Education Committee Chair Highlights NCLB Report, Expresses Concern about Lack of Participation in School Choice, Supplemental Services Options

Press release from here

U.S. House Education & the Workforce Committee Chairman Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-CA) today highlighted a report - released this morning by the U.S. Department of Education - on the progress made under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The report, which is required by Congress to track the law's Title I implementation, focuses on key provisions related to state assessments, accountability measures, trends in student achievement, teacher quality, school choice, and supplemental educational services.

Among the report's major findings is that states are not notifying those schools which did not achieve adequate yearly progress (AYP) in a timely enough manner. For example, regarding the 2004-05 academic year, only 15 states provided final AYP results to schools by September 2005. Moreover, despite the fact that NCLB requires parents to be informed of a school's AYP status prior to the beginning of the next school year, almost half of all school districts notified parents an average of five weeks after school had started.

"As we approach next year's reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, this report provides Congress, schools, and parents valuable information about the progress being made in implementing NCLB's chief reforms," said McKeon. "While the report details generally strong progress toward meeting the law's key goals, I'm particularly concerned that parents are not being informed quickly enough if their child's school is not making adequate yearly progress. In fact, this late notification seems to be impacting a parent's ability to take advantage of school choice and supplemental educational services options under the law."

The report supports McKeon's concern, finding that in the 2003-04 school year less than one percent of students eligible to attend a different public or charter school through NCLB's school choice provisions had actually taken advantage of the option. "Access to school choice and supplemental services options is vital to the ultimate success of NCLB," McKeon continued. "Parents whose children are eligible to take advantage of them should be notified in a timely manner so they can make the fully-informed decisions about their children's academic future. Other key findings of the report include:

* National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores in both reading and math have improved for 4th grade students, with Hispanic and African American students seeing more dramatic gains;

* The number of Title I schools that have been identified for improvement is roughly the same as it was before NCLB, disputing claims by education reform opponents that NCLB is too punitive;

* Only 14% of schools did not achieve AYP solely because of the performance on assessments by disabled students, while just four percent missed solely because of the assessment performance of limited English proficiency (LEP) students, disputing the claims of some that the performance of LEP and disabled students on assessments is the only reason schools are not achieving AYP; and

* Based on state reported data from the 2003-04 academic year, 86% of classes were taught by highly qualified teachers.

"As we continue a national discussion - from the classrooms in our schools to the kitchen tables in our homes - about what we need to do to ensure every child has access to a high-quality education, this report has uncovered valuable facts about both our successes in NLCB implementation and the areas in which we still need to work in closing the achievement gap in our nation's schools," concluded McKeon.





A BAPTIST UNIVERSITY THAT PERSECUTES BELIEF IN CREATION??

Baylor University is the Baptist-affiliated school in Waco, Texas, best known perhaps for its football team. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in Texas and, with some 14,000 students, the largest Baptist university in the world. Of late, however, the school has distinguished itself mainly by its evident disdain for the academic freedom of an eminent scholar and its concomitant promotion of a radical polemicist.

Baylor recently decided to deny tenure to Francis Beckwith, a leading bio-ethicist and one of the most accomplished scholars at Baylor. Beckwith had been associate director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies and associate professor of church-state studies. The vote to deny him tenure was little more than an act of political censorship directed against his conservative political and religious views. It has also turned into a media nightmare for Baylor's administration. Rod Dreher at the Dallas Morning News wrote this about Baylorgate: "The fact that a Baptist university cannot bring itself to award tenure to a scholar of Dr. Beckwith's stature is scandalous -- and will cause shock waves beyond Waco."

Beckwith's sin seems to be his belief in Christianity and his defense of the teaching of "intelligent design," the doctrine holding that it is possible to see evidence of an intelligent plan in the patterns of evolution and that advanced life forms could not have simply evolved via random interactions of chemicals. "Intelligent Design" has become the bogeyman of radical secularists, who want to make sure that no high school biology teacher in the country dare mention it as an alternative view of how biological processes took place.

