Moscow Education (Idaho)

From the Associated Press:

The University of Idaho will not receive $7 million it is owed by its foundation when the deadline for repayment passes today.

The University of Idaho Foundation — UI’s private, nonprofit fundraising arm — has already had the repayment deferred twice by the Idaho State Board of Education. A third deadline extension is unlikely before the deadline.

“They’d be technically in default,” said Luci Willits, a spokeswoman for the Board of Education.

The foundation ran into problems in 2002 when the university lent the foundation the money — without the required permission from the state board — to help cover development costs for the failed University Place project.

The foundation needed the money after reimbursement funds weren’t received from the state Building Authority during a statewide economic downturn.

University Place was a $136 million, three-building project in Boise, which the university wanted to use as a platform to expand its presence in Idaho’s capital.

Only one building was constructed, piling up about $25 million in debt on the school and resulting in a string of unresolved lawsuits and an ongoing federal criminal probe.

School officials have said the foundation’s failure to repay the loan won’t adversely affect current operating budgets.

In September, UI President Tim White said the worst of the school’s financial troubles were behind it after he slashed 250 jobs, cut $4.75 million to balance the current budget and eliminated several academic programs, including a doctoral program in geophysics, master’s programs in English, literature and educational technology, and bachelor’s programs in office administration, school and community health, and entomology.

Willits said the board is assisting in discussions between the university and the foundation, though no date has been set for the required board vote to extend the deadline.

“I don’t know if the board will take it up at the next regular meeting (in Boise this February), but the deadline will pass,” Willits said.

In America, government does not run Sunday school.

In a truly free country, government does not run Monday school, Tuesday school, Wednesday school, etc., etc.

--Marshall Fritz, President, Alliance for the Separation of School & State

From FIRE:

After the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) publicly exposed its repressive speech code this summer, Albertson College of Idaho has dramatically changed its policies. Albertson’s FIRE-assisted embrace of liberty follows a similar turn of events earlier this year at Dartmouth College.

 

“Albertson’s decision proves once again the truth of Justice Brandeis’ maxim that ‘Sunlight is the best disinfectant,’” remarked FIRE Interim President Greg Lukianoff. “Once Albertson’s speech codes were brought to the public’s attention, the college acted quickly to revise them.”

 

In July, FIRE featured the harassment policy in Albertson’s Student Handbook as its “Speech Code of the Month.” The policy in effect at that time outlawed “[a]ny comments or conduct relating to a person’s race, gender, religion, disability, age or ethnic background that fail to respect the dignity and feelings of the individual.” Another policy went on to criminalize “behaviors considered inconsistent with the standards and expectations described in this handbook,” even those not “specifically covered in the misconduct definitions.”

 

As FIRE pointed out at the time, Albertson’s speech code was “wholly inconsistent with freedom.” While “students generally have a right to be free from certain types of severe harassment, they do not have a legal right to have their dignity and feelings respected,” as the policy then asserted. Furthermore, the second policy left students open to being “punished for behaviors they do not even know are prohibited.”

 

After FIRE selected Albertson as the “Speech Code of the Month,” local media lambasted its speech code. As one writer pointed out, Albertson’s status as a private college means it is legally allowed to have a repressive speech code, but such a thing is morally wrong and legally suspect for an institution that claims to “prepare one for a life of freedom.”

 

In a positive development for liberty on campus, Albertson officials quickly eliminated both of the provisions highlighted in the “Speech Code of the Month” article.

 

“Since its founding, Albertson College of Idaho has embraced the ideals of freedom of speech,” Albertson President Bob Hoover said. “In the course of a review of the student handbook, policies that could have restricted open discourse were revised to reflect those ideals.”

 

Albertson’s harassment policy now declares, “Albertson College is committed to supporting academic freedom and freedom of speech, in an environment of open and vigorous dialogue within the reasonable limits of the law.” In response to Albertson’s actions, FIRE has upgraded the college on its comprehensive online database of campus liberty, Spotlight: The Campus Freedom Resource, from its previous poor, “red light” rating.

 

“We are thrilled with how far Albertson’s policies have come in the last few months,” FIRE’s Lukianoff concluded. “Students at Albertson are now freer as a result of the college’s actions.”

 

FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation that unites civil rights and civil liberties leaders, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals from across the political and ideological spectrum on behalf of individual rights, due process, freedom of expression, academic freedom, and rights of conscience at our nation’s colleges and universities. FIRE’s efforts to preserve liberty at Albertson College of Idaho can be viewed at thefire.org/albertson.

The gap between the number of men and women on college campuses is widening: 58 percent of the class of 2010 is likely to be female.

Basic reason:

Schools are not paying enough attention to the education of males. There's too little focus on the cognitive areas in which boys do well. Boys have more disciplinary problems, up to 10 percent are medicated for Attention Deficit Disorder, and they thrive less in a school environment that prizes... the ability to pay attention in class, to work with others, to organize and keep track of homework, and to seek help from others.

