Loading...
Title :
link :
UK: Male, pale and stale: university professors to be given 'reverse mentors'
A reminder of Maoist China and the "Red Guards". Wondering why applications to universities are down? Because universities have stopped being about the transmission and expansion of knowledge and become left-wing madrassas. Who wants to pay £50,000 to be told they’re racist, sexist, transphobic, etc.?
Male, pale and stale university professors are to be given “reverse mentors” to teach them about unconscious bias, under a new Government funded scheme.
Under the project, white men in senior academic posts will be assigned a junior female colleague from an ethnic minority as a mentor.
Prof John Rowe, who is overseeing the project at Birmingham University, said he hoped the scheme will allow eminent professors to confront their own biases and leave them “feeling quite uncomfortable”.
“What is understood about unconscious bias is that we have all got it, but the more you learn about it and become conscious of it, the more you can act,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
“While it is well known and obvious that women and minority groups suffer setbacks to their career progression no one really understands why. “It’s not as if there is any overt prejudice – it is something to do with the way the system is or the way it has evolved and we needed to find out why.”
The mentor scheme is one element of a broader project aimed at challenging bias, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s (EPSRC).
Prof Rowe, who is director of research at Birmingham University’s College of Engineering and Physical Science, said he hoped to interrogate the “underlying causes” that lead to the underrepresentation of female and ethnic minority academics at the top of academia.
“We are mindful that previous attempts at addressing such imbalances have not been successful, so we are investigating new ways of understanding how to support progression of our female and ethnic minority colleagues,” he said.
“Questions such as ‘Is there a bias when the gender of the academic is known?’, ‘Is it the result of the group dynamic of a panel of assessors?’ and ‘Are women encouraged to work in particular research areas, perhaps those outside of STEM subjects?’ will also be addressed.”
Staff from Birmingham will work with researchers from Aberystwyth University and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust.
The EPSRC, a government agency, is funding eleven “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” projects as part of an £5.5 million anti-discrimination drive in engineering and physical sciences.
It has previously been claimed that Oxford porters should be given “unconscious bias” training, amid claims that they assume black students are trespassing when they enter College grounds.
The university’s students’ union published their Liberation Vision document, which recommends that porters should also be trained in how to respond to reports of sexual violence and mental health issues among students.
The document says that and cleaners, known as “scouts”, tutors, supervisors and senior tutors should also partake in the training.
The move follows a series of complaints about porters unfairly targeting black students and singling them out for questioning about why they have entered College grounds.
SOURCE
Report casts doubt on link between academic outcomes and spending
August 7, 2018 – Milwaukee, WI – With campaigns in full swing, candidates are frantically trying to outdo each other in promising to spend more money on K-12 public schools. Yet little debate is had over the relationship between additional school funding and student performance.
This is a topic that deserves in-depth research. To get the ball rolling, WILL Research Director Will Flanders, Ph.D., looked at the relationship between test scores and the number of non-teachers in a school district, per pupil spending in a district, and teacher pay in a new report titled Money for Nothing: The Relationship Between Various Types of School Funding and Academic Outcomes. None of these factors seem to be linked to higher student test scores.
Dr. Flanders gathered data at the school district level on a number of categories of spending over a six year period. These include the number of non-teaching staff in a school district, the average pay of teachers in a district, and the overall per student spending in a distict. The dynamic changes both within and across districts on each of these variables creates a natural experiment for comparison with student outcomes. Using a statistical analysis that accounted for other plausible causes of student performance, he compared each spending variable with student performance. Among the key findings of this research:
School districts have increased their hiring of non-teachers, pay adminstrators 305% of teachers. The average school district hires 40.4% non-teacher with 101 districts having at least 50% of non-teachers making up their employees. School administrators make on average 305% of the average teacher in their district. Some districts such as Kenosha, Milwaukee, Madison, and Peshtigo pay their distict administrator more than 400% of the average teacher.
Yet, the number of non-teachers on staff has a negative effect on student test scores. When it comes to English proficiency on state exams, districts with more non-teachers have lower proficiency rates than districts with a higher percentage of teachers controlling for other factors known to relate to proficiency.
Teacher pay has kept up with inflation, no relationship to student test scores. Despite claims to the contrary, average teacher pay in Wisconsin is similar to six years ago, accounting for inflation. Our analysis shows that there is no statistically significant relationship between a district’s spending on teacher pay and student test scores.
