The blogspot version of this blog is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other mirror sites: Political Correctness Watch, Dissecting Leftism, Greenie Watch, Australian Politics, Socialized Medicine, Tongue Tied, Food & Health Skeptic Immigration Watch and Gun Watch. For a list of backups viewable in China, see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing). The archive for this mirror site is here or here.
****************************************************************************************



21 November, 2007

Battle-scarred teacher in L.A. barrios speaks out

Hi, my name is Migdia Chinea and I'm a recovering LAUSD "substitute." Oh, I'm also UCLA-educated with honors, refined, empathetic, college-level Spanish fluent and a Googleable professional screenwriter. To make ends meet during hard economic times, I became a "substitute teacher" for the Los Angeles Unified School District, or LAUSD - or to put it more kindly, a "guest teacher." As a guest LAUSD teacher I thought I would be an asset, but the system has never appreciated nor taken advantage of my educational or professional hard-earned accomplishments.

There's no teaching going on at LAUSD - only confinement of the sort one may find in a penal colony, complete with walkie-talkie-carrying wardens and bullhorns. And I have "confined" at many different schools within central Los Angeles in the last six months. Many students scream "suuuuuuuub" when they see someone like me - a "guest teacher" - in their classroom and trample anyone and/or anything as they push and shove their way inside.

Recently, I was privy to a narrative by a teacher in which he complained that after a one-day absence, his classroom was in shreds and wall posters were torn down. His VHS player and flash drive with all lesson plans were stolen as was his computer. Lab equipment was broken and tagged with gang symbols in permanent marker and completely nonfunctional. He was subsequently informed that his substitute teacher had walked out of the classroom numerous times throughout the day and had left the students to themselves. He wondered how the substitute could be so irresponsible and how he would break the news to his seventh-graders about their tagged notebooks with profane language and two-weeks worth of work in the garbage. Oh, woe!

I have covered the school at which that individual teaches. It is surrounded by criminal street gangs and is widely considered one of the most dangerous campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The South Side Village Boys, South Side Watts Varrio Grape, Grape Street Crips, East Side Village Bloods, Hacienda Bloods, Circle City Piru and Bounty Hunters street gangs all claim turf in that area, and frequent flare-ups of gang violence are common. I have found most classes in this school to be in a complete state of disaster, absolutely filthy, with no computers available. There are no simple supplies, such as pencils, pens or paper, nothing to be found anywhere. Was this teacher's class an exception? Did he not know that some of his students are probably gang members themselves?

I have observed that many students at this school (and other LAUSD schools) are violent and unpredictable. I was present, in fact, during a violent melee involving hundreds of students that brought in several police squad cars and helicopters flying overhead. I have also endured several school "lock downs." Here's how a "lock down" works: As in a prison, the inmates and their jailers are not allowed to leave for any reason, nor let anyone out.

I then wondered if this teacher had ever asked his students why they behaved the way they did. Are there still people out there who believe that students are ALWAYS right and eager to learn and downtrodden and good. Why are these LAUSD schools so dilapidated - is it the "suuuuuuubs"? I have actually been advised to take pictures of these areas of confinement, er, pardon me, "schools," just in case someone makes an accusation after I'm long gone and I have no way to defend myself. And I always try to leave one classroom door open because I am often afraid for my life - my life.

I've been injured more than once. On Oct. 5, 2007, at another notorious middle school, I was deliberately body-slammed on the head by two to three large young men in a P.E. class of 53 students, while another teacher (someone I had never met before) was decent enough to give a formal declaration to school and police authorities of what he had witnessed. I sustained a concussion and sciatica nerve damage as a result of this personal attack intended to "terrorize [me]." I have memory lapses and continued head and leg pain. I'm told by the local police that this sort of physical abuse on teachers occurs with disturbing regularity. The LAUSD case nurse assigned to my case labeled my attack "boys will be boys."

I've been burglarized (on June 11, 2007), by a stalker with key access to my locked classroom (likely by another teacher or custodian). This theft occurred during lunch break while I was on a five-minute bathroom errand and included a $2,600 2-week-old Sony Vaio notebook, my RX glasses, credit cards, etc. The incident was also reported to the jurisdictional police. But I will have to take LAUSD to Small Claims Court, because district officials will accept NO responsibility.

I've been insulted repeatedly, e.g., "hey, you bitch!," among many vile expletives, by students at various schools. I've been vandalized. My Mini S Cooper has been broken into twice. I'm usually so tired after a full day of "teaching" that I once never even noticed the damage until I opened the car's hatchback several days later.

I've been harassed and pelted with the same Halloween candy I bought as a treat for the students on Oct. 31, 2007. In the pandemonium that usually ensues at these "underprivileged schools," the bungalow class door handles that I reported as missing came off upon touching, fell off, and the students began using these door handles as weapons - their behavior and the school's fire code violation were reported to the LAUSD Board of Directors and the fire department. What a laugh.

My class was rampaged at a barrio middle school on May 23, 2007 - witnessed by two other substitute teachers who were sent in to "help me." One happened to be a lactating mother. These two individuals were also pelted with various objects. This incident was reported to the dean and to school security. No response from the dean for two whole class periods. This was also reported to LAUSD Superintendent David Brewer - no response at all.

I've been maltreated and threatened at all of these schools. But you're not supposed to complain about maltreatment. You're supposed to contain these students and stay quiet with your head down. Is anyone aware of that? Is anyone aware that "substitutes" cannot complain about anything? Is anyone aware that with an obesity and diabetes epidemic in our youth, regular teachers sell junk food for profit to students at many schools? I have reported that fact to the State Department of Education and Social Services. But you have to do so on a school by school basis because state bureaucrats believe it's a singular problem.

I have reported every single incident listed here and many, many more not listed here. However, the LAUSD has only aggravated the situation by doing nothing and ignoring everything. In my view, the LAUSD is completely corrupt, inept and broken, with many students having serious behavioral problems and disinterested in learning, whereas the teachers remain underpaid and exhausted - some of them just marking time until their retirement and giving out charity passing grades to high school students who can barely write or do math at a third-grade level.

I believe that the students who commit acts of dishonesty (like cheating), violence and outright destruction of property should be suspended. When the recidivist students are suspended, their parents or guardians should pay a fine, which may grow incrementally according to the student's offense - and I believe that when such offenses are perpetrated against a substitute, the fine should be doubled (like driving violations in construction zones). I believe that when these citations are enforced a few times, we will all see a marked improvement in student conduct. If there are no consequences to students for unruly behavior, and all they get is a nice little talk at the dean's office, unruly behavior is reinforced. These bad students know how to lie and abuse a system that appears to be afraid of them. They know there are no consequences. They're not learning much now, and the teachers cannot be teaching much in a chaotic environment - so it's a self-perpetuating situation.

As for me, I am exhausted. I feel exploited and I'm also injured, to boot. It's almost impossible for anyone in my position - in a few short days - to instill in these students any sense of decency, good manners and respect because they should be learning these civilities at home. Please know that I get paid very little with no health insurance coverage in sight. And while those incompetents in high-level administrative positions collect their big, fat paychecks for their lack of humanity, there seem to be no end to the problems.

This is a difficult economy, especially for educated single mothers. And women must do what they can do to support themselves and their families. But the press covers this aspect of survival from the teacher's perspective very little, concentrating instead (and almost exclusively) on the students' persistent test failures. I am aware that some teachers, and some "substitutes," may be incompetent and don't care about performing well on their jobs, nor do they care about their students. However, since I'm not one of those people, I believe that the media has an obligation to acknowledge the problems and report truthfully on what is going on. The schools are a mess, filthy, dilapidated and without supplies. The students are dangerous, disrespectful and out-of-control. The country should take notice that teaching has become a very dangerous job and that my life as a teacher is very, very, cheap.

Source




Ludicrous under-reporting of dangerous schools

Los Angeles had not one dangerous school. Can you believe that?

A little-publicized provision of the No Child Left Behind Act requiring states to identify "persistently dangerous schools" is hampered by widespread underreporting of violent incidents and by major differences among the states in defining unsafe campuses, several audits say. Out of about 94,000 schools in the United States, only 46 were designated as persistently dangerous in the past school year. Maryland had six, all in Baltimore; the District and Virginia had none.

At Anacostia Senior High School last school year, private security guards working under D.C. police recorded 61 violent offenses, including three sexual assaults and one assault with a deadly weapon. There were 21 other nonviolent cases in which students were caught bringing knives and guns to school. Anacostia is not considered a persistently dangerous school.

One high school in Los Angeles had 289 cases of battery, two assaults with a deadly weapon, a robbery and two sex offenses in one school year, according to an audit by the U.S. Department of Education's inspector general. It did not meet the state's definition of a persistently dangerous school, or PDS. None of California's roughly 9,000 schools has. The reason, according to an audit issued by the Department of Education in August: "States fear the political, social, and economic consequences of having schools designated as PDS, and school administrators view the label as detrimental to their careers. Consequently, states set unreasonable definitions for PDS and schools have underreported violent incidents."

Critics of the law, including lawmakers who hope the policy can be changed as part of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, say the low number is a sign the legislation is not working.

The District's definition counts only severe offenses -- generally felonies -- that have been officially verified by police. But many incidents are not formally reported by police. An investigation of the District's schools by The Washington Post this year has shown that more than half of teenage students attend schools that would meet the city's definition of persistently dangerous.

The problem is not confined to the District. In Virginia, a school gets the label by having a single severe incident -- such as a homicide, sexual assault or bomb use -- or by exceeding a certain number of "points" for lesser offenses. A school's threshold of points is based on enrollment; if it exceed its allowed number of incidents for three consecutive years, it is deemed dangerous.

In Maryland, if the number of expulsions or suspensions for more than 10 days at a school exceeds 2.5 percent of the number of enrolled students for three consecutive years, a school is considered persistently dangerous. At Crossland High School in Temple Hills, officials reported 1,927 suspensions in the 2005-06 school year, among its approximately 1,600 students, according to state data. The majority were for disrespect, insubordination and minor infractions, but more than 200 suspensions were given for fighting and making threats, and 11 were given for bringing weapons to school.

Under Maryland's definition, Crossland is not considered persistently dangerous. Yet in a school climate survey conducted last year, 75 percent of Crossland's students responding disagreed with the statement "I feel safe at school." Incidents of underreporting of violence are common nationwide.

Source




THOMAS KLOCEK CASE UPDATE AT DEPAUL

A little more than three years ago, former DePaul professor Thomas Klocek's professional life was turned upside down when the 15 year adjunct was essentially fired from the school after defending Israel from some spurious attacks by some Muslim students there. Klocek, a Roman Catholic, had a exemplary record in his decade and a half teaching at the Chicago Catholic university. Here's an update on the legal front of the Klocek case:

Six counts have survived motions to dismiss, four of them defamation claims, and two involving invasion of privacy. Klocek's legal team at Mauck and Baker is well stocked with evidence to substantiate those claims. A trial date is expected to be assigned at the end of this month, with the trial expected to last two weeks. From what I hear, Cook County courts are backlogged, but depending on the judge's calendar, the trial should begin within six months.

