Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Fact-free French economics education



In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe's economies prosper or continue to be left behind.

Thus begins Stefan Theil's article in Foreign Policy (merci . RV). Makes you wonder, isn't it about time those oafish, clueless Americans start listening to the brilliant ideas of those more-lucid-than-thou products of the Europe's avant-garde educational system?
"Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer," asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siScle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have "doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise," the text continues. Because the 21st century begins with "an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth]," any future prosperity "depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale." Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as "brutal," "savage," "neoliberal," and "American." This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.

.French students . do not learn economics so much as a very specific, highly biased discourse about economics. When they graduate, they may not know much about supply and demand, or about the workings of a corporation. Instead, they will likely know inside-out the evils of "la McDonaldisation du monde" and the benefits of a "Tobin tax" on the movement of global capital. This kind of anticapitalist, antiglobalization discourse isn't just the product of a few aging 1968ers writing for Le Monde Diplomatique; it is required learning in today's French schools.

.Equally popular in Germany today are student workbooks on globalization. One such workbook includes sections headed "The Revival of Manchester Capitalism," "The Brazilianization of Europe," and "The Return of the Dark Ages." India and China are successful, the book explains, because they have large, state-owned sectors and practice protectionism, while the societies with the freest markets lie in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa. Like many French and German books, this text suggests students learn more by contacting the antiglobalization group Attac, best known for organizing messy protests at the annual G-8 summits.

One might expect Europeans to view the world through a slightly left-of-center, social-democratic lens. The surprise is the intensity and depth of the anti-market bias being taught in Europe's schools. Students learn that private companies destroy jobs while government policy creates them. Employers exploit while the state protects. Free markets offer chaos while government regulation brings order. Globalization is destructive, if not catastrophic. Business is a zero-sum game, the source of a litany of modern social problems.

.A likely alternative scenario may be that the changes wrought by globalization will awaken deeply held resentment against capitalism and, in many countries from Europe to Latin America, provide a fertile ground for populists and demagogues, a trend that is already manifesting itself in the sudden rise of many leftist movements today.

Source






Pupils do better with public testing: OECD

The reality Leftists hate. It offends their irrational belief that all men (and kids) are equal

PUBLICLY ranking students' performance and requiring them to sit external examinations boosts their results, according to the biggest international survey of academic ability. Teachers' unions have been strident critics of the public reporting of student results, in particular comparing the performance of different schools. The unions have also argued against the introduction of national literacy and numeracy tests.

But the results of the Program for International Student Assessment, conducted every three years among 15-year-olds by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, show a consistently higher performance in schools that keep track of student performance on a public level. The report says external exams assessing students against a set standard, as occurs around Australia except in Queensland and the ACT, puts students about one school year ahead on the PISA scale. "The impetus provided by external monitoring of standards, rather than relying principally on schools and individual teachers to uphold them, can make a real difference to results," itsays. "PISA itself has encouraged countries not to take internally assessed education standards for granted and is now indicating a strong effect ... by subjecting schools to external assessment with publicly visible results."

Students at schools that publicly posted their students' results scored 14.7 points higher in the PISA science tests. When demographic and social factors were taken into account, the rise was still a significant 6.6 points. By contrast, informing parents of their child's performance relative to other students or national benchmarks increased scores by 4.7 and 4.2 points, which was not statistically significant. Reporting results relative to other schools had a negative effect, lowering scores five points, which was also not statistically significant. Students set external exams scored about 36 points higher, which, adjusted for demographic and social effects, was 17 points higher and not statistically significant.

The report defines external exams as subject-based exams assessing performance relative to an external standard such as Year 12 exams or the national literacy and numeracy tests that start in all states and territories in Years 3, 5, 7, and 9 in May.

Acting federal president of the Australian Education Union Angelo Gavrielatos said extreme caution should be taken in extrapolating general lessons from the OECD report. Mr Gavrielatos said the report failed to take into account differences in school systems such as curriculum, assessment and reporting policies. "We certainly believe that student results are the property of individual students, their parents and teachers," he said. "Parents have every right to know how their child is performing but no right to know about their neighbour's child. That's in no one's interest. "Countries like the UK and the US that have high-stakes testing and public reporting of student results in the form of league tables ranking schools are not high-performing countries in the PISA tests."