HT: Marv O.

FIRE discusses the issues as WSU and elsewhere and says:

As 2005 comes to a close, I feel obligated to report on a disturbing new trend. Although the steady stream of cases we receive continues unabated, their nature has, thankfully, become less and less egregious since FIRE’s beginnings. Lately, however, FIRE has been seeing a new variation in the reports we get—a complete and utter disregard for the due process rights of students. At the absolute minimum, in disciplinary cases, a public college or university must provide students a notice of the charges against them, an explanation of the evidence for the charges, and a chance to dispute the evidence. Increasingly, we are receiving cases where students (and to a lesser extent, faculty) are being suspended and even expelled without even a warning.

 

The problem that this presents is that the victims in these situations have no documentation of what has happened to them. Often, the first indication they receive that something has gone awry is their inability to register for classes, the shutting down of their university e-mail account, or worse, but not as uncommon as you might think, the appearance of a security officer to inform them they are no longer allowed on campus, and the embarrassing spectacle of an armed escort accompanying them off the grounds.

 

As anyone who follows FIRE’s work knows, we make sure that we have the whole story when we come to anyone’s defense. Take a look at the documentation for our recent victory at Washington State University where administrators purchased tickets for students who heckled another student’s play, with the president endorsing their right to do so. The same goes for our ongoing campaign against Stetson University for not only censoring a conservative student newspaper that dared to print a mild parody and a Jay Leno joke in their first issue, but also for trying to sabotage the paper by pressuring its advertisers not to run ads.

Mark Tapscott over at Town Hall has written a scathing article about our educational campuses titled Campus Left to Christians, Conservatives: Shut Up!

Here is an extract. This is via FIRE:

Scratch many of the administrators in charge on American campuses these days and you often find a neo-Stalinist who has no hesitation about suppressing views that deviate from leftist orthodoxy.

 

If you doubt me, try supporting Christianity or conservatism in a public way in the ivy covered groves of American academe. Take California State University at San Bernadino, for example, where administrators refuse to charter the Christian Students Association because the group thinks its members should be professing Christians. Imagine that!

 

The group ‘would not be required to admit members who did not support the purpose of the organization (beliefs),’ but, said CSUSB’s Christine Hansen, CSA could not exclude students ‘because of their status as a non-Christian or as a homosexual.’ Hansen is Director of the school’s Office of Student Leadership and Development.

 

Without the charter, CSA can’t receive financial assistance, distribute flyers and other materials on campus or hold meetings on school property. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is challenging CSUSB on behalf of the student group.

 

George Orwell would instantly recognize Hansen and her double-speak as an extreme left-wing campus bureaucrat using intentionally ambiguous but politically correct language to bully dissenters into submission.

 

Sadly, CSUSB is not unique, either in California or elsewhere. Hansen says she is merely enforcing a rule that covers all 23 campuses in the California State University system. One might think she would put enforcement on hold while the constitutionality of the rule is tried in court, as a result of a suit filed by the Alliance Defense Fund.

 

‘The right of association applies to all groups on campus,’ said Jeremy Tedesco, litigation staff counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund. ‘All student groups have a right to elect officers and members who share that group’s values or belief system. These universities are requiring Christian organizations to accept members who disagree with their beliefs and viewpoints, violating these students’ First Amendment rights.’

From FIRE:

Hey, no heckling zombie Jesus!

 

And if you disagree with Lucifer that “Hell is So Sweet,” keep it to yourself. At least until he’s done singing.

 

Otherwise, you might be asked to leave the theater.

 

A zombie Jesus and singing Lucifer are only two of the things that offended audiences earlier this year during “The Passion of the Musical” at Washington State University.

 

Threatening to eject hecklers represents a new attitude among WSU administrators. At first, they claimed heckling was a First Amendment right.

 

When student playwright Chris Lee presented his satirical production last April, the crowd went wild. Literally.

 

Offended audience members even threatened violence. The hostility was so intense that it stopped the performance.

 

Lee’s play was never confused with “Mary Poppins.” Jesus turns into a zombie. Lucifer sings the praises of hell, and Pontius Pilate hurls enough racial epithets to turn Strom Thurmond over in his grave.

 

Officials at WSU’s Center for Human Rights blasted Lee. They told him he directly provoked and taunted the audience. It was no longer a play, they said. It was a public forum.

 

“You are not free to shield yourself behind the label of playwright or actor and assume no responsibility for the consequences of your words and deeds,” they added.

 

WSU administrators admitted no wrongdoing on the part of the university, instead calling the heckling an exercise in free speech.

 

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education in Philadelphia took up Lee’s cause.