A deposition is scheduled for later his month with Yaser Tabarra, who was the executive director of CAIR Chicago in 2004. For more on CAIR's involvement in the case, click on the link below.

DePaul is playing hardball with Klocek and his legal team, making the ridiculous request to submit the former professor to three days of psychological testing. To me, well, that's nuts. But we're talking about academics here, so no one should be surprised. From Andy Norman, one of Klocek's attorneys:

We have a motion to dismiss two of the four affirmative defenses defendants have raised. Affirmative defenses are legal statements made by the defendants that say, in effect, that even if we prove our case against the defendants for defamation and invasion of privacy that there are reasons that the defendants still should prevail and we should lose.

In short, their affirmative defenses are (1) DePaul is not responsible for the DePaulia, which is independently run by students; (2) DePaul was permitted to defame Prof. Klocek because it was part of defendants' respective jobs to inform DePaul administrators, professors and students about the event of September 15, 2004; and DePaul's efforts to remedy the problem Prof. Klocek caused; (3) We made Prof. Klocek a public figure in March 2005 when we had the protest on the Lincoln Park campus and that the defendants cannot be responsible for defaming Prof. Klocek after that time because we caused him to be a public figure; (4) All the statements the defendants made about Prof. Klocek were substantially true and, therefore, not defamatory or invasion of privacy.

We have moved to dismiss ## (1) and (2) on the grounds that the defenses are not plead clearly enough to allow us to answer, and a hearing on our motion is set for 12/18/07 at 9:30 am. We have answered ## (3) and (4) with denials.

Source



20 November, 2007

Saving our children from the hazards of fascist schools

In Florida last week children were traumatized by protocols that for two days in a row kept them locked down in schools away from their parents. The reason given? A crime had taken place that is normally handled by the police. In these cases the two separate crimes, a robbery and an escaped convict, were used to justify a complete lock down of the area around Ft. Lauderdale.

Government schools are unsafe, frightening, and also fail to teach. Students graduate without understanding elementary book keeping, the principles of electricity, much less physics, how our courts work and many other subjects that two generations ago were assumed as basic parts of becoming a literate, functioning adult. In Maryland today parents who entrusted their children to government schools are facing jail time for refusing to do what many experts now say is hazardous to their health, immunizations. The events were reported in News Target, an online magazine that keeps Americans apprised of health alternatives. That article stated,

“State Attorney General Glenn F. Ivey has announced he is willing to criminalize parents if they don't bring them to the courthouse to have them injected, on the spot, with vaccines that contain methyl mercury -- a highly toxic nerve chemical that causes brain damage and is linked to autism. The action is backed by Circuit Judge William D. Missouri, Circuit Judge C. Philip Nichols Jr., and the chairman of the Prince George school board, R. Owen Johnson Jr. “Together, these judges and officials have conspired to turn Maryland into a medical police state, invoking the threat of imprisonment in order to achieve a vaccination goal that has more to do with politics than children's actual health or safety.”

Children have become targets of opportunity for the State, and every day more parents withdraw their children from government schools, determined to home school. But how to do that? If your children are at risk in the government school and now your house what can you do to protect them? One of the answers if provided by Dennis Klein, President, Karmel Games Inc.

The games produced by Mr. Klein provide invaluable skills for children in a form that makes learning fun and gives parents and children a space to come together where that happens. Mr. Klein founded Karmel Games in late 2003 – a rather different venture than his preceding career in the telecommunications industry! However, he brought extensive experience in product development, engineering management, marketing, and business development to his new company. He quickly established his credentials in the field by designing, developing and managing the production of his first game, Anagramania, in less than 4 months.

Rethinking school holds unsuspected opportunities for kids and parents to explore the world and we will try out these new worlds, including Great New Games, on the Spiritual Politician this Friday at 4pm Pacific time on the BBSradio.com. Coming home to learning through play and innovation may well remake the world in a form that is safer for all of us.

Source




The failure of state-sponsored schooling

The common argument in the libertarian movement against public schools is that they fail to educate our children. Actually, according to this argument, public schooling is like any monopolized business: expensive, inefficient, and utterly unable to provide the services wanted and needed. This is true, public schooling doesn’t work. But the proof of this is not the thousands of kids managing to go through nine or twelve years of schooling without even learning how to read and write. The proof of the failure of the whole schooling system, i.e. not only the public schools but also the private schools operating in a government controlled and licensed environment, is the small number of radicals managing to escape the brainwashing of centralized school plans.

This argument can much easier be dismissed by public school enthusiasts, but it is nevertheless the more important. Yes, public and state-controlled schools fail to educate our children and make them understand whatever it is "we" want them to understand. But the state school system is not solely intended to provide knowledge to the unknowing and ignorant, it is to provide a certain set of values and beliefs that benefit the ruling class.

The former is obviously failing, but does not provide a real argument against the political control of schooling and education. The problems and shortcomings, at least according to average Joe logic, can be solved and corrected through investing more tax money to increase the number of teachers educating in our schools. The logic isn’t that bad, even though it essentially disregards what we know of economic organization and production. If the problem can be attributed to not having a sufficient number of (fill in the blank) available, then more money should obviously be able to correct this "shortage."

It doesn’t make sense to say that the solution to something not being fully able to produce what we want, that there is a certain lack of resources to fulfill the aims, is to abolish the whole system. People generally don’t think this way – if something doesn’t work fully, then a little more effort/a little more money/one more chance can make it work. No one would take the car to the junkyard if it isn’t working – we first try to fix it.

It is true that this is what we have been doing with public schooling and the public schooling system for quite a while, but it still doesn’t work. But the system is not used by the same but different people – the people seeing the problems now are not the same as the ones who saw problems a decade ago. So we must be able to fix the problems of schooling, it is argued, by simply investing a little more money or provide yet another couple of laws. Just like a little more money was the solution to the problem for people a decade ago. The logic is not all that bad.

But look at it in another way: what about the students who do learn what the schools set out to teach them? Among those students it is safe to say that many of them were different, that they had different thoughts and values and experiences when they first went to school. Is that true when they nine or twelve years later have been educated? Too often the answer to this question is "no."

Ask anyone about democracy or rights or the state and it is obvious that something has happened to these people. Most of them, as I have argued in another article, blindly repeat the dogma of our era: democracy is superior, democracy is the only good system in a society, democracy works, democracy is every man and woman’s right. But what is democracy? Most people are unable to answer this question – "it has to do with voting."

The heterogeneous beliefs of kids going to school at the age of six or seven (or whatever) are literally untraceable when the same kids nine or twelve years later have been educated. Of course, there are differences in political views; but those differences are simply a matter of "how much more" state we "need," never the opposite and the question Why? is not asked and not even considered.

So the schooling system has essentially worked – this should be fairly obvious. But it hasn’t worked in full – there are some people who manage to go through the seemingly endless years of "education" only to end up almost the same except for having learned how to read and write. They somehow manage to keep their thoughts and values, and develop their own ideas on how the world should be without being heavily influenced by the state school system.

This is the true failure of the schooling system, and this failure is a reason politicians want to make public schooling "better." The radicals, if you will, are not only proof that the schooling system isn’t bulletproof; they are also, simply through existing, showing the horrors of public schooling: that most kids end up essentially the same when "educated."

The latter is the most important fact we can stress. "What about the radicals?" How come there is no middle ground between the big chunk of mainstream democracy hailers and the radicals? How come there isn’t more diversity in values and opinions? Why are there so very few people asking the so important question "Why"?

It is no doubt true that public schooling, be it schools run directly or indirectly by the state, throughout the western and other parts of the world has failed. But the failure is not only evident in the few people who do not want and do not need education, or in the few people who need more help to understand that which most people seem to think is "extremely important." The real failure is evident in the existence of radicals, and that existence is not only a threat to government – it is also an efficient means to make the public understand what government schools are all about. All we need to do is pose the right questions.

Source





19 November, 2007

ISRAEL CRITIQUE ON CAMPUS

Scholarship and truth does not matter. If it's anti-Israel it is OK

The target is professor Joel Kovel and his new book, Overcoming Zionism. The campus is the University of Michigan. But the controversy is all too familiar. On the one side are those who say universities have become centers for anti-Israel rhetoric. On the other are those who claim pro-Israel forces are stifling debate and limiting academic freedom.

Since the publication of The Israel Lobby by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the argument has intensified. Two back-to-back conferences that took place last month made clear just how divided the camps are. A conference at the University of Chicago, "In Defense of Academic Freedom," brought together a slew of scholars who say pressure from pro-Israel groups is taking a heavy toll on scholarship critical of Israel and on debate at university campuses.

The conference was inspired in part by the recent decision by DePaul University not to grant tenure to Norman Finkelstein, a critic of Israel and the author of The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Finkelstein's tenure process, which included a virulent campaign by Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz to deny him the status, became one of the most publicized. Finkelstein was recommended for tenure by the his department and the tenure committee, but the dean overrode them. Some fear this incident has set a precedent for future tenure processes becoming hostage to outside politics.

A few days after the Chicago conference, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), a pro-Israel group, hosted its own conference, "Israel's Jewish Defamers." The group largely targeted Jews who compare Israel to Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa. "What we are addressing today is criticism rooted in outright, demonstrable falsehood or wildly extreme, out-of-context distortion," JTA quoted Andrea Levin, CAMERA's executive director, as saying in her introductory remarks.

The latest bout of academic warfare has taken shape at the University of Michigan - home to one of the largest Jewish student bodies - where many are up in arms over the handling of Kovel's fiercely anti-Israel book. The university, which has a contract to distribute books from left-wing British publisher Pluto Press, has been strongly criticized for distributing the recently-published Overcoming Zionism. In his book, Kovel argues that the creation of Israel was a mistake, and advocates for a "one-state" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which Israelis and Palestinians would form a new country that isn't Jewish. The controversy led the university to temporarily halt distribution of the book and to review the relationship with the British publisher. But last week, Michigan announced it would renew its contract to distribute Pluto Press books.

The university has defended its decision, saying the relationship with the British press was one of commerce, not scholarship. "Distribution agreements are undertaken strictly as business relationships and have historically been a small part of the UM Press's business," said a statement announcing the unanimous decision. "Currently, the press distributes for five publishers. As is the case with all such commercial arrangements, books distributed on behalf of clients are not edited, reviewed or produced by the UM Press, and they do not bear the imprimatur of the press or of the University of Michigan." Still, Michigan said it would review the way such relationships were set up. Typically university presses don't have explicit guidelines for distribution agreements, "but the recent controversy surrounding the contract with Pluto Press has underscored the need for them," the statement said. Fundamental to that, Michigan said, is "the principle of freedom of expression."

Following the university's decision, the campus newspaper published an editorial supporting it: "There is no doubt that some people will have objections to Kovel's contentions, but is there any reason besides complacency and cowardice that those contentions should not be presented into the debate? While people may not agree with the content of the book, it does add to the debate, and it is exactly the type of book the university press should print."

