Friday, April 12, 2019



Representative Katherine Clark takes on Betsy DeVos over ‘racist’ policy change

The usual false cry of racism from a Leftist -- even though it is racial discrimination she is defending. She wants "protections" for badly behaved black students.  A vocal dumbcluck

The decision out of Washington last week to end a policy that protected black and brown students from unfair and often racist disciplinary practices could have easily passed with little notice.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos — whose legacy will be that she has repeatedly trampled protections for students — did it again last week, relying on discredited research that blames over-punished students themselves for blatantly unfair rates of suspensions and expulsions.

But DeVos didn’t see Katherine Clark coming.

The Melrose congresswoman was all over DeVos, blasting her in TV interviews and even calling for her resignation. Clark didn’t mince words, not at all, in decrying both the policy change and the entire Trump administration as racist.

In a phone interview, Clark told me she thought it was important that DeVos’s decision not get lost in the torrent of startling news pouring out of Washington.

“Her fundamental job as secretary of education is to look out for every student and make sure they have a fair opportunity for a quality education,” Clark said. Clearly, she doesn’t think DeVos is doing that.

“This is an administration that is marked by racist policies,” she continued. “It’s one of its hallmarks. So while not surprising, we cannot let it go unanswered. And when she does something so fundamentally wrong as rescinding protections and cherry-picking racist research, we have to respond.”

The “research” Clark refers to is a study of disparities in school suspensions by a group of conservative researchers. In a 2014 paper, they reached the conclusion that, in their words “early and prolonged problem behavior accounts for the racial gap in suspensions.” In other words, black and brown students who were getting suspended at far higher rates than their white peers were simply getting what they deserved.

That is ridiculous, as well as racist. And it’s a huge problem in our schools. My colleague James Vaznis recently reported on the state’s insistence that Roxbury Preparatory Charter School address its ridiculously high suspension rates for students of color. It’s a practice that stigmatizes students and seriously derails their learning.

Not surprisingly, DeVos did not take Clark’s suggestion that she step down. Initially, a spokesman for her department suggested that Clark was simply being opportunistic in criticizing the secretary; after a couple of days, the department stopped commenting altogether. Meanwhile, Clark said Congress is looking for ways to protect the students who stand to be affected by the change in policy.

“They should be ashamed,” Clark said. “The American public isn’t behind this. This is taking fringe research that when you look at the body of work of the writer it is an outrageous position — that these kids are just temperamentally different and the school-to-prison pipeline is inevitable, because that’s just what happens to black children.”

Criticized from the day she was first nominated for her post, DeVos has rolled back protections for one group of students after another: victims of sexual assault, students of color, students of for-profit colleges, even students with loans (that one was overturned in court). From the outset, she has displayed a blithe disregard for the notion that she should use her authority to ensure fairness.

But even by that standard, this decision — and the reasoning behind it — stands out.

“This is disqualifying for any public official, let alone the secretary of education,” Clark said.

As Clark and I spoke last week, we knew that the this incident would soon fade in public consciousness, overtaken by the inevitable next outrage. Clark wasn’t just fighting against a policy. She was also arguing, it seemed, against the numbness that can make the unacceptable appear routine.

“We cannot just let these moments pass with a shrug of the shoulders,” Clark told me. “These are fundamental values to who we are as Americans. If we can’t stand up against this, what will we stand up against?”

SOURCE 





Campuses are broken because of what we teach

President Trump’s executive order on free speech is the latest government response to what appears to be an atmosphere of increasing hostility to nonconforming ideas in institutions of higher education.

The order was no doubt issued with good intentions and in a civic spirit. Its impact, however, will only be on the margins as it doesn’t address the most profound problems affecting our universities today. And government is not the best instrument to implement the change our universities most need.

Concerned observers have good reason to fixate on the problem of free speech on campus. Instances of speakers being shouted down or disinvited, the emergence of speech codes, and other efforts to curtail speech are well-documented. And who can forget the protests a few years back around a Yale resident head’s suggestion that adult students at an elite university could use their own judgment in picking Halloween costumes?

Justifiably concerned about these efforts to promote “correct thinking,” many have been calling on universities to uphold the foundational American principle of the First Amendment. Trump explained his order in this light during the signing ceremony: “Taxpayer dollars should not subsidize anti-First Amendment institutions.”

The trouble is that the First Amendment is not the appropriate framework for understanding speech in an academic setting. For one thing, the First Amendment does not protect individuals from censorship by private institutions. Moreover, academic freedom is not a matter of individual liberty and creative expression, as the First Amendment has come to be understood.

John Stuart Mill explained that the pursuit of knowledge occurs through reasonable discourse — by making arguments and answering your opponent’s arguments. An atmosphere of free and open inquiry facilitates this dialectic. This is what is meant by academic freedom: disciplined conversation and the imperative to question assumed truths in the service of building and refining human knowledge.

Invoking the First Amendment or fixating on protests of individual speakers reflects confusion about the purpose of speech in education. While individual speaking events have educational value, they are not nearly as influential on students’ understanding as are the courses and curricula that account for the bulk of their education. And it is on this that concerned observers should focus: the education students are receiving.

At its best, a liberal arts education sharpens students’ thinking so that they are more critical and capable individuals and citizens. When this education is conducted by way of great texts of history, literature, and philosophy, students develop a deeper understanding of the human condition — of the human heart and its yearnings, of how our particular time fits into the larger scope of human history, and of the plight of others.

The most profound problem with our universities today is that so many disciplines have abandoned the pursuit of wisdom — of trying to understand the insights on the human condition of thinkers from the past. These disciplines take their bearings instead from the unquestioned premises that everything from art and literature to politics and society must be understood in terms of power and oppression, and that their own role is to correct the resulting injustice. It is from these premises that the obsession with identity politics arises. The predominance of this flat portrayal robs students of a deep education while simultaneously encouraging them to engage in unreflective activism.

The conversation about today’s universities would be improved if focus shifted away from concern with individual liberties and turned instead to the quality of education being offered. Universities have a crucial role to play in educating citizens for participation and leadership in a modern republic. Unfortunately, they are failing in this task today more than they are succeeding.

Civil society has the potential to play a leading role in improving higher education. Students and their families ought to choose their schools carefully. Alumni and philanthropists ought to be discerning about where and how they choose to invest their money. Aiding private citizens in these tasks are a growing number of nonprofit organizations, ranging from citizen watchdogs to donor-advisers, who can guide families and donors about the state of academia today and how those interested can best support a good education. The availability of a proper liberal arts education is crucial for the future of our republic.