 

Lee, angered by administrators’ attitude, produced another play. “The Magina Monologues”—based on Lee’s experiences at WSU and in his hometown—opened Nov. 17.

 

This time, administrators posted and read a notice before each performance: “Please be aware that disruption to this performance, or any program, will not be tolerated and will be dealt with accordingly—up to and including participants being escorted from the venue.”

 

No disruptions were reported.

 

Hooray. At last. It took university administrators time to see the light, but at least they saw it.

 

Shouting someone else down isn’t free speech. On the contrary, it’s a thuggish attempt to take away the other guy’s freedom. No matter what Lee has to say or how he chooses to say it, hecklers deserve the boot.

WSU finally took a stand against mob censorship. And with any luck, students received a deeper understanding of freedom of speech.

Although a provision in the defense appropriations bill permitting drilling for oil in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) failed, another controversial provision managed to slip thru: the largest ever appropriation for school choice. The provision permits up to 372,000 children displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita to receive reimbursement ($6,000 per student, $7,500 for special education students) for children to attend public or private schools of their choice.

Not surprisingly, the enemies of school choice, such as the National Education Association and the Anti-Defamation League, didn’t let the bill’s passage slip by without comment.

HT: Greg Jones

As is amply demonstrated by the article below, the teacher training programs approved by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education are heavily committed to turning out social change agents. 

Despite an overwhelming public mandate to equip teachers with the skills needed to improve student achievement, teachers are being indoctrinated in a social and political perspective that encourages them to seek the causes of educational failure in social and economic conditions, not in the classroom factors over which they have control. 

Instead of encouraging educators's take responsibility for the success of their efforts, the schools of education teach them that educational success is mostly beyond the ability of schools to bring about and typically beyond the ability of disadvantaged students to achieve. 

It is no wonder that most educators are so quick to blame educational failure on "racism, sexism, homophobia, etc" and so unwilling to look at the successes of schools like the KIPP academies.  Their training leaves them far better prepared to make excuses for failure than equipped to bring about success. 

Apparently, the reason is that excuse-making is about all schools of education have to offer.  If their published philosophies and curricular requirements are fair indicators, the education schools are both ignorant of and opposed to research-based teaching methodologies such as those discussed below.

So long as these institutions remain in charge of the teaching profession's training and development, teachers will mainly be trained to excuse failure, not bring about success. 

J. E. Stone, Ed. D.
Education Consumers ClearingHouse & Consultants Network
www.education-consumers.com
professor@education-consumers.com

University of Alabama: "The College of Education regards color-blind approaches to educational service that ignore the race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class of students as inadequate for addressing contemporary inequities and recognizes several levels at which it prepares its students to celebrate diversity, respect difference, and promote social justice. ... The College of Education is committed to preparing individuals to promote social justice, to be change agents, and to recognize individual and institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. It includes educating individuals to break silences about these issues, propose solutions, provide leadership, and develop anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist community and alliances."

University of Alaska at Fairbanks: "The problem is that teachers often do not reflect on the impact that race has on all students, both white and nonwhite. Teachers often profess 'colorblindness' which is at worst patronizing and at best naïve, because race and culture profoundly affect what is known and how it is known. You cannot erase race or ignore how it produces a caste-like system in the United States. Thus, we must encourage teachers to examine how racial and cultural 'others'
negotiate American school systems, and how they perform their identities utilizing various strategies and tactics of both resistance and acceptance in order to fit into the everyday life of schools. Most importantly, all teachers, counselors, and administrators need to constantly examine the status and power that comes with being white. ... We encourage teachers to understand education as a site of historical, political, economic, and social struggle, and to understand the interrelatedness of race, identity, and the curriculum, especially the role of white privilege."

Brooklyn College: "We educate teacher candidates and other school personnel about issues of social injustice such as institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism; and invite them to develop strategies and practices that challenge biases against non-English speakers, immigrants, and those with special needs. Thus, we strive not to reproduce the social, economic, political, and cultural inequities in society, but to explicitly build collaborations. These efforts will help to ensure input from all stakeholders and to generate opportunities for everyone to be co-owners, thus shifting the balance of power in ways that create a truly democratic society."

HT: Arnold Kling

In the meantime, UI is wringing its hands over diversity......

An important reform would be to require public schools to have higher pay schedules for secondary math/science teachers. The idea of paying physics and P. E. teachers the same is patently absurd. No University does that.

Jack Wenders

As reported in the Idaho Statesman:

Idaho's high schools need improvement in math, sciences

In the past few years Boise State has embarked on an important initiative to attract, enroll, retain and graduate students who personify academic excellence and reflect our institution's commitment to transform itself into a metropolitan research university of distinction.

With heightened enrollment standards, the most stringent among Idaho's public institutions, Boise State has made significant gains in that regard. Look no further than our 2005-06 freshman class - a group of 2,262 newcomers with five National Merit Scholars, above-average ACT scores and an average high school GPA of 3.34.

