Saturday, April 02, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO CHINESE FIGHT BUSING

They value education too much to put up with such nonsense

Chinese American families upset over their children's assignments to San Francisco public schools are again holding contentious meetings with school board members, staging protests and considering keeping their kids out of classes when the new school year begins in August. It's a swelling of anger not seen since two years ago, when some families stormed Superintendent Arlene Ackerman's office and police were called. About 25 families kept their children out of school for six weeks in protest then. At issue is the school district's court-ordered desegregation system, scheduled to expire in December, which is intended to give all students a shot at the best schools, regardless of where they live. The process of matching students to schools takes into account a student's top seven choices and the student's socio-economic status. The way it works out is that some students are sent away from their neighborhoods. A third of the district's 57,000 students are Chinese American. Many of them live on the city's west side, home to several of the highest- performing schools, and expect that their addresses will make them a shoo-in to attend those schools.

On Wednesday afternoon, a few dozen parents and children staged a demonstration in front of the school district headquarters on Franklin Street. One of the protesters, Patrick Yu, 48 -- who lives with his wife and 10- year-old son, Hiram, and another family in a home in the Outer Sunset -- wanted his son to attend middle school at A.P. Giannini, Hoover or Presidio. But Hiram was assigned to Aptos near St. Francis Wood -- which would require his taking two Muni buses, Yu said. The families are calling for more seats to be made available at certain schools and a review of the student-placement program to see if it unfairly impacts them.

The day before Wednesday's demonstration, there was a contentious, four- hour meeting between 200 angry parents and Board of Education president Eric Mar. The group is considering a one-week walkout when school starts. The complaints have been heard before, but this year is the perfect time to fight for change, said David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voters Committee. The desegregation system expires and the school board will determine what sort of assignment process it will adopt for the 2006-07 school year. In addition, the school board is now led by President Mar and Vice President Norman Yee, both Chinese Americans. "This year is key year -- a pivotal year -- for the Chinese community, particularly Chinese activists who are interested in this issue, to mobilize, " Lee said.


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MOVEMENT IN MAINE?

College-age Republicans told lawmakers Wednesday that Maine needs a law to make sure divergent political viewpoints are welcome on the campuses of the state's colleges and universities. Supporters of the bill - An Act to Create an Academic Bill of Rights - said such a document would free students and faculty at state-funded schools to express their political or philosophical views without fear of retaliation. The legislation, which is being considered by the Legislature's Education and Cultural Affairs Committee, reflects a belief among political and social conservatives around the country that their views are neglected in classroom and campus discussions. Similar legislation has been proposed in other states in recent years. "I am here today with my fellow College Republicans because I feel you must be made aware of a scary trend occurring on all Maine campuses," said Mia Dow, a member of the College Republicans at the University of Maine, Orono. "I have been taunted, sworn at and humiliated beyond the realm of imagination, and I am sick of this treatment," she said. Testimony continued late into the evening as legislators, professors and other young Republicans from campuses around the state spoke in favor of the bill. The committee is expected to discuss the bill in a workshop before voting on it.

Opponents said such a bill could stifle discussion on controversial topics. Allen Berger, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at the University of Maine at Farmington, said requiring faculty to abide by "definitions imposed by outsiders and possibly measured by political standards that diverge from academic criteria would be to severely constrain their academic freedom."

But Jon Reisman, professor at the University of Maine at Machias, supported the bill. Colleges around the state have made strides in the last decade to combat discrimination in areas of gender and ethnicity, he said, but intellectual diversity is now at risk. "We don't have intellectual pluralism on our campuses today and the research shows it," he said. Students feel they face the possibility of bad grades if their political or religious views differ with that of a teacher, said Melissa Simones, a junior at Bates College in Lewiston.

