Racist Obama backs race-based school discipline policies

This would just about complete the destruction of American public school education

President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate schools’ disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals’ behavior.

His July 26 executive order established a government panel to promote “a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.”

“African Americans lack equal access to highly effective teachers and principals, safe schools, and challenging college-preparatory classes, and they disproportionately experience school discipline,” said the order, titled “White House Initiative On Educational Excellence.”

Because of those causes, the report suggests, “over a third of African American students do not graduate from high school on time with a regular high school diploma, and only four percent of African American high school graduates interested in college are college-ready across a range of subjects.”

“What this means is that whites and Asians will get suspended for things that blacks don’t get suspended for,” because school officials will try to level punishments despite groups’ different infraction rates, predicted Hans Bader, a counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Bader is a former official in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, and has sued and represented school districts and colleges in civil-rights cases.

“It is too bad that the president has chosen to set up a new bureaucracy with a focus on one particular racial group, to the exclusion of all others,” said Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity.

“A disproportionate share of crimes are committed by African Americans, and they are disproportionately likely to misbehave in school… [because] more than 7 out of 10 African Americans (72.5 percent) are born out of wedlock… versus fewer than 3 out of 10 whites,” he said in a statement to The Daily Caller. Although ” you won’t see it mentioned in the Executive Order… there is an obvious connection between these [marriage] numbers and how each group is doing educationally, economically, criminally,” he said.

SOURCE





Ethnic minority pupils' underachievement to be tackled by 'blind marking' in bid to remove British teachers' prejudice

A good idea for all

Teachers could 'blind mark' pupils' work in an attempt to raise exam scores of children from ethnic minorities. The controversial plans are designed to reduce inequalities between races.

Under the proposals, teachers would not know the identities of pupils when marking their work.

Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrat party and Deputy Prime Minister, is believed to be in support of the policy.

A study by education watchdog Ofsted in 1999 showed that children with African or Asian-sounding names were likely to be given lower marks of up to 12 per cent in some cases.

Statistics show that almost half of young black people and 31 per cent of young Asian [mainly Pakistani] people are unemployed.

It is believed Liberal Democrat communities minister, Andrew Stunell, along with Clegg, want to introduce the policies soon despite opposition from other ministers.

A senior Whitehall source told The Guardian: 'We waited a long time to get the integration strategy out the door, but we're now keen to get on with the job of implementing it.

'A lot of the projects supported by the integration strategy have slipped by under most people's radars, but Andrew is keen that we turn up the volume and speak out much more often and much louder on race issues.'

There are also proposals to ethnic monitor banks but it is feared that this could compromise people's privacy.

Only six per cent of black Caribbean and African people are self-employed or own their own business compared with 15 per cent of white people.

The plans are expected to be published in a report by Liberal Democrat Baroness Meral Hussein-Ece later this year.

SOURCE







Australia: Exclusive Brethren's Agnew School one of Queensland's best for academic performance

This should put to bed allegations that students at fundamentalist Christian schools suffer academically.  The EB are VERY fundamentalist

IT is perhaps Queensland's least known and most misunderstood school.  It is also one of the state's top consistent academic performers.

Clearly the Agnew School  --  run by the Exclusive Brethren  --  is doing something right, recording the state's highest OP1 to 15 percentage regardless of school size over the past five years.

It is one of a handful of small schools not included in top-performing OP charts each year because of potential statistical anomalies that can happen in tiny sample sizes.

But analysis of five years of OP data shows those top scores are consistent, recording 100 per cent of OP-eligible students achieving an OP1 to 15 in three out of the five years.

Principal Norm Sharples was quick to point out the school had only a small number of OP-eligible students each year, with between five and 22 recorded between 2007 and 2011.

He said small class sizes  --  about 10 to 12 students per class  --  a commitment to academic excellence by the school's board and strong parental support was behind consistent top student performances.

Contrary to popular belief, students at the school use "plenty" of technology, including video conferencing at its six campuses across southeast Queensland.

Mr Sharples said the school also encouraged students to enrol in tertiary studies.

"We try not to be distracted by outside elements we do sports internally. Our motto is learning to learn. We have schools in other states which we are often comparing results and we look at how we could be doing better," Mr Sharples said.

The school currently has 359 Year 3 to 12 students at its six campuses, including Brisbane, Bundaberg, Maryborough, Nambour, Toowoomba and Warwick, which is only primary.

Its website states: "The School is conducted in accordance with the beliefs and teachings of the Brethren and the Directors are committed to ensuring that the Ethos, Values and Guiding Principles are enshrined in all aspects of school life".

SOURCE

America's Socialist School Teachers

By Warner Todd Huston

I am beginning to feel that there is no hope for many of our school teachers. They’ve become so infused with leftism that any semblance of Americanism is beyond their grasp. Even history is viewed from within a socialist prism as a recent editorial from a teacher from Pennsylvania proves.

In his editorial, teacher Robert J. Fisher of Upper Saucon Township sought to debunk what he called the “extreme right-wing elements” of today’s America. He did this by claiming that nearly every conflict in our history is some sort of example of Marxist class warfare.

For teacher Fisher, all of American history is one giant example of Marxist principles proven right. It doesn’t matter that the ideas of class as Marx described them really didn’t exist during all of American history, of course.

Fisher claims that “primitive Native Americans” and “subsistent frontiersmen from the Piedmont” were all engaged in class warfare with the “wealthier urban merchants and plantation owners.”

He goes on to claim that the Regulators in 1771 North Carolina, Shay’s rebellion (1787), and the earlier Bacon’s rebellion (1675) were all “class warfare.”

Then he says that the “powerful federal government” that Washington and his compatriots created was an attempt to “deal more effectively with such class-based rebellions.” His proof? The 1791 Whiskey Rebellion.

Fisher bounced to the Jacksonian era, saying that President Andrew Jackson’s goal was “reform” America to allow “the common man” to become vested in the system then touted the Civil War as the biggest “class struggle” of them all.

And who else was a hero? Of course it was the rise of the labor union coupled with Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies. These, he claims “helped create a vibrant middle class.”

All of this is skewed nonsense. The history of the United States cannot be so simplistically distilled as one of mere class warfare and it’s sad that this person who has been allowed to influence the minds of our children is so blinded by his Marxist theology that this is all he can see.

In fact, in nearly every case Fisher cites the Americans involved were not trying to tear down another class in order to “equalize” society. They did not consider themselves class warriors but people that aimed to advance to a better life themselves.

This is 100 percent opposite of Fisher’s Marxist theology. Marxism wants to tear down society and “the evil rich” and replace it all with an authoritarian, top-down, oppressive central government that allows no one to better themselves. This is as far from American history as can be.

And that whole business that the labor movement created some sort of heaven on earth? Hardly. In fact, the labor unions held America back with the costs and limits on innovation they imposed. It wasn’t unions that brought America that middle class, it was far more the fact that the USA was the one world power untouched physically by the ravages of WWII leaving us in the perfect position to rebuild the world and reap the untold benefits from that lucky stroke. That combined with our American capitalist system, our Yankee work ethic, and our American culture — the very one Fisher disparages as a series of class wars — that allowed us to take advantage of that post world war atmosphere.

But Fisher has inculcated his appreciation of Marxism from his years of indoctrination in our system of higher learning and unfortunately he’s teaching this garbage to our children.

Worse, he’s not alone.

SOURCE




        
Fleeing Public Schools in America

Sharply declining enrollment in half the nation's largest public school districts spells bad news for the union-dominated monopoly of government-run public schools.

School districts in longtime economically stagnant cities like Detroit and Cleveland hemorrhaged the most students, losing 32.1 percent and 17.7 percent, respectively. However, economic stagnation is but one of many reasons for declining student enrollment; factors that also include the collapse of the housing market, declining birthrates, migration from the cities, and increased school violence.

In that latter case, for example, Philadelphia, which saw a 10.2 percent drop in enrollment, reported that over the past five years in Philadelphia's 268 public schools, 4,000 students, teachers, or other staff members were "beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes."

In Chicago Public Schools, twenty-four students were fatally shot during the 2011-12 school year, with the overall shooting toll at 319, the highest in four years and a nearly 22 percent increase from the previous school year.

Yet, for some school districts, the most compelling reason for student flight was increased competition from charter and private schools. That conclusion was drawn by Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), which saw the third largest student decline of 11.1 percent.

MPS assigned its troubles to Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program, a school voucher program for poor and middle-income students that has allowed more than 23,000 students to enroll in private schools in and around Milwaukee.

If MPS is disturbed by this trend, the American public at large surely does not share the district's unease. "We have record-low confidence in our public schools," observed Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento. Indeed, Gallup's annual "Confidence in American Institutions" poll, conducted just last month, revealed that just 29 percent of Americans have confidence in American public schools. This trend is undoubtedly bolstered by the fact that decades of record amounts of money being fed into public school systems have only managed to produce mediocre-to-poor academic results.