But the decision to continue ties with Pluto Press has outraged some Jewish and pro-Israel groups. At the heart of the controversy is Stand With Us - Michigan, a local chapter of the national group. The local chapter got wind of the book from a local blogger, and in August brought it to the university's attention. Jonathan Harris, the Christian Zionist director of the Michigan chapter, told The Jerusalem Post by phone last week that the book was "an anti-Zionist screed that tries to prove Zionism is a horrible, racist ideology that brings about only bad."

The director of the University of Michigan Press, Phil Pochoda, expressed similar sentiment in an e-mail to the author, which was leaked. "The issue raised by the book is not free speech, but hate speech," wrote Pochoda. "Perhaps such vituperative and aggressive rhetoric works for the barricades, but it cannot be countenanced or underwritten by the university or the university press, even in this peripheral, distributed capacity." Despite this, the university press resumed distribution of the book.

In an op-ed to be published next week, Harris questions "why UMP would make the choice to promote and distribute Pluto books when they have 'no scholarly merit' and do not meet UMP's standards." Betsy Kellman, director of the Michigan regional chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview on Friday that she was "shocked" by the university's decision to continue its ties to Pluto Press. "ADL has often said you can be critical of Israel, but at some point you cross the line and it turns into anti-Semitism," said Kellman. "This book is holding Israel to a very different standard than other countries, and that's where ADL steps in."

Source




Academic hatred of "Zionism"

The news, coming over the weekend, that Barnard College has granted tenure to an anti-Israel anthropologist, Nadia Abu El-Haj, is a setback to those who had hoped that the tide of anti-Israel sentiment at Morningside Heights would begin to recede after President Bollinger's welcome of President Ahmadinejad. Press coverage of Ms. El-Haj's case in the Nation and the Jewish Week (by the same reporter, no less) has sought to portray her opponents as McCarthyites and has insisted that she has been falsely accused. In fact, she is on the record accusing Israel of being a colonial project.

This is a point to mark. Martin Kramer, who is the Wexler-Fromer Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, made the key point when, in a remarks published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, he wrote, "The tragedy of the academy is that it has become home to countless people whose mission is to prove the lie that Zionism is colonialism. Thus research is undertaken, books are written, and lectures delivered to establish a falsehood." He called the idea that Zionism is colonialism "the root lie."

This is the lie that Ms. El-Haj is dedicated to promoting. In her book "Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society," she writes, "The colonial dimension of Jewish settlement in Palestine cannot be sidelined if one is to understand the significance and consequences of archaeological practice or, far more fundamentally, if one is to comprehend the dynamics of Israeli nation-state building and the contours of the Jewish national imagination as it crystallized therein."

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, nonsense. The Jews of Israel are no more colonizers than the Indians were in America. They lived there thousands of years ago. They never left, except for brief periods during which they were expelled by actual colonizers. There's been much debate over Ms. El-Haj's Hebrew skills; what concerns about her skills is not so much her Hebrew but her English, particularly her ability to understand the plain language meaning of the word "colonial" and how it does not apply to Jews returning to Israel from exile elsewhere.

The fact is that the Zionist movement that created the Jewish state in the land of Israel is the 180-degree opposite of a colonial movement. It was - as Menachem Begin used to phrase it when we spoke with him - a national liberation struggle. So when one is confronted by a left that sides with every national liberation struggle save for the one in respect of the Jews, it's no surprise that people start to wonder about underlying motives. The real colonizers right now are the oil-rich Arab potentates that are pouring funding into American universities, hoping to brainwash our students with claptrap about Zionists being colonizers. Looks like the Barnard trustees fell for it, in the last year that President Judith Shapiro, herself an anthropologist, was on the job.

Source




The Strange War on Homework

American students continue to fall behind much of the rest of the world in math and science and recent surveys of their literacy and knowledge of history, civics and geography hover between embarrassing and "Oh my God." But one of the hottest issues in American education today is the crusade to cut down on "excessive" homework; and the war is being waged not by educrats, but by parents.

"I hate school," declared a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who complained that homework was destroying his son's life and his family and legions of anguished parents worried about the stress and self-esteem destroying effects of homework have joined his cry. After his assault on homework, Columnist Jeff Opdyke says, he received more than a thousand emails from fretting "parents, teachers, principals and guidance counselors," who spoke of "crying, fits, angry outbursts, frustration. And worse."

"Worse," included stories about parents who felt the need to medicate their children. A California mom wrote that the stress of homework was so great that "I was sent twice to see a psychiatrist to put [them] on pills." "Is there something we can do as parents," she asked, "to stop this insanity?" The insanity, presumably, was the homework, not pushing drugs on her kids.

Several years ago I wrote about the widespread opposition to so-called "high stakes" testing among the minivan set. As educational reformers discovered to their chagrin, many suburban parents thought that high standards were quite all right when they were applied to someone else's child. But the assault on the tests was a mild affair compared with the uprising against homework.

"If this is the price of excellence," one anti-homework parent complained on a recent radio call-in show, "I'll take mediocrity." He seems to echo educationist guru Alfie Kohn, who also inveighs against effects of standardized tests, grades, and musical chairs, but who seems to reserve a special animus for homework, which he blames for an epidemic of "stress and conflict, frustration and exhaustion."

Following his lead, school districts across the country are scrambling to put lids on assignments; capping the time children spend on homework. In Needham Massachusetts, the high school has gone even further to protect the fragile psyches of its young. "Less Homework, More Yoga, From a Principal Who Hates Stress," read a headline in The New York Times about Needham High School. All of this, the Times explained places the school in the "vanguard of a movement," among affluent schools that includes the formation of a group known as S.O.S. - "Stressed Out Students."

This is a genuinely strange crusade. A generation of hyper-parents has larded their children's days with band practice, piano lessons, soccer practice, volleyball, martial arts, dance recitals, and swim classes. For their part, teens find time to spend something like 6 hours a day using various forms of media; Xbox 360 sales do not seem to be suffering because kids are too busy to play video games and the malls have not been emptied of teens. And yet the cry goes up that it is Mrs. Grundy's history homework assignments that are destroying the innocence of childhood and wrecking the American family.

Of course, as any parent who has spent hours working on pointless dioramas and time-wasting cardboard volcanoes can testify, some of the complaints are not without some merit. But while some children undoubtedly do have too much homework, reports of a national homework crisis are highly exaggerated. In 2003, a study by the Brookings Institution found that the great majority of students at all grade levels now spend less than an hour a day studying, or about a quarter of the time they spend text messaging things like "NMHJC" (Not Much Here, Just Chilling) to one another.

The hand-wringing over homework also seems to miss the point because the overriding problem of Generation Me is not their excessive work-ethic. Universities and employers are not complaining that they are inundated with overstressed, burned out workaholic over-achievers. Rather the contrary. For every academic Stakhonovite who shows up at college or the office, there are legions of smug, entitled, graduates stuffed with self-esteem and great expectations but utterly unprepared for the rigors of college, work, or life.

This, of course brings us back to the parents, those obsessively involved, overprotective, indulgent moms and dads who have bubble-wrapped their children on the assumption that they are so frail and easily bruised that they must at all costs be protected against the symptoms of life, including, apparently, homework. One suspects that much of this anxiety is less about the kids, than about the angst of the grownups, many of whom seem genuinely afraid to do anything that might make them unpopular with their children, whose amusement and approval they crave so slavishly. That may also explain the endless parade of gold stars, happy faces, and participation trophies that mark the progress of modern childhood.

But for many children raised in bubble-wrap, life is turning out to be both overwhelming and disappointing, especially when they find out that the rest of world does not care as much about their self-esteem as mommy or daddy did. Of course it is true that middle school is often an ordeal and getting into college has become daunting rite of passage. But at some point grownups need to realize that life in general is full of switchbacks and speed-bumps -- most of which are a lot more stressful than an hour or two of science homework at the kitchen table.

Source





18 November, 2007

The battle for Middle East Studies

Post below lifted from American Thinker. See the original for links

Eminent intellectual dissidents have arisen and are taking on the leftist establishment which has dominated the study of Middle East affairs in the United States. Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami have given up hope of ever restoring balance and sanity to the hyper-politicized Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), and have now founded an alternative organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA).

Academic associations sponsor academic conferences and publish journals, but they also set the tone and help establish the intellectual agenda of an entire field. Based on my own experience as a member of three different academic associations, leadership roles tend to fall into the hands of people willing to do the grunt work. Which in practice means those burnishing their resumes and those with a political agenda. With the massive amount of Saudi money flowing into the American academy, it is hardly surprising that career opportunities have been so available to those who blame the West for all the problems of the Muslim world, shy away from real problems, and are obsessed with the usual left wing academic fads.

Nibras Kazimi of Talisman Gate provides an enlightening view of the situation, and some telling anecdotes revealing some of the rot within Middle East Studies. If you wonder what's the problem, try this:

...MESA shies away from discussing contemporary Middle Eastern issues for fear than any controversy may scare away the funders.

Can we all agree that Iraq is an important issue, and that such important issues should be front and center among the priorities to be discussed by Middle Eastern scholars? Yes? Good. Then why is it that during MESA's upcoming annual conference only five (yes, FIVE) panels are dedicated to Iraq out of a total of 206! Whereas there are at least a dozen panels dedicated to gender and sexuality studies!

Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be a single panel that seriously sets out to discuss jihadism during the whole four day stretch of the conference.

Columbia U becomes even more politically correct

Administrators at Columbia University threw a bone to the four famished students on a hunger strike yesterday, giving in to some of their lofty demands. Columbia agreed to raise $50 million to beef up ethnic studies and expand programs for multicultural students, strike organizers said, but refused to budge on the protesters' biggest demand - killing the school's proposed expansion into Harlem.

"We are very happy to hear that the university is willing to meet our demands," said student organizer Jamie Chen. "We took drastic measures, and we're glad that the university has come to a point of negotiation." Columbia's concession will expand the school's multicultural student center and expand the required freshman ethnic-studies class from a several hundred-student lecture to small seminar groups. Administrators have also agreed to add diversity training to orientation programs for new faculty and hire five new ethnic-studies professors.

The concessions, coupled with threats from campus doctors, were enough for two of the students to pull out of the hunger strike - now in its 10th day. Seniors Emilie Rosenblatt and Bryan Mercer left the strike late Wednesday night after doctors said they were in serious medical danger and would be put on involuntary leave if they continued. They were replaced by two newcomers, and the four students said they would continue to strike until the Harlem expansion plan was quashed.

"It's such an effective reality check to see that our actions have real impact," said Richard Brown, 19, who joined the strike yesterday. "But the administration has made no concessions to the community for the expansion. We want to ensure they do it in an ethical manner that respects my neighbors." Student representatives and administrators met late yesterday afternoon to address the issue. Columbia's proposed expansion plan would grow the campus by 17 acres.

Source




The university of life

It's time we put the 'human' back into humanities, says Anthony Kronman

At the end of the second world war a programme called directed studies (DS) was established at Yale University. Its purpose was to give students an organised introduction to the civilisation for whose sake the war had been fought. Sixty years later, the contours of the programme have changed, but its basic goal remains the same: to acquaint students with the west's greatest works of literary and philosophical imagination, equipping them with a storehouse of images and ideas on which they can draw as they struggle to find or make meaning in their lives.