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Stephen Bowen, R-Rockport, said the goal of any university is to expose students to a variety of experiences and ideas. The bill of rights would require universities to establish procedures for hearing complaints of discrimination based on a person's political and social beliefs. It also would prohibit colleges from considering such beliefs in hiring or firing of faculty. One committee member, Rep. Connie Goldman, D-Cape Elizabeth, said hiring and firing decisions are not always that clear-cut. "How much of this is plain out bad teaching and how much is a personal bias," she said.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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Friday, April 01, 2005

ANTI-CHRISTIAN SCHOOL DISTRICT LOSES A ROUND

A federal grand jury punished a public school superintendent for rejecting a vice-principal applicant because she refused to remove her children from a private Christian school. The jury unanimously said the constitutional rights of Karen Jo Barrow were violated and ordered former Greenville, Texas, Independent School District Superintendent Herman Smith to pay back wages of $15,000 and $20,000 in punitive damages. "This is truly a victory for every teacher and administrator in America," said Kelly Shackelford, chief counsel for Texas-based Liberty Legal Institute. "The jury sent a strong message that this type of behavior is not permitted within school districts."

Barrow claimed she was denied the opportunity to interview for the job because Smith insisted she remove her children from Greenville Christian School.

The teacher said she would use the awarded money to fund college scholarships for Greenville ISD and Greenville Christian School graduates who pursue education degrees.

Shackelford argued "American children are not children of the state. They're the children of the parents." "One of the most fundamental rights every parent has is the right to decide how to bring up and educate their children and whether they want to put them in a Christian school, public school or whatever school they feel is best for their own children," he said.

Source




Florida: Bush outlines expanded voucher proposal : "Gov. Jeb Bush advocated a dramatic expansion of school vouchers Wednesday that could affect thousands of students, calling the proposal for struggling readers 'as American as apple pie.' Bush estimated that the reading vouchers, if approved by state lawmakers, would be used by only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of eligible students. ... Bush put the proposal to state lawmakers even with the constitutionality of his groundbreaking voucher law still unsettled. When Bush became governor six years ago, that voucher law was a centerpiece of his first legislative agenda. The day after he signed the bill into law in 1999, opponents went to court to challenge the measure."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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Thursday, March 31, 2005

WHEN ANY REAL DISCIPLINARY MEASURES ARE FORBIDDEN.....

THe UK disaster continues

Teachers across the country are enduring a daily diet of verbal and physical abuse from children as young as 5 as discipline in schools worsens across the country, the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers heard yesterday. Voting unanimously to expel violent and disruptive pupils permanently from schools, the NASUWT members said that being sworn at, punched, stabbed with compasses and breaking up fights were now the stuff of daily life in many schools. The vote, by the country's second-largest teaching union, came after David Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools, gave warning last month of a growing discipline crisis in schools.

David Ward, a teacher from Sheffield who moved the motion, painted a picture of worsening discipline in schools up and down the country. In one school, children were spitting at teachers from the third floor, while at another, he said, the fire alarm had been set off 40 times in one day. "There is a picture of an increasing amount of ill- discipline, sometimes low-level, often not, of ineffective school policies and of unsupportive school management teams," Mr Ward said.

Members said that the abuse was not restricted to secondary schools and that some primary school heads were appearing to reward unruly behaviour. Ralph Robins, a primary school liaison officer in Cornwall, said that one pupil who had consistently verbally abused staff and refused to follow orders had been given alternative activities, such as model-making and playing on the computer.

Source





AMERICAN KIDS NEED INDIAN TEACHERS

If the schools did their job properly in the first place there would be no need for it

The failure of some American students to master math is adding up to big bucks for tutoring companies in India. A little-known provision in the federal No Child Left Behind law allows federal taxpayer dollars to flow to online tutoring services several time zones away in places such as New Delhi and Calcutta. Those services typically contract with U.S. tutoring companies, which provide them the computer software and set the lesson plan.

Few would begrudge using public money to give struggling students extra help. But some U.S. teachers decry the offering of instruction to Indian firms that pay full-time, college-educated tutors as little as $230 a month. They also complain that while the law requires teachers to be fully certified, private tutors have no such requirement. "We are seeing teachers being laid off," said Nancy Van Meter of the American Federation of Teachers. "Given that situation, it's hard to understand why our tax dollars are being used to create jobs overseas."

