BOOK REVIEW of The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You Won't Get the College Education You Paid For
Parents and taxpayers shouldn't get overheated about faculty salaries: tenure is where they should concentrate their anger. The jobs-for-life entitlement that comes with an ivory tower position is at the heart of so many problems with higher education today. Veteran journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley, an alumna of one of the country's most expensive and best-endowed schools, explores how tenure has promoted a class system in higher education, leaving contingent faculty who are barely making minimum wage and have no time for students to teach large swaths of the under- graduate population. She shows how the institution of tenure forces junior professors to keep their mouths shut for a decade or more if they disagree with senior faculty about anything from politics to research methods. And she examines how the institution of tenure – with the job security, mediocre salaries and low levels of accountability it entails – may be attracting the least innovative and interesting members of our society into teaching.
SOURCE
As staff walk out at a school plagued by violent pupils, teachers who dared to confront thugs in classrooms across Britain reveal how THEY were the ones to be punished
Staff at a struggling secondary school who are today staging a walk-out in protest of an escalating wave of verbal and physical abuse from pupils have won support from a teacher who made a similarly strong stand against classroom indiscipline.
Beleaguered teachers at the Darwen Vale High School in Blackburn, Lancs, overwhelmingly voted to go on strike in protest at what they see as the lack of support from senior management in dealing with pupils’ challenging behaviour. The children had been pushing, shoving and constantly swearing, leaving hard-pressed staff at the end of their tether.
Last month, a disciplinary hearing decreed that Michael Becker, 63, a teacher with an ‘exemplary’ record, should be allowed to return to the profession he loves despite an earlier conviction for assaulting a pupil. Mr Becker, 63, of Stutton, Suffolk, who reacted firmly to an unruly pupil, said: ‘I have enormous sympathy for these teachers who daily run the gauntlet of rowdy and aggressive children. I applaud their action.’
Two years ago, Mr Becker was fined £1,500 and ordered to pay £1,875 costs by Suffolk magistrates who believed the account of a disruptive 13-year-old who was in his class. The boy said the teacher had used unreasonable force to eject him from a lesson. Mr Becker has always contested that he had merely grabbed the boy by his belt and sweatshirt and removed him to a nearby storeroom when he refused — after repeated warnings — to stop telling particularly offensive and inflammatory racist jokes and leave the classroom.
When, last month, the General Teaching Council ruled that he could return to the classroom, Mr Becker said: ‘I’m delighted. I feel I’ve been vindicated. I just cannot describe the relief. I believe common sense has, at last, prevailed.’
And so, it would seem, do his many supporters. Roland Gooding, the former headteacher at the special school where Mr Becker gave ‘exemplary’ service for more than three decades, told the tribunal he ‘would not hesitate’ to employ Mr Becker again — adding public interest would not be served if he was forbidden from teaching.
At a time when schools are experiencing shortages of science and maths teachers, it would indeed seem a folly to ban Mr Becker from teaching, as he is a specialist in both.
His other passion is music: the school band, which he set up and ran, made ten albums — the proceeds of which went to charity — and appeared on television. In recognition of this laudable work, Mr Becker and his wife Ilona, 62, a retired secretary — who are parents to a grown-up son and daughter, and grandparents — attended a garden party at Buckingham Palace.
However, Mr Becker acknowledges that he did ‘overstep the mark’. He has also expressed genuine apologies and regret. But he would like to see the law clarified so other teachers fully understand what constitutes ‘reasonable’ force in removing disruptive pupils from lessons.
For his experience is not a one-off. It is replicated on a daily basis in classrooms throughout Britain, where teachers are expected to exercise almost saintly forbearance when confronted with pupils’ insolence, foul language and rowdyness.
‘All the power is with the children now,’ says Mr Becker. ‘Indiscipline is rampant and it seems to be a mark of honour to bring down a teacher.’ Mr Becker believes his experience is an extension of the barmy extremes of political correctness that currently hamstring every aspect of school life: the ludicrous health-and-safety zealotry that dictates pupils can’t make collages out of old eggboxes or loo roll holders any more for fear of contracting salmonella or ingesting germs; the nannying that forbids conker fights; and the absurd ‘risk assessment’ exercises that precede every trip outside the school gates.
Moreover, today’s discipline strategies are short-changing the diligent — an inequity not lost on Mr Becker. ‘Pupils stroll round classrooms as if teachers don’t exist,’ he says. ‘The boy I reprimanded was using his mobile and telling racist jokes. He was being unbearably insolent. It infuriated me that he was denying the other pupils their entitlement to learn without disruption, so I removed him.’ He adds: ‘Teachers should be allowed to teach. It’s a scandal that the system has forsaken those who want to learn.
‘My colleagues are constantly struggling with disrespectful and sometimes violent pupils. I know of one teacher, in a middle school, who is told to ‘f*** off’ 20 times a day. While other countries — many in Asia — are ascending the educational league tables, we are sliding down them.’
While parents would once support teachers’ efforts to discipline their children, now they are more likely to collude with their unruly offspring against their teachers.
Rita Burgess (not her current name), 55, teaches at a primary school in a deprived area of Liverpool. Her experience proves just how skewed in favour of children’s ‘rights’ the system has become. A year ago, two of her nine-year-old pupils were brawling in the classroom. She intervened to separate them. One of the children then ccused Mrs Burgess of assault, claiming she had strangled him.
The entire incident had been witnessed by the school’s assistant head, who testified that Mrs Burgess had merely broken up the fight. Had common sense prevailed the incident would have ended there, with a stiff reprimand and sanctions for the pupils.
But it didn’t. Preposterous though it seems, it was Mrs Burgess — a teacher with an unblemished record and 23 years experience — who was put through the wringer.
‘The headteacher said he could not take my word, which was corroborated by the assistant head, about what had happened,’ says Mrs Burgess. ‘He said if he did so, the parents would assume I’d colluded with my colleague to take sides against the children.’
What happened next is the stuff of nightmare. Mrs Burgess was suspended from her post for six weeks while the head carried out his investigation. In the time it took to accrue evidence — which exonerated Mrs Burgess unequivocally — she began to suffer from depression. ‘It was terribly stressful. I thought I was going to lose my job,’ she says. ‘Worst of all was the sense of utter betrayal.
Presumably the headteacher was obeying “procedures”, but we’ve now reached the point where heads are so frightened of litigation they give more credence to the word of children than to the testimony of two responsible adults.
There have been many instances of older pupils who’ve conspired against teachers and told lies just to get rid of them.’
Mrs Burgess’ experience is commonplace. It is replicated in schools all over Britain and it indicates how the ‘human rights’ of unruly pupils are trampling over the far more compelling right of the well-behaved to be educated.....
Mrs Burgess’ comments strike a chord with Basil Howard, a former head of religious education at a Midlands comprehensive. Mr Howard, dismayed by the daily verbal assaults on him by pupils, left the profession suffering from stress to become a social worker. He says: ‘I took my job seriously. I was a good, imaginative teacher. Even so, unruliness in the classroom was routine.
‘Pupils would wander aimlessly around, the more disruptive of them swinging Tarzan-like from the curtains. ‘“Mr Howard is a ****” was engraved indelibly by penknife and ink into desks. And I was expected to suffer this in silence. “You are a useless w***** and RE is pathetic,” was a typical torment.’
Like Mrs Burgess, Mr Howard notes that today even the most unruly pupils are indulged because they have ‘conditions’ that warrant quasi-scientific labels. ‘I believe the rot set in when teachers’ obligation to maintain discipline was undermined by pupils’ rights,’ he says.
‘Kids who are simply too idle to work are now excused because they have “learning difficulties”. My years as a social worker have taught me that children genuinely afflicted are, in fact, a tiny minority.
‘Moreover, teachers have become afraid to damage the fragile sensibilities of their pupils and school reports are so cloaked by euphemism that they are meaningless. What happened to the short, sharp shock of the one-liner? “Must do better” and, “An awful performance” leave no room for doubt or misinterpretation. ‘The pendulum has swung too far in favour of tolerance and acceptance.’
Small wonder, then, that so many pupils, denied boundaries and discipline at home, have no sense of the meaning of such out-moded values as respect, diligence, reliability and courtesy.
More HERE
Nearly two-thirds of Australian teachers want to quit - survey
NEARLY two-thirds of Australian teachers are considering quitting their jobs for a new career.
The Centre for Marketing Schools was commissioned to survey staff satisfaction levels of 850 teachers in government and non-government schools in South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia.
Centre for Marketing Schools director Dr Linda Vining said the survey confirmed the "deeper issues" of concern to teachers.
They included a lack of communication between staff and principals, and feeling undervalued and not being consulted.
"Teachers are feeling steamrollered . . . they are feeling that things are happening too quickly," Dr Vining said. "Through my research comes a sense they feel they are not valued members of the team - they are simply there to work and for many of them that's not fulfilling."
The survey also found:
SIXTY per cent of teachers said the school's direction was not clearly communicated.
FIFTY-ONE per cent did not feel part of a close-knit school community.
FIFTY-FOUR per cent said communication between staff and management was poor.
TWENTY-SEVEN per cent said the school principal was not approachable.
Education Minister Jay Weatherill said he had been "concerned about the morale of the workforce" when he was put in charge of the portfolio.
He said he had since announced a range of new policies aimed at improving communication between the central office and teachers.
"Many of the Supporting our Teachers initiatives are directly aimed at addressing teacher morale - such as the Public Teaching Awards, a major conference about teaching in the 21st century, a new outstanding teacher classification, a new recruitment policy and the Teacher Renewal Program," he said.
Association of Independent Schools of SA executive director Garry Le Duff said a more strategic approach to teacher retention was vital. "It seems unusually high that such a high proportion of people in teaching would be looking for alternative careers," he said. "But we certainly have to accept that people are more mobile in their occupations than a few years ago . . . and be more strategic in what sort of career pathways we're offering teachers."
SOURCE
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
SCOTUS: Tax credits for religious schools okay
The US Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by taxpayers in Arizona challenging a state tax credit program that primarily benefits parochial schools. In a 5-to-4 decision, the high court said the taxpayers lacked the necessary legal standing to bring their lawsuit.
The action sweeps away a ruling by a federal appeals court panel that had struck down the tax credit program as a violation of the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion.
The majority justices did not directly address the larger constitutional issue. Instead, the 19-page decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy focuses on whether the complaining taxpayers had suffered a direct and personal injury from Arizona’s religious school tax credit program.
Justice Kennedy drew a sharp distinction between government expenditures from the general treasury that directly benefit religion versus tax credits that provide individual citizens an opportunity to decide for themselves whether to direct the credited funds to a religious school.
“When Arizona taxpayers choose to contribute [to the tax credit program], they spend their own money, not money the state has collected from respondents or from other taxpayers,” Kennedy wrote. “Arizona’s [tax credit law] does not extract and spend a conscientious dissenter’s funds in service of an establishment [of religion],” he said. “On the contrary,” Kennedy said, “respondents and other Arizona taxpayers remain free to pay their own tax bills, without contributing to [the religious school tax credit program].”
The decision is important because it signals the intention of five members of the court to enforce a narrow interpretation of when taxpayers may be permitted to file lawsuits seeking to prove the government is engaged in unconstitutional support for or entanglement with religion.
In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the decision will make it harder for ordinary citizens to challenge government actions that they feel violate the First Amendment principle of government neutrality concerning religion. “Today’s decision devastates taxpayer standing in establishment clause cases,” Justice Kagan wrote in a 24-page dissent joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. “Appropriations and tax subsidies are readily interchangeable,” Kagan wrote. “What is a cash grant today can be a tax break tomorrow.”
She added: “The court’s opinion thus offers a road map … to any government that wishes to insulate its financing of religious activity from legal challenge.”
Supporters of the tax credit program praised the ruling. “Today’s decision marks the fifth time in recent years that the Supreme Court has rebuffed efforts by school choice opponents to use the courts to halt programs that empower families to choose a private school education,” said Tim Keller, executive director of the Arizona Chapter of the Institute for Justice.
SOURCE
Detroit goes charter
It's the only thing they had left to try
A bold — for the U.S., anyway — experiment is taking place in Detroit, which recently announced plans to convert nearly a third of its public schools into charter schools as soon as this fall.
Detroit already has a larger percentage of schoolchildren in charter schools than any other city except New Orleans and Washington, D.C. The Big Easy's transition to charters was driven by the disaster of Hurricane Katrina; the District's, by the disaster of the D.C. school system itself. Detroit is moving to charters largely out of fiscal necessity.
Teachers' unions and other usual suspects often object to charter schools on the grounds that they drain money from the public schools — a complaint that overlooks one salient fact: Charter schools are public schools. (Many, however, are not unionized, which does a lot to explain the union objection.) In fact, some school-reform advocates believe they will be the salvation of the public-school system, staving off the voucher campaign and saving public schools from wholesale abandonment.
It's telling that the charter movement has taken off in major urban areas saddled with terrible schools, rather than places — such as Virginia — where the mostly suburban systems meet parents' expectations. A principal reason people flock to the suburbs, of course, is to move to a better school district. If the charter movement can restore big-city school systems to some semblance of health, then they might also bring about what stadium and convention-center projects have not: an urban renaissance.
SOURCE
British school on the verge of a breakdown: Teachers set to walk out over pupil misbehaviour
Teachers at a struggling secondary school will stage a walk-out tomorrow in protest at a wave of verbal and physical assaults from pupils. Staff at Darwen Vale High School voted overwhelmingly to go on strike in protest at the lack of support they say they have received from senior management.
The threat came the day after Education Secretary Michael Gove announced a ‘back to basics’ crackdown on bad behaviour which he said was rife in too many schools.
Yesterday parents told how children at Darwen Vale in Blackburn, Lancashire, had been staging a low-level rebellion, challenging teachers to fights, pushing and shoving them and constantly swearing.