SOURCE 






MEF vs Columbia Univ.: Opposite Responses to Erdoğan's Bullying

Policy and controversy – Left: NATO parliamentarians gather at the start of the Forum-sponsored policy conference. Right: The Turkish delegation loudly interrupts the proceedings before storming out as Emre Çelik, a Turkish dissident, took the podium.

PHILADELPHIA – April 8, 2019 – When Turkey's government demanded that Columbia University cancel a panel on the rule of law in Turkey because of the inclusion of a panelist associated with the Gülen movement, guess what that august institution did? It caved, canceling the event three days before it was scheduled.

In contrast, when the Middle East Forum received a similar Turkish diktat in September 2017, it handled the situation with a bit more courage and cunning. We invite Columbia President Lee Bollinger (a legal specialist on freedom of speech, incidentally) to take notes:

Hosting a conference for NATO's Parliamentary Assembly (NATO-PA), MEF also invited a member of the Gülen movement. Less than a week before the event, NATO-PA informed us that no less than the presidential office in Ankara demanded we remove the Gülen associate, Emre Çelik. If we did not, NATO-PA would pull out.

Wishing neither to capitulate to Turkey's President Erdoğan, nor to have a major investment go up in smoke, we decided to have our cake and eat it too. We removed Çelik from the program, so the event went off as planned.

But we arranged for Çelik to enter the conference through a back-door and invited him on-stage at the final session. When Çelik rose to speak, the Turkish delegation loudly interrupted the proceedings, then led the entire NATO-PA delegation in storming out (video here).

As MEF President Daniel Pipes explained to the exiting delegates: "NATO exists 'to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization' of member states. But the Republic of Turkey has betrayed those principles. President Erdoğan's attempt to stifle free speech at a Middle East Forum event today was despicable. We did not accept it."

"As Middle East studies departments increasingly censor themselves to align with Middle East dictators, the Forum happily fills the intellectual void," notes MEF's director of academic affairs, Winfield Myers. "We examine all angles and provide platforms for a wide-array of voices – unafraid, with no apologies, and not bending before despots."

SOURCE 




Thursday, April 11, 2019



At America’s universities, status is for sale

WHEN WILLIAM “RICK” Singer was charged for using bribery and false information to get kids from wealthy families into school, few Americans were surprised to learn that some parents would do anything to get their kids a Yale or Stanford degree. What did surprise many people was that the scandal also involved traditionally second-tier schools like the University of Southern California and Wake Forest.

How did we get here? I would argue that this toxic situation was created, in part, by two major forces introduced in the 1980s: federal funding cuts, initiated under Ronald Reagan, and the 1983 launch of the US News & World Report college rankings.

The Reagan-era cuts were sizeable. By 1989, the federal share of education funding had dropped from 12 to 6 percent; further state cuts to higher education followed. Strapped for cash and faced with a declining student population, colleges and universities found themselves in a race to attract applicants.

Around the same time, in 1983, U.S. News & World Report launched its college rankings, which, for the first time, solidified a set of standards by which all of America’s institutions — from commuter schools like Northeastern to nationally renowned universities like Stanford — would now be judged. Some of the metrics used to determine rankings directly addressed educational quality, but other metrics seemed more tangential to the actual task of teaching and learning.

When federal aid evaporated, tuition costs escalated, forcing parents and students to justify the out-of-pocket expense of a degree. So they turned to the college rankings. “[Applicants] said, ‘Hmm, if I’m going to be spending this much money, I hope my degree is worth something, not just in the skills, but in brand value,’” says Steve Cohen, the coauthor of the 1983 book “Getting In!,” about college admissions.

In a short time, college applicants became brand shoppers. “Suddenly people had a much better idea of what other colleges existed out there and where they fell in the pecking order,” says Jeff Selingo, an authority who writes about higher education.

America’s institutions, which needed students’ dollars more than ever, were forced to appeal to this new kind of shopper. To attract wealthier and higher-achieving applicants, schools began to sink big money into aggressive marketing tactics, campus amenities, and pedigreed faculty. (Many schools were “recruiting top-notch college professors in much the same way professional sports teams lure star athletes,” reported The Washington Post at the time.)

Between 1995 and 2006, annual spending on college construction grew from $6.1 billion to $15.1 billion, according to College Planning & Management, an industry publication. As in the business world, the actual workers in higher education — primarily, adjunct professors — found their compensation inadequate while the number of highly paid college administrators, the executives, proliferated.

In the years that followed, schools that couldn’t play the rankings game fell down the list. Meanwhile, the exorbitant cost of enhancing an institution’s prestige was transferred onto students in the form of higher tuition. Americans’ educational debt now stands at $1.5 trillion.

In the 1990s, Northeastern was still a regional school, its campus mostly parking lots to accommodate its large commuter population. And it ranked 162nd. Reeling from shrinking enrollment and an economic recession, Northeastern’s president, Jack Curry, cut class size and 875 jobs. He sensed that the school’s time was up. “If we didn’t change,” Curry told me in 2014 while I was reporting a story for Boston magazine, “I don’t think we would have survived,”

“It was a traumatic time,” Bob Culver, a former Northeastern senior vice president and treasurer told me back then. “[Northeastern] was an institution that was physically and financially in need of attention at a time when all the sudden the market moved away from it.”

In 1996, Curry’s successor, Richard Freeland, saw the college rankings as an opportunity. Freeland had watched higher-ranked schools attract better students and bigger donations from alumni. He placed his bets: “There’s no question that the system invites gaming,” Freeland told me in 2014. “We made a systematic effort to influence [the outcome].”

Even as it published its methodology, exactly how U.S. News calculated its rankings was a closely guarded secret, and today the formula continues to be tweaked to reflect changing priorities. But like Google and Facebook algorithms, the formula can be inferred.

So Freeland had researchers reverse-engineer the rankings and calculate which U.S. News criteria he could manipulate, such as class size and graduation rate, to rise in the rankings. Freeland was so determined to advance that he even visited the U.S. News offices in Washington, D.C., to further divine the mysteries of the methodology with rankings guru Bob Morse. He also had a mission: to influence one metric. Due to Northeastern’s co-op program, most students were graduating in at least five years, rather than the traditional four, which counted against the school’s ranking, until Freeland appealed to the media company to reconsider the metric.

