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UK: No learning if you’re liberal
There was a fleeting moment during my curious boyhood when it seemed possible that I might actually transmogrify into … an academic pupil. I treasure the memory. Purley Grammar School for Boys it was, on a September day in the late 1960’s. An upstairs classroom overlooking the quad. Chalk dust caught in the sunlight, rows of ink-stained desks, twenty uninterested, fish-eyed youths, Dougie Firmer and old Nicholson.
Dougie was the school genius. It was already accepted that he was on his way in two years to Cambridge and then some top-Gag career in the higher etherium of the State. Frankly, we were in awe not only of his intelligence but of his quite unreal urbanity. Not only was he all brilliant polish for a seventeen year-old but he was brilliantly funny, too, and a natural mimic and extemporiser. If by chance after the boiled ham and carrots he’d begin to extemporise in the lower sixth common room on the subject, say, of how old Jewitt got his limp or Rainforth his taste in shoes everyone quieted down instantly. You knew to shut your silly prattle when Dougie gave forth, and belly-laugh with the best.
Now, Nicholson - dear, vague old Nicholson - was our European History master. He was an intellectual sort of chap too, but down at heel and careworn in dull brown tweed trousers and the regulation, leather-elbowed check jacket. His only natural talent was the ability to put otherwise hyper-active male youths to sleep. He had, in fairness, been perfecting his technique for thirty years or more. He called it teaching.
So ... it wasn’t very far into my first term at Purley Grammar. Three months earlier at my sink secondary modern school, despite every effort to leave the education system forthwith by learning as little as possible, I had somehow pulled a number of exam rabbits out of the hat and got mistaken for university material. Here I damn well was, then, imprisoned with five hundred males for another two academic years. My driving ambitions to get a job, get some money, get a car and get laid – especially get laid - were all in the deep-freeze.
Well, my story involves the schoolboy’s bane, homework. At the close of a previous, excruciatingly boring, double-period investigation of the Hapsburgs in the 19th century old Nicholson had sent us off to write an essay at home. Most of us hadn’t the faintest idea what he wanted from us because we slept so soundly through all old Nicholson’s soporifica. But work was work, and the exercise books were scribbled upon just the same and handed in for marking. Now, in that sunny upstairs classroom on this September day, they sat in a pile next to old Nicholson, with old Nicholson himself languidly perched as usual half-on, half-off his table.
He was unhappy. More than unhappy he was, for him, exercised. It had been a perfectly straightforward task, after all. Yet there was scarcely any attempt, any attempt whatsoever, to answer the question we had been set. Now Nicholson was on his feet dispatching exercise books towards their errant owners with mounting disdain. Were we all deaf and blind? Or just lazy and useless? Even normally reliable students like Martin Smith, the Head Boy, had gone and answered the wrong ruddy question. Only one boy – one – from among the lot of us had got it right.
All eyes rested on Dougie Firmer. But old Nicholson’s were focussed, inexplicably, on me. He strode over and planted my exercise book in front of me. Horribly self-conscious I opened it up. Nice words in green ink. 87%.
“One boy here at least,” Nicholson was saying, “who shows some desire to get on.” Twenty pairs of hate-filled, gimlet eyes settled on me. Fuck it, I thought, I didn’t even know what I had done right. They can’t hate me for that surely.
It didn’t last long. It was my only moment in the academic sunlight. Thereafter, thoughts of fast cars and female flesh put a stop to all old Nicholson’s best efforts to rediscover my early promise.
I don’t know what became of Dougie. I never heard of him after I left the school. It’s strange that someone so evidently outstanding didn’t make his presence felt in the public arena. A couple of years after I left Purley Grammar the school was catapulted into mediocrity by Anthony Crossland and Shirley Williams, who amalgamated all the local schools into the disastrous leftist fantasy world of comprehensive education. It might have been dubbed, “No child left in front.”
Today, thirty-five years later, leftist fantasies about equality still complicate the education of hundreds of thousands of kids. But the ones the left agonises most over are black and male. Black educational failure is an experience common to the entire Western world. But, inevitably, the outcomes are absolutely not accepted as being all that black boys are able to deliver.
Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, has boldly attacked the attitudes of “liberals like myself”, as he puts it, and “our historical bleating about racist teachers”. He points out that statistics don’t justify the usual presumption of racism in schools.
It’s true that only 27% of Afro-Caribbean boys leave school with five GCSEs at A to C grade, and this is far below the national average of 47% for boys and 57% per cent for girls. But 44% of Afro-Caribbean girls do reach that standard, many of them sisters from the same families. Poor Indian and Chinese boys do roughly three times better in exams than poor Afro-Caribbean boys. So another explanation is needed.
These are the words of Times journalist Minette Marin. And at this point in her argument you might, naturally enough, expect her to go on to talk about the ten thousand IQ tests conducted, among others, in scores of black populations. She might mention the striking incidence of small black skulls housing small, light brains. Stung by that word “skull, she might reserve a special mention for the malign influence of the liar Boas. She might apprise us of the narrowness of black women’s hips, and its implication for the head size of the babies they bear.
