MORE MONEY FOR EDUCATION HAS FAILED: OTHER SOLUTIONS NOW NEEDED

"Overall, the facts presented by this year's Report Card on American Education give us no cause for celebration. In fact, they confirm the same trend presented in past years' reports: increased spending without corresponding improvement in student performance. Over ten years have passed since the Goals 2000 agenda was proposed, and America has failed to reach these goals, despite increasing per pupil expenditures by more than 50 percent over the past twenty years.

It is clear after studying the data and results that the policies of the past have failed to meet the educational needs of our country's children. If we continue to spend more money on the existing educational system in an attempt to buy our way to better student achievement, we will condemn another generation of students to mediocrity.

Let's not keep making the same mistakes that have brought our schools to their present condition. We need to challenge the status quo and pursue serious fundamental reform to improve our educational system. Only then can real progress be made in student performance. Our children deserve nothing less.

The ALEC study expresses the opinion that educational results are improved by better teachers. I suspect that the personal experience of most of us verifies that... many of us have stories about one or two teachers who had a very positive effect on our school experience.

Teachers become better with experience, and they have better results if they're allowed to teach using the methods they've learned work best. Students learn when good teachers make learning fun. My input from some excellent, award-winning teachers over the years has been that schools have become more rigid, more bureaucratic, and that imposed state and federal programs have taken a lot of classroom control from teachers. Campaigns to reduce class size have resulted in having to hire more teachers... younger, less-experienced, lower-paid teachers. That's not a criticism of younger teachers, but experience, once laboriously gained, should not be sacrificed, especially to elitist programs generated by "experts" in quasi-political state and federal educational offices."

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THE RELENTLESS DRIVE TO DESTROY BRITISH EDUCATION CONTINUES

The Education Secretary will tell head teachers today that they must all accept a fair share of expelled pupils rather than allow disruptive youngsters to be concentrated in "sink schools" shunned by parents. Schools that are popular and oversubscribed will no longer be able to excuse themselves by claiming that they lack spare places. Grammar schools will have to accept difficult pupils, even if they do not meet the academic standards required for entry.

Mr Clarke told The Times that he wants to end the practice of shunting the most unruly pupils into the least popular schools, condemning them to a spiral of decline as teachers struggle against the odds to maintain order. The move is likely to upset many parents, who will fear the impact on their children's education if well-ordered schools are required to admit problem pupils.

However, Mr Clarke believes that schools will find it easier to manage "hard-to-educate" children in their local areas if they co-operate with each other. "There is a lot of controversy among groups of schools about whether certain schools end up taking more than their fair share of hard-to-educate kids," Mr Clarke said. "Sometimes particular schools end up taking more than their fair share." The Education Secretary will tell a conference in London today of 500 new heads that the key challenge facing schools is to maintain order by dealing firmly with persistently disruptive pupils.

He will announce that groups of schools will be expected to agree local protocols by September next year for sharing out expelled pupils. The agreements will be thrashed out at forums of heads, governors and officials from the local education authority. The Government will also change its code of practice on admissions to include an expectation that schools must share the burden of coping with expelled children. Mr Clarke said it would be "an essential feature" of the protocols that no school would be required to admit an unreasonable percentage of expelled pupils. He indicated that three or four pupils a year would be considered a reasonable number. He accepted that expulsion was an "essential tool in a head teacher's armoury" against the worst offenders. But schools must take responsibility for ensuring such children were educated appropriately. "All schools - including popular schools - should share a collective responsibility for ensuring that vulnerable, hard-to- place children, or children in public care that have been permanently excluded, are admitted to a suitable school as quickly as possible."

He wanted schools to reach voluntary agreements, but indicated he was willing to compel them to accept unruly pupils if the reform were not adopted swiftly enough. "We have set ourselves internal targets. If we felt this was not working we could consider taking further powers but we want to get this up and running as quickly as we can," Mr Clarke said. Groups of schools will be offered an incentive to reach agreement. Mr Clarke said they would be handed direct control of money currently allocated to the local education authority (LEA) for managing expelled pupils, so that they could tailor provision to greatest effect.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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