DS students take three-year courses in which they read Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Tolstoy and others. At any given moment, all the students are reading the same books and discussing them with their teachers in seminar-size classes. The sense of common adventure is strong and the experience of discovery often intense.

Such programmes are a rarity in the US today. They were once far more common. The ambition they express used to be a fundamental premise of American higher education: that college is a time not merely to learn a specialty and prepare for a career, but also to acquire the moral and intellectual equipment one needs to grapple with the question of what living is for.

This ambition has been discredited by the modern research ideal, which rewards specialisation above all else. Many university teachers today regard the question of life's meaning as one that no serious scholar ought to take up in the classroom. And it has been undermined by the careerist anxieties of students. Those anxieties have flourished in the absence of resistance from teachers too preoccupied with their research to see students as anything more than prospective members of their own specialties, rather than as human beings struggling for fulfilment and love, under the long shadow of death.

The dominance of the research ideal has obscured an older responsibility of the humanities - to train students in what used to be called "the art of living", an enterprise larger than any career. Having abandoned this responsibility, but finding themselves unable to compete, as producers of research, with their colleagues in the sciences, humanities teachers have sought to restore a sense of their mission and role by embracing a variety of progressive causes. This has created a culture of political correctness whose stifling uniformity encourages students to see themselves more as representatives than individuals; it blocks serious engagement with the very personal question of life's meaning.

As a result, American students graduate from college well-prepared for their careers, but under-educated in the meaning of life. In a world where the freedom to explore life's meaning is greater than ever, students are less well-equipped for this challenge than those in past generations - and if they want help in meeting it, they must look beyond their universities to the churches, which now have a dangerous monopoly in questions of spiritual importance.

The tradition of reading great books as a way of introducing students to perennial debates about the meaning of existence is one that American universities borrowed from their British counterparts. That tradition is under pressure in Britain for the same reasons it is in the US: an emphasis on research among teachers and on careers among students; the strangling effects of political correctness; and the spread of religious fundamentalism in response to the demand for a serious engagement with matters of spiritual concern.

Programmes such as DS are a way of fighting back against these pressures. The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott spoke of a "great conversation" among the writers whose works constitute the backbone of western civilisation. This civilisation is the shared inheritance of students on both sides of the Atlantic. To deprive them of it is to leave them without landmarks to navigate the difficult and thrilling business of life. There is time enough to prepare for a career, and for scholarly research. Part of a college education ought to be devoted to something else - to the question of what living is for.

Source





17 November, 2007

Teacher-training stupidity

Don't the educational theorists know ANYTHING about reality? They certainly don't realize that sometimes more is less. They quite reasonably want to get bright people into teaching so what do they do? They make it compulsory for aspiring teachers to undergo four years of brain-dead half-life in moronic teachers' colleges. Anybody with half a brain would NOT waste 4 years of their life that way. They would do a real degree instead. When a one year diploma was all it took to become a teacher, the applicants for teacher training were of a much higher quality. Connect the dots!

Even a one-year qualification is probably overkill in the case of someone with a good first degree or higher. I went into High School teaching with NO teacher qualifications whatever: Just a fresh Master's degree. And my students got excellent results in their exams! The story below is from Australia but I believe that the situation is similar in the USA -- with intellectual standards in American teacher-training colleges also in the basement

MEDIOCRE students are going on to become teachers because poor pay and low job status is scaring the best people away from the job. Education Minister Julie Bishop yesterday admitted there was a problem in attracting the best people into teaching, as an education expert warned of dire consequences for students.

At an education conference at Melbourne University yesterday, Professor Bill Louden from the University of Western Australia said most teachers now come from the second lowest quartile in school performance results. Mr Louden said the number of high achievers going into teaching has halved over recent years. Universities must lift their intake standards for teacher training before students begin to suffer, he said.

In a debate with opposition education spokesman Stephen Smith, Ms Bishop said low tertiary entrance scores for education was deterring bright students, and said the Howard Government was committed to lifting the social standing of the profession. "Students say they are not going into teaching because of the inflexible salary arrangements and the status of the profession - they want to be in a profession where people are paid on excellence, not on years in the job,'' Ms Bishop said.

Mr Smith said a Labor Government would also focus on getting the best students into teaching. "We have to tell young Australians (teaching) is a noble profession and absolutely essential to our fundamental economic and social prosperity and one of the great challenges for our ageing teacher stock is to become attuned to the digital age.'' He said Labor had committed to a 50 per cent reduction in HECS fees upfront for those studying maths and science, with a 50 per cent remission at the back end where the student takes up a relative occupation such as maths teacher or scientist.

During the debate, Mr Smith said university fees were scaring some students away from tertiary education, while Ms Bishop attacked Labor's plan to abolish full fee places. Ms Bishop said Labor had failed to tell universities how they would be compensated by scrapping the places- worth $700 million nationally. Mr Smith said Labor would release its plans prior to the election. Mr Smith attacked the Coalition's plan for a national curriculum for just years 11 and 12.

Ms Bishop yesterday said the national curriculum for English, maths and science would be headed by hand-picked expert groups, as the Government did with Australian history earlier this year.

A Labor Government would implement a standardised curriculum from kindergarten to year 12, so all Australian students would be learning the same material, he said. A national curriculum board would take the best of currciculum from each state and re-work it into a super-study for all Australian students.

Source




Bill to Expand Head Start Is Approved

Why is a program with no proven net benefits still sucking up taxpayer dollars after all these years? Ronald Reagan said that a government program is the nearest thing to everlasting life. I think this proves it

With two overwhelming votes, Congress approved a bill yesterday that would boost teacher qualifications in federally funded Head Start preschools, expand access to the program for children from low-income families and scrap a controversial system for testing 4-year-olds. The first reauthorization of Head Start since 1998 passed 95 to 0 in the Senate and 381 to 36 in the House and now goes to President Bush, who is expected to sign the measure. The 42-year-old program serves about 909,000 disadvantaged children, aiming to help prepare them for school academically, emotionally and socially.

The legislation sets a goal that by 2013 all Head Start teachers will have at least an associate's degree and half will have a bachelor's degree. It expands eligibility to families just above the federal poverty level, authorizes a funding increase and directs money to programs for younger children and migrant and Native American students. "For low-income children, having some type of early-childhood development is critically important to their success," House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said. "The reforms that are included in this bill I think are critically important so that Head Start can really be all that many of us want it to be. There are some tremendous Head Start programs around the country . . . but there are also some programs that don't fulfill the promise that we're making to parents and their children."

The bill eliminates a testing program for 4-year-olds that is supported by the Bush administration. Critics said the National Reporting System, a set of mini-tests intended to measure verbal and math skills, didn't provide a valid assessment of progress for students so young. The bill omitted an administration-backed proposal to allow faith-based groups to consider religion in hiring for Head Start.

The federal push to expand early-childhood education is part of a national movement to make preschool available to more children, particularly those from low-income homes. Several governors, including Timothy M. Kaine (D) of Virginia, are seeking to add government-funded preschool slots for needy children. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) noted that the legislation authorizes $7.3 billion in funding for fiscal 2008, up from $6.9 billion, and dedicates more money for teacher training. "Head Start teachers and staff are the heart and future of the program," Kennedy said in a statement. "They help children learn to identify letters and arrange the pieces of a puzzle. They teach them to brush their teeth, wash their hands, make friends and follow rules."

Kathy Patterson, federal policy director for Pre-K Now, a D.C.-based advocacy group, applauded the bill. "We're going to serve more kids, and one of the things we're particularly excited about is the emphasis on quality," she said. "The challenge will be in the appropriations process to make sure there's adequate funding."

Source





16 November, 2007

Good Marks for AP and IB: Experts Endorse College-Level Study Programs

This does however seem rather silly. Here in Australia, my son did an AP course in his final year of High School but he did it by taking an actual university course at an actual university. It is however good to hear from the report below that there are some quality choices available for U.S. High School students. But sad to hear that there is pressure to water down the History courses. Students must not learn the actual facts of history. Far too dangerous! If we are not careful they might even learn that Hitler was a socialist!

Debate rages among Washington area parents, students and teachers over which college-level track is superior: the large Advanced Placement program or the fast-growing International Baccalaureate. A report to be released today by a team of academic experts gives both high marks, with a slight nod to IB in two subjects. The experts assembled by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington-based think tank that advocates more school rigor, awarded a B-plus to the AP and IB English literature courses and a B-minus to history courses in both programs. But IB Biology received an A and AP Biology an A-minus. IB Math received a B-minus and AP Calculus AB a C-plus.

The Fordham Institute said those grades were good, compared with the mostly low marks it has given state standards for public schools. Its report concluded that AP and IB "demonstrate that independent entities can and do make programs and assessments that are rigorous, fair and intellectually richer than almost any state standard and exam for high school that we've seen."

The report -- "Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate: Do They Deserve Gold Star Status?" -- complained about indications from the College Board, which oversees the AP program, that it might revise some courses and tests. It said the College Board was pursuing changes to social studies courses that might encourage "more time talking about such themes as 'politics and citizenship' or 'continuity and change,' " which report authors worried would reduce time for learning facts about historical events.

About 14,000 U.S. high schools offer AP classes, and about 500 offer IB. The authors acknowledged the difficulty of comparisons. AP and IB are structured differently, although both give exams that enable students to earn college credit. AP has one-year courses, and many IB courses take two years to complete, so the Fordham report focused only on one-year IB courses.

Both programs lost points in math because they allowed more use of calculators than the authors considered appropriate. AP U.S. History was faulted for mentioning few specific historical events in its course plan. IB does not have a course devoted to U.S. history, but its world history course lost points for focusing too narrowly on the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors advised teachers to ignore the outlines for both courses and teach to what the report deemed rigorous AP and IB history exams.

Brad Richardson, regional director of IB North America, said he was pleased that the report praised IB, as it did AP, for preparing students well for college. Trevor Packer, a College Board vice president who oversees AP, declined to comment.

Source




British citizenship education -- just more political indoctrination

`We aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country both nationally and locally.' This ambitious statement sounds like it should have come from a political party's manifesto, but it is actually to be found in the final report of the Advisory Group on Citizenship Education, otherwise known as the `Crick Report'. The report gave birth to the new compulsory subject of citizenship being taught in schools in England since August 2002. The stated aim of introducing this new subject into the education system was to reverse the decline in young peoples' participation in public and political life in the UK. The Crick Report argued that research revealed `a historic political disconnection'. In effect, an entire generation has opted out of party politics. However, we should be wary about citizenship education for a number of reasons:

It is not the responsibility of teachers to solve what are political and social problems like apathy, low voter turnout, alienation and an absence of social cohesion. To expect teachers and schools to solve these problems is to redefine the role of teaching and education;

* citizenship education allows politicians to evade responsibility for their failure to inspire and engage young people with politics, and the failure to create a dynamic context in which political contestation exists

* citizenship education is anti-intellectual, prioritising values over academic enquiry. The emphasis on social engineering is to the detriment of the integrity of individual subjects

* citizenship education is insidious and authoritarian, because it lays down the values that young people are expected to hold without subjecting those values to public debate;

* citizenship education will not solve the problems it was set up to address. In fact, citizenship classes make things worse, as they reduce politics and the possibility of people fighting for meaningful change to a set of values and dispositions that can be acquired in the classroom through, in effect, a programme of behaviour modification.