To improve graduation and retention rates, the school invested heavily in campus infrastructure, resulting in the construction of a seven-building complex, at the cost of approximately $1 billion. (Residential students are less likely to drop out than commuter students.)

On business trips, Freeland schmoozed with colleagues at other ranked institutions to influence the peer assessment portion of the U.S. News methodology.

Freeland’s plan for Northeastern paid off. When he retired in 2006, the school had moved up to number 98. Boston Business Journal called the climb “one of the most dramatic since U.S. News began ranking schools.” In turn, the one-time commuter school began attracting significantly more applicants from further afield, which Freeland attributed to its new reputation. “All those kids out in California don’t know a damn thing about Northeastern, but they know it’s rising in the rankings,” he told me.

PERHAPS MORE TROUBLING is the fact that many of the U.S. News metrics can be gamed. Selectivity, for example, offers a quick way to understand a school’s desirability and prestige, which is why virtually all institutions play some version of the admissions rate game. The goal is to encourage ever greater numbers of students to try their luck, which grows a school’s applicant pool and drives down its admissions rate. As a result, schools have watched their selectivity increase year after year. Stanford now admits 4.4 percent; Princeton: 5.5 percent; Williams: 12.2 percent. This year, Northeastern accepted 19.3 percent, according to the university.

Average test scores and GPAs of incoming freshmen, another important ranking metric, can also be gamed. Like other schools, Northeastern has found ways to work around these numbers, particularly standardized test scores, which constitute 7.75 percent of the ranking. Since President Joseph Aoun took over in 2006, the percentage of students from international schools attending Northeastern has quadrupled to 20 percent of the student body. (This high percentage of foreign students is not uncommon at American universities today; because they pay their own way, they’re very desirable.) When applying, these students are explicitly instructed by Northeastern not to submit their SAT and ACT data. (Both Boston University and NYU are test-optional for these students.)

U.S. News penalizes schools that fail to submit all scores they receive from students, but if the school in question doesn’t collect this information, it has nothing to report. Based on Northeastern’s percentage of students coming from international schools, at least one-fifth of undergraduate scores weren’t factored into the official average reported to U.S. News.

SOURCE 







Muslim teacher at top London High School can't read or write

Struggling to read and write was not enough to stop a teacher getting a job at a top secondary school.

Faisal Ahmed was given the green light by elite teacher training program TeachFirst despite having 'extreme difficulty with handwriting', problems with reading and understanding 'written tests'.

Just days into his new job at St Thomas More Catholic school in leafy Wood Green, north London, he was summoned by the headmaster and suspended, reported The Sun.

Mr Ahmed suffers from dyspraxia, a condition that affects co-ordination, and he told the headmaster Mark Rowland that he was unable to write for 'more than a couple of minutes' as his condition caused him too much pain.

TeachFirst recruits top graduates who are parachuted into schools while they study for a teaching qualification, with the organisation receiving millions in funding.

The scandal emerged when Mr Ahmed, who is in his 30s, sued the school for constructive dismissal and disability discrimination after he quit in anger.

Papers obtained by the Sun showed that Mr Ahmed lost his legal battle and subsequent appeal over the 2016 scandal, with the London Central Employment and Tribunal throwing out his claims last month.

Ex-City worker Mr Ahmed was going to teach vital GCSE and A-Level lessons to teenagers.

TeachFirst admitted that they did not inform the school of Mr Ahmed's condition.

SOURCE 








Australian academics are heading down the Communist road

MAURICE NEWMAN

With Anzac Day near, self-loathing academics are back. Anything that undermines our national pride, besmirches our military achievements and questions our values will be prosecuted.

Rewriting Australia’s proud military record is important to revisionists. They want us to see brave, selfless service as being nothing more than the projection of white supremacy.

Murdoch University history lecturer Dean Aszkielowicz is the latest to demonstrate contempt for our national heritage. He mocks a section of the Australian War Memorial website that states “Australians continue­ to invoke the Anzac spirit, including the concept of egalitarianism, a sardonic sense of humour and a contempt for danger, in times of hardship”.

Aszkielowicz tells his students that “very few things the Aust­ralian War Memorial claims on its website about Anzac Day are true”.

How is it that only 74 years after the end of World War II, a young academic, filled with resentment and lack of appreciation for the world he has inherited, could be so ignorant of its values and have such disdain for the bravery of those who saved this country from tyranny?

Yet he and many of his academic cohort share this obsession to rewrite history and deny the real­ity that distant wars fought to preserve freedom also helped shape our national identity.

Murdoch University defends Aszkielowicz, saying “students are encouraged to draw on arguments and views from across the political and ­ academic spectrum”. “In the context of these lectures­, our academics provided ­informed but challenging comment respectfully — this is academic freedom in action,” it says.

Academic freedom? At so many universities these words have assumed Orwellian qualities. Today, freedom in the classroom and on the campus means conformity and alignment with the approved dogma. Refusal to toe the line can mean exclusion, expulsion and failure for students.

Take Bjorn Lomborg’s attempts to establish the Australian Consensus Centre, along with a $4 million endowment, at the University of Western Australia. He was rejected because, as UWA student guild president Lizzy O’Shea observed: “Many believe his (Dr Lomborg’s) ‘research’ downplays the effects of climate change and calls for inaction.” At least three other universities agreed and also turned him down.

Heretical teaching clearly has its limits. Those limits terminated the careers of Peter Ridd and Bob Carter, each having served for 30 years at James Cook University. Both differed with their colleagues over climate change, with Ridd criticising his colleagues’ “deficient” and “misleading” environmental research. He also called into question claims the Great Barrier Reef was being wrecked by global warming.

This was heresy on a grand scale and, rather than investigate his claims, the university simply fired him. It seems at JCU some academics have more freedom than others.

This politicisation of our universities also can be seen in the number of rejections experienced by the Ramsay Centre, which is seeking to establish liberal arts courses leading to a Western civilisation degree.

The centre offers a handsome endowment and numerous scholarships, but University of Queensland antagonists reflect the general academic view the courses are “trying to undermine critical analyses of ‘the West’ in favour of an anti-intellectual celebration of Western civilisation, something which is impossible to defend in a modern university”. In other words, we won’t have the virtues of Western civilisation taught at our “modern” universities.

