Scofflaws, Outlaws, and Unregistered Teachers

Government Monopolies and Guild Socialism

Back in the bad old days New Zealand’s economy was more regulated than East Germany’s.  Almost all human activity was governed by permits.  One had to have a permit to visit a latrine.  Virtually every occupation was a registered trade.  To practise one had to have the requisite qualifications and a “practising certificate”.  It was state sanctioned, and state enforced.  This grand system was ostensibly intended to protect the customer–which it may, or may not have done.  In reality (deliberately so) the permit and certificate system rather protected the jobs of the registrants, creating huge barriers to entry for others.

It was illegal to teach piano to a seven year old, unless one had a permit to do so and was suitably qualified and registered.  To be clear, we believe that registration as a suitably qualified and educated expert to perform a skilled service can be very helpful.  But in New Zealand’s case, the multitude of registers were “official”–that is, state managed or endorsed.  It represented a strangle-hold of antiquated guild socialism.  Imagine living in a society where you could only get a job as a software programmer if you were state-registered as such.  But those were the bad old days. 

Now many occupations and trades have voluntary, open-market certification systems and registrations.  They place the responsibility upon the consumer to perform responsible due diligence upon applicants for jobs or to provide a service.  Someone hangs out a shingle as an accountant.  It is up to us, the potential purchasers of his or her accounting services, to do some basic due diligence on the qualifications and experience of the touting accountant.  An efficient quick check can be performed when we ascertain that the touting accountant is a registered member a professional association of accountants and we can confirm on-line what  professional practising standards apply for membership. 

Some professions remain in the hide-bound guild-socialism model.  School teaching is one.  Ostensibly, one cannot earn a living as a school teacher without being a registered teacher–and teacher registration is controlled by the government–which admittedly is somewhat appropriate since teaching, education, and schools are government monopolies.  But the monopolist grip is a stranglehold.  It is forcibly imposed even on private schools, which are restricted to employing state registered teachers.  The system is a hangover from our failed “Eastern European” economic experiment.

It’s not surprising, then, that the system is failing (as state run commercial systems always tend to do).  There are just on 40,000 state registered teachers.  But it is reported there are over 5,000 non-state registered teachers active and illegally employed in New Zealand schools.  That represents just over one in ten.  Yet we confidently assert that those flying-under-the-official-radar teachers are likely doing a great job–at least as good as your average registered teacher.  The state teacher registration system is a vastly expensive, overrated, and unnecessary bureaucratic boondoggle.  Even within the monopolistic state education system it is failing and without relevance.

But it gets worse.  All guild socialist employment systems were designed to protect those within the guild from outside competition.  Other suppliers of the guild’s service were shut out.  It was an early version of closed shop socialism.  The best teachers in the world are those who know their subject thoroughly and are enthusiastic and passionate about it.  Many of those who are thus qualified will never bother to become registered teachers because they cannot be bothered with the arcane, antediluvian socialism the profession  represents.  They care too much about engineering, the law, literature, language–and so forth–to spend time complying with irrelevant educational qualifications and undergoing state registration.

All power to the 5,000 unregistered teachers who are teaching in our state monopolistic schools.   They are a beacon to a better educational future.  They testify to the irrelevance and inappropriateness of the present government monopoly and its guild socialism.  If teaching were a respected profession, it would be regarded as able to self-regulate.  The fact that teacher registration is just one more facet of a government imposed monopoly evidences most clearly the general disrespect in which teachers are held in New Zealand.

Sadly traces of our Eastern European workers’ paradise still linger.

Shelob’s Cobwebs

Ideological Inanities

“. . . When thou speakest, people say,
Did we hear a donkey bray?”

Of all world-views which compete in today’s ideological marketplace, statism ranks as one of the more gullible, ignorant and one-dimensional.  One can confidently predict what our numerous resident statists will say on any public issue of the moment.  Whatever concerns or ails us, doubtless more government rules, regulations, controls, intrusions, money, and government programmes will fix the problem. 

This becomes even more ludicrous when controversies arise in those few areas where the state already runs a monopoly, such as education.  The failings of our monopolistic government schooling system are well documented.  When you are already operating in a statist monopoly, the only response left when failures emerge is for the statist to adopt an Oliver-Twistian pose, stick out the porridge bowl and demand more (taxpayers’ money). 

The Green Party is a statist party.  All it ever wants for Christmas is more government, less freedom.  True to form, its education spokesman and ardent advocate for monopoly government schools, Catherine Delahunty slammed a poor little one-year-old, nascent charter school, the Vanguard Academy over the weekend.  It was failing, terribly.  Why?  Because it has just experienced a substantial drop in its roll.  Commissar Delahunty unsheathed her Cossack sabre and launched a full frontal attack, slicing through the air with a dreaded press release:

Charter school roll plunge

One of the five Charter schools lauded by the Government as a success has lost a quarter of its school roll this year, with each student now costing four times as much to teach than children in a regular public school, the Green Party said today.

Latest Ministry of Education roll count data shows that Vanguard Military College had 79 students attending in October this year – 25 percent below the 108 students it is funded to teach and the 104 students it started the year with.  “Plans to open four more of these [charter] schools next year must be put off till Government can prove they’re value for money, good for students and aren’t damaging neighbouring schools.

“Vanguard has been trumpeted by National as a success yet official data shows it is struggling to hold on to its students.  Principals in state schools are concerned about the disproportionate amounts of funding Charter schools are getting, saying that they’d be able to achieve amazing things for their own students if they had access to a similar amount of resources. “Charters are able to pay for transport, uniforms, stationary [sic] and even food for their pupils. Even if they were succeeding, it’d be no surprise given the level of resources.

“The problem with Charter schools is that they suck resources and students away from public schools. 

So, a fairly predictable rearguard eructation from one of our card-carrying statists.  But maybe she has some valid concerns?  Blogger, Cameron Slater went to the trouble of  asking the CEO of Vanguard Military College, Nick Hyde for a response. 

Vanguard Military School has continued to defy the critics and is happy to announce that it has produced outstanding results for 2014. Partnership Schools have been created to use innovation and to try different methods in an attempt to assist any child who if they continued in their current school environment would fail.  Vanguard has built its model around a military ethos and has a focus on producing productive citizens for New Zealand.

At the start of the year we enrolled 45 Level 2 students of various abilities and we are happy to announce that 41 of them have successfully gained their NCEA Level 2 qualification for a 91% success rate.  9 of them also finished off their Level 1 Certificates and a further 3 went on to gain NCEA Level 3.  We also hope to announce similar results soon about our Level 1 students.  I would also like to point out that Maths, English and Physical Education are compulsory for all students and our results have been moderated by other local schools in the area.

Today’s attack on the school by Catherine Delahunty and the Green Party has been disappointing.  As a school we are here to serve our students, their parents and the communities that they come from.  We have an open enrolment policy and accept all.  We have invited politicians of all parties to visit us, see what we are about and how we do things, as we can appreciate we are new and different.  Catherine Delahunty nor any member of the Green Party has visited our school or even spoken to us.

The “roll plunge” she talks about are students graduating and leaving on their own terms. An example is of 2 students who gained their NCEA Level 2 qualifications during the year, sat and passed the New Zealand Army entrance test and were offered service in August. As a school we have assisted them to be productive citizens for our country.

If she had, she might understand that our school is different and is not about keeping students for the entire year if they have already gained the qualification that they enrolled for.  The “roll plunge”  she talks about are students graduating and leaving on their own terms.  An example is of 2 students who gained their NCEA Level 2 qualifications during the year, sat and passed the New Zealand Army entrance test and were offered service in August.  As a school we have assisted them to be productive citizens for our country.  By holding them at school for a further 4 months is not in the student’s best interest.

Vanguard Military School’s priority is to get our students the NCEA qualification they enrol in and then assist them into apprenticeships, courses, jobs, the NZDF and next year when we enrol Level 3’s we hope to send some to University.  We appreciate that we receive tax payers money and therefore will continue to strive for top results but we are also entirely comfortable with our students graduating on their own terms and leaving us to become the best they can be in their chosen field.

The school is currently taking enrolments for 2015 and already has 127 students signed up.  We are full at Level 2 and Level 3 and only have a few places left at Level 1 before we reach our maximum roll for 2015 of 144.  So to anyone reading this out of interest, maybe hop on google and check out your local schools results and compare them with a 91% success rate at NCEA Level 2 because in my eyes that’s a lot of happy students, happy parents and hopefully happy taxpayers.

Regards

Nick Hyde
CEO

The roll plunge hysterically decried by Delahunty occurred because of exceptionally high numbers of pupils successfully graduating.  Which leaves Delahunty in the laughable position of objecting to a charter school because it has been so successful.  However, like all ideologues, statist Delahunty will not let the facts get in the way of her just-so ideologically hide-bound world view.  

But there is something more sinister at work here.  Statists like Delahunty don’t really care whether government schools succeed or fail.  Rather, the driving concern is that they all be the same.  It’s social justice, don’t you know.  The statist “people’s education system” will have controls and rules so that one size must fit all.  If that one size just happens to be uniform mediocrity, that would be a preferable outcome to having many schools succeed and some fail.

For Delahunty the worst possible outcome would be for those failing schools to be transformed into charter schools and copy Vanguard’s success.  She would have us believe that Vanguard’s success is a cause of the monopoly schools’ failures. “The problem with Charter schools is that they suck resources and students away from public schools,” she writes.

Private sector, bad.  Government sector, the only and highest good.  Behold Shelob’s cobwebs in the statist mind. 

New Zealand Schools

Amongst the Worst In the OECD

The propaganda machines have been busy for the past twenty-five years assuring New Zealand that our education system amongst the best in the world.  If the criteria for determining “best” included pass rates in our parochial secondary school qualification (NCEA) or conformity with the latest post-modern pedagogical theories the propaganda may have verisimilitude.  But when objective tests about what students actually know are completed, the Potemkin Village collapses. 

The OECD runs a research programme testing the knowledge levels of fifteen year old students across its membership [OECD Programme for International Student Assessment 2012 (PISA)].  The research is conducted every three years.  In our most recent examination New Zealand fell from 13th to 22nd in the OECD maths ratings.  This after decades of being told by the propagandists that our education system was right up there with the best in the world. 

The Ministry of Education is producing some diagnostic reports looking for causes and explanations for our systemic educational failure.  Amongst the causes of failure were:

• 60 per cent of students indicated they had never heard of mathematical concepts such as congruent figures, radicals and divisors.

• Kiwi students were less exposed to formal maths – such as algebra and geometry – than students in the comparable nations of Australia, Canada, Britain and Singapore.

• 40 per cent of students reported that noise and disorder and students not listening to the teacher occurred in most maths classes.  [NZ Herald]

The justifications and explanations for these failings were predictable and included:

Explanation I: A Failure of Capitalist Free Markets

Maths teachers with degree-level qualifications are more likely to be teaching in urban, high socio-economic schools, and students at these schools have higher exposure to complex concepts and formal maths.  Secondary Principals Association president Tom Parsons said the results stemmed from a national shortage of teachers with adequate mathematics training.  “There is such a demand for teachers who come out of university with maths qualifications that they can go wherever they like,” he said. “Usually this is high socio-economic urban areas.”

Explanation II: We Don’t Know (But We Do Know It’s Not Teacher Incompetence)

New Zealand Association of Mathematics Teachers president Gillian Frankcom said the reason for the decline was not clear cut. She said that since 2009, all secondary school teacher graduates had completed a comprehensive maths component and teacher incompetence could not be singled out for student failure.

No justifications were offered to explain disorderly classrooms and bad pupil behaviour.

We cynically expect that nothing will be done to address the erosion of government schooling until New Zealand slips to the bottom quartile in the OECD rankings.  But, hold on.  The OECD membership currently stands at 34 countries.  We are only about three or four places away from being in the fourth quartile.   Meanwhile no-one in the Parliament, and certainly no-one in the Ministry of Education seems remotely alarmed.  The teacher unions are on another planet. 