Specifically, despite increasing real spending per student on public K-12 education by 23.5 percent over the past decade and by 49 percent over the past 20 years, academic achievement standards, such as reading proficiency and graduation rates, have only marginally improved.

Those meager results have come despite American public school districts nationwide now spending $604.9 billion a year, with an average of $10,499 being spent per student and a pupil/teacher ratio of 15.4, compared to 1970 when the per-pupil expenditures were $4,060 and the pupil/teacher ratio was 22.3.

Yet, in many cities where spending per student exceeds $10,000 per year, graduation rates are horrifyingly well below the national average of 74 percent, such as in Detroit, which spends $11,100 per year, per student, but only 25 percent of its students graduate.

Sadly, that seems like a bargain when compared to the District of Columbia, whose public schools spend nearly $30,000 per pupil yet in return receive a student graduation rate of 60 percent and a student body that has some of the nation's lowest math and reading scores.

Still, it should be noted that many factors can determine academic performance; in particular, the type of family a child comes from, including those families where an ethos of education, discipline, hard work and other such values are regularly instilled.

However, public school advocates, in particular those in teachers unions, have long insisted, despite evidence to the contrary, that spending is the best predictor of educational performance. Of course, this is not unrelated to the fact that an ever increasing amount of the funding winds up in the pocketbooks of teachers and administrators.

For starters, the average salary for full-time public school teachers in 2010-11 was $56,069, but an analysis done by the Heritage Foundation found the typical public school teacher makes about $1.52 for every dollar made by a private-sector employee with similar skills.

Moreover, the generous fringe benefits offered to teachers - which include government-funded pension and health benefits - raise teacher compensation 52 percent above the going market rate, "making it the equivalent of a $120 billion overpayment charged to taxpayers each year," the Heritage study found.

Yet, for cash-strapped state and local governments plagued by a harsh recession, dwindling property taxes and gaping budget deficits, teacher unions and their allies in the Democratic Party have vigorously fought any reform efforts offered to rein in public employee benefit plans, however modest they may be.

New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie, for example, was pilloried by the New Jersey Education Association, the state's largest teachers union, for having the temerity to ask teachers to accept a pay freeze and increase their contribution to their healthcare plans from 0 percent to 1.5 percent.

In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker staved off a recall effort for asking public-sector employees (including teachers) to increase their contribution to their pension plans from 0 percent to 5.8 percent and pay 12 percent of their health care benefits.

In Chicago, where student reading proficiency is just 15 percent, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has threatened to strike if not given a 30 percent pay raise in exchange for extending the school year an extra ten days, even though that demand would reportedly force property taxes up 150 percent and require classrooms of 55 students.

Yet, while teachers have fought vigorously to protect their monetary benefits, they have also railed against calls to eliminate teacher tenure, have teachers measured against student performance, or provide parents an alternative choice of schools in which to educate their children.

SOURCE






Teachers are treated like 'NHS staff on a Saturday night: British Head teacher's fury as he is attacked by father who claimed his son was being BULLIED

A headmaster today attacked the culture of parents treating teachers like 'NHS staff on a Saturday night' after he was beaten up a father angry his son was being bullied at school.

Kieran Heakin, 60, was grabbed around the throat after being confronted in his study by the father who had gone to the school to claim his son was being bullied by fellow pupils.

As another teacher tried to intervene, the father also tried to 'knee' and headbutt Mr Heakin, shouting: 'Now I am really going to hurt you'

Mr Heakin, headmaster of St John the Baptist Roman Catholic school in Burnley, Lancashire, was left sore and bruised after the distressing incident and the father, 45, was subsequently arrested.

The head teacher hit out at the lack of respect shown to teachers by parents after the unnamed father who attacked him escaped jail after he was found guilty of assault.  He said: 'We are just like NHS staff on a Saturday night where people come into a hospital accident and emergency department and do not have any respect for those people who are trying to help.

'Teaching today is very different to what it used to be like. You have to be really on top of your game and each day you just do not know what is going to happen that day and it could be that a trivial incident turns into a major incident.

'Parents are going through hard times to and there are a lot more broken families and children today can sometimes suffer and these days are brought up having their tea in front of the TV.

'I have forgiven this person but you do get the small minority of parents who have no respect for anybody.

'Other teachers and heads can get depressed about it and when speaking to fellow head teachers I have found that they can get very irate and not want to carry on with the profession.

'But I see it as a character building experience and life is full of experiences.'

The attack occurred last November after father - who cannot be named to protect the identity of the child - stormed into the school to talk about taking his son out of classes.  He blocked the door of the study to prevent Mr Heakin from leaving his office and then assaulted him.  Mr Heakin added: 'I had visions of him beating me up and finishing me off. I did fear for my life.

'He then started to strangle me as I tried banging. I managed to get free but then he punched me twice in the arms and in my ribs. He was a well-built man and so the blows were hard.  'Then he came right up so that his nose was touching mine and said ‘now I am really going to hurt you’ and kneed me twice in the groin area.

'It was a savage attack. I was concerned for my own safety so I grabbed him by both wrists and held him very strongly for about two minutes while we got help.'

The dad was found guilty of two counts of assault at Burnley magistrates' court yesterday and was given 16 weeks in prison, suspended for a year, with 12 months' supervision and a 12-week 7pm to 7am curfew.  He was also ordered to pay £100 compensation and £200 costs.

Sentencing, the magistrates told the father: 'Head teachers and all teachers deserve the protection of the courts to be able to carry out their jobs, in often very difficult circumstances.'

SOURCE

America's Socialist School Teachers

By Warner Todd Huston

I am beginning to feel that there is no hope for many of our school teachers. They’ve become so infused with leftism that any semblance of Americanism is beyond their grasp. Even history is viewed from within a socialist prism as a recent editorial from a teacher from Pennsylvania proves.

In his editorial, teacher Robert J. Fisher of Upper Saucon Township sought to debunk what he called the “extreme right-wing elements” of today’s America. He did this by claiming that nearly every conflict in our history is some sort of example of Marxist class warfare.

For teacher Fisher, all of American history is one giant example of Marxist principles proven right. It doesn’t matter that the ideas of class as Marx described them really didn’t exist during all of American history, of course.

Fisher claims that “primitive Native Americans” and “subsistent frontiersmen from the Piedmont” were all engaged in class warfare with the “wealthier urban merchants and plantation owners.”

He goes on to claim that the Regulators in 1771 North Carolina, Shay’s rebellion (1787), and the earlier Bacon’s rebellion (1675) were all “class warfare.”

Then he says that the “powerful federal government” that Washington and his compatriots created was an attempt to “deal more effectively with such class-based rebellions.” His proof? The 1791 Whiskey Rebellion.

Fisher bounced to the Jacksonian era, saying that President Andrew Jackson’s goal was “reform” America to allow “the common man” to become vested in the system then touted the Civil War as the biggest “class struggle” of them all.

And who else was a hero? Of course it was the rise of the labor union coupled with Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies. These, he claims “helped create a vibrant middle class.”

All of this is skewed nonsense. The history of the United States cannot be so simplistically distilled as one of mere class warfare and it’s sad that this person who has been allowed to influence the minds of our children is so blinded by his Marxist theology that this is all he can see.

In fact, in nearly every case Fisher cites the Americans involved were not trying to tear down another class in order to “equalize” society. They did not consider themselves class warriors but people that aimed to advance to a better life themselves.

This is 100 percent opposite of Fisher’s Marxist theology. Marxism wants to tear down society and “the evil rich” and replace it all with an authoritarian, top-down, oppressive central government that allows no one to better themselves. This is as far from American history as can be.

And that whole business that the labor movement created some sort of heaven on earth? Hardly. In fact, the labor unions held America back with the costs and limits on innovation they imposed. It wasn’t unions that brought America that middle class, it was far more the fact that the USA was the one world power untouched physically by the ravages of WWII leaving us in the perfect position to rebuild the world and reap the untold benefits from that lucky stroke. That combined with our American capitalist system, our Yankee work ethic, and our American culture — the very one Fisher disparages as a series of class wars — that allowed us to take advantage of that post world war atmosphere.

But Fisher has inculcated his appreciation of Marxism from his years of indoctrination in our system of higher learning and unfortunately he’s teaching this garbage to our children.

Worse, he’s not alone.

SOURCE




        
Fleeing Public Schools in America

Sharply declining enrollment in half the nation's largest public school districts spells bad news for the union-dominated monopoly of government-run public schools.

School districts in longtime economically stagnant cities like Detroit and Cleveland hemorrhaged the most students, losing 32.1 percent and 17.7 percent, respectively. However, economic stagnation is but one of many reasons for declining student enrollment; factors that also include the collapse of the housing market, declining birthrates, migration from the cities, and increased school violence.

In that latter case, for example, Philadelphia, which saw a 10.2 percent drop in enrollment, reported that over the past five years in Philadelphia's 268 public schools, 4,000 students, teachers, or other staff members were "beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes."

In Chicago Public Schools, twenty-four students were fatally shot during the 2011-12 school year, with the overall shooting toll at 319, the highest in four years and a nearly 22 percent increase from the previous school year.

