Losing the Brains Race
America is spending more money on education while producing worse outcomes
In November the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released its Program for International Student Assessment scores, measuring educational achievement in 65 countries. The results are depressingly familiar: While students in many developed nations have been learning more and more over time, American 15-year-olds are stuck in the middle of the pack in many fundamental areas, including reading and math. Yet the United States is near the top in education spending.
Using the OECD data, Figure 1 compares K–12 education expenditures per pupil in each of the world’s major industrial powers. As you can see, with the exception of Switzerland, the U.S. spends the most in the world on education, an average of $91,700 per student in the nine years between the ages of 6 and 15. But the results do not correlate: For instance, we spend one-third more per student than Finland, which consistently ranks near the top in science, reading, and math.
Naturally, the OECD’s report has sparked calls for more spending. Speaking at Forsyth Technical Community College in North Carolina at the beginning of December, President Barack Obama said the federal government should spend more on improving achievement in math and science, much as Washington did in response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik launch a half-century ago.
But throwing more money at poorly performing schools has not moved the needle on performance. During the last 40 years, the federal government has spent $1.8 trillion on education, and spending per pupil in the U.S. has tripled in real terms. Government at all levels spent an average of $149,000 on the 13-year education of a high school senior who graduated in 2009, compared to $50,000 (in 2009 dollars) for a 1970 graduate.
Despite the dramatic increase in spending, there has been no notable change in student outcomes. Using data provided by Andrew Coulson, an education policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, Figure 2 shows National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in reading, math, and science, along with per pupil spending. The only trend line with a pulse is the amount of spending.
More spending usually means more teachers. Last year Obama not only used stimulus funds to preserve education jobs but called for “10,000 new teachers.” Yet as Figure 3 shows, the number of students per teacher in U.S. public schools fell from 17.4 in 1990 to 15.7 in 2007.
We have tried spending more money and putting more teachers in classrooms for more than a generation, with no observable improvements to anything except the schools’ bottom lines. Why? Because of the lack of competition in the K–12 education system. Schooling in the United States is still based largely on residency; students remain tied to the neighborhood school regardless of how bad its performance may be. Federal spending on education (which amounted to 8.3 percent of total public education spending in 2007) is funneled to students through the institutions to which they are tied, largely regardless of student performance. With no need to convince students and parents to stay, schools in most districts lack the incentive to serve student needs or differentiate their product. To make matters worse, this lack of competition continues at the school level, where teacher hiring and firing decisions are stubbornly divorced from student performance, tied instead to funding levels and tenure.
If reform is to be defined by something other than the amount of money flushed down the toilet, it is time to reverse the flow of power from the top (administrators, school districts, teachers unions, governments) to the bottom (students, their parents, and taxpayers who want their money spent wisely). A first step in that direction is to change our teacher labor market practices in terms of both hiring and firing. On the hiring end, there are too many restrictions on who can become a teacher. On the firing end, we need to restore the relationship between job retention and job performance. Lisa Snell, director of education at the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit organization that publishes this magazine and does public policy research), points out in an email one recent example of how bad a school’s labor practices can be: “L.A. Unified School District laid off hundreds of its top teachers and replaced them with lower-performing teachers with seniority.”
In long-suffering California, a bipartisan coalition is supporting a new response to such irrational practices: the “parent trigger,” which allows fed-up parents whose children are in a consistently underperforming school to quickly change the school’s leadership. By signing a petition, parents can force reorganization of a school’s management or conversion into a charter school. In December parents of students at Compton Unified School District’s McKinley Elementary School did just that.
A parent trigger is not a panacea, but it introduces an element of choice (and hence competition) into a monopoly that has been shortchanging its customers and benefactors for decades. Wealthy people already exercise school choice, either by sending their kids to private schools or by choosing where to live based on school districts. The parent trigger gives less fortunate parents a similar and much less expensive tool. Along with the growth of online education and the charter school movement, these lurches in the direction of consumer choice are heartening and long overdue.
SOURCE (See the original for graphics)
Teachers' Unions 101: "A" is for "Agitation"
If public school teachers spent more time teaching in classrooms and less time community-organizing in political war rooms, maybe taxpayers wouldn't feel as ripped off as they do. Before the Big Labor bosses start complaining about "teacher-bashing," let's be clear: An increasing number of rank-and-file teachers feel exactly the same way.
Retired New York teacher Vinne Cusimano, who was required to pay forced union dues in order to work, wrote me this week after receiving the March 2011 edition of his union's monthly publication. The cover of the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) magazine reads: "Defend What Matters! Educate. Collaborate. AGITATE." Inside the pamphlet, NYSUT President Richard Iannuzzi rails against "malicious politicians" in Wisconsin and elsewhere proposing "extreme anti-union" budget cuts. He urges his members to join "advocacy" efforts to "maintain critical resources" and lectures about the need to "value education over ideology and greed."
Cusimano, who taught for four decades in the Empire State, fired back at Ianuzzi in an open letter:
"As a member for over 40 years, I have never been so disappointed at the stand you are taking to call members to 'AGITATE!' We are trying to tamp down the rhetoric and you are outward(ly) inciting agitation. How dare you! You are supposed to be for the students/teachers. ... How can you support 'EDUCATE,' 'COLLABORATE,' and then encourage agitation?"
More to the point, what business does Iannuzzi -- a fat-cat union official who rakes in nearly $300,000 a year (plus a $100,000 pension) while his organization's net assets are more than $117 million in the red -- have lecturing anyone else about "ideology and greed"? Instead of imposing fiscal discipline on NYSUT, Iannuzzi and his cronies have gone on a spending spree -- dumping nearly $10.5 million into left-wing Democratic politics this past year alone. The NYSUT boasts a lobbying staff of 500, a 200,000-square-foot palace in Albany and a $213 million operating budget -- paid for through compulsory union dues of about $300 a year from some 600,000 members.
"Agitation," of course, is a full-time job for teachers' union officials in New York and across the country. As the New York Post reported exclusively this week, the city Department of Education compensates some 1,500 teachers for their union activities and also subsidizes other teachers who take their places in the classroom: "It's a sweetheart deal that costs taxpayers an extra $9 million a year to pay fill-ins for instructors who are sprung -- at full pay -- to carry out responsibilities for the United Federation of Teachers."
The UFT soldiers "collect top pay and fringe benefits, but work just one class period a day." Nice non-work if you can get it.
NYSUT, by the way, is the parent of the double-dipping UFT, which itself rakes in $126 million in member dues -- but only reimburses the city less than $1 million out of the $9 million it costs to take teachers out of the classroom to serve at the altar of Big Labor. UFT is also a chapter of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which spent nearly $2 million on the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. (In return, you may recall, the Obama administration granted the UFT one of its coveted health care Waivers for Favors last year -- exempting the behemoth union in a sweetheart deal from the federal mandate's costly rules on phasing out annual health coverage limits.)
The forced-dues racket is big business for teachers' unions crying poor. In Ohio, the state's education association siphoned nearly $23 million from rank-and-file school workers to fatten up its union staff. The Ohio Education Association donated more than $1.6 million to Democratic campaigns last year and tossed off five-figure checks each to union and progressive allies in Oregon, Colorado and Policy Matters Ohio, a left-wing think tank funded by radical billionaire George Soros.
At the federal level, the National Education Association squandered $13 million in teachers' dues on every pet liberal cause and crony from the AFL-CIO ($150,000) and AFSCME ($90,000), to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate ($200,000), Media Matters for America ($100,000) and the White House brigade at Health Care for America Now! ($450,000).
The goals of the teachers' union machine are not academic excellence, professional development and fairness. As former NEA official John Lloyd explained it: "You cannot possibly understand NEA without understanding Saul Alinsky. If you want to understand NEA, go to the library and get 'Rules for Radicals.'"
The goals are student indoctrination, social upheaval and perpetual agitation in pursuit of bigger government and spending without restraint. No wonder the signature "solidarity" color of the teachers' union protests this month is red.
SOURCE
Britain needs more overalls and fewer suits
The plans put forward last week by Michael Gove for “university technical colleges”, seem eminently sensible. The colleges, backed by businesses, would teach skills such as bricklaying, plumbing and engineering to pupils aged 14 and above, at the same time as more traditional subjects.
Some critics have warned of a system designed to funnel working-class children into non-academic learning. This is an absurdly snobbish way of looking at things. Now that the jobs market is increasingly flooded with graduates waving degrees of questionable quality, those with a verifiable practical qualification will be more sought after than ever.
At present, a trained plumber or master builder can still command a handsome salary, even though many other positions are highly uncertain. People joke about “cowboy builders” largely because the trade has been infiltrated by the inexperienced and unscrupulous – a problem that would be reduced by widespread training.
Yet how curious it is that, before the meltdown, society revered besuited conmen who built rotten markets on toxic debt much more than those with the talent to construct a solid home.
SOURCE
Monday, March 07, 2011
Sunday, March 06, 2011
Bill Gates fires arrows at the sacred cows of America's Education System
Good to have him onside
Speaking at the 2011 TED Conference (Technology, Education, Design), Gates sharply criticized states for the waste in American education. "The guys at Enron never would have done this! I mean this is so blatant, so extreme that, is anybody paying attention to what these guys do?" Gates said.
The 55-year-old multi-billionaire has made it a mission to find the money to make schools and teachers better.
"State budgets are a critical topic because here's where we make the real tradeoffs," he said. "If we make the wrong choice education won't be funded the right way."
Gates said many states, in their efforts to close their budget deficits, are making the wrong choices, cutting education. "The bottom line is we need to care about state budgets because they're critical for our kids and our future."
Gates' theory: Identify and develop teachers, then reward excellence in the field.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he and his wife started, is studying and videotaping teachers in seven urban school districts. The goal is to determine exactly what teaching methods work, and which don't.
In the meantime, Gates challenged some long-held assumptions about education. He said the U.S. spends $50 billion a year on automatic salary increases for teachers based on seniority, but, according to Gates, "Seniority seems to have no effect on student achievement."
Gates also questions spending $15 billion a year on salary bumps for teachers who get advanced degrees. "Such raises have almost no impact on achievement," he said.
The head of the nation's largest teachers union vehemently disagreed. "I was a math teacher for 23 years," said Dennis Van Roekel, President of the National Education Association. "I can guarantee you that what I took as part of my masters degree program in mathematics made a difference to me as a teacher."
Gates challenged the notion that smaller class sizes are better. He proposed that the best teachers actually take on more students. He said skilled teachers ought to be paid more to take on five or six more kids per class, so more children can benefit from what those teachers are doing right.
SOURCE
Free the Children, Cut the Budget: States have no business running schools
Pundits like David Brooks of the New York Times lament that the deficit-cutting mood supposedly sweeping the United States is myopically targeting education in favor of more powerful constituencies. “If you look across the country, you see education financing getting sliced — often in the most thoughtless and destructive ways,” Brooks writes. “The future has no union.” In Washington, he adds, early-childhood programs might be slashed, and
Many governors of both parties are diverting money from schools in thoughtless and self-destructive ways. Hawaii decided to cut the number of days in the school year. Of all the ways to cut education, why on earth would you reduce student time in the classroom?
Texas is taking the meat cleaver approach. School financing will be cut by at least 13.5 percent, around $3.5 billion. About 85,000 new students arrive in Texas every year. There will be no additional resources to accommodate them.
To Brooks’s relief, the Obama administration has at least one voice of sanity:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan gave a superb speech in November called the New Normal. He observed that this era of austerity should be an occasion to increase productivity and cut the things that are ineffective.
As though a bureaucrat’s bromides about increasing productivity and reducing ineffectiveness stands a chance of righting what’s wrong with education. We’ve had quite a lot of that over the years, with little to show for it. Education budgets went up; the quality of education did not.
Bureaucracy
There’s a reason for that: bureaucracy. That’s the antonym of “competitive entrepreneurial undertaking.” If we’re truly in a budget-cutting mood and wish to breathe life into education at the same time, we should de-bureaucratize schools by putting them entirely into the entrepreneurial arena: the marketplace.
I do not mean vouchers or charter schools. At best they operate according to a constricted model of competition tended by education bureaucrats and legislative bodies. The central flaw in these “reforms” is taxpayer financing. As long as the money comes through government, demands will be made for schools to be accountable to government rather than parents and students, setting limits to competition. Tax financing also reduces individual responsibility, while limiting — because of the double payment — most people’s ability to break out of the system altogether.
Moreover, financing learning through the compulsion of taxation is perverse. Education should be a consensual relationship among parents, children, and (when necessary) formal teachers. I’m fond of Isabel Paterson’s questions to teachers in her book The God of the Machine: “Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?”
What’s Really Radical?
