Thursday, February 15, 2007

No classroom left alone

Once upon a time when their party believed in small government, balanced budgets, and federalism Republicans ran on promises to dismantle federal bureaucracies and unnecessary government agencies. The Department of Education was a the target of particular animus. Ronald Reagan called it "President Carter's bureaucratic boondoggle." Republicans routinely inveighed against creeping federal control of education and pleaded for the return of control to local school boards.

As sincere as they seemed at the time, in the 18 years Republicans have held the presidency since the Department of Education was created, they have been no more successful in dismantling it than in evicting the Muppets from their home at public broadcasting. Advocates of small government and local control of education really got their comeuppance with George W. Bush. Lulled into a fog by the rhetoric of "compassionate conservatism," those who liked the old grumpy, small government variety of conservatism were mortified to see the federal government extend its reach into every classroom in America. Not even LBJ could have imagined No Child Left Behind.

The legislation sounded good on its face. Many children, especially in inner cities, were trapped in poor schools, standards seem to be invisible, and American children were falling further and further behind their foreign counterparts. What to be done? Since the federal government had such a magnificent track record in eliminating poverty and family fragmentation, politicians ranging from Teddy Kennedy to George W. Bush decided to give it one last assignment: improve K-12 education. Complaints from local school boards, teachers' unions, and fiscal conservatives were ignored. As only the federal government can do bureaucrats were hired, federal funding conditioned and reams of regulations enacted, in particular requirements for standardized tests, to ensure children were actually being taught.

Fast forward just a few years and we now have the specter of the federal government threatening the local school board of one of the most successful school districts in the country with a loss of funds because the local school board has balked at the prospect of testing (and then inevitably failing) non-English speaking students in English as the federal bureaucrats have deemed necessary. No really. Apparently federal education officials didn't like the reading exams that Fairfax and other local districts had devised for students learning English, because the tests according to the federal officials they were not equivalent to tests given to students fluent in English.

The Washington Post reported on Feb. 1, "In a sharply worded letter, Deputy Secretary of Education Raymond Simon said he is 'greatly distressed' that some school districts, including Fairfax County [in Northern Virginia], might violate the No Child Left Behind Act. Simon urged Virginia to enforce the law. If it does not, he said, federal education officials could step in, possibly withholding funds." Sensing the growing ire of parents who were now on to the bullying tactics of the Education Department, Secretary Margaret Spelling dashed off her own short piece for the Post claiming the local school district was "dragging its feet" in complying with federal testing dictates.

The victims in this tale of bureaucratic rapaciousness are not of course limited to less affluent, non-English speaking children. Ask any parent in this school district (largely populated by children of well to do, highly educated parents) which indisputably is successful whether they think the testing wrought by No Child Left Behind is a good thing and you will be greeted with much eye rolling and laughter. Real learning stops in April so curriculum can be diverted to daily drilling of students and test taking preparation. Days of classroom time each May are then taken up by the testing itself. With the help of the federal government students then lose weeks of classroom instruction.

The irony is delicious. We now have a federal bureaucrat put there at the behest of a Republican president dictating to a highly proficient local school board what questions should and should not be on the tests of Virginia school children. The Republicans' former natural constituency -- affluent and well-educated parents -- is now disgusted with the busybodies in the Bush Education Department.

With Republicans bemoaning the absence of a "real" conservative standard bearer for president in 2008 it would seem a good place to start for an aspiring Republican candidate would be to champion repeal of No Child Left Behind. Such a candidate would be on solid philosophical footing and appeal to the army of disenchanted parents. What's more, in this era of new found bipartisanship, they might even make some friends in the teachers' unions.

Source






INDIA SHOWS THE WAY IN EDUCATION

But the Australian Left (like most Leftists worldwide) is still ignoring the obvious with their paradoxical belief in the magical power of money

In Thomas Friedman's bestseller The World Is Flat, he explains how India positioned itself to become an invaluable player in the global economy. It began in the late 1990s with the boom in long-distance fibre-optic infrastructure. This enabled American companies to outsource a lot of tedious code-cutting work in the lead-up to the supposed Y2K meltdown of the world's computers. India had an enormous pool of highly educated English-speaking people who could perform the work at rock-bottom prices. Next, multinational companies began outsourcing ever more sophisticated work to India. Reuters newsagency, for instance, outsources news bulletins to Indian reporters, and US accounting firms sent 400,000 tax returns to Indian accountants in 2005.

The Indian middle class has blossomed, and clever young Indians no longer have to leave their families and migrate to Western countries to make something of themselves. They can do that right at home. We have grown used to speaking to women from Bangalore when phoning Diners Club to report a lost credit card. India was so well poised to capitalise on the technology that enables the "flattening" of the world economy, Friedman says, because it had a huge pool of well-educated workers. For an impoverished country, that was no mean feat, shaming Australian claims that lack of money is the sole cause of our higher-education woes.

In 1951 India's leaders decided to make good-quality education a priority, establishing the first of the nation's seven Indian Institutes of Technology, which became "islands of excellence". "India mined the brains of its own people," Friedman writes, "educating a relatively large slice of the elites in the sciences, engineering and medicine."

But, as Gurcharan Das wrote in Newsweek last year, it's no longer just the elites getting a decent education: "Government-run schools are a mess . . . But private schools - which can range from expensive boarding schools for the elite to low-end teaching shops in the bazaar - are proliferating. "Even the poor now send their kids to private schools, which can charge as little as $1 to $3 a month in fees and are spreading rapidly in slums and villages across India." Two-thirds of children in India's three largest states attend private schools and their reading and maths scores are significantly higher than those of other students.

Which brings us to Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd's education "revolution". He gets top marks for identifying education as his first election issue, crucial to economic growth. And while India's experience shows us resources aren't everything, Rudd's point that Australia's spending on universities has declined 7 per cent since 1995, while spending by OECD countries has risen on average by 48 per cent, struck a chord. In fact, the picture is worse than that, since the money is spread so thinly over a variable array of universities.

Rudd, who beavered through the summer break on his education policy, has already managed to convey a substantial message in a way his predecessors never could, with his clear link between the nation's future prosperity and the education level of its people. He argues that the way to boost Australia's flagging productivity is to invest massively in "human capital": education from preschool to university.

However, Rudd's first fleshed-out policy, a plan to offer universal preschool education, may backfire. While on the committee of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy in 2005, I became aware of a powerful desire by the education establishment to push formal education down into the preschool years. The thinking goes like this: if children are having trouble learning to read in primary school, it is not because the methods used to teach them are inadequate, it is because their families have not equipped them with what are called "pre-reading" skills - familiarity with books and the concept that the black stuff on the page has meaning.

While there is evidence that pre-reading skills are useful, especially for socially disadvantaged children, the evidence that intensive systematic phonics instruction is most effective in teaching most children to read is overwhelming. Yet there are still entrenched pockets of influential resistance to phonics-based teaching, in universities and various teacher associations.

As the literacy inquiry found, fewer than 10 per cent of course time in university teacher education departments is spent teaching teachers how to teach reading. But instead of fixing such problems, Rudd's early-education plan runs the risk of shifting responsibility for reading failures in primary school to preschool. That's no way to compete with India.

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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