PERVERSE BEHAVIOUR

Conservative parents should at least refuse to pay for "Humanities" college courses. I must say I was pleased when my son chose to specialize in Mathematics

"A leftist professor isn't worried that conservatives produce more kids than liberals do, since universities effectively destroy the values traditionalist parents try to instill. "I don't need to have kids to create mini-me voters: I get classrooms full of other people's kids," writes Bill Savage of Northwestern University. ".Loyal dittoheads will continue to drop off their children at the dorms.And then they are all mine."

On my radio show, Savage said that conservative homes keep kids away from liberal ideas, but once they encounter enlightened thinking they instantly see its superiority.

In fact, it's far easier for liberals to isolate offspring from opposing viewpoints than it is for right wingers - given leftist bias in entertainment, and the teaching profession at all levels.

At least Professor Savage acknowledges the agenda in elite colleges - raising painful questions for parents who proudly pay $40,000 a year to let academics treat their kids as ideological pawns.

Source




AUSTRALIAN TEACHERS FEAR COMPARISONS

The NSW Teachers' Federation has dealt a double blow to the parents of NSW - a snap walkout tomorrow and a ban on reporting school performance. The first move - a stopwork meeting at every public school from 9am tomorrow that will disrupt families on the last day of term - is in protest at the Howard Government's industrial laws. The second is aimed at the Carr Government, with the union banning long-overdue reforms that let parents know how their child's school is performing compared with the rest of the system.

The Teachers' Federation admitted it had decided to oppose the measure before it was even announced by the Premier yesterday. An angry Mr Carr said yesterday he would legislate to give parents vital information about the performance of schools if teachers opposed public release of the data.

As thousands of teachers prepare to walk out of classrooms for tomorrow's stopwork meeting, Mr Carr said he would over-rule the the Industrial Relations Commission if it opposed new annual school reports. "We'll legislate for it ... I mean this is a right of parents and we're going to see that parents have got that right," he said.

The Daily Telegraph has learned the Teachers' Federation lodged a complaint in the Industrial Commission after receiving on June 17 a secret Government briefing on the planned new reports. Teachers claim the reports breach "protocols" outlawing the release of academic results in any way that allows schools to be ranked or compared. Among a raft of demands, the protocols state: "The annual report is not the mechanism for identifying ineffective teachers."

Despite demands from parents for more data showing how schools were performing, federation senior vice-president Angelo Gavrielatos maintained the public had no right to the information. He said parents received all the data they needed on how their children were performing. "We oppose it because it will lead to league tables ... not even the Premier's assurances will stop that," Mr Gavrielatos said. "We will see this data being misused and abused by opportunistic politicians ... it's a political stunt. "They [league tables] will make not one single bit of difference to the improvement of educational outcomes for any kid in any school."

Due in part to a campaign by The Daily Telegraph, the Government has ordered schools to produce reports showing exam results, student and staff attendance rates and teacher qualifications. For the first time, parents will be able to compare the results of their students to the statewide average and to the results of students in similar schools.

The Industrial Commission is due to report on the issue on July 8 but Mr Carr indicated he would ask Parliament to over-rule it. A trial of the annual reports will be conducted in 50 areas next year and they will be introduced in all NSW public schools in 2007.

Mr Gavrielatos accused the Government of going "well beyond" the requirements of the Commonwealth, which threatened to withhold $3.6 billion in funding if the reports and a host of other reforms were not put in place. Mr Gavrielatos said if parents wanted to know how their school was performing they should talk to the principal and teachers. Teachers also are angry that the reports will list staff absences.

But president of the Secondary Principals Council Chris Bonnor welcomed the new reports, "subject to fine tuning".

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Email from a U.S. reader:

"Stupidity rules because the 'educators' are not doing their jobs educating children. The so called 'ethnomath' is probably just the lastest manifestation of this phenomenon.

How this came about is, I believe, the result of simple laziness on the part of lower grade teachers. The latest fads ("look say", "whole language") offered them a chance to 'do their jobs' without tears, without enforcing discipline, without actually making children learn. Without the actually grunge work of teaching. Why the education departments at the universities came up with such offerings as the 'audio-lingual method' of not learning a foreign language (imagine being taught Latin as a teeanager without anyone giving you a hint as to the grammar!) and other quick and easy frauds -- one-up-manship and the need to come up with something 'new' to earn a doctorate seem to be the easiest answers.

I lucked out. My parents sent me to a Catholic school staffed by terrorist penguins (the Sisters of Notre Dame de Nemours) who made me learn from fear of being hit (I also believed they were agents of the Spanish Inquisition who would burn me at the stake if I let them know what I thought of them, but over the years I have come to believe that was a misconclusion on my part) or kept back.

Public school teachers can never approach the terror factor that nuns have, but older generations kept discipline in their rooms and educated children to a high standard, just because they had the support of the parents, which isn't there any longer. When I was working as a security guard in a hotel in college I came across a room rented by the Dept of Ed. filled with ancient text books! Very un-PC, but by the 8th grade children in Boston in the 1890s were doing 1960s college level work!

American parents who realize their children are being cheated of a decent education are more frequently taking things into their own hands. In New York the Asian math cram schools now have lots of Jewish and non-Jewish white kids. Charter schools are more popular. In MA we have the MCAS, a series of mandated tests you need to pass to get out of high school. I am working with a teenager who was in the first group of kids who have to take it -- he can actually do division! (I now work in retail -- where the inability of teeangers to do simple math is legendary. The teenager takes a coat marked $19.99 off a rack that says "10 Per Cent Off Retail Price" and walks it over to the cashier and asks: "How much is this?") If only he had had math teachers who had actually studied math in college, rather than 'education.'"

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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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