POSSIBLE HIATUS

I go into hospital for a rather large surgical procedure today. It is however day surgery so I hope to be back home by the evening and blogging away as usual. If that proves too optimistic, however, this blog may not be updated for a day or so.




CALIFORNIA EDUCATION BUREAUCRATS WOULD SURVIVE A NUCLEAR WINTER

Enrollment drops, teachers leave, but administrators stay. That's the story at most of the 25 school districts with declining enrollment in the Sacramento region, according to a Bee analysis of state education data. Just eight of those districts reported to the state that they had cut administrators between the school years 1999-2000 and 2004-2005, even though the districts lost about 5,000 students during that period. Five of the 25 districts added administrators. And although most of those districts aren't cutting administrator positions, they are employing fewer teachers. Twenty-two of the 25 districts have fewer teachers today than they did five years ago, state data show.

Some districts can justify those numbers because their enrollment dropped incrementally, said James W. Guthrie, a professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for almost three decades. But the five districts that added administrators and another five in which administration ranks remained the same while enrollment dropped by more than 10 percent have some explaining to do, he said. "If you didn't cut, why? If you added, why?" Guthrie asked. "The burden of proof ought to be on why they haven't reduced their administrative staff."

Administrators defend the numbers by pointing to new federal and state initiatives that they say create more work. They also cite the difficulty of cutting supervisory staff in small districts. "You happen to be looking at the period of time when the state is rolling out high-stakes accountability," said Bob Wells, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators. "There are in fact more things to do that are administrative in nature."

Even though California continues to grow each year, about 40 percent of the school districts in the state are losing students. The reasons vary. In some places, high urban home prices cause young families to head for the suburbs. Rural districts often shrink as residents move to places with more jobs. And some areas have static, older populations without many kids.

The amount of funding a district gets is closely tied to the number of students it teaches. So schools with fewer students usually find themselves slicing up a smaller pie. And if the number of administrators in a shrinking district grows or stays the same, a bigger piece of that pie goes toward paying supervisors. That's exactly what has happened at most of the districts that are losing enrollment, but not losing administrators, in the Sacramento region, state data show.

More here




BRITISH CONFUSION OVER RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS

Multiculturalism, for so long the mantra of the left and the government when dealing with the issue of race, seems to have run out of steam. Margaret Hodge, minister for employment and welfare reform and MP for Barking in East London, seemed to echo the sentiment of many when she said that faith schools should promote integration, not segregation.

But this comes at the moment the government seems determined to fund more and more faith schools. David Bell, the chief inspector for the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), has called for the government to fund more of the 120 independent Muslim schools in Britain, to ensure that they can be regulated. There is a growing fear that faith schools will become detached from British society and could become hotbeds of anti-Western dissent.

Of course there are those who just dismiss faith schools altogether. The British Humanist Association has welcomed Hodge's statement, which it says acknowledges what it has been saying for many years: 'faith schools are a key cause of segregation.' However, it complains that Hodge did not include atheists in her catalogue of those kept out of faith schools: 'We are, however, disappointed that Ms Hodge mentions only that children of "other faiths" should not be excluded. Sixty-five per cent of 12- to 19-year-olds describe themselves as having no religion - are they to continue to be excluded from learning with their peers?'

This spat over faith schools reveals the rotten core at the heart of British education. Despite the rhetoric, there is no vision for schools in this country. When the government sees it as necessary to fund more faith schools, it does so because at least such schools can unashamedly promote some values. They have an ethos and a credo that they can promote. The 'multicultural comprehensive', by contrast, is a confused place, not knowing whether Christmas is offensive or Muslims should be allowed to wear religious garments as part of their uniform. The only value it aspires to is to have no values - which it refers to as 'tolerance'. Hodge attacked religious schools for being intolerant, saying: 'We need Ofsted to ensure the curriculum and values of faith schools are consistent with the national curriculum and with promoting tolerance.'

How a set of absolute moral and religious beliefs fits in with any notion of tolerance is beyond me. Unless, of course, you adopt the multiculturalist perspective - according to which tolerance means an appreciation of 'other values', without accepting them yourself. It means denying the right to criticise believers for their values, but denouncing anyone who evangelises belief to us. It is both a separation from other cultures and a failure to define our own culture. If we were to define our culture as apart from other religious cultures we would no doubt be subject to the government's new religious hatred legislation.

As far as faith schools go, I find the arguments put forward by the secularists particularly unconvincing. By taking the stance that all faith schools should be abolished, the British Humanist Association ends up suggesting that multicultural comprehensives are better than faith schools. But a system that denies the possibility of belief to its pupils, and offers nothing but cynicism and intellectual paralysis, can hardly be said to be good. At least a child brought up in a Catholic or Jewish school has a God to rail against. All state schools offer is the certainty that there is no truth other than the impossibility of knowing - a kind of postmodern purgatory.

But for Muslims, the promise of religious schools is a trap they could well do without. The ghettoisation of Muslims into faith-based communities can only reinforce the estrangement that young British Asians already feel. Some of them turn to religion and the symbols of religion as the easy route to rebellion. But this is a script largely written for them by an establishment that avoids engagement with young Asians.

Instead of promoting values around which we can fight to build a future for all, we have collapsed into looking for enemies in every community. Some young Asians appear ready to act out the worst fantasies of Hodge and co - but the political elite must bear the bulk of the responsibility for the Islamicisation of Britain's Asian youth.

Source

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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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