If we were asked to suggest a manifesto that would revolutionise our failing government schooling system and change it for the better, it would be this:

1. Empower the consumers of education services–that is, the parents–by introducing a national voucher system allowing parents to purchase whatever the education services they believe best from the schools of their choice.

2. Abolish the school zoning system.

3. Re-introduce bulk funding. 

Successive governments have not proven to be effective guardians nor good stewards of government schools.  Teacher unions certainly have not.  Governments have talked a big game, but spent most of the time on the sidelines playing tiddlywinks with the teacher unions. 

The only real guardian of the quality of education left is the parents who (in general) care far more about the welfare of their children (educational and otherwise) than bureaucrats, politicians, and unionists ever have or will be able to do.  Is it not ironic that parents are the one stakeholder–in fact the only real stakeholder–in securing an adequate education for their children that the state implacably distrusts and disenfranchises?

The question which the supererogatory powers absolutely refuse to face, let alone answer is this: if parents can be trusted to shop at supermarkets and put food on the table; if they can be trusted to clothe their children with the appropriate clothing; if they can be trusted to choose the most appropriate doctor for their children, why can’t they be trusted to select the most appropriate school? 

Letter from the UK (About Margaret Thatcher Redivivus)

Children held back by ‘vested interests’ in education, says Michael Gove

Education Secretary Michael Gove attacks educational establishment for holding back classroom reforms, just as thousands of teachers prepare to stage a national strike 

By Graeme Paton, Education Editor

The Daily Telegraph

08 Jul 2014 

Education standards risk being undermined “by vested interests determined to hold back reform”, Michael Gove has said on the eve of a major national teachers’ strike. In a swipe at classroom unions, the Education Secretary says attempts to reform schools have “not always been easy” because too many teachers believe “things must stay the same”.

Writing for The Telegraph, Mr Gove says large numbers of pupils across Europe – including England – are facing a bleak future unless extra effort is made to raise standards and create more equal access to good schools. He says teaching standards must improve because too many children are still attending schools that “aren’t good enough”. 

Michael Gove is one of the most courageous politicians of our day.  He is not afraid to front up and confront the unions which have hitherto had a stifling stranglehold over education in the UK–as they do here in New Zealand.  Just as Thatcher stared down the coal miner unions during the UK miners’ strike of 1984-5 and saw them off, opening up the pathway to necessary reform in the UK, so Gove is attempting the same.  Different unions, same reality.
 

The comments are made in a joint article with education ministers from Spain and Portugal as a major international conference is staged in London on Wednesday – just a day before Britain’s biggest teaching union prepares for a national strike over Coalition education reforms.

Education ministers, teachers and school leaders from seven countries are expected to attend the summit co-hosted by the Department for Education.  It is expected to place renewed focus on a series of Government education policies including the creation of a new generation academies and free schools, more freedom for head teachers, an overhaul of the curriculum and a new-style league tables focusing on achievement in core subjects. 

Mr Gove has also introduced a wave of reforms aimed at teachers including raising the bar on entry to the profession and a new system of performance-related pay. The reforms have been met with furious opposition from classroom unions who claim Mr Gove has turned teaching into one of the worst jobs in the world.  On Thursday, the National Union of Teachers will stage a one-day strike across England and Wales in protest over performance-related pay and escalating workload.

It threatens to shut around a quarter of state schools and lead to the partial closure of many more – forcing millions of parents to take the day off work or seek emergency childcare.  But writing in the Telegraph, Mr Gove said the Coalition’s reforms were typical of those being pursued across Europe and the developed world.

He also criticises the education establishment for failing to support change.  “Our struggle has not always been easy,” he says. “All of us have been opposed by vested interests determined to hold back reform, insisting that things must stay the same.  We understand that change can be difficult. But it must happen.”

In an article written jointly with Nuno Crato, minister for education in Portugal, and Lucía Figar, a regional minister for education in Spain, he said: “A child’s education is only ever as good as their teacher. So all of us are focusing on driving up the quality of teaching in our classrooms.”

“In England, we’re raising the bar for entry to the profession, expanding elite recruitment routes and offering new incentives to attract the brightest and best into teaching,” he said. “It’s already working – we now have the best qualified teachers in a generation, and Ofsted’s impartial inspectors report that schools improved faster last year than at any time in Ofsted’s history.” 

This is in sharp contrast to the union mentality which can be summarised in a few false propositions:
All teachers are the same.
All teachers are excellent.
We just need more teachers, which will be uniformly excellent by definition.
All teachers need to be paid more.

The article says that England, Spain and Portugal have “long traditions of educational excellence, but we know that too few of our children are guaranteed an excellent education. Too many children across Europe – especially those from poorer communities – still attend schools which just aren’t good enough,” it is claimed. “And the nature of economic and technological change means those children, and our societies, face bleaker futures unless we can improve their education and make opportunity more equal.”

The Education Reform Summit – jointly hosted by The Education Foundation think-tank – will take place on Wednesday and Thursday. It has been billed as the most “high-profile example yet of global interest in the Government’s school reforms”.  Mr Gove has said that education reform experts are “coming here to share their ideas and see what we are doing in this country”.

But the conference threatens to be overshadowed by the biggest public sector strike since the Coalition came to power. As many as a million workers are set to strike as members of the NUT walk out alongside the Fire Brigades Union, the GMB, the Public and Commercial Services Union, Unison and Unite.

The NUT has been locked in an ongoing dispute over a series of controversial reforms, including the introduction of a system of performance related pay, which will see future salary rises linked to pupils’ results and behaviour.  They have also been angered by mounting workloads and reforms to pensions which will see staff work for longer and retire with a smaller fund.

Christine Blower, NUT general secretary, said ministers were “refusing point blank to accept the damage their reforms are doing to the teaching profession. The consequences of turning teaching into a totally unattractive career choice will most certainly lead to teacher shortages.  Teaching is one of the best jobs in the world but is being made one of the worst under Michael Gove and the Coalition.” 

We suspect the General Secretary of the teachers’ union is probably right.  Under the entrenched education system, teaching was one of the “best jobs” in the world.  One could skulk in the corner of a classroom doing nothing for one’s students, sure that everything would be different if only one was paid more money.  But if not, the gig was OK.  There are not many other places in the world where you can get paid a princely sum and have a sinecure for life for doing very little.

The problem that Christine Blower and her members face is this: all of the faux outrage and rhetoric in the world is insufficient to blanket over the poor educational outcomes now evident.  If her members had been doing a decent job, the results would tell a different story. 

 

The NewSpeak of Global Schooling

Behind Common Core

By Mary Jo Anderson
Crisis Magazine

The philosophy in the school room in one generation will become the philosophy of government in the next.  — Abraham Lincoln

 [A]t the request of educators I wrote the World Core Curriculum, the product of the United Nations, the meta-organism of human and planetary evolution.   — Robert Muller, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General

The education reform known as Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for grades K-12, adopted by forty plus states and more than half of the U.S. dioceses, is designed to produce a universal “work force ready” population prepared to self-identify as “global citizens.”  Many education professionals have been critical of CCSS. But even they may not know the philosophical reason why financiers like Bill Gates have bankrolled the Common Core system. The same sources of funding for Common Core in the United States are promoting similar methods and aligned texts world wide through the auspices of the United Nations.

In Crisis, readers learned that Common Core is financed with over $150 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The collaboration of the Gates Foundation and the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been well publicized.  In addition, Gates, on behalf of his Microsoft Corporation, signed a 26-page Cooperation Agreement in 2004 between Microsoft and UNESCO to develop a “master curriculum” which included benchmarks and assessments.  The agreement stipulates that “UNESCO will explore how to facilitate content development.”

Some have decried Common Core as the nationalization of American education. Far more dangerous, however, is the globalism of Common Core that demotes American values, undermines American constitutional principles and detaches students from their families and faith. Common Core is simply the newest attempt in the decades-old battle (Outcome Based Education, Goals 2000) to impose a U.N. globalist worldview aimed at “peace,” sustainability and economic stability at the expense of freedom.

Briefly, the globalist philosophy calls for the establishment of a global culture based on a commitment to sustainable processes and humanistic ethics to ensure world peace and “fair” distribution of natural resources.  The U.N. serves as the hub for this globalist hope.  Adherents believe that some form of world congress and world citizenship is the end point of political evolution, and, therefore it is inevitable.  What is not certain, in their view, is the time of fulfilment.

Those who hold this philosophy are passionate—they fear that unless a form of world convergence of mind and political will arrives very soon, the planet may fail from wars, global warming and similar threats.  Pick up popular magazines and you’ll find “world leaders,” celebrities and pundits who espouse some version of globalism. How would globalism work at ground level?

A nation is permitted to keep its surface culture, such as language, music, and cuisine. But patriotism, religion, and individualism are anathema, as each competes with the globalist vision of world harmony. Moral codes that cannot be adapted to a multicultural vision, agreed upon in a world congress, must be jettisoned.
But back on the ground, it’s difficult to convince a people to abandon their country and culture, not to mention national resources; resistance would be too great. The quickest effective approach is to invest in education to ensure that the coming generation will embrace the principles of globalism as a natural consequence of their formation.   

Previous Crisis articles have detailed the lack of academic rigor of CCSS for both math and English Language Arts. Teachers have reported disturbing “aligned texts” that contain crude, sexually explicit reading selections for young teens. Parents have questioned multiple examples of anti-American sentiment (the Boston Tea Party as a terrorist attack, for example).  Despite this outcry, Common Core defenders insist that the standards are necessary, even though it only prepares students for admission to junior college.  If the standards are substandard, why are hundreds of millions of Gates and other foundation monies, as well as over a billion dollars in government carrots, being pumped into this ‘transformation” of education?  The goal is not academic excellence, but to reconstruct the nations of the world into a new, interdependent model. Their educational model is aimed at an economically stable world with “workforce ready” workers who share the same globalist vision.

UNESCO’s first Director-General was Sir Julian Huxley, who wrote, “The world today is in the process of becoming one … political unification in some sort of world government will be necessary…” UNESCO’s mission is to “construct” the U.N. model of peace “in the minds of men”:  “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”

How do you enter the “minds of men” for this reconstruction?  The quickest route to a transformed society is through education.  The U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, adopted in 2000, include universal education, under the auspices of UNESCO. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the primary public face of Common Core, prizes its partnership with UNESCO to insure global standards for educating tomorrow’s labor force via Education for All (EFA).

Another champion of CCSS and UNESCO is Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education.  Duncan addressed UNESCO in 2010 on “transformational education”:

And transformational reform especially takes time in the United States…. That goal can only be achieved by creating a strong cradle-to-career continuum that starts with early childhood learning and extends all the way to college and careers.

Duncan discussed Common Core as a means to reconstruct education in the United States, and noted the increased role of the federal government in education.   Duncan acknowledged the need for America to learn from other nations. He restated President Obama’s commitment to international cooperation for economic viability: “Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.”

As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can only produce precarious results…. The school should therefore use the means described earlier to combat family attitudes

Existing national models must be deconstructed for this global transformation to occur. UNESCO began the deconstruction of national education systems in 1949 with a pamphlet, “Towards a World Understanding, Vol.V: In the Classroom with Children Under Thirteen Years of Age” (Paris, 1949).  The pamphlet states, “As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can only produce precarious results…. The school should therefore use the means described earlier to combat family attitudes…” (p. 54-5).

A similar sentiment permeates Common Core aligned texts, many developed by Pearson Education, an international education Goliath—that has also received funds from the Gates Foundation to develop Common Core material.  Pearson produces texts that promote “reconstructed” school practices for social justice.  An example of Pearson texts for Common Core that raised some eyebrows recently includes this grammar lesson on editing possessives: “[The president] makes sure the laws of the country are fair,” “The wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation” and “The commands of government officials must be obeyed by all.”

A similar sentiment permeates other Common Core aligned texts. Concepts found in grade school children’s textbooks such as justice and equality are given politically biased meanings. Justice is newly defined to mean the redistribution of wealth and resources. Equality is used to dismantle preference for one’s own culture, religion and social customs. “Predictive information,” data ostensibly gathered on each student to improve performance, is in truth a measurement of a student’s adjusted attitude and behavior—a Soviet style “managed outcome.”