The Indian tutoring companies say they are simply filling a market void by providing after-hours services with which some U.S. teachers don't want to be bothered, said Anirudh Phadke, an official with New Delhi-based Career Launcher. The firm, which also serves students in the Middle East, tutors about 1,500 American students in math alone. "We have a lot of good teachers over here willing to do this full time," Phadke said during a telephone interview. "It's a good opportunity."

Because well-known online tutoring services, such as Sylvan Online, subcontract with firms such as Career Launcher, it's hard to say how many students are spending their money on Indian tutors.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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Wednesday, March 30, 2005

No Cop-Out Left Behind

The federal No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to improve public schools by setting clear performance standards and enforcing meaningful consequences if those standards went unmet. This was such a wonderful-sounding idea that the NCLB was ushered into law with unprecedented bipartisan support.

Another reason for the law's broad appeal is its lack of specificity. The federal government demands that states set standards, but doesn't dictate their content. The feds insist that schools make "adequate yearly progress," but leave the definition of that term to the states. In other words, NCLB is a politician's dream: It provides an opportunity to be seen as doing something, without necessarily having to do anything.

Michigan is living that dream. Earlier this month, the state Board of Education voted unanimously to redefine the term "adequate yearly progress" so that only 762 schools will be expected to fall below the standard next year instead of the 1,444 expected to fail under the current definition. The state board must now seek approval of their change from the U.S. Department of Education, which they are likely to get.

The official justification for lowering Michigan's education standards is to allow for "statistical error" in the determination of which schools are failing. In other words, if there is a slight chance that a borderline school could be considered "adequate," the Board wants to exempt it from having to follow the improvement measures required under the NCLB. Acting State Superintendent of Schools Jeremy Hughes told The Ann Arbor News, "For the purposes of meeting AYP, we're going to give schools the benefit of the doubt."

Rather than giving children the benefit of the doubt, by insisting on NCLB remedies whenever schools seem to be failing, Michigan's top public school officials want to give schools the benefit of the doubt.

If the education feds approve Michigan's plan, it won't be the first time the state will have redefined "adequacy." In the summer of 2002, 1,513 schools failed to meet Michigan's standards. Notwithstanding federal assurances that states couldn't just dumb-down their standards to circumvent the NCLB, Michigan did just that. It lowered the bar, requiring as few as 38 percent of students to pass the MEAP in order for a school to be considered "adequate" (in place of the original 75 percent requirement). Under this new definition, the number of "failing" schools dropped from 1,513 to just 216.

Consider what might happen if McDonald's followed the Michigan Board of Education's management model. It could lower its standards for the definition of an "adequately cooked" burger, with ample allowance for "culinary error." If it looked like a patty showed some sign of having been exposed to heat, then McDonald's would give itself "the benefit of the doubt," slap it on a bun and right into your hands. Mmmmmmmm.

Given the lengths to which the state Board of Education is going to circumvent NCLB's remedies, or at least to minimize the number of schools to which they are applied, you might imagine that those remedies are truly Draconian. Hardly. Schools that fail to make AYP must simply come up with and implement an improvement plan, and allow students to attend other public schools. Not private schools, mind you, just other public schools. If the school still fails to perform in subsequent years, it can theoretically be restructured, and its staff reassigned.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of the NCLB saga is that even if states were not doing their best to elude its consequences, it would still do next to nothing to improve public education. Getting schools to write up improvement plans? How much difference will that make? The Soviet Union had more "Five Year Plans" than you could shake a stick at, but that didn't prevent the collapse of its government-run economy.

As for restructuring, it is nothing more than a game of musical chairs. Even in the most recidivistically deficient schools, NCLB never calls for a single employee to be let go. They'll just get plunked down in other schools. Maybe in your school.

And public school "choice"? Breaking a monopoly requires more than allowing consumers to move to another of the same monopoly's outlets. When the Supreme Court ruled that Microsoft was a monopoly, what would the public have said if the court's remedy was for consumers to simply switch to buying different Microsoft products?

Though setting real standards and implementing real consequences in education truly is a wonderful idea, federal intervention is a misguided and embarrassingly anachronistic way of going about it. Rather than taking our cue from the government-devised Five Year Plans of a now-defunct communist state, perhaps there is another model for creating healthy incentives for effective, efficient, responsive service. Wasn't there another economic system that went up against communism back in the 20th century? And didn't it seem to work out pretty well by comparison?