Problems are thought to have begun after the school moved to temporary premises during a £22million rebuild under Labour’s now discredited Building Schools for the Future programme.
Some teachers have allegedly been the subject of malicious allegations by pupils trying to get them suspended, while teenagers have been filming lessons on their mobile phones and threatening to post the footage on the internet.
As a result, lessons are expected to be cancelled tomorrow for all 1,150 pupils as staff form a picket line outside the school’s temporary premises. In a ballot, 95 per cent of the school’s 31 National Union of Teachers members voted in favour of the strike. Two thirds of the 29 members of the National Association of Schoolteachers/Union of Women Teachers also voted to walk out.
Parents said teachers had been complaining of a dramatic deterioration in behaviour and lack of respect since the school moved to near a former council estate. One father said: ‘It’s not the best school and there are a lot of badly behaved pupils. I’m not surprised the teachers are striking – I wouldn’t want their job.’
NAS/UWT Lancashire representative John Girdley said: ‘We sincerely hope that changes can be implemented as a matter of urgency in order to allow the staff of the school to continue to deliver the high standard of education which our pupils deserve.’
But Darwen Vale head teacher Hilary Torpey said the problem had been vastly exaggerated. In a letter to parents, she wrote: ‘It is unfortunate that matters that were being dealt with by the school about appropriate behaviour and ways of managing it have been made public in this way and blown out of all proportion.’
She said the school, which had a ‘good’ pupil behaviour rating following an Ofsted inspection in June, had been revisited by auditors following the claims and they had again been ‘highly complimentary’.
The behaviour at Darwen Vale has a long way to go before it reaches the depths of violence and anarchy that blighted what was dubbed Britain’s worst school.
The Ridings in Halifax gained notoriety in the 1990s amid shocking accounts including a 14-year-old boy fondling a French teacher’s breasts in front of a class. In 1996, teachers voted to strike unless 61 pupils were expelled. Two ‘superheads’ were appointed and they mollified staff by expelling 12 students and suspending 21. By 1998, Ofsted inspectors reported a ‘remarkable transformation’, but the school slipped back into chaos and was closed in 2007.
SOURCE
The US Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit filed by taxpayers in Arizona challenging a state tax credit program that primarily benefits parochial schools. In a 5-to-4 decision, the high court said the taxpayers lacked the necessary legal standing to bring their lawsuit.
The action sweeps away a ruling by a federal appeals court panel that had struck down the tax credit program as a violation of the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion.
The majority justices did not directly address the larger constitutional issue. Instead, the 19-page decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy focuses on whether the complaining taxpayers had suffered a direct and personal injury from Arizona’s religious school tax credit program.
Justice Kennedy drew a sharp distinction between government expenditures from the general treasury that directly benefit religion versus tax credits that provide individual citizens an opportunity to decide for themselves whether to direct the credited funds to a religious school.
“When Arizona taxpayers choose to contribute [to the tax credit program], they spend their own money, not money the state has collected from respondents or from other taxpayers,” Kennedy wrote. “Arizona’s [tax credit law] does not extract and spend a conscientious dissenter’s funds in service of an establishment [of religion],” he said. “On the contrary,” Kennedy said, “respondents and other Arizona taxpayers remain free to pay their own tax bills, without contributing to [the religious school tax credit program].”
The decision is important because it signals the intention of five members of the court to enforce a narrow interpretation of when taxpayers may be permitted to file lawsuits seeking to prove the government is engaged in unconstitutional support for or entanglement with religion.
In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the decision will make it harder for ordinary citizens to challenge government actions that they feel violate the First Amendment principle of government neutrality concerning religion. “Today’s decision devastates taxpayer standing in establishment clause cases,” Justice Kagan wrote in a 24-page dissent joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. “Appropriations and tax subsidies are readily interchangeable,” Kagan wrote. “What is a cash grant today can be a tax break tomorrow.”
She added: “The court’s opinion thus offers a road map … to any government that wishes to insulate its financing of religious activity from legal challenge.”
Supporters of the tax credit program praised the ruling. “Today’s decision marks the fifth time in recent years that the Supreme Court has rebuffed efforts by school choice opponents to use the courts to halt programs that empower families to choose a private school education,” said Tim Keller, executive director of the Arizona Chapter of the Institute for Justice.
SOURCE
Detroit goes charter
It's the only thing they had left to try
A bold — for the U.S., anyway — experiment is taking place in Detroit, which recently announced plans to convert nearly a third of its public schools into charter schools as soon as this fall.
Detroit already has a larger percentage of schoolchildren in charter schools than any other city except New Orleans and Washington, D.C. The Big Easy's transition to charters was driven by the disaster of Hurricane Katrina; the District's, by the disaster of the D.C. school system itself. Detroit is moving to charters largely out of fiscal necessity.
Teachers' unions and other usual suspects often object to charter schools on the grounds that they drain money from the public schools — a complaint that overlooks one salient fact: Charter schools are public schools. (Many, however, are not unionized, which does a lot to explain the union objection.) In fact, some school-reform advocates believe they will be the salvation of the public-school system, staving off the voucher campaign and saving public schools from wholesale abandonment.
It's telling that the charter movement has taken off in major urban areas saddled with terrible schools, rather than places — such as Virginia — where the mostly suburban systems meet parents' expectations. A principal reason people flock to the suburbs, of course, is to move to a better school district. If the charter movement can restore big-city school systems to some semblance of health, then they might also bring about what stadium and convention-center projects have not: an urban renaissance.
SOURCE
British school on the verge of a breakdown: Teachers set to walk out over pupil misbehaviour
Teachers at a struggling secondary school will stage a walk-out tomorrow in protest at a wave of verbal and physical assaults from pupils. Staff at Darwen Vale High School voted overwhelmingly to go on strike in protest at the lack of support they say they have received from senior management.
The threat came the day after Education Secretary Michael Gove announced a ‘back to basics’ crackdown on bad behaviour which he said was rife in too many schools.
Yesterday parents told how children at Darwen Vale in Blackburn, Lancashire, had been staging a low-level rebellion, challenging teachers to fights, pushing and shoving them and constantly swearing.
Problems are thought to have begun after the school moved to temporary premises during a £22million rebuild under Labour’s now discredited Building Schools for the Future programme.
Some teachers have allegedly been the subject of malicious allegations by pupils trying to get them suspended, while teenagers have been filming lessons on their mobile phones and threatening to post the footage on the internet.
As a result, lessons are expected to be cancelled tomorrow for all 1,150 pupils as staff form a picket line outside the school’s temporary premises. In a ballot, 95 per cent of the school’s 31 National Union of Teachers members voted in favour of the strike. Two thirds of the 29 members of the National Association of Schoolteachers/Union of Women Teachers also voted to walk out.
Parents said teachers had been complaining of a dramatic deterioration in behaviour and lack of respect since the school moved to near a former council estate. One father said: ‘It’s not the best school and there are a lot of badly behaved pupils. I’m not surprised the teachers are striking – I wouldn’t want their job.’
NAS/UWT Lancashire representative John Girdley said: ‘We sincerely hope that changes can be implemented as a matter of urgency in order to allow the staff of the school to continue to deliver the high standard of education which our pupils deserve.’
But Darwen Vale head teacher Hilary Torpey said the problem had been vastly exaggerated. In a letter to parents, she wrote: ‘It is unfortunate that matters that were being dealt with by the school about appropriate behaviour and ways of managing it have been made public in this way and blown out of all proportion.’
She said the school, which had a ‘good’ pupil behaviour rating following an Ofsted inspection in June, had been revisited by auditors following the claims and they had again been ‘highly complimentary’.
The behaviour at Darwen Vale has a long way to go before it reaches the depths of violence and anarchy that blighted what was dubbed Britain’s worst school.
The Ridings in Halifax gained notoriety in the 1990s amid shocking accounts including a 14-year-old boy fondling a French teacher’s breasts in front of a class. In 1996, teachers voted to strike unless 61 pupils were expelled. Two ‘superheads’ were appointed and they mollified staff by expelling 12 students and suspending 21. By 1998, Ofsted inspectors reported a ‘remarkable transformation’, but the school slipped back into chaos and was closed in 2007.
SOURCE
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
College Professor Arrested for Closing Student’s Laptop in Class
Professor Frank J. Rybicki teaches Mass Media at Valdosta State University. The other day, he was arrested for assaulting a student in his class and is now facing battery charges.
Did he punch the student? No. Did he throw his chair across the room at the student? Definitely not. Did he inappropriately get a bit too intimate with a student? Not even close.
He was arrested for shutting a student’s laptop in class. The student, the professor claims, was web-browsing on sites not related to the course, instead of taking notes. After he closed her laptop, an argument ensued between the professor and the 22-year-old girl. Then, soon after the argument, the professor dismissed class early because he was so upset.
That was Friday. The following Monday, when the students came to class, instead of being greeted by their professor, they were greeted by officers. Inside Higher Ed has the story:
Frank J. Rybicki, assistant professor of mass media at Valdosta State University, did the equivalent last week when he shut the laptop of a student who was allegedly web surfing as opposed to taking notes. She filed a complaint (reportedly about a finger or fingers that were hurt when he shut the laptop) and the university’s police arrested him on a charge of battery. The Georgia institution suspended his teaching duties there, although not his pay.
The professor–and the students in the class–were asked by the University to not answer any questions relating to the incident. Still, Professor Rybicki did have a few words to say about this fiasco:
While he declined to discuss the incident specifically, Rybicki did answer a few questions. Asked if students shouldn’t look at non-class websites while in class, he said that was “pretty obvious.” Asked if he had ever caused physical harm to any student, he said “absolutely not, never.”
Many students have come to the defense of the professor. One said that his arrest was not justified “because he is a great teacher and she [the student with the laptop] was on Facebook, when we know not to be on other sites while the teacher is teaching.”
SOURCE
We Don’t Need Know Education
By the satirical Mike Adams
I’m getting to be a crabby old man and I’m not even fifty. But working at a liberal university for eighteen years has taught me never to accept responsibility for my actions or my disposition. Instead I blame my most recent bad mood (the one I’m in right now) on a student who just asked me a question about the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case United States v. Leon, (1984). Wanting to know the holding, he asked if it meant “that the police can rely upon a search warrant they don’t reasonably no is invalid.” I almost told the student there was know way he was going to pass my course if he didn’t no the difference between “know” and “no.” But I just new I would get in trouble if I did.
Of course, when criticizing the low quality of students in higher education it’s important that we not pick on males only (that would be sexist). No discussion of the declining quality of student communication skills would be complete without talking about the role (or was that roll?) of female students. After all, they make up more than 50% of the student body on the average college campus. You are (like totally) aware of their presence when you hear a conversation like the following, which occurred last Tuesday right outside my opened office door:
“I’m just like not real sure what I want to do when I graduate? I like thought I would like major in business but there’s a lot of like math and stuff? Plus, the classes in sociology are like easier and like way more interesting? I just seriously like need to focus on like what I want to do when I get out and stuff?”
None of the young woman’s sentences were actually questions. But the inflections at the end of each sentence (along with the general lack of confidence in anything she said) made them sound like questions. I mean, it made them like sound like questions? I’m sure that that woman has a Facebook account with a “like like” button. So she can like seriously like. And stuff.
Of course, it is racist of me to have just given two examples of declining student quality using white students. Let’s (like totally) fix that by recounting a conversation I heard just this morning as I was walking up the stairwell in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building, which is sure to be re-named Mike Adams Hall after I retire.
“You did dat. I did not do dat. Yo. Dats right. It’s yo fault. My situation? What about yo situation? I do dat. I do dat. But dats because you done did dat. Dats what I’m sayin’. Dat’s what I be sayin’.”
I have no idea what that young Hyphenated-American student was saying to his cell phone. All I know is that I have the song “Zip-a-dee-do-dat” stuck in my head. Thanks to the Diversity Office it’s the new “Song of the South”!
As much as I enjoy broaching these topics with humor the results aren’t funny when these students get out into the real world to compete in a full-time job applicant pool. So there has to be a serious discussion of how this problem became so pronounced and what can be done about it.
It would be tempting to blame these kinds of problems on the university English departments. After all, they rarely teach students English these days – opting instead to indoctrinate them into post-modern philosophy and radical feminist politics.
It would also be tempting to blame the Schools of Education that pay wacky professors like Maurice Martinez to teach “black English” to white students. Instead of asking the minority to conform to the majority they do the exact opposite – probably because it is more difficult and, hence, would require greater government intervention (read: greater federal grant opportunities).
But the problem is much broader than that. It is a problem stemming from our basic educational mission of promoting multiculturalism and diversity. In this age of diversity we are reticent to correct students for speaking in a “wrong” way or to reward them for speaking in a “right” way. To do either one of these things is to admit that there is a right or wrong way of doing things in any given cultural or social context. Professors who are unwilling to agree that English is the “right” language to speak in this country are hardly willing to assert that there is a right or wrong way to speak it.
President George W. Bush was considered an idiot by most college professors simply because he was inarticulate. One of my colleagues even circulated an email saying that Bush was responsible for the fact that most college students are inarticulate. But Bush is no longer in office and the problem keeps getting worse. Multiculturalism has come up short in our efforts to promote linguistic skill and social competency. It’s time for a new strategery. I think you gnome sayings. Gnome sayin’?
SOURCE
British schools have been hiding true extent of pupil bad behaviour for years, claims Education boss
Bad behaviour is rife in schools – and heads have been hiding the problem for years, the Education Secretary has warned. Michael Gove said yesterday that schools were suffering from a ‘real behaviour problem’.