The Russian model, in fact, is codified in the US agreement to the Moscow Declaration, which states: “Ministers recognized that the internationalization of education is a reality.”  The agreement U.S. officials signed calls for a program, “…implemented by education ministers of all the world countries and international organizations, including the World Bank, UNESCO, and UN” (ITAR-TASS, 6-2-2006). The U.S. Department of Education said the member delegates “pledged to share best practices across borders” to build “education systems that can allow people … to live and contribute to a global society, and to work in a global economy” (U.S. Dept. of Education, 6-2-2006).

U.N. affiliated organizations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank also reflect UNESCO’s vision.  Loans are made and trade preferences are granted to those nations or entities that promote “twenty-first century thinking.”   Most chilling is that UNESCO fronts the implementation of the U.N. plan known as Agenda 21.  Enacted in 1992, Agenda 21 strives to “reorient” the world’s education systems to achieve sustainable development: “Both formal and non-formal education are indispensable to changing people’s attitudes … and behaviour consistent with sustainable development” (# 36.2).

And now we arrive back at Gates’s agreement with UNESCO. EFA contains repeated units on collectivism, shared goals and sustainable development as does CCSS.  Note this passage from the EFA’s Global Monitoring Report:

It is crucial that education stakeholders are well positioned … in advancing a wide range of other development goals.  The GMR will provide Policymakers … stakeholders with powerful new evidence to show why it is crucial that equitable learning be given its rightful place at the centre of the post 2015 global development architecture. It will identify the types of reforms in teaching and learning that are needed to promote transformative change.

Sustainable development is the soft power structure intended to achieve manageable populations and absolute control of global resources, all in the name of “peace.”  It is ruled by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats—and certain philanthropic billionaires.
 
Academia, public policy institutes and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) promote this globalist vision. One particularly noteworthy recent example comes from Oxford University where the Oxford Martin School Commission released a report on October 16. The purpose of the Commission is to “anticipate the consequences of our collective actions, and influence policy and behaviour accordingly.”  A pre-publication statement by Commission chairman, Pascal Lamy, former Director General of the WTO, repeated the mantra, “The ability to address today’s global challenges is undermined by the absence of a collective vision for society. We urge leaders to establish shared global values….”

These lofty sentiments of transnational corporations and associations have influenced American school districts for years. For example, one can point to the 2008 Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents position paper, “Global Education: A Call to Action.” In it we read:

[M]obility of populations fuel renewed calls for mutual understanding and appreciation on a global scale … Global education, when seen through this lens, is more about understanding, cooperation, and world peace.  [Schools are to] [i]nclude expanded treatment of global concepts in the next revision of the curriculum frameworks in social studies [and] [p]rovide resources to educators to promote the integration of global concepts into the curriculum.

Common Core exemplars and aligned texts are designed to cause disorientation for the American child by de-emphasizing national cultural identity. At home he learned to be proud of his country, to respect the flag and the Constitution, but under CCSS the child will find few positive images of America.  Of the texts suggested for kindergarten and first grade none teach the concept of freedom, or offer a song (America the Beautiful?) or any story praising heroes of the American Revolution. Children of this age naturally want to love family and friends, discover a sense of belonging and develop an identity.  Common Core avoids “cultural bias” by discouraging the development of a patriotic attachment to the nation state.

IIt’s difficult to conceive of a student learning virtue, self-sacrifice, courage, perseverance, mercy, regret or triumph by reading maintenance manuals.

International student testing materials encourage this trend. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is administered to 15 year-old students every three years in most of the world’s developed nations.  The PISA standings drive text selection for reading literacy. To avoid cultural bias, PISA defines literacy as the ability to read the material required for workplace proficiency, rather than works of literature.

Therefore, utilitarian texts, such as EPA manuals and assembly instructions account for fifty percent of reading assignments under the CCSS.  Students are deprived of decent grounding in the great works of literature.  As a result, students are less likely to appreciate the cultural heritage of the West.  It’s difficult to conceive of a student learning virtue, self-sacrifice, courage, perseverance, mercy, regret or triumph by reading maintenance manuals.  There is more to good citizenship than “workplace proficiency.”

Yet, CCSS promoters insist that citizenship is addressed. For example, the New York State Common Core Social Studies Framework states:

The primary purpose of Social Studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.

This sounds reasonable enough to the casual reader.  A deeper examination must match this rationale with the actual content of texts and tests. Then it becomes clear that the language of the rationale holds different meanings to those who designed the texts and tests with an agenda in mind.

An iconic example of this tactic is at the United Nations where the stealth phrase “health and reproductive rights” seems to promise decent prenatal care. Nothing in the phrase suggests abortion and sterilization, but those are the intended “rights.”  Thus, in the New York framework, the word “informed” should prompt the question, “informed with what information?” And the phrase “public good” must answer “whose definition of public good?”  Is same-sex parenting a public good? And what of the phrase, “culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world?”  Should we be comfortable with a goal that fails to emphasize American cultural achievements, American citizenship, American constitutional principles and civic virtues?  Or do we realize that the “framework” reorients students toward the vision of a secular, globalist humanism?

It appears that few recognize this gambit under the guise of education for “job security” in the global economy. If it is a globalized world, the reasoning goes, then blurring the lines of culture and country must be achieved in order to insure a cooperative workforce with fewer cultural divisions or religious tensions. A tractable workforce asks no questions because it has no foundation of knowledge from which to form the questions.

Common Core is the latest blueprint for a techno-serfdom, workers managed for the global economy. Student and teacher are transformed indeed—into utilitarian tools of global commerce: The student is a product, schools are processing plants, and teachers are information delivery agents.  The socialist “workforce management” scheme is the inverse of American principles where free persons find their own vocation and pursue it according to their talents. The “workforce” model believes that the state can anticipate the workforce needs of the economy, then train workers “cradle to career.”

Common Core is part of the subterranean template in place to indoctrinate our society into accepting “workforce security” in exchange for a global public square where American values are a distant memory, and Christian, especially Catholic, practice is confined behind church doors.  Perhaps with an awareness of this abandonment of fidelity to particular national values in the face of globalizing pressures, Pope Francis this week warned against worldly “hegemonic uniformity”: “And this is the fruit of the devil, the prince of this world, who leads us forward with the spirit of worldliness…. They accepted the habits of the pagan … that all should be one people, and everyone would abandon their customs. A globalizing conformity of all nations is not beautiful” since “it is the hegemonic uniformity of globalization, the single line of thought” rather than a unity of nations each with its own unique customs and traditions that make up a particular civilization. If education is reduced to job training, the consequences will be tragic. As C. S. Lewis reminds us, “If education is beaten by training, civilization dies … civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost.”

Mary Jo Anderson is a Catholic journalist and public speaker. She has been a frequent guest on “Abundant Life,” an EWTN television program, and her “Global Watch” radio program is heard on EWTN radio affiliates nationwide. She writes regularly for Crisis Magazine and is a contributing correspondent for WorldnetDaily.com. More articles and commentary can be found at Properly Scared and at Women for Faith and Family. Mary Jo is a board member of Women for Faith and Family and has served on the Legatus Board of Directors. With co-author Robin Bernhoft, she wrote “Male and Female He Made Them: Questions and Answers about Marriage and Same-Sex Unions,” published in 2005 by Catholic Answers. In 2003 Mary Jo was invited to the Czech Republic to address parliamentarians on the Impact of Radical Feminism on Emerging Democracies.

Trojan Horses

Computers in Class Rooms

Group-think educrats and academic educationalists have got it wrong again.  In govenrment schools computers have become synonymous with progressive, advanced education.  Any school worth its merits has pupils kitted out with laptops or tablets.  More and more courses and lessons are being structured around the electronic idol sitting on the pupils’ desks.  Otherwise they will be missing out.  They will not be prepared for life in the real, new, e-world.

Instead of focusing on a content rich curriculum and instructively teaching it, the curriculum is becoming besotted with “teaching” IT techniques.  Schools and teachers who do not have the necessary kit available are told they are disadvantaging their pupils and belong in the dark ages. Teachers are becoming dispirited and de-motivated. Pupils are graduating with vast experience in how to manipulate and use computers, but remain ignorant of the sciences, the arts, and how to think reasonably and accurately.

Au contraire.  Smart schools are now banning computers.  Why?  Because they inhibit learning.
This, from Pacific Standard Magazine:

Want to Remember Your Notes? Write Them, Don’t Type Them

By Paul Bisceglio • April 25, 2014

In the past decade, a bunch of studies have shown that bringing a laptop to class is not great for learning. Anyone who has sat through a lecture with the Internet in front of them hasn’t really been surprised. After all, you can only take so many notes while simultaneously catching up on Game of Thrones and g-chatting with your friends.

A new study in Psychological Science, though, suggests there’s even more to laptops’ negative effects on learning than distraction. Go old school with a pen and paper next time you want to remember something, according to Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton and the University of California-Los Angeles, respectively, because laptops actually make note-taking too easy.

The researchers ran a series of studies that tested college students’ understanding of TED Talks after they took notes on the videos either in longhand or on Internet-less laptops. Even without Facebook, the computer users consistently did worse at answering conceptual questions, and also factual-based ones when there was a considerable delay between the videos and testing.

The problem, it seems, is that the lightening-quick speed of typing encourages listeners to transcribe what they’re hearing without actually paying attention to what’s being said.

The problem, it seems, is that the lightening-quick speed of typing encourages listeners to transcribe what they’re hearing without actually paying attention to what’s being said—a note-taking approach that has been proven ineffective in the past. Typing every last word that’s said might make you think you have a more complete understanding of the material, but when it comes to comprehension, notes’ quality outweighs their quantity, Mueller and Oppenheimer say.

“Although more notes are beneficial, at least to a point,” they write, “if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content, as is more likely the case on a laptop than when notes are taken longhand, the benefit disappears.”

And here’s the scary news: Whether we’re aware of it or not, this effect may be totally unavoidable—or at least the result of a habit so deeply ingrained in us it will be hard to overcome. In one study, Mueller and Oppenheimer specifically told laptop-using participants not to write their notes verbatim, but most still did. They couldn’t help it.  “Despite their growing popularity, laptops may be doing more harm in classrooms than good,” Mueller and Oppenheimer write.

Here is the view of a senior academic at Baylor University on laptop (and tablet) use in class:  

From the FAQ page of Alan Jacobs, Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University in Waco, Texas:

Is it okay if I bring my laptop to class to take notes?

No, sorry, not any more. Now that Baylor offers wireless internet access in most classrooms, the university has provided you with too many opportunities for distractions. Think I’m over-reacting? Think you’re a master of multitasking? You are not. No, I really mean it. How many times do I have to tell you? Notes taken by hand are almost always more useful than typed notes, because more thoughtful selectivity goes into them; plus there are multiple cognitive benefits to writing by hand. And people who use laptops in class see their grades decline — and even contribute to lowering the grades of other people. Also, as often as possible you should annotate your books.

The really smart teachers and schools, the ones that not only believe in education but understand what it is and how learning takes place, are making their classrooms computer-free zones.  The government education system is running as fast as it can in the opposite direction.  Anyone care to guess which will prove to be right? 

Letter from the UK (About Jihad in Schools)

Jihad At Work 

ContraCelsum recently carried a piece about Jihadis attempting to take over Birmingham schools, by means of lies, subterfuge, threats, and intimidation.  It has now emerged that there is substance in the allegations.  The official investigations have widened to include 25 schools, not just he handful first mentioned. 

Below is an update on what is unfolding:

Extremist Muslims Try To Be Headteacher at 25 Birmingham Schools

by Andre Walker  

14 Apr 2014

Breitbart London

The investigation into a plot by radical Muslims to take over schools has been extended to 25 institutions across the City of Birmingham. Last month Breitbart London reported that a probe had begun into whether jihadis had tried to sack the headteacher of one school and replace them with a radical Muslim. Today’s Daily Mail reports the investigation is now much wider.