Source






Why not a free market in education? "After more than a century of existence, public schooling is an abject failure in terms of educating children and inspiring a love of learning among them. While many people have been able to survive the public-schooling ordeal, many others have been severely damaged by the process, even to the extent of having their pre-school awe of the universe and thirst for knowledge pounded out of them by time they graduate 12 years later. Gates sees the problem. When it comes to the solution, however, his mind remains mired within the public-school paradigm, leading him to fall into the same reform trap that bedevils so many others."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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Tuesday, March 29, 2005

NCLB REQUIREMENTS BEING EVADED -- VOUCHERS NEEDED INSTEAD

As President George W. Bush began his second term, education policy-makers were wondering whether he would spend some of his political capital on further expanding school choice or instead invest it wholly on extending the testing regimen of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) into the nation's high schools. During his first term, Bush used federal power and his bully pulpit to advance parental choice more than any previous president had done. The president championed a pilot program of vouchers to enable children in some of Washington, DC's worst public schools to transfer to private schools; backed Education Savings Account tax breaks for families saving for children's K-12 tuition; and pushed for NCLB-mandated public school choice or free tutoring for children stuck in low-performing schools. In his second Inaugural Address, on January 20, Bush vowed to "bring the highest standards to our schools and build an ownership society."

However, Bush's early emphasis since the election appeared to be more on toughening standards than on stressing ways for families to take ownership of their schools through choice. At a pre-Inaugural talk at a public high school in northern Virginia, the president unveiled a proposed $1.5 billion initiative to beef up reading and math standards in high schools. Bush told J.E.B. Stuart High School students, teachers, and staff his initiative would enable high school teachers to analyze test data and determine which ninth-graders were at risk of falling too far behind to graduate. To ensure the intervention is successful, Bush said, he wants to test ninth-, 10th-, and 11th-grade students in reading and math, as NCLB now requires in grades 3-8. "Listen, I've heard every excuse in the book not to test," Bush commented. "My answer is, how do you know if a child is learning if you don't test? We've got money in the budget to help the states implement the tests. There should be no excuse saying, well, it's an unfunded mandate. Forget it--it will be funded."

Nevertheless, expanding NCLB-required testing will not be an easy sell on the political left or the right. Teacher unions continue to attack testing as part of their strategy of opposing greater accountability and NCLB in particular. Several state legislatures, some of them Republican-controlled, also have balked at current federal requirements, threatening to pull out of NCLB and forfeit federal aid or to seek exemption from testing. For education reformers leery of increased government involvement, NCLB's boosting of choice could be seen as a positive trade-off. As Bush told his Stuart High audience, "Accountability systems don't work unless there are consequences. And so in the No Child Left Behind Act, if a school fails to make progress, parents have options. They can send their child to free after-school tutoring, or they can send their child to a different public school."

Unfortunately, the public school choice option remains more of a promise than a reality. In December, a 55-page General Accounting Office (GAO) report found less than 1 percent of students eligible under NLCB to transfer to better-performing public schools actually did so. The GAO said thousands of students were denied choice because their districts determined there was no space for them, even though federal education officials had said claims of limited capacity could not be used to deny students choice. The GAO also found many local school bureaucracies failed to inform parents of their educational options until after a school year had begun.

Bush's original blueprint had a far more robust choice mechanism: converting NCLB aid to school systems into vouchers enabling students in deficient public schools to select private schools. However, prominent members of Congress from both parties insisted the voucher provisions be eliminated at the start of NCLB deliberations early in 2001. Early signs are that the Bush administration currently values bipartisan support for NCLB over a tough fight for vouchers.

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TEACHER AT FAMOUS BRITISH PRIVATE SCHOOL DOWNPLAYS EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT

It may indeed be true that school marks are not the best predictor of success at university. IQ and similar tests do seem to be the best predictors of subsequent educational achievement (as Eton itself has found) -- so why not use such tests to determine university entry if "potential" is to be assessed independently of school performance? Since minorities mostly do badly on IQ tests that won't happen -- showing that it is not really an assessment of "potential" but rather social levelling that is the aim of the exercise

All universities should require significantly higher grades from applicants from leading independent schools because of the quality of education they receive, a senior teacher at Eton said yesterday. It would be unjust if parents were buying entry to elite universities for their children rather than the opportunity for their children to reach their academic potential, he said. "I would feel it totally wrong if an independent school were getting a higher proportion of pupils into Oxford and Cambridge than their real ability merits," said David Townend.