Yet, for some school districts, the most compelling reason for student flight was increased competition from charter and private schools. That conclusion was drawn by Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), which saw the third largest student decline of 11.1 percent.

MPS assigned its troubles to Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program, a school voucher program for poor and middle-income students that has allowed more than 23,000 students to enroll in private schools in and around Milwaukee.

If MPS is disturbed by this trend, the American public at large surely does not share the district's unease. "We have record-low confidence in our public schools," observed Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento. Indeed, Gallup's annual "Confidence in American Institutions" poll, conducted just last month, revealed that just 29 percent of Americans have confidence in American public schools. This trend is undoubtedly bolstered by the fact that decades of record amounts of money being fed into public school systems have only managed to produce mediocre-to-poor academic results.

Specifically, despite increasing real spending per student on public K-12 education by 23.5 percent over the past decade and by 49 percent over the past 20 years, academic achievement standards, such as reading proficiency and graduation rates, have only marginally improved.

Those meager results have come despite American public school districts nationwide now spending $604.9 billion a year, with an average of $10,499 being spent per student and a pupil/teacher ratio of 15.4, compared to 1970 when the per-pupil expenditures were $4,060 and the pupil/teacher ratio was 22.3.

Yet, in many cities where spending per student exceeds $10,000 per year, graduation rates are horrifyingly well below the national average of 74 percent, such as in Detroit, which spends $11,100 per year, per student, but only 25 percent of its students graduate.

Sadly, that seems like a bargain when compared to the District of Columbia, whose public schools spend nearly $30,000 per pupil yet in return receive a student graduation rate of 60 percent and a student body that has some of the nation's lowest math and reading scores.

Still, it should be noted that many factors can determine academic performance; in particular, the type of family a child comes from, including those families where an ethos of education, discipline, hard work and other such values are regularly instilled.

However, public school advocates, in particular those in teachers unions, have long insisted, despite evidence to the contrary, that spending is the best predictor of educational performance. Of course, this is not unrelated to the fact that an ever increasing amount of the funding winds up in the pocketbooks of teachers and administrators.

For starters, the average salary for full-time public school teachers in 2010-11 was $56,069, but an analysis done by the Heritage Foundation found the typical public school teacher makes about $1.52 for every dollar made by a private-sector employee with similar skills.

Moreover, the generous fringe benefits offered to teachers - which include government-funded pension and health benefits - raise teacher compensation 52 percent above the going market rate, "making it the equivalent of a $120 billion overpayment charged to taxpayers each year," the Heritage study found.

Yet, for cash-strapped state and local governments plagued by a harsh recession, dwindling property taxes and gaping budget deficits, teacher unions and their allies in the Democratic Party have vigorously fought any reform efforts offered to rein in public employee benefit plans, however modest they may be.

New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie, for example, was pilloried by the New Jersey Education Association, the state's largest teachers union, for having the temerity to ask teachers to accept a pay freeze and increase their contribution to their healthcare plans from 0 percent to 1.5 percent.

In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker staved off a recall effort for asking public-sector employees (including teachers) to increase their contribution to their pension plans from 0 percent to 5.8 percent and pay 12 percent of their health care benefits.

In Chicago, where student reading proficiency is just 15 percent, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has threatened to strike if not given a 30 percent pay raise in exchange for extending the school year an extra ten days, even though that demand would reportedly force property taxes up 150 percent and require classrooms of 55 students.

Yet, while teachers have fought vigorously to protect their monetary benefits, they have also railed against calls to eliminate teacher tenure, have teachers measured against student performance, or provide parents an alternative choice of schools in which to educate their children.

SOURCE






Teachers are treated like 'NHS staff on a Saturday night: British Head teacher's fury as he is attacked by father who claimed his son was being BULLIED

A headmaster today attacked the culture of parents treating teachers like 'NHS staff on a Saturday night' after he was beaten up a father angry his son was being bullied at school.

Kieran Heakin, 60, was grabbed around the throat after being confronted in his study by the father who had gone to the school to claim his son was being bullied by fellow pupils.

As another teacher tried to intervene, the father also tried to 'knee' and headbutt Mr Heakin, shouting: 'Now I am really going to hurt you'

Mr Heakin, headmaster of St John the Baptist Roman Catholic school in Burnley, Lancashire, was left sore and bruised after the distressing incident and the father, 45, was subsequently arrested.

The head teacher hit out at the lack of respect shown to teachers by parents after the unnamed father who attacked him escaped jail after he was found guilty of assault.  He said: 'We are just like NHS staff on a Saturday night where people come into a hospital accident and emergency department and do not have any respect for those people who are trying to help.

'Teaching today is very different to what it used to be like. You have to be really on top of your game and each day you just do not know what is going to happen that day and it could be that a trivial incident turns into a major incident.

'Parents are going through hard times to and there are a lot more broken families and children today can sometimes suffer and these days are brought up having their tea in front of the TV.

'I have forgiven this person but you do get the small minority of parents who have no respect for anybody.

'Other teachers and heads can get depressed about it and when speaking to fellow head teachers I have found that they can get very irate and not want to carry on with the profession.

'But I see it as a character building experience and life is full of experiences.'

The attack occurred last November after father - who cannot be named to protect the identity of the child - stormed into the school to talk about taking his son out of classes.  He blocked the door of the study to prevent Mr Heakin from leaving his office and then assaulted him.  Mr Heakin added: 'I had visions of him beating me up and finishing me off. I did fear for my life.

'He then started to strangle me as I tried banging. I managed to get free but then he punched me twice in the arms and in my ribs. He was a well-built man and so the blows were hard.  'Then he came right up so that his nose was touching mine and said ‘now I am really going to hurt you’ and kneed me twice in the groin area.

'It was a savage attack. I was concerned for my own safety so I grabbed him by both wrists and held him very strongly for about two minutes while we got help.'

The dad was found guilty of two counts of assault at Burnley magistrates' court yesterday and was given 16 weeks in prison, suspended for a year, with 12 months' supervision and a 12-week 7pm to 7am curfew.  He was also ordered to pay £100 compensation and £200 costs.

Sentencing, the magistrates told the father: 'Head teachers and all teachers deserve the protection of the courts to be able to carry out their jobs, in often very difficult circumstances.'

SOURCE

Louisiana Teachers Union Threatens Schools



Headline - 7/27/12
(Baton Rouge, Louisiana) Posted Friday:

The American Federation for Children—the nation’s voice for school choice—today condemned the actions of the Louisiana Association of Educators (LAE), after counsel for the teachers union yesterday sent threatening letters to schools participating in Louisiana’s statewide voucher program, urging them to drop out of the program or face a lawsuit from the union.

The letter comes despite a judge’s ruling two weeks ago that dismissed a union attempt to get an injunction stopping the program.

In the letter, which was faxed to participating voucher schools yesterday evening, a law firm retained by the LAE union threatens to initiate litigation against individual schools if they do not pledge—in writing—by 4 p.m. local time tomorrow to cease participation in the Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence (SSEE) program.

Kevin P. Chavous, a senior advisor to the Federation, denounced the bullying tactics as a remarkably cruel attempt to block children from attending the schools their parents have chosen for them.

Bullying by the teachers union? What a shock!

Parenting beyond boundaries

Radical Unschooling

Radical unschoolers seem to have this reputation of being really free-wheeling, anything-goes-to-the-point-of-unparenting folk, and I really don’t think that’s true of anyone, especially the Christian radical unschoolers. Everyone has their “thing” and even the most liberal atheistic RUS will have what they will and will not accept when it comes to their children.

To not have personal standards or requirements of our children is to tip over into the realm of neglect, and I think that folks who have made the active choice to unschool, no matter how wacky their ideas may seem, are far from neglectful or uninterested in their children. They may make decisions that in the end are possibly unwise and at worst irresponsible, but that is not the same as just not caring about your kid – who they are, how they feel, and what they do.

Even in parenting without limits and boundaries, there is still the fact that we are feeding into our children our own thoughts, feelings, experiences, wisdom, and knowledge. We are still under the command to raise up disciples. The difference comes in the manner in which we do that discipling.

Christian Radical Unschooling

To a Christian radical unschooler, our bottom line is that our children, regardless of their age, size, gender, birth order, giftings, issues, etc, are our fellow human beings and should be treated with the exact same dignity, respect, and consideration as any of the other seven billion people on this planet. The only difference between our children and the dude down the street is that we have been given special spiritual and physical responsibility for them as their coverings.

So what it really boils down to is: “How do you disciple your neighbors – when you are directly responsible for them and they live in your home?”

Different people have different ideas about what constitutes discipling: from a strict, methodical, punitive discipline approach, all the way to just “hoping they’ll make the right decision” without ever once giving any example or instruction. For ME, I look to Christ and His apostles as my example for discipling others, including my children. Jesus led by example, and asked folks to follow Him, but did not coerce or browbeat anyone into making that choice.

