Friday, June 17, 2005

Semi-private "Academies" reverse years of failure in British city schools

A lot like American Charter schools but with a greater business-orientation

The controversial introduction of city academies is starting to reverse decades of educational failure, a report today indicates. Jacqui Smith, the Minister for School Standards, told The Times that the report showed the Government was right to press on with its plan to open 200 academies by 2010 at a cost of 5 billion pounds. She said that children in the most deprived urban areas could not afford to wait "whilst a high-level ideological debate" took place.

The report, by the accountants PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), will boost Tony Blair's mission to reform the education system. He has urged ministers to go on the offensive after an analysis of the first 11 academies showed high levels of parental satisfaction with their children's education, and improvements in discipline and attendance. Most of the new schools are heavily oversubscribed.

The Times has been told that the report also highlights the impact of private sponsors in raising aspirations at academies, many of which replaced failing comprehensives with a history of poor results. Mr Blair is a passionate advocate of the academies and his former chief policy advisor Lord Adonis, now an education minister, attracted unpopularity on the Left for his advocacy of them. The report will be seen as a vindication for his stance.

The report's assessment of academic standards is more mixed, however, noting that while GCSE results since 2002 had improved in six academies, they had not in the other five. The Department for Education and Skills (DfES), which publishes the study today, is also issuing a response highlighting the academies' record in national curriculum tests of English, mathematics and science for 14-year-olds. This showed that pass rates at the 11 academies were an average nine percentage points better than those of their predecessor schools in English and maths. Nationally, there was an improvement of six percentage points in English and seven in maths over the same period.

The Government's programme has come under intense scrutiny in recent months, with a critical report from the Commons Education and Skills Select Committee and threats from teaching unions to fight proposals for new academies. The Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough was failed by Ofsted inspectors last month. The Labour-dominated committee had urged the Government in March to halt the programme until it could demonstrate that academies represented the best use of public money. It said in a report: "We fail to understand why the DfES is putting such substantial resources into academies when it has not produced the evidence on which to base the expansion of this programme."

Teaching unions also oppose the involvement of private companies as sponsors of academies, which are state-funded schools. Sponsors are handed control of the governing body in return for investing up to 2 million pounds towards the building costs of academies, which cost around 25 million each.

Ms Smith said: "What this report shows is that academies are beginning to have an impact on standards and that the sort of prerequisites that are necessary for greater standards are in place. "They have parental support, high aspirations, a focus on behaviour and are orderly schools, which were problems in the predecessor schools. "Large numbers of parents, pupils and staff believe that academies have high aspirations for their children and are helping to deliver them in contrast to the schools they replaced." Ms Smith acknowledged that "more work needs to be done", adding: "I don't think it will happen overnight but there have been some pretty big transformations in these schools. This reinforces our arguments that we were right to focus on the areas of greatest disadvantage where standards were not good enough."

George Cameron, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that he welcomed the initiative. "City academies follow on from the city technology colleges that the Tories set up," he said. "What matters is not just that they receive extra resources but also that they have proper autonomy and devolution of power. They cannot be just old comprehensives with a new lick of paint."

PwC found that 87 per cent of parents were satisfied with the education their children were receiving, and 80 per cent of those with pupils about to start at an academy had made it their first choice. There was no evidence that academies were having an adverse impact on neighbouring schools by creaming off bright pupils, as some teaching unions contended. Ability levels of children at age 11 were lower in academies than in other local schools, yet they were raising standards more quickly. PwC's report is the second of five annual reports commissioned by the DfES to monitor the effectiveness of academies.

Source




PETTINESS UNDERMINES RECOGNITION OF EXCELLENCE

Daniel Kennedy remembers when he still thought that valedictorians were a good thing. Kennedy, a wiry fifty-nine-year-old who has a stern buzz cut, was in 1997 the principal of Sarasota High School, in Sarasota, Florida. Toward the end of the school year, it became apparent that several seniors were deadlocked in the race to become valedictorian. At first, Kennedy saw no particular reason to worry. "My innocent thought was What possible problem could those great kids cause?" he recalled last month, during a drive around Sarasota. "And I went blindly on with my day."

The school had a system in place to break ties. "If the G.P.A.s were the same, the award was supposed to go to the kid with the most credits," Kennedy explained. It turned out that one of the top students, Denny Davies, had learned of this rule, and had quietly arranged to take extra courses during his senior year, including an independent study in algebra. "The independent study was probably a breeze, and he ended up with the most credits," Kennedy said.