The debate about the disconnection of young people from politics has absorbed a growing number of academics and policy makers around New Labour for some time. Reports published by think tanks like the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) and Demos have acknowledged that the British political system is facing a crisis of legitimacy. All the political parties have lost their social base and find it particularly difficult to connect with young people. Teaching unions, exam boards, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), political parties and pressure groups have all welcomed the compulsory nature of citizenship education as playing a positive role in combating youth apathy....

One of the most striking things about citizenship education is the speed with which it has moved from the theoretical musings of policy wonks to a compulsory subject, which is seen as a panacea for a range of our political and social ills. That is not to say that there has been no disagreement over what and how students should learn. Concerns have been expressed by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) about the quality of some teaching - in particular, the lack of intellectual rigour and content associated with the subject. But what is lacking is any real philosophical or political debate about the effectiveness and consequences of this new subject. Educationalists and policymakers alike need to address a number of fundamental questions about citizenship education.

Will it work? This is a question that supporters of citizenship education have been asked for some years. Their understandable response was to give it time. Five years down the line, it is now possible to make some preliminary observations since the subject was made statutory for Key Stage 3 (pupils from 11 to 14 years old) and Key Stage 4 (ages 14 to 16) in August 2002. There has been no rise in voter turnout amongst first-time eligible voters in the last General Election of 2005 or the 2007 local elections. Research from the British Youth Council shows that the figures for young people getting involved in any type of political or direct action campaign or pressure group activity remain static at around two per cent over the past few years. So far, citizenship education is failing to reconnect young people to our political system or promote any substantial type of improvement in participation rates....

Many educationalists and commentators now believe that a key role of teaching is to turn young people into active citizens who participate more in civil society, vote and volunteer in their local community. In a review of Key Stage 3 citizenship carried out in December 2006 amongst citizenship teachers, one of the main conclusions was that `skills and active citizenship were felt by the vast majority of our respondents to be more important than knowledge and understanding within the content of the curriculum'. Teachers have always had some role to play in the creation of citizens. A good, rounded, liberal education can contribute informally to the socialisation of our young people into broader society. However, until recently, this process was implicit and was more a by-product of a sound education. Above all, the integrity of individual subjects and their content were automatically respected and seen as the key to a proper education.

This is no longer the case. Citizenship, in particular via its cross-curricular themes, is damaging the integrity of every subject. The crude explicit requirement that citizenship concepts, values, dispositions, skills and aptitudes be spread across all subjects has resulted in a hollowing out and diluting of specific subject content. In short, citizenship education is having a directly damaging effect on subject knowledge. Academic subjects have become subordinate to the imperative of social engineering. The curriculum is increasingly seen principally as a vehicle for overt socialisation, even indoctrination, into the latest fashionable cause or value. No matter what the subject, teachers are now expected to make links in their schemes of work and lesson plans to topics as diverse as safe sex, relationships, healthy eating, diversity, homophobia, Islamophobia, voting, volunteering and sustainability, to list just a few.

Lessons in academic subjects like history, biology or geography that would once have been considered outstanding would now fail an Ofsted inspection if these citizenship themes were not included. These new requirements redefine dramatically the role of a teacher and purpose of teaching. This change needs to be challenged. Teachers should not be playing this kind of role in what is, essentially, a social engineering project. Instead, there should be a robust defence of the value of academic subjects for their own sake.

Citizenship education is an attempt to instil a new set of values in today's young generation. Proponents acknowledge that almost all the institutions that once represented the moral and social arbiters of our times - the Church, the family, trade unions, political parties and scientists - can no longer be relied on to inspire the necessary trust and respect to impart values to the nation's youth. In a recent article in the Guardian Education supplement, former education secretary Estelle Morris let slip that many parents can no longer be trusted with the task of teaching moral values, a comment I've heard increasingly (off the record) at citizenship conferences from leading citizenship advocates. Citizenship education is seen as offering future generations a moral compass now sadly lacking in society....

Amid this uncertainty over values and what our society should prioritise as important, the citizenship curriculum, and the school curriculum more broadly, has become a battleground (or gravy train) for a whole host of campaigns zealously trying to get their moral message into the classroom. Recent campaigns include more focus on fairtrade and Third World debt. Indeed, many schools teach global citizenship straight from teaching materials produced by the charity Oxfam. Public health officials demand more attention to healthy eating, obesity, safe sex - even the dangers of sunshine! Other groups demand more black history or gay history or examples of positive multiculturalism. Banks promote financial capability as a virtue. Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, has been sent to every secondary school in the country to urge greater responsibility towards our planet and environment. No doubt some of these campaigns may have worthy aims. The point, however, is that these are issues for public policy and debate, not for the classroom.

At first glance, the citizenship curriculum may look like it is promoting uncontroversial values like honesty, fairness, tolerance, etc. However, closer inspection reveals that alongside these goes a set of personal behaviours recast as moral values. For example, in citizenship literature, community is now a value, as is participation (voting), volunteering, sustainability and caring for the environment. This process of redefining certain political positions and opinions into values that are uncontested first emerged in the Crick Report but has intensified over the past two years.

In the classroom, via citizenship, many of the unresolved issues of public life are transformed into new concepts to be passed on to children as a fait accompli. Racism, environmentalism and other political ideas are converted into matters of moral and ethical behaviour. While concern for the environment may be desirable, should it be prescribed as a value? Where is the space for intellectual debate about such questions?

In the past, schools were asked to produce well-educated young people capable of making independent decisions about what to do with their lives. Now teachers are increasingly meant to produce people with a particular set of views repackaged as moral values. But the absence of any moral consensus in Britain today will not be solved through indoctrinating children into the latest fashionable values. The problem with trying to instil new values solely through the classroom is that they often lack any resonance or real connection with peoples' lives. Real values, strong values, emerge not out of schoolbooks but from strong communities and a real clash of ideas in society.

This values-led education is insidious and authoritarian. If left unchallenged, this trend could eventually destroy the spirit of intellectual enquiry within education, potentially undermining the individual student's freedom of conscience and his or her right to determine their own social and political value system. The danger is that students are now being told what to think. This may seem a wild exaggeration, but let's think about those young people who may reject the prescriptive values taught in citizenship lessons. Official guidelines quite clearly stipulate that students must demonstrate a concern and commitment for the values laid out in the curriculum in order to achieve a good assessment. So, what marks will be awarded to the young man who has concluded that there is no point in voting (rejecting the value of participation), the young woman who feels that `sustainable development' may be robbing the developing world of the most advanced technology, or the pupil who has decided to get involved in party politics - with the far-right British National Party?

More here





15 November, 2007

UCLA's Politicized Middle East Studies Professors

By Cinnamon Stillwell -- See the original for links

Earlier this year, the Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. It was founded in 1957 by Gustave E. Von Grunebaum, a scholar at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute and the first president of the Middle East Studies Association. Grunebaum sought to establish at UCLA a groundbreaking Middle East and Islamic Studies program featuring an array of experts in languages, culture, and history.

Unfortunately, the best-known UCLA professors specializing in the region today, far from embodying the classical approach to the discipline in which knowledge is the overriding goal, exemplify the highly politicized world of modern Middle East studies. Ignoring the vast majority of the region and myriad pressing issues, including terrorism, the need for religious reform, women's rights, resistance to modernity, and the prevalence of tyranny, this cadre of Middle East studies professors is fixated instead on post-colonialism, the Arab/Israeli conflict, U.S. foreign policy, and shielding themselves from outside criticism. As pointed out by journalist Rachel Neuwirth, what passes for education at UCLA's Center for Near Eastern studies is, all too often, "sustained academic indoctrination."

No professor better exemplifies this politicized approach than historian Gabriel Piterberg. A devoted disciple of Orientalism author Edward Said, Piterberg's course on the subject, "The Last Conscious Pariah: The Life and Work of Edward Said," features the sort of post-colonialist jargon of which his hero would have been proud. In the section titled, "Culture, Imperialism and Resistance," readings include post-colonialist Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, the grandfather of today's brand of academic moral relativism, and Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist theoretician who devised a series of strategies to subvert Western democratic societies from within - a process some would argue is well underway in academia.

As did Said, Piterberg takes a relentlessly anti-American and anti-Israel stance, with which he buttresses his career of political activism. He appears regularly at anti-war protests and teach-ins organized by various leftist groups and the Islamist Muslim Student Association, and is a signatory to a 2002 petition urging the University of California to divest from Israel. On one occasion, he even canceled a class to attend a student-led anti-war protest.

In the Arab/Israeli conflict, Piterberg blames Israel exclusively, and romanticizes the Palestinian "resistance." He distorts the conflict's history by employing terms such as "ethnic cleansing" and "atrocities" to describe Israel's founding in 1948. Born in Argentina, Piterberg was raised in Israel and fought with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) against the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in southern Lebanon in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, he later charged that the campaign was not "necessary for national defense."

Following academic fashion, Piterberg opposes a two-state solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict, and favors instead the formation of a single bi-national state, despite a paucity of evidence that such a proposal is either tenable, humanitarian, or favored by a majority of Israeli citizens. He has made clear his hostility towards Israel's Jewish foundations, most notably at a speak-out held by the Muslim Student Association in 2000, when he stated, "You can't have a Palestinian state with its own rights, when you have 150,000 Jewish extremists sitting in the middle."

In April, Piterberg spoke at a UCLA conference titled, "Covering Lebanon: Media and the 2006 War," which came to the preposterous conclusion that Western media coverage of the conflict was biased in favor of Israel. He fit in perfectly with the roster of one-sided participants.

Piterburg is fond of portraying himself as a victim of discrimination for his political views. In 2003, he blamed Campus Watch for an inadvertent error made by UCLA's Center for Jewish Studies that omitted his history seminar, "Myths, Politics, and Scholarship in Israel," from a list of Israel-related courses. At the time Piterberg made this claim to the Daily Bruin, Campus Watch had yet to feature any material on Piterberg, a fact that was parodied by Middle East scholar Martin Kramer. Subscribing to the belief, common among Middle East studies professors, that criticism equals censorship, Piterberg stated, "There is an atmosphere since Sept. 11 (2001), there's an attempt to silence views that are not palatable to certain other views." No doubt Piterberg will chalk up this very article to the "attempt to silence" his views, even as he continues to enjoy a prominent platform from which to express them.

Piterberg's colleague Sondra Hale, UCLA professor of anthropology and co-editor of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, also spoke at the "Covering Lebanon" conference. Hale was one of the signatories to a 2002 open letter warning that Israel would use the Iraq war to perpetrate "ethnic cleansing" against the Palestinians. In addition, she was a scheduled participant in the canceled American Association of University Professors (AAUP) conference on academic boycotts (focusing solely on Israel).