No school taxes and no compulsory attendance. Sounds radical, but what’s really radical is the State’s asserting the power of parens patriae over children and forcing everyone to pay for the outrage. As education historian E. G. West noted, it did not take laws to achieve virtually universal education in the nineteenth century (among the free population). But it did take laws to give us schools that function like indoctrination centers, preaching the glory of government while preparing children to be quiescent taxpaying citizens who will take their place in industry, the bureaucracy, or the military. Today the goal is to train the personnel necessary to assure America’s status as the undisputed leader of the global economy, as though the world marketplace were a race among nations.
My references to competition, entrepreneurship, and markets do not imply that education should be provided by for-profit firms only or even predominantly. A freed education market would include nonprofits, co-ops, extended homeschooling, and things no one has thought of yet. The key is to liberate all participants from the heavy hand of bureaucracy. No authority should interpose itself between aspiring providers competing with one another and consumers of education services. Only then will the “discovery procedure” that F. A. Hayek identified with competition be fully ignited.
What about the Poor?
That’s the inevitable question. The irony is that poor children in this society have been treated disgracefully by government school authorities. It is sheer chutzpah for advocates of “public education” to say they worry about the poor after having inflicted and/or tolerated such abuse for so long.
The poor would stand a much better chance in a freed education environment. If some of the most destitute places on earth manage to have private for-profit schools for poor children, then so can the United States, especially if the shackles were removed. Of course, there would be far fewer poor people in a freed society.
Will School be separated from State any time soon? Unlikely. The public-school industry, including the unions and all the vendors selling things to school districts, is big, rich, and powerful. The education-industrial complex surely rivals the military-industrial complex in its capacity to consume tax revenues.
But if for no other reason, the dismal fiscal condition of the states makes this a good time to talk about separation. It certainly won’t happen if nobody ever mentions it.
How would we go about it? I’ve long thought the best way would be simply to turn each school over to the people who work in it. Let them run the schools and compete independently of government without tax revenues. An alternative would be to turn the schools over to the parents if they want them. Just get them away from the bureaucracy.
Brooks is right. Education is important – far too important to leave to politicians and bureaucrats.
SOURCE
The cheating epidemic at Britain's universities
A cheating epidemic is sweeping universities with thousands of students caught plagiarising, trying to bribe lecturers and buying essays from the internet. A survey of more than 80 universities has revealed that academic misconduct is soaring at institutions across the country.
More than 17,000 incidents of cheating were recorded by universities in the 2009-10 academic year – up at least 50 per cent in four years.
But the true figure will be far higher because many were only able to provide details of the most serious cases and let lecturers deal with less serious offences.
Only a handful of students were expelled for their misdemeanours among those universities which disclosed how cheats were punished.
Most of the incidents were plagiarism in essays and other coursework, but others examples include:
* Three cases categorised as "impersonation" by Derby University and three at Coventry, along with 10 "uses of unauthorised technology"
* Kent University reported at least one case where a student attempted to "influence a teacher or examiner improperly".
* At the University of East Anglia students submitted pieces of work which contained identical errors, while others completed reports which were "almost identical to that of another student", a spokesman said, while one was caught copying sections from the Wikipedia website.
* A student sitting an exam at the University of the West of Scotland was caught with notes stored in an MP3 player.
* A Bradford University undergraduate completed work at home, smuggled it into an examination then claimed it had been written during the test.
* The University of Central Lancashire, at Preston, reported students had been caught using a "listening and/or communications device" during examinations.
* Keele undergraduates sitting exams were found to have concealed notes in the lavatory, stored on a mobile telephone and written on tissues while two students were found guilty of "falsifying a mentor's signature on practice assessment documents to gain academic benefit".
Many institutions reported students buying coursework from internet-based essay-writing companies. Dozens of websites offering the services are available on the web, providing bespoke essays for fees of £150 and upwards. Some offer "guaranteed first class honours" essays at extra cost and many "guarantee confidentiality and privacy" – hinting that the essays can be used to cheat.
In one website offering "creative, unique, original, credible" essays, a testimonial from a previous customer says: "I am very satisfied with my order because I got the expected result." There are even sites which offer express services, while many claim the work is written by people with postgraduate qualifications.
Nottingham Trent discovered examples of bespoke essays, and Newcastle reported three cases of essays being purchased from a third party. Two students bought work at Salford and cases were also reported at East London University, Greenwich and London South Bank, which uncovered three incidents.
Professor Geoffrey Alderman, from the University of Buckingham, who is a long-standing critic of falling standards in higher education, said: "I think it is a pretty depressing picture. "It is worrying that students now resort to cheating on such a widespread scale and that the punishments on the whole are not robust enough. "In my book it should be 'two strikes and you're out'.
"Although universities are perhaps better than they were at detecting certain types of cheating, such as plagiarism, when I talk to colleagues across the sector there is a view that cheating has increased."
Professor Alderman said the style of teaching and assessment now used at some institutions was partly to blame for the rise in academic dishonesty. "There has been a move away from unseen written examinations and most university degree courses are now assessed through term papers, which makes it more tempting to commit plagiarism," he said.
"I advocate a return to the situation where it is impossible to pass a degree unit without achieving a minimum score in an unseen written test."
SOURCE
Good to have him onside
Speaking at the 2011 TED Conference (Technology, Education, Design), Gates sharply criticized states for the waste in American education. "The guys at Enron never would have done this! I mean this is so blatant, so extreme that, is anybody paying attention to what these guys do?" Gates said.
The 55-year-old multi-billionaire has made it a mission to find the money to make schools and teachers better.
"State budgets are a critical topic because here's where we make the real tradeoffs," he said. "If we make the wrong choice education won't be funded the right way."
Gates said many states, in their efforts to close their budget deficits, are making the wrong choices, cutting education. "The bottom line is we need to care about state budgets because they're critical for our kids and our future."
Gates' theory: Identify and develop teachers, then reward excellence in the field.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he and his wife started, is studying and videotaping teachers in seven urban school districts. The goal is to determine exactly what teaching methods work, and which don't.
In the meantime, Gates challenged some long-held assumptions about education. He said the U.S. spends $50 billion a year on automatic salary increases for teachers based on seniority, but, according to Gates, "Seniority seems to have no effect on student achievement."
Gates also questions spending $15 billion a year on salary bumps for teachers who get advanced degrees. "Such raises have almost no impact on achievement," he said.
The head of the nation's largest teachers union vehemently disagreed. "I was a math teacher for 23 years," said Dennis Van Roekel, President of the National Education Association. "I can guarantee you that what I took as part of my masters degree program in mathematics made a difference to me as a teacher."
Gates challenged the notion that smaller class sizes are better. He proposed that the best teachers actually take on more students. He said skilled teachers ought to be paid more to take on five or six more kids per class, so more children can benefit from what those teachers are doing right.
SOURCE
Free the Children, Cut the Budget: States have no business running schools
Pundits like David Brooks of the New York Times lament that the deficit-cutting mood supposedly sweeping the United States is myopically targeting education in favor of more powerful constituencies. “If you look across the country, you see education financing getting sliced — often in the most thoughtless and destructive ways,” Brooks writes. “The future has no union.” In Washington, he adds, early-childhood programs might be slashed, and
Many governors of both parties are diverting money from schools in thoughtless and self-destructive ways. Hawaii decided to cut the number of days in the school year. Of all the ways to cut education, why on earth would you reduce student time in the classroom?
Texas is taking the meat cleaver approach. School financing will be cut by at least 13.5 percent, around $3.5 billion. About 85,000 new students arrive in Texas every year. There will be no additional resources to accommodate them.
To Brooks’s relief, the Obama administration has at least one voice of sanity:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan gave a superb speech in November called the New Normal. He observed that this era of austerity should be an occasion to increase productivity and cut the things that are ineffective.
As though a bureaucrat’s bromides about increasing productivity and reducing ineffectiveness stands a chance of righting what’s wrong with education. We’ve had quite a lot of that over the years, with little to show for it. Education budgets went up; the quality of education did not.
Bureaucracy
There’s a reason for that: bureaucracy. That’s the antonym of “competitive entrepreneurial undertaking.” If we’re truly in a budget-cutting mood and wish to breathe life into education at the same time, we should de-bureaucratize schools by putting them entirely into the entrepreneurial arena: the marketplace.
I do not mean vouchers or charter schools. At best they operate according to a constricted model of competition tended by education bureaucrats and legislative bodies. The central flaw in these “reforms” is taxpayer financing. As long as the money comes through government, demands will be made for schools to be accountable to government rather than parents and students, setting limits to competition. Tax financing also reduces individual responsibility, while limiting — because of the double payment — most people’s ability to break out of the system altogether.
Moreover, financing learning through the compulsion of taxation is perverse. Education should be a consensual relationship among parents, children, and (when necessary) formal teachers. I’m fond of Isabel Paterson’s questions to teachers in her book The God of the Machine: “Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?”
What’s Really Radical?
No school taxes and no compulsory attendance. Sounds radical, but what’s really radical is the State’s asserting the power of parens patriae over children and forcing everyone to pay for the outrage. As education historian E. G. West noted, it did not take laws to achieve virtually universal education in the nineteenth century (among the free population). But it did take laws to give us schools that function like indoctrination centers, preaching the glory of government while preparing children to be quiescent taxpaying citizens who will take their place in industry, the bureaucracy, or the military. Today the goal is to train the personnel necessary to assure America’s status as the undisputed leader of the global economy, as though the world marketplace were a race among nations.
My references to competition, entrepreneurship, and markets do not imply that education should be provided by for-profit firms only or even predominantly. A freed education market would include nonprofits, co-ops, extended homeschooling, and things no one has thought of yet. The key is to liberate all participants from the heavy hand of bureaucracy. No authority should interpose itself between aspiring providers competing with one another and consumers of education services. Only then will the “discovery procedure” that F. A. Hayek identified with competition be fully ignited.
What about the Poor?
That’s the inevitable question. The irony is that poor children in this society have been treated disgracefully by government school authorities. It is sheer chutzpah for advocates of “public education” to say they worry about the poor after having inflicted and/or tolerated such abuse for so long.
The poor would stand a much better chance in a freed education environment. If some of the most destitute places on earth manage to have private for-profit schools for poor children, then so can the United States, especially if the shackles were removed. Of course, there would be far fewer poor people in a freed society.
Will School be separated from State any time soon? Unlikely. The public-school industry, including the unions and all the vendors selling things to school districts, is big, rich, and powerful. The education-industrial complex surely rivals the military-industrial complex in its capacity to consume tax revenues.
But if for no other reason, the dismal fiscal condition of the states makes this a good time to talk about separation. It certainly won’t happen if nobody ever mentions it.
How would we go about it? I’ve long thought the best way would be simply to turn each school over to the people who work in it. Let them run the schools and compete independently of government without tax revenues. An alternative would be to turn the schools over to the parents if they want them. Just get them away from the bureaucracy.
Brooks is right. Education is important – far too important to leave to politicians and bureaucrats.
SOURCE
The cheating epidemic at Britain's universities
A cheating epidemic is sweeping universities with thousands of students caught plagiarising, trying to bribe lecturers and buying essays from the internet. A survey of more than 80 universities has revealed that academic misconduct is soaring at institutions across the country.
More than 17,000 incidents of cheating were recorded by universities in the 2009-10 academic year – up at least 50 per cent in four years.
But the true figure will be far higher because many were only able to provide details of the most serious cases and let lecturers deal with less serious offences.
Only a handful of students were expelled for their misdemeanours among those universities which disclosed how cheats were punished.
Most of the incidents were plagiarism in essays and other coursework, but others examples include:
* Three cases categorised as "impersonation" by Derby University and three at Coventry, along with 10 "uses of unauthorised technology"
* Kent University reported at least one case where a student attempted to "influence a teacher or examiner improperly".
* At the University of East Anglia students submitted pieces of work which contained identical errors, while others completed reports which were "almost identical to that of another student", a spokesman said, while one was caught copying sections from the Wikipedia website.
* A student sitting an exam at the University of the West of Scotland was caught with notes stored in an MP3 player.
* A Bradford University undergraduate completed work at home, smuggled it into an examination then claimed it had been written during the test.
* The University of Central Lancashire, at Preston, reported students had been caught using a "listening and/or communications device" during examinations.
* Keele undergraduates sitting exams were found to have concealed notes in the lavatory, stored on a mobile telephone and written on tissues while two students were found guilty of "falsifying a mentor's signature on practice assessment documents to gain academic benefit".
Many institutions reported students buying coursework from internet-based essay-writing companies. Dozens of websites offering the services are available on the web, providing bespoke essays for fees of £150 and upwards. Some offer "guaranteed first class honours" essays at extra cost and many "guarantee confidentiality and privacy" – hinting that the essays can be used to cheat.
