Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Schools boot out bureaucrats to win pupils to new 'brands'

Amazing progress towards choice coming in Britain

Companies and top head teachers will form rival education "brands" to run groups of secondary schools under government plans for a classroom revolution. Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, aims to create local education markets to increase competitive pressures on state schools to improve standards.

Local authority controls will be swept away to give rival brands the freedom to respond to "parent power". Schools will be allowed to write their own curriculum to create greater choice and tailor education to the needs of different pupils. Ms Kelly has drawn up a list of businesses and charities to be invited to enter the schools market. The Times has learnt that new providers could be in place by next September, underlining Tony Blair's impatience at the current pace of reform.

Ambitious heads will be free to become "chief executives" of chains of schools, and private schools will be encouraged to protect their charitable status by establishing their brands in the state sector. They will be given funding to run state schools, which would use the power of the private school's image to attract parents.

Ms Kelly will publish a White Paper next week that will promise to abolish bureaucratic obstacles and harness "parent power" to reshape the education system. Local authorities will lose powers to block the expansion of popular schools or prevent new providers entering the market. School Organisation Committees, in which council officials decide policy with representatives of heads and governors, will be abolished. Instead, heads will run their own affairs in charge of "independent state schools". Councils will be left to ensure that local markets operate fairly, for example in admissions policies.

Local authority boundaries will be broken down to encourage providers to enter the market. Organisations will be able to run groups of schools across the country as part of their "brand", seeking new business by offering to run underperforming comprehensives. The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) will also steer them towards struggling inner-city schools to ensure that poorer pupils have the same opportunities as those in wealthier suburbs.

Brands will be held accountable for the performance of all schools within their group. Parents will be able to lobby for new providers to take over the management of schools if they are dissatisfied with standards. Heads with records of academic success would be encouraged to expand their influence by taking over several schools. Assistant heads in charge of individual schools would be accountable to this "chief executive" for the success of the brand in responding to parental demands

Source




Labour councils will resent loss of empires

Another commernt on the new British reforms

The Government's White Paper plan for sweeping reform of secondary schools gives substance to Ruth Kelly's pledge to put "parent power" at the heart of education. Head teachers will be free to shape schools in response to parental wishes, subject only to rules on fair admissions. New providers will vie for parental support to take over under-performing schools.

Successful heads will be free to extend their influence to other schools. Companies, charities and fee-paying schools will be encouraged to create "brand" identities that give purpose and pride to groups of comprehensives, particularly in inner-city areas. The package promises to be the most "new Labour" of Tony Blair's education reforms with its aim of using consumer pressure to reshape public sector provision.

But the proposal to establish local education markets threatens a showdown with many Labour MPs, who will see it as further evidence of Mr Blair's desire to open public services to private providers. Labour councils will also be hostile to the move to break up their education empires and relegate them to an advisory role. School organisation committees, set up by Labour in its first term as part of moves to abolish grant-maintained status, will go. They are seen as obstacles because heads who wish to expand come under pressure from their council and other schools.

The proposal to allow schools to design their own curriculum, subject to DfES approval, will be seen as particularly radical given the hostility that Ms Kelly attracted for her rejection in February of reforms set out by Sir Mike Tomlinson, the former head of Ofsted, to replace GCSEs and A levels with a diploma. New school providers will be able to negotiate their own pay and conditions agreements with teachers, in the same way as city academies [charter schools], to encourage innovation.

Teachers' unions will be fearful that this marks the end of national salary scales. However, their experience in academies so far has been one of improved conditions. The White Paper will confirm the creation of 200 academies by 2010 and ministers are confident that the goal will be achieved quite comfortably.

The reforms have been driven by a Prime Minister who is desperate to stamp his legacy on education and health before he stands down. Last week he told his monthly press conference: "By the end of the third term I want every school that wants to be, to be able to be an independent non-fee paying state school with the freedom to innovate and develop in the way it wants and the way the parents at the school want, subject to certain common standards, and the White Paper will be the route map to make this happen."

Mr Blair highlighted the example of Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham College, a successful inner-city school in South London where 86 per cent of pupils gained five good GCSEs last year. He said it had raised standards without altering its intake of pupils. "The whole purpose of our reform programme is to give the kids in the poorer more disadvantaged areas the chance of a really good school," he said. The school has formed a federation with a second academy, the Haberdashers' Aske's Knights Academy, that has opened on the site of the Malory School in Bromley, where only 15 per cent of pupils passed five good GCSEs

Source





NYC REARRANGING THE DECKCHAIRS ON THE TITANIC

New York City Schools Chancellor Klein has redefined contraband as any token of love, gratitude, or holiday cheer, worth over five dollars retail, gifted to teachers by students and their parents. If no security bugs caught me secreting a Santa Claus mug into my knockoff gym bag, I should for now avoid the wrath of the Office of Special Investigations, which is the closest modern equivalent of King Henry the Eighth's Court of Star Chamber. But as a respecter of the spirit of giving, I am high-risk as a tempter of fate.

Klein has ruled that because teachers are far more prone to corruption than is the general population and can be assumed to put their souls on market for a silk tie, they must be protected from their impulses. Any seasonal gift worth more than a slice of cherry pie must be returned to the sender.

Not only does that decree assume the worst of teachers' judgment, an attitude recognized as Klein's calling card, but also it is unenforceable, counterproductive, and insulting to all. It implies that educators can be bought, that their sense of honor is apocryphal, that students and parents have no other motive than seeking to bribe or otherwise curry favor, and that a crisis of integrity has arisen across the board. Parents by their own initiative have expressed outrage at the chancellor's patronizing, paternalistic, and hypocritical fiat. The same Conflict of Interests Board that is lauding Klein for his five-dollar cap, two summers ago allowed one of Klein's senior deputies, already drawing pay equal to that of a U.S. Supreme Court Judge, to hold a different six-figure, unrelated, overlapping second job.

Is Klein for real or is he spoofing Scrooge? Is his meanness tongue-in-cheek, or is it yet another self-caricature? How do we appraise the gift? Do we send parents flyers admonishing them to attach original receipts? Do we snip the ribbon and ravage the wrapping paper in view of the child wherever and whenever presented with the gift? Was it on sale? Was it the genuine designer article or an intellectual property rights violation? This is the stuff of satire, but it also the grist for the mill of disgust.

If a confidential informant claims that there was a $7.99 price tag on a gift that you, the teacher, failed to regurgitate, you will be called down to the Office of Special Investigations weeks after being advised that an allegation of employee misconduct has been lodged against you. You will be provided no details and may stew in speculation before your hearing. It will have a predetermined outcome and be held by a retired police detective who will be prosecutor, jury, and judge. There will be no legal oversight or standards for evidence gathering or admissibility. This is no bona-fide judicial forum.

You will be provided with no copies of any written allegations, witness testimony, or other evidence whatsoever. Subpoenas, hidden cameras, undercover surveillance agents, and other techniques may deployed to nab you absconding with a your cache of donated #2 pencils.

The Chancellor has lost many of his natural allies among reformers and educational researchers and historians. He has shunned many of the finest material assets and thinkers in the professional community. He has estranged men and women of all parties, wings, factions and philosophies. Deploying troops to interdict ten-dollar bonuses of scented soap demeans him and our common cause of serving children

From Redhog

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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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