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Education

is a hot topic causing heated debate. Everyone can agree children are not perfoming to standards of the past, but how can the situation be rectified?

The Feds Strike Back

NON-ASIAN MINORITIES tend to score lower on standardized tests used for college admissions than do Asian-Americans and whites. The obvious answer to this gap is better schools in minority neighborhoods and better study habits. But the Clinton Administration has a quicker fix: Let's just declare the tests invalid.
The draft of a new "resource guide" by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights says that "the use of any educational test which has a significant disparate impact on members of any particular race, national origin, or sex is discriminatory" unless the school using the test can prove otherwise. That makes almost all educational tests suspect. Specifically, the department is warning that the SAT and ACT tests are presumed to be invalid if they are a significant basis for college admissions and financial-aid decisions that fail to produce proportional representation by race and gender.
John Leo

The Other Side of Affirmative Action

Those who have been pushing affirmative action all these years do not want their dogmas put to the test and discredited. The Clinton administration is leaning on colleges and universities to keep putting racial body count ahead of academic standards. The U. S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights recently sent out a booklet which warns that "the use of any educational test which has a significant disparate impact on members of any particular race, national origin, or sex is discriminatory."
Thomas Sowell

Shootings a boon to home education
More parents opt out of system after Colorado
--WorldNetDaily Issue - Education

You just can't get good help
40 percent of teacher prospects flunk test
The numbers intensify growing concerns about the preparation of students in public schools and the quality of teachers at those schools. At the same time, they renew questions about whether such tests can measure teaching ability.
``I think it would be shocking if you gave it to every higher-education student and 40 percent failed, regardless of whether they were in teacher education,'' said Patte Barth, senior associate of the Education Trust group in Washington. ``It's a high-school-level test.''
PHILIP WALZER, The Virginian-Pilot Issue: Education

WEA Union Drops Vindictive Lawsuit Against Teacher
Support Group

Foundation stops union’s year-long attempt to intimidate teachers into silence. Middle school counselor Barbara Amidon of Olympia and Spokane-area speech language pathologist Cindy Omlin founded a plaintiff support group known as the "WEA Challengers Network" to spread information to teachers involved in the Foundation’s statewide class-action suit Leer v. WEA, which stopped the WEA’s program of illegally using teachers’ compulsory dues for political purposes.
National Right to Work

TWO EMPLOYEES SUE CLINTON/GORE
NLRB

National Right to Work Foundation attorneys filed suit against the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, pleading for an order that would compel the NLRB to take action on a case completely ignored for more than six years. Read more from NRTW

IDAHO JUDGE UPHOLDS PAYCHECK PROTECTION, RULES AGAINST NEA
State District Court Judge Daniel Eismann ruled against the Idaho Education Association in its suit challenging Idaho’s paycheck protection statute, passed in 1997. Judge Eismann strongly disagreed with the IEA/NEA’s contention that the law violates the union’s free-speech rights. The new law, the judge said, furthers "an important governmental interest of contributors not being required to contribute to political causes that they do not favor."
Capital Research Center

Home Schoolers: Are Stable Families Source Of High Test Scores?
A new study finds that home-schooled students score much higher than the national average,
even higher than kids at private schools. Some findings may shatter the stereotype
of home-schooling parents.
Investor's Business Daily

Reading, Writing and Remedial Training
Now that the tobacco industry and our system of justice has
convinced the American people that they are not responsible for
their actions, we can expect to see many more lawsuits. Suing will
be a the growth industry of the next millennium. Let us begin with
high school students in possession of diplomas who cannot read,
barely write and are at a complete loss when it comes to simple
mathematics. As they enter the job market, they soon realize that
they have been victims of educational malpractice.
Dick Boland

Scholarships based on scholarship
Thomas Sowell

Black students or all students?
Published in The Orlando Sentinel, Dec 1 1998

Let's raise the bar
Those who oppose Prop 16 say that standardized
tests are racially biased. They point to statistics
that show how some Black and Latino kids with
low board scores have excelled in college. What
they don't mention are the millions of children of
all races who flunk out because they were not
prepared for college work. This is an educational
problem, not a race problem. What upsets me is
that instead of trying to solve this problem, Judge
Buckwalter and his friends want to sweep it under
the rug with false charges of racism.
John Doggett