Mr Townend, 58, an assistant master, admitted that his remarks would be unpopular with some parents. They would also be controversial at a time when the heads of independent schools feared that their students could miss out as universities strive to meet the Government's targets for increasing the number of state school entrants. But Mr Townend, who has taught chemistry at the Berkshire school for 37 years, said social justice demanded that universities follow Bristol's example of taking school background into account when sending out their offers of places. He proposed a motion which was overwhelmingly passed by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers at its annual conference in Torquay committing it to campaign for entry to higher education to be on potential alone. The union voted to encourage universities to make allowance in the selection procedures for a variety of educational provision experienced by individual candidates at school or college. "It must be right that pupils from Eton should be required to achieve significantly higher grades than someone who has not had the benefits we at Eton can provide," Mr Townend said.

Universities have been given "benchmark" targets by the Higher Education Funding Council for increasing the proportion of state educated pupils they admit. The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service is also changing the application form to include questions indicating a candidate's school and social background. This month the London School of Economics admitted that it sets aside 40 places which are available only to applicants from low-achieving state schools.

Mr Townend told the conference of teachers from state and independent schools that he would not want to see universities set quotas for state school pupils, which would be unfair. However, research had shown that teachers in the independent sector tended to overestimate the grades their pupils would achieve at the end of their courses while those in the state sector underestimated them. It would be much fairer for pupils to apply to university only after they had received their results, argued Mr Townend, who said that he believed passionately in social justice. "I emphatically state that entry to university should be on potential alone. "Oxbridge asks for three As and many good universities from the Russell group ask for 3 Bs from Eton. I see no reason why they should not offer much lower grades from schools without such good results."

Last year Eton introduced psychometric tests designed by Durham University for all applicants at the age of 11 and they had been used to measure the potential of junior scholars. Early indications were that the tests were a good measure of ability and potential, he said.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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Monday, March 28, 2005

A GLIMMER OF SENSE FROM CALIFORNIA

News reports point to CSU forum this week with African-American leaders, in which they try to figure out why a disproportionately small percentage of African-Americans attend the university system. This comes against the backdrop of a Harvard report showing that only 57 percent of African-American students graduate with their class. I wasn't at the conference, and am relying on news reports. But the quotations from some leaders suggesting that the problem is, in essence, a marketing one is delusionary. It's not a matter of insufficient scholarships, as one CSU official told the Times. The problem is a massive failure of the public education system, a system that is more committed to the interests of union members than to providing quality education.

When I debated the OC school superintendent at a Center Club luncheon, I made an admittedly radical and ideological argument: Why not shut down the public schools and let the marketplace provide education? We don't let the government build our cars (i.e., Yugo), but rely on the private sector (i.e., Toyota). Why should we be surprised that government creates mediocrity at best, and horrors at worst? The usual retort is that this would be unfair to poor kids. Yet it's the inner city and poor kids who suffer the most under our one-size fits-all, government monopoly. Most of us in the middle class can afford to move to neighborhoods with decent schools, so most of us are oblivious to how bad the education system is at many levels. But even the schools we think are good would no doubt be shamed if a true competitive marketplace was developed. The big policy question is whether school vouchers offer real hope for moving in that direction.

Source




DO LITTLE KIDS NEED TO LEARN ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY?

The Australian State of New South Wales is as bad as California these days

Children as young as six are being taught about same-sex parents in books about "Jed and his Dads" distributed in state primary schools. The books -- now the subject of an investigation ordered by Premier Bob Carr yesterday - are being used as a "learning aid" for kindergarten and early primary school students. The taxpayer funded books -- written by Brenna Harding, 8, and her lesbian mother Vicki -- who featured in the My Two Mums segment on Playschool -- are aimed at students in kindergarten, Year 1 and Year 2.

