UK: Oxbridge discriminating against grammar schools 'could unfairly impact black and minority ethnic pupils', warns education thinktank

Grammar schools are State-funded selective schools

Britain's leading universities have been warned not to discriminate against grammar schools as it could unfairly impact black and minority ethnic youngsters.

The warning comes after the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, Professor Stephen Toope, faced accusations of ‘social engineering’ for saying that enrolling more grammar school pupils would not help to widen ‘participation goals’.

Canadian-born Professor Toope told the Times Education Commission: ‘We have to keep making it very, very clear we are intending to reduce over time the number of people from independent schools.’

Now, the head of a respected think-tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), has waded into the row. Research from HEPI has shown that grammar schools send more ethnic minorities students to Cambridge than all other state schools in the country combined.

It also indicated that children from the most disadvantaged 20 per cent of households are more than twice as likely to get an Oxbridge place if they live in an area with grammar schools.

HEPI’s chairman, Nick Hillman, said: ‘If Oxbridge sets limits on grammar school recruitment, we may see the number of UK students with minority ethnic backgrounds drop.’

Dr Mark Fenton, chief executive of the Grammar School Heads Association, said: ‘Professor Toope should also be aware that in counties with a wholly selective system, virtually all the most academic students attend selective schools regardless of social background. If Cambridge was to reduce admissions from grammar schools, this would be manifestly unfair on large swathes of the country.’

Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said: ‘Grammar schools are a valuable part of our system, and universities must have a fair, transparent application process. Discriminating against a child because of their background or which school they went to is never acceptable.’

Mr Zahawi added: ‘I am proud we have more 18-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds at university than ever before and I want a system that continues to equip those students with the skills and knowledge they need to progress, whether to a top-tier university, an apprenticeship or the world of work.’

A Cambridge University spokesman said: ‘We do not discriminate against any applicant. If society is serious about offering opportunities to everyone, universities like ours need to reach beyond traditional recruiting grounds to very talented pupils who wouldn’t necessarily have considered applying.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10793175/Thinktank-Oxbridge-discriminating-against-grammar-schools-unfairly-impact-black-pupils.html

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Adams, Banks face a huge task in forcing NYC schools to focus on teaching all kids to read

Reading is fundamental — or so you might think. But, as The Post’s Cayla Bamberger reported last week, parents and education advocates across the city are demanding that the Department of Education do more to help all students learn how to read.

In 2019 (the last full pre-COVID school year), less than half of all Grades 3-8 students were proficient in reading. Then the debacle of remote learning set back all kids, leaving Mayor Eric Adams and Chancellor David Banks a lot of damage to undo.

Adams’ own struggle with long-undiagnosed dyslexia informs his approach: His budget plan earmarks $7.4 million for dyslexia screening and support programs, plus launching two new schools for students with reading disabilities in Harlem and The Bronx.

Banks, meanwhile, wants to rethink the DOE’s approach to literacy by stressing phonics at an earlier age. That’s a huge win for kids and common sense over the ideologues who dominate the education establishment.

Sadly, that includes the State Education Department and Board of Regents, who in recent years have focused on dropping standards across the board to conceal rather than heal the system’s failings. That’s produced rising high-school graduation rates even as remote learning left all too many kids actually learning far less.

The SED’s new “alternative pathways to graduation” serve to confer diplomas on functional illiterates. Teens (especially ones with learning disabilities) get steered into paths where the system doesn’t have to address their problems learning to read.

Since they’re disproportionately minority kids, it’s a kind of racial segregation — the very sort of “inequity” that such progressives supposedly despise.

Adams is spot-on when he laments that the DOE’s $37 billion a year in taxpayer money isn’t buying a whole lot of learning success for the great majority of city students, especially black and Hispanic ones, who don’t perform at grade level in reading or math.

