British school segregation increases over ten years

Schools are now more segregated by poverty than 10 years ago when Labour had just come to power, Government figures indicate. Most areas saw an increase in the division of pupils, by school, depending on whether on not they took free school meals. The data also shows that, by race, Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils are the most segregated between schools.

A report released by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, analysed statistics on school composition. It found: "Grammar schools have a lower than average incidence of pupils eligible for free school meals and pupils classified as special educational needs. "But they have a higher than average incidence of ethnic minority pupils, largely due to higher than average number of Indian pupils."

Some local authorities which had grammar schools saw a huge influx of secondary school pupils from neighbouring areas, the report said. In four council areas which had selective schools, more than 60 per cent of the secondary school intake came from other authorities. The report added: "On average, selective local authorities gained above-average attaining pupils in Year 7 and lost low-attaining pupils."

The research considered the extent to which children from deprived backgrounds were concentrated in particular schools. It found: "The level of segregation by free school meal, in primary and secondary schools, increased for most local authorities between 1999 and 2007. "Nationally, Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils were the most segregated between schools. However black African and black Caribbean pupils were more segregated between local authorities."

Source





A hostile environment -- for learning how to write well

The recent focus on the AoA lawsuit against Dartmouth (which has been dismissed at the request of the AoA) caused me to neglect reporting on a piece of threatened litigation against the college pertaining to a different, though perhaps not entirely unrelated, matter. A few months ago a former Dartmouth writing instructor, Priya Venkatesan, informed some of her former students that she was planning to sue them, along with Dartmouth.

Dartmouth inflicted Venkatesan on an unlucky set of Writing 5 students (most Dartmouth freshmen are required to take one of the seminars that comprise Writing 5 in order to improve their expository writing). Venkatesan in turn inflicted her post-modern views of science on the students. As Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal reports, she taught them that "scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth," inasmuch as "scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct." Her goal, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. As if we don't have enough problems.

Showing clear signs of life, some of Venkatesan's students reacted by taking issue with her theses during class. Venkatesan deemed this pushback "very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful." She responded by accusing the students of "fascist demagoguery," consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," and canceling classes for a week. Later, as noted, she threatened to sue some of her students for creating a "hostile work environment," and to sue Dartmouth itself for countenancing the "harassment." To her credit, however, Venkatesan has apparently reconsidered her decision to sue.

Venkatesan has moved on to Northwestern. She leaves behind some questions, especially this one: how could Dartmouth have hired her? Dartmouth's answer likely would be that employers make bad hiring decisions from time to time. A good case can be made, however, that this bad hiring decisions was the product to some extent of weaknesses in Dartmouth's approach to the teaching of writing (whether similar weaknesses extend to other courses at Dartmouth is the subject for another day).

There were three problems with hiring Venkatesan to teach expository writing. First, learning how to write well is difficult enough without the distraction of a wacky ideology -- i.e., that scientific knowledge is, in essence, a fraud perpetrated by the white male hierarchy -- or indeed any ideology. Second, Venkatesan does not appear to be a good writer. Third, given her over-the-top reaction to disagreement by her students, she does not appear to be very stable.

Dartmouth certainly can be excused for not having anticipated the third of these defects. But unless the missives collected here are an aberration, the college probably should have been able to discern that Venkatesan's writing falls short of what is expected of a college writing instructor. And Venkatesan has made no secret of her bizarre post-modern views.

Unfortunately, these views might have made Venkatsesan more, not less, appealing to Dartmouth. For I'm told that Venkatesan's seminar was hardly the only one in the Writing 5 program with a left-wing ideological bent. I'd like to be able to demonstrate this by sharing the subject matter of past and current seminars with our readers, but this does not seem to be possible because Dartmouth apparently elects not to provide descriptions on its website (or maybe my computer search skills are inadequate; I'll accept help here). One student reports having combed through the Writing 5 offerings several terms ago in the hope of finding an indoctrination-free seminar. According to this student, he thought he had finally succeeded, but once he took the course found himself locking horns with his instructor over politics and making very little progress with his writing.

Nor is this an isolated case. Although my daughter did not take Writing 5, the reports of the students I've spoken to about the course range from lukewarm to strongly negative. In fact, several expressed to me how fortunate my daughter was not to be saddled with it.

In theory, writing about contentious matters may seem like a good way to improve one's expository writing skills. And given an able, fair-minded professor, this theory can be transformed into practice. For example, Walter Sinnot-Armstrong's Philosophy 3 course (Reason and Argument) teaches, in essence, argumentation. Students must write a final paper on a controversial subject, such as race-based preferences for minority group members. Sinnot-Armstrong, moreover, is an unabashed liberal. Yet based on what I've heard, the course is an excellent one in which conservatives freely write what they think about these highly-charged subjects and pay no price for doing. That's because Sinnot-Armstrong apparently brings no agenda to the classroom other than teaching the methodology of argument.