My children follow me. They mimic me. They mirror every word I say and attitude I exhibit. They go where I go and breathe in the spiritual air I breathe out. *IF* I am doing a good job in following and mirroring Christ, then it eventually will come to a point where their faith must be their own, and their OWN hearts must be either for or against God. They will no longer be mirroring, but walking on their own.

The Freedom to Choose

One day, they will make that choice for themselves, whether to walk the way Jesus walks, or to walk the path that leads to destruction. I believe that God is not interested in righteous pagans. It is not my desire to have children who “look good on paper” but are really just whitewashed tombs. So I would much rather have raised a child who can say, “I don’t believe,” and have the intellectual honesty to tell me as much, than one who professes faith but is a complete hypocrite inside.

Setting limits and boundaries about what is acceptable behavior doesn’t teach the heart and mind, nor does it form character. Those things are “inherited” through following another’s example and making it one’s own. By demanding certain rules be followed, we miss the opportunity to allow our children to naturally grow from mimicry, to making choices for themselves.

When we attempt to exert our will over another to create a limit or boundary to their behavior, whether our child, or someone else, we are doing something that God Himself does not even do.  We are bound by natural laws – we cannot simply flap our arms and fly away for example – but our behavior is governed by our own internal controls.  God does not MAKE us do anything. He gives us commands, and requests we follow them, but it is up to us to choose whether or not we will do it.  When we find it difficult, He gives us His Spirit and power to accomplish those things.

That is, I believe, the key to parenting without limits. We invite our children to follow us, which they do as a natural extension of being our children. When they are young, and find something harder than others, we assist them to make the choices we feel are best (i.e. taking them to church with us, removing them from dangerous situations, etc). As they mature, and no longer need our assistance, they begin to own their behavior for themselves; forming their own relationship with Christ.

In the end, we only have control over the behavior of ONE person on this planet – our own. Everyone else, we are merely coaxing along to follow our example. We should work to make it a good one, because our children are apt pupils. They WILL learn what we teach them – whether we realize we included the lesson or not.

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Don't blame Britain's universities for their lack of state-school students

Vince Cable's efforts to force universities to admit more working-class students are ridiculous, given what the Government has done to slow social mobility, says Archie Cornish

Vince Cable’s calls for elite universities to admit a greater proportion of working-class students or face financial penalties are a little empty. As of September, proposals state, "elite" universities will face penalties of up to £500,000 if they do not admit an externally set quota of state school students.

Cable is casting the Russell Group universities in the role many feel the banks occupy: rogue, self-interested institutions which burn and pillage society and must be slapped on the wrist, or better handcuffed. It is a piece of political evasiveness as cheap as David Cameron’s cack-handed (and inaccurate) observation last year that Oxford had only admitted one black student. The government’s ministers have always struggled to distance themselves from the institutions which propelled them into power, but are usually met with little more than impatience: Oxford and Imperial College London have reacted to the Business Secretary’s remarks by telling him to mind his own Business.

This government has severely damaged access for Britain’s universities. It introduced the infamous £9,000 maximum fees, which most of the big names are set to charge, and which were met with sometimes obnoxious (that flag-swinging) but undoubtedly serious protests. The government has always argued that it had to hike the fees given the economic climate, and while this may be true, there can be no excusing its atrocious presentation of the policy: the £9k bombshell was interpreted as a standard (rather than maximum) fee, and the its architects failed to emphasise the waivers and delays available for poorer students. When this year’s applications to UCAS were predicted to fall by 10 per cent in January, the sound of two and two being put together could .

Given how much the Coalition government has done to compromise poorer students' access to top universities, it is ridiculous for Cable to portray them as obstacles in the path of reforms.

That's not to say that reforms aren't needed. Oxford, Cambridge and the other Russell Group universities have an unhealthy stranglehold on power and influence in Britain. More needs to be done to ensure that applicants from a wider range of schools get into top universities, so that the future elite is drawn from more than private schools and some exceptionally good state schools.

Oxford itself has decided to target prospective applicants not by school but by income, seeking out those whose families earn less than £16,000 a year, and who traditionally will not go to university. This makes greater social sense - but, unfortunately, poorer headlines. Michael Moritz’s donation of £75m, on the other hand, made a big splash. The welcome reception of the millionaire’s gift, which by next year will already assist 100 students, suggests that in the face of unrelenting funding cuts, universities must ramp up their strategies for targeting alumni for support.

True change in education needs more than money, though, just as real social mobility relies on more than quotas and figure-fixing. The director of the Sutton Trust, which last year rated Cambridge’s Oxbridge-feeder Hill’s Road Sixth Form College as an "elite institution", explained the school’s success in terms of the high percentage of children whose parents are Cambridge dons. If this shows anything, it is that there is more to school success than the private-state dichotomy Cable relies on.

In contrast, Cable’s remarks are just not subtle enough. The top universities really are not evil opponents of change, and the government’s attempts to fashion themselves as crusaders for social mobility are transparent and hypocritical. Like so many proposed actions on universities, it is a surface solution to a deep, complex problem.

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Britain's "Academies" given power to hire unqualified teachers

I agree with this.  I was a successful High School teacher despite having not one minute of teacher training

Thousands of state schools will be allowed to hire unqualified staff to teach for the first time because ministers believe the best teachers are “born, not made”.

Under existing rules, all mainstream state schools have had to ensure their teachers held “qualified teacher status” (QTS) after completing officially recognised training.

However, the Department for Education announced that academies will be given the same freedom that private schools have to hire anyone they think would succeed in the classroom.

Headteachers of academies will be able to employ professional scientists, engineers and musicians, or experienced staff from overseas, who could make excellent teachers but do not have QTS, the government said.

Under new contracts announced yesterday, all schools that become academies from November will automatically be given the new freedom to hire staff without QTS.

Michael Gove, the education secretary, will also allow all 1,957 existing academies, including around half of state secondary schools, to apply for the same power.

Mr Gove was unavailable for comment on his reforms, which are expected to be resisted by teachers’ unions.

The education secretary has already clashed with the two biggest teaching unions, the NASUWT and the NUT, over a series of changes that they say amount to an attack on teachers’ pay and working conditions.

A spokesman for the Department for Education said: “Independent schools and Free Schools can already hire brilliant people who have not got QTS.

“We are extending this flexibility to all academies so more schools can hire great linguists, computer scientists, engineers and other specialists who have not worked in state schools before.”

The spokesman said the “vast majority” of teachers were likely to continue to have formal teaching qualifications, and that no existing teacher’s contract will be affected.

But the extra “flexibility” should help schools improve more quickly. Officials said schools would continue to be held accountable for the quality of teaching through Ofsted inspection and league tables.

Richard Cairns, headmaster of Brighton College, a leading independent school, said an unqualified teacher who trains on the job is often better than someone with a postgraduate certificate in education.

“I strongly believe that teachers are born not made and I will actively seek out teachers from all walks of life who have the potential to inspire children," he said.  “We have 39 teachers without formal teaching qualifications, including me.”

However, Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, representing secondary heads, urged academies to ignore the reforms.

“Teaching is a skill, and the idea of employing individuals who have not been given the tools to do a professional job flies in the face of the coalition government's aspiration of creating a high status profession,” he said.

“Of course subject knowledge makes a difference but it is no replacement for professional training.”

“This policy change is a retrograde step which ASCL would advise academies to ignore.”

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, accused the government of a “dereliction of duty.”

“All children deserve to be taught by qualified teachers,” she argued.

“Parents and teachers will see this as a cost-cutting measure that will cause irreparable damage to children's education. Schools need a properly resourced team of qualified teachers and support staff, not lower investment dressed up as ‘freedoms’.”

Stephen Twigg MP, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, said: "While we welcome more professionals coming into teaching there need to be clear safeguards and ensure there is adequate training capacity in schools. If there are issues with teacher training and development, they should be addressed head on, not avoided.

"These kind of announcements should be presented to Parliament, not sneaked out hours before the Olympics opening ceremony."

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A College Reinvents Teacher Education

Under pressure, Hillsdale improves its already excellent program and shows that accreditation doesn’t matter if you’re good

In 2007, Michigan’s Department of Education changed its policy to require national accreditation for all teacher certification programs in the state. Hillsdale’s program had been certified by the state for decades, but administrators concluded that it would be wasteful to dedicate precious resources to an accreditation process that lacked both value and credibility.

Instead of closing the school’s Education Department, Hillsdale’s administration recognized that teacher certification is not the same as teacher education. The college could still produce smart, dedicated teachers for America’s classrooms, even if the students wouldn’t have an immediate path to certification. Hillsdale decided to continue its program and invite schools unrestricted by the burden of certification requirements to hire its graduates.

The professors in the Education Department embraced this new freedom and began to think about what teacher education could be without the ideological straightjacket (i.e., “standards”) from the state. We began our revision by identifying what kind of preparation was truly important for future teachers. 