And headmasters have conspired to hide the true nature of yobbish behaviour in the classroom by concealing naughty pupils and incompetent teachers from Ofsted inspectors, he added. As a result, thousands of teachers – trained at the taxpayers’ expense – have fled the profession, citing bad classroom behaviour as the reason. And with 1,000 children being suspended every school day for abuse and assault, their disruptive behaviour is interfering with the education and life chances of tens of thousands of pupils.
Mr Gove’s comments will enrage teachers’ unions, who insist behaviour in schools is good and that any attempt to paint a bad picture is ‘scaremongering’.
Mr Gove announced his ‘back to basics’ plans as he published guidance for schools on dealing with bad behaviour. Under the updated guidance, which has been reduced from 600 pages to 50, school heads will be able to press criminal charges against pupils who make false allegations about teachers in England. They will also be able to confiscate mobile phones without fear of being accused of infringing pupils’ rights.
Launching the guidance, Mr Gove said he was told by teachers that ‘weak teachers are invited to stay at home, we make sure disruptive pupils don’t come in, and the best teachers are on corridor duty. We put on our best face for inspections’.
He added: ‘We rely on Ofsted to let us know how behaviour is in many schools. It is certainly the case that in some schools the behaviour problem is critical. ‘We do know from recent evidence that the single biggest reason [for teachers leaving the profession] is because of poor behaviour.
‘The biggest barrier to entry is the fear of not being safe in the classroom. These are both indicators of a real behaviour problem.’ Two-thirds of teachers believe bad behaviour is driving staff out of the classroom, according to the Department for Education.
Mr Gove’s behaviour tsar, Charlie Taylor, said the guidance should encompass rules on school uniform and advice on recruiting educational psychologists. He said a school uniform, with top buttons done up and a nicely tied tie, can ‘set the tone for a school’.
Mr Taylor added: ‘You need to have the high expectations; you need to have the rules in place and the boundaries. ‘But in any school, and in particular in a deprived area...you need to do a bit extra with them.’
Pimlico Academy in Central London, where Mr Gove launched his guidance, has a full-time education psychologist and four part-time psychotherapists to work with children with the most serious problems.
Concerns that schools are hiding badly behaved pupils from Ofsted were raised at a Commons select committee hearing last year. Tom Trust, a former member of the General Teaching Council for England, told the committee: ‘Getting evidence from head teachers is not always reliable because they have got a lot to lose. Ofsted’s views on behaviour are not worth the paper they are written on.’
SOURCE
Professor Frank J. Rybicki teaches Mass Media at Valdosta State University. The other day, he was arrested for assaulting a student in his class and is now facing battery charges.
Did he punch the student? No. Did he throw his chair across the room at the student? Definitely not. Did he inappropriately get a bit too intimate with a student? Not even close.
He was arrested for shutting a student’s laptop in class. The student, the professor claims, was web-browsing on sites not related to the course, instead of taking notes. After he closed her laptop, an argument ensued between the professor and the 22-year-old girl. Then, soon after the argument, the professor dismissed class early because he was so upset.
That was Friday. The following Monday, when the students came to class, instead of being greeted by their professor, they were greeted by officers. Inside Higher Ed has the story:
Frank J. Rybicki, assistant professor of mass media at Valdosta State University, did the equivalent last week when he shut the laptop of a student who was allegedly web surfing as opposed to taking notes. She filed a complaint (reportedly about a finger or fingers that were hurt when he shut the laptop) and the university’s police arrested him on a charge of battery. The Georgia institution suspended his teaching duties there, although not his pay.
The professor–and the students in the class–were asked by the University to not answer any questions relating to the incident. Still, Professor Rybicki did have a few words to say about this fiasco:
While he declined to discuss the incident specifically, Rybicki did answer a few questions. Asked if students shouldn’t look at non-class websites while in class, he said that was “pretty obvious.” Asked if he had ever caused physical harm to any student, he said “absolutely not, never.”
Many students have come to the defense of the professor. One said that his arrest was not justified “because he is a great teacher and she [the student with the laptop] was on Facebook, when we know not to be on other sites while the teacher is teaching.”
SOURCE
We Don’t Need Know Education
By the satirical Mike Adams
I’m getting to be a crabby old man and I’m not even fifty. But working at a liberal university for eighteen years has taught me never to accept responsibility for my actions or my disposition. Instead I blame my most recent bad mood (the one I’m in right now) on a student who just asked me a question about the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case United States v. Leon, (1984). Wanting to know the holding, he asked if it meant “that the police can rely upon a search warrant they don’t reasonably no is invalid.” I almost told the student there was know way he was going to pass my course if he didn’t no the difference between “know” and “no.” But I just new I would get in trouble if I did.
Of course, when criticizing the low quality of students in higher education it’s important that we not pick on males only (that would be sexist). No discussion of the declining quality of student communication skills would be complete without talking about the role (or was that roll?) of female students. After all, they make up more than 50% of the student body on the average college campus. You are (like totally) aware of their presence when you hear a conversation like the following, which occurred last Tuesday right outside my opened office door:
“I’m just like not real sure what I want to do when I graduate? I like thought I would like major in business but there’s a lot of like math and stuff? Plus, the classes in sociology are like easier and like way more interesting? I just seriously like need to focus on like what I want to do when I get out and stuff?”
None of the young woman’s sentences were actually questions. But the inflections at the end of each sentence (along with the general lack of confidence in anything she said) made them sound like questions. I mean, it made them like sound like questions? I’m sure that that woman has a Facebook account with a “like like” button. So she can like seriously like. And stuff.
Of course, it is racist of me to have just given two examples of declining student quality using white students. Let’s (like totally) fix that by recounting a conversation I heard just this morning as I was walking up the stairwell in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building, which is sure to be re-named Mike Adams Hall after I retire.
“You did dat. I did not do dat. Yo. Dats right. It’s yo fault. My situation? What about yo situation? I do dat. I do dat. But dats because you done did dat. Dats what I’m sayin’. Dat’s what I be sayin’.”
I have no idea what that young Hyphenated-American student was saying to his cell phone. All I know is that I have the song “Zip-a-dee-do-dat” stuck in my head. Thanks to the Diversity Office it’s the new “Song of the South”!
As much as I enjoy broaching these topics with humor the results aren’t funny when these students get out into the real world to compete in a full-time job applicant pool. So there has to be a serious discussion of how this problem became so pronounced and what can be done about it.
It would be tempting to blame these kinds of problems on the university English departments. After all, they rarely teach students English these days – opting instead to indoctrinate them into post-modern philosophy and radical feminist politics.
It would also be tempting to blame the Schools of Education that pay wacky professors like Maurice Martinez to teach “black English” to white students. Instead of asking the minority to conform to the majority they do the exact opposite – probably because it is more difficult and, hence, would require greater government intervention (read: greater federal grant opportunities).
But the problem is much broader than that. It is a problem stemming from our basic educational mission of promoting multiculturalism and diversity. In this age of diversity we are reticent to correct students for speaking in a “wrong” way or to reward them for speaking in a “right” way. To do either one of these things is to admit that there is a right or wrong way of doing things in any given cultural or social context. Professors who are unwilling to agree that English is the “right” language to speak in this country are hardly willing to assert that there is a right or wrong way to speak it.
President George W. Bush was considered an idiot by most college professors simply because he was inarticulate. One of my colleagues even circulated an email saying that Bush was responsible for the fact that most college students are inarticulate. But Bush is no longer in office and the problem keeps getting worse. Multiculturalism has come up short in our efforts to promote linguistic skill and social competency. It’s time for a new strategery. I think you gnome sayings. Gnome sayin’?
SOURCE
British schools have been hiding true extent of pupil bad behaviour for years, claims Education boss
Bad behaviour is rife in schools – and heads have been hiding the problem for years, the Education Secretary has warned. Michael Gove said yesterday that schools were suffering from a ‘real behaviour problem’.
And headmasters have conspired to hide the true nature of yobbish behaviour in the classroom by concealing naughty pupils and incompetent teachers from Ofsted inspectors, he added. As a result, thousands of teachers – trained at the taxpayers’ expense – have fled the profession, citing bad classroom behaviour as the reason. And with 1,000 children being suspended every school day for abuse and assault, their disruptive behaviour is interfering with the education and life chances of tens of thousands of pupils.
Mr Gove’s comments will enrage teachers’ unions, who insist behaviour in schools is good and that any attempt to paint a bad picture is ‘scaremongering’.
Mr Gove announced his ‘back to basics’ plans as he published guidance for schools on dealing with bad behaviour. Under the updated guidance, which has been reduced from 600 pages to 50, school heads will be able to press criminal charges against pupils who make false allegations about teachers in England. They will also be able to confiscate mobile phones without fear of being accused of infringing pupils’ rights.
Launching the guidance, Mr Gove said he was told by teachers that ‘weak teachers are invited to stay at home, we make sure disruptive pupils don’t come in, and the best teachers are on corridor duty. We put on our best face for inspections’.
He added: ‘We rely on Ofsted to let us know how behaviour is in many schools. It is certainly the case that in some schools the behaviour problem is critical. ‘We do know from recent evidence that the single biggest reason [for teachers leaving the profession] is because of poor behaviour.
PRIMARY SCHOOLS CRISIS
Tens of thousands of children face being turned away from primary schools because a migrant baby boom has led to a severe shortage of places.
London alone faces a shortage of some 70,000 primary places in the next four years, according to a report, and Berkshire, Bedfordshire, Birmingham, Bristol, Sheffield and Hove, are under enormous strain.
Parents in the worst-hit areas will have to separate their siblings and send their four-year-olds on 30 minute bus rides across their borough to get them into a school. The rapid increase in numbers, which will cost £1.7billion, is being attributed to a baby boom fuelled in part by rising net migration – which more than doubled under Labour.
Many migrants were young and have since started families. It has been predicted 500,000 more primary places will be needed by 2018.
A sluggish housing market has compounded the crisis because parents are effectively trapped in areas with too few school places.
Others have found they lack the cash to send their offspring to private schools.
‘The biggest barrier to entry is the fear of not being safe in the classroom. These are both indicators of a real behaviour problem.’ Two-thirds of teachers believe bad behaviour is driving staff out of the classroom, according to the Department for Education.
Mr Gove’s behaviour tsar, Charlie Taylor, said the guidance should encompass rules on school uniform and advice on recruiting educational psychologists. He said a school uniform, with top buttons done up and a nicely tied tie, can ‘set the tone for a school’.
Mr Taylor added: ‘You need to have the high expectations; you need to have the rules in place and the boundaries. ‘But in any school, and in particular in a deprived area...you need to do a bit extra with them.’
Pimlico Academy in Central London, where Mr Gove launched his guidance, has a full-time education psychologist and four part-time psychotherapists to work with children with the most serious problems.
Concerns that schools are hiding badly behaved pupils from Ofsted were raised at a Commons select committee hearing last year. Tom Trust, a former member of the General Teaching Council for England, told the committee: ‘Getting evidence from head teachers is not always reliable because they have got a lot to lose. Ofsted’s views on behaviour are not worth the paper they are written on.’
SOURCE
Monday, April 04, 2011
Florida Education Reforms Succeed, Spread to Other States
Florida is widely recognized as the state leader in education reform. Students in the Sunshine State have made the strongest academic achievement gains in the nation since 2003, and they are one of the only states that have been able to narrow the achievement gap between white and minority students. Yesterday, the Washington Post highlighted the Florida model, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s role in its creation:
State leaders seem to know a good reform strategy when they see it, and many across the country are beginning to embrace the Florida reform model.
Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico and Governor Gary Herbert of Utah just signed the Florida-style A-F grading system into law in their respective states. The scale grades schools and school districts on a straightforward, transparent scale designed to inform parents and taxpayers about achievement results. The move will arm parents with more information about school performance – a necessary step to improving education. State leaders in Indiana, Arizona and Louisiana also recently implemented the A-F grading scale.
While transparency about school performance is essential to results-based education reform, providing parents with opportunities to act on that information is crucial. Many states are now working to enact that most important piece of the Florida reform model – school choice.
In Indiana, a school choice bill – what could become the largest in the country – is under consideration that would provide significant new education options for families. According to the Foundation for Educational Choice, the House bill under consideration would create a new voucher program that would allow children to attend a private school of their choice. Scholarship amounts will be determined on a sliding scale based on income, and after three years, the cap on the number of eligible students would be lifted.
Moves to embrace the Florida reform model – in whole or in part – illustrate the great capacity of state leaders to look toward what works in education and modify it to meet the needs of local communities.
By contrast, Washington has been trying for nearly a half century to push education reform from the top down, despite being far from the students and schools their policies impact.
The Washington Post goes on to say that “[Jeb] Bush left office in 2007, and his legacy is much debated.” While some may like to debate which of the reform elements of his plan were most effective, there’s little room to debate the results.
Florida students have demonstrated the strongest gains on the NAEP in the nation since 2003, when all 50 states began taking NAEP exams. Moreover, between 1998 and 2008, the average score for black students increased by 12 points in reading from 192 to 204. In Florida, it increased by 25 points—twice the gains of the national average. If African American students nationwide had made the same amount of progress as African American students in Florida, the fourth-grade reading gap between black and white would be approximately half the size it is today.
If federal policymakers truly wanted to help education reform flourish, they would relieve states of the bureaucratic red tape and heavy handed mandates, and allow state leaders to have more control over how education dollars are spent. As the recent replications of the highly successful Florida reform model show, state leaders are eager to do what works and what’s in the best interest of students.
SOURCE
Pupils could face police action as British government announces surprise raids on schools to tackle bad behaviour
Britain's worst schools will face surprise raids by inspectors and heads will be able to press charges against pupils under moves to stamp out discipline problems in the classroom.
Teachers will also be given powers to confiscate pupils’ mobile phones in a package of measures designed to end years of politically correct official guidance that gave disruptive children the upper hand.