This is now a pattern. Students at the University of NSW are told James Cook was an invader rather than a discoverer.

The rewritten history of governor Arthur Phillip portrays him as genocidal, notwithstanding his demands Aborigines be well treated. He abolished slavery 20 years before Britain. Yet better to depict him as a white supremacist than someone doing his best with what he had.

Likewise, governor Lachlan Macquarie must be remembered for his tit-for-tat violence towards Aborigines than his role in the social, economic and architectural development of the colony.

There is a growing movement to have the statues of all three removed and their names erased from public places.

Winston Churchill understood “a nation that forgets its past has no future”. French histor­ian Ernest Renan said “forgetting … is a crucial factor in the creation of the nation”.

Louisa Lim, author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, writes: “National amnesia has become what Chinese writer Yan Lianke calls a ‘state-sponsored sport’. And as Beijing’s global influence rises, its controlling instincts — to tame, corral, shape, prune, expurgate history and historical memory — are increasingly exported. At home, Beijing’s tightening grip on history designs not only what can be remembered but also the manner in which it can be marked.”

China’s latest official version of history has the force of law. It venerates Chinese patriotism and military sacrifices. As well as uniting the country behind common beliefs, Beijing will conveniently use this history to press territorial claims over the entire South China Sea.

In Australia, we have yet to hear the vision splendid our universities and academics, such as Aszkielowicz, envisage will arise from the ashes of our best-forgotten past. Perhaps, like the Chinese, it is a socialist utopia where censorship, not academic freedom, is clinically enforced and where complying academics can win an exalted place in history.

SOURCE  




Wednesday, April 10, 2019




Ted Cruz Threatens To Go After Law School that ‘Blacklists Christian Organizations’

Dummies at Yale think they can prevent discrimination by discriminating

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has sent a letter to Yale Law School voicing his concern that the elite institution is discriminating against Christians.

Cruz is objecting to a recent policy change that impacts whether the school will support positions for law school students who work for employers whose politics do not align with those of Yale.

“Public news reports indicate that Yale Law School has recently adopted a transparently discriminatory policy: namely, that Yale will no longer provide any stipends or loan repayments for students serving in organizations professing traditional Christian views or adhering to traditional sexual ethics,” he said in the letter.

He asked for a response from the school and said if it is not satisfactory, he could refer Yale Law to the Justice Department for an investigation of discrimination.

As reported by the Washington Examiner, Yale amended its policy after LGBTQ groups on campus objected to the law school offering stipends that supported students who worked for organizations the LGBTQ students considered discriminatory.

“The First Amendment protects both free speech and the Free Exercise of religion. Yale’s new policy does neither,” Cruz said.

Noting that the controversy that led to the policy came from the presence of an Alliance Defending Freedom speaker on campus, Cruz said it had the clear intent “to blacklist Christian organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and to punish Yale students whose values or religious faith lead them to work there.”

Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken issued a public post defending the policy as opposing all discrimination.

“We recently decided that the Law School will require that any employment position it financially supports be open to all of our students. If an employer refuses to hire students because they are Christian, black, veterans, or gay, we will not fund that position,” she wrote.

However, in a March email reported by the Examiner, Gerken made it clear than the school was responding to an LGBTQ group known as the Outlaws, which had pushed for the change to address its concerns about supporting conservative organizations.

“We appreciate the leadership of Outlaws for raising the issue of applicability of our nondiscrimination policy to student employment opportunities funded by the Law School … We reaffirm our commitment that these (LGBTQ) students, faculty, and staff should not experience discrimination inside or outside of this Law School,” Gerken wrote.

“The Law School cannot prohibit a student from working for an employer who discriminates, but that is not a reason why Yale Law School should bear any obligation to fund that work, particularly if that organization does not give equal employment opportunity to all of our students,” she wrote.

SOURCE  






11 Year Old Girl Banned By Teacher From Writing About Her ‘Hero'



Long Island sixth-grader Bella Moscato wants to discuss why “Donald Trump is my hero,” but her teacher at Samoset Middle School thinks the 45th president “spreads negativity and says bad stuff about women,” she said.

The 11-year-old from Lake Ronkonkoma told News 12 her teacher asked students to fill out a worksheet titled “What is A Hero To You?” then nixed her choice because she doesn’t like Trump.

“What I didn’t get, she was ok with somebody doing Barack Obama, but not ok with Donald Trump?” Moscato said. “That’s what got me angry. I didn’t like that.”

Moscato’s parents demanded an apology from the Sachem Central School District at a recent board meeting, but so far have received only a public statement from the superintendent alleging their daughter is a liar.

Superintendent Kenneth Graham issued a statement to News 12 alleging “it is not accurate that this student was told that they were not allowed to conduct research on any individual for a school assignment, including President Trump.

“To the best of our knowledge, by choice the student is still conducting their project of President Trump,” Graham wrote.

“My daughter’s hero is the president of our country,” Moscato’s father, Arthur Moscato, said proudly to a loud applause at the recent board meeting. “I can’t believe that anybody in the school would tell my daughter … that that guy can’t be her hero. I’m incensed by this.”

“I’m incensed that my story was said to be unaccurate, by you,” he said. “My story isn’t unaccurate. My daughter didn’t lie.”

Moscato’s mother, Valerie Moscato, elaborated for News 12.

“This was really frustrating to me because, you know, my daughter has every right to do and pick a hero of her choice. It’s her First Amendment right, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, so it was really upsetting to me that she was trying to shut her down,” she said.

The news station’s video from the interview makes it clear the youngster isn’t going to let her teacher’s political bias stand in her way. The worksheet asked students how they define a hero, and Moscato wrote “a person who saves people. Somebody who puts their life on the line to save someone.”

A hero’s qualities include “brave, kind, loyal and confident,” she wrote.

When prompted to “provide one example of a real life hero from the past or present,” Moscato wrote “Donald Trump winning the presidency.”

“What positive contribution has this person made to society?” the worksheet asked.

Moscato wrote: “Donald Trump has helped millions of people by creating a great economy. He is fighting every day to protect people from drugs crossing the border.”

District board members had little to say when confronted about the incident, News 12 reports, but at least one promised to “look into it.”

SOURCE 






Australia: Outrage as grade school bans students from handing out birthday invitations because it could hurt the feelings of those who miss out

Are kids supposed to think that everyone likes them? A strange life lesson

A bizarre new ban on birthday party invitations being handed out in the playground at a primary school on Sydney's north shore has sparked outrage.