The analysis contained in the 2006 PISA results, released last month, covered 55 countries, including Australia, matching school characteristics with student scores in the science tests, which was the main area examined in 2006, as well as shorter tests on reading and maths. It found that while students in academically selective schools scored substantially higher, streaming students in classes according to their ability within a school lowered their scores by about 10 points, or 4.5 points when adjusted for social effects. "(This suggests) such a policy might potentially hinder learning of certain students more than it enhances learning of others," the report says.

Commenting on the results, PISA director Andreas Schleicher said the effect of selective schools and grouping students according to their ability was not necessarily incompatible. "If you are in a selective school, you do better on average," he was reported as saying. "But if you stratify the entire system, you would not see a positive impact."

Source





Students Lose When Diversity Is Main Focus

A good education requires balance. Students should learn to appreciate a variety of cultures, sure, but they also need to know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Judging from the courses that the nation's leading education colleges offer, however, balance isn't a goal. The schools place far more emphasis on the political and social ends of education than on the fundamentals.

To determine just how unbalanced teacher preparation is at ed schools, we counted the number of course titles and descriptions that contained the words "multiculturalism," "diversity," "inclusion" and variants thereof, and then compared those with the number that used variants of the word "math." We then computed a "multiculturalism-to-math ratio" - a rough indicator of the relative importance of social goals to academic skills in ed schools. A ratio of greater than 1 indicates a greater emphasis on multiculturalism; a ratio of less than 1 means that math courses predominate.

Our survey covered the nation's top 50 education programs as ranked by U.S. News and World Report, as well as programs at flagship state universities that weren't among the top 50 - a total of 71 education schools. The average ed school, we found, has a multiculturalism-to-math ratio of 1.82, meaning that it offers 82% more courses featuring social goals than featuring math. At Harvard and Stanford, the ratio is about 2: Almost twice as many courses are social as mathematical. At the University of Minnesota, the ratio is higher than 12. And at UCLA, a whopping 47 course titles and descriptions contain the word "multiculturalism" or "diversity," while only three contain the word "math," giving it a ratio of almost 16.

Some programs do show different priorities. At the University of Missouri, 43 courses bear titles or descriptions that include multiculturalism or diversity, but 74 focus on math, giving it a lean multiculturalism-to-math ratio of 0.58. Penn State's ratio is 0.39. (By contrast, the ratio at Penn State's Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania, is over 3.) Still, of the 71 programs we studied, only 24 have a multiculturalism-to-math ratio of less than 1; only five pay twice as much attention to math as to social goals.

Several obstacles impede change. On the supply side, ed-school professors are a self-perpetuating clique, and their commitment to multiculturalism and diversity produces a near-uniformity of approach. Professors control entry into their ranks by determining who will receive the doctoral credential, deciding which doctoral graduates get hired, and then selecting which faculty will receive tenure. And tenured academics are essentially accountable to no one.

On the demand side, prospective teachers haven't cried out for more math courses because such courses tend to be harder than those involving multiculturalism. And the teachers know that their future employers - public school districts - don't find an accent on multiculturalism troubling. Because public schools are assured of ever-increasing funding, regardless of how they do in math, they can indulge their enthusiasm for multiculturalism, and prospective teachers can, too.

Accrediting organizations also help perpetuate the emphasis on multiculturalism. In several states, law mandates that ed schools receive accreditation from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. NCATE, in turn, requires education programs to meet six standards, one entirely devoted to diversity, but none entirely devoted to ensuring proper math pedagogy. Education schools that attempt to break from the cartel's multiculturalism focus risk denial of accreditation.

Ensuring quality math instruction is no minor matter. The Program for International Student Assessment's latest results paint a bleak picture: U.S. 15-year-olds ranked 24th out of 30 industrial countries in math literacy, tying Spain and surpassing only Greece, Italy, Portugal, Mexico, and Turkey, while trailing Iceland, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak Republic and all of our major economic competitors in Europe and Asia.

The issue isn't whether we should be teaching cultural awareness in education colleges or in public schools; it's about priorities. Besides, our students probably have great appreciation already for students from other cultures - who're cleaning their clocks in math skills, and will do so economically, too, if we don't wise up.

Source

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