Education Secretary Michael Gove, who will unveil the plans today, is determined to reverse the collapse in classroom discipline that has resulted in 1,000 children a day being suspended from school for abuse and assault.
As well as confiscating mobiles, which are banned in many classrooms, teachers will be allowed to search the phones for evidence of cyber-bullying and inappropriate material.
And they will be allowed to break up fights and manhandle unruly pupils out of the classroom. They will also automatically be given the benefit of the doubt when facing malicious allegations from children or parents – and given anonymity while the claims are investigated.
Under the new rules they will then be allowed to launch criminal action against their own pupils who have made false allegations about them. The youngsters will also face expulsion over the claims.
Teachers will also be allowed to hand out automatic detentions to misbehaving students, without having to give parents 24 hours’ notice.
The 50-page document replaces more than 600 pages of complex guidance on discipline.
Mr Gove will also press the schools inspection body, Ofsted, to carry out more unannounced raids at the worst schools. At present most schools receive many months’ notice before an Ofsted inspection – giving them time to cover up the worst problems. New powers to carry out so-called ‘no-notice inspections’ have been used only five times in 18 months.
A government source said Mr Gove expected the powers to be used more widely, adding: ‘In the small number of schools with very bad behaviour problems we need more no-notice inspections. It must become unacceptable for schools to tolerate persistent serious problems.’
Mr Gove said the new measures would hand power in the classroom back to teachers. He added: ‘Improving discipline is a big priority. Teachers can’t teach effectively and pupils can’t learn if schools can’t keep order.
The new regime will remove the controversial ‘no touch’ rules, which banned teachers from any physical contact with pupils.
The guidance also gives teachers far greater protection against malicious complaints from pupils and their parents. One in four teachers has faced false allegations from a pupil, while one in six has had unfounded allegations made by parents.
Chris Yeates, the leader of teachers’ union NASUWT, yesterday criticised the ‘disproportionate’ powers allowing teachers to search for mobile phones – despite having previously branded mobiles ‘offensive weapons’ used by bullies.
Charlie Taylor, head of a tough inner-city school for excluded pupils, has been appointed as a school discipline tsar to drive through the reforms. He said: ‘For far too long, teachers have been buried under guidance and reports on how to tackle bad behaviour. I am determined to make sure I help schools put policy into practice.’
SOURCE
Millions of Australians behind on basic skills; threatens Australia's international competitiveness
Not as bad as the USA but getting there
AUSTRALIA'S international competitiveness is under threat because up to eight million Australian workers don't have the reading, writing or numeracy skills to undertake training for trade or professional jobs.
The nation's 11 Industry Skills Councils will today call for a new campaign to tackle endemic numbers of workers with poor reading and writing skills, launching a report detailing the problems being faced by industry training bodies.
The bodies say they are confronting inadequately prepared school leavers, an ageing workforce struggling to cope with technological advances and overseas-born workers with English as a second language.
The report, No More Excuses, calls for the Council of Australian Governments to develop a national "overarching blueprint for action on language, literacy and numeracy".
The report will reignite the skills debate at a time when industry is warning of the re-emergence of shortages of trained workers and Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott have thrust workforce participation and getting the long-term unemployed into work to the front of the political debate.
The report says "the situation looks as if it could be getting worse, not better" in terms of the language, literature and numeracy skills of workers.
"International studies have shown that over the past two decades, Australia's literacy and numeracy skill levels have stagnated while those of other countries, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, have improved.
"By continuing to accept the current levels, we are limiting the future success of individuals, businesses and our economy," the Industry Skills Councils say in a joint statement to be released today.
The report calls for industry training programs to be provided with specific funding to tackle language, literacy and numeracy gaps faced by students and overseas-born workers with English as a second language.
It also calls for recruits to be given better advice about the language and maths requirements of training courses.
Forest Works chief executive Michael Hartman, who runs training programs for the forest, wood, paper and timber products industry, said literacy and numeracy were the "foundation of productivity".
A failure to improve skills among both school leavers and experienced workers would see Australian businesses fall behind international competitors.
Electrocomms and Energy Utilities Industry Skills Council chief executive Bob Taylor told The Australian a decade of calls for skill-ready school leavers had failed to achieve any tangible improvements.
And the resources and infrastructure industry skills council, SkillsDMC, writes in the report that some indigenous recruits on resources projects have learning levels as low as primary school grade four.
This means that providing them with literacy and numeracy skills "is costly and time-consuming, and often results in the employee spending more time at training than at work".
Mr Taylor said industry had been complaining about the poor quality of literacy and numeracy among school leavers looking to enter the trades for more than 10 years and there had been no improvement.
He said the report was aimed at ending the "blame game" and incorporating basic reading, writing and numeracy skills into preliminary training courses.
He said lack of skills in this area was a "real issue" in terms of drop-out rates of apprentices and schools needed to become more focused on providing the relevant skills to the 70 per cent of students who would not attend university and seek work in a trade.
Mr Taylor said preliminary training courses to allow regional workers access to jobs on the National Broadband Network included facets of basic literacy and numeracy training.
He said it was "quite frustrating" that basic maths and physics of the 15- to 16-year-olds seeking trades in the 1960s was superior to today's 18-year-olds seeking trades.
Mr Hartman said his industry was confronting literacy and numeracy problems among older workers who had been long-term employees in industries that were suddenly facing technological change.
He said under current training arrangements, there was not a lot of money available to enable trainers to help students struggling with basic literacy and numeracy skills and this needed to be addressed: "It is a major problem in our society; unless we tackle it, we'll fall further behind in terms of international competitiveness and the skills of our people."
SOURCE
Florida is widely recognized as the state leader in education reform. Students in the Sunshine State have made the strongest academic achievement gains in the nation since 2003, and they are one of the only states that have been able to narrow the achievement gap between white and minority students. Yesterday, the Washington Post highlighted the Florida model, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s role in its creation:
“The president who turned No Child Left Behind from slogan into statute is gone from Washington, and the influence of his signature education law is fading. But another brand of Bush school reform is on the rise.
“The salesman is not the 43rd president, George W. Bush, but the 43rd governor of Florida, his brother Jeb.
“At the core of the Jeb Bush agenda are ideas drawn from his Florida playbook: Give every public school a grade from A to F. Offer students vouchers to help pay for private school. Don’t let them move into fourth grade unless they know how to read.”
State leaders seem to know a good reform strategy when they see it, and many across the country are beginning to embrace the Florida reform model.
Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico and Governor Gary Herbert of Utah just signed the Florida-style A-F grading system into law in their respective states. The scale grades schools and school districts on a straightforward, transparent scale designed to inform parents and taxpayers about achievement results. The move will arm parents with more information about school performance – a necessary step to improving education. State leaders in Indiana, Arizona and Louisiana also recently implemented the A-F grading scale.
While transparency about school performance is essential to results-based education reform, providing parents with opportunities to act on that information is crucial. Many states are now working to enact that most important piece of the Florida reform model – school choice.
In Indiana, a school choice bill – what could become the largest in the country – is under consideration that would provide significant new education options for families. According to the Foundation for Educational Choice, the House bill under consideration would create a new voucher program that would allow children to attend a private school of their choice. Scholarship amounts will be determined on a sliding scale based on income, and after three years, the cap on the number of eligible students would be lifted.
Moves to embrace the Florida reform model – in whole or in part – illustrate the great capacity of state leaders to look toward what works in education and modify it to meet the needs of local communities.
By contrast, Washington has been trying for nearly a half century to push education reform from the top down, despite being far from the students and schools their policies impact.
The Washington Post goes on to say that “[Jeb] Bush left office in 2007, and his legacy is much debated.” While some may like to debate which of the reform elements of his plan were most effective, there’s little room to debate the results.
Florida students have demonstrated the strongest gains on the NAEP in the nation since 2003, when all 50 states began taking NAEP exams. Moreover, between 1998 and 2008, the average score for black students increased by 12 points in reading from 192 to 204. In Florida, it increased by 25 points—twice the gains of the national average. If African American students nationwide had made the same amount of progress as African American students in Florida, the fourth-grade reading gap between black and white would be approximately half the size it is today.
If federal policymakers truly wanted to help education reform flourish, they would relieve states of the bureaucratic red tape and heavy handed mandates, and allow state leaders to have more control over how education dollars are spent. As the recent replications of the highly successful Florida reform model show, state leaders are eager to do what works and what’s in the best interest of students.
SOURCE
Pupils could face police action as British government announces surprise raids on schools to tackle bad behaviour
Britain's worst schools will face surprise raids by inspectors and heads will be able to press charges against pupils under moves to stamp out discipline problems in the classroom.
Teachers will also be given powers to confiscate pupils’ mobile phones in a package of measures designed to end years of politically correct official guidance that gave disruptive children the upper hand.
Education Secretary Michael Gove, who will unveil the plans today, is determined to reverse the collapse in classroom discipline that has resulted in 1,000 children a day being suspended from school for abuse and assault.
As well as confiscating mobiles, which are banned in many classrooms, teachers will be allowed to search the phones for evidence of cyber-bullying and inappropriate material.
And they will be allowed to break up fights and manhandle unruly pupils out of the classroom. They will also automatically be given the benefit of the doubt when facing malicious allegations from children or parents – and given anonymity while the claims are investigated.
Under the new rules they will then be allowed to launch criminal action against their own pupils who have made false allegations about them. The youngsters will also face expulsion over the claims.
Teachers will also be allowed to hand out automatic detentions to misbehaving students, without having to give parents 24 hours’ notice.
The 50-page document replaces more than 600 pages of complex guidance on discipline.
Mr Gove will also press the schools inspection body, Ofsted, to carry out more unannounced raids at the worst schools. At present most schools receive many months’ notice before an Ofsted inspection – giving them time to cover up the worst problems. New powers to carry out so-called ‘no-notice inspections’ have been used only five times in 18 months.
A government source said Mr Gove expected the powers to be used more widely, adding: ‘In the small number of schools with very bad behaviour problems we need more no-notice inspections. It must become unacceptable for schools to tolerate persistent serious problems.’
Mr Gove said the new measures would hand power in the classroom back to teachers. He added: ‘Improving discipline is a big priority. Teachers can’t teach effectively and pupils can’t learn if schools can’t keep order.
The new regime will remove the controversial ‘no touch’ rules, which banned teachers from any physical contact with pupils.
The guidance also gives teachers far greater protection against malicious complaints from pupils and their parents. One in four teachers has faced false allegations from a pupil, while one in six has had unfounded allegations made by parents.
Chris Yeates, the leader of teachers’ union NASUWT, yesterday criticised the ‘disproportionate’ powers allowing teachers to search for mobile phones – despite having previously branded mobiles ‘offensive weapons’ used by bullies.
Charlie Taylor, head of a tough inner-city school for excluded pupils, has been appointed as a school discipline tsar to drive through the reforms. He said: ‘For far too long, teachers have been buried under guidance and reports on how to tackle bad behaviour. I am determined to make sure I help schools put policy into practice.’
SOURCE
Millions of Australians behind on basic skills; threatens Australia's international competitiveness
Not as bad as the USA but getting there
AUSTRALIA'S international competitiveness is under threat because up to eight million Australian workers don't have the reading, writing or numeracy skills to undertake training for trade or professional jobs.
The nation's 11 Industry Skills Councils will today call for a new campaign to tackle endemic numbers of workers with poor reading and writing skills, launching a report detailing the problems being faced by industry training bodies.
The bodies say they are confronting inadequately prepared school leavers, an ageing workforce struggling to cope with technological advances and overseas-born workers with English as a second language.
The report, No More Excuses, calls for the Council of Australian Governments to develop a national "overarching blueprint for action on language, literacy and numeracy".
The report will reignite the skills debate at a time when industry is warning of the re-emergence of shortages of trained workers and Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott have thrust workforce participation and getting the long-term unemployed into work to the front of the political debate.
The report says "the situation looks as if it could be getting worse, not better" in terms of the language, literature and numeracy skills of workers.
"International studies have shown that over the past two decades, Australia's literacy and numeracy skill levels have stagnated while those of other countries, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, have improved.
"By continuing to accept the current levels, we are limiting the future success of individuals, businesses and our economy," the Industry Skills Councils say in a joint statement to be released today.
The report calls for industry training programs to be provided with specific funding to tackle language, literacy and numeracy gaps faced by students and overseas-born workers with English as a second language.
It also calls for recruits to be given better advice about the language and maths requirements of training courses.
Forest Works chief executive Michael Hartman, who runs training programs for the forest, wood, paper and timber products industry, said literacy and numeracy were the "foundation of productivity".
A failure to improve skills among both school leavers and experienced workers would see Australian businesses fall behind international competitors.
Electrocomms and Energy Utilities Industry Skills Council chief executive Bob Taylor told The Australian a decade of calls for skill-ready school leavers had failed to achieve any tangible improvements.
And the resources and infrastructure industry skills council, SkillsDMC, writes in the report that some indigenous recruits on resources projects have learning levels as low as primary school grade four.
This means that providing them with literacy and numeracy skills "is costly and time-consuming, and often results in the employee spending more time at training than at work".
Mr Taylor said industry had been complaining about the poor quality of literacy and numeracy among school leavers looking to enter the trades for more than 10 years and there had been no improvement.
He said the report was aimed at ending the "blame game" and incorporating basic reading, writing and numeracy skills into preliminary training courses.
He said lack of skills in this area was a "real issue" in terms of drop-out rates of apprentices and schools needed to become more focused on providing the relevant skills to the 70 per cent of students who would not attend university and seek work in a trade.
Mr Taylor said preliminary training courses to allow regional workers access to jobs on the National Broadband Network included facets of basic literacy and numeracy training.
He said it was "quite frustrating" that basic maths and physics of the 15- to 16-year-olds seeking trades in the 1960s was superior to today's 18-year-olds seeking trades.