While we are encouraged by the skill level of the recent high school graduates who chose to attend Boise State, approximately 90 percent of whom are Idaho residents, we are nevertheless frustrated and concerned about the inaptitude among too many of the state's high schoolers in the areas of mathematics and science.

To put it bluntly: Too many of Idaho's high school graduates are unprepared for the academic rigors of postsecondary education in math and the sciences.

How many is too many? Consider this: 40 percent of students who enter Idaho's postsecondary institutions must take remedial courses before they are able to begin college-level coursework.

To be sure, this is not a problem exclusive to Idaho. But it is a problem nevertheless - an endemic, systemic problem that has plagued our society for decades.

The most alarming part of this disturbing trend? In our changing economy, almost every high school graduate will need at least a modicum of math and science skills - whether he or she goes directly into the work force, enrolls at a university or enters a technical program.

That is the problem. Fortunately, the State Board of Education is working to provide a solution with an initiative called "The Future is Now! High School Redesign Initiative." The board's plan is in response to the need for: (a) increased math and science skills among high school students so they are better prepared in those areas before they enter college; and (b) a decrease in the number of college students who need remedial courses, which are repetitive, costly and often delay graduation. Last year alone, Idaho college students took 24,000 credit hours of remedial courses at a cost to the state of close to $2 million.

Without question, there is a need for this initiative in Idaho. Consider:

• Two-thirds of the nation's new jobs will require additional education beyond high school, and students will need to           perform up to par academically to qualify for these jobs.
• An educated work force is the foundation of a competitive economy, and to be successful in growing and attracting businesses that produce jobs with competitive wages, Idaho must do a better job of educating its students.
• Idaho ranks 46th in the nation in terms of college graduates per capita - only Mississippi, Arkansas, Nevada and West Virginia rank lower.
• Thirty states are proposing or have enacted high school reform initiatives similar to the one being formulated by the State Board of Education.

We can better prepare our high school students if we adopt the State Board's plan to increase the academic rigor and expectations in our schools.

This initiative has the backing of Boise State University and our sister institutions.

Space limitations do not allow me to delineate the specifics of the board's initiative.

Among other steps, it includes a six- to seven-year plan that will strengthen the state's high school curriculum and ratchet up its math and science high school graduation requirements, which in turn will better prepare our young people to enter college or the work force.

More information on the plan is available at the State Board of Education's Web site.

Of course, there are added costs involved; hence the long-term plan to phase in these initiatives. But they are steps we must take for our students and our state.

Bob Kustra is president of Boise State University.

Idaho Supremes tell Legies how not to fund building of Pub Ed Schools

"So how do we pay for it?" asks everybody and their legislator's brother, without questioning the basic premise of the Pub Ed methodology.

The Idaho Constitution notwithstanding, why Is it axiomatic that Idaho must have a system of public education instead of private free market education?

Why not repeal the Pub Ed Articles in the Idaho Constitution and move to a private free market system via temporary vouchers?

Vested union interests, archaic teaching methodologies, inability to think out of the socialist education box and refute accepted socialist cliches, refusal to use latest Internet and other technologies, ignorance about how the free market for education would really work should all be discussed.

Boise, ID -- Once upon a time, a long time ago, a truck stopped before entering a tunnel because the top of the truck was 1 inch too high to drive through.  After causing a horrendous traffic jam and pondering this predicament for 50 years, an 11-year old girl leaned out of her parents' Volkswagen and yelled to the trucker as they drove by, "Let some air out of your tires and drive on through the tunnel."

The little girl's solution was so simple, so basic, that one wonders why the adults never thought of it.

It's the same with today's education problem:  how best to educate our children.  The solution is so simple and it has been staring us in the face for the last fifty years.  It is the same solution we have for all the other exchanges of commodities and services in the free market but we refuse to admit that teaching, the exchange of information from an adult to a child, falls into the category of economic supply and demand, competition, or price formation.

Ironically, this continual denial by supposed academics, both Demos and Republicans, is the result of that which drives all movements in the free market: self interest.  The difference is that in a true free market, one cannot use the collective coercive power of force, the government.  But Public Education at the national and state levels is not a free market entity.  It is Big Government Business.  Big altruistic, collectivist, statist, nationalized socialist government business.

Pub  Ed is Big Business for unions, the NEA and Idaho's IEA affiliate, who like to wield monopoly power to collect money from their captive teachers for their favorite political parties (mostly to pass legislation to keep themselves in power).