There’s no greater social-justice cause than helping poor and minority students learn to read. It’s a shame the mayor and chancellor need to fight not only the DOE’s inertia and the misbegotten policies of the last mayor but also the state education authorities as well as the ideologues and special interests who’d rather cover up the injustice than truly confront it.

https://nypost.com/2022/05/08/nyc-schools-face-a-huge-task-by-teaching-all-kids-to-read/

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Australia: Activists masquerading as educators

The recent news from the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) that fewer and fewer students are choosing to study higher mathematics at Secondary school is yet another black mark against our education system.

Unfortunately, things are hardly better in Literature.

Victoria, which leads the way in progressive education, has seen students ditching literature in their droves. Over the last three years, the subject has dropped outside of the top 20 VCE subjects, with students preferring to study arguably less useful subjects such as ‘Food and Technology’ and ‘Media’.

This isn’t surprising given that the VCE’s booklist for literature in 2022 is heavily weighted toward modern texts that reveal a thoroughly unhealthy obsession with Marxism, Identity Politics, and Critical Race Theory. One-third of all texts on offer were published within the last 20 years, neglecting the remaining 5,000 years’ worth of literary history.

Students should be reading books by world-renowned authors like Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and George Orwell. Instead, they are reading about ‘power, gender, and obsession’ in Jeanette Winterson’s racy novel The Passion. Oscar Wilde is overlooked in favour of Shelagh Delaney’s exploration of ‘sexuality, homophobia, and racism’ in her production A Taste of Honey. Then there is Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Father Comes Home from the Wars that challenges ‘binary understandings of power’. Books like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which plumbs the depths of the human condition, have been replaced with Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise denouncing the ‘abuses of capitalism’.

When great books manage to make the cut, they are taught through an ideological lens. For instance, students studying Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey will look at the ‘obsessions of Georgian England’ and the ‘emergence of consumer culture’. In Tim Winton’s non-fiction work The Boy Behind the Curtain, ‘colonisation, capitalism, and politics’ are emphasised as key themes alongside ‘masculinity, gender, and family’.

Literature should not be used to send a political message to students. When learning is replaced with ideology, it undermines education. The study of literature should be about teaching students to think critically, not indoctrinating them with a progressive worldview.

Australian literature is notably absent from the 2022 VCE booklist.

While one-third of the texts were written by Australians, only half were actually set in Australia and the majority of these were poems. This reflects a dubious trend in education in which the idea of a global identity is promoted while the idea of an Australian identity is actively questioned.

Students should be reading classics like The Harp in the South by Ruth Park, A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, or one of Banjo Paterson’s famous poems. Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, which looks at the birth of a distinctly Australian identity in the lead-up to Federation, also deserves to be on the list. Even films such as Ladies in Black are of value because they address the rich cultural impact of immigration from Europe in the wake of the second world war. These works are all listed on the Institute of Public Affairs’ Australian Cannon and are classic pieces of literature that construct a vivid picture of the Australian way of life.

The problem is far greater than the booklist itself. Activists masquerading as educators have infiltrated Australian schools. They have successfully been destroying the pre-existing model of education and imposing their own. The choice of texts in this year’s booklist for Victorian students is an undisguised exercise in social engineering which robs students of their cultural heritage.

Victorians are being sold short.

Students from Queensland and New South Wales will read many of the great books missing from Victoria’s VCE program. For instance, the QCE literature booklist offers texts like Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Queensland students have a much broader range of top-quality works that does not include pointed summaries pushing a progressive agenda like in Victoria. The New South Wales HSC English program, which also involves the study of literature, looks at Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Short Stories by Henry Lawson, and Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. This comes after a concerted effort in New South Wales to overhaul the Year 11 and 12 English syllabuses to include more ‘classic’ texts in 2017.

The solution for Victoria is simple. Give students the opportunity to read works of substance that look at the universal human experience rather than focusing solely on the issues faced by minority groups. More students would study literature if more classics with relatable life lessons were on the booklist, as is the case in New South Wales and Queensland.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/activists-masquerading-as-educators/

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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