In January 2007, Hale helped organize a two-day workshop co-sponsored by UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Center for the Study of Women titled, "Linking Middle East and Arab American Gender Studies." Antioch University liberal studies professor and Association of Middle East Women's Studies president Nada Elia participated. Last month, Elia was as a panelist at a UC Berkeley screening of the Palestinian terrorist-glorifying documentary, Leila Khaled: Hijacker. The event came under the dubious title, "Women, Resistance, and Political Participation." Apparently, equal opportunity for female terrorists is a pressing "feminist" issue these days. If these are the sorts of associations Sondra Hale and UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies are cultivating, a panelist celebrating Osama bin Laden isn't far off.

Next we come to Saree Makdisi, a UCLA professor of English with a focus, as described in his bio, on "British literature and imperial culture." But it's his interest in "the cultural politics of the contemporary Arab world" that has proven to be problematic. Makdisi reaches a broad, non-academic audience by publishing regularly in the Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, and the Nation.

Makdisi is Edward Said's nephew, and anti-Israel politics seem to run in the family. His biases on the Israeli/Arab conflict are clear in the title of his forthcoming book, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. Makdisi rarely lets truth stand in the way of effective propaganda: Middle East scholar Martin Kramer labeled Makdisi an "anti-Israel agitator," and noted his fantastical claim that Israel has "actualized all the logics, apparatuses, discourses, and practices associated with the worst, the ugliest, the most violent and draconian forms of European racism."

Writing at his blog earlier this year, Makdisi condemned the requirement that Palestinians simply recognize Israel's right to exist. As he put it, "[Israel's] demand that its 'right to exist' be recognized reflects its own anxiety, not about its existence but about its failure to successfully eliminate the Palestinians' presence inside their homeland - a failure for which verbal recognition would serve merely a palliative and therapeutic function." With "peacemakers" like Makdisi, who needs war?

Makdisi is equally preoccupied with critics of Middle East studies, a field long unused to the rigors of accountability. In a 2006 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times titled, "Neocons Lay Siege to the Ivory Towers," Makdisi accuses his imagined arch nemesis Martin Kramer, along with Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes, of being members of "pressure groups" who are also "failed academics driven by crassly political motivations" - charges easily dismissed by a cursory glance at either man's C.V.

Makdisi was a signatory to a 2002 letter addressed to the Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper at the University of Chicago, objecting to "irresponsible allegations of anti-Semitism and 'abuse of power' against faculty of the University" allegedly made by Campus Watch and other organizations against then-Chicago (now-Columbia) Arab studies professor Rashid Khalidi and various Middle East studies professors. The letter objected most strenuously to the rise in student complaints, calling them "a perversion of the classroom." Students having a say in their education would seem to constitute one of the foundations of higher education, not a perversion of the classroom. But not, it seems, for Makdisi and his cohorts.

In another example of Ivory Tower-driven paranoia, Makdisi declared in the Seattle Post Intelligencer earlier this month that "academic freedom [is] at risk on campus" by none other than "Israel's American supporters." In his op-ed, Makdisi decried the "outside interference" of scholars such Martin Kramer and organizations such as Stand With Us, the David Project, the Israel on Campus Coalition, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and, of course, Campus Watch, for somehow "severely disrupt[ing] academic processes." It seems that academic freedom is a one-way street for self-described "champions of freedom" such as Makdisi - and a dead-end one at that.

UCLA Near East history professor James Gelvin, another signatory to the 2002 University of California divestment petition directed at Israel, presents challenges of his own. His students have taken note, describing him, in one case, as "more of an advocate for the Palestinian cause" than a historian. In response to rising criticism, especially that perceived as emanating from Campus Watch, Gelvin told the Daily Bruin, "What really irks those guys is that I don't use my classroom for political purposes, and thus my lectures don't advance their political agenda." Would that Gelvin's claim were true, for it is certainly not the agenda of Campus Watch to further the politicization of the field of Middle East studies, but, rather, the opposite.

Gelvin implies that U.S. foreign policy was to blame for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and, in a larger sense, the rise of Islamism. Accordingly, in a course titled, "The History of the Near and Middle East," Gelvin assigns students the book, Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives, which is co-edited by Georgetown Islamic studies professor John Esposito. Esposito is a celebrated recipient of Saudi financial largesse at Georgetown University and, perhaps not coincidentally, one of the prime apologists for Islamism in the field of Middle East studies. One reading assignment from the book is Sayyid Muhammad Husaid Fadlallah's, "We Must Think Before We Act; September 11 Was a Gift to the U.S. Administration," whose title alone suggests a decidedly subjective view of the matter. Similarly, Gelvin's subtitle under a discussion section on the war on terrorism for the same course is, "The Mess That We're In." To be fair, Gelvin's course readings include offerings from all sides of the political spectrum, not to mention the oft-ignored words of al-Qaeda leaders, but one wonders in what context it's being presented?

Gelvin's role as the organizer of a conference to be held at UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies this month titled, "Jihadi Islam Conference/Workshop," would seem to answer this question. While the conference's subject matter is laudable, especially in light of the dearth of attention paid to terrorism in the field of Middle East studies, its conclusions may prove debatable. According to Gelvin's description, the conference seeks to "propose alternative approaches" to the "underlying assumption of Islamic or Middle Eastern exceptionalism." Appearing on a panel alongside UC Irvine professor Mark LeVine, whose own forays into delusion are well-known (he once declared, "It is time for the United States to declare a truce with the Muslim world, and radical Islam in particular,") Gelvin will provide what he calls "A Historian's Reply to Terrorology." Applying the lessons of history to the present is praiseworthy, but doing so while ignoring the specific nature of today's threats is little more than willful blindness.

Between the politicized polemics, the blatant biases, and the na‹ve approach to foreign policy proffered by UCLA's Middle East studies professors, there is certainly room for improvement at the Center for Near Eastern studies. This is isn't to say that no professors are rising to the occasion, but those in the public eye are conveying a consistently biased impression that is fostering distrust in Middle East studies at UCLA. One might question whether the Center for Near Eastern studies' fiftieth anniversary is a cause for celebration, or an opportunity to reexamine its future course. One thing's for sure, Gustave Von Grunebaum must be turning in his grave.

Source




Ersatz School Choice

"Vouchers go down in crushing defeat"

That headline thundered from Wednesday's Salt Lake City Tribune, as it announced that more than 60 percent of Utahans who voted on whether to uphold the statewide school-voucher program said no. It was a big setback for the voucher movement. The Utah legislature had approved the program by one vote. But the teachers' union, which opposes vouchers, gathered enough signatures to put the question to the voters. It poured a ton of money into its successful effort to have the people veto the law. This was the tenth time in over 30 years that voters have defeated school vouchers or education tax credits, says the National School Boards Association. It may not look like a win for the cause of educational freedom, but in the long run it might be. That depends on what we do about it.

I doubt if Utahans rejected vouchers for the right -- that is, libertarian -- reasons. More likely, they did so either because they bought the union's argument that vouchers would drain the government schools' coffers (unfortunately, they wouldn't have) or because they feared who might turn up at the private suburban schools. Regardless, the voters' acceptance of vouchers would have jeopardized the private, relatively independent schools in the state. So I see Tuesday's ballot results as a dodging of the bullet.

The law passed by the legislature would have required private schools to "[g]ive a formal national test every year" to each student. A "national test" means only one thing: a standardized test approved by the education establishment. This might sound innocuous, but it's insidious. Who controls the exam controls the curriculum. And who controls the curriculum controls the school. The law also would have compelled schools to publish the test results. Would schools have taken a chance on getting poor test results (even if their kids were learning anyway)? No. Schools wanting eligibility for vouchers would have had no choice but to teach to the test. Teaching to the test means teaching kids how to take tests. How would that create school choice?

Unsurprisingly, governments tend to attach conditions to the money they give away. It is no rebuttal to say it's really the parents' money. For most -- but not all -- parents, that would be true (some would be subsidized), but the point is politically irrelevant. It would be seen as government or public money. And that means most people would find plausible the argument that the ultimate recipients of such money must be accountable. "Accountable" would mean accountable to the government's school bureaucracy. Voucher advocates are aware of this. In Utah they accepted the testing requirement, although given that provision, one wonders how the game could have been worth the candle.

It's the Government

All of this gets to the crux of the voucher issue. We can demonstrate that an unhampered private sector is more effective and efficient than government in whatever it does because it is entrepreneurial, unlike a bureaucracy. But that doesn't get at the fundamental issue -- which is this: government should not be in charge of educating our children. Why not? Because it's the government -- the institution that rests on the morally flawed premise that it is all right for politicians to take other people's money without their consent, interfere with their peaceful transactions, and exploit the weak. Why on earth would we want schools built on that foundation?

It is tempting to try to use government as a shortcut to freedom. Look how readily libertarians embrace medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide, both of which, in the name of expanding choice, would further subordinate the individual to the Therapeutic State. So it would be with vouchers. (These days, government schools are undisguised agencies of the Therapeutic State.) Exactly how does luring nongovernment schools onto the plantation advance the separation of school and state? There are no shortcuts to liberty.

Source





14 November, 2007

Radicalizing mathematics

Those who worship at the altar of Political Correctness and believe American public schools are doing just a dandy job of educating youth might want to consider the following: China graduated almost 200,000 engineers, 44 percent of the undergraduate degrees, in 1999, according to the National Science Foundation, and has plans to eventually graduate a million engineers each year.

In contrast, U.S. engineering schools churned out just 73,000 engineers in 2004, according to Ronald Barr, Past President of the American Society for Engineering Education, totaling less than 5 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded. "Our graduate schools are filled with foreign nationals who last year earned 58 percent of the engineering Ph.D.s awarded in the United States. This country relies heavily on these grads to fill our technological needs, but more and more U.S.-trained engineers are returning home after graduation," Barr wrote back in 2005.

Barr makes the case that students must excel at math and science to succeed in the engineering field. So you would think there would be a renewed focus on that third R - Rithmetic. But in some New York City schools, math class has become a vehicle for leftist teachers to indoctrinate students to socialism. If the kids learn a little math along the way, it's likely an accident.

Click on www.radicalmath.org and be amazed. Right away you'll notice the organization's mission: "RadicalMath is a resource for educators interested in integrating issues of social and economic justice into math curriculum and classes."

These folks recently held a conference attracting 400 math teachers and education professors entitled "Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Math Education and Social Justice." The official program's first page started with a passage from Paulo Freire, the Brazilian Marxist educator and icon of the teaching-for-social-justice movement: "There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to [. . .] bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of our world."

Ellen Davidson from Simmons College led the first session of the conference entitled: "How Unfair Is It? Analyzing World Resource Distribution in Mathematically Rigorous Ways." The workshop promised to design lessons to "help children build stronger conceptual mathematics skills while simultaneously helping them understand social injustice."

Sarah Ludwig led a workshop on Teaching Mathematics Through an Economics Justice Lens and a group of Chicago public high school students took attendees through a social justice mathematics project involving racial profiling. But I really wish I could have been there for: "Beyond Barbie: Moving from Scale to Social Justice," facilitated by Portland State's Swapna Mukhopadhyay. The workshop description reads: "In this hands-on session" - whatever that means - "we will focus on how mathematizing Barbie doll in terms of proportional reasoning opens up to a deep interrogation of some vexing social and cultural issues of our global world. Besides unpacking the relationship between self image, self worth and body image that result in eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, we will also look at the labor issues - particularly in terms sweatshops conditions - in toy manufacturing." Got that? And you thought calculus was hard.