Parents at Mosman Public School now have to send party invitations to their children's classmates via email to avoid anyone not invited from getting upset or offended.

They were also advised by the school via email to discourage their children from discussing planned festivities while at school, The Daily Telegraph reported.

It's understood the school implemented the new ban after a child became upset when they weren't invited to a classmate's party.

'It's going too far, we have to build resilient kids,' one outraged parent told the publication.

'You can't give birthday invitations by paper (at the school), only by email and you must tell your children not to talk about the party.'

Mosman isn't the first school in NSW to impose a bizarre birthday-related ban.

Birthday candles are banned at Seven Hills West Public School in western Sydney, where only small individual cakes are allowed to brought to school to celebrate.

'We welcome small individual cakes or the like if your child wishes to share his/her birthday with the class. Candles ARE NOT permitted and teachers are UNABLE to cut cakes,' a school newsletter from February this year states.

Bardia Public School in Sydney south-west has also banned teachers from cutting cakes.

Birthday cakes have been banned at Wamberal Public School on the Central Coast since 2017.

St Thomas More Catholic Primary School near Campbelltown in Sydney's south-west followed suit earlier this year.

SOURCE  




Tuesday, April 09, 2019


Don’t rush those regulations on small colleges

The closure of Mount Ida College was unfortunate and terrible for all those involved. But the student disarray and faculty and staff job losses that ensued are not the norm for small colleges, and certainly not the lens through which the public should view these institutions.

Regulators are reacting to Mount Ida’s closure by rushing to determine rules for colleges facing challenges in Massachusetts. The risk of publicly identifying an institution on a “watch list” will preclude any chance of a turnaround and potentially cause undue harm to institutions that are working hard to succeed. Instead of looking at that single incident as the template for the future of small colleges, it is much more instructive to look at the successes of institutions like Simmons and Regis – two colleges that fought through difficult times to emerge as healthy and vibrant institutions. In fact, these institutions are stronger today than ever before.

Eleven years ago, Simmons was facing difficult times. There was a structural deficit, with three years of financial losses to address, a partially finished academic building, and a banker – Lehman Brothers – headed for bankruptcy. A “snapshot” of that institution would have sent parents, students, and benefactors scurrying.

But instead of closing the school, Simmons’ leadership went to work, slashing the budget and making deep and painful layoffs, while setting prudent budget practices, including mandating a minimum annual surplus of $1 million and seeking tuition revenue diversification. Stabilization allowed innovation. Simmons partnered with a world-class education company, 2U, to become an early adopter of high-quality online education in 2014. Currently, 29 percent of Simmons’ tuition revenue comes from online graduate programs, and its graduate schools’ enrollment now doubles undergraduate enrollment.

Today, robust revenues from Simmons’ online programming provide flexibility to support ongoing strategic initiatives and prudent financial decision-making, a required way of life for a tuition-dependent, modestly endowed institution.

Regis, too, faced challenging times 20 years ago, but the university made hard choices through budget and program cuts, and leadership understood that a successful turnaround required a bold growth strategy. The Regis administration and board of trustees moved quickly to adapt the university to the needs of the changing job market, becoming a leader in health sciences and nursing, and expanding graduate programs to keep classrooms full during nights, weekends. and summers. Regis also developed a robust online program that now serves more than a thousand students worldwide.

Diversifying revenues, growing enrollment with new degrees and programs, and deciding to become coeducational has paved the way for Regis’s long-term financial growth. University faculty are adept at both the academic core of education and the career development of students, many of whom are first in their families to attend college.

Today, Regis meets the modern workforce needs of our Commonwealth — for example, awarding degrees to 500 nurses every year. In fact, when Mount Ida closed, Regis stepped in not only to accept transfer students, but also take over the entire dental hygiene program, including faculty and staff. Thanks to Regis’s significant investment, the students in the program will soon learn in a new cutting-edge dental clinic in Waltham.

At Regis and Simmons, access and social justice are at the heart of the mission. Regis offers bachelor’s degrees to provide easily accessible opportunities to students in the city of Lawrence. For more than a decade, Regis has been educating nurses in Haiti, significantly contributing to the country’s health care needs. As the only women’s college in Boston, Simmons provides 16 full scholarships to low-income city residents and continues to feed the local workforce with skilled nurses, social workers, and library scientists ready to lead.

Across this state, more students are educated at private colleges than publics – and choose small colleges because they love the close-knit atmosphere, where faculty are deeply invested in students’ personal and professional growth. Small colleges are the centers of their communities. Students, faculty, and staff help keep Main Streets alive. Students give invaluable volunteer hours at local schools and nonprofits. College campuses provide sports, music, movies, and dance, as well as libraries and playing fields. They are more than an economic engine for this state; they are a fundamental component of our state’s identity.

Are there any regulations acceptable to college presidents? Of course. We are already fully engaged and providing important feedback on the process. A subset of finance leaders from area colleges and universities are helping policy makers to better understand a range of metrics and data that will assist in the early detection of financially fragile institutions and help both the schools and students avoid a rushed, crisis situation.

Given the long history of innovation among Massachusetts colleges and universities, we need support for our efforts, not an anchor to weigh them down. In the well-meaning effort to protect students and their families, rushing the implementation of regulations may inadvertently hurt them by damaging the small colleges that serve them so well.

SOURCE







He bought the fencing coach’s house. Then his son got into Harvard

It was a modest house by this town’s standards, a center-entrance colonial, three bedrooms and a two-car garage on a quarter-acre lot. The inside hadn’t welcomed a renovator in many, many years, and the outside didn’t wear its age particularly well.

Its owner: Peter Brand, Harvard University’s legendary fencing coach. Its assessed value: $549,300.

So when the house sold to a wealthy Maryland businessman for close to a million dollars in May 2016, the town’s top assessor was so dumbfounded that he wrote the following in his notes: “Makes no sense.”

The buyer, it turns out, was the father of a high school junior who was actively looking at applying to Harvard with an eye toward being on the fencing team.

Soon enough, Jie Zhao’s younger son would gain admission and join the team. And Zhao, who never lived a day in the Needham house, would sell it 17 months after he bought it for a $324,500 loss.

The home sale may become the next chapter in the national debate over fairness in college admissions.