Our Public Indoctrination System - by Leslie Evas Acirema

The Private School Voucher Movement NCPA 9/4/98

School Vouchers Open Doors in Milwaukee - 9/1/98
--CNS

School Vouchers Gain Support
--CNS

The most insightful comments came
from Thomas Sowell in the following article. (Links)

Bad Teachers
April 19, 1998
Thomas Sowell
ONCE YOU HAVE gotten used to a whole vocabulary of euphemisms, it can be shocking to come across the plain truth. The title of a new book may therefore jolt some people: Bad Teachers by Guy Strickland.

If every parent whose child has had a bad teacher were to buy this book, it would hit the top of the best-seller list in no time. More important, millions of parents would learn how to recognize signs of a bad teacher -- and how to cope with the evasions and doubletalk that parents are likely to encounter from the teacher, the principal and other school officials.

"Bad Teachers" is written in plain English, unlike the pious gobbledygook of most education literature and most educators.

The education establishment will not be able to dismiss Guy Strickland the way they dismiss other critics, by saying that those critics don't really know what it is like inside the schools today, that they don't have all that wonderful "expertise" and experience that teachers supposedly have. Strickland was both a teacher and a principal before he became an education consultant.

This book not only acknowledges that there are bad teachers, it also recognizes the lasting damage they can do to children and the virtual impossibility of firing them. A classic example was a teacher who "molested children at five different schools" but who "was never arrested or even fired, just transferred on to the next school."

Most bad teachers are not that bad. But even those who are merely well-meaning incompetents can do lasting damage to a child. Hurt feelings, psychological scars and negative reactions to the learning process can be among the consequences that can follow a child for years, producing an ill-educated adult who will pay for the rest of his life for not having gotten a good education.

Guy Strickland offers many practical suggestions for what parents can do to minimize the damage done by bad teachers. However, unlike the education establishment literature, "Bad Teachers" does not assume that there are always "solutions" that will make things right. Sometimes the only thing that will work is getting your child transferred to another teacher or another school. And neither is easy.

This book does not buy the malarkey that teachers and principals know best because they have some mysterious "expertise" that mere parents cannot hope to fathom. The author says: "Who is Qualified to Judge a Teacher? You Are!"

He asks: "What is a good car wash? Is it the one certified by the American Society of Car Washes? Is it the one endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce? No. It's the one that people keep going to, because it does a good job of cleaning cars."

By the same token, good teachers are those whose students learn, not those with worthless certificates and diplomas from schools of education -- "pieces of paper that signify nothing," as the author aptly puts it.

Too many parents are intimidated by the lofty airs and pompous jargon of "educators." This book tries to put some backbone in such parents and let them know how to deal with the tactics that educators have developed for dealing with them.

One chapter is titled, "High Noon: Confronting the Teacher." It runs through various defenses and ploys used by the education establishment to evade responsibility for bad teaching.

The most brutal reality of all is this: "No one really cares whether your child learns anything at school." All sorts of people have all sorts of other agendas -- from the teachers' union lobbyist who is paid to protect teachers from competency testing to principals who will readily "sell your child down the river" to keep the teachers happy and the district office out of their hair.

Education in general has a very low priority with people who call themselves educators. Out of 145 possible goals, none of the top 8 selected by teachers had anything to do with academics. "Self-esteem" stood at the top, followed by such things as "attitude" and "socialization" -- in short, things designed to turn your child into the kind of person the teacher wants him or her to be, which may bear no relationship to the kind of person you are trying to raise your child to be.

If you buy only one book on education in your lifetime, this is the one to buy. I say that as the author of a couple of books on education myself. But I am willing pass up some sales of my own books in order to urge you to buy this one.

Charles R. Kesler - Putting the Public Back in Public Education