Thursday, March 15, 2007



A puny step forward

The Aspen Institute's Commission on No Child Left Behind recently released Beyond NCLB: Fulfilling the Promise to Our Nation's Children, a report it touts as offering gutsy proposals to solve the nation's educational problems. "It's time to take a bold step forward and commit to significantly improving NCLB," declares a statement on the report's back cover, with its striking American flag and blue-sky motif. "We must insist on high achievement for all students. Our nation's children deserve it."

So what sort of revolutionary changes to the status quo does the report propose? None, really. Sure, it calls for a few new-ish things, like voluntary national standards, focusing on teacher effectiveness instead of credentials, and tracking the performance of individual students, but nothing really bold. Indeed, most of the recommendations would add regulations to a law already larded with them, and none would do what's necessary to truly transform American education: Decentralize our hidebound, government-controlled education system and take power away from the teachers' unions, administrator associations, and other special interest groups that dominate it.

Of course, not all interest groups love everything the commission recommended. National Education Association President Reg Weaver, for instance, complained about the report's teacher effectiveness proposals. But small quibbles aside, the report has been praised by numerous establishment groups, such as the Public Education Network and the National Association of Elementary School Principals, and public officials ranging from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a Democrat of Massachusetts, to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

If boldness is what you're after, those are not good signs. But what reform would fit the bill? Something that doesn't just tweak our top-down, command-and-control educational system -- or make it worse, like federal standards -- that's what. Something that breaks the stranglehold of special interests and gives power to the parents the system is supposed to serve. Something that would enable parents to move their kids and tax dollars out of bad schools and into good ones, and would release parents and children from their present state of dependence on policymakers and bureaucrats. That something is school choice.

Unfortunately, no reform recommendation of that sort is ever likely to come from a national commission, because such bodies are almost always stacked with members of the very interest groups that would lose power were parents able to take their children and tax dollars out of unsatisfactory public schools. The Aspen commission, for instance, was dominated by insiders, including several former officials in the U.S. Department of Education and other federal entities, a one-time teachers' union president, and numerous other individuals whose livelihoods have come from public schooling. And Aspen isn't alone. Tough Choices or Tough Times, a recent report from the National Center on Education and the Economy, was also the work of a commission heavy on public education and political insiders, and while it advocated some new flexibility for schooling, it also called for expand-the-mold reforms, like vastly increasing teacher pay.

Thankfully, truly bold reform doesn't have to come from a national commission. Indeed, just two weeks ago it came from the state of Utah, where Governor Jon Huntsman signed the nation's first-ever universal school choice bill into law. Utah's new program is far from perfect -- it sets low voucher amounts and largely holds districts harmless when kids leave -- but by giving parents real power, it nonetheless begins to address the fundamental flaw in American public education.

Of course, the special interests aren't taking this lying down. Utah's School Boards Association, Association of School Superintendents, and PTA, among other groups, have joined forces and threatened to take the program to court, just as their cousins in other states have done whenever choice has been proposed or enacted. As revolting as these attempts to keep children captive in public schools are, though, they do have one silver lining: They make it very clear that school choice is a truly bold step forward.

Source




Stalinists in South Australian education

Year 12 board wants to put parents in the Mushroom Club -- kept in the dark and fed bullsh*t. "The children of the light love the light and the children of the darkness love the darkness" -- to paraphrase Jesus (John 3: 19-20)

The state's examination board is attempting to suppress by law the Year 12 performances of individual schools. The Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia has asked the State Government for new laws to prevent public comparisons between the performances of public and private schools. Under a legislative review to be in place by 2010, the Government is about to force the SSABSA to release these details to the Education Department and the Education Minister, but the board wants to keep this from being extended to public release.

Its existing policy is only to publish statewide results, which do not include variations between individual schools or between government, independent and Catholic systems. Individual schools are able to obtain their own results and compare them with statewide averages through a password-protected website administered by SSABSA.

The board, which sets and approves curriculums and assesses student achievement for Years 11 and 12, is a State Government authority, but is not directly answerable to the Education Minister. Under the Government's review, it will be replaced by a new body called the SACE Board, which will be answerable to the minister. SSABSA says its proposal to block the public release of school performance details would avoid the "damaging effects" of comparing these. [Quite a confession of public school failure!]

Chief executive Janet Keightley said the board was "very clear" that the school a child attended was a "small contributing factor" in academic achievement. "To rank schools on this basis is very, very misleading and very dangerous because it means people will make serious decisions on very, very poor quality information," she said. "Any kind of simplistic comparison is not advantageous."

Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop said yesterday that parents had a right to know the academic standards and overall performance of schools and poorly-performing schools would be shown up by the release of results. "If parents were provided with this information, state governments would have to answer to them for the failings of state education systems," she said.

A spokeswoman for SA Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith said the State Government did not have a position on the issue. "The Government will develop a policy when in possession of all the facts and responses from the public consultation," she said. South Australian Institute for Education Research president Ted Sandercock said researchers needed the data. "Quite often, you want to see what are the differences and what are they due to," he said. Association of Independent Schools executive director Garry Le Duff said he wanted the same access to information as the Education Department. "It should be released to individual schools and all school sectors, not just to the government sector," he said.

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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