Pub Ed is Big Business for building contractors who -- even though we have the technology to provide much cheaper modes of information transfer, teaching, over the Internet -- want to continue building the same old expensive brick and mortar education prisons to which we must then bus our children so they can participate in what amounts to the old Prussian Education Model where students must sit up straight, at military attention, and listen to a teacher drone on and on for hours in front of 30 students in order to learn.  The only thing missing from our inherited Prussian Model is the metal neck brace.  (Maria Montessori proved this model was ridiculous back in the last century when she took in the state's public education so-called "idiots," privately re-educated them differently, and laughed her butt off as her students scored higher than the Italian State's public education students.)

Empirically, the public education method has academically failed in every state in the union.  Continually throwing more money at the public education system does not solve the problem.  Case histories abound from California to Washington, D.C.

Is anybody paying attention?  The Texas Supreme Court has ruled that it is not their business to dictate to the legislature how to handle public education.  Hey, don't mess with Texas.  Unfortunately, Idaho's IEA union is pushing an Initiative to attach a 1% sales tax increase to Public Education.  Talk about vested interests, corporate welfare.  And, as usual, the editors at the Idaho Statesman are busy offering up all their standard socialist baloney about rearranging the spending chairs on the sinking Pub Ed Titanic by chopping the 66% voting requirements for schools bonds to 60%, tapping Idaho $200 million tax surplus, and throwing even more money at our bankrupt Pub Ed system.  Can anybody down at the Statesman spell "old paradigm" or, like Burger King or Jack in the Box or whomever, "think out of their buns?"

So, like the little girl who solved the trucker's 50-year old problem of how to drive his too-high truck through a tunnel by letting air out of his tires, maybe it's time for us to REMOVE the Public Education Articles cluttering up the Idaho Constitution and think about free market methods for education.

The benefits of a private system of education are manifold:

• Private costs per student are cheaper than public costs per student.
• Internet and other technology is cheaper, faster, and offers more choice for all students (including "challenged" students) than busing K-12 students five miles through the snow to a brick and mortar prison. 
• Private schools can choose to say "Under God" or not in their Pledge to the Flag.
• Private schools can teach whatever religious views they want and celebrate religious holidays with Christmas trees, Nativity scenes, Easter Bunnies, Chanukah decorations, Islamic decorations, or Choking Chickens at Midnight if they choose.
• Private schools can specialize, or not, into science and math, or music, or drama, or dance, or sports, or hot rod repairs or whatever they want.
• Private schools do not require bond issues for continually rising property taxes that are now threatening to kick old folks out of their paid-off homes.
• Private schools can teach bilingual or not.

People with no children, or whose children have already graduated, would not have to pay taxes for public schools.  ("But gee whizzers, an educated public benefits everybody, right?  Wow, what a truism.  The same can be said for every single commodity and service in the U.S.  But that doesn't mean we should nationalize every business into a socialist enterprise (an oxymoron, by the way) to achieve it.  Nor does this stupid truism *** sophism account for Little Johnny who decides to become a bank robber instead of a pediatrician.  Ding-dong.  Score 10 points for the free market and zero for the socialists.)

Private schools, through competition for the best teachers, would raise good teachers' salaries according to standard free market supply and demand.

All of the current religious and other court cases resulting from everybody trying to push their religious or ethnic views or throttling others' views in the Public Education System would automatically disappear in a Private Free Market Education System.  (Just think, O'Reilly at FOX News and our Bozo Congressmen could lighten up and talk about real issues -- like should Fed Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke drop $100 bills from helicopters to prevent a national recession -- instead of whether our kids should say, "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays" at school.  This continual rehashing of the pros and cons of the separation of church and state in the old 1780s Articles of Confederation vis a vis the U.S. Constitution needs to stop.  It's almost 2006 and I think most people in the world want freedom of religion separated from their government.  I know I don't want the Feds to tell me how to choke chickens in my church at midnight and offer barbecued chicken wings to the Power Ball Lottery Gods every Wednesday and Saturday, do you?)

So maybe it's time to let the air out of your truck tires and dump those tired old socialist cliches about how only a public education system can educate our youth.  If that was true, we should immediately set up State Grocery Stores, State Automobile Dealers, and State Everything Elses, including a State Idaho Statesman Newspaper so the Statesman editors can put their money where their mouths are (i.e. their statist editorials continually urging you to spend spend spend for Idaho's bankrupt Public Education System).