Nationals leader Andrew Stoner yesterday said the books are another example of "political correctness gone mad". Earlier this month it was revealed the term "Before Christ" (BC) was removed from literacy test history books and replaced with "Before Common Era" (BCE). Mr Stoner said the two books robbed parents of their right to choose when they wanted their children to be "exposed to this sort of material".

The books were produced by Learn to Include -- a non-profit program run by the Gay and Lesbian Counselling Service of NSW -- and funded by the NSW Attorney-Generals Department, which provided $33,000 over two years. They are also accompanied by a teacher's manual, developed with the assistance of the NSW Department of Education. The books were launched last month at a party hosted by the Teachers' Federation and the NSW Anti-Homophobia Interagency, with entertainment provided by Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Big Band.

Mr Stoner yesterday called on Premier Bob Carr to immediately ban the books being used in primary schools. "The books are clearly inappropriate for young children and are an outrageous attempt to brainwash our kids," Mr Stoner said yesterday. [Parents] want their children to be allowed to grow up at their own pace and find out about same sex relationships at a more appropriate time. This is not the sort of stuff that young five and six-year-old children ought to be exposed to."

According to latest census figures, fewer than 40,000 Australian gay and lesbian couples have children.

Christian Democrats MP Reverend Fred Nile said yesterday the books are nothing more than "homosexual propaganda aimed at brainwashing children at such a sensitive age". "It's a disgrace," Mr Nile said. "Kids at that age are innocent until you start putting these ideas into their heads."

Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt said yesterday the books are not part of the official school syllabus and it was up to the school and parents whether they wanted them used in the classrooms. The Parents and Citizens Association said any parent offended by the books' content should speak to their school's principal.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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Sunday, March 27, 2005

CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE JUST GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS

To me, learning is one of the more exciting aspects of life. That interest has been a handicap because I have difficulty working with stiff, bureaucratic organizations and putting up with politically-afficted decisions. Unfortunately, almost all of American education is controlled by such organizations.

Last week, with my naivet‚ in hand and my skepticism on hold, I attended a meeting about charter schools. I guess that I had some blind hope that charter schools might have the freedom to be able to avoid the constrictions that teachers and students face in traditional public school systems. The session was organized by a non-profit group that acts as a paid consultant to help charter schools get organized, approved, and hopefully, become successful. Their consulting contract is available for about $100,000 over a 5-year period. I suspect their help is well worth that cost. They have a staff of people who are experienced in starting charter schools... people who have successfully navigated through the process. They assist about a half-dozen new schools each year. That there is such a consulting group, and that their guidance is worth $100K toward getting a charter school going is, in itself, pretty revealing...

Let me make my attitude very clear. Children are going to learn if they're given half a chance. They're going to learn from whatever they're exposed to, and they'll hunt for such exposure. Learning is as natural to kids as crawling, then walking, and then running. Learning is easy... education isn't.

Charter schools ARE public schools. They get federal financing and get paid like any other public school, and operate by much the same rules. They cannot choose their students, but must convince parents to move their kids from some other school. They have somewhat more autonomy in the way they run their school, but are still subject to the education bureaucracy.

One of the meeting participants seeking to start a charter school said that she had been home schooling her children. I asked her why she wanted to move from home schooling to opening a charter school. Her response was that other parents were asking her to teach their children too. Consider - this mother, teaching her own children, is deemed, by some other parents, to be an educator preferred over the public schools already paid for and available to them. She must be doing something right... something that is obvious to those who know her and her children. What a condemnation of our public schools... that an untrained parent can be preferred over the government schools that have been in full operation for decades, touting their expertise and caring professionalism. In case you're not aware, home schooling is growing rapidly, and with demonstrated success.....

Starting a charter school is NOT like starting a typical small business. It has most of the difficulties of a small business start-up, plus the bloating and constrictions typical of making something happen THROUGH government rather than AROUND it....

