Homeschooling Vs Public Schooling
http://www.inflatablestudios.com/saff01.htm
There’s a few others there. Click ‘next’ bottom right of cartoon.
Homeschooling Vs Public Schooling
http://www.inflatablestudios.com/saff01.htm
There’s a few others there. Click ‘next’ bottom right of cartoon.
From:
http://familyintegrity.org.nz/
7 April 2008 – Family Integrity #365 — One family’s ordeal…
Dear Friends,
This is a terrible story.
The outrageous antics of the Police and the social welfare agents are bad enough. But they are not the only villains in this story.
Have a read:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=557440&in_page_id=1879
The parenting practices of this apparently very typical family are also to blame. The practices, I believe, are quite common and typical. But let’s look a wee bit closer.
The children attended school. Simply being separated for at least 6 hours a day, 5 days a week will soon make the children strangers to their parents. In addition, we all know that children pick up all kinds of lousy messages and attitudes at school. Many teachers convey the anti-parent message that your parents are not allowed to force you to do anything, to discipline you or correct you. This is totally subversive of parental authority. So the first question: why do parents allow their children to attend these institutions where they are subject to such subversive propaganda? Probably the simplest answer is that the parents send their children to school in good faith and have no idea whatsoever as to what is going on. The typical answer to, “What did you do and learn at school today, Johnny?” is “Nothing.” Application: get your children out of such institutions. Ideally teach them at home or find a private school you can thoroughly trust.
The children were allowed computers in their rooms as well as other games and entertainment technology. That means a fair bit of what they did was unsupervised. Children need guidance in these areas. If the computers were connected to Internet, this was indeed a very foolish thing to do, leaving the children to surf the Internet unsupervised. Application: never let children have unsupervised time on internet and never let them have their own computer or TV in their rooms. This is just the same as leaving stacks of pornography magazines, books and films in their rooms. How can one be surprised if they then come out with vile speech and disobedient and disrespectful attitudes?
The children were allowed to develop friendships, spend lots of time and even stay over night at the homes of people the parents did not approve of. Again, this is incredibly foolish. Why do parents do this? Again, they do so in good faith, do not want to appear snooty or arrogant, want to apprear friendly and non-discriminatory toward neighbours, for after all, they are neighbours. (Actually we’re not sure if they were neighbours or not.) But the strongest influence that caused the parents to have such a hands-off approach to the shepherding of their children was that such an approach is what society today demands. Application: tell society and its demands to jump in a lake: your children are your responsibility and you must raise them according to what you believe is right. If you do not approve of certain people, do not let your children associate with them. This is impossible if they attend school, of course, so again home education is nearly essential. We must say more: if you disapprove of this or that, you must be clear about this to your children and explain why. More than that, you must approve, and even demand, behaviour and standards that you want to see in your family. Schooling institutions no longer propagate the higher standards of our Traditional Western Christian Civilization, but today they socialise everyone to a politicised list of so-called commonly held set of values. That is the formal curriculum. The hidden curriculum (what goes on behind the bike sheds and at recess and behind teacher’s back) socialises all to the lowest common denominator…and this is getting lower all the time.
The children were allowed to get away with saying “F…off, you cow,” to their mother who would give a few warnings about such language. Such language should have been rooted out years ago. Again, it is nearly impossible to do this if the children are at school, but at the very least they could have learned to never use that language at home, but only at school, as I did as a kid. But to tolerate them saying such things to their own mother is unbelievable. But then, the father did say the same thing to a social worker. Sure he was under duress, but it was a terrible example. The application is: don’t use language or act in ways you don’t want to see replicated in your own children. They need to know exactly where the boundaries are and that you will be swift and sure about enforcing the boundaries. Swift and sure about enforcement. Here we are up against it as the re-write of Section 59 categorically forbids parents from correcting or disciplining their children. It would seem the law we have is designed to prevent parents from doing their duty toward their children and to give children license to be as disrespectful and disobedience as they like.