Mr Hartman said his industry was confronting literacy and numeracy problems among older workers who had been long-term employees in industries that were suddenly facing technological change.
He said under current training arrangements, there was not a lot of money available to enable trainers to help students struggling with basic literacy and numeracy skills and this needed to be addressed: "It is a major problem in our society; unless we tackle it, we'll fall further behind in terms of international competitiveness and the skills of our people."
SOURCE
Sunday, April 03, 2011
DOE fines Virginia Tech for shootings response
Virginia Tech will have to pay the maximum $55,000 fine for violating federal law by waiting too long to notify students during the 2007 shooting rampage but will not lose any federal student aid, the U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday.
Department officials wrote in a letter to the school that the sanction should have been greater for the school's slow response to the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, when student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 students and faculty, then himself.
The $55,000 fine was the most the department could levy for Tech's two violations of the federal Clery Act, which requires timely reporting of crimes on campus.
"While Virginia Tech's violations warrant a fine far in excess of what is currently permissible under the statute, the Department's fine authority is limited," wrote Mary Gust, director of a department panel that dictated what punishment the school would receive for the violation.
The university avoided the potentially devastating punishment of losing some or all of its $98 million in federal student aid. While that's possible for a Clery Act violation, the department has never taken that step and a department official said Tuesday it was never considered for Tech.
University officials have always maintained their innocence and said they would appeal the fine, even though it's a relatively small sum for a school of more than 30,000 full-time students and an annual budget of $1.1 billion. The amount would cover tuition and fees for one Virginia undergraduate student for four years, or two years for an out-of-state undergrad.
"We believe that Virginia Tech administrators acted appropriately in their response to the tragic events of April 16, 2007, based on the best information then available to them at the time," spokesman Larry Hincker said in a statement.
The Clery Act requires colleges and universities that receive federal student financial aid to report crimes and security policies and provide warning of campus threats. It is named after Jeanne Ann Clery, a 19-year-old university freshman who was raped and murdered in her dormitory in 1986. Her parents later learned that dozens of violent crimes had been committed on the campus in the three years before her death.
The Education department issued its final report in December, finding that Virginia Tech failed to issue a timely warning to the Blacksburg campus after Cho shot and killed two students in a dormitory early that morning in 2007. The university sent out an e-mail to the campus more than two hours later, about the time Cho was chaining shut the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more students and faculty, then himself.
That e-mail was too vague, the department said, because it referred only to a "shooting incident" but did not mention anyone had died. By the time a second, more explicit warning was sent, Cho was near the end of his shooting spree. "Had an appropriate timely warning been sent earlier to the campus community, more individuals could have acted on the information and made decisions about their own safety," the department said in its letter.
A state commission that investigated the shootings also found that the university erred by failing to notify the campus sooner. The state reached an $11 million settlement with many of the victims' families. Two families have sued and are seeking $10 million in damages from university officials. That case is set for trial this fall.
Virginia Tech argues that, relying on campus police, it first thought the shootings were domestic and that a suspect had been identified so there was no threat to campus. The university argued that the Department of Education didn't define "timely" until 2009, when it added regulations because of the Tech shootings.
Hincker, the university spokesman, outlined six other serious incidents at other college campuses before and after the Tech shootings in which notifications were not given for hours, or in some instances the next day, and the schools were not punished.
"The only reason we want to appeal this is that it gives us the process to explain how a notice given on one campus can be OK if it's this long, and a notice given on another campus is not OK if it's this short a time period," he said. "As best we can tell, it's whatever DOE decides after the fact." The education department rebuffed that argument, saying officials should have treated it as a threat because the shooter was on the loose.
Through its appeal, Hincker said the university hopes to find out how the department came to its conclusion. School officials were never interviewed, he said, and the department refused to share materials or respond to Freedom of Information requests sent by the school. If the school loses the appeal, it could fight the fine in court.
Several victims' family members maligned Tech for saying it would appeal. "This is in black and white," said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was injured in the shootings. "They're going to spend more money appealing it than just paying the fine, because they do not want to admit they did anything wrong."
Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was shot but survived, said she was not surprised by the maximum fine. "I feel like it's par for the course, if you will, for what they are allowed to do," she said. "I think it is a woefully, woefully, woefully sad amount of money for the staggering loss of life."
Andrew Goddard, whose son Colin also was injured, said even a smaller fine would have accomplished a purpose. "The bottom line is just having a monetary amount points out what they did was wrong," he said. "There's really no way you can replace 32 people, or even seek to equate that with money. I'm not too worried about the amount. Even if they charged them a dollar, it would have done the same thing."
Only about 40 schools have come under review for Clery violations in the 20 years that the law has been in place. The largest fine to be levied was $350,000 against Eastern Michigan University for failing to report the rape and murder of a student in a dormitory in 2006.
S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security On Campus, a nonprofit organization that monitors the Clery Act, said it's "a shame" the department had only really began fining schools for noncompliance in 2005. "If the Department of Education had sent a stronger message about having to follow the law and that something faster would be expected sooner, the shootings at Virginia Tech may have never happened," Carter said.
SOURCE
Hanky-panky to make a government school look good
Rhee was hornswoggled
In just two years, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus went from a school deemed in need of improvement to a place that the District of Columbia Public Schools called one of its "shining stars."
Standardized test scores improved dramatically. In 2006, only 10% of Noyes' students scored "proficient" or "advanced" in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.
Because of the remarkable turnaround, the U.S. Department of Education named the school in northeast Washington a National Blue Ribbon School. Noyes was one of 264 public schools nationwide given that award in 2009.
Michelle Rhee, then chancellor of D.C. schools, took a special interest in Noyes. She touted the school, which now serves preschoolers through eighth-graders, as an example of how the sweeping changes she championed could transform even the lowest-performing Washington schools. Twice in three years, she rewarded Noyes' staff for boosting scores: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher won an $8,000 bonus, and the principal won $10,000.
A closer look at Noyes, however, raises questions about its test scores from 2006 to 2010. Its proficiency rates rose at a much faster rate than the average for D.C. schools. Then, in 2010, when scores dipped for most of the district's elementary schools, Noyes' proficiency rates fell further than average.
A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes' classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.
This is a series of documents obtained by USA TODAY through public-records requests. It details a back-and-forth between two District of Columbia agencies on test-score investigations.
Noyes is one of 103 public schools here that have had erasure rates that surpassed D.C. averages at least once since 2008. That's more than half of D.C. schools.
Erasures are detected by the same electronic scanners that CTB/McGraw-Hill, D.C.'s testing company, uses to score the tests. When test-takers change answers, they erase penciled-in bubble marks that leave behind a smudge; the machines tally the erasures as well as the new answers for each student.
In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.
On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.
"This is an abnormal pattern," says Thomas Haladyna, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has studied testing for 20 years.
A trio of academicians consulted by USA TODAY — Haladyna, George Shambaugh of Georgetown University and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University — say the erasure rates found at Noyes and at other D.C. public schools are so statistically rare, and yet showed up in so many classrooms, that they should be examined thoroughly.
USA TODAY examined testing irregularities in the District of Columbia's public schools because, under Rhee, the system became a national symbol of what high expectations and effective teaching could accomplish. Federal money also was at play: Last year, D.C. won an extra $75 million for public and charter schools in the U.S. government's Race to the Top competition. Test scores were a factor.
USA TODAY initially looked at Noyes only because of its high erasure rates. Later, the newspaper found that Wayne Ryan, the principal from 2001 to 2010, and the school had been touted as models by district officials. They were the centerpiece of the school system's recruitment ads in 2008 and 2009, including at least two placed in Principal magazine.
"Noyes is one of the shining stars of DCPS," one ad said. It praised Ryan for his "unapologetic focus on instruction" and asked would-be job applicants, "Are you the next Wayne Ryan?"
In response to questions from USA TODAY, Kaya Henderson, who became acting chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools after Rhee resigned in October, said last week that "a high erasure rate alone is not evidence of impropriety."
D.C. "has investigated all allegations of testing impropriety," Henderson said. "In those situations in which evidence of impropriety has been found, we have enforced clear consequences for the staff members involved, without hesitation."
Henderson, who was Rhee's deputy, said the system would identify only schools where violations of security protocol were found. "For the majority of schools" investigated, there was "no evidence of wrongdoing," she said. Out of fairness to staff members, she said, she declined to identify all the schools that were investigated.
There can be innocent reasons for multiple erasures. A student can lose his place on the answer sheet, fill in answers on the wrong rows, then change them when he realizes his mistake. And, as McGraw-Hill said in a March 2009 report to D.C. officials, studies also show that test-takers change answers more often when they are encouraged to review their work. The same report emphasizes that educators "should not draw conclusions about cheating behavior" from the data alone.
Haladyna notes, however, that when entire classrooms at schools with statistically rare erasures show fast-rising test scores, that suggests someone might have "tampered with the answer sheets," perhaps after the tests were collected from students. Although not proof of cheating, such a case underscores the need for an investigation, he says.
More HERE
Lefties, not Etonians, are closing British libraries
Zadie Smith is wrong about libraries – and the BBC were wrong to let her broadcast her attack on the 'cuts', writes Simon Heffer
Just as some of us believe in Father Christmas or the Lone Ranger, I have long believed there is no institutional political bias in the BBC. I have made many programmes for the corporation over the past 20 or so years and have never encountered any blatant example of it. I know some senior BBC executives who I think might even vote Conservative – not that that signifies a freedom from Leftism these days. However, one contribution to the Today programme this week made me think I might be wrong.
It was the piece-to-microphone by Zadie Smith, a novelist, about the closure of libraries. For five minutes she was allowed to broadcast an attack on the “cuts”, and the effect they were having on these institutions. She did so with her assertions, prejudices and misinformation going unchallenged.
Miss Smith happens to be a woman, a Leftist and a member of an ethnic minority. I fear there are some people in the BBC for whom that formula signals the need to suspend disbelief. No man of the Right from the ethnic majority would ever be given such a platform to make such assertions. The editor responsible should be the subject of the most rigorous inquiry, to say the least.
Miss Smith and I would agree that libraries are good. We would disagree about why they are closing. She says it is because the Cabinet is full of people from “Eton and Harrow” who simply don’t care. Not a single member of the Cabinet went to Harrow. Only one, the Prime Minister, went to Eton. Two other OEs, Sir George Young and Oliver Letwin, attend Cabinet but are not members of it. The BBC seems not to mind that she says these dishonest and unpleasant things. Had someone spoken in the same way about homosexuals, Muslims or even Jews, the world would have ended.
Libraries are closing not because of “cuts”, or because of a callous, privately educated clique whose bookshelves are so capacious and well-stocked that they have no need of public provision – they are closing because mischievous Leftist councils of the sort supported by Miss Smith choose to close them rather than make savings elsewhere.
If you sack diversity officers or lesbian outreach workers, that merely makes sense, since the productivity and social value of such jobs are minimal. If you close a library, you harm children, the elderly and the intellectually curious poor who are already betrayed by our dismal education system. The political point made is therefore far more satisfying. (Miss Smith seemed to think another purpose of libraries was to be somewhere from which her mother could steal books, but let that pass.)
The BBC is making “cuts”, because the Government feels the revenue from generous licence-fee settlements past has been squandered or badly deployed. The BBC should not have diversified into the guide books business nor given an £18 million contract to one rather ordinary presenter. There long ago ceased to be a link between funding and quality in the BBC: look at the job of informing, educating and entertaining that Radio 3 does on very little money.
So the BBC is touchy about “cuts”, and Miss Smith was a suitably high-profile voice to articulate this anger. But she was also wrong. There is another side to the coin, and in the interests of impartiality I trust we shan’t need to wait too long before seeing or hearing it.
SOURCE
Virginia Tech will have to pay the maximum $55,000 fine for violating federal law by waiting too long to notify students during the 2007 shooting rampage but will not lose any federal student aid, the U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday.
Department officials wrote in a letter to the school that the sanction should have been greater for the school's slow response to the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, when student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 students and faculty, then himself.
The $55,000 fine was the most the department could levy for Tech's two violations of the federal Clery Act, which requires timely reporting of crimes on campus.
"While Virginia Tech's violations warrant a fine far in excess of what is currently permissible under the statute, the Department's fine authority is limited," wrote Mary Gust, director of a department panel that dictated what punishment the school would receive for the violation.
The university avoided the potentially devastating punishment of losing some or all of its $98 million in federal student aid. While that's possible for a Clery Act violation, the department has never taken that step and a department official said Tuesday it was never considered for Tech.
University officials have always maintained their innocence and said they would appeal the fine, even though it's a relatively small sum for a school of more than 30,000 full-time students and an annual budget of $1.1 billion. The amount would cover tuition and fees for one Virginia undergraduate student for four years, or two years for an out-of-state undergrad.
"We believe that Virginia Tech administrators acted appropriately in their response to the tragic events of April 16, 2007, based on the best information then available to them at the time," spokesman Larry Hincker said in a statement.
The Clery Act requires colleges and universities that receive federal student financial aid to report crimes and security policies and provide warning of campus threats. It is named after Jeanne Ann Clery, a 19-year-old university freshman who was raped and murdered in her dormitory in 1986. Her parents later learned that dozens of violent crimes had been committed on the campus in the three years before her death.
The Education department issued its final report in December, finding that Virginia Tech failed to issue a timely warning to the Blacksburg campus after Cho shot and killed two students in a dormitory early that morning in 2007. The university sent out an e-mail to the campus more than two hours later, about the time Cho was chaining shut the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more students and faculty, then himself.
That e-mail was too vague, the department said, because it referred only to a "shooting incident" but did not mention anyone had died. By the time a second, more explicit warning was sent, Cho was near the end of his shooting spree. "Had an appropriate timely warning been sent earlier to the campus community, more individuals could have acted on the information and made decisions about their own safety," the department said in its letter.