As other studies have shown, there is no statistically significant relationship between overall per student spending and test scores. In fact, when proper control variables are included, school districts that spend more per student have lower academic proficiency in both math and English.
Dr. Flanders said:
“When it comes to spending on K-12 public schools, Wisconsin is at the point of diminishing returns and just does not receive a return on investment for children. The state should look at other options—such as increasing competition through choice and charter schools, both of which are drastically underfunded compared to their public schools.”
SOURCE
Religion in decline in Australian schools
Australian school students are becoming more likely to identify with “no religion” even in religious schools, including a 68 per cent increase in Catholic schools.
The trend, which mirrors changes in the wider population, has led the peak independent schools body to warn religious schools to rethink their marketing.
Across all schools, 37 per cent of students identify with "no religion", according to an analysis of 2016 census data by the Independent Schools Council of Australia. That's up from 30 per cent in 2011.
At government schools, 45 per cent of students profess to no religion or did not specify a religion in the 2016 census, up from 38 per cent in 2011 and the highest proportion ever recorded.
The number of students describing themselves as having no religion increased 68.2 per cent at Catholic schools.
About 31 per cent of students at independent schools are categorised as having no religion, up from 24 per cent in 2011, and 14 per cent of students at Catholic schools did not have a religion, up from 10 per cent in 2011.
The change reflects a drift to secularism in the wider population. About 30 per cent of people reported “no religion” in the 2016 census, up from 22 per cent five years earlier. The trend is most marked with the younger population, with 39 per cent of those aged 18 to 34 reporting no religion.
Just over one in two Australians of any age identified as Christian, with Catholicism and Anglicanism the two biggest denominations.
"Schools may need to think about the implications of the slow but steady rise of secularism, and the ways this may affect their approach to religious education and how they market their schools," the Independent Schools Council of Australia states in its analysis.
Matt Beard, a fellow at the Ethics Centre, said the rise in non-religious students wouldn't necessarily affect the approach schools take to education.
“If you found out students aren't reading literature, you wouldn't stop teaching novels," Dr Beard said. "But it may provide a catalyst for having a discussion around whether religious education is a critical analysis of faiths and their place in society or teaching the tenets of particular religions."
Social researcher Rebecca Huntley said the Baby Boomers kickstarted the rise in no religion, but also a changed relationship with the church even for those who identify with a religion.
"Children get their religious direction and affiliation from their parents and with each generation since the Baby Boomers we've seen not just a decline in people identifying on census documents as belonging to a particular religion but also a decline in behaviour associated with religion," Dr Huntley said.
"You might put that you're Catholic on the census form but that does not necessarily mean that you go to church every Sunday and do the other things the church might tell you to do."
Dr Huntley added that, anecdotally, she'd observed parents "suddenly declaring for a religion and doing things like baptizing their child to give them more school choice".
The number of students describing themselves as having no religion increased 68 per cent at Catholic schools, 48 per cent at independent schools and 41 per cent at government schools.
The next biggest increase was in students who said they were Christian, with a 59 per cent increase in Catholic schools, a 15 per cent rise in private schools and a 27 per cent rise in government schools.
Students professing to Islam also grew by 19 per cent in Catholic schools, 41 per cent at independent schools and 36 per cent at government schools.
Greg Whitby, executive director of the Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, which oversees 80 schools, said the diocese "recognises things are changing" and caters to students with different levels of understanding in faith-based lessons.
"Though Catholic students have enrolment priority, we welcome other community members who wish to join our caring learning communities," Mr Whitby said.
Julie Townsend, headmistress at St Catherine's School Waverley, a private Anglican girls' school, said most of her students did not have a strong religious affiliation and attended the school mainly for its educational facilities, but also benefited from its Christian underpinnings.
"The families who send girls to St Catherine's may not be religious in the home but they're looking to the school to teach them about Christianity and its values of compassion and kindness," Dr Townsend said.
SOURCE
thus Article
that is all articles
This time, hopefully can provide benefits to all of you. Okay, see you in another article posting.
You now read the article with the link address https://onechildsmart.blogspot.com/2018/08/uk-male-pale-and-stale-university.html
0 Response to " "
Post a Comment