Thursday, September 21, 2006

The California Left wants to segregate Latino schoolchildren

For now, the state Legislature's unseemly war on the gutsy, no-nonsense state Board of Education is over, with our unpopular Legislature abandoning Sacramento for its long annual vacation back in the home districts. It would be nice if the public -- left largely in the dark in this debate -- could hurl probing questions at local "progressive" legislators as to why they are waging war on the state Board of Education, why they are trying to turn back the clock on Latino kids and segregate them again, and why they are fudging numbers to make it appear that Latino kids are not improving when in fact they're improving faster than they have in decades.

If you hate politicians, you will really despise them when you find out how low our Legislature went to serve the twisted purposes of adult special-interest groups at the expense of California's poorest kids. The latest effort, Senate Bill 1769 by Southern California Democrats Martha Escutia, Judy Chu and Jackie Goldberg, is likely to be vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, just as it would have been by former Govs. Gray Davis and Pete Wilson before him, and ... well, you get the idea.

Senate Bill 1769 arises from voters' 1998 decision to ban "bilingual" education, which kept immigrant kids stuck in Spanish and stunted in English. But "progressive" and Latino-elected leaders were unanimous in insisting that, under Proposition 227, Latino kids would buckle from the intense pressure of having to perform academically while trying to learn English. Remember that? Didn't happen. Under Wilson, an emboldened state Board of Education had already begun to reform the schools. Prop. 227 was a useful tool. As The Chronicle reported in 1999, "In the past year alone, Wilson's board reinstated phonics instruction, changed how math will be taught, installed a new state achievement test, established grade-by-grade academic standards and refused to consider school district requests to teach in languages other than English."

Davis' Board of Education was just as gutsy, linking textbook content to the tougher standards -- despite pitched opposition. Tests scores are now steadily climbing. Our awful schools are doing something right. But last spring, the Latino and Democratic Caucus declared war on the Board of Education. "Progressive" legislators demand that the board adopt a faddish idea, "Option VI," to help "close the gap" between immigrant and non-immigrant kids. The board refused, so the Democrats cut the board's $1.5 million annual funding.

No serious researcher would embrace "Option VI," the latest Orwellian effort to segregate Latino kids and water down academic standards. The "books and materials" were accurately described by the Los Angeles Times as having "more pictures and simple vocabulary." Dumbed-down. Separate. Arnold, who has temporarily funded the gutsy Board of Education from funds he controls, will likely veto SB1769. When I had lunch with him several weeks ago, we didn't discuss it specifically, but he firmly opposed simpler books and separate materials. "We don't want separate, we want together," he told me.

Even so, this will not be the last we've heard from Sacramento "progressives." So what's really going on? For starters, immigrant children are so quickly becoming literate in English compared to a decade ago, that many California schools now refuse to identify them as fluent. Why? Because California rewards schools for having "English learners." Schools who admit a student has become "proficient" lose that money. That money, in turn, feeds a politicized adult lobby inside the schools whose jobs and power rely on keeping kids in the "English learner" category.

One result: 170,000 children fluent in English are stuck in the "learner" category today. Some 522,000 immigrant kids, reclassified as proficient in English, scored higher on statewide tests than average California students. Their scores strongly suggest that schools are requiring "English learners" to learn it better than average California students before they are classified as proficient.

A tortured analysis in Escutia's bill claims that the "performance gap" between English learners and other California students "has remained virtually constant in most subject[s]" since Prop. 227. How absurd. In truth, California's "English learner" population of about 1.6 million swells weekly from illegal immigration. As fast as kids learn English, their numbers are replenished. The "gap" won't be narrowed anytime soon. Former Govs. Wilson and Davis get it. In July, they wrote an open letter urging Sacramento not to dumb-down standards: "Standards provide a measure of excellence regardless of one's skin color, family income or ZIPcode. ... Not every child will fully meet the challenge, but all will benefit from the effort."

Schwarzenegger will probably do the right thing. But as long as a fervently politicized mini-industry in our schools is rewarded, the progressives' misbegotten war over English immersion, textbooks, curriculum and skills will persist.

Source





NEW BRITISH COMPRESSED DEGREES POPULAR

The new nine-to-five degree, which spells the end to three-month summer vacations, is proving a hit with lawyers, hoteliers and professionals keen to get ahead in the job market. As the first full-time fast-track students embarked on their courses yesterday, universities piloting the revolutionary programmes were already turning away candidates, having filled their quotas. The new degree compresses three years' work into two, as students toil through both summer vacations. They cost 3,000 pounds less than a traditional honours course and ministers hope that this will encourage more people who are put off by top-up fees and student debts to apply.

This year the proportion of state school pupils and those from low-income families at university dropped to its lowest level in three years, despite government pressure to increase numbers. Julie Smith, senior lecturer in law at Staffordshire University, said that the department had been "pleasantly surprised" by the numbers applying. With school-leavers, career-changers, European, African and Canadian students, she says that the degree has a healthy mix. "There will always be more than one tutor for every module, so they will have back-up," she said. "If any student finds it too much, they can slow down along the way and even do the three-year degree." Staffordshire is one of five universities, with Derby, Leeds Metropolitan, Northampton and the Medway partnership, offering fast-track degrees. The Higher Education Funding Council for England is pouring 3 million into the flexible learning programmes and expects about 600 students to enrol in the first year.