In one website offering "creative, unique, original, credible" essays, a testimonial from a previous customer says: "I am very satisfied with my order because I got the expected result." There are even sites which offer express services, while many claim the work is written by people with postgraduate qualifications.
Nottingham Trent discovered examples of bespoke essays, and Newcastle reported three cases of essays being purchased from a third party. Two students bought work at Salford and cases were also reported at East London University, Greenwich and London South Bank, which uncovered three incidents.
Professor Geoffrey Alderman, from the University of Buckingham, who is a long-standing critic of falling standards in higher education, said: "I think it is a pretty depressing picture. "It is worrying that students now resort to cheating on such a widespread scale and that the punishments on the whole are not robust enough. "In my book it should be 'two strikes and you're out'.
"Although universities are perhaps better than they were at detecting certain types of cheating, such as plagiarism, when I talk to colleagues across the sector there is a view that cheating has increased."
Professor Alderman said the style of teaching and assessment now used at some institutions was partly to blame for the rise in academic dishonesty. "There has been a move away from unseen written examinations and most university degree courses are now assessed through term papers, which makes it more tempting to commit plagiarism," he said.
"I advocate a return to the situation where it is impossible to pass a degree unit without achieving a minimum score in an unseen written test."
SOURCE
Saturday, March 05, 2011
VA: Old-fashioned courtesy penalized
There is an old legal principle that says the law does not concern itself with trivialities. And I suspect that it happens that way most of the time. Here it did not and the punishment could presumably be overturned in the courts on that ground
A local middle school student held open a door at school, reportedly because someone had their hands full. But after that, the student was suspended.
All schools in Southampton County have tight security at the front door, and students are told not to open the door for anyone. But Superintendent Charles Turner tells NewsChannel 3 that the rule was disobeyed when the student opened the door for the woman with her hands full.
The school system recently spent thousands of dollars upgrading door security at all of its schools. Once the construction was complete, administrators said that no students would be allowed to open the doors for anyone, with safety being the reason.
Any visitor who tries to get into the school during school hours is going to find out that all of the doors are locked. If they want to get in, they are required to press a button and someone inside the school will decide whether to let them in.
"We are very protective of our teenagers and it allows us to make sure that the people coming in to the door come into the office for help," Principal Allene Atkinson says, "Parents have been overwhelmingly supportive of this system because our whole objective is to ensure that our children are safe."
But some parents like Billy Haydu say they have mixed feelings about the student's suspension. While they understand that the student broke policy, they do believe the student is being unfairly punished for trying to do a good deed. Haydu says, "My personal opinion, I don't think that was fair. I would think they would talk to them, explain the situation, but I think suspending them was just a little bit harsh."
SOURCE
America's College Obsession
Andy Ferguson, one of America's most engaging and perspicacious journalists, has not -- as Andre Malraux said of Whittaker Chambers -- returned from the hell of college admissions with empty hands. In "Crazy U," his chronicle of his son's senior year of high school -- a year of college visiting, application, essay writing, open-house attending, interviewing, financial aid seeking, and waiting, waiting, waiting -- is by turns hilarious, shrewd, and revealing.
The "crazy" in the book's title refers to our national obsession with college -- a little piece of insanity to which Ferguson is more prone than most. Preoccupied by his son's prospects of being admitted to a good college, Ferguson devours advice books, college guides, and, in weak moments, websites like College Confidential, prompting this reflection about anonymous advice websites:
"I'd been bewildered by [too much information] before ... Before a business trip I'd go online to find a recommendation for a rodent-free hotel or a reliable restaurant. Half a dozen websites would be waiting to help ... From them I learned that the local big-chain hotel was in fact a good bargain, with pleasant service and an excellent location, and also a hellhole staffed by human ferrets, with overflowing toilets and untraceable smells that had ruined the honeymoon of vox-12popula and iwantmyrum, who were now exacting their revenge by abusing the hotel on every website they could find."
But along with the confusion and the profusion of contradictory advice he found on the Web and elsewhere about getting into college, Ferguson notes the dismaying effects of following the advice. He quotes an expensive "consultant" who advises "'Early on in high school your child should find a teacher they like and go that extra mile. They should ... cultivate that relationship ... be enthusiastic in class ... and spend time outside of class with the teacher, if that's possible.'" The aim, Ferguson summarizes, is to "release" at recommendation time "a gusher of praise."
In other words, Ferguson interprets, the process "turned them into Eddie Haskell . . . It guaranteed that teenagers would pursue life with a single ulterior motive . . . It coated their every undertaking in a thin lacquer of insincerity."
If the process encourages a certain amount of obsequiousness and even dishonesty in America's youth, it also elicits more than a dollop of deceit by the colleges themselves. Fixated on their US News & World Report rankings, colleges "fudge" numbers like the SAT scores of incoming freshmen, the graduation rate, and average class size. Wall Street Journal reporter Steve Stecklow compared the data schools submitted to US News with the data they submitted to bond rating agencies. "(I)f they lied to a rating agency, they might go to jail; if they lied to US News they might make the Top Twenty. Reviewing credit reports for more than one hundred schools, he caught one in four fudging the numbers."
The college admission rigmarole reflects in so many ways the cultural and political preferences of the liberals who run the vast majority of these institutions. A "sample" college essay Ferguson purchased online reflected the fashion:
"There was no question our hired hand thought he knew the magic words that would make an admissions committee coo: 'I would be proud to work collaboratively with diverse populations to solve problems ... my readiness for greater challenges in the diverse learning environment ... my enthusiasm for history, diplomacy and cultural diversity...'"
Just as gag-inducing is the spiraling cost of this four-year excursion into diversityland. The annual cost of a typical private college went from $3,663 in 1975 to $34,132 in 2009. (Many are above $50,000 now.) Ferguson analyzes it succinctly: "It's the same problem that afflicts health care (the other sector of the American economy that has seen skyrocketing costs in the past few decades), a large portion of the people consuming the services aren't paying for the service out of their own pocket. The costs are picked up by third parties." No one has the incentive to cut costs.
But even paring away the layers of folly that surround the quest for college does not, in the end, disillusion Ferguson. A year's research and experience has revealed that the application process is needlessly complicated and stressful, that college admission is marred by many injustices, that college itself is perhaps a "bubble" investment that has been way oversold, and that the costs are completely unrelated to the value of the product.
But when his son is accepted at the school of his choice, Ferguson and his wife rejoice. They've drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid. We all have. But after reading this hugely entertaining book, we at least see it more clearly.
SOURCE
Bad news for free schools in Britain
The Financial Times reports that the Department for Education is not going to meet its target date for relaxing school building regulations. This is bad news for the government’s ‘free schools’ agenda.
The idea behind free schools is a great one: expand the supply of good school places by encouraging private organizations to set up their own schools, which will then receive state funding on a per-pupil basis. This expansion in supply will allow British parents to exercise choice over where their children go to school. That choice will, in turn, bring competitive pressures to bear on the state education system: popular schools will be able to expand, bad schools will wither and die. Standards will be driven up across the board as a consequence.
But there’s a problem. For this to work, you need lots of new providers entering the market. And that’s not going to happen if you’ve got very strict building and planning regulations, which allow local authorities to obstruct the process.
The government always planned make it easier for schools to be set up in pre-existing buildings, like office blocks or empty shops. That’s what has happened in Sweden, where ‘free schools’ have been a huge success. It bodes ill that the government has fallen behind schedule, so let’s hope they can get things back on track quickly.
But there’s another big problem with the government’s free schools agenda, and that’s that they’ve decided to prevent providers from making a profit out of running the schools. But without profit-making chains entering the free schools market, it is unlikely that enough new schools will be established. The whole thing risks ending up a damp squib.
Overall, I have to question the government’s tactics. They’ve got good ideas and good intentions. But they are being too timid. Their opponents are going to make a huge fuss about anything they do to liberalize public services, so why bother attempting to placate them? Be radical and get it over with, I say. Otherwise, it’ll be 2015 before you know it, and you won’t have done half the things you set out to do.
SOURCE
There is an old legal principle that says the law does not concern itself with trivialities. And I suspect that it happens that way most of the time. Here it did not and the punishment could presumably be overturned in the courts on that ground
A local middle school student held open a door at school, reportedly because someone had their hands full. But after that, the student was suspended.
All schools in Southampton County have tight security at the front door, and students are told not to open the door for anyone. But Superintendent Charles Turner tells NewsChannel 3 that the rule was disobeyed when the student opened the door for the woman with her hands full.
The school system recently spent thousands of dollars upgrading door security at all of its schools. Once the construction was complete, administrators said that no students would be allowed to open the doors for anyone, with safety being the reason.
Any visitor who tries to get into the school during school hours is going to find out that all of the doors are locked. If they want to get in, they are required to press a button and someone inside the school will decide whether to let them in.
"We are very protective of our teenagers and it allows us to make sure that the people coming in to the door come into the office for help," Principal Allene Atkinson says, "Parents have been overwhelmingly supportive of this system because our whole objective is to ensure that our children are safe."
But some parents like Billy Haydu say they have mixed feelings about the student's suspension. While they understand that the student broke policy, they do believe the student is being unfairly punished for trying to do a good deed. Haydu says, "My personal opinion, I don't think that was fair. I would think they would talk to them, explain the situation, but I think suspending them was just a little bit harsh."
SOURCE
America's College Obsession
Andy Ferguson, one of America's most engaging and perspicacious journalists, has not -- as Andre Malraux said of Whittaker Chambers -- returned from the hell of college admissions with empty hands. In "Crazy U," his chronicle of his son's senior year of high school -- a year of college visiting, application, essay writing, open-house attending, interviewing, financial aid seeking, and waiting, waiting, waiting -- is by turns hilarious, shrewd, and revealing.
The "crazy" in the book's title refers to our national obsession with college -- a little piece of insanity to which Ferguson is more prone than most. Preoccupied by his son's prospects of being admitted to a good college, Ferguson devours advice books, college guides, and, in weak moments, websites like College Confidential, prompting this reflection about anonymous advice websites:
"I'd been bewildered by [too much information] before ... Before a business trip I'd go online to find a recommendation for a rodent-free hotel or a reliable restaurant. Half a dozen websites would be waiting to help ... From them I learned that the local big-chain hotel was in fact a good bargain, with pleasant service and an excellent location, and also a hellhole staffed by human ferrets, with overflowing toilets and untraceable smells that had ruined the honeymoon of vox-12popula and iwantmyrum, who were now exacting their revenge by abusing the hotel on every website they could find."
But along with the confusion and the profusion of contradictory advice he found on the Web and elsewhere about getting into college, Ferguson notes the dismaying effects of following the advice. He quotes an expensive "consultant" who advises "'Early on in high school your child should find a teacher they like and go that extra mile. They should ... cultivate that relationship ... be enthusiastic in class ... and spend time outside of class with the teacher, if that's possible.'" The aim, Ferguson summarizes, is to "release" at recommendation time "a gusher of praise."
In other words, Ferguson interprets, the process "turned them into Eddie Haskell . . . It guaranteed that teenagers would pursue life with a single ulterior motive . . . It coated their every undertaking in a thin lacquer of insincerity."
If the process encourages a certain amount of obsequiousness and even dishonesty in America's youth, it also elicits more than a dollop of deceit by the colleges themselves. Fixated on their US News & World Report rankings, colleges "fudge" numbers like the SAT scores of incoming freshmen, the graduation rate, and average class size. Wall Street Journal reporter Steve Stecklow compared the data schools submitted to US News with the data they submitted to bond rating agencies. "(I)f they lied to a rating agency, they might go to jail; if they lied to US News they might make the Top Twenty. Reviewing credit reports for more than one hundred schools, he caught one in four fudging the numbers."
The college admission rigmarole reflects in so many ways the cultural and political preferences of the liberals who run the vast majority of these institutions. A "sample" college essay Ferguson purchased online reflected the fashion:
"There was no question our hired hand thought he knew the magic words that would make an admissions committee coo: 'I would be proud to work collaboratively with diverse populations to solve problems ... my readiness for greater challenges in the diverse learning environment ... my enthusiasm for history, diplomacy and cultural diversity...'"
Just as gag-inducing is the spiraling cost of this four-year excursion into diversityland. The annual cost of a typical private college went from $3,663 in 1975 to $34,132 in 2009. (Many are above $50,000 now.) Ferguson analyzes it succinctly: "It's the same problem that afflicts health care (the other sector of the American economy that has seen skyrocketing costs in the past few decades), a large portion of the people consuming the services aren't paying for the service out of their own pocket. The costs are picked up by third parties." No one has the incentive to cut costs.