But instead she writes this:-
"One of the most charismatic reformers in the world of literacy is Ruth Miskin. Once the head of a famously successful primary school in Tower Hamlets, east London, she’s now the creator of a programme called Read Write, which schools can buy to turn literacy problems round quickly and easily. She gave expert evidence to the Commons select committee that so galvanised Kelly"
The Ofsted reports her schools have had clearly bear that out. They back up her view that the black boys she sees doing her programme all over the country have no problem learning to read. “Black boys learn to decode just as fast as any white middle-class girl,” she says, if they are taught properly and have the joy of rapid success. There is, according to Miskin, no problem with discipline; they love learning and there is no gap between them and any other group.
I wonder if Ruth Miskin does genuinely believe there to be no gap between black boys and any other ethnic - or, indeed, tribal - group. Either way, the mere fact that she publicly affirms human equality with such enthusiasm returns us with one giant stride to 1910 and the unarithmetic Franz Boas. Somehow, in the public debate on black education we never seem to get past 1910. Boas still has us snared. None of the compendious evidence – and stupendous experience - that has been compiled to elucidate the reasons for black educational and economic outcomes has any real intellectual purchase on the situation because it is not read by the liberals who control the educational system.
But liberal denial goes much further than that. It goes deep in the bone. Nobody really needs to read Rushton, Brand or Lynn & Vanhanen because we have the greater teacher of life itself. In my case, for example, a determined effort to avoid hard work, though it cost me formal education, did not blunt my intellectual equipment. Such intelligence as I possess has served me passably well. So, where are the hundreds of thousands of tolerably competent black minds that, although like me lacking a university education, have risen in life just the same? Ah, white racism. Inevitable.
Round and round we go, giving more credence to yet more well-intentioned wastes of time. After Miskin has brought literacy to our, of course, always vibrant Afro-Caribbean and African Dougie Firmers we will have to shoulder the same burden of abject black failure. Another false ray of hope will briefly shine, and yet another. And on it will go because no public figure has enough courage to speak a simple human truth … and absolutely no courage whatsoever to address the awful, illiberal question which follows from it: since black mean IQ is so low what on earth are we supposed to do with our black population?
SOURCE
Regulations Threaten to Limit Best Schooling Options for Children
What is the measure of a good school? And who is best positioned to decide what works?
For decades, policymakers and education officials have attempted to bolster school “accountability” by increasing regulations on schools across the board—public, charter, and private. They have tried to do so at the federal level for half a century, with federal intervention in K-12 education hitting a high-water mark under the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind policy and the Obama administration’s attempts to pressure states into adopting Common Core.
Yet ever-increasing government intervention in schooling has had little positive impact on education outcomes writ large. Math and reading achievement outcomes have been largely stagnant since the 1970s for high school seniors, while graduation rates have seen only modest improvements (and even those figures may be artificially inflated).
About one-third of high school graduates have to take remedial courses in college, one-third of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, and 20 percent of high school graduates who want to join the Army cannot do so because they cannot pass the Armed Forces Qualification Test.
It’s no surprise, then, that families have been looking for alternatives to geographically-assigned district schools. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have begun to offer alternatives, enacting private school choice options such as vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education savings accounts.
Although the education choice landscape is growing, government officials who take a heavy-handed approach to regulation threaten its long-term success. Instead of freeing traditional public schools from bureaucratic red tape that has tied the hands of educators and stifled innovation, some policymakers want to expand that top-down regulatory approach to the growing private school choice sector.
Take, for example, the Louisiana Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers to eligible families to enroll their child in a private school of their choice. In order for private schools to participate, they must adhere to a host of government regulations, including the requirement that all students on a scholarship take the same standardized test administered to public schools in the state.
Some private school principals have been concerned that regulations like this would drive school curriculum, thereby discouraging schools from participating. Indeed, just one-third of private schools in Louisiana participate in the program, and an experimental evaluation found that participation in the program had a negative effect on student academic achievement.
We are now beginning to better understand the way regulations affect private schools’ willingness to participate in private school choice programs. We are also seeing that Louisiana’s “accountability” measures had unintended consequences, and that could happen elsewhere.
Along with Corey DeAngelis of the Cato Institute and Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas, we recently released the first experimental evaluation of the effects of various regulations on the willingness of private school principals to have their school participate in a hypothetical voucher program. We randomly assigned one of three different regulations—or no government regulation—as part of school participation in a hypothetical voucher program.
We found that an open enrollment requirement (mandating that private schools take all students who apply as a condition for participating in a voucher program) decreased the likelihood that private school leaders in Florida were “certain to participate” in the voucher program by around 17 percentage points.
At the same time, requiring participating private schools to administer a standardized test to their students decreased the likelihood that private school leaders were “certain to participate” by around 11 percentage points.