Whilst Birmingham City Council will not name which schools are involved, it is clear from the average size of schools in the City that many thousands of children may be affected. This would include a huge number of Christian children.  Yesterday the number of schools under investigation rose to 15, and today it has risen again to 25. It is unclear whether this number will increase further, or how successful the jihadis were at infiltrating the schools concerned.

The Education Secretary Michael Gove, has also reacted by insisting that any school should be automatically failed by OFSTED in cases “where religious conservatism is getting in the way of learning and a balanced curriculum”.

In response to nearly 200 complaints about the plot, Birmingham City Council has appointed a former headteacher, Ian Kershaw, as their chief advisor on the subject. The plot has been called the ‘Trojan Horse’ plot, as jihadis had tried to get onto school governing bodies so they could remove the headteacher and replace them with a radical.

Investigators found an unsigned and undated letter claiming that a radical group of Muslims was attempting to force out moderate governors and teachers. The letter sent shock waves through the British education system, and has pushed Birmingham City Council into taking decisive action.

Khalid Mahmood MP, who represents Birmingham Perry Barr, said that the council has known about plot claims for “eight years at least” but had not acted for fear of “appearing anti-Muslim”.   Birmingham City Council has been in trouble before for pandering to radicals, in 1998 it rebranded Christmas as ‘Winterval’ in order to avoid offending the city’s Muslim community. It only backed down when there was a chorus of criticism from the public and the media.

Testing, Testing, Testing . . .

The Show Never Starts

When civil government assumes itself as demi-god powers to rule over families and their children, bad things happen.  When civil government forgets the most fundamental and essential duty of government is self-govenment, which in the case of overreaching state authority means restricting its own powers and overreaches, saying no to itself and its besetting lust for command and control, bad consequences necessarily follow. 

When civil government determines for itself that it has a duty and responsibility to teach children, subverting or replacing parents and families, illiteracy, innumeracy, and educational failure is the inevitable outcome.  One of the causes is that bureaucrats cannot stop being bureaucratic.  Instead of teaching, the bureaucratic mind requires measuring teaching, testing teaching, weighing teaching, and assessing teaching.  It’s what bureaucrats do.  The bigger the country, the bigger the government, the worse the educational outcomes.  Pity the poor US kids in government schools.

Michelle Malkin explains one consequence of government schooling:  a tyranny of testing.

Have you had enough of the testing tyranny? Join the club. To be clear: I’m not against all standardized academic tests. My kids excel on tests. The problem is that there are too damned many of these top-down assessments, measuring who knows what, using our children as guinea pigs and cash cows.

College-bound students in Orange County, Fla., for example, now take a total of 234 standardized diagnostic, benchmark and achievement tests from kindergarten through 12th grade. Reading instructor Brian Trutschel calculated that a typical 10th-grade English class will be disrupted 65 out of 180 school days this year alone for mandatory tests required by the state and district. “It’s a huge detriment to instruction,” he told the Orlando Sentinel last month. The library at one Florida middle school is closed for a full three months out of the 10-month school year for computerized assessments.

“It’s horrible, because all we do is test,” Nancy Pace, the school’s testing coordinator, told the newspaper. “There’s something every month.” My Colorado 8th-grader has been tied up all week on her TCAPs (Transitional Colorado Assessment Program), which used to be called CSAPs (Colorado Student Assessment Program), which will soon be replaced by something else.

One is reminded of a fundamental credo of ungoverned civil government: if it moves, tax it; if it moves faster, tax it more; if it stops moving, subsidise it.  Applied to state education testing supplants taxing: if a school exists, test it; if it grows, test it more comprehensively; if it looks like closing down, help it fill in its tests.  No wonder pupils graduate severely truncated in their ability to read, write and compute.   

Breathing Toxic, Foetid Air

The Nauseating Stench of Vapid Idealism

It seems that idealism has inundated the Commentariat, at least in New Zealand.  It’s not just the government and its agencies.  A form of insipid idealism also appears to pervade the atmosphere of the once smoke-filled editorial rooms of our daily newspapers.  How bizarre.  Cynicism was once not only a trade-mark of the media, it was a requirement to get a union card.  Now we are all being asked to breathe the free air of an imaginary, ideal world.

Consider the following editorial discussing government sex education which appeared in the NZ Herald:

In an ideal world, parents would teach their children respectful attitudes to sex. In reality, that is not always happening. . . .

Arguments about individual morality and cultural sensitivity have made this an area in which governments have hesitated to intrude. They know also that there will be a backlash from a minority who believe sex education has no place in schools and is the plaything of dissolute liberals.  But what the select committee has suggested is far removed from that.

Ideally, boys would have improved attitudes and girls would be safer and better understand their rights. At present … the balance may be tilted against this outcome.

(The parliamentary committee evaluating government sex education in schools has clearly also be caught up in this miasma.  It too is asking us to dream up an ideal world–of improved attitudes and better understanding of rights.  Apparently the Herald has gone to a revival meeting and got religion; it has bought into this aura of hope and change. )

The yellow brick road to sexual utopia is going to be paved with students in schools making “respectful and informed choices”.  Ideally.
  Sex education in government schools is going to achieve that outcome.  Ideally.  Count on it.  It never has in the past–but this time it will be different.  Ideally.  (Cue that hoary definition of insanity to do with repeating the same mistake and expecting a different outcome.)  Then comes another use of the “i” word:

Ideally, boys would have improved attitudes and girls would be safer and better understand their rights. At present, especially when parents do not involve themselves, the balance may be tilted against this outcome.

One of the dysfunctional aspects of Unbelief which never seems to go away is that, as Chesterton observed, when people stop believing in God, they will believe in anything.  They become wistfully credulous.  They are unable, for whatever reason, of following the not ignoble example of Friedrich Nietzsche who strove to face the implications–horrible though they be–of a world where God was dead, and who sought to glory in them, to the point of becoming insane. Instead, most people–certainly the New Zealand Commentariat–have retreated to a wistful soporific hope of an “ideal world”, characterised by respect and self-awareness of rights. 

But, at the same time, and out of the other side of the mouth, comes the deeply religious assertion that the individual soul, the self, is the only effective, actual ultimate reality.  We can be anything we want to be.  The only restrictions are those we place upon ourselves.  The role of society and the community is to cheerlead everyone along the  road to self-actualisation and self-respect.  As psychologist Paul E. Vitz declared back in the late seventies:

Selfish psychology emphasizes the human capacity for change to the point of almost totally ignoring the idea that life has limits and that knowledge of them is the basis of wisdom.  For selfists there seem to be no acceptable duties, denials, inhibitions, or restraints.  Instead there are only rights and the opportunities for change. [Paul E. Vitz, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 1977), p.38.]

Now, thirty years on, the diseased fruit of this selfist rebellion against God is ripening.  Let’s reflect on how this call for respectful attitudes and acknowledgement of rights has played out, and will play out, in sex education in our government schools.  Respect must apply not just to attitudes and actions towards members of the opposite sex.  It must also be applied to all human sexualities–to the sexuality of the homosexual, the trans-sexual, the bi-sexual, the multi-sexual, and the serially promiscuous.  Respect will include acknowledging the rights of people to be as they choose, without denials, inhibitions, or restraints.  

Government sex education will start from these foundations and move outwards.  Therefore, it will ultimately promote libertine sexual behaviour.  It is inevitable:  “Man is the master of his fate (that is, God is dead) and nothing human is foreign to me.”  Unbelieving, atheistic sex education cannot “ideally” be anything else.  It has no foundation, no framework, no moral grounding to be anything else. 

The bottom line is that when a kid declares in class, “I am trans-gender” the only response permissible by agents of the state is to say, “Right on.  Let’s all respect that.”  We challenge any government school educator, any sex teacher in government schools, any official in the Ministry of Education, or any politician, or anyone in the Herald editorial conference room, for that matter, to say otherwise.  And that, mums and dads, makes a complete mockery of all this pious talk about “ideally respectful attitudes”.  Respect is only going to go one way.

The government sex curriculum will not only teach implicit sexual promiscuity–since it must respect the choices of all, including the rampantly promiscuous–it also has to accede to the demands by homosexual, trans-sexual, bi-sexual and omni-sexual provocateurs that their respective sexualities must be part of the sex-ed curriculum and be presented in a “respectful” way–that is, promoted as normal, legitimate, holy, just, and good sexual behaviour.

This is the real world of government sex education.  And all the kings horses and all the kings men, sitting in their little committees in the Ministry of Education, or in parliament, or in the education unions, know this to be true.  But ideally, by their lights, they want to keep that particular dirty secret locked away.  And they do a pretty good job–so much so that the Herald and other media outlets whimsically suspend their critical unbelief and go along, to get along.  Rather they all talk wistfully about “an ideal world” where things will be different from the reality they know exists, but refuse to face up to, preferring to keep it as a dirty little secret between those in the know. 

They cannot bring themselves to do anything to criticise or blaspheme the religion of Self.  Why, such a thing would be disrespectful. 

What Do Islam and the Cold War Have in Common?

 Jihad To Control Schools Justifies Lying

We wrote recently about the Muslim practice of taqiyya, which justifies Muslims lying in three circumstances, one of which is war or jihad.  It is discussed extensively in  Patrick Sookhdeo’s, Global Jihad: The Future in the Face of Militant Islam. (McLean, VA: Isaac Publishing, 2007), who cites Islamic leaders, teachers, and historical sources, including quotations from Muhammad.

A basic idea is that non-Muslims or outsiders are not owed the truth.  In recent days a potential case study of taqiyya in action has come to light.  Muslims are allegedly trying to take over schools in Birmingham and Bradford in the UK and lying and dissembling appear to be at the heart of their tactical approach.  We say “appear” because at this stage investigations by school authorities, local councils, and the police are underway and are not yet completed. 

But the prima facie case appears pretty strong.
  Either an anti-Muslim conspiracy is underway, or the reverse is true–a strongly pro-Muslim conspiracy employing actual dirty tricks to take control of schools has been rolling out for some time.  What is clear, however, is that if the Muslim conspiracy were proven, it would be entirely consistent with Islamic teaching in the inner core, as contrasted to the expedient public face which Islam adopts, at least in the early days of gaining control of a specific area.

So, what has allegedly gone down?  The Birmingham Mail reports:

‘Jihadist plot to take over Birmingham schools’

Secret documents allege extremist conspiracy to remove heads and staff through dirty tricks campaign

 By Jeanette Oldham
 7 Mar 2014 06:00

An alleged plot by Islamic fundamentalists to take over Birmingham schools by ousting headteachers and staff through dirty tricks campaigns is being investigated by education chiefs.  The city council and the Birmingham Mail have received documents which purport to show Jihadists are targeting schools and orchestrating false allegations against staff, including non-Muslims, in an operation dubbed Trojan Horse.

The schools in question have substantial Islamic presence on the rolls.  A letter has surfaced, unnamed, in which those active in a dirty-tricks campaign, named Trojan Horse, in Birmingham schools have written to Muslims in Bradford, advising them to engage in the same campaign in that city.  Here are excerpts from the letter (now in the hands of the authorities):

The documents allegedly feature correspondence from one Birmingham Muslim fundamentalist to another in Bradford.  They detail a five point guide for taking over a school and encourage rolling out Trojan Horse to Bradford and then Manchester, cities with rapidly growing Muslim populations.  The documents outline alleged successful plots being carried out against a number of Birmingham headteachers.

The documents also give a step-by-step guide for targeting other under-performing schools with dirty tricks methods, involving the spreading of lies about the school heads.  Once forced out, hard-line Muslim supporters move in and push through plans to make the schools academies.  The academy status, as promoted by schools minister Michael Gove, allows them to be run out of the control of the local authority, with funding provided direct from central Government.

The secret documents state: ‘’Operation ‘Trojan Horse’ has been very carefully thought through and is tried and tested within Birmingham, implementing it in Bradford will not be difficult for you.’’  Trojan Horse, the documents state, has been fine-tuned so that it is ‘totally invisible to the naked eye and allows us to operate under the radar. I have detailed the plan we have in Birmingham and how well it has worked and you will see how easy the whole process is to get the whole process is to get the head teacher out and our own person in.’’