A state commission that investigated the shootings also found that the university erred by failing to notify the campus sooner. The state reached an $11 million settlement with many of the victims' families. Two families have sued and are seeking $10 million in damages from university officials. That case is set for trial this fall.
Virginia Tech argues that, relying on campus police, it first thought the shootings were domestic and that a suspect had been identified so there was no threat to campus. The university argued that the Department of Education didn't define "timely" until 2009, when it added regulations because of the Tech shootings.
Hincker, the university spokesman, outlined six other serious incidents at other college campuses before and after the Tech shootings in which notifications were not given for hours, or in some instances the next day, and the schools were not punished.
"The only reason we want to appeal this is that it gives us the process to explain how a notice given on one campus can be OK if it's this long, and a notice given on another campus is not OK if it's this short a time period," he said. "As best we can tell, it's whatever DOE decides after the fact." The education department rebuffed that argument, saying officials should have treated it as a threat because the shooter was on the loose.
Through its appeal, Hincker said the university hopes to find out how the department came to its conclusion. School officials were never interviewed, he said, and the department refused to share materials or respond to Freedom of Information requests sent by the school. If the school loses the appeal, it could fight the fine in court.
Several victims' family members maligned Tech for saying it would appeal. "This is in black and white," said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was injured in the shootings. "They're going to spend more money appealing it than just paying the fine, because they do not want to admit they did anything wrong."
Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was shot but survived, said she was not surprised by the maximum fine. "I feel like it's par for the course, if you will, for what they are allowed to do," she said. "I think it is a woefully, woefully, woefully sad amount of money for the staggering loss of life."
Andrew Goddard, whose son Colin also was injured, said even a smaller fine would have accomplished a purpose. "The bottom line is just having a monetary amount points out what they did was wrong," he said. "There's really no way you can replace 32 people, or even seek to equate that with money. I'm not too worried about the amount. Even if they charged them a dollar, it would have done the same thing."
Only about 40 schools have come under review for Clery violations in the 20 years that the law has been in place. The largest fine to be levied was $350,000 against Eastern Michigan University for failing to report the rape and murder of a student in a dormitory in 2006.
S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security On Campus, a nonprofit organization that monitors the Clery Act, said it's "a shame" the department had only really began fining schools for noncompliance in 2005. "If the Department of Education had sent a stronger message about having to follow the law and that something faster would be expected sooner, the shootings at Virginia Tech may have never happened," Carter said.
SOURCE
Hanky-panky to make a government school look good
Rhee was hornswoggled
In just two years, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus went from a school deemed in need of improvement to a place that the District of Columbia Public Schools called one of its "shining stars."
Standardized test scores improved dramatically. In 2006, only 10% of Noyes' students scored "proficient" or "advanced" in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.
Because of the remarkable turnaround, the U.S. Department of Education named the school in northeast Washington a National Blue Ribbon School. Noyes was one of 264 public schools nationwide given that award in 2009.
Michelle Rhee, then chancellor of D.C. schools, took a special interest in Noyes. She touted the school, which now serves preschoolers through eighth-graders, as an example of how the sweeping changes she championed could transform even the lowest-performing Washington schools. Twice in three years, she rewarded Noyes' staff for boosting scores: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher won an $8,000 bonus, and the principal won $10,000.
A closer look at Noyes, however, raises questions about its test scores from 2006 to 2010. Its proficiency rates rose at a much faster rate than the average for D.C. schools. Then, in 2010, when scores dipped for most of the district's elementary schools, Noyes' proficiency rates fell further than average.
A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.'s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes' classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.
This is a series of documents obtained by USA TODAY through public-records requests. It details a back-and-forth between two District of Columbia agencies on test-score investigations.
Noyes is one of 103 public schools here that have had erasure rates that surpassed D.C. averages at least once since 2008. That's more than half of D.C. schools.
Erasures are detected by the same electronic scanners that CTB/McGraw-Hill, D.C.'s testing company, uses to score the tests. When test-takers change answers, they erase penciled-in bubble marks that leave behind a smudge; the machines tally the erasures as well as the new answers for each student.
In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.
On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.
"This is an abnormal pattern," says Thomas Haladyna, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has studied testing for 20 years.
A trio of academicians consulted by USA TODAY — Haladyna, George Shambaugh of Georgetown University and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University — say the erasure rates found at Noyes and at other D.C. public schools are so statistically rare, and yet showed up in so many classrooms, that they should be examined thoroughly.
USA TODAY examined testing irregularities in the District of Columbia's public schools because, under Rhee, the system became a national symbol of what high expectations and effective teaching could accomplish. Federal money also was at play: Last year, D.C. won an extra $75 million for public and charter schools in the U.S. government's Race to the Top competition. Test scores were a factor.
USA TODAY initially looked at Noyes only because of its high erasure rates. Later, the newspaper found that Wayne Ryan, the principal from 2001 to 2010, and the school had been touted as models by district officials. They were the centerpiece of the school system's recruitment ads in 2008 and 2009, including at least two placed in Principal magazine.
"Noyes is one of the shining stars of DCPS," one ad said. It praised Ryan for his "unapologetic focus on instruction" and asked would-be job applicants, "Are you the next Wayne Ryan?"
In response to questions from USA TODAY, Kaya Henderson, who became acting chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools after Rhee resigned in October, said last week that "a high erasure rate alone is not evidence of impropriety."
D.C. "has investigated all allegations of testing impropriety," Henderson said. "In those situations in which evidence of impropriety has been found, we have enforced clear consequences for the staff members involved, without hesitation."
Henderson, who was Rhee's deputy, said the system would identify only schools where violations of security protocol were found. "For the majority of schools" investigated, there was "no evidence of wrongdoing," she said. Out of fairness to staff members, she said, she declined to identify all the schools that were investigated.
There can be innocent reasons for multiple erasures. A student can lose his place on the answer sheet, fill in answers on the wrong rows, then change them when he realizes his mistake. And, as McGraw-Hill said in a March 2009 report to D.C. officials, studies also show that test-takers change answers more often when they are encouraged to review their work. The same report emphasizes that educators "should not draw conclusions about cheating behavior" from the data alone.
Haladyna notes, however, that when entire classrooms at schools with statistically rare erasures show fast-rising test scores, that suggests someone might have "tampered with the answer sheets," perhaps after the tests were collected from students. Although not proof of cheating, such a case underscores the need for an investigation, he says.
More HERE
Lefties, not Etonians, are closing British libraries
Zadie Smith is wrong about libraries – and the BBC were wrong to let her broadcast her attack on the 'cuts', writes Simon Heffer
Just as some of us believe in Father Christmas or the Lone Ranger, I have long believed there is no institutional political bias in the BBC. I have made many programmes for the corporation over the past 20 or so years and have never encountered any blatant example of it. I know some senior BBC executives who I think might even vote Conservative – not that that signifies a freedom from Leftism these days. However, one contribution to the Today programme this week made me think I might be wrong.
It was the piece-to-microphone by Zadie Smith, a novelist, about the closure of libraries. For five minutes she was allowed to broadcast an attack on the “cuts”, and the effect they were having on these institutions. She did so with her assertions, prejudices and misinformation going unchallenged.
Miss Smith happens to be a woman, a Leftist and a member of an ethnic minority. I fear there are some people in the BBC for whom that formula signals the need to suspend disbelief. No man of the Right from the ethnic majority would ever be given such a platform to make such assertions. The editor responsible should be the subject of the most rigorous inquiry, to say the least.
Miss Smith and I would agree that libraries are good. We would disagree about why they are closing. She says it is because the Cabinet is full of people from “Eton and Harrow” who simply don’t care. Not a single member of the Cabinet went to Harrow. Only one, the Prime Minister, went to Eton. Two other OEs, Sir George Young and Oliver Letwin, attend Cabinet but are not members of it. The BBC seems not to mind that she says these dishonest and unpleasant things. Had someone spoken in the same way about homosexuals, Muslims or even Jews, the world would have ended.
Libraries are closing not because of “cuts”, or because of a callous, privately educated clique whose bookshelves are so capacious and well-stocked that they have no need of public provision – they are closing because mischievous Leftist councils of the sort supported by Miss Smith choose to close them rather than make savings elsewhere.
If you sack diversity officers or lesbian outreach workers, that merely makes sense, since the productivity and social value of such jobs are minimal. If you close a library, you harm children, the elderly and the intellectually curious poor who are already betrayed by our dismal education system. The political point made is therefore far more satisfying. (Miss Smith seemed to think another purpose of libraries was to be somewhere from which her mother could steal books, but let that pass.)
The BBC is making “cuts”, because the Government feels the revenue from generous licence-fee settlements past has been squandered or badly deployed. The BBC should not have diversified into the guide books business nor given an £18 million contract to one rather ordinary presenter. There long ago ceased to be a link between funding and quality in the BBC: look at the job of informing, educating and entertaining that Radio 3 does on very little money.
So the BBC is touchy about “cuts”, and Miss Smith was a suitably high-profile voice to articulate this anger. But she was also wrong. There is another side to the coin, and in the interests of impartiality I trust we shan’t need to wait too long before seeing or hearing it.
SOURCE
Saturday, April 02, 2011
Homogenized Diversity
By the inimitable Mike Adams
I don’t get angry very often but this morning I got so mad I nearly dropped my assault rifle. I was writing another column in my camouflaged pajamas (no one saw me) when I got an email from a critic of one of my recent columns on campus diversity. The reader corrected my reference to the campus “LGBTQIA Resource Center” noting that it was only an “LGBTQIA Resource Office,” not an actual center. Since getting that email I haven’t slept a wink.
It appears that, at least on our campus, the African Americans get a “Cultural Center,” the Woman Americans get a “Resource Center” and the Hispanic Americans (although some of them aren’t actually Americans “yet”) get a “Centro.” But the LGBTQIA Americans only get a “Resource Office.” This is the kind of inequality that makes our institution look bad. So I think it’s time to call for a Queer Resource Center on campus that will help foster a sense of true equality.
In addition to giving an appearance of equality, re-naming the LGBTQIA Office will help to unite the Ls with the Gs. In recent years, there has been increasing tension concerning which one should go first in the alphabet soup of diversity. To date, they have been falling back on the antiquated notion that the ladies should go first. Calling them all Queers (as some schools already do) will have a unifying effect -unless, of course, they decide to break into a spontaneous game of dodge ball. In the name of tolerance, “smear the queer” will not be tolerated.
Note that my proposal says a “Queer Resource Center on campus … will help foster a sense of true equality.” I did not say it would actually achieve true equality. In order to have true equality we will have to do something about the funding discrepancies between all the different victim groups on campus. In recent years, the African American Cultural Center has been the beneficiary of the most victim-related funding. (Note: Women come in second place with Hispanics, Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts, Qs, Is, and As trailing far behind).
So I propose a new way of allocating the money to our various centers of hyphenation and victimhood. Under my plan, we will simply dump all of the money into one fund and divide by four. This will give each of the major victim groups an equal allocation of the money. But I would caution against doing this before we officially open the new Queer Resource Center. Otherwise, there may be an effort to divide the present “Office” into separate Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Inter-sexed, and Allied Offices. It may sound Machiavellian but queerer things have happened.
Under my plan, the African American Center will lose a good bit of funding. But our African victims will stand to gain with another component of my new “homogenized diversity” plan. Under my new (Ok, it’s actually really old) plan we will have separate “colored” and “white” bathrooms. The term “people of color” is making a comeback on our college campuses and it’s time to make it part of a new and comprehensive bathroom expansion plan.
Under the current oppressive regime of diversity, women are the only victims who get their own bathrooms. That needs to change and it will when we start providing separate restrooms – not just for African Americans – but for Hispanic Americans and Queer Americans, too.
Some may think my new plan is too expensive. But that is a simplistic view that fails to take account of certain long-term benefits. For example, we presently spend a great deal of money filling “glory holes” in our campus men’s restrooms. These holes are drilled (into the walls separating bathroom stalls) by gay men looking for casual sexual encounters in between classes. We have to fix them every time a heterosexist complaint is leveled by a straight man who prefers to (go #2) in privacy – as opposed to having sex with a complete stranger. But once we have Queer Restrooms those glory holes will be inoffensive (and useful) to those who encounter them.
At first glance, giving separate bathrooms to those who call for inclusion is like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to someone who bombs third world nations with regularity. But overt actions should never be taken as a sign of hypocrisy. The feelings behind them are the only thing that matters.
SOURCE
British schools failing to promote the classics
Classic literature risks dying out in schools as hundreds of thousands of pupils are allowed to complete GCSEs without studying a single book written before the 20th century, Michael Gove warns today. Fewer than one in 100 teenagers who sat the most popular English literature exam last year based their answers on novels published prior to 1900, says the Education Secretary.
Only 1,236 out of 300,000 students read Pride and Prejudice, 285 studied Far From the Madding Crowd and just 187 completed Wuthering Heights as part of the test, he claims. At the same time, more than 90 per cent of answers were based on the same three books – Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Mr Gove says the disclosure underlines the extent to which England’s “constricted and unreformed exam system” fails to encourage children to read.
He says Britain also has some of the best modern children’s writers in the world, including Philip Pullman, JK Rowling, Michael Morpurgo and Anthony Horowitz, but many young people are “growing up in ignorance of their work”.
It follows the publication of a major international study in December showing that reading standards among British teenagers had slumped from 7th to 25th in a decade.
“We’re not picking up enough new books, not getting through the classics, not widening our horizons. In short, we’re just not reading enough,” he says.
Mr Gove’s comments were made after a tour of independent “charter schools” in American last month. He claims that a love of reading is promoted in many schools opened in tough inner-city areas, praising one that issued children with a challenge to read 50 books in a year.
