role in "maintaining the planet." The next extension of this strange idea was even more pointed. Teachers College now interpreted its mandate, I was told, as one compelling it "to distribute itself all over the world and to teach every day, 24 hours a day."

To gain perspective, try to imagine the University of Berlin undertaking to distribute itself among the fifty American states, to be present in this foreign land twenty-four hours a day, swimming in the minds of Mormon children in Utah and Baptist children in Georgia. Any university intending to become global like some nanny creature spawned in Bacon’s ghastly utopia, New Atlantis, is no longer simply in the business of education. Columbia Teachers College had become an aggressive evangelist by its own announcement, an institution of true belief selling an unfathomable doctrine. I held its declaration in my hand for a while after I read it. Thinking.

Let me underline what you just heard. Picture some U.N. thought police dragging reluctant Serbs to a loudspeaker to listen to Teachers College rant. Most of us have no frame of reference in which to fit such a picture. Narcosis in the face of true belief is a principal reason the disease progressed so far through the medium of forced schooling without provoking much major opposition. Only after a million homeschooling families and an equal number of religiously oriented private-school families emerged from their sleep to reclaim their children from the government in the 1970s and 1980s, in direct response to an epoch of flagrant social experimentation in government schools, did true belief find ruts in its road.

Columbia, where I took an undergraduate degree, is the last agency I would want maintaining my planet. For decades it was a major New York slumlord indifferent to maintaining its own neighborhood, a territory much smaller than the globe. Columbia has been a legendary bad neighbor to the community for the forty years I’ve lived near my alma mater. So much for its qualifications as Planetary Guardian. Its second boast is even more ominous – I mean that goal of intervening in mental life "all over the world," teaching "every day, 24 hours a day." Teaching what? Shouldn’t we ask? Our trouble in recognizing true belief is that it wears a reasonable face in modern times.

A Lofty, Somewhat Inhuman Vision

Take a case reported by the Public Agenda Foundation which produced the first-ever survey of educational views held by teachers college professors. To their surprise, the authors discovered that the majority of nine hundred randomly selected professors of education interviewed did not regard a teacher’s struggle to maintain an orderly classroom or to cope with disruptive students as major problems! The education faculty was generally unwilling to attend to these matters seriously in their work, believing that widespread alarm among parents stemming from worry that graduates couldn’t spell, couldn’t count accurately, couldn’t sustain attention, couldn’t write grammatically (or write at all) was only caused by views of life "outmoded and mistaken."

While 92 percent of the public thinks basic reading, writing, and math competency is "absolutely essential" (according to an earlier study by Public Agenda), education professors did not agree. In the matter of mental arithmetic, which a large majority of ordinary people, including some schoolteachers, consider very important, about 60 percent of education professors think cheap calculators make that goal obsolete.

The word passion appears more than once in the report from which these data are drawn, as in the following passage:

"Education professors speak with passionate idealism about their own, sometimes lofty, vision of education and the mission of teacher education programs. The passion translates into ambitious and highly-evolved expectations for future teachers, expectations that often differ dramatically from those of parents and teachers now in the classroom. "The soul of a teacher is what should be passed on from teacher to teacher," a Boston professor said with some intensity. "You have to have that soul to be a good teacher."

It’s not my intention at this moment to recruit you to one or another side of this debate, but only to hold you by the back of the neck as Uncle Bud (who you’ll meet up ahead) once held mine and point out that this vehicle has no brake pedal – ordinary parents and students have no way to escape this passion. Twist and turn as they might, they will be subject to any erotic curiosity inspired love arouses. In the harem of true belief, there is scant refuge from the sultan’s lusty gaze.

Rain Forest Algebra

In the summer of 1997, a Democratic senator stood on the floor of the Senate denouncing the spread of what he called "wacko algebra"; one widely distributed math text referred to in that speech did not ask a question requiring algebraic knowledge until page 107. What replaced the boredom of symbolic calculation were discussions of the role of zoos in community life, or excursions to visit the fascinating Dogon tribe of West Africa. Whatever your own personal attitude toward "rain forest algebra," as it was snidely labeled, you would be hard-pressed not to admit one thing: its problems are almost computation-free. Whether you find the mathematical side of social issues relevant or not isn’t in question. Your attention should be fixed on the existence of minds, nominally in charge of number enlightenment for your children, which consider a private agenda more important than numbers.

One week last spring, the entire math homework in fifth grade at middle-class P.S. 87 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan consisted of two questions:

1. Historians estimate that when Columbus landed on what is now the island of Hati [this is the spelling in the question] there were 250,000 people living there. In two years this number had dropped to 125,000. What fraction of the people who had been living in Hati when Columbus arrived remained? Why do you think the Arawaks died?

