Friday, July 28, 2006

BRITAIN'S CHARTER SCHOOLS POPULAR

Parents are backing Tony Blair's controversial city academy programme overwhelmingly, according to an independent report that will reveal today that each place is heavily oversubscribed. The day after a mother failed at the High Court to prevent her children's Islington primary school being replaced by an academy, a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is expected to show that the semi-independent schools are receiving three times the applicants to places available. The findings are a "massive vote of confidence" by parents in the Government's programme to build 200 academies by 2010, Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, told The Times, in spite of criticism by teachers' unions and Labour leftwingers that they are unaccountable and too expensive.

Twenty-five of the twentyseven academies opened so far are oversubscribed for the next term - more than six times so in the case of new academies in Hackney, Southwark and Lambeth. Mossbourne Community Academy, which replaced the failing Hackney Downs school, has had 1,137 applications for 191 places. Those academies that had replaced failing or weak schools - even those that were severely criticised or failed by Ofsted, such as Bexley and Unity - were also oversubscribed, though less so. "No one has ever pretended, least of all the Government, that we'd be able to provide instant success," Lord Adonis told The Times. "The key issue is the rate of progress, and what the report shows is that we are getting the basics right, the rate of improvement is good and that in particular the leadership of the academies is strong."

According to the Government, the PwC report finds that results for 14-year-olds are improving faster than in other schools facing similar challenges. The accountants also found that the freedoms enjoyed by the principals of the semi- independent schools had paid off with more innovative teaching. Since Charles Clarke announced the ambitious education reform programme in 2000, the spotlight has been shone on the new schools, often with uncomfortable results. Last summer it emerged that although only 42 per cent of state school students who took GCSEs passed five with A*-C grades, including English and maths, at the academies the results were far worse. At the King's Academy, 23 per cent of pupils passed at the same rate, while at Unity only 6 per cent achieved similar results, as did 11 per cent at Capital in Brent. Only 14 of the 27 academies had been open long enough for last year's results to be included, but 7 were in the worst 200.

Lord Adonis said that the Government recognised that more progress needs to be made at GCSE level, but while many of the schools were still in the process of being turned around, it was striking that parents wanted to send their children to them

Source






Spelling: A shameful comparison

When kids whose native language is not English can spell English better than our kids can, what does that tell you?



The "wallpaper method" of teaching spelling by sticking words on the classroom wall for children to absorb is failing in Australia. Writing tests conducted by the University of NSW reveal that about nine times more students in Singapore - where about half of children speak English as a second language - can spell less-common English words or those with unusual spelling patterns. The stark difference is attributed to the more traditional drill approach adopted by Singapore schools to teach spelling, with the syllabus even listing words that students are expected to be able to spell.

About 9 per cent of Year 3 students in Singapore could spell words such as chaotic, dilemma, laborious, perceive and voyage, while only 1 per cent of Year 3 students in NSW reached an equivalent score. The improvement in students' spelling over two years was also markedly different, with 36.5 per cent of Year 5 students in Singapore able to spell at the same level, compared with 12 per cent of Year 5 students in NSW.

The tests, conducted by Educational Assessment Australia at UNSW and involving more than 110,000 Australians and more than 10,000 Singaporeans, required students to construct a news story based on an event. While the EAA students comprised a high proportion of private school students, the results are similar to those of the NSW Government's basic skills tests, which are sat by all Year 3 and 5 students in government and non-government schools. The 2003 results for the primary writing assessment of the NSW test show only 2 per cent of Year 3 students and 11 per of Year 5 students composing a factual piece of writing could spell words such as actions, appearance, camouflage, disappeared, frightening, muscular and predators.

EAA director Peter Knapp attributed the difference in spelling capabilities to the teaching methods used, with Australian schools adopting a more progressive strategy that encourages teachers to teach spelling in context. The fact that results for the different tests in Australia and Singapore, and populations of students, were so similar suggested the problem was the way in which spelling was taught. "I think it's definitely an issue of pedagogy and the absence of anything explicit in our syllabus documents," Professor Knapp said. "Spelling is not a high-order cognitive skill such as sentence construction, however, it requires practice and memory - two aspects of traditional pedagogy that have somehow fallen out of favour. "Teachers are encouraged to teach spelling in context, the wallpaper approach, that children absorb the spelling of words through reading them and saying them or looking at them on a classroom wall."

The chairman of the national inquiry into the teaching of literacy, Ken Rowe from the Australian Council for Educational Research, said the secret of Singapore's success was its direct and explicit instruction.

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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