Black Activist Takes Issue with School Choice Opposition

Project 21 Fellow Suggests Senator Kennedy's Antipathy to "No Child Left Behind" Voucher Provision Reveals Liberal Elitism and Allegiance to Big Labor

Senator Edward Kennedy's (D-MA) opposition to a proposed revision of the federal "No Child Left Behind" educational policy to allow school choice is evidence of an elitist attitude and a willingness to put the desires of the teachers' unions over the needs of students according to a fellow with the black leadership network Project 21. "When public schools are failing our children, parents should have accessible school choice options to meet their child's educational needs," said Project 21 fellow Deneen Borelli. "To deny children the opportunity they need in order to preserve the status quo is something Senator Kennedy and his colleagues should be ashamed of doing."

With No Child Left Behind up for congressional renewal this year, last week Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings outlined changes the Bush Administration would like to make to the policy. These changes include making schools accountable for science test scores, improved gathering of data on graduation rates, publication of school test results and a more vocational bent to some math and English curricula.

The key revisions would allow students at "chronically underperforming" schools - schools that fail to meet defined standards for a period of five years or more - to be given vouchers worth thousands of dollars that they could use to attend other public or private schools. Underperforming schools could be turned into charter schools and union contracts could be overruled to move teachers to other schools. In an interview with The Washington Times, Secretary Spelling said, "We've given [these schools] a chance, we've given them resources and it's time for us to say [the law] is a real promise and other options have to be brought to bear." A bill to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind policy is expected to be introduced in March or April.

In response to the school choice revision, Kennedy, who now chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions that will conduct hearings on the reauthorization bill, said: "I am disappointed that the Administration has once again proposed siphoning crucial resources from our public schools - already reeling from increased requirements and budget cuts - for a private school voucher program. I'm also disappointed that the Administration has proposed circumventing state law with respect to worker protections and other issues. We need to focus on how to help public schools improve and not use this reauthorization to push an ideological agenda that detracts from this goal."

Reg Weaver, the president of the National Education Association teachers' union, similarly criticized the proposal for allegedly trying "to strip collective-bargaining agreements."

"Our educational policy should be focused on the children, but it seems that Senator Kennedy wants to rename this policy 'No Union Member Left Behind,'" said Project 21's Borelli. "We must remember that Senator Kennedy is the son of privilege. In his formative years, he went to the Fessenden School - the alma mater of Howard Hughes and Senate colleague John Kerry. He also attended the Milton Academy, a school that today boasts a $150 million endowment and a 125-acre campus for less than 700 students. He effectively had school choice because his family could afford to enroll him in the best schools. Now, however, as a lawmaker, he wants to force less fortunate students to stay in underperforming government-run schools so that unionized teachers can maintain the status quo. It's a classic case of do as I say, not as I do."

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Britain: `Test teaching ideas before imposing them on children'

So sad that this is not axiomatic everywhere

Children are missing out on the best possible education because teaching techniques have never been tested rigorously, one of Britain's most senior scientists has said. Education needs to learn from medicine and other scientific disciplines by using rigorous experiments to determine which approaches work best, according to Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, the country's largest independent funder of bio-medical research.

He told The Times that Labour and Tory governments had reformed the education system on the basis of political dogma without any reliable evidence that their policies would benefit children. Whereas the merits of drugs were assessed by randomised controlled trials before they were given to patients, children were taught according to the ideological hunches and opinions of politicians and educationists, who could not know whether their strategies would work.

Questions such as optimum class size, whether boys and girls were better taught separately, and how best to teach literacy and numeracy, had never been investigated by scientific experiment, he said. The best way to identify the best methods was to split similar children into study and control groups and teach them differently, emulating the way that drugs were tested against a placebo. "Many more matters of public policy are susceptible to experiment than is often assumed," Professor Walport said.

The notion of conducting controlled experiments in education is often criticised as unethical, as one set of children would miss out on the superior technique, but Professor Walport said that that was no worse than subjecting every child to untested policies. "It's not unethical to do experiments in education. It is unethical not to," he said. "Many of the educational policies that are put into action are experimental as it is. They are just experiments without controls. When I raised this in Whitehall, I got the response: `You don't possibly expect to compare educational outcomes like this, do you?' But that missed the point. The point is that you do this when you don't know."