Send a message to your Idaho legislator today:  Dump the Public Education System from the Idaho Constitution and introduce a temporary voucher system on the way to a totally private Free Market Education System.  Save our children, save our seniors, and save your pocketbook which is getting thinner and thinner and thinner... -- FM Duck

Parents should demand more educational choices

   The Idaho Education Association has opened fire on Idaho taxpayers, parents and even students, suggesting that the only way to save government schools is to pump more money into them. Nothing could be further from the truth. But the IEA wants to scare you into raising your taxes and give schools - and the teachers' union - a $180 million blank check. To do what, exactly?
   Don't believe the rhetoric. What schools need - badly - is to stop embracing a 19th century education model and start giving parents additional options. For instance, charter schools outperform traditional schools. They cost about 20 to 25 percent less to operate than what traditional government schools cost. There should be more charter schools in our state. Virtual schools and home schools are providing an equal or better educational opportunity at a fraction of the cost of traditional schools.
   Why is the IEA against these new, exciting and better schooling options? Because for the IEA, it's not about making schools better. It's about enriching the IEA. It's about embracing the status quo.
  It is regretful that the teachers' union would exploit Idaho students for its own material gain. At least the group is consistent. A national teacher union leader, when asked if his union represented students, said, "When students start paying dues I will be interested in the welfare of students." That's rich.
My group, Idahoans for Excellence in Education (www.ieepac.org) is the voice of education improvement in Idaho. We are working to provide students with a 21st century education. We are working to make our schools the model of opportunity, allowing Idaho students to measure up and outperform any other education system in the world. For us, it's not about enriching ourselves or our members. It's about giving parents, students and teachers real change that will make our schools better.
Remember, funding for government schools has increased tremendously over the past two decades. Idaho taxpayers spend more than $8,000 per student per year or more than $200,000 per classroom in a traditional public school for a mediocre education. The result: Schools have more money. Has that made a difference in school performance? No.
      So, why, despite huge increases in expenditures, have schools not improved? The answer is simple: They don't have to. When was the last time that you saw a government school shut down because of poor performance? You haven't. It's never happened. Public schools that fail children continue to operate because they have little to no accountability. That's the way IEA wants it.
        What will force our schools to perform better? Higher standards. More accountability. Choice in public education. There is no doubt, that if forced, an overhaul of the traditional public school system would not only ensure that traditional schools would survive, but thrive - on the same amount of money. Our schools have the people, the expertise and they have the resources to improve.
     Instead of pouring more money into a dying education model, let's try something different: Empower parents with more educational choices. Force traditional schools to reinvent themselves in light of a competitive education system. Demand that schools perform or close.
    The liberal Idaho Education Association is out of touch with most Idaho parents or Idahoans in general. I'm proud that my organization, Idahoans for Excellence in Education, is speaking out, and working to advance some much-needed improvements to the state's education system.
    We want to see real change, not just the movement of more money into one group's pocket. Before you accept the notion that schools need another $180 million, ask some serious questions. Ask the teachers' union why it wants to raise your taxes. Ask why it is against improving education. Ask why it supports the status quo.
      Don't be fooled by the teachers' union rhetoric. It exists to champion the working conditions of its constituency - its paying dues members. You exist to better the education of your children. Take part, demand choice, and say no to unneeded and unnecessary taxation.

Darrel Deide of Caldwell is chairman of Idahoans for Excellence in Education.

Interesting article. You also might want to look at: http://www.popecenter.org/clarion_call/article.html?id=1652

Jack Wenders

Next: No Collegian Left Behind?

Standardized test advocates now targeting higher ed

Shawn Vestal
Staff writer
December 25, 2005

If the debate over standardized testing in public schools is beginning to die down, a new one may soon flare up.

A new federal commission studying the future of higher education in America is likely to try to nudge the system toward some form of standardized testing, said its chairman, Charles Miller. He said colleges and universities are letting students down - requiring less stringent work, less classroom time and lower standards - and Americans need to ensure they're getting the best system of education possible in a competitive world.

Many academics despise the idea of standardized testing, arguing that university learning is too broad and various to be measured by a single test, and such tests are a poor way to measure the "higher-order thinking" taught at universities. Still, the idea of establishing more yardsticks for effectiveness is becoming a big part of planning at schools in the Inland Northwest and around the country.

"I like the concept of setting learning goals, measuring them and then improving what you're doing to get there," said Doug Baker, who oversees academic programs at the University of Idaho. "My concern with standardized testing is that it tends to focus on facts and figures. Š That's a pretty shallow level of understanding or education."

At Washington State University, provost Bob Bates sounds a similar note. Schools should do a better job of measuring their performance, he said, but a standardized test is a poor way to do it.

"The basics for K-12 are pretty consistent and pretty well-known - the old reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic," Bates said last week. "In higher education, people are getting an education in a much broader range of areas."

But Miller and other critics of higher ed say students aren't getting as good an education as they used to. The number of Americans with college degrees is rising, but average literacy scores in the country are falling, according to a recent assessment of adult literacy by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Even testing supporters acknowledge that implementing any kind of a standardized test in higher ed would be extremely difficult. Institutions vary greatly in their styles and offerings, and tenured professors - already a difficult kind of cat to herd - value academic freedom highly. For some, that very liberty is part of the problem.

