Friday, December 12, 2014


Alleged gang rape at UVA

The Leftmedia have a story to tell, and they’re generally not going to let facts get in the way. This truth came in to stark relief with Friday’s massive correction Rolling Stone issued to its November report on a gang rape at the University of Virginia.

The correction was so big, it may be easier to recount what the original report got right than what it got wrong. A quick recap:

A UVA student given the name “Jackie” recounted how a man Rolling Stone calls “Drew” and his fellow fraternity brothers raped her at a party. But among numerous other errors, it turns out Drew belongs to a different fraternity than the one in question, and there was no party the night Jackie says she was raped. Much trouble would have been avoided had reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely not acceded to Jackie’s request not to interview the accused because she feared retribution. Bad decision.

The story was evidently too good to check because it fit the narrative of a widespread “rape culture” supposedly evidenced by the epidemic of sexual assault on campuses around the country. In fact, Erdely went around looking for just the right story to support that narrative. We’ve already questioned the breadth of the epidemic itself, and Rolling Stone’s shoddy and reckless journalism hardly does anything to correct the record, much less help true victims of rape.

Jackie may have been raped, and just because some of the facts were wrong doesn’t mean all of them were. And it should go without saying that this doesn’t invalidate other rape accusations. But truth cannot be a casualty of narrative.

Other media outlets swallowed Rolling Stone’s original story hook, line and sinker, leading to a cascading effect turning a lie into a legend. Media often blindly take up a cause célèbre in pursuit of ratings and the almighty advertising dollar. (We note that this is one reason The Patriot Post doesn’t accept advertising, instead relying on the support of our readers for our sustenance.)

It’s noteworthy that, just like the Jonathan Gruber videos, the UVA story began to fall apart because of the efforts of an independent blogger.

Worked into a tizzy by Rolling Stone’s story, feminists hammered “rape apologists” who dared ask questions. To them, men accused of rape are guilty until proven innocent. And to many of them, they’d even rather cling to a false story than admit men are innocent.

That recalls the response to rape accusations against Duke University’s lacrosse team several years ago. Those likewise proved to be false, though only after the reputations of those young men were destroyed.

Nevertheless, UVA students protested, while university president Teresa Sullivan responded to the allegations by shutting down activities at all fraternities and sororities. When Rolling Stone essentially retracted the story, Sullivan didn’t apologize for overreacting – she doubled down. “Over the past two weeks,” she said in a statement, “our community has been more focused than ever on one of the most difficult and critical issues facing higher education today: sexual violence on college campuses. Today’s news must not alter this focus.”

Reason Contributing Editor Cathy Young concludes: “Commentators across the political spectrum have expressed concern that Rolling Stone’s sloppy journalism will damage what Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle calls ‘the righteous fight for rape victims.’ But despite its righteous goals, the crusade against rape has leaned too far toward promoting the dangerous idea that accusation equals guilt and that to doubt an accuser’s word is heresy. Finding the balance between supporting victims and preserving the presumption of innocence is a difficult line to walk. Perhaps the lessons of the UVA story will help steer the way toward such a balance.”

In Young’s separate analysis of the Obama administration’s Department of Education push to have colleges and universities more vigorously prosecute sexual assault, she writes, “The Department of Education has recommended that colleges use the lowest burden of proof – ‘preponderance of the evidence,’ which means a finding of guilt if one feels the evidence tips even slightly toward the complainant. Missing is virtually any recognition of the need for fairness to the accused.”

Bottom line: Sexual assault allegations should be investigated and prosecuted by qualified law enforcement agencies, not on the pages of Rolling Stone or other pop media outlets

SOURCE






Welcome to TotCare: Obama's Preschool Takeover

The wheels on the bus go ‘round and 'round, just like the endless cycles of big, bad government programs to federalize preschool and daycare.

On Wednesday, the White House Summit on Early Education will unveil nearly $1 billion in new “investments” to “expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America” from “birth and continuing to age 5.” It’s a retread of President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union school-spending plan, which was a repackaging of his 2011 Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge program.

Those Obama initiatives are knockoffs of moldy-old Democratic policy chestnuts, such as former Vice President Al Gore’s push to fund preschool for all 3-year-olds at a cost to taxpayers of at least $50 billion over 10 years, left-wing actor/director Rob Reiner’s “I Am Your Child” campaign for universal preschool and child care, and Hillary Clinton’s various “It Takes a Village” schemes to expand Head Start from womb to work. With age comes fiefdom.

How could anybody be against tax-subsidized Pre-K for all, you say? Let me count the ways.

Every one of these Big Babysitter boondoggles rests on “progressive” junk science. The Obama White House asserts that “studies show that for every dollar we invest in early childhood education, we see a rate of return of $7 or more.” Balderdash. This discredited claim rests on results of the tiny Perry Preschool Project in Michigan, run at a cost of $19,000 per child more than a half-century ago, and a similar program in North Carolina called the Abecedarian Early Intervention Project.