First, we concluded that teachers need a broad liberal arts education.  Hillsdale is a liberal arts college and its education faculty takes this identity seriously. We believe that it’s not enough for a teacher to be a specialist in one subject area or to be a pedagogical technician. The best teachers are liberally educated and know how numerous subjects fit together to form a coherent picture of reality. Such an image can only develop if future teachers have a rigorous core curriculum that addresses the sciences, language, history, art, etc. 

Second, we decided that future teachers need to know the subjects they will teach very well. Deep understanding of a subject can only develop from extensive study in the subject.  Unlike some institutions that offer a major in Education, Hillsdale requires all students to complete a major in an academic discipline.  This means that those students who wish to pursue a career in teaching—even those who will teach at the elementary level—will have an undergraduate degree in an academic field. Coupled with Hillsdale’s strong core curriculum, we believe the in-depth study associated with an academic major will prepare the future teacher to model and provide a quality education for K-12 students.

Third, we determined that the most important aspects of pedagogy—the function and work of a teacher—are best learned in a real classroom with real students under the tutelage of a master teacher. This means that future teachers are best prepared for their careers by observing and working with real classroom teachers.

In light of those principles, we realized that many of our existing courses had been developed only to meet the state’s onerous standards, which had tightly controlled what was taught in teacher education courses. With those requirements no longer binding, we were free to keep what was useful, eliminate that which was not, and create new courses to address whatever was being overlooked.

We decided to eliminate methods classes and courses in educational psychology and technology. Because the state had such a heavy hand in dictating these classes (enforcing their “standards”), much of the content was irrelevant or antithetical to the mission of both the college and the department. We believe that our students’ undergraduate experience will be much richer if they take more courses in their major or work with a teacher in a real classroom than if they have to slog through low-information courses.

We revised a number of existing courses (e.g., Philosophy of Education, Explicit Phonics Reading Instruction, and Children’s Literature) that addressed important ideas and topics that were consistent with the mission of the College. In an effort to match the rigor of courses in other departments across the campus, education professors made those courses much more content-driven and more demanding in terms of reading, discussion, and writing.

The Education Department also recognized a need for a new course in English grammar and, with consultation from the college’s English Department, designed a comprehensive course in English grammar for future teachers. Language is the most important tool of the teacher’s trade.  As Richard Mitchell (“the Underground Grammarian”) once said, “’Good grammar’…is the Law by which meaning is found and made.”

Yet as David Mulroy showed in his book The War Against Grammar (2003), most educators do not know how the English language works. He concluded, “Unfortunately, few…teachers now have the necessary educational background to teach grammar or to integrate it within their lesson plans. There is only one way for them to obtain this knowledge: it has to be taught explicitly in the college curriculum.” At Hillsdale, we recognize that language is the vehicle for thinking, learning, and teaching and the Education Department decided to make sure that the future teachers who graduate from our college have a solid understanding of how the English language works.

Finally, we partnered with a well-respected private school in the community to develop a new teacher apprenticeship program. This semester-long internship requires college students to work closely with experienced classroom educators to learn the craft of teaching.

As the semester moves along, the apprentices gradually increase their responsibility—from observation to lead teaching—as the master teachers deem appropriate. We concluded that school personnel (i.e., administrators and teachers) were in a much better position to make decisions about the apprentices’ progress and level of responsibility, and therefore we shifted most of the day-to-day responsibilities of the apprenticeship to the school.

The standard teacher preparation program requires the student to dedicate an entire semester (and sometimes two semesters) exclusively to the student-teaching experience, but Hillsdale offers both part-time and full-time placements depending on how much time students have in their schedules.  Most of our students choose a part-time (about 10 hours a week) apprenticeship so that they can continue to take a full load of classes.

Unlike most teacher education programs, which see themselves as gatekeepers to the teaching profession, Hillsdale sees itself as offering advice and supplementary services for students who want to pursue teaching. Our education faculty is available to advise students on what opportunities are available for students who want to teach.

Fully informed about the wide variety of options, Hillsdale students are free to choose which opportunities—including education courses—they think they will need if they want to teach. Some of our graduates find teaching positions at private and charter schools without having a single education course on their transcript, although we have heard from graduates (and their employers) that the revised curriculum is worth the time and effort.

Many private or charter schools have hired our smart, dedicated, well-prepared graduates. Leaders from these schools have often found the standard ed school certification to be a poor indicator of teacher quality. Because they are free to hire the most talented applicants available, regardless of certification status, they have flocked to Hillsdale for teacher candidates.

Since 2009, Hillsdale College has hosted a job fair for schools that are interested in hiring Hillsdale graduates. In 2012, the job fair drew representatives from 30 schools in states as far away as Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and North Carolina.

The impact of the changes we have made has been very encouraging, both to the department and the college as a whole. As the department changed its focus and increased the academic rigor of its coursework, we have seen more academically gifted students taking education classes and pursuing careers in teaching. No longer are education classes viewed as trivial “hoops” through which future teachers must jump. Students now see these courses—especially the teacher apprenticeship—as pivotal to their future success.

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“Studies” Departments Suffer a Loss

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but I think something remarkable occurred at UCLA last week.   By a vote of 56%-44%—almost double the margin of Scott Walker’s recent recall-election victory—the UCLA faculty rejected a proposed “Community and Conflict in the Modern World” general-education requirement. 

The proposal would have required each UCLA student to take a class that examines “community and conflict.”  Although the proposal did not precisely define “community and conflict,” it listed a set of sample courses that would satisfy the requirement.   Approximately half of those courses were taught by one of the “studies” departments—e.g. African American Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, Labor and Workplace Studies, American Indian Studies, etc.  Almost all of the remaining half would naturally fit in one of the “studies” departments.

I was shocked by the vote.  I’d estimate that out of approximately 4,000 faculty members at UCLA, only about 40 have right-of-center political views.  And of those 40, approximately three-quarters aren’t true conservatives—instead they’re libertarians or right-leaning moderates.  I know of only five UCLA professors who at least occasionally call themselves conservative, consistently vote for Republicans, and are willing to admit that publicly.

Given the above facts and the 56-44 vote, it necessarily follows that a large fraction of liberal professors voted against the “community and conflict” requirement.

The same attitudes were true of UCLA students.  Based on some informal polls I’ve conducted, approximately 80% of UCLA students preferred Obama over McCain in the last presidential election.  Despite the overwhelmingly liberal ideology among UCLA students, only 45% said that they were disappointed that the proposal failed. (Another 6% said that UCLA needs a diversity-related requirement but opposed the current proposal.  This poll is ongoing – I am using numbers that the web site listed at approximately 8:00am on June 10.)

Although I was shocked by the results, one of my liberal friends lectured me why I shouldn’t have been so surprised.  “I know you think UCLA is just a bunch of knee-jerk leftists,” he explained.  “But a lot of those leftists are actually academic conservatives.”  By the latter phrase he meant people who value high standards and rigor in teaching and research.

While few people will say it, nearly everyone on college campuses understands that the “studies” classes are not very rigorous; nor do they have high intellectual standards.

If, however, you say something like that on a university campus, within seconds you’ll usually hear a reply such as, “No, no academic discipline is any more rigorous than any other.  It’s just that different disciplines require different talents.”

Notwithstanding how often you hear such statements, no one in the history of mankind has ever said, “Darn, I made a D in Chicano studies.  I guess now I’ll have to major in chemistry.”  In contrast, lots of people have said the opposite.  Academic conservatives—even those who are leftwing politically—understand that fact.

My liberal friend made another claim:  The same academic conservatives, although they do not think very highly of the “studies” departments, do not want to admit that fact publicly.  They understand the mob-like responses they will have to face, including being called a racist, if they do that.  Indeed my liberal friend speculated that if the “community and conflict” proposal had been decided by an open ballot instead of a secret one, then the proposal would have passed almost unanimously.

Thus, the current situation on college campuses is similar to the last several years of the Soviet Union.  Nearly everyone can see that the system is faulty.  But no one will dare to say that publicly.

Last week UCLA revealed a crack in the wall of campus political correctness.  Maybe someday the academic equivalent of a Ronald Reagan will demand that we tear down the entire wall.

More HERE




Oxford U attacks British government's state school student target

Leading universities defy government calls to take more students from state comprehensives.

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, has told elite universities to increase the number of undergraduates they admit from working class backgrounds or face financial penalties.

The policy prompted fears that highly academic institutions would reject well-qualified sixth-formers from private schools to meet the government’s agenda of “social meddling”.

However, about half of the most respected academic institutions in the country are refusing to use state school intake as a key target for increasing opportunities for deprived students.

Oxford said the state school target would be “misleading” while Imperial College London suggested that the problem lay with poor results in comprehensives and colleges.

All universities wanting to charge higher tuition fees of more than £6,000 must sign contracts with a government watchdog containing targets to “widen access” to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Under the new regime coming into force in September, universities could face fines of up to £500,000 for failing to meet their targets or be banned from charging fees above £6,000 a year.

Analysis of the contracts that institutions have signed with the Office for Fair Access watchdog suggests that three-quarters of universities intend to charge the maximum £9,000 a year for at least some of their degree courses.