It turns out that RadicalMath got its start with a grant from the New York City Department of Education. The conference's principal organizer, Jonathan Osler, is a math teacher at El Puente Academy, a small "social-justice" high school in Brooklyn. Back in 2005, he and two math teachers from other schools applied for the DOE's Zone Teacher Inquiry Grants Program. According to City Journal's Sol Stern, some of the social-justice issues that math classes explore are: check-cashing locations ripping off poor people, H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt ripping off poor people, and foreclosure agencies ripping off poor people.

When informed about the "Creating Balance" conference, the school's chancellor Joel Klein told Stern, "This is a private conference, at which a range of views will be expressed. It seems that many of these views are hardly `radical.'"

Hardly radical? It used to be that kids would actually learn some math in high school before going off to college to be turned into Commies. It probably doesn't matter whether these kids can add, subtract and multiply. After all, social justice demands that society provide for them from cradle to grave. But, has anyone warned the Chinese?

Source




No provision for a genuinely gifted child

The parents of a seven-year-old science prodigy have begun a world-wide search for a university place for their child, with the warning that "a great mind could be lost" if he is not offered the chance to pursue his studies at degree level. Ainan Celeste Cawley, the son of a British father and a Singaporean mother, passed his O-level chemistry in Singapore at the age of 6 and is studying for an A level in the same subject.

The case of the child genius, whose parents claim that he could walk at six months and construct complex sentences by his first birthday, has provoked both curiosity and concern. Experts believe [with no evidence] that the lack of a normal childhood can do irreparable long-term psychological damage.

Yesterday Ainan's father, Valentine, said that it had been apparent from birth that his son, who likes drawing and watching Mr Bean videos when not studying, was very unusual. "As a toddler, he would seek out science books in the library, showing a preference for dense texts with complicated illustrations of scientific matters. These he would absorb quietly and comment on later. "By the time he was 3 or 4, he was interested in hyper-dimensional shapes and would draw their shadows in two dimensions as a form of intellectual play," he said.

Mr Cawley, a writer, said that his son showed an interest in chemistry when he was 6 and picked up a chemistry O-level paper at his aunt's house. "He was 6® and he got all the questions right. It turned out that he had taught himself chemistry on the internet," he said.

He denied that child prodigies were doomed to failure at university and said that it would be unfair to allow his son's mind to "stagnate". "Imagine you are the strongest man in the world and someone says to you, try lifting something small like a banana. It's like asking him to deny his true nature. Well, it's the same with a child prodigy," he said.

The parents are looking for a sponsor for their child's university education and say that one of them would accompany him during his studies. Syahadah Cawley, his mother, who is an artist, denied that they had put any pressure on him. "He is home-tutored most of the time, but he goes to school for PC classes and Malay lessons and has friends there," she said.

Mr Cawley added: "He is a very cool dude. You have never seen anyone more relaxed and laidback in your life." The couple said that it was too early to tell if their other sons, Fintan, 4, and Tiarnan, 1, were equally gifted.

Professor Tim White, of the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, said he had no doubt that the child was a chemistry prodigy. "He has an excellent grasp of the subject - he is well able to write and balance equations, draw molecular formulas, understands the chemical properties, knows about radioactivity and so on. Clearly, a normal school would be incredibly frustrating for Ainan," he said. He added that his own university had decided not to offer a place to Ainan because the laboratory benches were too high, with shelves out of reach and chemical dispensers too big for the child to hold.

"There were considerable logistical barriers - chemistry is an experimental science, and unlike gifted child musicians and mathematicians, quite special requirements would be needed," he said. Professor White had mixed feelings about sending a seven-year-old to university. "He is a boy, but it would certainly be a great shame if he become frustrated and lost his enthusiasm for science by being constrained in an environment that did not stretch his abilities and imagination," he said.

Priya Naidu, a lecturer at the School of Chemical and Life Sciences at the Singapore Polytechnic, said that the child was a "cute little boy with the attention span of a seven-year-old", but the academic ability of a 17 to 18-year-old chemistry student. "He has the capability to learn very quickly and is reading up on university texts and scientific journals." But Joan Freeman, Visiting Professor in the Psychology of Education at Middlesex University, said that she thought Ainan's parents were making a terrible mistake. "To send a child to university at 7 is like you are not regarding him as a human being, but as a performing monkey," she said.

Ainan himself was not available for interview. His mother said: "He is rather shy with new people. Most of the truly gifted are introverts - studies show this."

Source




British A-level successor derided as second-rate

Diplomas are the poor relation of A levels and will not transform the school system, education experts will say in a report today that will be seen as a devastating attack on one of the Government’s pet projects. The 14-19 diplomas, which will be introduced next year, are designed to end the divide between practical and academic learning.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, hopes that they will become the “jewel in the crown” of the education system, making the A level redundant. But according to a report by education experts, the diplomas are “the latest in a long line of broad vocational qualifications occupying the ground between academic qualifications and apprenticeship” and would “suffer in the shadow of A levels”.

The Nuffield Review, led by Professor Richard Pring, from the University of Oxford department of education, said that the introduction of the diplomas had been rushed.

When the Government released details of the new diplomas last month there were three academic subjects (science, humanities and languages) but the original 14 were more vocational, raising questions about whether they could compete with A levels. The subjects included hair and beauty, travel and tourism and society, health and development.

Of the first diplomas, the report said: “Such middle-track qualifications have in the past been regarded as an alternative for the less academically able and the review predicts that teachers will view diplomas in the same way — with A levels and GCSEs remaining the more prestigious qualifications. “It is unfortunate that the three new diploma lines will be developed later than their vocational counterparts, as this means the diploma brand will have to forge its identity as a broad vocational qualification.” The Government had to decide now, the report said, whether GCSEs and A levels would run alongside diplomas or be included in their framework.

Ministers scrapped next year’s scheduled review of A levels, announcing instead that all qualifications for 14 to 19-year-olds would be reviewed in 2013. But the report’s authors said that the reform of A levels could not wait until then. Dr Ken Spours, from the University of London’s Institute of Education, said: “The diplomas will not transform the 14-19 system. As long as A levels remain unreformed, diplomas will end up being regarded as a poor relation.”

Diplomas are designed to appeal to employers by giving pupils a grounding in core subjects and practical skills. Several universities said that they would accept the engineering diploma as entry to their degree courses.

The report’s authors, who have been evaluating high school education since 2003, questioned the purpose and role of the diplomas. They also criticised the “lack of genuine involvement of qualifications experts, practitioners and awarding bodies” in the diploma’s development. But Professor Pring said that they did offer some benefits. “There is, no doubt, enthusiasm from many schools and colleges for the opportunity that diplomas may provide for a more flexible approach to the curriculum.”

Source





13 November, 2007

Best school in town and still they want to close it

The envious British Left again: Stoke-on-Trent is failing its pupils badly, so how on earth does it think it will raise standards by shutting its successful grammar school?

There are many reasons why St Joseph's College, a Catholic grammar in Stoke-on-Trent, is a thriving school. Its academic performance at GCSE and A-level puts it in the top 200 in the country. Its pastoral care is sensitive and exhaustive. Its extra-curricular activities are the best the state system has to offer. And its head teacher, Roisin Maguire, is, says Ofsted, an "outstanding leader".

But it's the smell of fresh bread, wafting from a DT laboratory, that gets me. It's the interrupted year 9 French class who wait, in turn, to give different reasons why each and every one of them "loves coming to school". It's the first XV rugby team sheet stuck to the noticeboard in the school reception. And it's the sixth-former, Katie Bailey, who has no fear in asking to plunder my contacts book so that she can "get into journalism".

Astonishingly, this happy, confident establishment - one of 164 grammar schools remaining in the country - is threatened with closure. Under plans drawn up by Serco, the private company enlisted by Stoke-on-Trent council to tackle the authority's educational needs, it is possible that St Joseph's could close in 2010 to be replaced by a nonselective Catholic school on the same site, with a different set of governors and staff. It would be the first grammar school to shut for nearly 20 years.

Stoke-on-Trent, a Labour council, turned to Serco because it was in freefall, having been named the third worst local authority for education in the country. Serco, in turn, has responded by drafting four proposals to restructure the authority's secondary schools. The "favoured" proposal at present is to shut all the secondary schools in the area and reopen 12 new secondary schools - a mixture of trust schools and academies - and four new special schools in the district, with a 200m pound boost in funding.

The restructuring is, says Ged Rowney, director of children and young people's services, a "great opportunity" and one that it is "essential we grasp". This is all well and good. Stoke-on-Trent does need to do something about its secondary schools. But why meddle with its best? The council says that for the process to be "fair" it needs to consider all schools in its restructuring process, not just the failing ones. Part of the problem for Stoke is that its schools are 23% under capacity - which means, for efficiency's sake, some will have to shut. But again, why St Joseph's? "It's something I find very hard to fathom," says Maguire. "Yes, we're selective, but that's not why we're good. There are selective schools in this country who are not doing so well. It's about what you do with the kids once you get them. This school isn't a good school because it's Catholic or it's selective. It's a good school because we know every child and we love them and care for them and we challenge them."

Maguire explains that unlike most grammar schools, St Joseph's does not simply take the brightest pupils. Indeed, Ofsted does not even class St Joseph's as "a grammar". It does have an entrance test, but it is one that 75% of applicants pass. After that, entrance is determined by "faith criteria", whereby the child's parents are asked to fill out a form, co-authored by their relevant "religious leader", on how righteous their 11-year-old is. About 80 students in every year are Catholic and the remaining 30-40 are from a variety of other faiths. In the sixth form, St Joseph's takes another 50-70 pupils from nearby city state schools. "There are many very bright children who do not get into St Joseph's," says Maguire. "We've built strong links in the community - my best English teacher now works two days a week in other city schools. And children from those schools come here for revision classes, too. "Stoke has so many problems. It is right at the top of the league tables for teenage pregnancies and Neets [young people not in education, employment or training], and right at the bottom for education. We are one of the things that Stoke can be really proud of. Why would you want us to go to the wall?"

St Joseph's is not quite at the wall yet. Rowney insists that although the closure of all the schools and the reopening of new secondaries is the "favoured" option, there are three others that would keep St Joseph's open. But if the favoured option does come to pass when the final decision is made in February, you can be sure there will be little noise from Westminster.

Labour's Department for Children says it will keep out of local authority decisions. But it has made it clear that it wishes to make it easier for parents to shut grammar schools. Apart from restructuring plans, such as the one Stoke-on-Trent is proposing, the only way to shut a selective school now is by parental ballot. The ballot requires 10 parents to trigger a petition and then 20% of parents in the affected area to sign it. Since this law was passed in 1998, only one ballot has come to fruition - and it failed to close the selective school.

Labour wishes to make the system simpler by shortening the ballot process and, possibly, by allowing petitioning parents access to the contact details of other parents in the area. "It is absolutely right," said Jim Knight, the schools minister, last month, "that we keep the parental ballot arrangements under review. We are firmly committed to giving local parents the right to abolish selection at existing grammar schools."