As David Armor of the libertarian Cato Institute noted in a thorough review of the scientific literature this fall, the “groups studied were very small, they came from single communities several decades ago, and both programs were far more intensive than the programs being contemplated today.”

More recent research by the Brookings Institution’s Russ Whitehurst found that the vaunted academic benefits of full-time Pre-K in Georgia and Oklahoma “have had, at best, only small impacts on later academic achievement.” In fact, Georgia elementary school students’ test scores are mediocre, and Oklahoma test scores have been on the decline for the past decade. A 2010 Department of Health and Human Services report, which assessed approximately 5,000 3- and 4-year-olds who were randomly assigned to either a control group or a group that had access to the federal Head Start program, concluded that “at the end of kindergarten and first grade … the Head Start children and the control group children were at the same level on many of the measures studied.”

In 2012, government researchers reported “little evidence of systematic differences in children’s elementary school experiences through 3rd grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group.” The federal investments in early childhood programs keep ballooning, yet the educational impacts are dubious at best.

Then there’s the alarming encroachment of data miners into the lives of parents and their young children. As I’ve reported previously, Common Core-aligned assessment systems such as Teaching Strategies Gold in Colorado and California’s “Desired Results Developmental Profile” are stockpiling massive amounts of information on preschoolers' social, emotional, physical, language and cognitive development. The collection of data and accompanying assessment inevitably dictate the content in the classroom. TS Gold, which integrates its results into the vast network of statewide longitudinal data systems, raked in $30 million in federal Race to the Top subsidies in 2012. The latest round of Obama’s “Preschool Development Grants” and “Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership Awards” require applicants to plug into this insatiable data machine, as well as “linking” and “partnering” with a plethora of other government programs.

After attending TS Gold training sessions last year, Cindee Will, principal of the James Irwin Charter Academy in Colorado Springs, calculated that compliance, not including taking and uploading photos of students as required, would soak up at least 16.5 hours of kindergarten class time per week or 640 hours a year of instruction in class. Test administration four times a year for an average of 25 students, she told me, would mean “150 hours per year or 2.5 months: one quarter of our time. And this equation is done with the knowledge that our K program is a half-day program!”

As you might imagine, the administrative and financial burdens on small, privately run part-time preschool programs would be even more onerous. Fatal. And exactly as planned.

Think Obamacare is bad? Well, welcome to TotCare. The goal of the educational central planners, you see, is the elimination of competition. The fact is that the vast majority of Pre-K kids are already happily enrolled in early childhood programs outside of Fed Ed’s clutches. The “problem” isn’t most families' lack of access to preschool. It’s Washington’s lack of access to your kids for their institutionalized warehousing, data mining and pedagogical propaganda schemes. The Nanny State’s ceaseless quest for control keeps creepily rolling along.

SOURCE





UK: A Sikh Principal, Too English for a Largely Muslim School

As a Sikh and second-generation Briton running a public school made up mostly of Muslim students, Balwant Bains was at the center of the issues facing multicultural Britain, including the perennial question of balancing religious precepts and cultural identity against assimilation.

But in January, Mr. Bains stepped down as the principal of the Saltley School and Specialist Science College, saying he could no longer do the job in the face of relentless criticism from the Muslim-dominated school board. It had pressed him, unsuccessfully, to replace some courses with Islamic and Arabic studies, segregate girls and boys and drop a citizenship class on tolerance and democracy in Britain.

“I suppose I was a threat, giving these children more British values, for them to be integrated into society,” Mr. Bains said in his first interview since the controversy over his departure.

His experience has helped bring to life the often deeply emotional and highly contentious conflicts unearthed by a British government investigation this year into whether organized groups of conservative Muslims were having undue influence on public schools.

The topic has become especially sensitive at a time when Britain is concerned about the radicalization of young Muslims in the country and their involvement with jihadis in Syria and Iraq. The investigation was prompted by an anonymous letter, sent last year to local officials in Birmingham, alleging an organized Islamic takeover of British schools in Muslim neighborhoods.

Conducted by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, or Ofsted, the inquiry found the allegations to be overstated. But the agency found much that was troubling about Muslim efforts to promote changes in secular public schools, and it has recently widened its investigation to 46 schools across the country.

The investigation found that five schools in Birmingham, including Mr. Bains’s, shared a pattern of behavior similar to what was described in the anonymous letter. The letter also cited Mr. Bains’s impending resignation, a month before it was made official and which only a few knew about, suggesting that the author was someone with detailed knowledge of the schools.

“The Sikh head running a Muslim school,” the letter said, “will soon be sacked and we will move in.”