Zhao, who has lavished his largesse on the fencing world and on Harvard, knows how the home purchase looks. But he said it was not meant to help his younger son get into college. Rather, in a series of interviews with the Globe, he called it an investment and favor for Brand, the coach whom he said had become his close friend.

“I want to help Peter Brand because I feel so sorry he has to travel so much to go to fencing practice,” Zhao said of the coach’s 12-or-so-mile commute.

But Harvard officials, who say they first learned of the transaction this week from the Globe, want to know a lot more. They have retained outside counsel — whom they declined to name — to conduct an independent investigation.

“We are committed to ensuring the integrity of our recruitment practices,” Harvard College spokeswoman Rachael Dane said.

A roiling nationwide college admissions scandal has resulted in federal criminal charges against 50 parents, coaches, and consultants, and exposed the lengths to which rich parents will go to get their kids into elite schools. On Wednesday, actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin appeared in Boston federal court in connection with their roles in the alleged bribery scheme.

Harvard has, so far, been unscathed. But the 2016 sale of Brand’s home raises questions about whether Brand helped Zhao’s son get into Harvard in exchange for the inflated home price.

Harvard officials pointed out to the Globe they have a clear conflict of interest policy. It states “a conflict of interest exists when individual commitment to the University may be compromised by personal benefit.” Employees are expected to avoid situations or activities that could interfere with their “judgment in the best interests of Harvard University.”

Failure to disclose possible conflicts could lead to disciplinary action or termination, the policy says.

During the weeks Zhao’s Needham house sat on the market for $699,000, it caught the eye of a family looking to buy a property and flip it. They were surprised by the price, and even more surprised it had sold a year earlier for almost $1 million.

They didn’t buy it, but looked up the buyer and seller in property records. They Googled them, and joked among themselves there might have been some funny business between Harvard’s fencing coach and the family of a recruit.

In March, after federal prosecutors announced the indictments of dozens in the massive college admissions scam, they decided to call the Globe.

SOURCE






University cheats in Australia face jail and huge fines

Cheats who take exams or write essays on behalf of university students could be jailed for two years if the Morrison government wins the next election.

Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan is also threatening university cheats with fines of up to $210,000.

Mr Tehan does not want hardworking students to have to compete with swindlers and frauds. "It's simply not good enough," he told reporters in Canberra on Sunday.

"It's not fair for those students who are doing the hard yards, for those students who are doing all the work, for those students who put hours into studying."

The minister is especially wary of highly sophisticated cheating services based offshore.

"If you're a cheating service, understand now you are going to face the full force of the law if you provide those services to students here in Australia," he said.

"For those services based overseas, we are going to use blocking to make sure that they cannot provide those services.

"For those who are here and operating in Australia, understand that we will come after you."

SOURCE 





Monday, April 08, 2019



Don’t rush those regulations on small colleges

The closure of Mount Ida College was unfortunate and terrible for all those involved. But the student disarray and faculty and staff job losses that ensued are not the norm for small colleges, and certainly not the lens through which the public should view these institutions.

Regulators are reacting to Mount Ida’s closure by rushing to determine rules for colleges facing challenges in Massachusetts. The risk of publicly identifying an institution on a “watch list” will preclude any chance of a turnaround and potentially cause undue harm to institutions that are working hard to succeed. Instead of looking at that single incident as the template for the future of small colleges, it is much more instructive to look at the successes of institutions like Simmons and Regis – two colleges that fought through difficult times to emerge as healthy and vibrant institutions. In fact, these institutions are stronger today than ever before.

Eleven years ago, Simmons was facing difficult times. There was a structural deficit, with three years of financial losses to address, a partially finished academic building, and a banker – Lehman Brothers – headed for bankruptcy. A “snapshot” of that institution would have sent parents, students, and benefactors scurrying.

But instead of closing the school, Simmons’ leadership went to work, slashing the budget and making deep and painful layoffs, while setting prudent budget practices, including mandating a minimum annual surplus of $1 million and seeking tuition revenue diversification. Stabilization allowed innovation. Simmons partnered with a world-class education company, 2U, to become an early adopter of high-quality online education in 2014. Currently, 29 percent of Simmons’ tuition revenue comes from online graduate programs, and its graduate schools’ enrollment now doubles undergraduate enrollment.

Today, robust revenues from Simmons’ online programming provide flexibility to support ongoing strategic initiatives and prudent financial decision-making, a required way of life for a tuition-dependent, modestly endowed institution.

Regis, too, faced challenging times 20 years ago, but the university made hard choices through budget and program cuts, and leadership understood that a successful turnaround required a bold growth strategy. The Regis administration and board of trustees moved quickly to adapt the university to the needs of the changing job market, becoming a leader in health sciences and nursing, and expanding graduate programs to keep classrooms full during nights, weekends. and summers. Regis also developed a robust online program that now serves more than a thousand students worldwide.

Diversifying revenues, growing enrollment with new degrees and programs, and deciding to become coeducational has paved the way for Regis’s long-term financial growth. University faculty are adept at both the academic core of education and the career development of students, many of whom are first in their families to attend college.

Today, Regis meets the modern workforce needs of our Commonwealth — for example, awarding degrees to 500 nurses every year. In fact, when Mount Ida closed, Regis stepped in not only to accept transfer students, but also take over the entire dental hygiene program, including faculty and staff. Thanks to Regis’s significant investment, the students in the program will soon learn in a new cutting-edge dental clinic in Waltham.

At Regis and Simmons, access and social justice are at the heart of the mission. Regis offers bachelor’s degrees to provide easily accessible opportunities to students in the city of Lawrence. For more than a decade, Regis has been educating nurses in Haiti, significantly contributing to the country’s health care needs. As the only women’s college in Boston, Simmons provides 16 full scholarships to low-income city residents and continues to feed the local workforce with skilled nurses, social workers, and library scientists ready to lead.

Across this state, more students are educated at private colleges than publics – and choose small colleges because they love the close-knit atmosphere, where faculty are deeply invested in students’ personal and professional growth. Small colleges are the centers of their communities. Students, faculty, and staff help keep Main Streets alive. Students give invaluable volunteer hours at local schools and nonprofits. College campuses provide sports, music, movies, and dance, as well as libraries and playing fields. They are more than an economic engine for this state; they are a fundamental component of our state’s identity.

Are there any regulations acceptable to college presidents? Of course. We are already fully engaged and providing important feedback on the process. A subset of finance leaders from area colleges and universities are helping policy makers to better understand a range of metrics and data that will assist in the early detection of financially fragile institutions and help both the schools and students avoid a rushed, crisis situation.

