Sunday, November 06, 2005

EXAM CHEATS IN BRITAIN

Staff at the AQA exam board have said that they detected 'blatant copying of material from the internet' in some of this year's coursework for GCSE English, and that some schools gave students so much help it amounted to 'a kind of mass plagiarism'.

Another board, Edexcel, said teacher guidance stretched what was acceptable: 'More insidiously worrying [than blatant plagiarism] is the growth of what one moderator described as "teaching by numbers" and there were other references to "over reliance on teacher notes" and "similar responses within a centre"', said its report. Meanwhile, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) prepares to publish the results of a two-year inquiry into cheating in school exams.

Yes, this is all very worrying. But what else can we expect, in a culture of grade inflation that abhors failure and views educational success purely in terms of a rising pass rate? For some years, university lecturers have been warning that the cult of course work, projects and 'portfolios' in schools are churning out students who simply don't know how to write an essay, and are unaware that including verbatim sources from the internet amounts to plagiarism. Teachers are under such pressure to ensure that their students pass their assessments that it can hardly be a shock if some lose sight of where hand-holding and handout-giving ends and writing their students' assignments begins. And though they can barely fail to get the grades as a result, the biggest losers are the students, who have been cheated of a decent education in the name of improving educational attainment. Bring back the prospect of failure in education - and with it, the freedom for students to think for themselves.

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ANOTHER REASON TO SEEK ALTERNATIVES TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Parents' rights were not violated when a Southern California elementary school conducted a psychological survey of their children and asked them about sexual feelings and masturbation, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco pointedly refrained from commenting on what the judges termed "the wisdom of ... some of the particular questions'' that were asked of children in grades one, three and five in the Palmdale School District in Los Angeles County. But the court said parents, while entitled to make basic decisions about a child's upbringing, have no constitutional right to control what they are taught at school or what questions they are asked.

"Parents have a right to inform their children when and as they wish on the subject of sex,'' said Judge Stephen Reinhardt in the 3-0 ruling. "They have no constitutional right, however, to prevent a public school from providing its students with whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual or otherwise.''

One of the Palmdale parents, Tammany Fields, said she was surprised and dismayed. "It gives the schools more control and the parents less control,'' Fields said. "I believe it should truly be the parents' decision to educate a child on appropriate questions about sex.'' She said she, her husband and four other parents haven't decided whether to appeal further. Their suit sought damages for violations of their right to privacy and their civil rights. Fields said her son came home from his fifth-grade class one day in 2001, asked to speak to her privately, and told her about the questions he and his classmates had been asked. He told her he was offended, she said.

The survey, intended to measure children's exposure to early trauma, was designed by a district counselor who was studying for a master's degree in psychology. Parents had consented to the survey after being told of its overall nature but were not informed of specific questions. Students were asked 79 questions about how often they had certain thoughts, feelings and experiences, such as anger, bad dreams and suicidal impulses. Ten of the questions concerned sexual topics, including how often they thought about sex or whether they were "touching ... private parts too much.''

The survey was discontinued after parents complained. The district's lawyer, Dennis Walsh, said school officials ultimately "recognized the inappropriateness of some of the questions.'' But he said the court rightly found that school curriculum is controlled by school boards, subject to the limitations of state law -- for example, California law allows parents to remove their children from sex education classes.

Reinhardt, in Wednesday's ruling, said the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in the 1920s that parents' rights to raise their children included the right to decide whether a child goes to public or private school. But a parent's constitutional prerogatives do not extend beyond the schoolhouse door, he said.

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UNUSUAL STRAIGHT TALK FROM THE PRESIDENT OF A TEACHERS' UNION

"If the United States is to preserve our system of free public schools, teacher unions are going to have to stop accepting the status quo and making excuses for the poor performance of our students. Most of us know that contrary to all of the talk about how we are raising our standards, in most of our schools they continue to decline. The low scores on the so-called high stakes tests are testimony to the fact that large numbers of students leave school knowing next to nothing and ill equipped for any but the most menial of jobs. While many of our most talented young people spend their days in so-called accelerated courses with curricula once thought more appropriate to the college level, too many of them have whizzed right by basic skills and cannot string together three coherent sentences or know to any degree of certainty if they have received the correct change in a store. We must face the fact that some of the right-wing critique of public education, particularly their criticism of the ever inflating costs of public education, resonates with the American public because it is true, or at least truer than some of the blather put out by the people who run the schools and the unions who represent the people who work in them. If it is true that our freedom is ultimately tied to our being an enlightened and educated citizenry, we are in terrible trouble.

Excuse number one - We don't have enough money to meet the educational needs of our students. While too many of our school districts do need more financial resources, resources that many find impossible to raise through the regressive property tax, the fact of the matter is too many of them also waste a substantial portion of what they have, a good piece of the waste mandated by state and federal law. I've written elsewhere about the administrative bloat in school districts where level upon level of bureaucracy insures that teachers and educational support staff are over scrutinized and under supervised to the point where teaching innovation and imagination are increasingly giving way to the routines of educational programs, particularly in math and English, that are intended to make teaching thinking-free. We have program upon program upon program. Can anyone seriously say that our students know more and are more skilled than they used to be? With entrepreneurial aplomb some crafty educators have gone corporate, developing and skillfully marketing programs for everything from mathematics to values education. School districts employ large numbers of central office administrators who then turn around and hire consultants who often come selling their programmatic wares. Where are the NEA and AFT to challenge this pentagon-like waste in our schools?

Meanwhile, over forty school districts on Long Island defeated their school budgets last spring. Pressed by ever-escalating property taxes, citizens were in revolt. That revolt, I fear, will spread as the middle class in the United States is squeezed more and more by a taxation system designed by and for the rich and an economy that increasingly is either exporting or abolishing the good jobs that used to support a comfortable middle class life. If education unions do not become outspoken advocates for economy in our schools, they will find taxpayers increasingly revolting against them. Surely some of the budget defeats on Long Island were aided by the local newspaper's articles on teachers earning over one hundred thousand dollars a year".

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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.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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