So, the police and social welfare agents in this story were abominable, but they were following the trends and policies of their superiors. This is bad, and NZer will be suffering such interventions more and more. But none of this would have happened if the parents had closer relations with their children, if the family had been operating as a unit instead of as a collection of individuals living, most of the time, under the same roof. The parents and children were clearly NOT on the same page. Application: train your chldren to recognise that the agents of the state are sadly no longer to be trusted, but that they will divide, conquer and destoy your family, your reputations, your future employment prospects and even your ability to travel. So children must stick close to parents and stick up for them and never, never divulge to others outside your four walls what goes on inside your four walls. Your family’s private family life is no business of anyone else. If authorities come around and start getting nosey, you must all be agreed that “Silence is golden.” Simply say nothing — NOTHING — to any of these agents.
As this story dramatically illustrates, the state agents (schooling institutions, police, social workers) used the tactics of divide and conquer plus their privileged position of using force, to damage this family. Don’t let it happen to you.
Regards,
Craig Smith
National Director
Family Integrity
PO Box 9064
Palmerston North
New Zealand
Ph: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
Family.Integrity@xtra.co.nz
http://www.FamilyIntegrity.org.nz
David W. Kirkpatrick Senior Education Fellow
U.S. Freedom Foundation http://www.freedomfoundation.us
School Reform Predictions: Easier Said Then Done
It’s been said the only two constants are death and taxes. Not true. There are at least two more: change and the need for change.
The need for change is particularly true of public schools in the United States, and has been since the emergence of the system with the passage of Pennsylvania’s Common School Act in 1834. Yet perhaps no other institution has been so successful in resisting change and outwitting all predictions of improvement.
Even so innovative an individual as Thomas Edison, who reportedly was awarded more patents than anyone else in history was hopelessly optimistic when he predicted that the motion picture, which he invented and subsequently improved so that pictures and sound were synchronized, would so revolutionize the schools system that within “a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”
Not quite. And similar predictions on the potential for technology has proved to be similarly erroneous.
In 1945 it was William Levenson, director of the Cleveland, Ohio public schools who proclaimed that “the time may come when a portable radio receiver will be as common in the classroom as is the blackboard.” It never happened.
Not many years later, in the 1950s and 1960s, psychologist B.F. Skinner was promoting the use of “teaching machines and programmed instruction” which, he thought, would make it possible for students to “learn twice as much in the same time and with the same effort as in a standard classroom.”
As a teacher in the 1960s I recall an instance where considerable effort and planning went into creating “language laboratories,” where a foreign language classroom was subdivided into individual cubicles whereby students could simultaneously proceed with relatively individual instruction using technology. I also recall visiting one such classroom only to find that the teacher had turned off the technology and was attempting to teach the class as a unit in the usual fashion, which meant trying to do it over the walls which were on three sides of each student’s unit.
A bit closer to the mark was then-president Bill Clinton’s still-quoted remark about building “a bridge to the twenty-first century” whereby, among other things, computers would be as much a part of classrooms as blackboards.
Well, here we are in the twenty-first century and computers are certainly more common in the schools than there were during the Clinton administration but blackboards are also still with us and student achievement, drop out rates, and other indications of educational achievement are not appreciably higher than 15-20 years ago.
Other predictions along the way included one by John W. Gardner, a brilliant education leader. In his 1969 book, No Easy Victories, he wrote: “I am entirely certain that twenty years from now, we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive. ‘The pieces of the educational revolution are lying around unassembled.”
Nearly 40 years later, not a mere 20, the “pieces of the educational revolution,” if they exist, are still lying around unassembled, often not even recognized, and the “primitive” education in the schools is still tolerated.
Nor was Gardner alone. When his book was published, a well funded National Educational Finance Project involving a number of leading scholars was coming to a conclusion. When their work was published in 1970 their conclusion was virtually synonymous with Gardner’s as they wrote, “One thing that is certain is that the pressure on the American educational system, which has been intense in the last ten years, will continue to diminish as we move into the future.” It has not diminished. It has also continued the long history of such pressure being largely ineffective.
In 1991 President George H. W. Bush convened an education gathering of governors who devised Goals 2000, “the most far-reaching education plan of any President since Lyndon B. Johnson.” Not one of the Goals for 2000 was achieved by 2000. In 2001, they were repealed.
In brief, anyone looking for a career in education should become a school reformer. Not because they will succeed. But they will be assured of a lifetime career where the need never ends.