Given the long history of innovation among Massachusetts colleges and universities, we need support for our efforts, not an anchor to weigh them down. In the well-meaning effort to protect students and their families, rushing the implementation of regulations may inadvertently hurt them by damaging the small colleges that serve them so well.

SOURCE 







He bought the fencing coach’s house. Then his son got into Harvard

It was a modest house by this town’s standards, a center-entrance colonial, three bedrooms and a two-car garage on a quarter-acre lot. The inside hadn’t welcomed a renovator in many, many years, and the outside didn’t wear its age particularly well.

Its owner: Peter Brand, Harvard University’s legendary fencing coach. Its assessed value: $549,300.

So when the house sold to a wealthy Maryland businessman for close to a million dollars in May 2016, the town’s top assessor was so dumbfounded that he wrote the following in his notes: “Makes no sense.”

The buyer, it turns out, was the father of a high school junior who was actively looking at applying to Harvard with an eye toward being on the fencing team.

Soon enough, Jie Zhao’s younger son would gain admission and join the team. And Zhao, who never lived a day in the Needham house, would sell it 17 months after he bought it for a $324,500 loss.

The home sale may become the next chapter in the national debate over fairness in college admissions.

Zhao, who has lavished his largesse on the fencing world and on Harvard, knows how the home purchase looks. But he said it was not meant to help his younger son get into college. Rather, in a series of interviews with the Globe, he called it an investment and favor for Brand, the coach whom he said had become his close friend.

“I want to help Peter Brand because I feel so sorry he has to travel so much to go to fencing practice,” Zhao said of the coach’s 12-or-so-mile commute.

But Harvard officials, who say they first learned of the transaction this week from the Globe, want to know a lot more. They have retained outside counsel — whom they declined to name — to conduct an independent investigation.

“We are committed to ensuring the integrity of our recruitment practices,” Harvard College spokeswoman Rachael Dane said.

A roiling nationwide college admissions scandal has resulted in federal criminal charges against 50 parents, coaches, and consultants, and exposed the lengths to which rich parents will go to get their kids into elite schools. On Wednesday, actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin appeared in Boston federal court in connection with their roles in the alleged bribery scheme.

Harvard has, so far, been unscathed. But the 2016 sale of Brand’s home raises questions about whether Brand helped Zhao’s son get into Harvard in exchange for the inflated home price.

Harvard officials pointed out to the Globe they have a clear conflict of interest policy. It states “a conflict of interest exists when individual commitment to the University may be compromised by personal benefit.” Employees are expected to avoid situations or activities that could interfere with their “judgment in the best interests of Harvard University.”

Failure to disclose possible conflicts could lead to disciplinary action or termination, the policy says.

During the weeks Zhao’s Needham house sat on the market for $699,000, it caught the eye of a family looking to buy a property and flip it. They were surprised by the price, and even more surprised it had sold a year earlier for almost $1 million.

They didn’t buy it, but looked up the buyer and seller in property records. They Googled them, and joked among themselves there might have been some funny business between Harvard’s fencing coach and the family of a recruit.

In March, after federal prosecutors announced the indictments of dozens in the massive college admissions scam, they decided to call the Globe.

SOURCE 






University cheats in Australia face jail and huge fines

Cheats who take exams or write essays on behalf of university students could be jailed for two years if the Morrison government wins the next election.

Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan is also threatening university cheats with fines of up to $210,000.

Mr Tehan does not want hardworking students to have to compete with swindlers and frauds. "It's simply not good enough," he told reporters in Canberra on Sunday.

"It's not fair for those students who are doing the hard yards, for those students who are doing all the work, for those students who put hours into studying."

The minister is especially wary of highly sophisticated cheating services based offshore.

"If you're a cheating service, understand now you are going to face the full force of the law if you provide those services to students here in Australia," he said.

"For those services based overseas, we are going to use blocking to make sure that they cannot provide those services.

"For those who are here and operating in Australia, understand that we will come after you."

SOURCE  


Sunday, April 07, 2019



Ohio Catholic classical school sues city to protect civil rights, religious freedom

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing a small, Catholic college preparatory school filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday to challenge an Ohio city’s ordinance that requires the school to violate its religious beliefs in employment, admissions, and other policies or risk fines and jail time.

The Lyceum provides its students with a faith-integrated, classical education and seeks to form “lifelong learners in a joyful pursuit of the Truth, who is Christ.” As a faith community, the school seeks to abide by and convey the teachings of the Bible and the doctrine of the Catholic Church, including their teachings on marriage and sexuality. But in 2018, the South Euclid City Council passed a sweeping ordinance that could force the school to hire teachers or enroll students who disagree with its mission and teachings.

“Religious schools like The Lyceum must be free to operate consistently with their faith without fear of unjust government punishment—that is their right under the First Amendment,” said ADF Legal Counsel Christiana Holcomb. “But the city’s ordinance threatens this small school with criminal penalties simply for selecting faculty and students who share its religious convictions. The Lyceum’s parents, students, and faculty have agreed to live by community standards rooted in Catholic teaching. The city’s hostile regulation not only threatens the school, it also undermines the rights of parents and students who deliberately seek out this unique, faith-based education.”

Initial drafts of the South Euclid ordinance contained an explicit provision that allowed religious organizations to act consistently with their mission and teachings, but the city council removed those protections from the final text. The ordinance is also vague, making it impossible for The Lyceum’s administrators to know whether the school’s policies are in violation of the law.

Although the school has made multiple attempts to obtain clarification, the city twice illegally refused to answer the school’s public records request. And when the school directly asked the city whether its ordinance applies to The Lyceum, the city refused to say. So the school’s leaders are left with no other option but to proceed to federal court, reasonably fearing that living out and articulating their faith would directly violate city law and put them at risk of an up to $500 fine, restitution, or up to 60 days in jail per occurrence.

“The First Amendment doesn’t allow government hostility, targeting, or discrimination against religious schools because of their beliefs,” said Holcomb. “Unfortunately, South Euclid is threatening to crush The Lyceum because of its beliefs. The U.S. Supreme Court has recently made it clear on at least two occasions that the First Amendment continues to protect the belief that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. That’s why we’re asking a federal court to stop the city from enforcing its flawed and hostile law.”