But even paring away the layers of folly that surround the quest for college does not, in the end, disillusion Ferguson. A year's research and experience has revealed that the application process is needlessly complicated and stressful, that college admission is marred by many injustices, that college itself is perhaps a "bubble" investment that has been way oversold, and that the costs are completely unrelated to the value of the product.
But when his son is accepted at the school of his choice, Ferguson and his wife rejoice. They've drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid. We all have. But after reading this hugely entertaining book, we at least see it more clearly.
SOURCE
Bad news for free schools in Britain
The Financial Times reports that the Department for Education is not going to meet its target date for relaxing school building regulations. This is bad news for the government’s ‘free schools’ agenda.
The idea behind free schools is a great one: expand the supply of good school places by encouraging private organizations to set up their own schools, which will then receive state funding on a per-pupil basis. This expansion in supply will allow British parents to exercise choice over where their children go to school. That choice will, in turn, bring competitive pressures to bear on the state education system: popular schools will be able to expand, bad schools will wither and die. Standards will be driven up across the board as a consequence.
But there’s a problem. For this to work, you need lots of new providers entering the market. And that’s not going to happen if you’ve got very strict building and planning regulations, which allow local authorities to obstruct the process.
The government always planned make it easier for schools to be set up in pre-existing buildings, like office blocks or empty shops. That’s what has happened in Sweden, where ‘free schools’ have been a huge success. It bodes ill that the government has fallen behind schedule, so let’s hope they can get things back on track quickly.
But there’s another big problem with the government’s free schools agenda, and that’s that they’ve decided to prevent providers from making a profit out of running the schools. But without profit-making chains entering the free schools market, it is unlikely that enough new schools will be established. The whole thing risks ending up a damp squib.
Overall, I have to question the government’s tactics. They’ve got good ideas and good intentions. But they are being too timid. Their opponents are going to make a huge fuss about anything they do to liberalize public services, so why bother attempting to placate them? Be radical and get it over with, I say. Otherwise, it’ll be 2015 before you know it, and you won’t have done half the things you set out to do.
SOURCE
Friday, March 04, 2011
Texas College Scholarship Targets Only White Male Students
Only white men with a 3.0 grade-point average can apply for a new scholarship being offered by a Texas nonprofit group, the Austin American-Statesman reports.
Colby Bohannan, a Texas State University student, said he founded the Former Majority Association for Equality group after fighting in the Iraq war and returning home to find no college scholarships available for white males like himself -- only women and minorities.
"I felt excluded," Bohannon, a student at Texas State University, told the newspaper. "If everyone else can find scholarships, why are we left out?"
Bohannon went on to say that he and his friends will begin handing out $500 scholarships this summer, arguing that white male students now make up a minority group in Texas.
School officials have so far not taken issue with the group's objective, saying the scholarship is no different from one offered to students from different ethnic groups.
"From the university's standpoint, we can't take issue with a scholarship offered to a certain group," Joanne Smith, Texas State University's vice president of student affairs, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
SOURCE
10-hour school day on the way to boost grades in Britain (and Saturday mornings too!)
Children could go to school for ten hours a day and on Saturday mornings under a radical shake-up of secondary education. Education Minister Michael Gove wants school days to run from 7.30am to 5.30pm to improve pupils’ performance and enable them to study vocational courses alongside core academic subjects. He also wants sites to open on Saturdays and to increase terms by two weeks, to a total of 40 weeks a year.
It would mean youngsters gaining more than an extra year of teaching over a five-year period. Longer days in the state system would bring them in line with many private schools, giving disadvantaged youngsters more time in class to catch up with more privileged peers. They would also be popular with working parents who struggle to fit 3pm school finishing times in with their jobs.
Mr Gove said the measures – which would mirror exemplary Far Eastern schools such as in Singapore – would not be compulsory but strongly advised.
The teachers’ union criticised the plans, arguing that staff already have a punishing workload and that children need time to rest.
Mr Gove unveiled the plans yesterday alongside the findings of an independent review into vocational education. Led by Professor Alison Wolf, it found a third of non-academic GCSE-equivalent courses are pointless or even harm career prospects. One, the certificate in Personal Effectiveness, taught pupils, among other things, how to claim benefits.
Mr Gove said youngsters aged 14 to 16 should focus on core subjects of his English Baccalaureate – English, maths, a science, a humanity and a foreign language. He said vocational courses should be taught alongside the core and occupy up to 20 per cent of the school timetable.
If schools can manage to get all their pupils up to scratch during a short school day then they should stick to it, he said. But if pupils are failing to pass maths and English GCSEs, as more than half do, they must lengthen the school day.
Mr Gove said it was up to individual schools to decide whether to adopt the measures, but added: ‘I personally believe that people should be learning for longer. ‘Lots of schools have found having an extended school day – sometimes weekend education, or longer terms – helps.’
Mr Gove said he would not prescribe the longer hours, but has ‘lifted the bureaucratic requirement on schools to give us notice about varying the school day’. ‘The opportunity is now there for schools to offer students more,’ he said.
Academies, ‘free’ schools and faith schools are able to vary their hours, provided they teach for a minimum of 190 days a year. Comprehensives must seek permission from their local authority.
Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of education union ATL, criticised the plans. She said: ‘Longer hours in school do not neatly equate into higher achievement by pupils. ‘The reasons why some fail to achieve as well as they could are complex and varied. Being born into a disadvantaged family is the most significant. ‘Young people need to spend time with families and friends and to organise their own activities, or rest.
‘Teachers in the English state schools already work an average of 50 hours a week – 18 of them teaching and the rest marking and preparing students’ work, in parents’ meetings, staff meetings, and training. They need a life outside school too.’
Professor Wolf’s review attacked as ‘immoral’ the pressures of school league tables which have caused a move away from a core curriculum. She said it was ‘absolutely scandalous’ that half of all 16-year-olds are leaving school without good GCSEs – a C grade or higher – in English and maths.
SOURCE
Gasp! Australian private schools spend more on their students than government schools do!
Did anyone expect otherwise? What do they think the parents pay for? A most unsurprising revelation. After the Latham debacle, the Labor party would be mad to use this as an excuse to attack private school funding -- but they are pretty mad. Witness their carbon tax and fibre broadband policies
The Coalition has warned the updated My School website will undermine government funding to independent schools while failing to help parents make better educational choices for their children.
Opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne said the government had not made a convincing case for publishing independent schools' financial data. "The Coalition doesn't believe that information being made available will add anything to the educational outcomes of either government or non-government students," he told The Australian Online. "There can only be one reason to publish non-government financial data and that is to undermine government funding of non-government schools."
Schools Minister Peter Garrett launched My School 2.0 this morning at Telopea Park bilingual school in the Canberra suburb of Barton. He said the site was "game-changing" and would give parents "unparalleled data" on school finances.
Mr Garrett warned against parents removing their children from schools simply because of the updated data, instead saying they should read the website carefully and consult their school principals. "Have discussions as you feel are necessary with the school in question," he said. "Think carefully about what you read and what you get from the site and then make your own decisions."
Australian Education Union president Angelo Gavrielatos warned that the My School 2.0 website showed an alarming resources gap between government and private schools. "The gap is being fuelled by a central government funding system which is blind to the real needs of students," he said.
The union boss told The Australian Online the new financial information pointed to a need for a greater investment in the nation's government schools. But he said the information on the website remained limited, as it failed to include millions of dollars held in trust by private schools. "Literally millions of dollars in surpluses and millions held in trust foundations, assets and investment portfolios by private schools will not be shown on the My School website."
He said even on the financial information available, private schools were spending more than double what government schools were spending per student on capital expenditure and 25 per cent more in recurrent funding.
Queensland Education Minister Cameron Dick urged parents to use the revamped My School website with caution, saying he was concerned about the potential for unfair comparisons, given the complexity of the information. “The data could be used unfairly in relation to some schools; some schools have different needs, some communities have different needs ... that's appropriate that they would be funded to a different level,” he told reporters in Brisbane.
“Funding is affected by location, school programs, age and size of facilities, staffing, overall enrolment and the number of indigenous, international, non-English speaking students and students with disabilities.”
The Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens' Associations said it too was concerned with the publication of school finances. “Every school is unique and therefore not comparable,” state president Margaret Leary said in a statement. “The figures presented on the My School website are not a true and fair indicator.”
SOURCE
Only white men with a 3.0 grade-point average can apply for a new scholarship being offered by a Texas nonprofit group, the Austin American-Statesman reports.
Colby Bohannan, a Texas State University student, said he founded the Former Majority Association for Equality group after fighting in the Iraq war and returning home to find no college scholarships available for white males like himself -- only women and minorities.
"I felt excluded," Bohannon, a student at Texas State University, told the newspaper. "If everyone else can find scholarships, why are we left out?"
Bohannon went on to say that he and his friends will begin handing out $500 scholarships this summer, arguing that white male students now make up a minority group in Texas.
School officials have so far not taken issue with the group's objective, saying the scholarship is no different from one offered to students from different ethnic groups.
"From the university's standpoint, we can't take issue with a scholarship offered to a certain group," Joanne Smith, Texas State University's vice president of student affairs, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
SOURCE
10-hour school day on the way to boost grades in Britain (and Saturday mornings too!)
Children could go to school for ten hours a day and on Saturday mornings under a radical shake-up of secondary education. Education Minister Michael Gove wants school days to run from 7.30am to 5.30pm to improve pupils’ performance and enable them to study vocational courses alongside core academic subjects. He also wants sites to open on Saturdays and to increase terms by two weeks, to a total of 40 weeks a year.
It would mean youngsters gaining more than an extra year of teaching over a five-year period. Longer days in the state system would bring them in line with many private schools, giving disadvantaged youngsters more time in class to catch up with more privileged peers. They would also be popular with working parents who struggle to fit 3pm school finishing times in with their jobs.
Mr Gove said the measures – which would mirror exemplary Far Eastern schools such as in Singapore – would not be compulsory but strongly advised.
The teachers’ union criticised the plans, arguing that staff already have a punishing workload and that children need time to rest.
Mr Gove unveiled the plans yesterday alongside the findings of an independent review into vocational education. Led by Professor Alison Wolf, it found a third of non-academic GCSE-equivalent courses are pointless or even harm career prospects. One, the certificate in Personal Effectiveness, taught pupils, among other things, how to claim benefits.
Mr Gove said youngsters aged 14 to 16 should focus on core subjects of his English Baccalaureate – English, maths, a science, a humanity and a foreign language. He said vocational courses should be taught alongside the core and occupy up to 20 per cent of the school timetable.
If schools can manage to get all their pupils up to scratch during a short school day then they should stick to it, he said. But if pupils are failing to pass maths and English GCSEs, as more than half do, they must lengthen the school day.
Mr Gove said it was up to individual schools to decide whether to adopt the measures, but added: ‘I personally believe that people should be learning for longer. ‘Lots of schools have found having an extended school day – sometimes weekend education, or longer terms – helps.’
Mr Gove said he would not prescribe the longer hours, but has ‘lifted the bureaucratic requirement on schools to give us notice about varying the school day’. ‘The opportunity is now there for schools to offer students more,’ he said.
Academies, ‘free’ schools and faith schools are able to vary their hours, provided they teach for a minimum of 190 days a year. Comprehensives must seek permission from their local authority.
Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of education union ATL, criticised the plans. She said: ‘Longer hours in school do not neatly equate into higher achievement by pupils. ‘The reasons why some fail to achieve as well as they could are complex and varied. Being born into a disadvantaged family is the most significant. ‘Young people need to spend time with families and friends and to organise their own activities, or rest.
‘Teachers in the English state schools already work an average of 50 hours a week – 18 of them teaching and the rest marking and preparing students’ work, in parents’ meetings, staff meetings, and training. They need a life outside school too.’
Professor Wolf’s review attacked as ‘immoral’ the pressures of school league tables which have caused a move away from a core curriculum. She said it was ‘absolutely scandalous’ that half of all 16-year-olds are leaving school without good GCSEs – a C grade or higher – in English and maths.
SOURCE
Gasp! Australian private schools spend more on their students than government schools do!
Did anyone expect otherwise? What do they think the parents pay for? A most unsurprising revelation. After the Latham debacle, the Labor party would be mad to use this as an excuse to attack private school funding -- but they are pretty mad. Witness their carbon tax and fibre broadband policies
The Coalition has warned the updated My School website will undermine government funding to independent schools while failing to help parents make better educational choices for their children.
Opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne said the government had not made a convincing case for publishing independent schools' financial data. "The Coalition doesn't believe that information being made available will add anything to the educational outcomes of either government or non-government students," he told The Australian Online. "There can only be one reason to publish non-government financial data and that is to undermine government funding of non-government schools."