# # # # #
“The President has just signed a school aid bill worth 5.5 billion dollars…large portions of that sorely needed money;..will be poured down the same narrow funnels which have proved so unhelpful to so many students in the past…And we’ll come back in one year or two years asking for more money because many of the schools are still a disaster area…” Harvey B. Scribner, Chancellor, New York City schools. Vital Speeches of the Day, August 15, 1971.
# # # # #
(The punctuation of this paragraph is exactly as it appears in the magazine.)
“If you ask what schools are for the obvious answer is to educate kids, but there’s an equally important answer. And that is to socialise them, to bring them up to be comfortable in adult society and I think this has always been a feature of the education process, otherwise it wouldn’t take so long. You don’t need 15 years to educate somebody but you need 15 years to socialise somebody. I think we should use the schools for the socialising role and we should somehow or other try to separate the educational role from that so that as a pupil you were in the class with every other 14 year old but you might be doing maths with adults and Japanese language with 10 year-olds or whatever. So everybody learnt at an individual pace but you were socialised at a chronological pace.”
(From his course notes for Understanding Education in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1997.)
“Schools are social instruments designed to bring about the attainment of extrinsic goals which lie outside of and beyond the schools themselves. For our purposes, four functions of schooling can be identified. One of the clearest functions of schooling apparent from the first day parents leave their children at the school gate is the role of the school as a baby-sitting agency….[Another] thing schools set out to do is socialize young children into a set of moral values and cultural practices….[T]he task…is made all the more problematic because of a lack of agreement over what sorts of values and beliefs ought to be inculcated.” (The next two functions are: preparing children for the world of work and the promise of upward social mobility coupled with the reality of cultural and class reproduction.)
“Whether we like it or not schools and teachers have a strong influence on the developing values of young people and they have that influence whether they plan to or not. We have to acknowledge that all people live by a set of values and that there is certainly no such thing as value neutrality in education. It is not an easy thing to meet the obligation to include attitudes and values as an integral part of the New Zealand curriculum. The implicit values education that comes from the way a teacher behaves, the way they speak to children, the kind of control they operate in their own classroom, what is sometimes referred to as the hidden curriculum, cannot be overestimated
“What I would like to see in the political debate about education is a recognition that public education is an exercise in social engineering by definition.”
Unresearched government-decreed practices in schools could socially, emotionally and intellectually deform children, says Christchurch Teachers’ College principal Colin Knight. Dr. Knight said the education system placed children at risk by continuing to neglect educational research. “It is of serious concern to me that, despite the far-reaching effects of teaching on society, few educational practices have a sound research basis.” He said changes in what went on in schools were mainly brought about by politically initiated reviews and reports on questionnaires and Gallup polls, by parliamentary debate and political expediency.
Tags: HOW TO GET AN EXEMPTION FROM SCHOOL IN NEW ZEALAND
Question:
I have received a letter back from the MOE saying;
“Please add to the sections on assessment, including your plans to set learning goals for………… and the evaluation of these goals over time in a planning and review cycle. You need to show how you will evaluate the overall teaching and learning programme you have set for………….”.
Answer:
They aren’t really asking for much. And also, having your exemption held up while they ask for more information is standard procedure….it happens to everyone.
I should point out that when they ask you to list learning goals they are in fact going outside their legal parametres. The law says the MoE must be “satisfied the child will be taught at least as regularly and well as in a registered school.” Note that it is the teaching, not the learning, that needs to be as regular and well. Note also that “Registered school” is not the same as state school, but includes all the schools in the country, including alternatives and weird ones too who never do any assessment. In other words, there are no objective standards by which your application can be judged apart from “as regularly and well”.
You shouldn’t have to write more than a single paragraph. I’ll attach (and pasted below)some lengthy examples of what schools have written in their ERO reports…this will give all kinds of ideas. Here is what I wrote a while back to someone else on the topic:
“The question on assessments is easy. Because you observe your child nearly all day, everyday, you know when the child has understood the material and when he has not. You know when he has mastered the skill involved and when he as not. When he has understood/mastered the material/skill to your satisfaction, you progress or move on to the next subject. When he has not understood/grasped/mastered it, you review until he does. So you do an informal assessment based on intimate observation. That’s all that’s needed. You may do the odd oral quiz or written one you make up yourself. You may also get a hold of formal tests which are available here or there, tests like the P.A.T., Progress and Achievement Test, which is available from: Alan Curnow, 200 Hill St., Richmond, Nelson, (03) 544-7728.”
