Sunday, January 21, 2007

NJ STUDENTS ROBBED OF THEIR HISTORY

"to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan..."

There has never been a more succinct statement about the obligation and privilege the nation has to care for its military veterans than that brief clause in Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. But the New Jersey legislature thinks setting aside a day on which to remember those who have bought our freedom with their blood is not as important as it used to be.

New Jersey legislators have unanimously passed a measure that includes a provision to remove the state mandate to teach about Veterans Day in the public schools. And not only Veterans Day: The bill would also remove requirements to teach about Columbus on Columbus Day, the Pilgrims around Thanksgiving Day, and even Commodore John Barry Day, which commemorates the Revolutionary War hero for whom a bridge is named, which spans the Delaware River to connect Bridgeport, N.J., to Chester, Pa.

It is the possible repeal of the law to teach about veterans on Veterans Day that has upset a lot of people, including, understandably, veterans. There are few enough who serve in today's all-volunteer military and a decreasing number of citizens who have relatives in the military, or know anyone in service. That makes it much more important for students to learn of the contributions made by veterans to secure the freedoms too many of us take for granted. Those freedoms mark the difference between American schools and those in dictatorial societies that are forced to teach state propaganda.

The ban on teaching about such holidays is included in a larger bill that passed the legislature last month. It is designed to help control New Jersey's spiraling property taxes. Governor Corzine has not indicated whether he'll sign it. He'd better not if he knows what's good for his Democratic Party. Have Democrats forgotten the 1988 campaign during which Republicans hammered presidential candidate Michael Dukakis for vetoing a bill while he was governor of Massachusetts that would have required all public school students in the state to recite the Pledge of Allegiance? Sure, it was wrong to question Dukakis' patriotism, but it worked politically for Republicans, who pounded him with the issue, along with the line about his being a "card-carrying member of the ACLU."

Since 1967, New Jersey schools have been told to observe Veterans Day and related holidays to promote "the development of a higher spirit of patriotism." Under the "law" of political correctness, apparently anything that promotes love of country, or God, or the military is now to be avoided. Thank Jupiter (it used to be "thank God," but He's been out for some time), public schools can still distribute condoms. Maybe a way around the law would be for veterans to teach sex education.

A New Jersey Veterans of Foreign Wars adjutant and veteran of the Army and Coast Guard, Hank Adams, said of the proposed law, "It's not right." Students "are not going to know the sacrifices that were made so they can enjoy the protections that they have." Other veterans groups are petitioning Governor Corzine not to sign the bill. But after campaigning on a pledge not to raise taxes and then reversing himself shortly after taking office, Mr. Corzine has already proved how out of touch he can be with average voters.

While New Jersey residents are steamed about their high taxes, they may get even angrier about the message this proposed law sends to veterans and how little governing officials appreciate their sacrifices.

A co-sponsor of the anti-Veterans Day measure, state Senator John Adler, said, "I don't think the state should be in the business of telling districts to do every single thing." Oh really? As most parents of public school students everywhere know, the state has been imposing its will on schools, students, and parents for quite a few years. That New Jersey is close to not doing so when it comes to patriotism and veterans communicates one message to those who have put their lives and limbs on the line for the rest of us: "drop dead."

Source






Give Top Teachers a Bonus: Little Rock rewards teachers; unions resist

Is there a bigger scandal in America than the low state of inner-city schools? Oprah Winfrey, utterly frustrated with the problem, last month discussed the $40 million she has spent building the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls--in South Africa. Ms. Winfrey said South African students want to learn, but in U.S. schools, "the sense that you need to learn just isn't there." Where'd it go?

There are multiple-choice answers to that question, and most of them are right. Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York offered one answer in his State of the City speech Wednesday: The desire to learn disappeared down the bottomless well of centralized public-school bureaucracies. Mayor Bloomberg proposed greatly increased autonomy for school principals--one irrefutably proven answer to making a school better. He also wants teachers to prove they deserve tenure, an idea so obvious that it probably has no chance.

One measure of the tenure decision for New York City teachers would be their students' test scores. News accounts said the city teachers' union is "certain to fight" linking test scores to tenure. This, too, is among the multitude of correct answers for why students have no incentive to learn in big-city schools.

Mike Bloomberg, a name difficult to keep out of conversations about national politics, has been known to make visits elsewhere in the country on what we political gamesters would call "exploratory" trips. Let me suggest that the mayor explore a Southern strategy in Little Rock, Ark., where five grade schools are continuing an experiment in linking teacher merit pay to student test scores, first described in this space in October 2005.

That column, "How One School Found a Way to Spell Success," described how teachers at the Meadowcliff School, formerly full of student underachievers, were promised bonuses linked to improvements in the standardized test performance of each student. (The column is available on OpinionJournal here.) The size of the bonus increased relative to the student's year-over-year test gains. A 4% improvement earned a $100 bonus, rising to $400 if the student gained 15% (some did). Everyone in the school was in the bonus plan, including the cafeteria ladies, who started eating with the kids rather than in their own lounge. It worked. Scores improved. Twelve teachers got bonuses from $1,800 to $8,600. The checks were handed out in a public ceremony. Oprah would love Meadowcliff.

Last year, they added Wakefield School to the bonus program (after the school's unionized teachers voted overwhelmingly for it), and this year three more grade schools--Geyer Springs, Mabelvale and Romine. All are urban schools of the sort everyone in America professes to be concerned about, notwithstanding that public concern gets a D+ for achievement every year.