The investigation found that some teachers and school board governors at the other schools were encouraging homophobia, anti-Semitism and support for Al Qaeda, sometimes inviting speakers who endorsed the establishment of a state run under Sharia law.

One school stopped music and drama lessons as well as Christmas and Diwali celebrations, and subsidized trips to Saudi Arabia for Muslim students.

In another school, the report found, girls and female teachers were discriminated against, and compulsory sex education, including discussions about forced marriage, was banned. Girls and boys seen talking for too long or considered flirtatious were reprimanded, while boys were given worksheets that said a wife had to obey her husband.

The report, released in July, highlighted Mr. Bains’s case and concluded that there had been a “coordinated, deliberate and sustained action, carried out by a number of associated individuals, to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos into a few schools in Birmingham.”

Muhammad Khan, the chairman of the board of governors at the time, who is no longer at the school, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Three governors who were also present at meetings with Mr. Bains also refused to comment on his allegations.

Muslim leaders in Britain have condemned the report’s findings, saying it was wrong to conflate conservative Muslim practices with an alleged agenda to Islamicize school systems.

Mr. Bains, 47, was born to Indian immigrants in a suburb of Coventry notorious for prostitution and violent crime. He grew up listening to stories of how his father, a teacher in Punjab State, walked 30 miles each day to and from school. He would study by candlelight because his village had no electricity. After arriving in Britain and securing work as a laborer, he put his son and daughters through college.

“It made me value education more, and because it is free in this country,” Mr. Bains said. “I lifted myself out of poverty because of education. If I could do it, if I could break the cycle, other children could, too.”  His background, he said, is that “I’m an inclusionist.”

He added that he saw his role as being to “educate children to live and function in a multicultural Britain, to be appreciative of the views of other people, but also to express themselves.”

In 2012, he became head teacher of Saltley, a school where grades were falling behind the national average. In spite of his ordeal throughout 2013, the school achieved its best General Certificate of Secondary Education grades ever — roughly equivalent to the high school diploma in America. Britain’s school inspectorate judged the school as one of the most improved state schools that year.

“But I never got a single congratulation” from the school’s governing board, a mix of elected parents and other people from the community and members appointed to represent the staff and the local government, Mr. Bains said. “It was emotional harassment.”

The chairman of the governing board took to challenging his day-to-day decision making, Mr. Bains said. In one instance he was required to justify every decision he made during a three-month period, Mr. Bains said, including why he had students walk on the right side of the corridor instead of the left, what he said at assemblies and why he made changes to the school website. He had to print and distribute the resulting 300-page document to each of the 15 members of the governing board.

When a student threatened six classmates with a knife, he expelled the boy, a Muslim, in a decision supported by parents and the local authority. But governors reinstated the boy. Because Mr. Bains did not suspend another student, a white boy who had surrendered the weapon, talk spread among staff that he was racist and Islamophobic. He discovered a Facebook post and text messages calling on parents and students to protest against him, he said, and later learned that the message had even been circulated among local mosques.

“Some of the children would come in and tell me, ‘Mr. Bains, they’re going to egg your car today, so you better move your car,’ ” he said. “I felt very isolated, I was despondent. I was a head teacher going into work without any power.”

The treatment, he said, lasted 11 months, beginning just two months after he was appointed head teacher, until he resigned.

By then, all non-Muslim governors except one at his school had left. He was immediately replaced by a friend of the chairman of the board of governors. A number of staff members at other schools cited in the government investigation also resigned because they disagreed with the attitudes taken by some administrators. They also claimed that teachers had been appointed based on their religious zeal, not their teaching qualifications.

The government report partly vindicated him, Mr. Bains said. But if nothing changes, he said, “then it means anyone can just go in and destroy a school and get away with it.”

SOURCE





Amazing:  Australian teachers supporting RESEARCH into educational methods

A change from the "we just know" approach of the  past.  Maybe they have finally learnt something from the failure of their treasured "look and learn" method of teaching literacy

The Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA) is proud to announce the establishment of an independent, competitive research grant available to researchers to conduct research with teachers and students in primary schools.

The grant of up to $75,000 will be made available annually to enable researchers to undertake research around the efficacy of different pedagogical approaches to the teaching of English in the primary school setting and will involve teachers and schools as research partners. The researchers will be expected to work collaboratively to report the research in a manner which is relevant to the PETAA membership and the broader education community.

On announcing the research grants, PETAA President, Associate Professor Robyn Cox, commented that to the best of our knowledge no other professional association of teachers has made a financial commitment of this magnitude, and in cash, to fund original research in Australia.

The grant further confirms PETAA’s ongoing commitment in support of educational research in the field of literacy; an initiative embedded within PETAA’s new Strategic Plan.

 The Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA) is a leading national teacher professional association supporting the teaching of English and literacy in Australian primary schools

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