Do spend a bit of time thinking about assessment, remembering that there are no hard and fast rules or anything specific that they’re looking for, just that you appear to know what your’re talking about…also remembering that what you write down is not a contract or a promise of what you WILL do, but more of a statement of intent.
Russell St. School 1999, Primary
Although there has been a clear schoolwide focus on developing sound learning programmes, considerable progress has also been made in the area of assessment. Assessment schedules each term set out the requirements for assessing student learning. The focus areas for both Terms 1 and 2 this year have been English and mathematics.
Goal setting is an integral component of every classroom programme. Class, and individual goals in some classrooms, provide the base for students to take responsibility for their own learning. Students are assessing their own work to varying degrees, throughout the school.
A schoolwide report on student achievement in mathematics (number and basic facts), spelling, and reading, provided the school with good information from which to analyse student achievement and evaluate programmes. From the results, recommendations have included introducing a schoolwide programme for spelling. The school has also established expectations for students’ recall of addition, subtraction and multiplication facts. Regular and consistent review is leading to continual improvement in school programmes and ultimately, student achievement.
Teachers monitor student progress by including achievement objectives and learning outcomes in their unit planning, and continually assessing these. In some classrooms learning logs are being used as an effective record of student progress and achievement. A variety of other methods of recording ongoing achievement is being used. The school acknowledges that a further stage in the assessment system will be the development of a schoolwide cumulative record of student achievement.
Russell School, Porirua East, Decile 1, Primary, 2000
The assessment policy and recently developed school achievement statement provide appropriate guidance to teachers for monitoring, recording, and reporting student achievement. Since the 1998 Review Office report a great deal of work has been done to address the recommendations relating to assessment. The school is well on the way to developing an effective and manageable assessment system. The recommendations that follow are designed to assist the school in ensuring that valid and useful information is generated by valid and useful assessment practices.
Teachers use a range of suitable monitoring procedures to evaluate students’ performance. These include checklists, anecdotal notes, and formal and informal tests. The administration of entry, one month, six month and six year net diagnostic tests provides sound baseline data for junior school teachers. The senior teacher compares each result with previous data so that student progress is monitored. Results are used to ensure that appropriate intervention programmes are provided to students with identified needs. New entrant teachers use the information to determine suitable groupings for literacy and numeracy teaching sessions.
Under the leadership of the deputy principal the school has developed links between planning and assessment requirements. Junior, middle and senior syndicate teachers maintain a consistent system of assessing and recording progress and achievement as students move through the school. However, because the national achievement objectives are not always redefined as specific learning outcomes, the quality of the assessments suffers. Some teachers do not always have a clear focus for their teaching, therefore they do not always have a clear focus for assessing the learning. Specific and accurate assessment of individual students and their level of attainment should result from clearly established NAO, SLO and assessment item links.
The codes used to record achievement levels are open to interpretation. This affects the accuracy of assessments. It is exacerbated by the fact that there are no consistent criteria for determining the extent to which a student has met the stated learning outcome. No moderation across classes takes place, leading to inconsistencies in applying the codes. Senior managers are aware of the need to address this to ensure that assessments are comparable and fair.
The points reported above lead to difficulties in keeping accurate cumulative records. At present the cumulative record cards show very broad notions of progress and achievement, with a ‘best fit’ curriculum level being allocated. The usefulness of the cumulative record would be enhanced by the addition of brief anecdotal notes to detail actual achievement against the stated learning outcome.
The school has a well-established system for reporting to parents on student achievement. This includes interviews and written reports. Reported comments are based on assessment data, work samples and test results that are collected in individual student profiles. The profile samples would be enhanced by the inclusion of brief annotations that record the level of achievement and the context for it. This should, alongside the improved cumulative records, provide teachers with a more substantial base of evidence for reporting purposes.
