Friday, June 13, 2008

Putting Children Last

Democrats in Congress have finally found a federal program they want to eliminate. And wouldn't you know, it's one that actually works and helps thousands of poor children. We're speaking of the four-year-old Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that provides vouchers to about 2,000 low-income children so they can attend religious or other private schools. The budget for the experimental program is $18 million, or about what the U.S. Department of Education spends every hour and a half.

This fight has nothing to do with saving money. But it has a lot to do with election-year politics. Kevin Chavis, the former D.C. City Council member who sits on the oversight board of the scholarship program, says, "If we were going to do what was best for the kids, then continuing it is a no-brainer. Those kids are thriving." More than 90% of the families express high satisfaction with the program, according to researchers at Georgetown University.

Many of the parents we interviewed describe the vouchers as a "Godsend" or a "lifeline" for their sons and daughters. "Most of the politicians have choices on where to send their kids to school," says William Rush, Jr., who has two boys in the program. "Why do they want to take our choices away?"

Good question. These are families in heavily Democratic neighborhoods. More than 80% of the recipients are black and most of the rest Hispanic. Their average income is about $23,000 a year. But the teachers unions have put out the word to Congress that they want all vouchers for private schools that compete with their monopoly system shut down.

This explains why that self-styled champion of children's causes, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Congressional delegate from the District of Columbia, is leading the charge to kill the program. Ms. Norton contends that vouchers undermine support and funding for public schools. But the $18 million allocated to the program does not come out of the District school budget; Congress appropriates extra money for the vouchers.

The $7,500 voucher is a bargain for taxpayers because it costs the public schools about 50% more, or $13,000 a year, to educate a child in the public schools. And we use the word "educate" advisedly because D.C. schools are among the worst in the nation. In 2007, D.C. public schools ranked last in math scores and second-to-last in reading scores for all urban public school systems on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Opponents claim there is no evidence that the D.C. scholarship program is raising academic achievement. The only study so far, funded by the federal Department of Education, found positive but "not statistically significant" improvements in reading and math scores after the first year. But education experts agree it takes a few years for results to start showing up. In other places that have vouchers, such as Milwaukee and Florida, test scores show notable improvement. A new study on charter schools in Los Angeles County finds big academic gains when families have expanded choices for educating their kids.

If the D.C. program continues for another few years, we will be able to learn more about the impact of vouchers on educational outcomes. The reason unions want to shut the program down immediately isn't because they're afraid it will fail. They're afraid it will succeed, and show that there is a genuine alternative to the national scandal that are most inner-city public schools. That's why former D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams and current Mayor Adrian Fenty, both Democrats, support the program.

"Hopefully," says Mr. Chavis, "Congress will focus on the kids, not the politics here." Barack Obama might call that the audacity of hope, if he finally showed the nerve to break with the unions on at least one issue and support these poor D.C. students.

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AAUW education report minimizes boy crisis in our schools

Boys have trailed girls in most indices of academic performance for at least two decades. In recent years, boys' educational struggles have finally been acknowledged and explored in the mainstream media. This has resulted in an unfortunate backlash from misguided women's advocates. The latest example of these advocates' efforts to minimize or deny the boy crisis in education is the American Association of University Women's highly-publicized new report "Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education."

The AAUW says its report "debunks the myth of a `boys crisis' in education," but the study provides little evidence to support this contention. According to the Report's own data, girls get much better grades than boys, are far more likely to graduate college, and are on the good side of a longstanding "literacy gap."

It is also true that girls are much more likely than boys to graduate high school, and boys are far more likely than girls to be disciplined, suspended, held back, or expelled. The vast majority of learning-disabled students are boys, and boys are four times more likely than girls to receive a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although more girls than boys enroll in high level math and science classes, boys do score a little better in math. However, girls' advantage in reading is several times as large.

Most of the AAUW report's claims are superficial and unconvincing. The Report tells us "the crisis is not specific to boys; rather, it is a crisis for African American, Hispanic, and low-income children." Of course-low income and minority children do not fare as well as children from more advantaged groups. But the boys of any cohort are still behind the girls in most indices.

The Report reassures us that both sexes have stayed the same or improved on standardized tests in the past decade. This isn't the point-the gender gap isn't new, but has existed for well over a decade.

The AAUW says the report's "results put to rest fears of a `boys' crisis' in education, demonstrating that girls' gains have not come at boys' expense." This is another irrelevant point. Nobody claims the boy crisis exists because of girls' gains-the issue is that boys' performance fell significantly behind girls', and has remained behind because we've failed to address boys' problems.

This is not the first time a highly-publicized study has claimed to debunk the boy crisis. In 2005, Duke University announced its study on child wellbeing by telling the media "American boys and girls today are faring almost equally well across key indicators of education, health, safety and risky behavior." Press reports followed suit, with headlines such as "Boys, girls fare equally in U.S.: Study debunks both sides in long debate" and "Boy-girl gender gap? Not so fast."