Schools Minister Peter Garrett launched My School 2.0 this morning at Telopea Park bilingual school in the Canberra suburb of Barton. He said the site was "game-changing" and would give parents "unparalleled data" on school finances.
Mr Garrett warned against parents removing their children from schools simply because of the updated data, instead saying they should read the website carefully and consult their school principals. "Have discussions as you feel are necessary with the school in question," he said. "Think carefully about what you read and what you get from the site and then make your own decisions."
Australian Education Union president Angelo Gavrielatos warned that the My School 2.0 website showed an alarming resources gap between government and private schools. "The gap is being fuelled by a central government funding system which is blind to the real needs of students," he said.
The union boss told The Australian Online the new financial information pointed to a need for a greater investment in the nation's government schools. But he said the information on the website remained limited, as it failed to include millions of dollars held in trust by private schools. "Literally millions of dollars in surpluses and millions held in trust foundations, assets and investment portfolios by private schools will not be shown on the My School website."
He said even on the financial information available, private schools were spending more than double what government schools were spending per student on capital expenditure and 25 per cent more in recurrent funding.
Queensland Education Minister Cameron Dick urged parents to use the revamped My School website with caution, saying he was concerned about the potential for unfair comparisons, given the complexity of the information. “The data could be used unfairly in relation to some schools; some schools have different needs, some communities have different needs ... that's appropriate that they would be funded to a different level,” he told reporters in Brisbane.
“Funding is affected by location, school programs, age and size of facilities, staffing, overall enrolment and the number of indigenous, international, non-English speaking students and students with disabilities.”
The Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens' Associations said it too was concerned with the publication of school finances. “Every school is unique and therefore not comparable,” state president Margaret Leary said in a statement. “The figures presented on the My School website are not a true and fair indicator.”
SOURCE
Thursday, March 03, 2011
How low can we go?
CA: Student calls police after math teacher rattles table
An eighth-grade math teacher at Atherton's Selby Lane School rattled a table to get his students' attention Tuesday afternoon, police said. He succeeded on that score. But the demonstration landed him on paid administrative leave.
Officers went to the campus at 2:26 p.m. to check on reports of a teacher causing a disturbance in a classroom and possibly throwing objects, said Sgt. Tim Lynch of the Atherton Police Department.
When officers arrived, however, they found a calm teacher with class in session and determined nothing had been thrown.
Lynch said it appears the teacher's table-rattling act startled a female student who left the class and called police from a cell phone. "My impression by talking to her was that she was disturbed by what the teacher was doing," Lynch said.
Most of the students in the class weren't bothered by the teacher's actions, Lynch said. Though the teacher "dramatically" made his point, "it wasn't a teacher out of control," he added.
Redwood City School District Deputy Superintendent John Baker said the teacher will remain on leave pending an investigation. He said he didn't know what specifically happened and would interview the teacher, the student and her parents in the coming days, as well as other students.
No complaints have been lodged against the teacher in the past, Baker said. The district put the teacher on leave because of the police response and the nature of the complaint, he said.
SOURCE
Why wasn't the student suspended for leaving class without permission? Or arrested for filing a false police report? This is like a child calling 911 for being punished
Keep taking English and maths in Britain till you get a good grade
Hundreds of thousands of students who fail to get good GCSE grades in English and maths are to be forced to carry on studying the subjects in the biggest shake-up of the curriculum for decades.
Education Secretary Michael Gove is appalled by official figures to be released today showing that the majority of teenagers fail to get C grades or above in both English and maths.
Sources say Mr Gove plans to accept the recommendations of an independent review which will mean that for about 300,000 pupils a year it will be compulsory to carry on studying the key subjects.
Under the rules, they will be forced to carry on doing so until they retake their exams and achieve a C grade or higher at GCSE level. Those who fail to get a good grade will have to keep on studying English and maths until they leave education at 18.
The review of vocational study, by leading academic Professor Alison Wolf of King’s College London, will today warn that 37 per cent of students achieve neither maths nor English GCSE at grades A* to C when they first take the exam. Of this group, only two per cent go on to achieve both by age 18. Some 12 per cent initially achieve an A* to C grade in their English GCSE, but not maths. About 17 per cent of them, or fewer than one in five, achieves a maths GCSE A* to C by the time they are 18. Seven per cent initially achieve a maths GCSE A* to C but not English. About a quarter – 24 per cent – of this group achieves English GCSE A* to C by 18.
Overall, the percentage of children achieving both maths and English GCSE grades A* to C rises from 44.8 per cent initially to 49 per cent at 18. But some 329,000 did not have maths and English A* to C when they first sat the exam. At age 18, 304,000 still did not.
The report will today blame the ‘shocking figures’ not on young people, but on ‘funding incentives which have deliberately steered institutions, and, therefore, their students, away from qualifications that might stretch young people and towards qualifications that can be passed easily’.
Mr Gove believes the previous government’s measures –aimed at helping boost schools’ league table rankings – encouraged hundreds of thousands of pupils to drop academic subjects in favour of easier options.
Students taking three or more A-levels will almost always have achieved at least a grade C in both maths and English, since this acts as an informal entry requirement for such courses. Conversely, most students on non-A-level, vocational courses will not.
There has been a 3,800 per cent increase in the number of children taking non-academic GCSE equivalents since Labour changed the rules in 2004. These gave non-academic qualifications – including computer skills, sports leadership and certificates of ‘personal effectiveness’ – parity with traditional subjects.
The move helped fuel a damaging collapse in the number of children taking academic courses. ‘No other developed country allows, let alone effectively encourages, its young people to neglect mathematics and their own language in this way,’ the report will add. ‘The UK is effectively unique in not requiring continued mathematics and own-language study for all young people engaged in 16 to 19 pre-tertiary education.’
To encourage schools to teach core subjects Mr Gove has already introduced an English baccalaureate A* to C in five core subjects including English and maths.
Professor Wolf will recommend that students who are under 19 and do not have GCSE A* to C in English and maths ‘should be required, as part of their programme, to pursue a course which either leads directly to these qualifications, or which provide significant progress’. Such requirements should be placed even on students who take up apprenticeships.
A Coalition source said: ‘We have inherited a disastrous system from Labour. Millions of children have been pushed into dead-end courses. ‘We want people to keep doing these GCSEs to get themselves up to a good grade. Of course there are children with special educational needs who may never achieve a C grade or above, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be continuing with these subjects.
SOURCE
Why Jews Are Losing The Battle For The Campus
The warnings have been there. In 2006, the US Commission on Civil Rights found that "many college campuses thoughout the US continue to experience incidents of anti-Semitism." Gary Tobin in his 2005 book "Uncivil University: Politics and Propaganda in American Education," concluded that "anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are systemic in higher education and can be found on campuses all over the United States." Across the country too many Jewish and pro-Israel students are patronized, mocked, intimidated and sometimes physically attacked, while anti-Israel professors poison the minds of America's future leaders. Yet Jewish leaders have by and large not responded effectively.
How did the Jewish community, known for its rhetorical genius, lose a critically important political battle on American campuses? Here is a thumbnail sketch:
In 1990, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, explained on Jordanian TV how the Arab Lobby can and will match Jewish political and organizational success in America (the clip is here). Zogby and his allies recognized that the campus and the media, unlike Capitol Hill, are two battle grounds that Arabists could win by allying themselves with the American left. In both venues they already had beachheads and feet on the ground. The campus was in transition politically, influenced by '60s tenured radicals who had adopted the dogma of post-colonialism, and its Palestinian version, Professor Edward Said's "Orientalism."
Moreover, America was experiencing a significant increase in foreign born Muslim students as well as increased Muslim immigration (many from countries with a culture of vicious anti-Semitism). Zogby focused on forming alliances with Marxist professors, die-hard socialist activists, African- American student groups, gay-lesbian groups and, most importantly, Jewish progressives. He also realized that an emerging anti-Israel Left/Muslim axis on campus could be better organized and benefit from an inflow of Arab petro dollars into prestigious American universities. All this was happening while many Jewish leaders, intoxicated by the Oslo agreement, were abandoning Israel programming.
Today, we can see the brilliance of Zogby's strategy: Anti-Israel sentiment suffuses the campus atmosphere. In the classroom, radical professors express the the dominant narrative that the Palestinians are right and the Israelis are in the wrong. In its mild form, the Palestinians suffer needlessly at the hands of Israeli occupiers; in its more vicious version, Israel is a racist, genocidal apartheid nation. Outside the classroom, anti-Israel groups hold conferences, screen films and conduct theatrical demonstrations that portray Israel in the harshest of terms.
Israel's advocates are rudely interrupted, prevented from speaking; pro-Israel events are disrupted; Jewish students are intimidated verbally or even physically, and are excluded from pro-Palestinian events. Pathetic attempts by Jewish groups to initiate dialogue with Palestinian students are rejected. Any acknowledgement of Israelis' humanity is seen as a validation of Palestinian oppression. Our epoch's secular religion - political correctness and multiculturalism - judges people by who they are, not what they do. Israelis are by definition always guilty, while darker skinned, impoverished, indigenous Palestinians are eternally innocent.
Far more than their parents and their community suspect, Jewish students find it challenging and often unpleasant, if not actually frightening, to support Israel on many campuses today.
Through research and interviews with campus activists and students from around the country, we are developing a compilation of anti-Israel incidents and descriptions of hostile atmospheres on campuses.
Here are just four recently reported incidents:
Hampshire College, Amherst. Last semester a pro-Israel student was repeatedly verbally harassed by individuals covering their faces. The student was called "baby killer," "genocide lover," "apartheid supporter" and "racist." After receiving an email that read "Make the world a better place and die slow," she moved off the campus. She has now returned but is still afraid to disclose her identity.
Rutgers University. Last month, a group of pro-Israel students and Holocaust survivors were made to pay an entrance fee to an event that likened Palestinians to Holocaust victims. The event had been advertised as free and open to the public; Palestinian supporters were let in without charge.
Indiana University. Last November, five incidents of anti-Jewish vandalism were reported in one week, including rocks thrown at Chabad and Hillel; sacred Jewish texts placed in various bathrooms and urinated upon; and an information board about Jewish studies programs smashed with a stone.
Carlton University, Ottawa. Last April, a non-Jewish supporter of Israel and his Israeli roommate were attacked by an Arab-speaking mob who screamed anti-Semitic epithets. Nick Bergamini was punched in the head and chased by a man who swung a machete at his head, missing by inches.
Now ask yourself: What would have happened on campus, in the media or in the community if these incidents had been directed at African American, Hispanic or Muslim students?
We have the answer: In October 2009, a noose was found at the University of California-San Diego library. Students occupied the chancellor's office. The governor, the chancellor and student leaders condemned the incident. The school established a task force on minority faculty recruitment and a commission to address declining African-American enrollment, and vowed to find space for an African- American resource center.
All this - only to discover a few weeks later that the noose was planted by a minority student.
Jewish students and Jewish buildings attacked and intimidated are not a hoax, yet Jewish leaders sit on their hands. No one calls for sensitivity training for Muslim and leftist students about the use of blood libels and anti-Semitism. No one demands students be taught about proper behavior in a civil society or about principles of free speech and academic inquiry. More and more, the ugly aspects of the "Arab street" are coming to campus. With the commendable exception of the Zionist Organization of America - which won civil rights protection for California students under Title 6 - Jewish leaders have remained mostly silent. Without their protest, why should university administrations care?
SOURCE
CA: Student calls police after math teacher rattles table
An eighth-grade math teacher at Atherton's Selby Lane School rattled a table to get his students' attention Tuesday afternoon, police said. He succeeded on that score. But the demonstration landed him on paid administrative leave.
Officers went to the campus at 2:26 p.m. to check on reports of a teacher causing a disturbance in a classroom and possibly throwing objects, said Sgt. Tim Lynch of the Atherton Police Department.
When officers arrived, however, they found a calm teacher with class in session and determined nothing had been thrown.
Lynch said it appears the teacher's table-rattling act startled a female student who left the class and called police from a cell phone. "My impression by talking to her was that she was disturbed by what the teacher was doing," Lynch said.
Most of the students in the class weren't bothered by the teacher's actions, Lynch said. Though the teacher "dramatically" made his point, "it wasn't a teacher out of control," he added.
Redwood City School District Deputy Superintendent John Baker said the teacher will remain on leave pending an investigation. He said he didn't know what specifically happened and would interview the teacher, the student and her parents in the coming days, as well as other students.
No complaints have been lodged against the teacher in the past, Baker said. The district put the teacher on leave because of the police response and the nature of the complaint, he said.
SOURCE
Why wasn't the student suspended for leaving class without permission? Or arrested for filing a false police report? This is like a child calling 911 for being punished
Keep taking English and maths in Britain till you get a good grade
Hundreds of thousands of students who fail to get good GCSE grades in English and maths are to be forced to carry on studying the subjects in the biggest shake-up of the curriculum for decades.