The modernising Conservative front bench might now know where it stands on this issue, but the party as a whole continues to twist its knickers on grammar schools. When David Willetts, then shadow education spokesman, said the 11-plus exam "entrenches advantage" he set off a backlash among backbenchers, who consider the maintenance of grammar schools a touchstone Conservative issue. They had, perhaps, forgotten that Margaret Thatcher and John Major failed to use their 18 years to revive the 11-plus.

David Cameron considers the row over grammar schools to be the "shallow end" of the education debate - and has said he admires Labour's academies programme. He has, however, indicated that he will shut no grammar schools. So don't expect a raging debate at next week's prime minister's questions about St Joseph's College.

"The Tories just can't get involved," says Sam Freedman, of the Policy Exchange think tank. "It doesn't work for them politically. I can't see them intervening. As for Labour, that's tricky. There may be some backbenchers who are ideologically opposed to a private company restructuring a local authority's schools and who may feel strongly enough that they wish to fight to save this one school. But then again, it's a grammar school. They're between a rock and a hard place."

The parents and pupils of St Joseph's are already making a noise. The website of the local Sentinel newspaper, which broke the story last Monday, has been bombarded with comments from parents and old pupils. Facebook and MySpace sites have been set up to organise support. A petition on the Downing Street website already has hundreds of names. Why not add your own?

Source




Leftists cannot stand the competition of other ideas

It shows that they know how little foundation in reality their views have. Centers for African American Studies or Women's Studies (etc.) are fine but not a center for the study of Capitalism and Limited Government

Organizers of the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government Fund hoped to turn their new program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign into a Hoover Institution of the Midwest, a model for getting more free market ideals and ideological diversity into major research universities.

But when a faculty committee was able to get all the details of the agreement that created the new center, it found provisions that were "fundamentally inconsistent" with university values that are designed to ensure a diversity of views. Specifically, the panel found that portions of the agreement would have restricted funds to research designed to reflect certain points of view, and that donors were given control over matters traditionally left to academics.

The faculty panel - which was appointed by the chancellor - said it was "deeply troublesome" that the agreement to accept the center was made without faculty consultation and that many details were kept secret until recently. The panel called for Chancellor Richard Herman to renegotiate the deal for the academy and on Tuesday, a spokeswoman confirmed that he had pledged to do so. Faculty leaders praised Herman for backing away from a deal that has angered many professors - even while it was cheered by many conservatives.

The agreement to create the center was signed in July 2006 between the university and a group of wealthy alumni but for almost a year there was very little public information about the arrangement, although rumors started to spread about it. In the summer of 2007, the academy became more public, planning a debut conference and announcing its plans to support research, conferences and events promoting capitalism. Funds were placed in the university foundation, not an academic department, and faculty members started to complain that it sounded like a research center was being created with donor control and an ideological agenda. Those complaints led the Faculty Senate to urge Herman to appoint a committee to study the issue. He did - and the professors on the panel (nominated by the Senate) were from a range of disciplines and political perspectives.

The panel's report said that some of the work envisioned in the new center was "outcome neutral," such as the idea of supporting work on "the philosophical, moral and economic underpinnings of capitalism." But other kinds of research agendas, the panel found, "unmistakably signal an ideological predisposition or presupposition." For example, the governing documents the university agreed to said that the center's research would focus on "the relationship between economic growth and reduced government size" and how "free market capitalism can become more effective in providing opportunities and prosperity for individual nations." Another topic cited for research support: "why communism, socialism, government bureaucracy have failed to bring prosperity, and how capitalism brings material wealth to a broad spectrum of society."

There is nothing wrong with any Illinois professor holding those views or doing work that supports those views, the panel said, but there is something wrong with a research center supporting only such work and thereby refusing to support research that might, for example, find that Nordic countries with high tax rates have brought considerable wealth to their societies.

Further, the panel found that documents creating the academy had it housed indefinitely in the university foundation, governed by a self-perpetuating advisory board, and that the board would be making funding decisions, assuming the chancellor's approval. The faculty panel found that it was "highly problematic" to house such an organization in the foundation, the university's fund-raising arm.

Two key principles were at stake, the panel found: institutional neutrality and university autonomy. On the former, the panel said that "a university ... and especially a public university exists for the common good, not for the propagation of the views of its donors."

The faculty panel repeatedly stressed that its objections were on issues of principle, not politics and that it would have had the same reaction to a center with a different ideology - even if the would-be donor could point to greater diversity that might result from the gift. The panel report imagined a situation where the American Socialist Party, citing the lack of socialists on campus, proposed a center that would support research "examining how public ownership of the means of production and higher income equality achieved by a redistributional tax system will bring economic and moral well being to a broad spectrum of society." Such a donation would be rejected, the panel said, just as the one that was accepted should have been rejected as a "breach of the principle of neutrality."

On the issue of autonomy, the report noted that donors are entitled and welcome to work with fund raisers and academics on shaping gifts that reflect donor interests. But for donors to play a role in handing out grants or approving recipients for research is inappropriate, the panel said. Decisions about who receives funds for academic work - whether research or teaching - "lie at the core of the university's functions" and need to be made by professors, the panel said.

While the panel was emphatic that the relationship with the capitalism center needed to be renegotiated, it said that the faculty would be open to an arrangement with these donors that met university standards, and the report stressed that it was not trying to discourage the involvement of the donors.

Nicholas C. Burbules, chair of the Senate at Illinois and professor of educational policy studies, said he thought the faculty panel issued "a very strong report" with an emphasis "on the most important things - they stuck with issues of academic principle and policy." Some Illinois professors have criticized the politics of the donors, and Burbules said it was important that no attention was paid to that issue in the report.

He said that faculty thinking on the capitalism academy has evolved. At first, as people heard just little bits of information, there was a "what the heck is going on here" feeling. Then as more information came out, many professors felt "anxiety" and there was considerable criticism of the chancellor for making the agreement. But Burbules said that he thought that the chancellor acted correctly in agreeing to renegotiate the deal, and that professors appreciated his quick response to the report. "We're open to working in a collaborative way with the donors," Burbules said, as long as any arrangement shows "unambiguous" respect for academic principles.

James E. Vermette, a businessman and investor who was one of the founders of the center, said that he had "no problem" with renegotiating the agreement with the university, and that he thought that all that would be needed would be "some wording or clarification." He said he has not read the report.

Vermette said that he and other founders wanted research to be "objective and neutral," and that he didn't have any problem if some of the research supported didn't adhere to his views on capitalism. But he also said it was "absolutely wrong" to say that the original agreement sought to favor some views over others and that the founders' "basic principles" can't change. "We understand what the university is all about," he said. "I'm confident that rational people will be able to work their way through this - as long as our basic principles don't change."

Anne D. Neal, a member of the advisory board for the capitalism program and president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, was more critical of the faculty report. She said that "it goes without saying that the principle of neutrality is central to academic research. Donors cannot condition their gifts on preordained conclusions, and any language that suggests otherwise should be modified."

But she said that she did not believe all departments and programs at Illinois were held to the same standard, saying that she found "ideological terms" in the African American Studies and Research Program at Illinois, and noting that the women's studies program presumes that people should "integrate feminist theory into their professional work and everyday lives."

Neal added: "While the committee report raises serious and legitimate questions, I am left with the nagging feeling that the committee's concern about `ideological predispositions' goes only one way - and that its problems with the Academy on Capitalism, underscored by its repeated, snide footnotes on the benefits of Sweden's state-run economy - expose its own ideological predispositions rather than a genuine, consistent concern about a free marketplace of ideas."

Source




Death by Political Correctness: Who killed Antioch College?

Leftism destroys anything it gets to control -- even a once distinguished college

It is 9:30 on a sunny Monday morning in October, a time, day, and month when most college campuses bustle with activity: students hurrying to class or relaxing between classes on library steps or tree-covered lawns. Here, on the 200-acre campus of Antioch College, a 155-year-old liberal-arts institution best known nowadays for a campus culture that long ago drifted from the progressively liberal to the alarmingly radical (people still talk about the anti-date-rape policy that required a separate verbal consent for each step of an amorous encounter, famously parodied on Saturday Night Live in 1993), the phrase "bustling with activity" is not what comes to mind. What comes to mind is the neutron bomb.

There are plenty of trees on Antioch's historic campus in Yellow Springs, a town of 4,600 about 20 miles east of Dayton in rural southwestern Ohio--soaring oaks, walnuts, maples, and firs, many likely more than a century old. And there are plenty of buildings--dozens of residence halls and classroom facilities, along with a library that has seen better days and a turreted Victorian-era main building designed by James Renwick Jr., architect of the Smithsonian Institution's landmark castle in Washington, D.C., and St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. As for Antioch students, however, there are none to be seen this morning, except for an occasional shadowy figure moving silently among distant trees like one of Ohio's long-vanished Miami Indians on a solitary hunt. A visitor to the campus might infer that ultra-radicalism doesn't sell, at least when the price is the nearly $40,000 per year it costs to attend Antioch College.

On June 9, 2007, the trustees of Antioch University, an adult-education offshoot of Antioch College that now dominates the college administratively, financially, and in terms of overall student population, announced that Antioch College would suspend operations on July 1, 2008, with a possibility of reopening in much-altered form in 2012, and that its entire faculty, including tenured professors, would be laid off.

The reasons for the shutdown given by the trustees and by Tulisse Murdock, Antioch University's chancellor since 2005, were many: years and years of incurable deficits, this year totaling $2.6 million on an annual college budget of $18 million; an extraordinarily low endowment of just $36 million (neighboring Ohio liberal arts colleges Oberlin and Kenyon boast endowments of $700 million and $167 million respectively); and a chronically low student enrollment that topped 600 only once during the preceding 25 years (compare that with Oberlin's enrollment of nearly 2,900) and has declined precipitously since 2003.

During the 2006-07 academic year, for example, only 330 full-time students were enrolled in Antioch's bachelor-of-arts and bachelor-of-science programs--once so highly regarded that Antioch could boast that it had more graduates who went on to obtain Ph.D.'s than any other college in the country. This fall, after news of the pending shutdown decimated the incoming freshman class, there are just 220 Antioch College undergraduates left. That represents a decline of almost 90 percent from the 2,000 or so young people who attended Antioch during its peak enrollment years of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Antioch's students, its faculty--whose numbers have also drastically shrunk (just 37 today, down from 140 during the early 1970s)--and many residents of Yellow Springs, a pleasant college town of handsome old houses and businesses that advertise their liberal-leaning, Antioch-friendly "green" and "fair trade" consciousness, are fighting to save the college, citing its long and illustrious history. Antioch's first president, in 1853, was the famous education reformer Horace Mann, and until things went bad, Antioch regularly turned out graduates who went on to become stellar public figures, writers, and scholars: Coretta Scott King, wife of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, the District of Columbia's Democratic congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, and, most recently in the news, Mario R. Capecchi, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for his work on embryonic stem cells in mice. (This was Antioch College's second Nobel; Jo