However, half of the research-intensive Russell group universities in England have refused to include specific targets for increasing the number of state school students they admit.

Oxford University said it was “misleading” to treat all state school students as disadvantaged, compared with those who have been privately educated.

“Our goal is to increase access for under-represented groups. We are not convinced that using school type is the best means to that end,” the university said in an introduction to its contract with Offa.

Instead, Oxford will focus on attracting candidates from homes with incomes of less than £16,000 a year, the very poorest in society. Other universities are focusing on attracting applications from neighbourhoods which rarely send students into higher education.

The University of Manchester said targets for increasing students from state schools and colleges was “widely acknowledged” as “the least valid” milestone to use.

“The social composition of top performing state schools has been shown to be extremely skewed towards more affluent sections of society,” the university said on Thursday.

Imperial College London said state educated students were “not a disadvantaged group in themselves”. Imperial currently takes 38 per cent of students from independent schools. But this simply reflects “the gap in performance” between A-level students in state and private sixth-forms.

Tim Hands, master of the independent Magdalen College School, Oxford, said the state school targets were the product of "politically inspired social meddling".

A Department for Business, Innovation and Skills spokesman said: “The Government is determined that no-one with the ambition and ability, whatever their background, should come up against barriers to accessing higher education.

“Universities will be investing over £670 million in attracting students from disadvantaged backgrounds by 2016/17, over quarter of their fee income above basic fee levels."

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Moral formation and the school choice movement

Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum summed up the problem with public schooling in America when he repeatedly called it an “outdated factory model.” Part of Santorum’s purpose was to draw greater attention to the simple fact that parents bear the primary responsibility for the education of their children.

Mississippi State Senator Michael Watson, an advocate for school choice, notes that when it comes to education, “Government does not take responsibility without taking power.” Over time, the government has superseded the parental role in education. The effects are disastrous, not just for education but for moral formation too.

The battle for meaningful reform in public education has been a long and protracted one spanning decades, but states, not the federal government, are turning the tide.

In 2011 at least a half dozen states enacted school choice reforms. In Louisiana, over half of public school students will now be eligible for vouchers. The school choice movement has been steadily making inroads because parents are demanding options and greater control over the moral formation and education of their children. The groundswell of support for reform has come from families and not elected officials or the political class.

Reformers have argued that greater choice -- meaning open enrollment in public school districts -- vouchers, and charter schools, will provide competition for students, thus improving the quality of education. Virtually every study that has tested that theory has backed up the claim that schools that compete for students and tax dollars improve.

There has been a substantial shift away from the thinking that only substantial spending increases in the status quo public education model will improve education. Jay Greene in Education Myths cuts to the heart of the issue, “If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved . . . . We’ve doubled the per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet the schools aren’t better.”

U.S. courts have also ruled in favor of voucher and school choice initiatives. Some opponents have tried to argue that tax credits allowing for school choice violate the First Amendment, which protects religious freedom. However, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of religious liberty, as parents, not government, end up endorsing the religious schools of their choosing.

Education, moral formation, and religious expression are in need of greater space from government instead of further secularized encroachment. It is not the government’s role to inhibit the free exercise of faith; rather it has a duty to encourage and uphold it.

Separation of school and state provides greater educational opportunities for an increasing complex global economy. The “factory model” has not adequately educated millions of public school students. Walter Russell Mead commented on the factory model of education: “Don’t we want to teach our children to do something smarter than move in large groups by the clock and the bell, follow directions and always color between the lines?”

Defenders of educational reform and school choice know there are still miles to go given the entrenched opposition from the National Education Association (NEA) and other powerful special interests committed to doubling down on reform-blocking campaigns.

Politicians and elected officials like to talk about equity and fairness, but millions of students with socio-economic disadvantages are denied fairness of opportunity when it comes to education. This is true simply because of the neighborhoods and school districts where they live. It is no wonder that school choice is often referred to as the “civil rights issue of our time.” However, it is also an important religious issue. Educational reform allows for parents to play a greater role in their child’s education, but it will also help strengthen the moral formation of a society in disarray.

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Obama quietly implements Common Core

New standards for math and English called Common Core are poised to hit public schools across the nation. Some schools will begin implementing them as early as this fall, before parents have any inkling what has happened to their children’s classroom instruction.

Parents will not know how or why the nationally prescribed curriculum came about or how to change it if they don’t like it.

That undoubtedly sounds similar to the famous assertion of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that Congress would have to pass the Affordable Care Act for people to know what’s in it. The nationalized Common Core for education is like Obamacare in ripping control over critical, life-altering decisions from those most affected.

Achieve, a band of like-minded corporate moguls that formed in 1996 to push national education standards, had to report rather sheepishly last month that its own poll showed Americans are almost totally in the dark about the Common Core juggernaut.

A remarkable 79 percent of registered voters know “nothing” or “not much” about what Achieve calls the Common Core State Standards. Another 14 percent said they knew “some,” and just 7 percent claimed to know “a lot.”

None of that is surprising: Those standards for teaching English and mathematics were put together behind closed doors starting in 2009 by “experts” assembled by resident bureaucrats of the Washington-based Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association.

In 2010, even before a final draft had been made public, the Obama administration began pressuring states to commit to the Common Core in order to be eligible for a slice of the $4.5 billion Race to the Top fund carved out of the federal stimulus.

More recently, the U.S. Department of Education made adoption of such “college- and career-ready standards” one of its many conditions for granting states No Child Left Behind waivers.

Thus, any pretense of these being voluntary “state standards” went out the window long ago — all the more so because the Common Core now is linked to mandatory national tests that are being paid for by another $350 million in Obama stimulus bucks.

Achieve had a headache remedy handy for the embarrassing lack of public knowledge revealed by its own pollsters: Write a glowing description of the Common Core and then ask folks again what they thought. After reading it, 77 percent of respondents said they supported implementation of the Common Core, a finding Achieve then touted. This was the description the pollster spoon-fed them: “These new standards have been set to internationally competitive levels in English and math. This means that students may be more challenged by the material they study, and the tests they take will measure more advanced concepts and require students to show their work.”

That’s a classic example of a pollster manipulating questions to obtain a result desired by an advocacy group. Remember, the description was for folks who confessed to knowing basically nothing about the Common Core.

Suppose respondents had before them instead the following description:

“Your local schools are about to start implementing standards and assessments developed by Washington-based interest groups and pushed by the federal government. These standards, known as the Common Core, have never been field-tested, and your local school board has been unable to put them to a public hearing or vote.

“The national standards provide no process for states or localities to amend them. They will require students to take four federally subsidized tests a year, all of them via computer, and the results will be a factor in evaluating local teachers.”

Given that factual statement, it is doubtful the desire to push forward with immediate implementation would have reached 25 percent.
Would parents really trust behind-the-scenes forces to have total sway over their children’s education if they knew they would be powerless to monitor the content of lessons or the online testing?

Forty-six states are on board with the Common Core. Only Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia have chosen to stick completely to their own standards and thereby safeguard the rights of their citizens. In the compliant 46, local school systems are dutifully beginning the process of retraining their teachers to conform to the centralized system.

When 90 percent of parents, taxpayers and voters learn what is going on, perhaps the “repeal and replace” battle cry won’t refer only to Obamacare.

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NINETY British primary pupils sent home every day for attacks in class: Shocking figures reveal rising school violence

A Rising tide of violent indiscipline in primary schools was laid bare yesterday.  Official figures revealed that 90 children are sent home every day for attacking teachers or classmates.

And the worst deterioration in behaviour is being seen in the most affluent parts of the country. Teachers blamed parents for failing to equip children with the social skills they need to cope in the classroom.

Last year primary schools expelled nearly 300 pupils aged 11 and under for violence and handed out almost 17,000 suspensions. This means that on any given school day in 2010/11, 90 pupils were ordered out of school for attacking a member of staff or fellow pupil.

Primaries were forced to bar pupils more than 10,000 times for persistent disruption in lessons and 6,390 times for verbal abuse.

Hundreds more pupils were sent home for other serious breaches of school rules such as bullying, racist abuse, sexual misconduct, theft, drugs or alcohol offences and damage to property.

Figures issued by the Department for Education shows that while the number of secondary pupils being suspended or expelled is falling, there is a worsening picture at primary level – especially in the most affluent parts of the country.

The number of suspensions has increased most sharply in the country’s wealthiest areas.

The trend follows claims from teachers that spoilt middle-class children are just as likely to challenge authority at school.

Earlier this year, Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: ‘A minority of children are very aware of their rights, have a total disregard of school rules and are rather less aware of their responsibility for their own learning and how to show respect to staff and other students.

‘This can apply as much to over-indulged middle class children as those from challenging families.’

The latest data emerged days after a psychologist warned that parents who are afraid to discipline their children are creating an unruly generation. Dr Tanya Byron, who featured in BBC TV’s The House of Tiny Tearaways, described the rise of the ‘friend-parent’ who tries to be the child’s equal rather than an authority figure.