Minnesota had the first charter school legislation in the nation, and the first charter school, City Academy of St. Paul, is in its 12th year of operation. There are 104 Minnesota charter schools, with about 17,000 students. There are over 3,000 charter schools nationally. There is little doubt in my mind that the presence of charter schools is an improvement over having just traditional public schools. They add choices to the mixture. Unfortunately, charter schools also add to the monopoly of government-controlled schools. The growth of charter schools does prove one thing... there is no shortage of people who are dissatisfied with the current schools and are willing to start new schools to compete with them.

If the government education monopoly ever became courageous enough to be willing to compete with private schools on a level playing field, all of those inspired, determined people working hard now to open charter schools would be able to open private schools and really educate the way they WANT TO, without jumping through the governmental hoops. At that point, education might again become more synonymous with learning.

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MERIT PAY NEEDS A FREE MARKET TO WORK

It should surprise no one that Gov. Schwarzenegger wants to pay California teachers based on job performance. He has firsthand experience with merit pay, having earned millions for muscular box office appeal in his former career. Merit pay is a simple and sound idea. Reward people for teaching better, and you will have better teachers. It seems to work in other professions.

But public school teachers are the only professionals whose customers cannot leave without great effort. Certainly, they cannot take their education dollars with them. Measuring merit without a competitive market is like landing a plane in a snowstorm without instruments. What makes a teacher good, and who should decide? In the film industry, moviegoers decide which actors are entertaining. And when agents scout new talent, their choices are informed by recent successes. Clients decide which lawyers are effective. The strongest cases find their way to the best attorneys, who then hire associates and train them similarly.

But with parents' hands tied and checkbooks hijacked, public schools can't consult their preferences when they decide which teachers have merit. Political determinations of "merit" can easily go astray. Other states' experiments with teacher merit pay show how quickly such efforts may lose their bearings. Merit inflation is one common problem. Decades of union pay scales and job security have engendered an A-for-effort and cookies for everyone teaching culture. When Texas and Tennessee adopted merit pay, principals insisted that all their teachers were above average, which forced those states to shut down their programs as too expensive. On the other hand, capping awards would invite administrators to hand out the bonuses to their favorites. It would be ironic, but not unlikely, if merit pay became another opportunity for political patronage.

To avoid such pitfalls, the governor suggested tying merit pay to student performance on standardized tests. But this is both more complicated and less objective than it sounds. The system can't simply reward high scores. If it did, it would favor teachers in wealthy neighborhoods whose students came to school with excellent skills. Nor can the system reward only improvement. If it did, it would unfairly penalize teachers whose students were already scoring too well to post large gains. Moreover, any money for test results scheme will worsen the problem of teachers cheating on standardized tests to avoid the consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act. Teachers willing to erase wrong answers on exams to avoid having their school labeled "needing improvement" will also be tempted by the thought of a personal raise.

But the governor should not give up on merit pay. Instead, he should tie his merit pay proposal to the expansion of school choice in California. School choice and merit pay are the twin beacons of market-based reform. Schwarzenegger has already proposed expanding California's charter school system. If he wants his reforms to succeed, these two proposals should not be separated. Merit pay will prod teachers toward excellence, and parents, through their choices, will show school administrators what merit should mean. A school voucher program would be even better for this purpose. "The governor feels that unless you hold people accountable in the public sector the way you did in the private sector, you're not going to get very far," Education Secretary Richard Riordan has said.

The governor is right. But merit pay works in the private sector because companies are accountable to their customers. If parents remain consigned to tourist class, a new merit pay system in public schooling may do little to smooth a bumpy ride.

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Idealistic Berkeley teachers: "Berkeley teachers, demanding a pay raise after two years without one, are refusing to work any more hours than their contract requires, and the impact is being felt throughout the school district. Kids within the Berkeley Unified School District are not being assigned written homework because teachers won't grade papers on their own time. A black history event was canceled Friday evening. And parents had to staff a middle-school science fair one recent night. 'I find it depressing,' said Rachel Baker, whose 5-year-old son attends kindergarten at Emerson Elementary School. 'Teachers do a lot with a little. All of a sudden, a lot of things that they do are just gone. It's demoralizing.' Baker said her son's teacher stopped sending home reading assignments and notes to parents. Last week, Emerson canceled its black history month celebration. Teachers said it is difficult to give less to their students."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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