Some policies are tried out in pilot studies, but these rarely feature control groups, and the initiatives are introduced nationally before the study's outcome has been evaluated. Research is often conceived to find evidence to support existing policies, rather than to decide what works before policy is decided. "The scientific method, which is to ask the question, is almost the antithesis of the political method, which is to say I'll tell you the solution," Professor Walport said.

The Department for Education and Skills's research budget, now about 4.5 million pounds, was far too low, he said, and the department needed to appoint a chief scientist responsible for ensuring its research meets rigorous scientific criteria.

His call was welcomed by Nick Gibb, the Shadow Schools Minister, who said that too many education policies had been introduced without evidence. He said: "The look-and-say method of teaching children to read is a prime example. Where were the pilot studies that showed it worked? When the first proper study was done in Clackmannanshire, it found that synthetic phonics was a much more effective strategy. It was so successful that children were withdrawn from the control group as it would have been immoral to continue."

Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham, said that it was not always simple to conduct controlled experiments into educational strategies. "There are so many factors that affect success, including the background and ability of pupils and the skill of teachers, that it can be hard to separate out the effect of any one factor," he said. "And the findings of research are rarely strong enough to overturn prior conceptions."

In the balance:

Reading: Whole-word approach to learning to read was introduced without evidence that it was more effective than phonics. Phonics is now making a comeback after research suggested it was more effective

Coeducation: There is little good evidence from properly controlled studies that shows whether boys and girls learn better when taught together or separately

Literacy and numeracy strategies: Introduced across the country after only minimal pilot studies into their likely effects

Specialist schools and city academies: Introduced across the country even though there was no research showing that either would have a beneficial effect

Class size: Little good research exists on the optimum size of the groups in which pupils are taught

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Australia: More power to principals plan

Under-performing teachers could be sacked under a radical proposal to give school principals the power to "hire and fire" their staff

Setting up education as a key election battleground, Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop yesterday launched a full-frontal attack on what she dubbed the "all-powerful teachers' unions". Rejecting Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd's notion of an "education revolution", Ms Bishop said teaching appointments should be in the hands of individual principals and not state education departments.

She put forward higher standards as the issue on which the education agenda should be fought. The higher standards would be created by greater autonomy for principals, performance incentives for teachers and improved literacy and numeracy skills, she said. "Many school principals across Australia cite as their biggest frustration the fact that centralised education bureaucracies parachute teachers into schools or summarily remove valued teachers," Ms Bishop said. "Giving the power to principals will fix the problem of state governments, captive of the unions, unable to deal with under-performing teachers."

The proposal is expected to be formally raised with state governments at the next Ministerial Council on Education scheduled for April. Labor education spokesman Stephen Smith offered in-principle support, saying he believed principals should have a greater say in who was teaching in their classrooms. "I'm happy to have a conversation with my state ministers about it," he said. [A conversation! How radical! Will they talk about football too?]

State Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith said South Australian schools already had the ability to choose the best teacher for the job. Ms Bishop said she would work co-operatively with the states but warned the Federal Government could use funding as a "leverage". "Education is a national priority and it is too important to be left at the mercy of state parochialism and union self-interest," she said.

Australian Education Union state president Andrew Gohl rejected Ms Bishop's assertions, saying her plan for principal autonomy was "out of touch". "If you extend Julie Bishop's plan to its logical conclusion, it would mean that the most highly experienced, highly skilled teachers end up in small clusters of already highly advantaged schools," he said. "An education system has a responsibility to all students, regardless of where they live, to provide access to quality teachers."

During her speech, Ms Bishop also said: SHE would be putting a proposal to the states to offer rewards and incentive payments to well-performing teachers; THE Government would explore alternative pathways for teacher registration; STATES should provide further details about individual schools' performance; INCREASES in public spending had to improve standards; REITERATED her criticism of literacy and numeracy standards around the nation.

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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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