Teachers’ leaders said yesterday that a lack of parental support was to blame for discipline problems.

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said a recent survey had shown that two-thirds of teachers highlighted poor support from parents.  ‘Sending children to school on time, with basic equipment and clear expectations of how they are expected to behave is a critical part of the job of all parents,’ she said.

‘Parents must understand that their responsibility for their child’s behaviour does not end at the school gate.’

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: ‘Some children are arriving unprepared for what it means to be in a large group of people.’

The figures show that boys are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than girls.  The average suspension was for 2.4 days but 2,900 lasted more than two weeks.

The fall in numbers being barred from lessons in secondary schools is partly due to schools’ increasing use of unofficial exclusions – or ‘managed moves’ – which transfer disruptive pupils to other secondaries.

Primary pupils perpetrate more assaults on teachers than secondary. Some 42 primary pupils are sent home every day for assaults on teachers, compared with 32 secondary pupils.

The Department for Education said the figures justified Coalition moves to strengthen teachers’ powers to keep order in the classroom.

SOURCE

What if public schools were abolished?

In American culture, public schools are praised in public and criticized in private, which is roughly the opposite of how we tend to treat large-scale enterprises like Walmart. In public, everyone says that Walmart is awful, filled with shoddy foreign products and exploiting workers. But in private, we buy the well-priced, quality goods, and long lines of people hope to be hired.

Why is this? It has something to do with the fact that public schools are part of our civic religion, the primary evidence that people cite to show that local government serves us. And there is a psychological element. Most of us turn our kids over to them, so surely they must have our best interest at heart!

But do they? Murray N. Rothbard's Education: Free and Compulsory explains that the true origin and purpose of public education is not so much education as we think of it, but indoctrination in the civic religion. This explains why the civic elite is so suspicious of homeschooling and private schooling: it's not fear of low test scores that is driving this, but the worry that these kids aren't learning the values that the state considers important.

But to blast public schools is not the purpose of this article. There are decent public schools and terrible ones, so there is no use generalizing. Nor is there a need to trot out data on test scores. Let me just deal with economics. All studies have shown that average cost per pupil for public schools is twice that of private schools (here is a sample studyDownload PDF).

This runs contrary to intuition, since people think of public schools as free and private schools as expensive. But once you consider the source of funding (tax dollars vs. market tuition or donation), the private alternative is much cheaper. In fact, the public schools cost as much as the most expensive and elite private schools in the country. The difference is that the cost of public schooling is spread out over the entire population, whereas the private school cost is borne only by the families with students who attend them.

In short, if we could abolish public schools and compulsory schooling laws, and replace it all with market-provided education, we would have better schools at half the price, and be freer too. We would also be a more just society, with only the customers of education bearing the costs.

What's not to like? Well, there is the problem of the transition. There are obvious and grave political difficulties. We might say that public education enjoys a political advantage here due to network effects. A significant number of "subscriptions," etc. have been piled up in the status quo, and it is very difficult to change those.

But let's pretend. Let's say that a single town decided that the costs of public schooling are too vast relative to private schooling, and the city council decided to abolish public schools outright. The first thing to notice is that this would be illegal, since every state requires localities to provide education on a public basis. I don't know what would happen to the city council. Would they be jailed? Who knows? Certainly they would be sued.

But let's say we somehow get past that problem, thanks to, say, a special amendment in the state constitution that exempts certain localities if the city council approves. Then there is the problem of federal legislation and regulation. I am purely speculating since I don't know the relevant laws, but we can guess that the Department of Education would take notice, and a national hysteria of some sort would follow. But let's say we miraculously get past that problem too, and the federal government lets this locality go its own way.

There will be two stages to the transition. In the first stage, many seemingly bad things will happen. How are the physical buildings handled in our example? They are sold to the highest bidder, whether that be to new school owners, businesses, or housing developers. And the teachers and administrators? All let go. You can imagine the outcry.

With property taxes abolished, people with kids in public schools might move away. There will be no premium for houses in school districts that are considered good. There will be anger about this. For the parents that remain, there is a major problem of what to do with the kids during the day.

With property taxes gone, there is extra money to pay for schools, but their assets have just fallen in market value (even without the Fed), which is a serious problem when it comes to shelling out for school tuition. There will, of course, be widespread hysteria about the poor too, who will find themselves without any schooling choices other than homeschool.

Now, all that sounds pretty catastrophic, doesn't it? Indeed. But it is only phase one. If we can somehow make it to phase two, something completely different will emerge. The existing private schools will be filled to capacity and there will be a crying need for new ones. Entrepreneurs will quickly flood into the area to provide schools on a competitive basis. Churches and other civic institutions will gather the money to provide education.

At first, the new schools will be modeled on the public school idea. Kids will be there from 8 to 4 or 5, and all classes will be covered. But in short order, new alternatives will appear. There will be schools for half-day classes. There will be large, medium, and small schools. Some will have 40 kids per class, and others 4 or 1. Private tutoring will boom. Sectarian schools of all kinds will appear. Micro-schools will open to serve niche interests: science, classics, music, theater, computers, agriculture, etc. There will be single-sex schools. Whether sports would be part of school or something completely independent is for the market to decide.

And no longer will the "elementary, middle school, high school" model be the only one. Classes will not necessarily be grouped by age alone. Some will be based on ability and level of advancement too. Tuition would range from free to super expensive. The key thing is that the customer would be in charge.

Transportation services would spring up to replace the old school-bus system. People would be able to make money by buying vans and providing transportation. In all areas related to education, profit opportunities would abound.

In short, the market for education would operate the same as any other market. Groceries, for example. Where there is a demand, and obviously people demand education for their kids, there is supply. There are large grocery stores, small ones, discount ones, premium ones, and stores for groceries on the run. It is the same for other goods, and it would be the same for education. Again, the customer would rule. In the end, what would emerge is not entirely predictable — the market never is — but whatever happened would be in accord with the wishes of the public.

After this phase two, this town would emerge as one of the most desirable in the country. Educational alternatives would be unlimited. It would be the source of enormous progress, and a model for the nation. It could cause the entire country to rethink education. And then those who moved away would move back to enjoy the best schools in the country at half the price of the public schools, and those without children in the house wouldn't have to pay a dime for education. Talk about attractive!

So which town will be the first to try it and show us all the way?

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What hope for Britain's faith schools?

The Roman Catholic primary school with a 90 per cent Muslim intake raises questions about immigration and the future of our church schools

'We’ve only the one family who insist on taking their children out of RE lessons,” says Father Bernard Kelly, the long-serving chairman of the governors at the Rosary School at Saltley in inner-city Birmingham.

Thirty years ago, its 400 pupils were all Catholics, many of them first or second-generation Irish. Now all but 10 per cent are Muslims, yet their parents are apparently happy for them to sit through lessons taught by a largely Christian staff and taken from a Catholic syllabus that includes subjects such as the Pope, the Virgin Mary, the Mass and Jesus.

“What can I say?” exclaims 72-year-old Fr Kelly. “It’s their choice. We make no imposition on them to change their religion.”

Saltley itself, he reports, has altered dramatically even in his 17 years in the parish “and now there are certainly Muslim schools nearby that these children could go to. We’re right next door to a local authority, non-denominational primary, but still Muslim parents keep choosing our Catholic school. It’s a revelation to me.”

He means it in the best possible sense of word – so much so that he insists that the 80-year-old Rosary School will be here “for another eight decades”. Others, though, might use the same word in a different spirit. For this Catholic primary has been making headlines on account of its unusual intake, and has in the process reignited the fierce debate about immigration and the role and purpose of state-funded faith schools.

If these, critics ask, are to continue to be funded by the taxpayer to the tune of 100 per cent of their wage bills and 90 per cent of their capital costs (the other 10 per cent has to be raised by members of the church or denomination), then shouldn’t the logic of the system be that Catholic schools cater for Catholic children, Jewish ones for Jewish children and so on? Why should the state pay the Catholic Church to educate Muslims?

The question takes on a greater urgency when we consider the first fruits of the 2011 census, which was unveiled last week. These show the largest growth in population in England and Wales (by 3.7 million) in any 10-year period since records began in 1810, with one principal cause being a rise in immigration.

That brings a new diversity to our population, in ethnic and religious terms, but also places fresh strains on the compact between government and churches, sealed by the 1944 Education Act, which allows for children in particular faith groups to attend taxpayer-funded “voluntary-controlled” and “voluntary-aided” schools, such as the Rosary Primary.

There are currently about 6,500 such primaries and secondaries in the state system – 65 per cent of them Anglican, 33 per cent Catholic, and smaller numbers of Jewish and Methodist. In recent years, Whitehall has extended this concession to other faiths. The most recent figures from the Department for Education list one Hindu, one Seventh Day Adventist, four Sikh and 11 Muslim voluntary-aided schools.

But numbers have not kept pace with our rapidly rising and diverse population, leading to anomalies such as that seen at the Rosary School. Indeed, the influx has been so fast that, as we can see from the Rosary School, some of society’s institutions no longer explicitly reflect the communities they serve.