The documents state schools with poor Ofsted reports and with large Muslim student populations should be targeted for takeover.  They add: ‘’The poor performing schools are easy to disrupt, the better performing with strong head teachers is much harder and so we have to manufacture a strong enough reason, but rest assured we have not failed yet, no matter how difficult removing the head teacher may be. You just have to be clever and find the most appropriate way to deal with the school.’’  The documents add: ‘’This is all about causing the maximum amount of organised chaos and we have fine-tuned this as part of operation Trojan Horse. You must identify what the heads strengths are and build a case of disruption around that.’’

Implicit in the dirty-trick campaign is lying and deceiving and misrepresentation.  At one point the Bradford letter says:

Whilst sometimes the practices we use may not seem the correct way to do things you must remember this is a ‘Jihad’ and as such all means possible to win the war is acceptable.’

That is, it’s OK to lie.  What are some of the alleged lies already used in Birmingham?  Hard line, Salafi parents are used to create false allegations which result in staff removals by the authorities.  Amongst these are allegations about staff inflating exam results.

The documents also mention an alleged plot to oust the head teacher at another school by ‘planting the seed’ of allegations of cheating in SAT tests. The head teacher and her deputy both resigned last year after education chiefs rejected the school’s SAT results due to exactly those allegations.[Breitbart, London]

The next phase is to ensure that consistent Muslims are appointed in positions of authority in the schools.  Then, the third phase it to apply for and secure “academy” status which gives the schools much greater autonomy.  They can then function as Islamic madrassa schools. 

Meanwhile, police have confirmed to the Birmingham Mail that a fraud investigation has been reopened at Adderley Primary School after the documents came to light. It is understood the investigation centres on allegations of ‘faked’ resignation letters.  Both schools were named in the documents, along with Saltley School.  The documents claim former Saltley headmaster Balwant Bains would ‘soon be sacked’. In fact, the much respected principal resigned last November after a damning Ofsted report criticised his “dysfunctional” relationship with governors. [Birmingham Mail]

The Birmingham Mail reports that it has received documents purporting to show that jihadists are launching an operation called ‘Trojan Horse’ through which they plan to orchestrate false allegations against staff members.  Once the original staff members are ousted, the group allegedly plan to install their own supporters in positions of influence and encourage the schools to educate children in strict Islamic principles. They would then apply for academy status, allowing them to be taken out of local authority control, and thus be freer to run the school along strict Islamic lines. [Breitbart]

During the Cold War the KGB and Western spy agencies became committed experts at seeding and releasing disinformation–aka, lying–to promote their respective causes.  If the allegations about Muslims in Birmingham and Bradford are proved up–and there is lots of prima facie evidence to back it up–it should not surprise us at all.  Taqiyya is a real, actual, live, doctrinal justification for lying. In jihad, anything goes.  The Islamic end of world domination justifies the means every time.

"Sex Education" in Government Schools

Parents Are Smarter Than Government Bears

In New Zealand government schools–which are part of a government mandated and enforced monopoly–sex education is compulsory.  Now the official reason the government insists on educating your children about sex is the high rate of teenage pregnancy in this country.  But when the government runs a programme with the aim of reducing teenage pregnancy, there is only one possible outcome–more teenage pregnancies–which is what has been happening.

. . . a cross-party [parliamentary] inquiry [has] found New Zealand’s high teenage-pregnancy rate was partly the result of inconsistent and sometimes non-existent sexual and reproductive lessons in schools.  [NZ Herald]

According to the propaganda employed to justify compulsory government sex lessons, non-existent sex education in schools causes teenage pregnancies.  Now, however, since government sex education has been compulsory and has been going for some time now and yet more teenage pregnancies have occurred, what’s the excuse?  Well, it’s because monopoly government sex propaganda has been inconsistent, and sometimes non-existent.  This is what we call the “great double down”.  Sex education in the monopolistic government schools is not working because there is not enough of it.  So, we will have more.

But also, a qualitative improvement is being proposed.
 

Sex education is mandatory, but the 18-month inquiry found programmes were “fragmented and uneven”, parents were able to keep children out of them and classes often focused on physical aspects of sex.

The select committee recommended that the Government give all schools two years to create programmes that meet Ministry of Health standards.  The Education Review Office would monitor whether schools were meeting the needs of students of all cultures, ethnicities and sexual orientations.  Cabinet ministers said yesterday that they would “partially accept” the recommendations.

Government sex education has to cater to the sex-education of  homosexuals, trans-sexuals, bi-sexuals, and whatever other sexual “orientation” presents itself.  In government circles, none of these “sexualities” is immoral; rather they are all considered amoral.  They are regarded as a freedom right.  Morality and ethics have nothing to do with them.  They are thus to be presented as entirely legitimate and lawful–and, thus, are part of the government sex curriculum  So, it is no wonder that compulsory government sexual education focuses almost exclusively on sexual mechanics.  Moreover, it is no wonder that the specialist teachers often brought in to teach these subjects are immoral libertines, whose end-game goal is to break down every taboo and moral restriction upon human sexual activity, to the end that human sexual activity may become animalistic. 

A former board of trustees member who resigned over “unacceptable” sex education classes at her school opposes recommendations that sex education programmes be mandatory for all schoolchildren.  Jo-Anne Sim resigned last month as a trustee of the Blaketown Primary School on the West Coast after a teacher taught what Ms Sim said were explicit lessons that were not appropriate for Year 7 and 8 pupils.  The classes included discussion about oral and anal sex, flavoured condoms, and pleasure points – despite parents having been told in writing beforehand that pupils would be taught only the basics.

We are familiar with a non-government school which teaches all subjects through the lens of Scripture.  It operates in a Decile One (low socio-economic) area.  It is a Cambridge school, which means that its education qualifications are world-class and internationally recognised. Its external exams are marked in London. No chance of gilding the lily with inflated internal assessments.  The roll is slowly but steadily growing.  Many of the families are not Christians.  Why, do non-Christian parents choose to send their children to this Christian school?

There are a variety of reasons.  The education is of an excellent standard, with pupil learning well beyond peers in the government monopoly schools.  The curriculum is focused on core subjects: reading, writing, maths, and science.  The teachers, all committed Christians, are dedicated professionals and practise their faith in their interactions with pupils–they are gentle, kind, but firm.  Pupils are taught to be respectful, to be thankful, to be polite, and to work diligently.  Parents love all these aspects.

But they also appreciate that the school curriculum does not move into areas that belong to the family–such as “sex education” in a misplaced attempt to combat social evils and practise social engineering.  Meanwhile the school does teach the divine morality surrounding marriage and families in its Bible curriculum (after all, three of the Ten Commandments address this directly.)  Parents who are not Christians appreciate these things a great deal.

They think that it is far better than some moral libertine discussing condom-use, together with practising how to apply them, as part of a mandatory government sex-education class in the monopoly government schools.  No wonder parents in those schools are finding their children are coming home from these lessons “grossed out” and disturbed.

But that’s paganism for you: when everything is relative and perspectival, anything can happen.  And it does.  No wonder conscientious parents want to send their children to a Christian school even when they themselves are not professing Christians, and at not insignificant cost, we may add. 

Succeeding to Fail

Grade Inflation

The NZ Herald has analysed how well high school students are achieving according to the government schools qualification standard (“NCEA).  It turns out that internal assessment (tests and assignments) delivers a far higher rate of achievement than external examinations.  To put the matter simplistically: if students are asked to sum 2+2, they get the answer right more often when their teacher asks them in class, than when they are sitting an external exam.

Students do much better when they are internally assessed than when they are put under the pressure of an exam, a comprehensive Weekend Herald analysis of NCEA entries reveals.  Internal assessments are becoming increasingly important to secondary school students as the place of old-fashioned exams fades – and they generally result in better achievement.  The difference in achievement rates between the two types of assessment can be nearly 50 per cent, although the gap differs according to subject, level and school decile.

To take one example: students in decile one schools who were studying maths with calculus achieved 83 per cent of internal assessments at Level 3 in 2012. The achievement rate for external assessments was much lower, with only 34 per cent of entries achieved.

This sounds great.  Achievement rates 50 percent higher when students are internally assessed.  Ah, not so fast.

One person to have raised concerns about internal assessments is Professor Dale Carnegie, head of engineering and computer science at Victoria University.  A vocal critic of NCEA who advocates a return to percentage scores, he said there were well-founded concerns over the moderation of internal assessment.  As a result, engineering departments at Victoria University and the University of Auckland had moved to insist students completed specific external assessments.  “In essence, we do not trust the internal assessment anywhere near as much as the external,” Professor Carnegie said.

The universities have felt compelled to introduce their own competency testing for applicants because it has emerged that often (under NCEA) the applicants lack required maths abilities, skills, and competence.  The market place is finding the NCEA qualifications are deceptive and misleading and replacing them with its own.

But the government educational monolith is persisting.

Rowena Phair, the ministry’s deputy secretary, viewed the data and said it reflected NCEA’s flexibility and relative complexity as opposed to the old exam-based system.  There were several factors that contributed to students achieving better results in internal assessment, Ms Phair said:

• Students could be assessed at a time when they were ready for assessment, rather than months later at the end of the year,
• A reassessment opportunity might be available following further study,
• A wider sample of student evidence could be used in making the final judgment on student achievement.

“The difference in achievement rates between internally and externally assessed standards can be seen across other subjects and has not changed substantially over time.”

Ah, yes.  A student studies a particular subject, say the manipulation of quadratic equations.  At the end of the module, he or she is internally assessed.  They pass.  Then they promptly forget what they have studied, as they move on to other things.  But the student facing an external examination at the end of the year knows he or she needs to keep remembering, revising, holding the information as best they can.  End result: the latter student emerges having learned and retained much, much more.  Folks, this is definitely not rocket science.

The government educational monolith is increasingly driven by achieving NCEA credits, not by learning and mastering a subject.  The two are not necessarily the same at all.

Internally assessed standards allow teachers to give students much more explicit guidance, which was one logical explanation for the general pattern that internal results were higher. “Remembering that we are concerned with recognising achievement and not selecting an elite, it should be understood as a better directed assessment process rather than any reduction of rigour.”

And how will these accredited students do when they move out of school into the real world where they no longer have access to “explicit guidance” of their teachers.  Not too good.  But note the rider in the above citation: NCEA is focused upon recognition of achievement, not upon actual achievement.  Assume we are studying German.  The task/achievement is German vocabulary.  We study and learn three hundred German words, complete an assessment helped along by the explicit guidance of the teacher.  We achieve the requisite standard.  Then we move on to something else, and promptly forget eighty percent of the learned vocab.  We have achieved (that is, been recognised) in NCEA-speak, but learned very little. 

But the educational establishment is driven by “recognition” rates. 

The Government has set a target for 85 per cent of 18-year-olds to have NCEA Level 2 or an equivalent qualification in 2017.  Allan Vester, chairman of the NZ Secondary Principals’ Council and head of Edgewater College in Pakuranga, said internal assessments allowed different skills to be assessed than in an exam and generally had lower rates of non-achievement.  That meant it was likely that they would be seen by schools as a way of meeting the 85 per cent target.

Another factor was a desire to perform better in “league table”-style comparisons with other schools. That was not necessarily negative if handled correctly, he said, and safeguards included a rigorous and improved moderation process.  However, Mr Vester said, if the push for achievement went to unrealistic levels there was risk that public perception of NCEA would suffer.

The government monolith announces an achievement target.  As always, the unintended consequences are the fly in the ointment.  Schools are racing to meet the achievement targets.  The actual, unintended result?  The standard undergoes “grade inflation” and becomes progressively worthless.

Is the situation hopeless?  No, but correcting it will be painful.  Because New Zealand’s government education system is now being ranked internationally in league tables, the current slippage in rankings is likely to exacerbate.  Eventually, this will lead to a revolt–firstly, by the universities (as is happening in some disciplines and faculties now), and secondly, by parents themselves.  If the upshot is parents standing up and firing the government educators, and assuming responsibility to select and provide for their children’s education, it will be a very, very good thing. 