"At most universities, the faculty decides what to teach, and they often teach what their research is," said Richard Phelps, an author and proponent of standardized testing. "I think it's true that once faculty get tenured, they really don't have to do all that much - most of them do ... but there are some that don't. Most faculty can do whatever they please. They set their own standards."
Alphabet soup

The standardized test has probably never had more influence in American life.

You take one to get a driver's license. Colleges and universities use them to choose students, and many professions require them. Public schools are now wrestling with the fact that 10th-graders can't graduate without passing one. The alphabet soup of test names makes up a familiar list: SAT, ACT, GRE, WASL, ISAT.

The tests in grades K-12 - the WASL in Washington, and the ISAT in Idaho - have been hotly debated, opposed by educators and others who say that the tests distort the curriculum and measure only passive learning and rote memory. Supporters say schools need to be held to a measurable standard and improved. Starting this year, students can't graduate without passing the tests, and schools risk losing federal funding if they perform poorly on them.

Testing is the centerpiece of President Bush's controversial education reform, No Child Left Behind. Miller, the chairman of the higher education commission, helped create the blueprint for that act with his work on standardized testing in Texas, where he served on the state Board of Regents and worked to bring standardized testing and performance reviews to universities.

In an interview last week from his Houston office, Miller said the commission isn't considering anything mandatory with regard to testing but may encourage schools to adopt the concept. The Texas system of universities uses the Collegiate Learning Assessment and will soon be reviewing the early results.

"It's clear that some kind of assessments (is) needed," Miller said.

Peter Sacks, an author and longtime critic of standardized testing, said he agrees that higher ed needs to be more accountable - just not in this manner.

Sacks said colleges and universities are failing to serve the whole public, disproportionately excluding the poor and minorities in a race to "maximize their prestige position in the marketplace."

A big part of that is the use of standardized tests to define high-performing students, Sacks said, when, in fact, the tests do not predict whether a student will do well in class. Sacks added that the tests tend to favor students who are rich, white and male.

"This is a terrible idea," Sacks said of requiring standardized testing in postsecondary schools. "I foresee an outright rebellion among college professors."
The whole elephant

America's system of higher education is something like the elephant in the famous fable - what you think of it has a lot to do with which part you're holding. Community colleges and liberal arts colleges serve different populations, and in a different way. Land-grant schools have a different mission from that of Ivy League institutions.

Measuring and comparing the overall effectiveness of colleges and universities is difficult. College rankings like those compiled by U.S. News and World Report try every year, and universities generally complain that the comparisons are misleading or shallow - though they also trumpet the news when they do well.

Still, there is a growing sense that universities need to be more accountable.

A lot of this comes from the institutions themselves - WSU is implementing a system of "benchmarking" to measure a variety of internal targets, and setting goals to help meet the state's effort to kick up degree production.

Baker said the UI has made accountability one of its main goals, with an eye toward making sure students emerge from their academic programs with the proper range of skills.

"We have a sea change in higher education right now," he said. "Universities need to figure out how to play as an orchestra and not a bunch of soloists we hope will come together as an orchestra."

Baker agrees that there is no single score card for measuring and comparing schools. But he argues a score card based on standardized testing would falsely portray a school's effectiveness.

The more you standardize a test to apply across many institutions, the more you gravitate toward general, simplistic ways of measuring knowledge, he said.

For example, he said that learning to work in a team and draw on learning from different disciplines is a crucial skill for today's graduates.

A standardized test would be hard-pressed to measure such learning, Baker said. And if it attempted to, it would likely distort the kind of instruction needed, shifting it more toward a lecture format and less toward hands-on learning, thereby preventing students from learning critical thinking, he added.

Baker's comments reflect a long-standing criticism of standardized tests - that they force teachers to teach to the test, rather than teach students to think for themselves.
Einstein and Mitty

Baker provided an example of a different measure the UI has used, which led the school to make some changes.

For years, educators have known that some business-school graduates aren't as good at bringing the various components of their education - from finance to management to marketing - fully and comprehensively to bear in a real company.

So about a decade ago, the faculty at UI changed their teaching approach. Business majors at the school now spend their full junior year in a single class that puts them in a team and requires them to use skills and knowledge from across the curriculum.

The students are learning in ways that may not correspond to a single, testable measure, he said, but it's more valuable to them and their future employers.

Phelps and Miller argue that standardized testing doesn't necessarily have to be shallow and based on memorization. They point to the College Learning Assessment, which asks students to take in a variety of sources of information and exhibit an ability to use those sources in complex ways. But Phelps also argues that it's not such a bad thing to measure just facts and figures. Most work is based on so-called lower-order thinking. In other words, details and deadlines are important even in the world of abstract thought, he said.

And though higher-order thinking describes the efforts of a scientific genius like Albert Einstein, it also describes a persistent dreamer detached from reality, like the fictional Walter Mitty.

"He was a higher-order thinker, too," Phelps said. "(That mental faculty) can be bad as well as good."