Education Secretary Michael Gove is appalled by official figures to be released today showing that the majority of teenagers fail to get C grades or above in both English and maths.
Sources say Mr Gove plans to accept the recommendations of an independent review which will mean that for about 300,000 pupils a year it will be compulsory to carry on studying the key subjects.
Under the rules, they will be forced to carry on doing so until they retake their exams and achieve a C grade or higher at GCSE level. Those who fail to get a good grade will have to keep on studying English and maths until they leave education at 18.
The review of vocational study, by leading academic Professor Alison Wolf of King’s College London, will today warn that 37 per cent of students achieve neither maths nor English GCSE at grades A* to C when they first take the exam. Of this group, only two per cent go on to achieve both by age 18. Some 12 per cent initially achieve an A* to C grade in their English GCSE, but not maths. About 17 per cent of them, or fewer than one in five, achieves a maths GCSE A* to C by the time they are 18. Seven per cent initially achieve a maths GCSE A* to C but not English. About a quarter – 24 per cent – of this group achieves English GCSE A* to C by 18.
Overall, the percentage of children achieving both maths and English GCSE grades A* to C rises from 44.8 per cent initially to 49 per cent at 18. But some 329,000 did not have maths and English A* to C when they first sat the exam. At age 18, 304,000 still did not.
The report will today blame the ‘shocking figures’ not on young people, but on ‘funding incentives which have deliberately steered institutions, and, therefore, their students, away from qualifications that might stretch young people and towards qualifications that can be passed easily’.
Mr Gove believes the previous government’s measures –aimed at helping boost schools’ league table rankings – encouraged hundreds of thousands of pupils to drop academic subjects in favour of easier options.
Students taking three or more A-levels will almost always have achieved at least a grade C in both maths and English, since this acts as an informal entry requirement for such courses. Conversely, most students on non-A-level, vocational courses will not.
There has been a 3,800 per cent increase in the number of children taking non-academic GCSE equivalents since Labour changed the rules in 2004. These gave non-academic qualifications – including computer skills, sports leadership and certificates of ‘personal effectiveness’ – parity with traditional subjects.
The move helped fuel a damaging collapse in the number of children taking academic courses. ‘No other developed country allows, let alone effectively encourages, its young people to neglect mathematics and their own language in this way,’ the report will add. ‘The UK is effectively unique in not requiring continued mathematics and own-language study for all young people engaged in 16 to 19 pre-tertiary education.’
To encourage schools to teach core subjects Mr Gove has already introduced an English baccalaureate A* to C in five core subjects including English and maths.
Professor Wolf will recommend that students who are under 19 and do not have GCSE A* to C in English and maths ‘should be required, as part of their programme, to pursue a course which either leads directly to these qualifications, or which provide significant progress’. Such requirements should be placed even on students who take up apprenticeships.
A Coalition source said: ‘We have inherited a disastrous system from Labour. Millions of children have been pushed into dead-end courses. ‘We want people to keep doing these GCSEs to get themselves up to a good grade. Of course there are children with special educational needs who may never achieve a C grade or above, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be continuing with these subjects.
SOURCE
Why Jews Are Losing The Battle For The Campus
The warnings have been there. In 2006, the US Commission on Civil Rights found that "many college campuses thoughout the US continue to experience incidents of anti-Semitism." Gary Tobin in his 2005 book "Uncivil University: Politics and Propaganda in American Education," concluded that "anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are systemic in higher education and can be found on campuses all over the United States." Across the country too many Jewish and pro-Israel students are patronized, mocked, intimidated and sometimes physically attacked, while anti-Israel professors poison the minds of America's future leaders. Yet Jewish leaders have by and large not responded effectively.
How did the Jewish community, known for its rhetorical genius, lose a critically important political battle on American campuses? Here is a thumbnail sketch:
In 1990, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, explained on Jordanian TV how the Arab Lobby can and will match Jewish political and organizational success in America (the clip is here). Zogby and his allies recognized that the campus and the media, unlike Capitol Hill, are two battle grounds that Arabists could win by allying themselves with the American left. In both venues they already had beachheads and feet on the ground. The campus was in transition politically, influenced by '60s tenured radicals who had adopted the dogma of post-colonialism, and its Palestinian version, Professor Edward Said's "Orientalism."
Moreover, America was experiencing a significant increase in foreign born Muslim students as well as increased Muslim immigration (many from countries with a culture of vicious anti-Semitism). Zogby focused on forming alliances with Marxist professors, die-hard socialist activists, African- American student groups, gay-lesbian groups and, most importantly, Jewish progressives. He also realized that an emerging anti-Israel Left/Muslim axis on campus could be better organized and benefit from an inflow of Arab petro dollars into prestigious American universities. All this was happening while many Jewish leaders, intoxicated by the Oslo agreement, were abandoning Israel programming.
Today, we can see the brilliance of Zogby's strategy: Anti-Israel sentiment suffuses the campus atmosphere. In the classroom, radical professors express the the dominant narrative that the Palestinians are right and the Israelis are in the wrong. In its mild form, the Palestinians suffer needlessly at the hands of Israeli occupiers; in its more vicious version, Israel is a racist, genocidal apartheid nation. Outside the classroom, anti-Israel groups hold conferences, screen films and conduct theatrical demonstrations that portray Israel in the harshest of terms.
Israel's advocates are rudely interrupted, prevented from speaking; pro-Israel events are disrupted; Jewish students are intimidated verbally or even physically, and are excluded from pro-Palestinian events. Pathetic attempts by Jewish groups to initiate dialogue with Palestinian students are rejected. Any acknowledgement of Israelis' humanity is seen as a validation of Palestinian oppression. Our epoch's secular religion - political correctness and multiculturalism - judges people by who they are, not what they do. Israelis are by definition always guilty, while darker skinned, impoverished, indigenous Palestinians are eternally innocent.
Far more than their parents and their community suspect, Jewish students find it challenging and often unpleasant, if not actually frightening, to support Israel on many campuses today.
Through research and interviews with campus activists and students from around the country, we are developing a compilation of anti-Israel incidents and descriptions of hostile atmospheres on campuses.
Here are just four recently reported incidents:
Hampshire College, Amherst. Last semester a pro-Israel student was repeatedly verbally harassed by individuals covering their faces. The student was called "baby killer," "genocide lover," "apartheid supporter" and "racist." After receiving an email that read "Make the world a better place and die slow," she moved off the campus. She has now returned but is still afraid to disclose her identity.
Rutgers University. Last month, a group of pro-Israel students and Holocaust survivors were made to pay an entrance fee to an event that likened Palestinians to Holocaust victims. The event had been advertised as free and open to the public; Palestinian supporters were let in without charge.
Indiana University. Last November, five incidents of anti-Jewish vandalism were reported in one week, including rocks thrown at Chabad and Hillel; sacred Jewish texts placed in various bathrooms and urinated upon; and an information board about Jewish studies programs smashed with a stone.
Carlton University, Ottawa. Last April, a non-Jewish supporter of Israel and his Israeli roommate were attacked by an Arab-speaking mob who screamed anti-Semitic epithets. Nick Bergamini was punched in the head and chased by a man who swung a machete at his head, missing by inches.
Now ask yourself: What would have happened on campus, in the media or in the community if these incidents had been directed at African American, Hispanic or Muslim students?
We have the answer: In October 2009, a noose was found at the University of California-San Diego library. Students occupied the chancellor's office. The governor, the chancellor and student leaders condemned the incident. The school established a task force on minority faculty recruitment and a commission to address declining African-American enrollment, and vowed to find space for an African- American resource center.
All this - only to discover a few weeks later that the noose was planted by a minority student.
Jewish students and Jewish buildings attacked and intimidated are not a hoax, yet Jewish leaders sit on their hands. No one calls for sensitivity training for Muslim and leftist students about the use of blood libels and anti-Semitism. No one demands students be taught about proper behavior in a civil society or about principles of free speech and academic inquiry. More and more, the ugly aspects of the "Arab street" are coming to campus. With the commendable exception of the Zionist Organization of America - which won civil rights protection for California students under Title 6 - Jewish leaders have remained mostly silent. Without their protest, why should university administrations care?
SOURCE
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Letting the cream rise
For Princetonians, the senior thesis is a high hurdle before graduation. For Wendy Kopp, class of 1989, it became a career devoted to transforming primary and secondary education. What began as an idea for a teacher corps for hard-to-staff schools, urban and rural, became Teach for America. At first it was merely a leavening ingredient in education; it has become a template for transformation.
Back then, Kopp's generation was stigmatized by journalistic sociology as "the 'me' generation" composed of materialists eager to be recruited into careers of quick self-enrichment. She thought the problem was not her peers but the recruiters. So she became one.
This academic year, 16 percent of Princeton's seniors and 18 percent of Harvard's applied to join Teach for America, of which Kopp is CEO. TFA is the largest employer of recent graduates from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Eight percent of seniors at the University of Michigan (undergraduate enrollment: 26,830) applied last year for TFA's two-year commitments. More than 5 percent of graduating seniors at 130 colleges are applicants.
Kopp began by "meeting anyone who would meet with me," soliciting corporate executives for seed money. She believed something that bemused skeptics -- that students from elite schools would volunteer to have their first experience out of college teaching in difficult-to-staff schools in areas of urban and rural poverty.
"I knew college students would do it -- I had just been a college student." What was needed, she thought, was a high-status service organization with an aura of selectivity.
Raised in comfortable circumstances in Dallas, Kopp precociously understood not just the importance of education but the educational importance of where one is born. TFA's first recruiting was done by fliers shoved under dorm room doors. Her Yale recruiter had 170 messages on his answering machine in just three days. TFA's first cohort totaled 500 teachers. This year TFA will select 5,300 from 48,000 applicants, making it more selective than most colleges.
This school year, there are 8,000 TFA teachers. Of the 20,000 TFA alumni, two-thirds are still working full-time in education. Of those, only one in six says that even without TFA he or she might have gone into K-12 teaching.
TFA has become a flourishing reproach to departments and schools of education. It pours talent into the educational system -- 80 percent of its teachers are in traditional public schools -- talent that flows around the barriers of the credentialing process. Hence TFA works against the homogenization that discourages innovation and prevents the cream from rising.
Kopp, whose new book ("A Chance to Make History") recounts her post-Princeton education, has learned, among much else, this: Of the 15 million children growing up in poverty, 50 percent will not graduate from high school, and the half that do will have eighth-grade skill levels compared to those from higher-income families and neighborhoods.
Until recently -- until, among other things, TFA -- it seemed that we simply did not know how to teach children handicapped by poverty and its accompaniments -- family disintegration and destructive community cultures. Now we know exactly what to do.
In government, the axiom is: Personnel is policy. In education, Kopp believes, "people are everything" -- good ones are (in military parlance) "force multipliers." Creating "islands of excellence" depends entirely on finding "transformational leaders deeply committed to changing the trajectories" of children's lives.
We do not, she insists, have to fix society or even families in order to fix education. It works the other way around. The movie "Waiting for Superman" dramatizes what TFA has demonstrated -- that low-income parents leap at educational opportunities that can break the cycle of poverty. Teaching successfully in challenging schools is, Kopp says, "totally an act of leadership" by people passionately invested in the project.
Speaking of leadership, someone in Congress should invest some on TFA's behalf. Government funding -- federal, state, local -- is just 30 percent of TFA's budget. Last year's federal allocation, $21 million, would be a rounding error in the General Motors bailout. And Kopp says every federal dollar leverages six non-federal dollars. All that money might, however, be lost because even when Washington does something right, it does it wrong.
It has obtusely defined "earmark" to include "any named program," so TFA has been declared an earmark and sentenced to death. If Congress cannot understand how nonsensical this is, it should be sent back to school for remedial instruction from some of TFA's exemplary young people.
SOURCE
10 Commandments Removal From VA Schools Causes Student Unrest
Some students in Giles County, VA are upset after the local school board voted twice in as many months to remove framed copies of the 10 Commandments from its schools. A group of teens from one local high school says the move is causing dissension, with some students even coming close to physical blows over the issue. WVVA reports:
At one point, the board reversed its initial removal decision. But that changed after the Freedom From Religion Foundation threatened to sue the Giles County School Board on behalf of residents who wanted the Commandments removed after they were re-posted.
That group issued the following statement to WVVA:
The Blaze contacted the American Center for Law and Justice, which many times represents defendants in religious cases such as this, but did not immediately receive a response. The local superintendent refused media requests from WVVA.
SOURCE
Australia: Degree target aims too high
Who sets these arbitrary and absurd targets anyway? And based on what reasoning, if any?