Yet the study showed nothing of the sort. Boys and girls fared equally in six of the 28 categories studied by the researchers - and girls fared better than boys in 17 of the remaining 22. Even the few advantages the study found for boys were modest. By contrast, many of girls' advantages were very large.

The new AAUW report, unable to dispel the boy crisis, falls back instead on the alleged wage gap, claiming, "Perhaps the most compelling argument against a boys crisis is that men continue to out earn women in the workplace." They explain that among all women and men working full time, year-round, median annual earnings for women were 77 percent of men's earnings in 2005.

It has been amply demonstrated that the wage gap is largely caused by the career sacrifices mothers make to care for their children and the primary breadwinner role most fathers assume when their children are born. The wage gap is very questionable in and of itself, and certainly is of no relevance when discussing gender and school performance.

The boy crisis is real. England has widely acknowledged a similar crisis in its system, and has taken steps in recent years to address the problem. The U.S. has not. Instead of giving credence to the AAUW's unfortunate sophistry, we instead need to focus on how to change our educational system to address boys' problems.

Source







Australia: A nasty education bureaucracy tries to get revenge on someone who stood up to them

Reinstated teacher given a difficult job for which she is not trained. What does it say about a bureaucracy that fills positions with unqualified people? Someone needs to crack down on these petulant sulkers

A WOMAN who won back the right to teach after being suspended for posing nude for a magazine says she cannot take the position she has been offered because she is not qualified to do the job. Lynne Tziolas, 24, was last month dismissed from Narraweena Public School on the Northern Beaches after she posed naked with 45-year-old husband Antonios for a feature in Cleo magazine.

She has since successfully fought her case for reinstatement, but received an email on Tuesday informing her she would be offered a new temporary position - at a Northern Beaches school for children with learning difficulties and behavioural problems.

Mr Tziolas yesterday said his wife, who was due to take up her new role today, planned to instead inform the Department of Education and Training that it was unacceptable. "It's quite unsatisfactory really - I think they've tried to offer her a job that's not in the mainstream school system to basically get her out of the way," he said. "Teaching at this school is something she's not qualified to do. It's not why she became a teacher. There are teachers out there who have studied specifically for learning difficulties and behavioural problems. These kids require a very specific and formalised type of teaching."

Mr Tziolas said his wife's decision to take part in the Cleo feature, in which she revealed intimate details of her marriage, had resulted in her being asked by the department to prove why she did not belong on a prohibited employment list. "That list includes paedophiles, child pornographers, convicted drug dealers and incompetent teachers. It's pretty much like a criminal record as far as teaching or working with children is concerned," Mr Tziolas said. "That was sorted out and the response was that she had been reinstated but reinstatement, to my mind, means putting you back in your previous position. "She hasn't lost her teaching approval but they suspended her from Narraweena Public School, so it's really not clear to us what her status was or is. It's still pretty confused."

While they did not regret the decision to take part in the feature, for which the couple was paid $200, Mr Tziolas said the matter was blown out of proportion. "It seems like it's just dragging on. It's difficult to be motivated as a teacher with all this scrutiny," he said.

NSW Teachers Federation deputy president Bob Lipscombe yesterday said the Department of Education needed to fill the position with a suitably qualified candidate. "One would hope that the teachers at the school in question had appropriate qualifications and training and experience to teach," he said. "The federation would have some concerns if a teacher was being compelled to work in a school such as the one she has been appointed to. We wouldn't see that as fair, either to the teacher or the students involved."

Source

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm a regular reader of your blog, which I enjoy a great deal. I must say that I am a little bit surprised that you are supporting the teacher's right to a job over the parents' right to bring up their children as they see fit.

I don't know how things work in Australia, but I can tell you from personal knowledge that here in America, VERY few people have the insider connections to get their child placed in the classroom of their choice. In fact, if you are bold enough to ask for a certain teacher, the principal will tell you that they simply cannot allow parents to interfere with the placement process, and your little Johnny will be placed with the teacher you like the least just to teach you a lesson for trying to beat the system.

When I was in junior high school in a small town in the South, a male teacher was caught in flagrante with somebody else's wife, and he never passed through the portals of the school again. He probably got a job in a different school district, and that was undoubtedly the right solution, as he simply could not have been taken seriously after that.

IMO, the school board there in Australia doesn't care what the teacher did, but they KNOW that parents will object to having their child placed with the porn queen. If the school appears indifferent to "morals" then parents may get the idea to start reviewing the curriculum, making surprise visits to their child's classroom, etc., and the public schools HATE that. The same sort of process occurs when schools try to get rid of the Christmas program -- the nominal Christians go balistic faster than the devout, because the existence of the Christmas program lulls them into thinking that the school supports their cultural Christianity. Wiping out every trace of Christianity makes parents start thinking about what kind of worldview the public school is pushing instead.

If the teacher really had no idea that posing nude would have an adverse effect on her career, then she is dumber than a rock and ought to be fired on that basis. The funniest part was that this fool did it all for $200.

jonjayray said...

Yes. I should have given more background.

The parents strongly SUPPORTED the teacher in this matter

Australia is not America