The response to this challenge has been attempts to agree an upper and lower cap on admissions from the sponsoring faith group to ensure that the school lives up to its own denominational mission and justifies the allocation of state funds. But there is little agreement on what those limits should be – or even if they are necessary.

The Rt Rev John Pritchard, Bishop of Oxford, head of the Church of England’s Education Board, caused headlines last year by suggesting his schools should admit only one in 10 Anglican church-goers because their “primary function” is “to serve the wider community”. Otherwise, he warned, C of E schools risked operating only to collect “nice Christians into safe places”.

As well as highlighting concerns about community cohesion, the bishop’s remarks were also interpreted as addressing the widespread perception that church schools too often attract ambitious but irreligious middle-class parents because of their better-than-average academic records.

Current practice in most Anglican schools is to admit about 50 per cent of churchgoers (real or otherwise). But the Church of England, as the Established Church, has a unique view of itself as serving everyone in local communities, regardless of their denominational attachment or absence of one. And so the balancing act it tries to pull off is to try to make its schools sufficiently different from their secular counterparts – without ever making them so Christian that they put off the godless and those of other faiths.

The Church School of the Future, published in March under the auspices of Bishop Pritchard, addressed this conundrum directly. It advocated no softening of the commitment to the teaching of RE or to a collective act of Christian worship, but also promoted “distinctiveness within an inclusive community framework”.

Worthy sentiments, but hardly a blueprint for headteachers on how to proceed day to day. The reality is that in most schools they make their own decisions. Some, for example, allow Muslim pupils to wear veils or skullcaps, others don’t. At the Rosary, it is permitted, but Fr Kelly reports that most choose to wear the standard uniform instead. Some schools insist all attend acts of worship, others don’t. Again, it is optional at the Rosary. And some allow children to finish early to attend faith-formation classes at their local temple or mosque. Others don’t.

Michael Gove has often spoken of his admiration for faith schools. But the Secretary of State’s views on the question of a cap may be judged by a leaked letter he wrote earlier this year concerning a planned Catholic comprehensive in Richmond. A high-profile local campaign group, claiming that non-Catholics in the area faced religious discrimination by being excluded from the school, had been pressing for only half of the places at the new school to be reserved for Catholics. In his letter, Mr Gove described this suggestion as seeming “very sensible to me”.

This 50 per cent mark seems to represent the direction of travel for Whitehall and Westminster in the wider debate. But it is fiercely resisted by those running long-standing denominational schools. The Catholic bishops, for instance, defeated a 2008 proposal from the Labour government to impose a 25 per cent non-Catholic intake.

With hindsight, it feels like a curious victory. While some of the most popular and high-achieving Catholic schools can happily fill their classes with Mass-goers, overall figures produced by the Catholic Education Service in 2011 show that nationwide the level of Catholic pupils in Catholic schools stands at 70 per cent – that is, lower than the Labour government had proposed. In Catholic sixth forms, the figure falls to 50 per cent.

However, there seems little appetite right now to revisit the issue, but cases such as the Rosary Primary continue to highlight the apparent absurdities of the present policy of muddling through. The Catholic weekly, the Tablet, reported in 2011 that there were about 25 other schools in similar situations – mainly in the North West and the Midlands, and specifically areas that once had large immigrant Catholic populations, but where the next generation had moved out to be replaced by Muslim families.

The situation varies around the country. In some large cities, the recent influx of Poles and other eastern Europeans has seen Catholic parishes and schools rejuvenated and filled to the limit. And so different dioceses adopt different approaches.

In Salford diocese – which serves Catholics in the Manchester region – the bishop decided in September 2010 to close Sacred Heart Primary in Blackburn when the percentage of Catholics fell to 3 per cent, and to sell the premises to the local education authority. Among those keen to take it over was the local mosque that wanted to run it as a Muslim voluntary-aided school.

“We want to make sure the educational needs of the community are met,” said the diocesan director of education, Geraldine Bradbury, at the time. “We would not be serving the local community by insisting that we run the school. It means having a Catholic headteacher [all Catholic schools must have a Catholic head] and 10 per cent of the timetable on RE. It would be very wrong of us.”

In Birmingham, by contrast, faced by similar statistics at the Rosary School, there is a commitment to keep it open as long as local parents want it. Fr Kelly insists that the work it is doing today in its classrooms with its 90 per cent Muslim intake is “living the gospel in a wider context” and therefore absolutely central to the “witness” of the Church in a multicultural society.

In the space between his unbridled enthusiasm, the Anglican Bishop of Oxford’s controversial talk of distinctiveness and inclusion, and Bradbury’s straightforward pragmatism lies the heart of an unresolved debate about the direction of faith schools funded by the public purse. In an age where immigration is profoundly changing the very fabric of our society, is it whom these schools serve in the denominational sense or how they go about it that justifies their continued existence?

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Australia: State of secrecy over University of Queensland job loss

They fired a whistleblower but bribed him to stay silent about his job loss.  Big Bucks, no doubt!  Taxpayer bucks

THE University of Queensland will have us believe that Phil Procopis, the whistleblower in the uni's nepotism scandal, was made redundant simply because his department was restructured.

Procopis was the director of a unit known on campus as ARMS, an acronym for Assurance and Risk Management Services. ARMS no longer exists.

Procopis's position was abolished and he signed a confidentially agreement to receive his payout. Restructures happen. So does nepotism. So does secrecy.

Vice-chancellor Professor Paul Greenfield and his deputy Michael Keniger left the university after The Courier-Mail revealed a "close family member" [his daughter] of Greenfield had gained entry to the medical faculty without the proper entry requirements.

Greenfield denied any wrongdoing, saying the relative was admitted to the medical school as the result of a misunderstanding.

Procopis is central to the story because The Courier-Mail recently revealed he was the mysterious whistleblower who raised concerns about the improper admission with Chancellor John Story.

The scandal got a head of steam, I believe, because it shattered our perceptions that post-Fitzgerald Queensland was relatively free of cronyism and that our society had at last become a (cliche alert) "level playing field".  In a broader sense, it also challenged national ideals of egalitarianism and the fair go.

Until the university scandal, most of us naively believed Queenslanders were rewarded on merit. The truth was a little different. Now we know it will not harm your prospects to have friends or relatives in high places.

Nepotism exists in Queensland across business, the arts, law, medicine and even the media.  Premier Campbell Newman admitted it existed in government and shrugged his shoulders when asked what he was going to do about it.

The university controversy also got a head of steam because the venerable institution at first issued misleading press releases about Greenfield and Keniger leaving. Greenfield was forced out after the university commissioned an investigation by Tim Carmody, SC. Carmody's report remains secret and we don't even know for sure the name of the student at the heart of the affair.

The university made a mockery of the the new regulatory body, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, by refusing to hand over the Carmody report.

TEQSA chief commissioner Dr Carol Nicoll told a Senate estimates hearing the uni would not release the document, claiming confidentiality and privilege.

Tertiary Education Minister Senator Chris Evans was cryptic, telling the hearing it was a "complex case", and not as "straightforward" as some suggest.  Was he suggesting universities are beyond the reach of Federal Cabinet?

Greenfield walked away with a payout of $952,000, reports tabled in Parliament revealed. His deputy, Keniger, a key figure in the imbroglio, also quit. He got $695,000.

The Crime and Misconduct Commission has completed its investigations into the scandal and its brief of evidence is in the hands of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Meanwhile, the university has not released all the details surrounding the exit of Procopis. It should.

The academic committee set up to evaluate ARMS was chaired by Dr Len Gainsford from Victoria. It praised Procopis's unit and gave it seven "commendations".

"ARMS is widely respected by managers across UQ," it reported. "The unit consists of a committed and dedicated team." It said ARMS "responded well to governance initiatives" and its audits were "well regarded".

It added: "The introduction of a risk-management framework and development of commitment towards its progress has been effective."  Despite the glowing report card ARMS was abolished.

Vice-Chancellor Deborah Terry says the restructuring was the result of a "routine, cyclical" review initiated before the admissions scandal.

Terry says "it would be inaccurate and wrong" to link the role of Procopis in unearthing the scandal to his redundancy.

Procopis's redundancy and the disbanding of his department happened despite Terry announcing on May 17 that Procopis would have a central role in misconduct matters under a package of governance reforms.

Terry told The Courier-Mail recently that at the time of her May announcement, "the proposed reorganisation ... had not been finalised".

In a letter to staff she added: "The review and the re-organisation were unrelated to the fact that Mr Procopis communicated to the Chancellor information he had received (about the scandal). It was entirely appropriate for Mr Procopis to do this, as UQ policy identified his position as a receiver for disclosures of this nature."

As the only ARMS employee made redundant, Procopis must be feeling unlucky. An insider tells me Procopis never wanted to be a whistleblower. He was just doing his duty.

Until recently he was also chair of the Crime and Misconduct Commission's audit committee.

Who tipped him off remains a mystery. "The university will not disclose their identity," says Terry.

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