Davies was named valedictorian. His chief rivals for the honor were furious-in particular, a girl named Kylie Barker, who told me recently that she had wanted to be valedictorian "pretty much forever."

Kennedy recalled, "Soon, the kids were doing everything they could to battle it out." As we drove past sugary-white beaches, high-rise hotels, and prosperous strip malls, he told me that the ensuing controversy "effectively divided the school and the community." Kennedy took the position that Davies had followed the school's own policy, which he had been resourceful enough to figure out, and whether he should have been allowed to load on an easy extra class was beside the point. He'd done it, and he hadn't broken any rules. Davies's guidance counsellor, Paul Storm, agreed. In an interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune at the time, he said of Davies, "He's very clever. He said, `I want to be valedictorian. I've figured out I need to do this and that. Can you help me?' Denny had a good strategy, and this strategy was available to anyone who was a competitor."......

During the final weeks of the school year, Kennedy was meeting with both sets of riled parents, and students were buttonholing him in the hallway. "I'm telling you, it was hostile!" he said. Some teachers considered boycotting graduation; students talked about booing Davies when he walked out onstage. Kylie Barker's mom, Cheryl, said that she recalls getting a call in the middle of the day from Kylie's chemistry teacher, Jim Harshman, who asked her to pick up Kylie from school, saying, "She's in a pressure cooker here, and she's about to burst." .....

Kennedy remembers finally "convincing everybody to agree reluctantly-and I do mean extremely reluctantly-to have co-valedictorians." He went on, "I have been in education basically my whole life, and I've been to a lot of graduations in my time. But I dreaded this one. Sarasota High is a big school-three thousand kids-and there were probably seven thousand people in the audience. At that time, it felt like half of the students in the room hated one of those two valedictorians and half hated the other. The tension was so thick that I was sitting up there in my cap and gown sweating buckets the whole time." In the end, both students got through their speeches-Kylie's was about integrity-without incident. But Kennedy, a likable traditionalist who has been married to his childhood sweetheart for thirty-seven years, concluded that it was time to get rid of valedictorians at Sarasota High.

Kennedy convened a committee to consider various alternatives, and it was decided that from then on all students in the top ten per cent of the class-which at Sarasota means about seventy-five people-would march in first during graduation and have an asterisk printed next to their names on the program. "Students and parents got to see more kids recognized," Kennedy said. "It made everybody feel better."

Stephanie Klotz's academic ambitions made her stand out at Valley View High, in Germantown, Ohio, from which she graduated in 2001..... Several weeks before the school year ended, the principal of Valley View told Klotz that she and four other students would share the valedictorian title. Klotz thought the decision was odd-as she recalled, one of the girls had got a B-but she let it go. "Notices were sent out, relatives notified," her father, Randy Klotz, said. Three of the students had G.P.A.s above 4.0 because they'd taken at least one A.P. course, whereas Stephanie, whose G.P.A. was 4.0, had not. (Instead of taking A.P. history in her junior year, Stephanie, who hoped to become a doctor, had decided to take another chemistry course.) Three weeks before graduation, Stephanie was told that the school was reversing its decision: she and Megan Keener, another girl with a 4.0 G.P.A., wouldn't be valedictorians after all. (Keener, too, lacked A.P. credits, though she had been taking classes at local colleges.) Two students with G.P.A.s above 4.0 would be named co-valedictorians, and a third would be salutatorian. "I would be nothing," Klotz recalled.

When Klotz told her parents, they complained first to the principal, then several times to the school board. Finally, the family hired a lawyer and sued the school district, the superintendent, and the principal of Valley View. A judge in the Common Pleas Court of Montgomery County, Ohio, sided with the Klotzes, and, days before graduation, issued an order reinstating Klotz and Keener as valedictorians...

More here





A summary of an academic liar: Ward Churchill: "This newspaper devoted a great deal of space this past week probing charges of academic misconduct against Ward Churchill, and...we bet you reached the same conclusion we have: There is no way the University of Colorado can permit Churchill to remain on its staff without indicting the scholarship of every other professor. ... His invention of facts surrounding the smallpox epidemic among the Mandan Indians in 1837 is more reprehensible than his misrepresentation of the Dawes Act. His appropriation of Professor Fay Cohen's work for a 1992 essay is more inexcusable than his almost word-for-word use of a paragraph by Professor Rebecca Robbins. His claims of Indian ancestry, although almost certainly bogus, at least may have stemmed from family lore. Churchill should have acknowledged the truth many years ago instead of slyly trying to throw critics off his track."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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