But in a dig at the teaching establishment in England, Mr Gove says many children in this country are held back by an “anti-knowledge” culture that prevents them from reaching their potential. “The children I met were smart and lively. But they were also, overwhelmingly, from the most disadvantaged homes,” he says.
“That didn’t mean their teachers lowered the bar. Quite the opposite. They wanted to give those children a chance to enjoy the glittering prizes – so they set expectations high.
“I want the same culture here. I want to take on the lowest-common-denominator ethos, the 'let’s not be too demanding', 'all this smacks of targets', 'the poor dears can’t manage it', 'the idea of a canon is outmoded', 'it’s all on the internet anyway' culture which is anti-knowledge, anti-aspiration and antithetical to human flourishing.
“Instead, I want a culture in which the more you read, the more you are celebrated. "That’s why I have said we should set our own 50 Book Challenge. And that’s also why I want to develop a stronger and more durable culture of reading for pleasure.”
SOURCE
Australian Catholic school bans gay 'cure' seminar
Some ideas may not be expressed -- even ones that the Holy Father would endorse!
A CATHOLIC school has kiboshed a "curing homosexuality seminar" set to be held at their Caboolture college.
The meeting sparked outrage on Facebook, with a protest page set up against it.
But the group holding the meeting has accused Catholic Education of discrimination over the decision.
A statement released by Brisbane Catholic Education says St Columban's College at Caboolture "immediately" withdrew permission for its hall to be used as a venue by the Miracle Christian Center when they realised what the meeting was about.
"Permission was given by the school, on the basis that the nature of the meeting would need to be in line with the college's Catholic Christian values," the statement said.
Principal Ann Rebgetz said the group had deliberately withheld from the school the real nature of the event.
But Miracle Christian Center president Dorian Ballard denied the accusation, saying when they hired halls they didn't advise what they would be preaching about.
He denied the group was homophobic. He said they had been discriminated against and the case was now with their lawyers.
"We are not homophobic, many of us have come out of the homosexual lifestyle," he said.
"We are not afraid of homosexuals; we love them, we've ministered to them for years.
"This topic is always up for debate. It's great to hear a lot of different views in the broad spectrum and we have been silenced, we have been discriminated against."
Former student and Facebook "Protest against the curing homosexuality seminar" page organiser Lexi Ryan said the school had done the right thing and she had cancelled the protest, which had 353 people who had replied they would be attending.
SOURCE
By the inimitable Mike Adams
I don’t get angry very often but this morning I got so mad I nearly dropped my assault rifle. I was writing another column in my camouflaged pajamas (no one saw me) when I got an email from a critic of one of my recent columns on campus diversity. The reader corrected my reference to the campus “LGBTQIA Resource Center” noting that it was only an “LGBTQIA Resource Office,” not an actual center. Since getting that email I haven’t slept a wink.
It appears that, at least on our campus, the African Americans get a “Cultural Center,” the Woman Americans get a “Resource Center” and the Hispanic Americans (although some of them aren’t actually Americans “yet”) get a “Centro.” But the LGBTQIA Americans only get a “Resource Office.” This is the kind of inequality that makes our institution look bad. So I think it’s time to call for a Queer Resource Center on campus that will help foster a sense of true equality.
In addition to giving an appearance of equality, re-naming the LGBTQIA Office will help to unite the Ls with the Gs. In recent years, there has been increasing tension concerning which one should go first in the alphabet soup of diversity. To date, they have been falling back on the antiquated notion that the ladies should go first. Calling them all Queers (as some schools already do) will have a unifying effect -unless, of course, they decide to break into a spontaneous game of dodge ball. In the name of tolerance, “smear the queer” will not be tolerated.
Note that my proposal says a “Queer Resource Center on campus … will help foster a sense of true equality.” I did not say it would actually achieve true equality. In order to have true equality we will have to do something about the funding discrepancies between all the different victim groups on campus. In recent years, the African American Cultural Center has been the beneficiary of the most victim-related funding. (Note: Women come in second place with Hispanics, Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts, Qs, Is, and As trailing far behind).
So I propose a new way of allocating the money to our various centers of hyphenation and victimhood. Under my plan, we will simply dump all of the money into one fund and divide by four. This will give each of the major victim groups an equal allocation of the money. But I would caution against doing this before we officially open the new Queer Resource Center. Otherwise, there may be an effort to divide the present “Office” into separate Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Inter-sexed, and Allied Offices. It may sound Machiavellian but queerer things have happened.
Under my plan, the African American Center will lose a good bit of funding. But our African victims will stand to gain with another component of my new “homogenized diversity” plan. Under my new (Ok, it’s actually really old) plan we will have separate “colored” and “white” bathrooms. The term “people of color” is making a comeback on our college campuses and it’s time to make it part of a new and comprehensive bathroom expansion plan.
Under the current oppressive regime of diversity, women are the only victims who get their own bathrooms. That needs to change and it will when we start providing separate restrooms – not just for African Americans – but for Hispanic Americans and Queer Americans, too.
Some may think my new plan is too expensive. But that is a simplistic view that fails to take account of certain long-term benefits. For example, we presently spend a great deal of money filling “glory holes” in our campus men’s restrooms. These holes are drilled (into the walls separating bathroom stalls) by gay men looking for casual sexual encounters in between classes. We have to fix them every time a heterosexist complaint is leveled by a straight man who prefers to (go #2) in privacy – as opposed to having sex with a complete stranger. But once we have Queer Restrooms those glory holes will be inoffensive (and useful) to those who encounter them.
At first glance, giving separate bathrooms to those who call for inclusion is like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to someone who bombs third world nations with regularity. But overt actions should never be taken as a sign of hypocrisy. The feelings behind them are the only thing that matters.
SOURCE
British schools failing to promote the classics
Classic literature risks dying out in schools as hundreds of thousands of pupils are allowed to complete GCSEs without studying a single book written before the 20th century, Michael Gove warns today. Fewer than one in 100 teenagers who sat the most popular English literature exam last year based their answers on novels published prior to 1900, says the Education Secretary.
Only 1,236 out of 300,000 students read Pride and Prejudice, 285 studied Far From the Madding Crowd and just 187 completed Wuthering Heights as part of the test, he claims. At the same time, more than 90 per cent of answers were based on the same three books – Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Mr Gove says the disclosure underlines the extent to which England’s “constricted and unreformed exam system” fails to encourage children to read.
He says Britain also has some of the best modern children’s writers in the world, including Philip Pullman, JK Rowling, Michael Morpurgo and Anthony Horowitz, but many young people are “growing up in ignorance of their work”.
It follows the publication of a major international study in December showing that reading standards among British teenagers had slumped from 7th to 25th in a decade.
“We’re not picking up enough new books, not getting through the classics, not widening our horizons. In short, we’re just not reading enough,” he says.
Mr Gove’s comments were made after a tour of independent “charter schools” in American last month. He claims that a love of reading is promoted in many schools opened in tough inner-city areas, praising one that issued children with a challenge to read 50 books in a year.
But in a dig at the teaching establishment in England, Mr Gove says many children in this country are held back by an “anti-knowledge” culture that prevents them from reaching their potential. “The children I met were smart and lively. But they were also, overwhelmingly, from the most disadvantaged homes,” he says.
“That didn’t mean their teachers lowered the bar. Quite the opposite. They wanted to give those children a chance to enjoy the glittering prizes – so they set expectations high.
“I want the same culture here. I want to take on the lowest-common-denominator ethos, the 'let’s not be too demanding', 'all this smacks of targets', 'the poor dears can’t manage it', 'the idea of a canon is outmoded', 'it’s all on the internet anyway' culture which is anti-knowledge, anti-aspiration and antithetical to human flourishing.
“Instead, I want a culture in which the more you read, the more you are celebrated. "That’s why I have said we should set our own 50 Book Challenge. And that’s also why I want to develop a stronger and more durable culture of reading for pleasure.”
SOURCE
Australian Catholic school bans gay 'cure' seminar
Some ideas may not be expressed -- even ones that the Holy Father would endorse!
A CATHOLIC school has kiboshed a "curing homosexuality seminar" set to be held at their Caboolture college.
The meeting sparked outrage on Facebook, with a protest page set up against it.
But the group holding the meeting has accused Catholic Education of discrimination over the decision.
A statement released by Brisbane Catholic Education says St Columban's College at Caboolture "immediately" withdrew permission for its hall to be used as a venue by the Miracle Christian Center when they realised what the meeting was about.
"Permission was given by the school, on the basis that the nature of the meeting would need to be in line with the college's Catholic Christian values," the statement said.
Principal Ann Rebgetz said the group had deliberately withheld from the school the real nature of the event.
But Miracle Christian Center president Dorian Ballard denied the accusation, saying when they hired halls they didn't advise what they would be preaching about.
He denied the group was homophobic. He said they had been discriminated against and the case was now with their lawyers.
"We are not homophobic, many of us have come out of the homosexual lifestyle," he said.
"We are not afraid of homosexuals; we love them, we've ministered to them for years.
"This topic is always up for debate. It's great to hear a lot of different views in the broad spectrum and we have been silenced, we have been discriminated against."
Former student and Facebook "Protest against the curing homosexuality seminar" page organiser Lexi Ryan said the school had done the right thing and she had cancelled the protest, which had 353 people who had replied they would be attending.
SOURCE
Friday, April 01, 2011
Obama’s Union-Friendly, Feel-Good Approach to Education
The Obama administration, principally the president and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, are now routinely making public statements which are leading to one conclusion: instead of fixing American education, we should dumb down the standards.
According to the Associated Press, President Obama “is pushing a rewrite of the nation’s education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools” and wants “a test that ‘everybody agrees makes sense’ and administer it in less pressure-packed atmospheres, potentially every few years instead of annually.”
The article goes on to say that Obama wants to move away from proficiency goals in math, science and reading, in favor of the ambiguous and amorphous goals of student readiness for college and career.
Obama’s new focus comes on the heels of a New York Times report that 80% of American public schools could be labeled as failing under the standards of No Child Left Behind.
Put another way: the standards under NCLB have revealed that the American public education system is full of cancer. Instead of treating the cancer, Obama wants to change the test, as if ignoring the MRI somehow makes the cancer go away.
So instead of implementing sweeping policies to correct the illness, Obama is suggesting that we just stop testing to pretend it doesn’t exist.
If Obama were serious about curing the disease, one of the best things he could do is to ensure that there is a quality teacher in every classroom in America. Of course, that would mean getting rid teacher tenure and scrapping seniority rules that favor burned-out teachers over ambitious and innovative young teachers.
That means standing up to the teacher unions. For a while, it looked like Obama would get tough with the unions, but not anymore. With a shaky economy and three wars, it looks like Obama’s re-election is in serious jeopardy. He needs all hands on deck – thus the new union-friendly education message.
Obama’s new direction will certainly make the unionized adults happy. They’ve hated NCLB from the get-go.
And the unions will love Obama’s talk about using criteria other than standardized testing in evaluating schools.
He doesn’t get specific, of course, but I bet I can fill in the gaps. If testing is too harsh, perhaps we can judge students and schools based on how hard they try or who can come up with the most heart-wrenching excuse for failure or how big the dog was that ate their homework.
This makes sense in America’s continual slouch toward mediocrity. But hand-holding and effort awards didn’t produce the light bulb or the automobile or the MRI.
Hard work, accountability and the real possibility of failure – those are the things that made America great. Some kids and parents need to receive the cold hard reality that they’re not up to snuff. The Obama administration should not dumb things down so fewer people feel bad.
Because then those same people will complain when the cancer is incurable.
SOURCE
Students Who Get It!
John Stossel
I went to Princeton in 1969, where they taught me that government could solve the world's problems. Put the smartest people in a room, give them enough taxpayer money, and they will fix most everything. During those years, I heard nothing about an alternative. How things have changed!
I recently spent time with several hundred college-aged people at a Students for Liberty conference in Washington, D.C. Here were hundreds of students who actually understand that government creates many of the problems, and freedom -- personal and economic liberty -- makes things better.
I appeared at the conference along with David Boaz of the Cato Institute. Here are some highlights.
Karina Zannat, a student at American University in Washington, D.C., said, "A lot of my professors seem to think that even when politicians spend money in seemingly wasteful ways, we should be OK with it because every dollar spent is one dollar that goes toward income for an American citizen."
This is a common canard known as the "broken window" fallacy. The 19th-century French free-market writer Frederic Bastiat exposed it with the story of a boy who breaks a shop window, prompting some townspeople to look at the bright side: fixing the window will stimulate economic activity in the town. The fallacy, of course, is that had the window not been broken, the shopkeeper would have spent the money in more productive ways.
People often commit this fallacy -- have a look at what's being written in the wake of Japan's tsunami.
Meg Patrick of George Mason University asked about the Austrian business cycle theory. How delightful to meet a student interested in that! This is Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek's argument that when government inflates the money supply and holds down interest rates to create an economic boom, a bust, or recession, must follow because the prosperity is built on an artificial foundation.
Meg wanted to know if "the injection of fiscal stimulus into the economy (after the bust) disrupts the signals necessary to fix the current problem."
To which I replied: Sure does. The market is signaling that certain changes are needed, but stimulus spending interferes with those signals. If businesses are not allowed to fail, we don't get the market feedback we need.
David Boaz added: "If you get drunk, you have a hangover. I'm sure some of you have tried the theory: just keep drinking. But you can't keep drinking forever."
Ian Downie from the University of Virginia had a good question about spending: "Our congressional representatives have huge incentives to steal the wealth from the vast majority of the country and funnel it down to their constituents. What kind of systematic changes can we make to stop this perverse incentive machine?"
"The special interests are always there," Boaz said. "The challenge is to get the public interest -- the taxpayers -- to stick around after the election, to keep putting pressure on. And that is very difficult."
He went on to say we need constitutional limits on what government can do. We tried that, of course, but too many insiders have an incentive to interpret the limits so broadly that they are hardly limits at all. So government grows.