The deputy principal has undertaken comprehensive analyses of art, social studies and mathematics test results, to determine school-wide trends and patterns of achievement in these areas. The data analysis has provided some useful information, however, it is important to ensure that the tests are appropriate. This will help ensure that information gleaned from the analysis of results is valid and reliable. Staff and trustees would then have more accurate information for determining priorities in planning and resource allocation.
Some teachers undertake evaluation of units of work. The evaluations tend to be general and descriptive rather than evaluative. As senior managers and teachers make the suggested refinements to the assessment system, the data gathered should provide a useful base for achievement related evaluations of units of work. This will add an important facet to the school’s curriculum quality assurance system.
Russell School BoI, Decile 5, Primary, 2000
Teachers regularly monitor and assess student progress against curriculum objectives. They demonstrate a good understanding of the cyclic nature of planning and assessment, and evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching programmes after each study unit.
In a number of essential learning areas, teachers individually select what they consider to be appropriate learning outcomes against which to assess students. It would be beneficial for teachers to work together to identify more consistent benchmarks of achievement criteria that could provide a developmental profile of expected achievement over time in different subjects. This would help teachers track student progress more consistently and provide an established framework of appropriate learning outcomes for planning purposes.
The principal and staff are exploring summative methods of collating and analysing student achievement. They have prepared some good reports on student performance for the board in aspects of English, mathematics, and social studies. Staff are seeking ways to provide comparisons for trustees and parents about the performance of their students against general age expectations in New Zealand.
Teachers are attempting to do this by having advisers provide them with external tests such as the one recently completed in mathematics. Using this material in comparative ways can be problematic. Comparisons of this nature should be made against normed and standardised materials such as those already used by the school in the Progressive Achievement Tests. Analysis of these results would provide better quality comparative data against national age expectations. It would also be interesting for staff to compare these results with the school’s own achievement information to determine the effectiveness of its own assessment procedures.
Paroa School, WHK, Decile 1, Primary, 2001
Assessment practices have strengthened since the last review. What is to be assessed against the relevant achievement objectives is decided for all essential learning areas and all levels across the school. Teachers assess student learning in specific units of work against the specific learning outcomes identified in unit planning. Students’ learning is monitored in a way that is methodical and purposeful.
A school-wide formal assessment timetable ensures there is consistency in data collection. The timetable includes all essential learning areas and is well understood and followed by teachers. This should lift the quality of assessment data that is collected.
Individual student profiles are used consistently and well. Formal assessment requirements are fully reflected in these profiles. They provide a cumulative record of achievement for students across the school. Parents are invited to view them when they attend report interviews. They report that they are able to understand more graphically what their children can do. To make this information more useful, work samples and evaluations should be dated.
The growing use of student self evaluation and assessment is commendable. Students are taking a more active part in their learning. They are being encouraged to become independent learners and reflective of the learning process.
Conclusions drawn from assessment information at year eight indicate that there is little difference in levels of achievement in English between rümaki and mainstream students.
Tamariki School, Primary Integrated, Decile 5, 2001
The principal and teachers have made some progress in managing these aspects of learning. Their involvement in the Assessment for Better Learning (AbeL) contract is enabling them to consolidate their ideas and improve their assessment practices. They have trialed a number of different data gathering methods and have introduced portfolios and cumulative record cards. These development have helped the teachers, the students and their parents to identify some of what the students have learnt and to begin evaluating students’ progress more effectively.
The next development for teachers is to establish assessment programmes that identify students’ progress against the national achievement objectives. They need to make sure that these developments result in school-wide assessment and recording procedures that enable teachers to evaluate student achievement and their curriculum programmes more effectively. [Action 4.2]
The teachers and principal have also taken steps to formalise their curriculum evaluation and reporting procedures. A curriculum delivery report by the principal to the board in 2001 contained some useful self-review information. This process needs to continue so teachers can evaluate the effectiveness of their programmes as part of the school’s self-review programme. [Action 4.3]
The emphasis on external examinations also limits the development of approaches to assessment. While a wide range of classroom assessment practices is used, formal school assessment systems currently reflect a norm referenced approach. Student achievement at all levels in many subjects is recorded and reported in terms of marks, percentages and grades. Such an approach yields limited data on student performance that can be used to improve learning. It does not demonstrate what students can do and what their learning needs are.