THE government's target for 40 per cent of young Australians to be graduates by 2025 is not realistic, according to a leading demographer, Bob Birrell.
One scenario would require the number of domestic students completing degrees to rise 82 per cent between 2009 and 2025, Dr Birrell and colleagues say in a new paper in the journal People and Place. "Neither Australia's higher education sector nor the government departments that administer it appear to understand that their target will require such an enormous increase," they say.
But a spokesman for Tertiary Education Minister Chris Evans said the government was confident its demand-driven system would deliver the university places needed to meet the target.
Dr Birrell said more realistic targets, funding and campus building should be aimed at poorly serviced regional and outer suburban areas.
The target for 25 to 34-year-olds was seen as ambitious when floated by the Bradley review in 2008 and adopted in modified form the following year by the government.
But as statistics revealed dramatic growth in young degree holders between 2006 and 2009, some commentators said the 2025 target looked easy. "The government's 40 per cent target could be reached naturally, well before 2025, allowing for enrolment pipelines, and without accounting for the contribution of degree qualified immigrants," the Group of Eight universities said in 2010.
The Birrell paper says the Go8 and others have misread the 2006-09 growth spurt. Domestic graduates and migrants with professional qualifications together account for just half this growth, according to modelling done by Dr Birrell and his colleagues. Their modelling takes into account the number of graduates who enter and leave the 25 to 34 age group as time passes.
Migrant professionals tend to be older and leave the age group more quickly than domestic graduates, meaning that on present trends their net contribution to the target would be nil before 2025.
The Birrell analysis suggests "that the recent rapid rise in the proportion of 25 to 34-year-olds with degrees is not a precursor to an easy pathway to achievement of the 40 per cent target, as asserted by the Go8". The paper concludes that overseas students who have graduated or arrived with undergraduate degrees are the most likely reason for the remaining half of the growth seen in 2006-09.
The survey that revealed the 2006-09 growth covers people who were residents in Australia for at least 12 months, meaning it would also pick up overseas students on temporary visas such as the graduate skills visa.
The authors say the growth represented by overseas students "is about to come to an end given that the government has largely removed the carrot of permanent residence as an inducement to study in Australia".
Between 2006 and 2009 the share of 25 to 34-year-olds with at least an undergraduate degree rose from 29.2 per cent to 34.6 per cent but another 410,000 graduates were needed to meet the 2025 target.
Even a 35 per cent increase in immigration would deliver only an extra 124,000 graduates over the period, the authors say. Relying on local students would require an 82 per cent increase from 98,732 domestic graduations in 2009 to 179,600 in 2025.
Senator Evans's spokesman said updated 2010 estimates suggested the demand-driven system would deliver an extra 195,000 domestic undergraduate places between 2010 and 2013.
SOURCE
For Princetonians, the senior thesis is a high hurdle before graduation. For Wendy Kopp, class of 1989, it became a career devoted to transforming primary and secondary education. What began as an idea for a teacher corps for hard-to-staff schools, urban and rural, became Teach for America. At first it was merely a leavening ingredient in education; it has become a template for transformation.
Back then, Kopp's generation was stigmatized by journalistic sociology as "the 'me' generation" composed of materialists eager to be recruited into careers of quick self-enrichment. She thought the problem was not her peers but the recruiters. So she became one.
This academic year, 16 percent of Princeton's seniors and 18 percent of Harvard's applied to join Teach for America, of which Kopp is CEO. TFA is the largest employer of recent graduates from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Eight percent of seniors at the University of Michigan (undergraduate enrollment: 26,830) applied last year for TFA's two-year commitments. More than 5 percent of graduating seniors at 130 colleges are applicants.
Kopp began by "meeting anyone who would meet with me," soliciting corporate executives for seed money. She believed something that bemused skeptics -- that students from elite schools would volunteer to have their first experience out of college teaching in difficult-to-staff schools in areas of urban and rural poverty.
"I knew college students would do it -- I had just been a college student." What was needed, she thought, was a high-status service organization with an aura of selectivity.
Raised in comfortable circumstances in Dallas, Kopp precociously understood not just the importance of education but the educational importance of where one is born. TFA's first recruiting was done by fliers shoved under dorm room doors. Her Yale recruiter had 170 messages on his answering machine in just three days. TFA's first cohort totaled 500 teachers. This year TFA will select 5,300 from 48,000 applicants, making it more selective than most colleges.
This school year, there are 8,000 TFA teachers. Of the 20,000 TFA alumni, two-thirds are still working full-time in education. Of those, only one in six says that even without TFA he or she might have gone into K-12 teaching.
TFA has become a flourishing reproach to departments and schools of education. It pours talent into the educational system -- 80 percent of its teachers are in traditional public schools -- talent that flows around the barriers of the credentialing process. Hence TFA works against the homogenization that discourages innovation and prevents the cream from rising.
Kopp, whose new book ("A Chance to Make History") recounts her post-Princeton education, has learned, among much else, this: Of the 15 million children growing up in poverty, 50 percent will not graduate from high school, and the half that do will have eighth-grade skill levels compared to those from higher-income families and neighborhoods.
Until recently -- until, among other things, TFA -- it seemed that we simply did not know how to teach children handicapped by poverty and its accompaniments -- family disintegration and destructive community cultures. Now we know exactly what to do.
In government, the axiom is: Personnel is policy. In education, Kopp believes, "people are everything" -- good ones are (in military parlance) "force multipliers." Creating "islands of excellence" depends entirely on finding "transformational leaders deeply committed to changing the trajectories" of children's lives.
We do not, she insists, have to fix society or even families in order to fix education. It works the other way around. The movie "Waiting for Superman" dramatizes what TFA has demonstrated -- that low-income parents leap at educational opportunities that can break the cycle of poverty. Teaching successfully in challenging schools is, Kopp says, "totally an act of leadership" by people passionately invested in the project.
Speaking of leadership, someone in Congress should invest some on TFA's behalf. Government funding -- federal, state, local -- is just 30 percent of TFA's budget. Last year's federal allocation, $21 million, would be a rounding error in the General Motors bailout. And Kopp says every federal dollar leverages six non-federal dollars. All that money might, however, be lost because even when Washington does something right, it does it wrong.
It has obtusely defined "earmark" to include "any named program," so TFA has been declared an earmark and sentenced to death. If Congress cannot understand how nonsensical this is, it should be sent back to school for remedial instruction from some of TFA's exemplary young people.
SOURCE
10 Commandments Removal From VA Schools Causes Student Unrest
Some students in Giles County, VA are upset after the local school board voted twice in as many months to remove framed copies of the 10 Commandments from its schools. A group of teens from one local high school says the move is causing dissension, with some students even coming close to physical blows over the issue. WVVA reports:
The Giles County School Board voted Tuesday to removed framed copies of the Ten Commandments from its schools — for the second time in as many months. Now some students are speaking out against the decision.
Some students have posted the Ten Commandments on their lockers. One group from Narrows and Giles have ordered t-shirts to express their opinions on the issue.
The commandments were first removed in December, 2010 after a complaint.
At one point, the board reversed its initial removal decision. But that changed after the Freedom From Religion Foundation threatened to sue the Giles County School Board on behalf of residents who wanted the Commandments removed after they were re-posted.
That group issued the following statement to WVVA:
Along with the ACLU of Virginia, we are monitoring the situation to ensure that the school board does not attempt to skirt the law and put the Ten Commandments back into Giles County Schools. Any such attempts to violate the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent would constitute a losing legal battle for the school board.
The Blaze contacted the American Center for Law and Justice, which many times represents defendants in religious cases such as this, but did not immediately receive a response. The local superintendent refused media requests from WVVA.
SOURCE
Australia: Degree target aims too high
Who sets these arbitrary and absurd targets anyway? And based on what reasoning, if any?
THE government's target for 40 per cent of young Australians to be graduates by 2025 is not realistic, according to a leading demographer, Bob Birrell.
One scenario would require the number of domestic students completing degrees to rise 82 per cent between 2009 and 2025, Dr Birrell and colleagues say in a new paper in the journal People and Place. "Neither Australia's higher education sector nor the government departments that administer it appear to understand that their target will require such an enormous increase," they say.
But a spokesman for Tertiary Education Minister Chris Evans said the government was confident its demand-driven system would deliver the university places needed to meet the target.
Dr Birrell said more realistic targets, funding and campus building should be aimed at poorly serviced regional and outer suburban areas.
The target for 25 to 34-year-olds was seen as ambitious when floated by the Bradley review in 2008 and adopted in modified form the following year by the government.
But as statistics revealed dramatic growth in young degree holders between 2006 and 2009, some commentators said the 2025 target looked easy. "The government's 40 per cent target could be reached naturally, well before 2025, allowing for enrolment pipelines, and without accounting for the contribution of degree qualified immigrants," the Group of Eight universities said in 2010.
The Birrell paper says the Go8 and others have misread the 2006-09 growth spurt. Domestic graduates and migrants with professional qualifications together account for just half this growth, according to modelling done by Dr Birrell and his colleagues. Their modelling takes into account the number of graduates who enter and leave the 25 to 34 age group as time passes.
Migrant professionals tend to be older and leave the age group more quickly than domestic graduates, meaning that on present trends their net contribution to the target would be nil before 2025.
The Birrell analysis suggests "that the recent rapid rise in the proportion of 25 to 34-year-olds with degrees is not a precursor to an easy pathway to achievement of the 40 per cent target, as asserted by the Go8". The paper concludes that overseas students who have graduated or arrived with undergraduate degrees are the most likely reason for the remaining half of the growth seen in 2006-09.
The survey that revealed the 2006-09 growth covers people who were residents in Australia for at least 12 months, meaning it would also pick up overseas students on temporary visas such as the graduate skills visa.
The authors say the growth represented by overseas students "is about to come to an end given that the government has largely removed the carrot of permanent residence as an inducement to study in Australia".
Between 2006 and 2009 the share of 25 to 34-year-olds with at least an undergraduate degree rose from 29.2 per cent to 34.6 per cent but another 410,000 graduates were needed to meet the 2025 target.
Even a 35 per cent increase in immigration would deliver only an extra 124,000 graduates over the period, the authors say. Relying on local students would require an 82 per cent increase from 98,732 domestic graduations in 2009 to 179,600 in 2025.
Senator Evans's spokesman said updated 2010 estimates suggested the demand-driven system would deliver an extra 195,000 domestic undergraduate places between 2010 and 2013.
SOURCE
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Protests in Idaho
Many high school students throughout eastern Idaho weren't in class Monday morning, but instead, were outside protesting.
In response to Tom Luna's new Education Reform plan, and two of three bills passing the Senate on Thursday, high school students against the plan participated in a student walk-out.
Julia Donaldson, Senior at Highland High School: "We are protesting his plan and we are proposing that Luna publicly debate the American Falls counter plan which gives a lot more freedom to the schools as far as the technology bill goes."
If Luna's "Students Come First" proposal passes the Legislature, online education will be mandatory in the state, and laptops will given to every high school student. An online class would also be required.
Arizona Knight, Sophomore at Highland High School: "We need more one-on-one time. Not computers. Not technology, no. We need teachers."
Julia Donaldson, Senior at Highland High School: "His 'Pay for Performance' plan, which bases 50% of its evaluation on test scores, which is totally unfair, you know, you have the difference in socio-economic status's of the schools, teachers are going to start teaching us how to memorize instead of how to think."
In Boise, students walked a few blocks to the State Capitol, and several other Treasure Valley high schools participated.
Allison Westfall, Nampa School District Spokesperson: "We don't condone this during school hours. We do appreciate that students are passionate about this issue and want to express their opinion, but the appropriate form is to do that outside of the school day, or to contact their law makers."
Aliianna Kelemete, Highland High School, Pocatello: "We want to support our teachers the best way we can and we're out here and we know the consequences, but I think it's all for a good cause."
The bills that have passed the Senate last week will be discussed in the House Education Committee on Tuesday. In the meantime, emotions run high for those that oppose the bill, and those, like Governor Butch Otter, who support it.
Julia Donaldson, Senior at Highland High School: "It's just not good overall for the education of our students. And I'm a senior, but I care about my siblings future and the future of my teachers and friends."
The final bill, which funds the plan and has the technology elements was sent back to the Senate Education Committee for a reworking. That should be discussed this week as well.
SOURCE
An end to free higher education in Scotland?
Principals warn that universities in Scotland will be left with a £200m funding gap after tuition fees are raised in England
Scottish university principals have again called for an end to free higher education after a report warned of a £200m funding gap following the introduction of higher fees in England.
Universities Scotland, the umbrella body for higher education institutions, said the case for a "fair and modest" payment by Scottish graduates was now unanswerable if current levels of teaching and student numbers were to be maintained.
