Saturday, October 07, 2006

CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGES PICK UP THE PIECES



The state's community college system, which has long positioned itself as a port of entry for unconventional students, is bracing for an enrollment boom, and building a stronger academic safety net of tutoring and counseling services for those students. State researchers say community colleges will serve more than 2.1 million students in California by 2014, a 27 percent increase from today. The surge is not from more kids coming out of high school -- that population is expected to remain flat over the next decade. Instead, the two-year colleges are ramping up for what's become known as the "hidden tidal wave" of students who find that they are simply not ready for the work force.

"How can you be a nurse if you can't compute a dose? In today's world, you can't be a welder if you can't read a safety manual," said George Caplan, president of the statewide community college board. "You don't need political science, you don't need history or economics. But you have to be able to read analytically; you have to write cogently."

A proposed systemwide budget for the 2007-2008 school year includes an extra $47 million to hire more tutors and counselors to better guide students through a traditionally hands-off college system. The Legislature will be asked to sign off on the plan next year. Education leaders involved in the effort say it's a "cultural awakening" to the fact that many community college students are having trouble with college-level classes and need help before transferring to a California State University or University of California campus. Most students have to take remedial classes when they get to community college, according to statewide figures. Of incoming students, only about 12 percent make it into math classes rigorous enough for the state university systems to accept as transfer credit. It's slightly better for English -- 25 percent.

"We're not looking to blame the high school; we're not looking to blame the students; we're looking to the job at hand," said Laura Hope, an English professor at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga. Hope coordinates the Southern California college's "success centers," or tutoring clinics that are required attendance in some courses -- and a model program for the state community college system. Since the centers opened in 1999, transfer rates from Chaffey to four-year colleges have jumped to 25 percent from 7 percent, she said. "It was never that those students were incapable of the work," she said. "We just weren't helping them achieve the skills to help them move through the system."

Community colleges accept anyone over 18, with a high school diploma or not. It's too early to tell whether California's new exit exam for high school seniors is sending droves of high schoolers without diplomas to community colleges. The Los Rios Community College District in Sacramento, the state's second-largest with 76,000 students, has counted only 66 first-time college students this fall who enrolled without a high school diploma. That's only 11 more students than last year, before the exit exam was implemented. The exit exam requires students to meet eighth-grade-level math and algebra and 10th-grade-level English. Students need to get a little over half of the questions right on the test to pass it, which has community college leaders stressing that even those who pass may not be college-ready.

More here





Payoff for phonics revival in England

Primary school children today are 12 to 18 months ahead in spelling compared with children of the same age 30 years ago, new research suggests. In tests completed by 4,000 children last year, pupils of all ages at primary school did better than their peers who took the same test in 1975. A score of 26 or more out of 40 was achieved last year by the top 50 per cent of children aged eight to eight years, two months. In 1975 the same percentage success was not achieved until pupils were aged nine to nine years, two months. In 1975, only the top 25 per cent aged eight to eight years, two months achieved 26 or more.

The findings suggest that the introduction of key stage testing and the National Literacy Strategy has helped more children to focus on spelling. Colin McCarty, of the Test & Evaluation Consortium, who compared the results of tests completed by 4,000 pupils in England in 1975 and 2005, said that a return to the teaching of phonics might also be responsible for the change by providing the tools to build words. That children now started school earlier had also probably helped, Dr McCarty said. “Children are now starting school in the reception year as the norm and this is likely to have increased the exposure to spelling and reading.”

The Graded Word Spelling Test, which was devised by the educationist Professor P. E. Vernon in 1975, uses 80 words that are a close match with the vocabulary and phonic structures in the National Literacy Strategy. The test has been revised by Dr McCarty and his colleague Mary Crumpler and is reissued this week by the publisher Hodder Murray. The spellings get increasingly difficult, starting with “in”, “am” and “see” and ending with “erroneous”, “abscess” and “menagerie”.

Source






Australia's Feds to seize syllabus from states



A national board of studies with control of a uniform school curriculum is being proposed by the Howard Government in an attempt to wrest back control of schools from "ideologues" in state and territory education departments. Education Minister Julie Bishop will attack state education bureaucrats and accuse them of hijacking school curriculums, distorting them with "Chairman Mao" type ideologies in a speech to the History Teachers Association of Australia today. "Some of the themes emerging in school curriculum are straight from Chairman Mao. We are talking serious ideology here," she will say. "Ideologues ... have hijacked school curriculum and are experimenting with the education of our young people from a comfortable position of unaccountability. "We need to take school curriculum out of the hands of the ideologues in the state and territory education bureaucracies and give it to a national board of studies, comprising the sensible centre of educators."

Ms Bishop is calling for a national debate on the need for a common national school curriculum, saying there is widespread community concern about the content being taught in schools. In her speech today, she will say that the commonwealth has to take the lead in fighting for a "back-to-basics approach" across curriculums and that parents are rightly concerned by educational standards. "How is that we have gone from teaching Latin in Year 12 to teaching remedial English in first-year university?" she says. "The community is demanding an end to fads and wants a return to a commonsense curriculum, with agreed core subjects, like Australian history, and a renewed focus on literacy and numeracy. "The curriculum must be challenging, aiming for high standards, and not accepting the lowest common denominator. "It seems we are lowering the educational bar to make sure everyone gets over it, not raising it to aspire to excellence."