Some departments are developing a wider range of methods for recording and monitoring progress. Examples include the reporting format used in physical education, core art, metalwork and woodwork, which more clearly indicate levels of performance in defined areas. Also, an approach to assessment and reporting that reflects the objectives associated with national curriculum levels is used for students requiring additional support in English. This approach should be extended across the department.
In addition, the school’s approach to assessment impedes the progress of departments in fully implementing the new curriculum. The link between recorded assessment and the achievement objectives of the national curriculum in mathematics, science, English and technology is often tenuous or non-existent. Consequently, the requirement to monitor student progress against the national achievement objectives cannot be met. The school needs to face the challenge of reviewing its approaches to assessment, recording and reporting, and develop systems that enable it to demonstrate student progress more effectively.
The development of approaches and systems related to the assessment and recording of student achievement would enable the school to better respond to the changing nature of its intake. Increased rigour in approaches to the identification of students’ individual needs on entry and the collation of information on a schoolwide basis, would promote a more proactive approach to decision making, and the planning and resourcing of programmes to respond to learning needs. The availability of more meaningful and useful assessment information, would inform departmental evaluation, and facilitate the setting of specific targets for improving student performance and the development of appropriate programmes.
Some large departments, such as mathematics, have well-developed systems for monitoring curriculum delivery. Similar systems need to be developed to track and ensure implementation of the technology curriculum.
Collingwood Intermediate, Decile 7, 2002-08-07
During the review, the board adopted a potentially useful policy on the reporting and analysis of student achievement information. When this policy is implemented, the board and teachers will be in a better position to use student achievement information to target support for individuals and groups of students.
At present, the board receives only a limited range of information on student achievement. In 2001 trustees received curriculum review reports in mathematics and English. The mathematics report described the organisation of student class placements resulting from two sets of standardised tests. The results of these tests were later made available to trustees. The English review report included graphed information from standardised testing in aspects of English, with a generalised statement of results.
The principal and teachers have worked hard to implement a computerised assessment system to report to parents on the achievement of individual students. When it is fully operational, teachers expect to use this system to report to trustees on the achievement of students and groups of students, and to analyse trends and patterns in achievement.
Teachers use the computerised assessment system to report to parents on their child’s progress in the essential learning areas and essential skills. Parents receive comprehensive reports on their child’s achievement. These reports include information on the levels of achievement that a student has reached, and the effort the student has shown.
Aspects of assessment and reporting practice need to be improved to ensure that the information on student achievement is more useful and reliable. The computer system records student achievement against sets of progressive criteria. Teachers acknowledge that this criterion-referenced assessment provides only a snapshot of a student’s learning. Some of the criteria do not give a reliable and accurate picture of a student’s level of achievement. The principal and teachers should ensure that these progressions of learning are moderated by comparisons with external benchmarks and exemplars, as they become available to schools. [Action 4.3]
To report effectively to trustees and parents on student achievement, the board, through the principal, should:
establish comprehensive guidelines for the management of the assessment and reporting of student achievement;
specify the duties of the persons responsible for managing the reporting of student achievement and the development of the assessment system;
ensure that staff continue to develop the computerised assessment system; and
ensure that the board receives detailed analysed information about trends and patterns of student achievement and progress over time, including information about the progress of Mäori students. [Action 4.3]
The principal and teachers are likely to require further professional development if they are to be successful in completing the development of the assessment and reporting system. At present, teacher knowledge of the system is limited. Teachers report that the school librarian, who has responsibility for this area, has made significant progress in the development of the system. As the librarian was unavoidably absent for a major part of the review, and in the absence of much achievement data in hard copy, reviewers were unable to obtain information on student achievement.
Teachers keep individual portfolio records of student achievement that are shared with parents. Where students take care with the presentation of work, these portfolios form an attractive record of student achievement. For portfolios to be more useful, teachers should ensure that they consistently contain information for parents on the learning expectations for each piece of work, and information on whether the student has met the expectations. Teachers should make more extensive use of these records to identify and address student learning needs. [Action 4.3]