The lawsuit, The Lyceum v. The City of South Euclid—filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division—argues that the city’s ordinance violates the First Amendment, the 14th Amendment, and the Ohio Constitution. Matthew Nee, one of more than 3,300 attorneys allied with ADF, is serving as local counsel in the case for the church.

SOURCE 






British Schools Removing Analog Clocks From Exam Halls Because Kids Can’t Read Them

I looked to see if this was datelined April 1 but it is not

Apparently, younger generations in Britain have been spending so much time on their digital devices that they can no longer tell time on analog clocks, reports Inspire To Change. So, rather than educate kids to properly read an analog clock, schools have elected to remove the clocks entirely from exam halls.

"In the UK, many educators are phasing out analog clocks in favor of digital ones," reports the outlet. "Students taking the GCSE and A-level exams were complaining that they couldn’t read the time. In order to make everything 'as easy and straightforward as possible,' they are making the switch to digital time reading."

Not only that, the clock removals are happening in northwest London at schools like Ruislip High School, a city known for its gargantuan clock. Stephanie Keenan, Head of English at the high school, said teachers are "removing analog clocks from examination halls because teenagers are unable to tell the time."

Since students are under strict time limits during aptitude examinations, analog clocks will be swapped in favor of digital ones. Often the students will interrupt the test to ask the proctor how much time is left. The digital clocks will not only allow the students to keep track, they will lead to less interruptions.

Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders, simply said that the new generation cannot read a traditional clock due to the presence of digital technology. "The current generation isn’t as good at reading the traditional clock face as older generations," he told The Telegraph in 2018. "They are used to seeing a digital representation of time on their phone, on their computer. Nearly everything they’ve got is digital so youngsters are just exposed to time being given digitally everywhere."

Trobe added that teachers want the kids to feel as relaxed as possible during their exams without interruption.

"You don’t want them to put their hand up to ask how much time is left," he said. "Schools will inevitably be doing their best to make young children feel as relaxed as they can be. There is actually a big advantage in using digital clocks in exam rooms because it is much less easy to mistake a time on a digital clock when you are working against time."

To put it more bluntly, that means students taking tests to measure their intelligence cannot so much as perform the basic task of reading a piece of technology that has existed for several centuries ... And. The. Schools. Are. Enabling. This.

Sally Payne, a pediatric doctor, told The Telegraph that excessive use of digital technology is making it difficult for students to so much as hold a pencil.

"To be able to grip a pencil and move it, you need strong control of the fine muscles in your fingers. Children need lots of opportunity to develop those skills," she said. "It’s easier to give a child an iPad than encouraging them to do muscle-building play such as building blocks, cutting and sticking, or pulling toys and ropes. Because of this, they’re not developing the underlying foundation skills they need to grip and hold a pencil."

This tyke-tock illiteracy extends beyond the shores of Britain and into the United States where teachers have also suggested that analog clocks be swapped for digital ones. School curriculums, however, have not dropped the ball.

"In 2014, an Arizona teacher suggested that it may be time to retire the analog clock," said the Inspire To Change report. "However, currently United States schools are still keeping analog clocks. Learning to read the hands of a clock is part of the core curriculum in many schools."

Carol Burris, executive director of the advocacy Network for Public Education, told USA Today that children benefit tremendously by learning analog time due to the mathematics involved. "The skills that you need to read an analog clock are skills that kids when they’re young begin to learn," she told the outlet. "There’s a lot of very complex mathematical manipulations that are involved in being able to tell time with an analog clock. It takes some of the math skills students are learning and gives them an important real world context."

SOURCE 






‘Phallic’ slur on teaching methods by two Australian feminists

They are so full of hate

A row has erupted in education circles over a push for rigorous scientific research to inform classroom teaching practices, after a prominent education academic described it as a “masculinist fantasy” that would create a workforce of “phallic teachers” obsessed with “data, tools and … probes”.

Lucinda McKnight, who educates trainee teachers at Melbourne’s Deakin University, has called for “an urgent halt to the imposition of evidence-based education”, arguing that “pretending teachers are doctors … leaves students consigned to boring, standardised and ineffective cookbook teaching”.

The extraordinary claim, which follows bipartisan political support for the establishment of an independent national evidence institute to evaluate best practice in Australian schools, has provoked a swift backlash. Academics and teachers described it as “deeply flawed”, “bizarre” and “insulting”.

In an article on the Australian Association for Research in Education website, Dr McKnight and her co-author, Monash University academic and doctor Andy Morgan, takes aim at the push for education to embrace randomised controlled trials (RCTs), which are used in medicine to test the efficacy of a new drug or health intervention.

According to the article, encouraging teachers to be like doctors seems like a good idea but is “problematic” and ignores the fact evidence-based medicine is itself in “crisis”.

“Teaching is a feminised profession, with a much lower status than medicine,” the authors wrote. “It is easy for science to exert a masculinist authority over teachers, who are required to be ever more scientific to seem professional.

“They are called on to be phallic teachers, using data, tools, tests, rubrics, standards, benchmarks, probes and scientific trials, rather than ‘soft’ skills of listening, empathising, reflecting and sharing.” The article, based on a paper in the latest Journal of Education Policy, has been shared widely on social media and has sparked robust debate.

Pamela Snow, an expert in language and literacy at La Trobe University, described as “insulting” the assumption that “poor feeble women … would not be able to cope with the rigours of science’s analytic tools”.

“There is no connection ­between genitalia and the tools of scientific inquiry,” she said.

Dr Snow said teachers had an obligation to be aware of the latest research studies. “No one is pretending teachers are doctors but if they want to be afforded at least some professional autonomy then they have to accept professional accountability.”

Teacher and education blogger Greg Ashman, who has published a book about evidence-informed teaching practice, said the authors had taken legitimate criticism to launch an attack on the “entire concerto of evidence-based education”.

“Clearly, not all evidence is equal. Some randomised controlled trials are better than others. Some correlational studies are better than others,” he said.

“As teachers, it is time to build the expertise to evaluate these claims ourselves.”

Dr McKnight declined to speak to The Weekend Australian. On social media she claimed she had been “misrepresented”.

“I would like to emphasise that we are calling for scrutiny, not for ­rejecting scientific evidence.”

Dr Morgan said the medical industry had learned hard lessons about the application of evidence, including that an approach proven effective in a large population group might still be unsuitable for a particular patient, that should be heeded by educators.

SOURCE