There’s Blood on the Streets

Gangs of New York

New York is a happening place–provided  you enjoy watching internecine warfare.  The newly elected Mayor, Bill de Blasio is an automaton of extreme left wing progressivism.  The overwhelmingly progressive city is becoming uncomfortably discombobulated.  It a “progressivism, but not as we know it” kind of reaction.

One of the friction points is a battle between the previously burgeoning charter school movement and the teacher unions.  Big Bill favours shutting charter schools down in favour of bog standard government schools because everyone should get the same.  Egalitarian folly, but its what leftist ideology adoringly celebrates, until it experiences it.

The Wall Street Journal recently provided some colour.

Firstly, charter schools have been going ahead in leaps and bounds in New York, against a backdrop of under performing, failing government schools districts.

Half the kids in Harlem today attend charters, among them KIPP, Democracy Prep and Harlem Children’s Zone. Across New York, 70,000 students go to a charter.  The other night, at a private loft in Tribeca, Ms. Moskowitz was speaking before a roomful of donors and supporters. The mood was somber. Ms. Moskowitz said that Success Academy’s soon-to-be 10,000-strong student network makes it one of the 10 largest school districts in New York state. At the current rate of growth, in seven or eight years, “we’d be the 15th largest school district in America,” she said. “But that’s obviously highly in doubt.”

That is consistent with what is happening across the United States.

The schools are also mushrooming nationwide. Nearly half the public schools in Washington, D.C., and virtually all in New Orleans are charters. One reason the friction in New York is especially bad comes from the city’s practice during the Bloomberg years of having charters share space with regular schools. The charters then often proceeded, embarrassingly, to outperform the other schools.

One would have thought that government schools would celebrate the out performance of charters on their premises, and would use it as a reason to adapt, change, reform, and develop.  But no.  Why?  Well, firstly its not egalitarian.  All schools should be as bad as ours.  That’s what egalitarianism means–or at least what it inevitably produces.  Secondly, teacher unions hate charters with a passion.  They are intimidated by merit pay.  They envy their flexibility and want to see it destroyed, rather than they themselves arguing for more liberating flexibility in their own closed shops.

Meanwhile parents, particularly those living in dysfunctional, underperforming state school districts, would do anything to give their kids a shot at a better education.  But Big Brother says, no.  Actually Big Bill is reported to be a rank hypocrite on the subject.

As long as Mr. de Blasio was making it personal, she [charter school proponent, Moskowitz] noted in a New York Post op-ed that his son attends a selective, high-performing public high school. “Most parents don’t have a public school option that’s as good as de Blasio had access to for his son,” Ms. Moskowitz wrote. She added that his message to parents in neighborhoods with bad schools was simple: “Drop dead.”

Apparently the same sauce does not suit the gander, but the geese are going to get it whether they like it or not.

New Zealand is just entering the fray.  Our government schools have a smothering monopoly on  education.  Consequently, teacher unions have had an inordinate influence and in some cases actually control the sector.  Take the deaths of bulk funding, the re-imposition of  school zoning, and the complete stonewalling of the voucher system, for example. All three measures would have rewarded educational excellence and exposed under performance.  All three were viscerally hated because they threatened our mouldering egalitarianism. All three were cut off at the pass.  

Now we have a pilot charter school programme up and running.  For us, the success of charter schools in other jurisdictions like the United States and the United Kingdom is really important.  The more successful charter schools are elsewhere in revitalising and reforming the education sector the more the heat will come upon New Zealand’s education industry.  Particularly if our global rankings continue to slide, and our illiteracy and innumeracy rates–already bad enough–rise. 

A Medieval Mystery Play . . .

. . . As Performed by the Dread Pirate Roberts, Chicken Little and the Union Players

There are vested interests opposing at every step nascent charter schools in New Zealand.  Almost all of this strident opposition comes from the teacher unions, whose interests are being exposed as more self-orientated, than pupil orientated.  The more they rabbit on, the more public sympathy goes towards the charter schools. 

First there was the “ban”–otherwise known in union parlance as blackballing.  Regional teacher unions, with the encouragement of their union president, Angela Roberts, pronounced that no state teacher, nor school, nor any other entity with up to four degrees of separation from state schools were to have anything to do with such evils.  Strict protocols and instructions were issued, requiring, for example, that if pupils, parents, and teachers of a state school were walking down the footpath and a pupil, parent, or teacher, or a blowfly normally resident at a demonic charter school were found in the vicinity, all pupils and attendants of nanny state education were required to cross the road to the other side, thus avoiding contamination. 

Then there was the directive that no union members would be allowed to teach at the horrendously wicked charter schools, at risk of excommunication from the union.
  This was followed by the usual misinformation and deception.  Charter schools were alleged to be receiving more government funding per pupil than union controlled schools.  But, the comparisons were not apples with apples.  It turns out that start up costs of charter schools, compared to start up costs for union schools are generally equivalent. Deceptive and misleading behaviour is stock-in-trade for the teacher unions.  Why bother with minor issues like the truth when you are fighting for self-righteousness? 

Then there was the scaremongering.  Since charter schools could employ non-state registered teachers, the unions raised the spectre of charter schools being staffed by child molesting Neanderthals who were themselves illiterate and innumerate.  Great harm would be done to pupils, great evils would be perpetrated on young people being taught at the unconscionably wicked charter schools. 

OK, so how have charter schools been getting on attracting staff?  Firstly, they have been employing state registered teachers who, by all accounts, have been keen to get positions in the new schools.  Presumably it is no hardship for these professionals to say goodbye to their union membership cards, the fulminations of Dread Pirate Angela Roberts notwithstanding.

Then has come the latest revelation.  Charter teachers in some schools are going to be paid much more than their salary capped state pay levels.  This from the NZ Herald:

Charter school pays top dollar for teachers

By Nicholas Jones

NZ Herald

New Zealand’s largest secondary school lost five teachers after a charter school was established nearby which could offer better salaries. . . .   Both schools are on Auckland’s North Shore.  Rangitoto principal David Hodge told the Herald five teachers had chosen to move to Vanguard at the end of last year.  They took up top positions including the partnership school’s principal, deputy-principal, head of science, head of mathematics and head of English.  Mr Hodge said some of the salaries at Vanguard, in Albany, were about $16,000 more than his school could offer.

The teacher unions, and their lackey, the NZ Labour Party, have steadfastly (and successfully) opposed bulk funding of schools, whereby principals could attract higher quality teachers by offering them more pay.  In other words, what is normal and very effective in virtually every corner of the country is verboten in state schools.  Why?  Because the teacher unions are dominated by the cardigan brigade, a rump of state teachers who have taught for years, who are tired, de-motivated, place-fillers.  They cannot defend their salaries on merit, so they oppose to the death the idea that merit pay, rather than union awards apply in schools.  Meanwhile, the great majority of successful, ambitious teachers long ago left the profession for greener, more rational pastures.  

Rangitoto College, one of the country’s best state schools, has managed to attract and retain higher quality teachers.  As soon as some of its staff got a whiff of salaries commensurate with their skills, experience and effectiveness, they moved–as all utility maximising, rational employees do.  The principal of Rangitoto College, David Hodge was philosophical–showing he was well aware of the ridiculousness of the current union enforced remuneration regime in state schools.

“It’s good for [the teachers], isn’t it? If that’s what they want, then that’s what they’re getting. It’s a bonus for them.”  Other charter schools have employed experienced teachers working in their area, but none as many as five from the one school.   Vanguard’s principal, Rockley Montgomery, had been granted an early release from Rangitoto, for which Mr Hyde said he was grateful.  “Rangitoto is a very big school, decile 10. I don’t think David Hodge would have found any difficulty in replacing five staff … There would be plenty of people who would want to work at that school.”  Mr Hyde did not know what his staff were paid during their time at Rangitoto, but said he believed the appeal to change was not money. Vanguard has nine staff.

So this is how it is playing out.  Instead of the fear mongering of the unions, highly experienced and qualified teachers are being recruited into charter schools out of the state school system.  They are moving because they want professional challenges, they are being under-utilised in state schools, and they cannot get ahead in their professions because the significant obstacles. 

Dread Pirate Roberts and the teacher unions along with their political arm, the NZ Labour Party, have Chicken Littled the introduction of charter schools.  The sky was going to fall in and a fate worse than the bubonic plague was about to descend.  But, as is so often the case, the prophecies of doom were self-referenced.  Things are going to get much, much harder for the teacher unions.  Their ranks will diminish even further.  Their doomsaying histrionics will increasingly facilitate a more easy emergence of the truth–namely, the teacher unions are not primarily interested in school students or their education.  They are focused on the interests of their shrinking membership.  The two are not the same. 

 

Going Viral

Response That Tells a Story

We posted a piece recently about the perverse effects of protecting children from being children.  It specifically focused upon what has happened in a school where “health and safety” rules were abolished in the playground.  The effects have been salutary and very positive.  The post was entitled Unintended Perverse Effects.

Once the story became public, the school principal has been inundated with requests for information and general interest.  This, as reported in Stuff:

An Auckland principal who bravely ditched the playground rulebook has been overwhelmed by the positive international response to his story.  The phone has been buzzing with calls and interview requests from around the world for Swanson Primary School principal Bruce McLachlan.  “It’s been a busy week, I didn’t expect it. It’s the reaction against the cotton-woolling of kids, helicopter parenting and nanny states.”

It’s gone viral–showing that there is unease at the grassroots over the state’s nannying propensities in the vain attempt to protect people from themselves and to make the world one without risk, threat, or injury.
 

The Sunday Star-Times last week reported on the huge success the university experiment had on children’s behaviour – a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism – after the school let children do what they liked.  Rather than misbehaving, the children were burning all their energy climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush.  The story was shared more than 90,000 times on Facebook and the principal has been interviewed by 14 international media organisations. Another 30 principals have also contacted McLachlan.  “What’s really surprised me is there has been no disagreement. There isn’t a naysayer among them.”

Maybe this will be part of a roll-back of the lunacy and vanity and hubristic overreach whereby governments and bureaucrats attempt to swaddle  their citizens and subjects in protective cotton-wool.  Health and safety rules, regulations, and regimens have resulted in an unwarranted extension of state power–all well intentioned, all trying to prevent harm and damage.  But the trade-off, which is to push and cajole people to accept a soft-despotic state, is by far the biggest danger and threat of all. 

Far better to let people face consequences of their actions rather than attempting to so protect them by “do’s and don’t’s, rules and regulations, so that bad or negative consequences might never eventuate.  One of the most perverse side effects is inert populations, where instead of “nothing ventured, nothing gained” the prevailing ethos is one of fear and doubt.  Another perverse effect is to socialise responsibility for one’s actions rather than sheet home responsibility to where it actually lies.

Let’s hope Swanson Primary School (and the Otago University research underlying it) is an avatar of needed change.

Unintended, Perverse Effects

 The Paradox of Cotton Wool

The pejorative term “nannying” has achieved widespread usage in the last twenty-five years.  Surprisingly, it just happens to co-incide with the rise of the ubiquitous state and its endless “health and safety” rules.  The more the state has sought to micro-legislate and regulate our lives, the more cynical and bitter its ungrateful subjects have become.

Probably in New Zealand the nadir was reached when the infamously nannying government led by “Auntie Helen” was proposing to regulate the length of showers in the nation.  Why?  To combat the terrible, dreadful, looming threat of global warming, you plebian numbskulls.  Don’t you know what’s good for you. Fortunately, the people achieved a moment of rare sanity and unceremoniously voted Auntie Helen out.

There are many drivers of this malignant nannying disease in the body politic.
  The broadest driver is religious.  When a people reject the Almighty God, they become driven by vain attempts to replace His “functions”, one of which is His providential love and care of His creation.  So the state steps in to provide protection, care, and provision.  Father God is replaced by mother state.