Andrew Haldane, who leads the fast-track learning projects in Derby, said that tutors expected to accept a full quota on each of their courses in the joint honours tourism and hospitality sector as well as in business studies. More tutors will be recruited in January. However, he said that he expected few universities to follow suit until they were properly paid for the extra tuition. "We get slightly more than two years' worth (of tuition fees), but it's a good deal less than three," he said. "So if demand is shown for these programmes, the council would need to address that."

Last week Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, suggested that universities could replace three-year residential honours degrees with flexible credit-based systems, part-time courses and programmes delivered over the internet. Cliff Allen, deputy chief executive of the Higher Education Academy, said there was a market for accelerated degrees, but added that, without extra resources, they could be seen as "cut-price". The future, he said, would probably lie in the more flexible vocational degrees centred on workplace learning.

Source






Australia: More on pro-terrorist "Research"

The critics of my opinion piece on terrorism research allege that the status quo is fine. They also defend the ubiquitous "class, sex, race" theoretical template and similar ideological presuppositions that predetermine the outcomes of their research. These defenders of the status quo complacently think their research paradigm is irrefutable and therefore anyone who challenges them must be wrong. They typify the arrogance of the academic elites that dominate the research agenda in Australia. Fortunately, the truly lamentable state of affairs in terrorism studies is becoming clear as other scholars in the field reveal the abuses that are occurring ("Research 'blames West for terror"', The Australian, September 15).

Among the critics defending the status quo are Stuart Koschade and Luke Howie, who are doing PhDs. They claim that "during the next four years the academic community will be inundated with young Australian scholars with a special expertise in studying terrorism".

Apparently Australians are meant to think this is a good thing. On the contrary, we should be very worried about the ideologies that these researchers will be imposing on terrorism studies in the near future. In fact, these ideologies are quite bizarre, as I pointed out in my original article, and as David Martin Jones and Carl Ungerer have also recently revealed ("Delusion reigns in terror studies", The Australian, September 15). Overwhelmingly, these ideologies blame the victim for terrorism and absolve the terrorists.

Koschade and Howie proudly refer to themselves as members of "an ambitious bunch and we all plan to be significant features on the terrorism studies landscape". Let us therefore take them at their word and look at what they have achieved in this field as they have pursued their climb up the academic ladder. Koschade managed a special mention in the Best Paper by an Emerging Researcher prize, Social Change in the 21st Century conference 2005, a conference he promotes in his article. This conference is a one-day affair that appeals to postgraduates and has nothing particularly to do with terrorism. Koschade presented an essay about Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that was active in the early 1990s.

Howie similarly promotes the Safeguarding Australia Summit in Canberra this week, at which he is presenting a paper on Melbourne as a Terrorist Target and the Human Response as part of a session that goes for all of 20 minutes (tomorrow, for those who don't want to miss it). This conference exemplifies the way in which terrorism research has been absorbed into the academic conference industry. Participation in this industry is open to anyone who pays a very high fee: in this case, $1195. In return, participants get the opportunity to present a micro-paper (15-18 minutes) on the subject of their choice, the big pay-off being that they can then include their presentation at an impressive-sounding conference in their CV as they proceed to climb the academic ladder.

A gang of four critics (Alex Bellamy, et al, HES, September 13) also defends the status quo, within which they are apparently doing very well, exploring such areas as the "aesthetics of terrorism", as if there is something sublime about mangled bodies. Fortunately, the ideological bias of their work has been well exposed by others, so I need waste little time on them here, beyond noting their defence of the equally questionable views of Scott Burchill. Unfortunately, they fail to disclose that one of their number, Richard Devetak, is a co-author with Burchill of a textbook on international relations: hardly the basis of an objective defence.

This group also alleges that I have an obligation to disprove Burchill's claims that "Muslim identity in Australia has been increasingly constructed as a problematic Other". Why? If Burchill (or anyone else) says that Muslim identity is constructed by Santa Claus, am I obliged to disprove such a patently absurd claim? Isn't it up to Burchill to prove such assertions in the first place? The group then writes about "the empirical basis" of these arguments about the Other, as if such a basis exists. In fact there is no empirical evidence whatsoever that this "social construction of the Other" model has any basis in reality. This obsession with the Other is simply an item of faith taken up by post-structuralists and postmodernists and inherited from Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida and Edward Said, none of whom proved that it relates to any real aspect of human knowledge. It certainly plays no role in any reputable psychology or epistemology.

Goldie Osuri and Bobby Banerjee (HES, September 13) are explicit: they want me silenced. They also defend the theoretical template, make some observations about the Enlightenment and suggest I take a sabbatical in Kabul, without showing what any of this has to do with terrorism research in Australia. Brett Bowden's article (HES, September 13) is also simplistic and misleading, and he undermines his own credibility by misquoting the title of one of my articles. Bowden refers to What's Wrong with Terrorism? by Robert Goodin of the Australian National University, where Bowden is based. This book is notable for Goodin's claim that "terror is not only the weapon of organisations like al-Qa'ida; it also benefits democratic politicians. Political figures conducting a campaign of fear as part of their war on terrorism may therefore be committing at least one of the same wrongs as terrorists themselves."

This absurd and dangerously irresponsible argument exemplifies the crisis of terrorism studies in Australia. These critics seek to defend the ideological status quo from which they benefit, even if that ideology equates terrorism with the policies of the Australian Government and other democratic governments, and absolves vicious terrorists who have openly declared their intentions of destroying our society.

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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