2. In 1515 there were only 50,000 Arawaks left alive. In 1550 there were 500. If the same number of people died each year, approximately how many people would have died each year? In 1550 what percentage of the original population was left alive? How do you feel about this?

Tom Loveless, professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has no doubt that National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards have deliberately de-emphasized math skills, and he knows precisely how it was done. But like other vigorous dissenters who have tried to arrest the elimination of critical intellect in children, he adduces no motive for the awesome project which has worked so well up to now. Loveless believes that the "real reform project has begun: writing standards that declare the mathematics children will learn." He may be right, but I am not so sanguine.

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Foreign language study in British schools

The BBC asked “Should British pupils give up studying French?” However, the key issue isn’t whether or not children should be learning French, but the fact that schools are encouraging children to take easier subjects so that the school scores well on the league tables. Crucially this is not always to the advantage of the children, especially if they plan to apply to elite universities.

Independent schools tend not to do this because their reputation requires that they take greater interest in their pupils. In contrast, many state schools are taking the easy way out. Without radical reform of the education system, the government will only be able to choose between the blunt tools of either compulsion or league tables. Both have undesirable unintended consequences.

Others in the article echo my point. For example, the language learning expert Paul Noble states that "the core reason is because pupils know French is difficult to pass, and difficult to get something out of it”, while Michel Monsauret, attache for education at the French Embassy in London, points out that subjects such as religious studies are on the increase because they are perceived to be easier. Mr Monsauret correctly states that “languages are taught more extensively at private schools in the UK, and their pupils go on to dominate places at Oxbridge and the other best universities."

Predictably the National University of Teachers (NUT) is appalled: “The policy drift on modern foreign languages is unforgivable”. Children, according to the NUT, aren’t adequately equipped for life in a global society. A bit rich coming from an organization set up to protect the interests of teachers even when against the benefits to parents and children; an organization that is the biggest impediment to reform. Asking the NUT what is best for children is like asking a turkey what should be eaten at Christmas – the goose will always be cooked.

Whether one’s child should be taught French, German, Cantonese or Chamicuro should be solely that of the parents. Of course, they will be limited by what is being offered, which is an argument for a dynamic and competitive system – one driven by the free market, not bureaucratic oversight. That learning a language involves no literature shows how bankrupt the teaching is many of our schools. As such, the lamentations of Aida Edemariam and others are frankly irrelevant.

The teaching of French – or lack of it – is symbolic of the wider failure of bureaucratic control of the education.

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British schoolboys 'being held back by women teachers' as gender stereotypes are reinforced in the classroom

Women teachers are holding back boys by reprimanding them for typically male behaviour, according to a study out today. They are reinforcing stereotypes that boys are ‘silly’ in class, refuse to ‘sit nicely like the girls’ and are more likely to indulge in ‘schoolboy pranks’.

Women teachers may also unwittingly perpetuate low expectations of boys’ academic achievement and encourage girls to work harder by letting them think they are cleverer.

Schools should avoid dividing pupils into ability groups because the practice often results in girls dominating the higher-achieving tables, concluded the Kent University research.

The study of primary schools in the county suggests that under-performance among boys in most national exams could be linked to lower expectations.

The research mainly implicates women teachers, since nearly 90 per cent of primary school teachers are female. It warned that school staff find boys’ play, such as wielding toy guns, ‘particularly challenging and difficult’. Boys are punished and urged to conform to a more feminine style of play instead of being taught how to play responsibly with their preferred toys.

Bonny Hartley, the study’s lead author, said: ‘By seven or eight years old, children of both genders believe that boys are less focused, able, and successful than girls – and think that adults endorse this stereotype. There are signs that these expectations have the potential to become self-fulfilling in influencing
children’s actual conduct and achievement.’

Girls as young as four think they are cleverer, try harder and are better behaved than equivalent boys, her study found. By the age of seven and eight, boys also believe that their female classmates are more likely have these qualities.

For the study, 238 children aged four to ten were presented with a series of scenarios such as ‘this child is really clever’ and ‘this child always finishes their work’. They were then asked to point to a picture of a boy or a girl to say which they thought was being talked about.

The findings show that from the first year of school girls said their sex was more likely to record better conduct and achievement. From the age of eight, boys were also more likely to say that girls had better performance, motivation and effort, self-control and conduct.

In the second part of the study – being presented today at the British Educational Research Association annual conference at Warwick University – the children were asked if adults believed boys or girls were cleverer and better behaved.

From an early age, girls believe grown-ups think girls have better conduct and achievement. Boys develop the same beliefs around the age of eight.

The study drew no distinction between the beliefs and classroom practices of male and female teachers. Further research by the same team will consider the specific gender stereotypes held by teachers.

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