The ACLU and similar outfits consider "intelligent design" to be the backdoor introduction of religious indoctrination into the schoolhouse. More troublingly, as they see it, it is at variance with their preferred political causes -- such as homosexual marriage, racial quotas, global warming and other left-wing doctrines -- which they adhere to with a near-theological fervor and which they have long promoted under the guise of education.

Beckwith's supporters are understandably outraged. One of Baylor's graduate students described the firing of Beckwith in The American Spectator as a case of petty revenge. But the circumstances of of Beckwith's case are unusual and controversial, and have attracted attention and comment from First Things magazine, a prominent religious journal published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life (led by Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus). Its editor Joseph Bottum wrote on March 27:

"Baylor has apparently decided to sink back into its diminished role as a not terribly distinguished regional school. President Sloan is gone, the new high-profile faculty are demoralized and sniffing around for positions at better-known schools, energetic programs like the Intelligent Design institute have been chased away, and the bright young professors are having their academic careers ruined by a school that lured them to campus with the promises of the 2012 plan and now is simply embarrassed by them."

Beckwith had been hired by Robert Sloan, Baylor's former president, whose aim it was to turn Baylor into something more than the home of a football team and to build Christian academic excellence and achieve for Baylor true research university status. Sloan's recruitment program was known as "Vision 2012." After being forced out of his office, Sloan was replaced by John Mark Lilley. Moving to fire Beckwith for the crime of political incorrectness was among Lilley's first major decisions. The thinking among the heads of Baylor, whose brains no doubt are composed of random combinations of chemicals, is that Baylor can't have any views on biology that have word associations with religion.

Source





Stupid education policy from Australia's mainstream Left

They object to students paying their way through university! Only the taxpayer is allowed to pay for people's education, apparently. It is of course envy-driven -- envy of those who can pay

University chiefs have warned that Kim Beazley's pledge to ban full-fee university degrees costing up to $200,000 is "unsustainable" and must be dumped in the lead-up to next year's federal election. As senior ALP frontbenchers conceded yesterday it would prove far too expensive to compensate universities for the reduced revenue, vice-chancellors urged Mr Beazley to end his opposition to full-fee degrees.

During the 2004 election, contested by Mark Latham, universities said they could be left $1.2billion-a-year worse off under the ALP's plan to ban full-fee degrees and wind back the cost of HECS increases. That cost will now be substantially higher as a result of the FEE-HELP loans scheme which is supporting an explosion in demand for full-fee degrees and an increase in the cap on the number of places offered to students who miss out because of marks.

The push to encourage Mr Beazley to dump his opposition to full-fee degrees is supported by Melbourne University Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis and Australian National University Vice-Chancellor Ian Chubb, who are regarded as having strong ALP links. Queensland University Vice-Chancellor John Hay told The Australian last night the existing policy was "unsustainable". "I don't think their present policy is realistic," he said. "In the first place, the current level of funding is seriously inadequate. Many universities now, in a sense, depend on additional funding to make their activities viable. Either they are going to massively increase the level of commonwealth funding ... or it is unsustainable."

However, deputy leader Jenny Macklin said she was not walking away from the policy pledge. "Labor opposes full-fee degrees for Australian undergraduates at public universities," she said. Ms Macklin was recently mired in controversy over an internal row over Queensland Premier Peter Beattie's push to support full-fee degrees for medicine students to tackle the skills shortage. The degrees can cost up to $200,000 for students who miss out on a HECS place on marks. The ALP subsequently moved in parliament to oppose a measure to increase the cap on the number of full-fee medicine degrees that can be offered in a course. The measures also increased the FEE-HELP loan available to students.

At the last election, former education minister Brendan Nelson warned that a string of universities would be worse off under the ALP. They included the University of Queensland, which calculated it could lose $40 million a year; La Trobe, which could lose $18million; and Monash, which could lose $216 million over four years.

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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