Another driver is fear.  Terrible dangers lurk at the fringes of life.  Just as once it was thought that man-eating monsters lurked in the deep, new dangers and horrors and threats take their place to pervade the social atmosphere with gloom, worry, and general depression.  To the plaintiff cry of the child-like citizen, “caring” politicians arise to protect us from the beasties. 

Another is arrogance.  Our culture has a deep, abiding belief in the state’s limitless competence to solve any, each, and all problems.  The end result is a busybody state inserting itself into every nook and cranny of life to protect us ultimately from ourselves.

Another driver is the welfare state.  Because the state pays for health, education, and welfare–and in New Zealand that represents eighty percent of government spending– it wants to control the costs of the spend by reducing demand for said services.  The state reasons that it is better to set up its ambulance at “the top of the cliff” to prevent harm, rather than at the bottom.  Preventative actions inevitably mean nannying the population–relentlessly nagging citizens to live the approbated life, right through to regulating what they eat, when they eat, and how they eat.
 
The most extreme manifestation of the malady is found in government schools.  Here the state readily assumes the role of nanny to look after and protect children from all harm and danger.  Rules abound on how to walk, what to eat, when to eat, how to wash one’s hands, and the allowable number of breaths to be taken in a single minute.

As with all human overreaching, the outcomes have proved perverse.  Children have become uneducable.  Consider the following piece in Stuff:

Ripping up the playground rulebook is having incredible effects on children at an Auckland school. Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don’t cause bedlam, the principal says. The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.

Principal Bruce McLachlan rid the school of playtime rules as part of a successful university experiment. “We want kids to be safe and to look after them, but we end up wrapping them in cotton wool when in fact they should be able to fall over.”  Letting children test themselves on a scooter during playtime could make them more aware of the dangers when getting behind the wheel of a car in high school, he said.  “When you look at our playground it looks chaotic. From an adult’s perspective, it looks like kids might get hurt, but they don’t.” 

Now there’s a radical thought.  Children (and adult humans) learn by getting hurt.   Who would have thought.

Swanson School signed up to the study by AUT and Otago University just over two years ago, with the aim of encouraging active play.  However, the school took the experiment a step further by abandoning the rules completely, much to the horror of some teachers at the time, he said.  When the university study wrapped up at the end of last year the school and researchers were amazed by the results.

Mudslides, skateboarding, bullrush and tree climbing kept the children so occupied the school no longer needed a timeout area or as many teachers on patrol. Instead of a playground, children used their imagination to play in a “loose parts pit” which contained junk such as wood, tyres and an old fire hose.  “The kids were motivated, busy and engaged. In my experience, the time children get into trouble is when they are not busy, motivated and engaged. It’s during that time they bully other kids, graffiti or wreck things around the school.” 

Is this revolutionary?  Not at all.  It represents a return to a saner, more wise world.  Getting rid of smothering health and safety blankets turns out to be one of the most healthy and safe things to do.

Parents were happy too because their children were happy, he said.  But this wasn’t a playtime revolution, it was just a return to the days before health and safety policies came to rule.  AUT professor of public health Grant Schofield, who worked on the research project, said there are too many rules in modern playgrounds. “The great paradox of cotton-woolling children is it’s more dangerous in the long-run.”

Society’s obsession with protecting children ignores the benefits of risk-taking, he said.  Children develop the frontal lobe of their brain when taking risks, meaning they work out consequences. “You can’t teach them that. They have to learn risk on their own terms. It doesn’t develop by watching TV, they have to get out there.”

When Only One Will Do

The Security of a Monopoly 

One of the most insidious and debilitating effects of a monopoly is that the consumer has to take what he is given.  A monopoly is Henry Ford’s dictum writ large: “You can have any colour you want, as long as it’s black.”  A monopoly is supply driven and controlled, not demand controlled.  A monopoly reduces the consumer to the status of a “take-it or leave-it” beggar. 

Competition turns this perverse circumstance upon its head.  In a competitive market place, the consumer is king, the supplier/manufacturer is the servant.  In order to win customers the supplier must provide what the customer wants. 

One by-product of this arrangement is a perpetual discipline of cost control.  A high preference factor for most consumers is value, which translates into purchasing the best quality for the lowest possible price.  In a competitive market place, suppliers are perpetually disciplined by customers to control and even lower their costs.  Those who don’t, go out of business. 

Monopolies have no regimen for cost-controls.  Since the customer is captive (he has nowhere else to go), he must end up paying whatever the monopoly ends up charging. 

Government monopolies are no exception.
  In fact, they are the worst kind of monopolies.  Naturally, they end up overcharging.  Costs rise steadily, if not exponentially.  When the state has a monopoly over health and education services, costs rise well ahead of general inflation. 

Education provides the most telling example in New Zealand.  Here the government firstly has made education compulsory, then has set itself up as the monopoly provider of schooling.  The upshot?  Incessant price increases. 

As education scores deteriorate, the standard political response (from almost all political parties) is more spending on education–which is just another way of increasing the price of schooling.  In New Zealand we have a mixed funding model for schools.  The vast majority of the funding comes from the taxpayer, and that poor creature ends up paying a higher and higher price for schooling through the taxation system–as one would expect in a monopoly market.  But parents also pay directly, through various school levies, charges, and fees.  That also experiences a relentless rise in costs and charges.  As you would expect.

“In the past we have always convinced ourselves that a government education is a free education,” ASG chief executive John Velegrinis said. “But not when you actually think about all of the inputs, every time the parents have to put their hand in their pockets.”  The cost of education had risen by one and a half times the rate of inflation in the past 10 years, a situation that was unlikely to change, Melbourne-based Mr Velegrinis said. [NZ Herald]

Of course that situation will not change.  It’s a monopoly after all–actually, the worst kind of monopoly–a statist monopoly legislated and maintained by the powers of the government.  And the laws of monopoly are inviolate: costs and charges rise in real terms, whilst quality declines.  

This will remain until the monopoly is surrendered and broken down.  Ironically, there is an easy mechanism to do this: the education voucher.  The state spending per child per annum is a readily available figure.  Let the state provide vouchers to parents who want them, to be redeemed at the school of their choice, provided places are available.  Overnight, the consumer would have buying power–and, therefore, negotiating power.  Prices and charges of the kind to which Mr Velegrinis is referring would drop–relatively quickly, we expect. 

But there is a downside.  In fact, this would mean that some schools would be winning, others losing.  Some schools burgeoning, others languishing.  Some children would be getting a better education, others a sub-standard education.  This reality would strike at the ideological, egalitarian heart of the nation. 

But in reality egalitarianism has always been a myth, serving as a security blanket to coddle the feeble minded and the naive and the covetous.  Under that blanket, educational quality has waned, and illiteracy rates and truancy rates have risen.  But it feels not-so-bad because we choose to believe the myth that the government monopoly is providing free, universal, secular education to all children in the country.  It is a “just so” story. 

And, to be fair, it has given some certainty after all–we can be sure there will be inevitable, relentless, rising costs coupled with diminishing quality.  Which is a kind of security, is it not?
 

Reforming a Government Monopoly

Execution is Nine Tenths of Success

The Prime Minister, John Key has announced some common sense initiatives in the government school sector–which is the monopoly provider of education in New Zealand. 

Several new positions have been announced, some with substantial pay increases.  According to the NZ Herald,

The Government will spend an extra $359 million over the next four years to support teachers and principals, which will create four new management roles in schools – executive principals, expert teachers, lead teachers and change principals.

Brief job descriptions of the new roles are:

Executive principals will provide leadership across a community of schools, and be paid an additional allowance of $40,000 a year. Each will work with an average of 10 schools

Change principals will be employed to lift achievement in schools that are struggling. About 20 of these positions will be needed a year, and principals in this role will be given an additional $50,000 a year.

Lead teachers will be “highly capable” school teachers who will act as role models for those in their own school and those in their area. The Government anticipates around 5000 will be needed.

Expert teachers will work with executive principals and include experts in areas like maths and science.  The role will be on a two-year fixed-term basis, and their own school will receive funding to backfill their role for the two days a week they will be working with other schools.

So far, so good.  Details have yet to be worked out.  So now comes the bad news, or at least notes of caution.

Firstly, timing.  All the rolls will not be fully in place before 2017.  That is two elections away.  There is substantial political risk that if the unions do not like the details and the implementation they will use their substantial influence in the Labour Party to get it to commit to dismantle the changes.  Almost certainly Labour will be elected in 2017 (if not 2014) based on the pendulum law of politics.

Secondly, selection procedures.  There is a large union rump in the teaching profession which believes that longevity equals excellence.  Therefore, top jobs should go to  loyal union members who have been around the longest.  The unions to date have strenuously and vehemently objected to all forms of merit pay.  Yet this initiative represents a form of the same.  How will they respond?  Cue Angela Roberts, (union) NZEI president:

Ms Roberts said she was “cautiously optimistic” and welcomed the extra resourcing to support teachers, as well as greater collaboration between teachers across schools.  She said its ability to work as intended would depend on how it was implemented, but welcomed Mr Key’s promise that the profession would be involved in implementing the new roles.  “How this will look when it actually lands in schools is a lot different to a broad policy statement and I’m looking forward to working with the Ministry to help them make sure it lands well in our schools.”

On past form, Roberts words are standard code for “we will fight tooth and nail to protect the interests of our union members.”

It is critical that the selection of those to occupy these new positions should be chosen on merit not tenure.  But that, in turn, requires judgements about what constitutes superior versus inferior or pedestrian teaching performance.  Details have not been released (and are unlikely to have been determined) as to the selection processes and the entities who will finally decide who gets appointed.  Green co-leader Turei gave us a window into her mind–and the ruminations come as no surprise:

She said it looked a lot like performance-based pay for a few “cherrypicked” teachers and it was yet to be seen how the teacher unions would deal with that in negotiations.

Quite.  In addition, Turei–who is likely to be in a coalition government in 2017–shows herself wedded to fallacies of false dichotomy, and false cause:

Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei said the policy was not well thought out and did nothing to address poverty as a cause of underachievement.  “The key driver of poor achievement is poverty, it is hunger and sickness. It doesn’t matter what the best teacher does with that kid – if they are hungry or sick they are not going to learn. Professional development for some isn’t going to help the majority of our teachers dealing with kids with great needs.”

Turei implies that teachers–good, bad or indifferent–are not the issue.  If every child were to come to school adequately clothed, fed, and inoculated they would succeed educationally.  Which, one thinks, might provide the bones of a compelling argument for reducing teachers’ pay on the grounds of their irrelevance.

We doubt not the goodness of the government’s intentions.  But reform of a moribund legislated monopoly is not an easy task, particularly when there are so many vested interest groups trying to protect their respective patches.  And the runes and portents are not good.  As with all monopolies, the last interest group that is ever thought of is the customer–in this case, parents.  Until we get parental choice in the system, educational success will prove an ephemeral notion. 

The Return of New Math

Common Core’s Newer Math

A return to mathematical ignorance

By David G. Bonagura Jr.

January 17, 2014 12:00 PM

National Review Online  

[“Common Core” represents an attempt by the powers-that-be to standardise (and thereby control) schooling in the United States.  We have seen all of this before.  Certainly in New Zealand where the State holds a virtual monopoly on education.  The outcome, if Common Core is successful is therefore predictable: a burgeoning ignorance of the general population.  David G. Bonagura Jr. illustrates how this will eventuate, using maths as a case study. Ed.]


The following sentences from the New York Times could have been written today in homage to the Common Core Standards Initiative, the recently adopted national standards for the teaching of mathematics and English-language arts in grades K–12.

“Instead of this old method, the educators would stress from the earliest grades the new concept of the unity of mathematics and an understanding of its structure, using techniques that have been developed since the turn of the century. . . . The new concepts must be taught in high school to prepare the students for the type of mathematics that they will find when they reach college.”

But the century in question here is the 20th, not the 21st. This article, written in 1961, is not about today’s Common Core, but about New Math, the program that was supposed to transform mathematics education by emphasizing concepts and theories rather than traditional computation. Instead, after a few short years of propagating ignorance of all things mathematical, New Math became the butt of jokes nationwide (the Peanuts comic strip took aim more than once) before it was unceremoniously abandoned.