Its stance has increased pressure on the next Scottish government to scrap a longstanding tradition of free university education for domestic students, in the face of moves to allow English universities to charge between £6,000 and £9,000 a year in tuition fees.
But its conclusions were immediately challenged by the Scottish government, Universities Scotland's partner on the expert group that produced the report on funding, and by the National Union of Students Scotland.
Each side selected figures from the report that suited its policies. The universities used one of the highest figures based on the impact of inflation, while Scottish ministers chose figures that suited their current policy of funding universities entirely from general taxation.
The dispute – which has led to another rift on funding between the universities and Alex Salmond's nationalist government – follows weeks of speculation that Scottish universities faced a funding shortfall of up to £500m.
The country's leading colleges are now facing strikes, laying off staff and closing departments. Glasgow is planning to shut its modern languages and anthropology departments, while staff at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh are to take industrial action.
Salmond will campaign in this May's elections for the Scottish parliament by insisting that the shortfall is actually much smaller, and can be met by the taxpayer without fees or graduate taxes.
His officials believe Universities Scotland has been highly selective with the report's findings, by using a figure that included inflation and by ignoring the Scottish government's plans to charge English students up to £6,500 a year to study in Scotland.
If those fees were included and the baseline figure did not include inflation, the gap was actually £93m. And that, sources said, did not include another £35m in expected efficiency savings. Ministers are expected to promise this gap will be met by the government.
NUS Scotland accused Universities Scotland of "scaremongering" and misrepresenting the true scale of the funding gap in a deliberate attempt to bounce voters into accepting tuition fees.
The NUS will now be putting Labour, currently narrow favourites to win May's election, under pressure to pledge it would not charge students. Labour has said it believes some form of charge is now highly likely and refused to rule out a graduate tax or contribution.
More HERE
Universities 'told to discriminate against independent school pupils'
Universities should not be asked to “repair the problems of 18 years of upbringing and education” by skewing admissions in favour of poor-performing pupils, according to a leading headmaster.
Making lower grade offers to students from state schools is like forcing an engineer to improve the design of an aircraft “after the plane has already crashed”, it is claimed.
In a speech on Monday, Philip Cottam, chairman of the Society of Headmasters and Headmistresses of Independent Schools, says the number of children from deprived backgrounds failing to fulfil their potential is a “blot” on society.
But forcing admissions tutors to repair these problems by discriminating against privately-educated teenagers will fail to address key weaknesses in the education system, he claims.
Speaking at the society’s annual conference, he will criticise the decline of the state grammar school system which provided a decent academic education for pupils from the poorest families.
He will also attack the “culture of entitlement” at the heart of modern schooling “in which competition is seen as negative and all are expected to win prizes”.
The comments come just weeks after ministers insisted universities should hit targets to admit students from state schools and deprived backgrounds in return for charging more than £6,000 a year in tuition fees.
Institutions failing to do enough could be stripped of the power to levy fees as high as £9,000 under Coalition plans.
But Mr Cottam, head of fee-paying Halliford School in Shepperton, Middlesex, says more attention should be focused on repairing Britain’s broken education system than skewing university admissions.
“There is an argument to be made that our national failure to do the best by the 50 per cent or so of pupils who do not get five GCSEs at C or better, including mathematics and English, is in many ways more serious and more damaging than the under-representation of some in our selective universities,” he says.
Addressing headmasters, he adds: “Trying to force universities to repair, let alone make up for, the problems of 18 years of upbringing and education is certainly not the answer.
“It is approaching the issue from the wrong end and is like asking an aeronautical engineer to improve the design of an aircraft after the plane has already crashed.”
Private schools currently educate around seven per cent of children but privately-educated students make up more than four-in-10 of those attending Oxford and Cambridge.
But addressing headmasters at the society’s conference in Telford, Mr Cottam will say that "discriminating against independent school pupils using a mechanistic template" is unfair to the hundreds of thousands of young people in private education.
“It sometimes feels as though our critics believe that the academic success of our pupils has either been handed to them on a plate, or drilled into them, and does not reflect any real ability or potential, let alone hard, determined work by the individuals themselves,” he says.
In a wide-ranging speech, Mr Cottam says the modern education system has become too focused on “entitlement” and a culture in which “all are expected to win prizes”. This fails to promote true competition between young people or push pupils towards academic excellence, he says.
“An education system that emphasises entitlement at the expense of effort and commitment, and that tries to make everyone feel wonderful all of the time, will not develop the strength of character that we all need, in order to deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life,” he says.
Mr Cottam also criticises the decline of academically-selective grammar schools. Only 164 remain in England and Labour introduced legislation in the late 90s banning the opening of any more. The Conservative and Liberal Democrat front benches also oppose the expansion of academic selection.
“The grammar school system, for all its many faults, was a real engine of social mobility, and nothing since has been as effective,” he says. “As every estate agent knows, the selection by ability of the grammar school system has been partly replaced by selection by mortgage.
“I am not suggesting that we should necessarily return to the grammar school system but that we should take note of its successes, see how we can learn from them and replicate them where we can, within the different circumstances that now exist.”
The modern education system, he says, is increasingly expected to “provide the answer to all the social ills of society, with the result that it is in danger of resembling a branch of psychotherapy”.
SOURCE
Many high school students throughout eastern Idaho weren't in class Monday morning, but instead, were outside protesting.
In response to Tom Luna's new Education Reform plan, and two of three bills passing the Senate on Thursday, high school students against the plan participated in a student walk-out.
Julia Donaldson, Senior at Highland High School: "We are protesting his plan and we are proposing that Luna publicly debate the American Falls counter plan which gives a lot more freedom to the schools as far as the technology bill goes."
If Luna's "Students Come First" proposal passes the Legislature, online education will be mandatory in the state, and laptops will given to every high school student. An online class would also be required.
Arizona Knight, Sophomore at Highland High School: "We need more one-on-one time. Not computers. Not technology, no. We need teachers."
Julia Donaldson, Senior at Highland High School: "His 'Pay for Performance' plan, which bases 50% of its evaluation on test scores, which is totally unfair, you know, you have the difference in socio-economic status's of the schools, teachers are going to start teaching us how to memorize instead of how to think."
In Boise, students walked a few blocks to the State Capitol, and several other Treasure Valley high schools participated.
Allison Westfall, Nampa School District Spokesperson: "We don't condone this during school hours. We do appreciate that students are passionate about this issue and want to express their opinion, but the appropriate form is to do that outside of the school day, or to contact their law makers."
Aliianna Kelemete, Highland High School, Pocatello: "We want to support our teachers the best way we can and we're out here and we know the consequences, but I think it's all for a good cause."
The bills that have passed the Senate last week will be discussed in the House Education Committee on Tuesday. In the meantime, emotions run high for those that oppose the bill, and those, like Governor Butch Otter, who support it.
Julia Donaldson, Senior at Highland High School: "It's just not good overall for the education of our students. And I'm a senior, but I care about my siblings future and the future of my teachers and friends."
The final bill, which funds the plan and has the technology elements was sent back to the Senate Education Committee for a reworking. That should be discussed this week as well.
SOURCE
An end to free higher education in Scotland?
Principals warn that universities in Scotland will be left with a £200m funding gap after tuition fees are raised in England
Scottish university principals have again called for an end to free higher education after a report warned of a £200m funding gap following the introduction of higher fees in England.
Universities Scotland, the umbrella body for higher education institutions, said the case for a "fair and modest" payment by Scottish graduates was now unanswerable if current levels of teaching and student numbers were to be maintained.
Its stance has increased pressure on the next Scottish government to scrap a longstanding tradition of free university education for domestic students, in the face of moves to allow English universities to charge between £6,000 and £9,000 a year in tuition fees.
But its conclusions were immediately challenged by the Scottish government, Universities Scotland's partner on the expert group that produced the report on funding, and by the National Union of Students Scotland.
Each side selected figures from the report that suited its policies. The universities used one of the highest figures based on the impact of inflation, while Scottish ministers chose figures that suited their current policy of funding universities entirely from general taxation.
The dispute – which has led to another rift on funding between the universities and Alex Salmond's nationalist government – follows weeks of speculation that Scottish universities faced a funding shortfall of up to £500m.
The country's leading colleges are now facing strikes, laying off staff and closing departments. Glasgow is planning to shut its modern languages and anthropology departments, while staff at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh are to take industrial action.
Salmond will campaign in this May's elections for the Scottish parliament by insisting that the shortfall is actually much smaller, and can be met by the taxpayer without fees or graduate taxes.
His officials believe Universities Scotland has been highly selective with the report's findings, by using a figure that included inflation and by ignoring the Scottish government's plans to charge English students up to £6,500 a year to study in Scotland.
If those fees were included and the baseline figure did not include inflation, the gap was actually £93m. And that, sources said, did not include another £35m in expected efficiency savings. Ministers are expected to promise this gap will be met by the government.
NUS Scotland accused Universities Scotland of "scaremongering" and misrepresenting the true scale of the funding gap in a deliberate attempt to bounce voters into accepting tuition fees.
The NUS will now be putting Labour, currently narrow favourites to win May's election, under pressure to pledge it would not charge students. Labour has said it believes some form of charge is now highly likely and refused to rule out a graduate tax or contribution.
More HERE
Universities 'told to discriminate against independent school pupils'
Universities should not be asked to “repair the problems of 18 years of upbringing and education” by skewing admissions in favour of poor-performing pupils, according to a leading headmaster.
Making lower grade offers to students from state schools is like forcing an engineer to improve the design of an aircraft “after the plane has already crashed”, it is claimed.
In a speech on Monday, Philip Cottam, chairman of the Society of Headmasters and Headmistresses of Independent Schools, says the number of children from deprived backgrounds failing to fulfil their potential is a “blot” on society.
But forcing admissions tutors to repair these problems by discriminating against privately-educated teenagers will fail to address key weaknesses in the education system, he claims.
Speaking at the society’s annual conference, he will criticise the decline of the state grammar school system which provided a decent academic education for pupils from the poorest families.
He will also attack the “culture of entitlement” at the heart of modern schooling “in which competition is seen as negative and all are expected to win prizes”.
The comments come just weeks after ministers insisted universities should hit targets to admit students from state schools and deprived backgrounds in return for charging more than £6,000 a year in tuition fees.
Institutions failing to do enough could be stripped of the power to levy fees as high as £9,000 under Coalition plans.
But Mr Cottam, head of fee-paying Halliford School in Shepperton, Middlesex, says more attention should be focused on repairing Britain’s broken education system than skewing university admissions.
“There is an argument to be made that our national failure to do the best by the 50 per cent or so of pupils who do not get five GCSEs at C or better, including mathematics and English, is in many ways more serious and more damaging than the under-representation of some in our selective universities,” he says.
Addressing headmasters, he adds: “Trying to force universities to repair, let alone make up for, the problems of 18 years of upbringing and education is certainly not the answer.
“It is approaching the issue from the wrong end and is like asking an aeronautical engineer to improve the design of an aircraft after the plane has already crashed.”
Private schools currently educate around seven per cent of children but privately-educated students make up more than four-in-10 of those attending Oxford and Cambridge.
But addressing headmasters at the society’s conference in Telford, Mr Cottam will say that "discriminating against independent school pupils using a mechanistic template" is unfair to the hundreds of thousands of young people in private education.
“It sometimes feels as though our critics believe that the academic success of our pupils has either been handed to them on a plate, or drilled into them, and does not reflect any real ability or potential, let alone hard, determined work by the individuals themselves,” he says.
In a wide-ranging speech, Mr Cottam says the modern education system has become too focused on “entitlement” and a culture in which “all are expected to win prizes”. This fails to promote true competition between young people or push pupils towards academic excellence, he says.
“An education system that emphasises entitlement at the expense of effort and commitment, and that tries to make everyone feel wonderful all of the time, will not develop the strength of character that we all need, in order to deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life,” he says.
Mr Cottam also criticises the decline of academically-selective grammar schools. Only 164 remain in England and Labour introduced legislation in the late 90s banning the opening of any more. The Conservative and Liberal Democrat front benches also oppose the expansion of academic selection.
“The grammar school system, for all its many faults, was a real engine of social mobility, and nothing since has been as effective,” he says. “As every estate agent knows, the selection by ability of the grammar school system has been partly replaced by selection by mortgage.
“I am not suggesting that we should necessarily return to the grammar school system but that we should take note of its successes, see how we can learn from them and replicate them where we can, within the different circumstances that now exist.”
The modern education system, he says, is increasingly expected to “provide the answer to all the social ills of society, with the result that it is in danger of resembling a branch of psychotherapy”.
SOURCE
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