Standardized testing requirements appear to depress private school participation in school choice programs, which could partly explain what has transpired in the Louisiana Scholarship Program. High-quality private schools, as measured by tuition and enrollment growth, may have decided that the regulatory burden exceeded the benefits of participating in the program, and as a result, remained on the sidelines of the Louisiana Scholarship Program.
Although a growing body of literature is demonstrating that regulations on school choice programs generally correlate with lower rates of program participation, testing mandates—which in the hypothetical Florida experiment reduced school participation by 44 percent—are particularly notable for what little value parents place in them.
EdChoice recently released the results of the largest survey ever conducted of participants in a private school choice program. Parents participating in Florida’s tax credit scholarship program were asked to list the top three factors that influenced their decision to have their child attend their chosen private school. Only two factors—religious environment and instruction (66 percent) and morals/character/values-based instruction (52 percent)—were selected by a majority of scholarship parents.
Thirty-six percent of respondents listed a safe environment among their top three priorities when selecting a school for their child. The least important factor was standardized test scores. Just 4 percent of respondents listed standardized test scores as one of their top three factors.
Not only were families overwhelmingly satisfied with the tax credit scholarship program—92 percent of scholarship families reported being satisfied—but it is clear that Florida parents are choosing their child’s private school because those schools offered what their public schools either could not or would not.
So what do all of these findings mean?
At the very least, they suggest policymakers must be humble in their assumptions about what parents want in their children’s schools, and about their ability to drive quality through regulations.
A growing body of evidence suggests regulations, including standardized testing mandates, can depress school participation in private school choice programs. At the same time, while such regulations can discourage school participation (limiting the options available to families), they do not rise anywhere near the top of the factors parents value when choosing a school.
Parents are much more interested in those intangibles that standardized tests cannot capture, but that are more important to the long-term flourishing of their children, such as religious and values-based instruction. And for good reason: As Jay Greene has identified, we do not regularly see a relationship between changing test scores and later life outcomes.
Indeed, what parents are looking for is something apart from what their child’s traditional district school offered. To condition private school participation in a school choice program on adherence to the public school formula—as the Louisiana Scholarship Program does—renders school choice less meaningful by reducing the number of substantially different options available to families.
Policymakers should avoid being like the proverbial drunk looking for his lost keys under the lamppost because “that’s where the light is.” Standardized tests shine a light on an important aspect of school performance, but sometimes the keys are not under the light.
Families prioritize aspects of schooling that are less measurable, but equally or more important. Families want schools that will form children of good moral character. They want schools that will prepare their children to pursue their life and career goals. They want meaningful instruction in a safe school setting.
Choice is providing them access to just that.
SOURCE
Australian universities miffed about inquiry into freedom of speech
The government has asked a former chief justice of the high court, Robert French, to review the health of freedom of speech on Australia’s university campuses.
The review will take four months, and French has been asked to assess the framework protecting freedom of expression and inquiry, including the multiple codes of conduct and enterprise agreements that govern campuses.
He has also been asked to consider policy options that could “better promote” freedom of expression, including the development of a sector-led code of conduct to govern university behaviour.
The request comes after a series of controversies on university campuses where students and academic staff have been accused of stifling public debates.
But Universities Australia has questioned why the review is necessary, saying campuses should be free of political interference. [Including interference from Left-Fascist goons
It has also criticised some media commentators for being “very wide of the mark” and “selectively quoting from university policies and codes” to make their arguments about free speech.
Dan Tehan, the education minister, said universities were important institutions where ideas were debated and challenged and freedom of speech had to be protected “even where what is being said may be unpopular or challenging”.
“The best university education is one where students are taught to think for themselves, and protecting freedom of speech is how to guarantee that,” he said.
“If necessary, the French review could lead to the development of an Australian version of the Chicago statement, which is a voluntary framework that clearly sets out a university’s commitment to promoting freedom of speech.”
French said he would respect the “legitimate institutional autonomy” of Australia’s universities while undertaking the review.
“An important object of the review will be the production of a resource including a model code which can be used as a point of reference in any consideration by universities of their existing rules and guidelines relating to the protection of freedom of speech on campus,” he said.
But Universities Australia said the country’s universities had more than 100 policies, codes and agreements that support free intellectual inquiry, ensuring a culture of lively debate and a vigorous contest of ideas.
Prof Margaret Gardner, the chair of Universities Australia, said some assertions in media reporting had mischaracterised academic freedom and downplayed the robust state of debate on campuses.
“Some commentators on free speech at Australian universities have been very wide of the mark – jumping to the wrong conclusions or selectively quoting from university policies and codes,” she said.
“These same conclusions would not meet the threshold test of academic inquiry — informed by evidence and facts.
“They are made by advocates who appear to want government to override university autonomy with heavy-handed external regulation and red tape.
“Despite these incorrect assertions, a wide range of opinions are freely expressed on campus – in the context of Australian law and university codes of conduct.”
Gardner also said Universities Australia had not provided input for the review’s terms of reference.
A press release from Tehan’s office on Wednesday said: “Universities Australia have been consulted on the review.”
SOURCE
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