But it seems the same cannot be said consistently about the instructors of Writing 5 (who are not professors). In a course whose subject matter is avowedly ideological (which is not really the case with Philosophy 3), the temptation to exalt the ideology over the writing is inherently difficult to resist. It may even be the case (though I don't know for sure) that some post-modern ideologues view the two things -- ideology and writing -- as inextricably linked. In any case, the prospect for mischief is great; the prospect for improving one's writing is not. And so it too frequently plays out.

The college appears finally to have recognized that its writing program is flawed. Unfortunately, as I'll discuss in a follow-up post, Dean Folt's plan to redress this problem is, to put it kindly, counter-intuitive.

UPDATE: Priya Venkatesan came to Dartmouth from the University of California at San Diego where she was a teaching assistant. UC San Diego is the home of a notorious mandatory freshman program called Dimensions of Culture, which lasts a full year. As I described here, this program is, apart from the underlying "hate whitey" indoctrination, largely incomprehensibe to students. As one student put it:

I had no idea what was going on in that class. And even the TA said she had no idea what it was about. . . .Everyone hated the class, and they know it, and even at the end of the year they gave out these pins that said, "I survived DOC." And the lecturers [asked] "Aren't you so glad it's done?"

Given the scope of DOC at UC San Diego, it must be a magnet for TAs. However, I don't know whether Venkatesan taught in the program. If she did, this would tend to make her hiring less excusable, and to reinforce the view that her odd post-modern leftist views made her more, not less, appealing to Dartmouth.

Source







A Call to Fund the Young and Risky

A coalition of researchers on Tuesday strongly urged a greater commitment among policy makers, universities and private donors to support scientists early in their careers and encourage potentially "high-risk, high-reward" ventures, offering a series of recommendations that would alter longstanding federal funding and peer review mechanisms.

The recommendations, published in a white paper released by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, are mindful that stagnating funding tends to favor more "conservative," incremental projects that entail lower risk and lower potential rewards. Instead of spending their time as "serial grant writers," said Keith R. Yamamoto, the executive vice dean of the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, young scientists are eager - and should be encouraged - to work on bold new ideas.

They "want to do research that's not paradigm-extending but paradigm-breaking," he said at a panel announcing the report, ARISE: Advancing Research in Science and Engineering. Yamamoto is part of the group at the American Academy that finalized the paper's recommendations, the Committee on Alternative Models for the Federal Funding of Science. Its chairman, Thomas R. Cech, recently stepped down as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he spearheaded a new grant program aimed specifically at early-career scientists.

"Taxpayer dollars have already been invested in perhaps 30 to 35 years in education for these scientists, after which they compete with perhaps 100 to 200 others" to obtain faculty positions, Cech said. Once there, he continued, "they instead are squirreled away in their offices serving as" - using the same phrase - "serial grant writers." He called the state of affairs a "waste" and said that instead, funding mechanisms should promote "transformative research."

The report stresses that the two prongs of its policy focus - scientists early in their careers and high-risk research - are tied together. "The experiences of researchers at the beginning of their careers color and shape their subsequent work," it says. "Researchers who achieve success early gain the confidence, professional reputation, and career commitment that enable them to continue to make important scientific and engineering contributions as their knowledge and skills mature."

Two of the major policy proposals put forth in the report target grants and tenure policies. One-time grants of five or six years, similar to the National Science Foundation's CAREER program, the group concludes, would carry young scientists through their tenure decisions, alleviate the pressure to constantly apply for support and encourage longer-term and higher-risk work. Meanwhile, the report urges research universities to revise tenure policies to keep in mind the merits of well-designed research programs that might not necessarily produce expected or immediate results.

At the same time, researchers on the panel noted that peer review processes should sufficiently recognize collaborative work. The report also points out that scientists starting out their careers would benefit from mentoring, and that institutions should "undertake rigorous self-examination" of cultural barriers that could impede women and minorities from advancing in their research careers.

It also suggests boosting support for program officers at funding agencies so that they can better immerse themselves in the scientific fields through conferences, campus visits and in-depth research.

One recommendation is especially likely to attract resistance from research universities: The suggestion that they eventually cover more (or all) of their faculties' salaries, rather than relying on grant funding, further straining federal agencies. Cech called for "a bit of a rebalancing," arguing that universities needed "more institutional buy-in" to support their researchers.

Among the other policy recommendations in the white paper is for federal agencies to improve their data collection procedures so that researchers can track what happens to investigators who do and do not receive funding for specific proposals.

Source