Ms Bishop's attack comes after The Australian highlighted education bureaucrats who have failed to monitor effectively curriculums and the quality of education and who have become captive to teachers' unions. Last month, The Australian published the views of professor Ken Wiltshire, Australia's representative on the executive of the UN education body UNESCO and the architect of the Queensland curriculum under the Goss Labor government. Professor Wiltshire argued that state Labor governments had relinquished control of any system that effectively measured the standard of what was taught in schools and teacher performance.

"Our school curriculums have strayed far from being knowledge-based," he said. "Indeed, knowledge has been replaced by information. It is little wonder that the Howard Government's attempted reforms of schooling have gained traction with the Australian public."

In April, The Australian reported how literary study in Australia had been declared "dead" by Harold Bloom, one of the world's leading authorities on the works of William Shakespeare. After learning that a prestigious Sydney girls school had asked students to apply Marxist, feminist and racial analysis to the play Othello, the internationally renowned critic said: "I find the question sublimely stupid. "It is another indication that literary study has died in Australia," the Sterling professor of humanities at Yale and Berg professor of English at New York University told The Australian.

A spokesman for Labor education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin accused Ms Bishop of contradicting John Howard and others in her party. "Julie Bishop has contradicted both the Prime Minister and the former education minister Brendan Nelson in her attempt to impose mediocrity on our school system," the spokesman said.

Ms Bishop says a national curriculum would be subject to greater public scrutiny and so would be more accountable to the community. This would also remove the duplication of effort and resources currently spent by states developing individual curriculums. She says the states and territories collectively spend more than $180 million running their boards of studies and curriculum councils to develop very similar curriculums in identical subjects. "There are currently nine different year 12 certificates across Australia, each backed by separate curriculum developed by eight different education authorities," she says. "Is it necessary for each state to develop a separate curriculum? "Do we need to have a physics curriculum developed for Queensland, and another, almost identical physics curriculum for Western Australia? "My comments are not directed at teachers. Our teachers are a precious national resource. "Rather, I am critical of the social engineers working away in state government education authorities."

Source






Even the basics seem beyond present-day Australian teachers

A South Australian mother despairs at the lousy state of school education -- and the illiteracy of teachers

It is the last week of term three and the first written assessment of my youngest child's schoolwork for this year has come home. She is in a years 3-4 class with children ranging from eight to 10. Her entire assessment is based on one piece of work, a modest project on Greek mythology. It includes a "critical question: is Greek mythology still relevant today?" and a "rich task: create a poster that shows the roles that Greek gods, heroes and creatures would be seen doing today".

The work is assessed with a rubric that, among other things, is said to examine my child's ability to "analyse history ... and relate this to present possibilities" and "write texts ... which show awareness of different audiences and purposes". The rubric is defined as a scoring guide, but my dictionary does not provide this definition.

Apparently this form of assessment "compliments" the teaching strategies the school uses and encourages the students to "explore a topic deeper". It also leads a parent to despair. I know that I am supposed to work out that Greek mythology is only a "vehicle" for assessing areas of competence, but within minutes of receiving this assessment (and choosing to ignore the numerous inconsistencies therein) I concluded that it was nonsense. There is no mention of maths, reading and spelling, which are my main concerns.

My other child's assessment (sorry, rubric) considers a series of "strands" and came home with a CD-ROM that had to be viewed to work out what the rubric was assessing. Well, I can do that, but what are people without computers supposed to do?

I am one of an army of bewildered and frustrated parents who do not understand how teachers, or the ex-teachers who produce school curriculums, think. How can they produce this form of assessment and believe it is useful and valid? Unfortunately, I suspect that the increasingly bizarre forms of student assessment are not designed to reveal achievement but to disguise the lack of it. Parents are aware of their children's learning deficiencies and vague methods of assessment will not conceal them.

Most parents are clear about what they want their children taught - the basics - and they've been screaming about it for years. The failure of schools to deliver the basics is seen, increasingly, as bloody-mindedness on the part of education departments. But is it? Perhaps all the waffle, political correctness and esoteric rhetoric are used to hide the fact many teachers are no longer capable of teaching the basics.

It is not unusual to wander into a classroom and find spelling or grammatical errors on the whiteboard. (Correct them at your peril.) One of my children was taught by a teacher who never used apostrophes. I have seen a teacher with 30 years' teaching experience misspell nineteen (ninteen) and, when I assumed she'd made a simple mistake, she assured me that she'd checked it in the dictionary and it was correct.

Many children in my eldest child's Year 6 class cannot hold a pencil correctly, do not start sentences with capital letters or use full stops and do not read at their chronological age. When I discussed this with the teacher I was told: "Hardly any of them are reading at their correct reading age: we may have to do something about the tests."

If children are not taught the basics, they cannot perform well in tests on them. Poor test results do not look good for any school, ergo don't test or report on the basics. Give us a rubric about Greek mythology instead. Entrance requirements for teaching courses have always been low and continue to decline. I don't know how this decline can be arrested but I do know that teachers, however well meaning, are often unaware of their own limitations and never blame themselves for children's failure to learn.

From a parent's perspective, there are solutions: change the curriculum to emphasise basic skills; eliminate all-day sports clinics, visits from TV, radio or football personalities and so on; allow principals to sack underperforming teachers or insist that they attend courses to improve their skills; give good teachers large bonuses (with good teachers being determined by the parents, not their peers); and provide a simple, graded reporting system. Is this really too hard?

Meanwhile, there may be some hope at my children's school because "next term their will be opportunities to provide feedback on the new reporting format in various different formats". Parents will spend the holidays formatting various forms of complete rubbish.

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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