Sunday, April 16, 2006

ONLINE CHARTER SCHOOLS

The California Virtual Academies, a network of online public charter schools serving 35 counties statewide, is coming to the region in September with a digital-age alternative to the little red schoolhouse. CAVA offers a K-through-9 curriculum that students complete at home. The organization, based in Simi Valley, provides a loaner computer to every student along with a hefty bundle of books sent by mail. Students log in Monday through Friday and usually spend four or five hours every day completing their lessons with help from parents. Students use a back-to-basics curriculum designed by K12, a Virginia-based company that operates virtual academies in 10 states.

The program, said CAVA administrator Lisa Gillis, has been a hit with students for whom traditional school doesn't work - from young actors who are often on the road to students who have illnesses that keep them at home. "Parents are looking for options other than a brick-and-mortar school," she said.

The "virtual school" concept has grown tremendously in recent years. CAVA enrolls 3,500 students statewide, up from 750 when it opened in 2002. Its main competitor in California, Connections Academy, serves about 400 students in five counties near Los Angeles. The idea is similar to the now-familiar home-schooling concept, with a few crucial differences. Every CAVA student is assigned to a credentialed public school teacher who stays in touch via phone or e-mail. The teacher pays an in-person visit at least once every 50 days. And CAVA helps organize social outings and field trips for students. CAVA's six sites post relatively high scores on the state's Academic Performance Index, and the schools have met federal performance targets every year.

The increasing popularity of Web-based schooling should come as no surprise, said Eric Premack of the Sacramento-based Charter Schools Development Center. "I get my DVDs online, and I haven't stepped foot in a bank in I don't know how long," he said. "When you see how much of what kids do online and you take a step back, it's odd that we do so little educating online."

CAVA did serve Sacramento-region students in the 2002-2003 school year, then closed down its programs in the region. Gillis could not immediately say why the program closed down, but she said it's returning because of requests from parents. The Sacramento-region branch of CAVA will serve K-through-8 students in Sacramento, Sutter, Butte, Colusa, Placer, Yolo and Yuba counties. The Nuestro Elementary School District in Sutter County granted the organization a local charter.

The program has won over at least one family locally. Four years ago, Kelly Krug of Fair Oaks grew frustrated with the private school her son Ben attended. He had plenty of work to do, but none of it was challenging enough. The Krugs looked around for an alternative, but all the public schools they liked were full. So they turned to CAVA in 2002, intending to transfer Ben elsewhere the following year. But Ben flourished, and the family stuck with the K-12 curriculum even when CAVA shut down locally. Now Ben's little brother Sam, 8, is enrolled in the program too. Kelly Krug quit her job to stay home and supervise their education.

The boys log on in the morning, take a 90-minute break at midday for lunch and PE (perhaps a bike ride or a session on the trampoline), and then return to their studies. The kitchen table serves as the lab where the family dissects frogs together. Ben, his mother said, loves the program. "We have to tell him to stop reading, to slow down and have dinner and go to bed. Where education was a chore before, he now looks at it as a sport. That never happened with homework before."

Source






Stifling of Dissent at Northern Kentucky University

Post lifted from Blogger News



"Any violence perpetrated against that silly display was minor compared to how I felt when I saw it."

So says the literature professor who apparently led nine female students in tearing down a university-sanctioned display put up by a campus pro-life activist group. She continued "Some of my students felt the same way, just outraged." Outraged? That other people dared to have a pro-life viewpoint? And that they further dared to actually express it?

Apparently, the free speech rights of other people don't count for anything, if they make you feel angry or outraged. (Note the contradiction, as well - the display is "silly" when its importance to other people is being deprecated to minimize the offense, but it's an "outrage" when it comes to her feelings.)

This is classic. MY feelings are so important that they trump other people's rights. YOUR feelings are so insignificant that I can ignore you. This is the moral calculus possessed by a five-year old.

The symbolism of crosses - each of which represented an aborted fetus - being thrown into the garbage can by female students speaks for itself.






Elite girls' school 'kills the study of literature'

One of the world's leading authorities on Shakespeare's work, Harold Bloom, and the nation's pre-eminent poet, Les Murray, have declared literary study in Australia dead after learning that a prestigious Sydney school asked students to interpret Othello from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives. "I find the question sublimely stupid," Professor Bloom, an internationally renowned literary critic, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale and Berg Professor of English at New York University, said yesterday. "It is another indication that literary study has died in Australia."

The question was an assessment task in March set for advanced English students in Year 11 at SCEGGS Darlinghurst, an independent Anglican girls' school in inner Sydney. Considered one of the nation's leading schools, it charges almost $20,000 a year in fees for senior students. The assessment task asked students to write an essay explaining how Othello supported different readings. "In your answer, refer closely to the prescribed text and explain how dramatic techniques might be used to communicate each reading. You must consider two of the following readings: Marxist, feminist, race," the question says.

Bloom is a renowned defender of the Romantic poets and a critic of Marxist and post-modern approaches to literary criticism, among others. His 1994 work, The Western Canon, attacked the rise of ideologically based criticism. Murray, who has just published his latest volume of poetry, The Biplane Houses, described the question as horrifying and said Australian literary study was "worse than dead". He said literature should be removed from school curriculums, which, in the words of US poet Billy Collins, teach students to strap poetry to a chair and beat meaning out of it with a hose. "Students are being taught to translate (poetry and literature) into some kind of dreary, rebarbative, reductive prose for the purpose of getting high marks," Murray said. "They're being taught to overcome it, not to appreciate it, not to value it, not to be changed or challenged by it but to get mastery over it."

But SCEGGS head Jenny Allum defended the question, arguing that it asked students to show their understanding of Othello's themes. "It's phrased in a slightly different way ... but it's about the role of women, the role of black men in that society, the role of the worker, which I think are clear themes of Othello," she said. Ms Allum, also chairwoman of the academic committee of the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia in NSW, said it was a legitimate way of interpreting Shakespeare's themes using a modern-day understanding of feminism, race relations or Marxism. "There's always been different ways of looking at a play and drawing different meanings," she said.

SCEGGS head of English, Jennifer Levitus, said terms such as Marxism and feminism were modern labels used to help simplify the universal themes found in Shakespeare. The president of the English Teachers Association of NSW, Mark Howie, said the assessment question was in keeping with the syllabus - that students develop a personal understanding of the text and can relate to the notion that it can be interpreted differently in different contexts

Source

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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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