Grant Babcock, from the University of Pittsburgh, raised a good point: "If government grows in response to crises, what do we do? It seems like there is always another crisis on the horizon. It used to be international communism. Nowadays ... it's the threat of Islamist fundamentalism. ... Are we trapped?"
The media do keep inventing new crises. The global-warming crisis, the swine flu crisis, the pesticide crisis. "The running-out-of-oil crisis," Boaz added. Crisis is a friend of the state.
As Boaz pointed out, however, "sometimes there are crises that cause countries to go ... toward less government. New Zealand hit a crisis like that, and they actually reformed their economy. So there's at least the hope that the next crisis in the United States or Europe will cause people to say: 'This hasn't been working. We have to cut back.'"
After spending time with those students, I feel better about the future of America.
SOURCE
Robberies and other crime at Berkeley High School are common, prosecutor says
A horror story that is normal for some
Adults at Berkeley High School are obstructing prosecution of students arrested on suspicion of armed robberies on a campus where robbery, beatings and drug dealing are common, an Alameda County district attorney told a crowd at the school Monday night.
In two cases, witnesses were persuaded not to testify against suspects, one of them accused in a brutal beating and robbery on campus, Matt Golde said. In the other case, a football coach persuaded a witness not to testify, he said.
"I'm just trying to give you the reality of the danger in school here because some people don't appreciate the reality of the situation," Golde said. "We have so many armed robberies at this school it's unbelievable. We have a culture here where people are putting up with stuff that they shouldn't."
Golde, a supervisor in the county's juvenile division, made the comments during a parent forum designed to find solutions to the school's gun problem. More than 400 parents attended the meeting at the Berkeley Community Theater.
One of the students apprehended earlier this year already had a warrant for his arrest in connection with a "brutal beat-down" robbery on campus and "certain people at this school persuaded others not to testify against him," Golde said. Berkeley High students also are committing home burglaries, selling drugs on campus and across the street at Civic Center Park, he said.
Pasquale Scuderi, principal at Berkeley High, said that Golde's assertions are not the rule. "It is atypical that a staff member would say 'don't press charges,'" Scuderi told parents. "We have some pretty firm protocols for these types of incidents."
Since the beginning of the year, three gun incidents have been reported at the high school in which students were arrested on suspicion of gun possession, and one incident was reported at the smaller secondary Berkeley Technology Academy. Ashot was fired inside a bathroom at Berkeley High on March 21, but no one was injured.
Bill Huyett, superintendent of Berkeley schools, said all options are on the table for increasing security at the school and reducing the number of guns coming on campus. That includes installing metal detectors at school entrances, although Huyett said those may be troublesome because it will be difficult to get 3,400 students through them in the morning and after lunch.
Other options include searches of students and their lockers, bringing reformed criminals onto campus to work as mentors to troubled teens, and beefing up security in and around the campus. The school already has added two security guards, bringing the number to 14. On Wednesday, Berkeley police will meet with Huyett to offer recommendations on how to reduce student gun possession.
In a survey of 539 11th-graders at the school last year, 9 percent, or 48 students, said they brought a gun to school. Seven percent of 687 ninth-graders, also 48 students, said they brought a gun to school.
While Golde contended that students are bringing guns to school to commit armed robbery, school officials say the two most common reasons they hear are a belief that guns increase status and power and that they bring them for protection.
One student at the forum, 18-year-old Danielle Armstrong, said students are bringing guns to school because they fear gang members from other towns are waiting outside the school to shoot them. She said in one of her classes, two female gang members who didn't even attend Berkeley High were sitting in her class when a substitute teacher filled in.
"First, we need to make students feel safe to come here," Armstrong said. "That way they don't have to bring weapons to school."
Huyett said he thought parent comments during the two-hour meeting were divided between imposing stricter security measures and closing the campus or educating and mentoring kids about the dangers of carrying guns.
"We have a problem, and we need to address it now," Huyett told parents. "Metal detectors and searching lockers are deterrents. We're trying to get a feel for the community on whether we should do things that preserve personal freedoms or go for more intrusive actions to physically control guns or both."
Parent Gina Morning said she wants action now. "These three incidents are nothing new, it's just that things are now getting out in the open," she said. "We really need to lock these kids down. We've been fortunate so far that someone has not brought a gun on campus and started shooting us."
Scott Blake, however, said that Berkeley probably would not tolerate intrusive searches. "I'm concerned about being locked down and having metal detectors," he said. "In the history of race relations in this town, I wonder how you would implement a search-and-seizure policy and who would be the ones who implement it. I would imagine you could be violating people's rights by the way they look and this district could enter into litigation if you search and seize the wrong person."
SOURCE
The Obama administration, principally the president and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, are now routinely making public statements which are leading to one conclusion: instead of fixing American education, we should dumb down the standards.
According to the Associated Press, President Obama “is pushing a rewrite of the nation’s education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools” and wants “a test that ‘everybody agrees makes sense’ and administer it in less pressure-packed atmospheres, potentially every few years instead of annually.”
The article goes on to say that Obama wants to move away from proficiency goals in math, science and reading, in favor of the ambiguous and amorphous goals of student readiness for college and career.
Obama’s new focus comes on the heels of a New York Times report that 80% of American public schools could be labeled as failing under the standards of No Child Left Behind.
Put another way: the standards under NCLB have revealed that the American public education system is full of cancer. Instead of treating the cancer, Obama wants to change the test, as if ignoring the MRI somehow makes the cancer go away.
So instead of implementing sweeping policies to correct the illness, Obama is suggesting that we just stop testing to pretend it doesn’t exist.
If Obama were serious about curing the disease, one of the best things he could do is to ensure that there is a quality teacher in every classroom in America. Of course, that would mean getting rid teacher tenure and scrapping seniority rules that favor burned-out teachers over ambitious and innovative young teachers.
That means standing up to the teacher unions. For a while, it looked like Obama would get tough with the unions, but not anymore. With a shaky economy and three wars, it looks like Obama’s re-election is in serious jeopardy. He needs all hands on deck – thus the new union-friendly education message.
Obama’s new direction will certainly make the unionized adults happy. They’ve hated NCLB from the get-go.
And the unions will love Obama’s talk about using criteria other than standardized testing in evaluating schools.
He doesn’t get specific, of course, but I bet I can fill in the gaps. If testing is too harsh, perhaps we can judge students and schools based on how hard they try or who can come up with the most heart-wrenching excuse for failure or how big the dog was that ate their homework.
This makes sense in America’s continual slouch toward mediocrity. But hand-holding and effort awards didn’t produce the light bulb or the automobile or the MRI.
Hard work, accountability and the real possibility of failure – those are the things that made America great. Some kids and parents need to receive the cold hard reality that they’re not up to snuff. The Obama administration should not dumb things down so fewer people feel bad.
Because then those same people will complain when the cancer is incurable.
SOURCE
Students Who Get It!
John Stossel
I went to Princeton in 1969, where they taught me that government could solve the world's problems. Put the smartest people in a room, give them enough taxpayer money, and they will fix most everything. During those years, I heard nothing about an alternative. How things have changed!
I recently spent time with several hundred college-aged people at a Students for Liberty conference in Washington, D.C. Here were hundreds of students who actually understand that government creates many of the problems, and freedom -- personal and economic liberty -- makes things better.
I appeared at the conference along with David Boaz of the Cato Institute. Here are some highlights.
Karina Zannat, a student at American University in Washington, D.C., said, "A lot of my professors seem to think that even when politicians spend money in seemingly wasteful ways, we should be OK with it because every dollar spent is one dollar that goes toward income for an American citizen."
This is a common canard known as the "broken window" fallacy. The 19th-century French free-market writer Frederic Bastiat exposed it with the story of a boy who breaks a shop window, prompting some townspeople to look at the bright side: fixing the window will stimulate economic activity in the town. The fallacy, of course, is that had the window not been broken, the shopkeeper would have spent the money in more productive ways.
People often commit this fallacy -- have a look at what's being written in the wake of Japan's tsunami.
Meg Patrick of George Mason University asked about the Austrian business cycle theory. How delightful to meet a student interested in that! This is Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek's argument that when government inflates the money supply and holds down interest rates to create an economic boom, a bust, or recession, must follow because the prosperity is built on an artificial foundation.
Meg wanted to know if "the injection of fiscal stimulus into the economy (after the bust) disrupts the signals necessary to fix the current problem."
To which I replied: Sure does. The market is signaling that certain changes are needed, but stimulus spending interferes with those signals. If businesses are not allowed to fail, we don't get the market feedback we need.
David Boaz added: "If you get drunk, you have a hangover. I'm sure some of you have tried the theory: just keep drinking. But you can't keep drinking forever."
Ian Downie from the University of Virginia had a good question about spending: "Our congressional representatives have huge incentives to steal the wealth from the vast majority of the country and funnel it down to their constituents. What kind of systematic changes can we make to stop this perverse incentive machine?"
"The special interests are always there," Boaz said. "The challenge is to get the public interest -- the taxpayers -- to stick around after the election, to keep putting pressure on. And that is very difficult."
He went on to say we need constitutional limits on what government can do. We tried that, of course, but too many insiders have an incentive to interpret the limits so broadly that they are hardly limits at all. So government grows.
Grant Babcock, from the University of Pittsburgh, raised a good point: "If government grows in response to crises, what do we do? It seems like there is always another crisis on the horizon. It used to be international communism. Nowadays ... it's the threat of Islamist fundamentalism. ... Are we trapped?"
The media do keep inventing new crises. The global-warming crisis, the swine flu crisis, the pesticide crisis. "The running-out-of-oil crisis," Boaz added. Crisis is a friend of the state.
As Boaz pointed out, however, "sometimes there are crises that cause countries to go ... toward less government. New Zealand hit a crisis like that, and they actually reformed their economy. So there's at least the hope that the next crisis in the United States or Europe will cause people to say: 'This hasn't been working. We have to cut back.'"
After spending time with those students, I feel better about the future of America.
SOURCE
Robberies and other crime at Berkeley High School are common, prosecutor says
A horror story that is normal for some
Adults at Berkeley High School are obstructing prosecution of students arrested on suspicion of armed robberies on a campus where robbery, beatings and drug dealing are common, an Alameda County district attorney told a crowd at the school Monday night.
In two cases, witnesses were persuaded not to testify against suspects, one of them accused in a brutal beating and robbery on campus, Matt Golde said. In the other case, a football coach persuaded a witness not to testify, he said.
"I'm just trying to give you the reality of the danger in school here because some people don't appreciate the reality of the situation," Golde said. "We have so many armed robberies at this school it's unbelievable. We have a culture here where people are putting up with stuff that they shouldn't."
Golde, a supervisor in the county's juvenile division, made the comments during a parent forum designed to find solutions to the school's gun problem. More than 400 parents attended the meeting at the Berkeley Community Theater.
One of the students apprehended earlier this year already had a warrant for his arrest in connection with a "brutal beat-down" robbery on campus and "certain people at this school persuaded others not to testify against him," Golde said. Berkeley High students also are committing home burglaries, selling drugs on campus and across the street at Civic Center Park, he said.
Pasquale Scuderi, principal at Berkeley High, said that Golde's assertions are not the rule. "It is atypical that a staff member would say 'don't press charges,'" Scuderi told parents. "We have some pretty firm protocols for these types of incidents."
Since the beginning of the year, three gun incidents have been reported at the high school in which students were arrested on suspicion of gun possession, and one incident was reported at the smaller secondary Berkeley Technology Academy. Ashot was fired inside a bathroom at Berkeley High on March 21, but no one was injured.
Bill Huyett, superintendent of Berkeley schools, said all options are on the table for increasing security at the school and reducing the number of guns coming on campus. That includes installing metal detectors at school entrances, although Huyett said those may be troublesome because it will be difficult to get 3,400 students through them in the morning and after lunch.
Other options include searches of students and their lockers, bringing reformed criminals onto campus to work as mentors to troubled teens, and beefing up security in and around the campus. The school already has added two security guards, bringing the number to 14. On Wednesday, Berkeley police will meet with Huyett to offer recommendations on how to reduce student gun possession.
In a survey of 539 11th-graders at the school last year, 9 percent, or 48 students, said they brought a gun to school. Seven percent of 687 ninth-graders, also 48 students, said they brought a gun to school.
While Golde contended that students are bringing guns to school to commit armed robbery, school officials say the two most common reasons they hear are a belief that guns increase status and power and that they bring them for protection.
One student at the forum, 18-year-old Danielle Armstrong, said students are bringing guns to school because they fear gang members from other towns are waiting outside the school to shoot them. She said in one of her classes, two female gang members who didn't even attend Berkeley High were sitting in her class when a substitute teacher filled in.
"First, we need to make students feel safe to come here," Armstrong said. "That way they don't have to bring weapons to school."
Huyett said he thought parent comments during the two-hour meeting were divided between imposing stricter security measures and closing the campus or educating and mentoring kids about the dangers of carrying guns.
"We have a problem, and we need to address it now," Huyett told parents. "Metal detectors and searching lockers are deterrents. We're trying to get a feel for the community on whether we should do things that preserve personal freedoms or go for more intrusive actions to physically control guns or both."
Parent Gina Morning said she wants action now. "These three incidents are nothing new, it's just that things are now getting out in the open," she said. "We really need to lock these kids down. We've been fortunate so far that someone has not brought a gun on campus and started shooting us."
Scott Blake, however, said that Berkeley probably would not tolerate intrusive searches. "I'm concerned about being locked down and having metal detectors," he said. "In the history of race relations in this town, I wonder how you would implement a search-and-seizure policy and who would be the ones who implement it. I would imagine you could be violating people's rights by the way they look and this district could enter into litigation if you search and seize the wrong person."
SOURCE
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