The first formal attempt to analyze the Little Rock merit-pay experiment was released earlier this week by the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. The study, led by the university's Gary Ritter, focused on the results in a single school, Wakefield, which had consistent student test scores across three years.

The Ritter study also summarized the expansion and refinement of the incentive program since its inception. At Wakefield (and the three newest schools), the bonuses are awarded for the average growth in test scores of each teacher's class, rather than per-student achievement as at Meadowcliff. At the fall start of Wakefield's first year in the program, its students tested in the 16th percentile; at year's end they were in the 29th percentile. Its teachers got $228,300 in bonuses. Meadowcliff's second-year bonuses totaled $200,926.

For consistency, the study looked at results on a standardized math test given at Wakefield School the past three years to each student, ending in the fourth and fifth grades. The school's teachers were covered by the bonus program last year. The students' math grades improved by a standard measure (called NCE) of 3.5 points, while those in three Little Rock comparison schools declined. That 3.5 point gain equals about one-sixth of the normally cited national average gap in math scores between black students and white students. If compounded for six years, the gap would close.

Too hopeful? It seems to be for the Little Rock teachers' union. A man versed in the downward slope of many such good intentions warned me last year to watch for the counteroffensive from either Little Rock's bureaucrats or its teachers' union. The union has made its move. In last fall's school-board election, the union ran a slate of candidates and gained control of four of the board's seven seats. It hopes to capture one more school-board seat this September. By June, however, Little Rock will have five grade schools inside the merit-bonus program. If standardized test scores rise in these three new schools as well, it would take a special brand of community self-destruction to throw out the bonus program at the union's behest.

There'd be one more bitter irony in that, too. Just a few days ago, the school board in Rogers, Ark., in the affluent northwest corner of the state, voted 6-1 to apply for federal funding of a merit-pay program under the U.S. Department of Education's Teacher Incentive Program. Where do you think at least some the highest performing, bonus-earning teachers in Little Rock's urban schools will migrate to if the union's school board flattens their merit-pay program? The University of Arkansas education researchers, incidentally, plan to work with Rogers from Day One to measure outcomes if the plan goes forward.

The original money for the bonus program at Meadowcliff school, and its design, came from the Hussman Foundation of Little Rock. Since then, Walter Hussman Jr. has been able to solicit support for the plan's expansion to the other grade schools from the Walton Family Foundation and the Brown Foundation of Houston. If the program isn't killed, he expects to find funding for more schools from other out-of-state foundations.

Building a school for girls in South Africa is fine by me. But imagine how electrifying it would be if a U.S. citizen could ever believe in the efficacy of starting a Leadership Academy for Girls in Arkansas. Who said something about having a dream?

Source





IMMIGRANT INFLUX OVERCROWDING BRITISH SCHOOLS

Pressure from an influx of children from East European immigrants has forced a council to draw up plans to build four new primary schools. Bradford council in West Yorkshire, where nearly 5,000 workers arrived last year, is one of many local authorities experiencing a shortfall of places in inner-city areas. Yesterday education chiefs there said two of its existing primary schools would need to be expanded and four new ones built to cope with the increased demand for new places. Bradford has the second highest birth rate of any part of Britain outside London, and coming on top of that, immigration has left its school system struggling, it said.

A council report said the high number of births 'has caused a shortfall in places in some parts of the district when combined with large numbers of Eastern European workers who are also moving into the district, sometimes bringing their families with them'. It added that it had been 'impossible to predict the increase in numbers of newcomers' and finding places for them is 'becoming much more difficult'.

Bradford is just one of many local councils reporting that it is under strain as a result of record levels of immigration from Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. One in five primary school children are now from an ethnic minority, and some councils have been faced with massive bills to fund extra support such as interpreters as they are legally obliged to admit children from European Union member states. At least 27,000 school-aged youngsters have arrived with their parents in the UK since ten countries - including Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic - joined the EU on May 1, 2004.

Elsewhere in the country, Wrexham in North Wales has reported that its schools are facing a similar pressure - around 50 Polish children started school there in September. Agnieszka Tenteroba, a Polish teacher working with the newcomers, said: 'First it was the husbands coming to work. People who want to stay then bring their families so we will have more and more Polish children in Wrexham.'

Meanwhile in Slough, Berkshire, the council has reported that an influx of an estimated 10,000 Poles has left it facing going 15 million pounds in the red, with nearly 900 school pupils from non English-speaking backgrounds. And in Peterborough, where there were just 22 children of economic migrants enrolled in secondary schools in January 2004, that has risen to more than 100 with one secondary school warning it was being 'overwhelmed'.

The Government does not collect figures for the number of children brought with them by immigrant workers, so officials in Bradford are having to base their estimates on the number of new National Insurance permits being issued - 4,650 last year.

The council's executive will now be asked to recommend research into how to expand school provision to cater for the increased number of children. Colin Gill, executive member for children's services, said: 'In those areas of the district where there are substantial changes in population size and distribution, we will need to make alterations to ensure that we provide the right number of primary school places in the right locations.'

Bradford's birth rate, according to the latest figures, is the fourth highest in Britain, after Birmingham and the London boroughs of Newham and Hackney, with much of the growth thought to be within the city's more established immigrant communities

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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