Flash forward 50 years, and Common Core is today making the same promises: “The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.”

But what makes us think Common Core will live up to its hype? And how is it substantially different from New Math, as well as subsequent math programs such as Sequential Math, Math A/B, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Standards? These have all failed America’s children — even though each program promised to transform them into young Einsteins and Aristotles.

The problem with Common Core is not that it provides standards, but that, despite its claims, there is a particular pedagogy that accompanies the standards. And this pedagogy is flawed, for, just as in New Math, from the youngest ages Common Core buries students in concepts at the expense of content.

Take, for example, my first-grade son’s Common Core math lesson in basic subtraction. Six- and seven-year-olds do not yet possess the ability to think abstractly; their mathematics instruction, therefore, must employ concrete methodologies, explanations, and examples. But rather than, say, count on a number line or use objects, Common Core’s standards mandate teaching first-graders to “decompose” two-digit numbers in an effort to emphasize the concept of place value. Thus 13 – 4 is warped into 13 – 3 = 10 – 1 = 9.

Decomposition is a useful skill for older children, but my first-grade son has no clue what it is about or how to do it. He can, however, memorize the answer to 13 – 4 – but Common Core does not advocate that tried-and-true technique​.

Common Core’s elevation of concept over computation continues in its place-value method for multiplying two-digit numbers, which is taught in fourth grade. Rather than multiply each digit of the number from right to left, Common Core requires students to multiply each place value so that they have to add four numbers, rather than two, as the final step in finding the product.

Common Core’s most distinctive feature is its insistence that “mathematically proficient students” express understanding of the underlying concepts behind math problems through verbal and written expression. No longer is it sufficient to solve a word problem or algebraic equation and “show your work”; now the work is to be explained by way of written sentences.

I have seen this “writing imperative” first-hand in my sons’ first- and third-grade Common Core math classes. There is certainly space in their respective books for traditional computation, but the books devote enormous space to word problems that have to be answered verbally as well as numerically, some in sections called Write Math. The reason, we are told, is that the Common Core–driven state assessments will contain large numbers of word problems and spaces for students to explain their answers verbally. This prescription immediately dooms grammar-school students who have reading difficulties or are not fluent in English: The mathematical numbers that they could have grasped are now locked into sentences they cannot understand.

The most egregious manifestation of the “writing imperative” is the Four Corners and a Diamond graphic organizer that my sons’ school has implemented to help prepare for the writing portion of the state assessments. The “fourth corner” requires students to explain the problem and solution in multiple sentences. How all this writing helps them with math is yet to be demonstrated.

Hence Common Core looks terribly similar to the failed New Math program, which also emphasized “the why rather than the how, the fundamental concepts that unify the various specialties, from arithmetic to the calculus and beyond, rather than the mechanical manipulations and rule memorizations.” Common Core may not completely eschew the “how,” and it may not be obsessed with binary sets and matrices as New Math was, but it is likely to lose the “how” — the content — in its efforts to move the “why” — the concepts — into the foreground.

The problem is not that students, including those in the primary grades, should not be presented the basic concepts of mathematics — they should be. But there is a difference between learning basic concepts and expressing the intricacies of true mathematical proofs that Common Core desires. Mathematical concepts require a high aptitude for abstract thinking — a skill not possessed by young children and never attained by many. What will happen to students who already struggle with math when they not only are forced to explain what they do not understand, but are presented new material in abstract conceptual formats?

All students must learn to perform the basic mathematical operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in order to function well in society. Knowing why these operations work as they do is a great benefit, but it is not essential. And in mathematics, concepts are often grasped long after students have mastered content — not before.

In trying to learn both the “why” and the “how” in order to prepare for the state assessments, students will not fully grasp either: They will not receive the instructional time needed to learn how to do the operations because teachers will be forced to devote their precious few classroom minutes to explaining concepts, as the assessments require. The “how” of the basic operations, which need to be memorized and practiced over and over, will be insufficiently learned, since Common Core orders teachers to serve two masters.

The result is simple arithmetic: Instead of developing college- and career-ready students, we will have another generation of students who cannot even make change from a $5 bill, all courtesy of the latest set of bureaucrat-promoted standards that promise to save American education.

By giving concept priority over content, Common Core has failed to learn the history lesson from New Math. Students instructed according to Common Core standards will ultimately know neither the “why” nor the “how,” and we will eventually consign these standards to the ever-expanding dustbin of failed educational initiatives, until the next messianic program is unveiled.

And, of course, this doomed educational experiment, like its predecessors, has a high cost: our children’s ability to do math.

— David G. Bonagura Jr. is a teacher and writer in New York. He has written about education for Crisis, The Catholic Thing, The University Bookman, and the Wall Street Journal.

Socialism Its Own Worst Enemy

New York Household Idols To Fall Out of Favour

One of the best cures for a people wedded to the naive ideals and faux justice of socialism is to experience more of it.  New York has long been a “progressive” city: that is, it has a strong proclivity towards big interventionist governments.  The departing Mayor Bloomberg fitted the stereotype really well.  He was nanny state personified, passing rules, regulations, and wowser laws to try and regulate every part of the human anatomy and human behaviour.  New Yorkers grumbled a bit, but basically they loved it.  They loved being bossed and nannied by Sharkey.  It made them feel that all is right with the world. 

Now the electorate has doubled down, electing as mayor a chap who is not just a nannying Big Brother but a dyed in the wool, old-school, long term socialist radical.  De Blasio ticks all their boxes.  So the voters ticked his ballot paper.  New Yorkers are about to get a dose of good old fashioned ideological socialism.  It may help cure them of their folly–at least for a while. 

One thing de Blasio opposes (and campaigned against) is charter schools.
  He is ideologically opposed.  The state always does it better, don’t you know.  Except there is a growing body of hard evidence that charter schools have done extremely well and that all the socialist saws and slurs about them being just another form of class oppression of the poor are ideological claptrap. 

Nina Rees, a charter school advocate,  writing in USA Today summarises the state of play.

New York¹s public charter schools are upending old assumptions about urban education. And they can help even more students if New York¹s incoming mayor lets them.

Earlier this year, Stanford¹s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) revealed that in just one school year, the typical New York City charter school student gained about five additional months of learning in math and one additional month of learning in reading compared with students in traditional public schools.

These gains, repeated year after year, are helping to erase achievement gaps between urban and suburban students. A rigorous 2009 study from Stanford professor Caroline Hoxby found that students who attend New York City¹s charter schools from Kindergarten through 8th grade will make up 86% of the suburban-urban achievement gap in math and 66% of the gap in English.

These are serious advances.  But it is amongst the poor areas (aka ghettoes) that charter schools are achieving their most impressive results.

What makes these results so impressive is that charter schools are not elite private schools. They are tuition-free public schools, funded by taxpayers and open to any student.  New York has roughly 70,000 students enrolled in public charter schools, and the numbers are on the rise. This school year alone, 14,000 new students in the city enrolled in charter schools ­ with the vast majority in low-income neighborhoods.

Remarkably, several charter schools in low-income neighborhoods are showing some of the most impressive achievement gains. For instance, while just 30% of students citywide passed New York¹s new Common Core math exam, 97% of students passed the exam at Bronx Success Academy 2. The passage rate was 80% at Leadership Prep Ocean Hill in Brownsville, a community that has suffered academic failure for generations.

Charter schooling is not magical pixie dust.  Some charter schools are better than others.  Let’s face it: some charter schools fail miserably.  But here is the rub.  In the government run, union controlled schools, miserable failure becomes institutionalised to perpetuity because the state, by definition, cannot fail.  Failing schools demand and always “deserve” more money, more resources, higher pay for teachers–all ostensibly to make the school do better, but in reality, the outcome is a perpetuation of  sub-standard education.  Why?  Socialists are ideologically unable to admit failure or incompetence of state run and controlled activities.  At the bottom line it is state institutions which must succeed–and success is defined as perpetuation, not competence.  It has to be that way because socialist ideology requires it to be so. Voters who ticked De Blasio deserve it all.  Pity about the poor kids who represent collateral damage along the way. 

Like traditional public schools, some charters do under-perform, and the charter school movement is working hard to improve quality at every school. But study after study shows that high-quality charter schools are putting high school graduation and college within reach for many New York City students who once had bleak educational prospects.

Unfortunately, this opportunity could be imperiled. Incoming mayor Bill de Blasio has taken an aggressive anti-charter stance. His main point of contention is that the city¹s charter schools often share buildings with traditional public schools without paying rent.

Mayor Bloomberg introduced “co-location” as a way to turn unused classrooms into productive learning environments. Sharing space also tests the hypothesis that environmental factors make it difficult for children in certain neighborhoods to succeed in school. Charters quickly proved that theory wrong. For example, 88% of third and fourth graders at Success Academy Harlem 5 passed the state math exam. The traditional public school located in the same building only managed to attain a pass rate of 6%.

De Blasio opposes such things on ideological grounds.  Charter schools are not state schools–and therefore are sub-standard in the sense of being evilly unjust.  New Yorkers love him.  We predict they are going to end up hating him.  But for our money the dumb voters who bow, scrape, and genuflect before their statist household idols, and who, therefore, ticked de Blasio, deserve what’s coming down the pike. 

Mayor-elect de Blasio views this space-sharing arrangement as an improper subsidy for charter schools. But the crucial fact here is that charter schools are public schools.  Traditional public schools in New York City don¹t pay rent for their classrooms, and they already receive more funding per student than charter schools do.

Charter schools start with a public-funding disadvantage, and now Mayor-elect de Blasio could put them deeper in the hole­ to the tune of another $3,000 per student ­ by forcing them to pay rent in the city with the highest real-estate costs in the nation.  If he succeeds, it¹s difficult to see any other outcome than fewer charter schools and fewer options for parents desperate to get their children into good schools ­ a tragedy for the 50,000 families who are on charter school wait lists in New York City.

Fifty thousand families on wait lists for charter schools in New York!  Herein lies a tale.  It is a generally true postulate that parents, (not state bureaucrats, unions, and politicians) have a much better grasp and deeper commitment to their children’s educational success.  It is also true that they tend to make far, far better choices in the matter.  But to the ideological socialists such nostrums represent extreme heresy. 

Across the country, charter schools have produced particular academic gains among students in poverty, minority students and students still learning English. The same CREDO study that revealed impressive learning gains among New York City¹s charter school students also showed that, nationwide, black students in poverty who attend charter schools gained the equivalent of 29 extra days of learning in reading each year, and 36 extra days in math, compared to their traditional public schools peers.

Mayor-elect de Blasio made narrowing inequality a central theme of his successful campaign. In his election night victory remarks, he called inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” and said, “we are all at our best when every child, every parent, every New Yorker has a shot.”

What better way to give every child a shot at success than to let schools that are doing a great job educating kids serve even more? As he begins his tenure as New York¹s mayor, those of us in the charter school community wish Bill de Blasio the very best, and ask him to join with us to help give every child in New York City a first-rate education.

Nina Rees is the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Slogans about inequality are standard socialist claptrap.  Socialists always have a certain kind of equality in mind when they thus harangue.  It is an equality deeply rooted in covetousness and envy.  De Blasio reckons that “we are all at our best when every child, every parent, every New Yorker has a shot”.  Ok.  What does that mean? 

Does it mean that every parent should have a shot at getting their children into a school of their preference and choice?  Absolutely not.  That’s not the equality de Blasio has in mind.  He means an equality created by the state, enforced by the state, and promulgated through state institutions.  To the socialist soul, better to have all schools as state schools and everyone in the muck together, equally, than to have some succeeding in non-state controlled education.  Everyone has a right to experience state controlled sub-standard outcomes or failure.  That’s the socialist vision: everyone is better off when all New Yorkers go down the tubes together.  That’s when the city is at de Blasio’s best. 

Welcome to the wonderful world of progressive socialism.  It will likely be instructive to many souls.  It will also likely end in a few household idols being crushed up, ground down, and thrown out.  For the sake of those parents wanting better for their children, let’s hope so.