Whatever comes of the discussion, it is unlikely that higher education would - or even could - adopt testing in the same way as grades K-12. But with the overwhelming movement toward assessment and accountability, Miller sees the tests as a probable part of the way schools are measured in the future.

"I believe there are some things about testing that are coming to higher education, regardless of what the commission does," he said.

Here is the conclusion of Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern. No surprises here to me.  

This paper provides copious results from a 2003 survey of academics. We analyze the responses of 1208 academics from six scholarly associations (in anthropology, economics, history, legal and political philosophy, political science, and sociology) with regard to their views on 18 policy issues. The issues include economic regulations, personal-choice restrictions, and military action abroad. We find that the academics overwhelmingly vote Democratic and that the Democratic dominance has increased significantly since 1970. A multivariate analysis shows strongly that Republican scholars are more likely to land outside of academia. On the 18 policy questions, the Democratic-voter responses have much less variation than do the Republicans. The left has a narrow tent. The Democratic and Republican policy views of academics are somewhat in line with the ideal types, except that across the board both groups are simply more statist than the ideal types might suggest. Regarding disciplinary consensus, we find that the discipline with least consensus is economics. We do a cluster analysis, and the mathematical technique sorts the respondents into groups that nicely correspond to familiar ideological categories: establishment left, progressive, conservative, and libertarian. The conservative group and the libertarian group are equal in size (35 individuals, each), suggesting that academics who depart from the leftist ranks are as likely to be libertarian as conservative. We also find that conservatives are closer to the establishment left than they are to the libertarians.

HT: Tyler Cowen

Business lobby wants school principals to act as managers

By DEAN A. FERGUSON
of the Tribune

Principals may see a flurry of bills aimed at influencing how they manage schools when Idaho's Legislature convenes in January. And, as part of the same business-backed push, teachers may see an effort to change how they are paid.

"There's a whole bunch of bills that are drafted," said Teresa Molitor, a lobbyist for the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry. "Title 33 has a whole bunch of places that need to be looked at."

Title 33 is the Idaho code that deals with education. IACI lobbies for Idaho businesses and is widely considered the state's most powerful interest group.

The business lobby wants school principals to act more like managers and less like teachers.

There is a "fuzzy line between management and employee," Molitor said. That collegial relationship makes it hard for leaders to make hard choices, such as conducting teacher evaluations, she said.

In the past, the business community believed educators who said schools couldn't be operated like businesses, Molitor said. Since then, there's been a change of heart.

"There are many aspects of school management that are -- surprise, surprise -- very much like running a business."

Specific legislation isn't public, but IACI has released its general policy goals.

Moscow's senator said the public should pay attention to IACI's agenda.

"It's a shadow Legislature," said Republican Sen. Gary Schroeder. "It's more powerful than the Legislature itself."

Schroeder questions the group's motives.

"Some people are wondering why the business lobby seems to be driving the education agenda in the Legislature and ignoring the expertise of legislators themselves," Schroeder said.

The seven-term senator, whose chairmanship of the Senate Education Committee was yanked a year ago by senate leadership, said the group crafts policies that, in part, hinge upon a profit-based motive to privatize education. Also, he suspects the business lobby simply wants to destroy the teacher's union.

Molitor said businesses mainly want a well-trained work force and the best bang for the educational dollar.

"It's work force, it's investment, ... it's all those crucial issues that face us as a stakeholder," Molitor said. "Student achievement is a number one goal."

The group notes 40 percent of Idaho's college freshmen need remedial courses before starting college-level work. Also, Idaho ranks 46th in the nation for the percentage of college graduates.

Better leadership from school principals can turn that around, Molitor said.

That means universities may need to change what they teach principals, according to a policy statement published on IACI's Web site.

Principals also need more flexibility to allocate limited resources, Molitor said.

For instance, business leaders want students to have more science and math courses. That would require more flexibility.

"The public school budget is 85 percent labor cost," Molitor said.

It should be easier to fire poor teachers, she said. Principals also need to consider retraining teachers. Further, school trustees, superintendents and principals need more influence over teacher salaries.

The group favors scrapping a system that pays teachers based on seniority and their education levels.

"Most people would agree that there is little correlation between a teacher's 'experience' and 'education' and how well students learn," according to a policy statement on the group's Web site.

The group wants more pay for teachers of high-performing students. But, the group doesn't want to boost funding levels -- an approach termed "revenue neutral."

Molitor said she will approach leaders of the Senate and House education committees with the proposals.

"It's one of those hot topics right now," Molitor said.

As reported in today's edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

Idaho legislators are feeling the heat since the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday the state must fund school facilities needs.

The decision settled a 15-year-old lawsuit between the state of Idaho and the Idaho Schools for Equal Educational Opportunity, an organization of school districts that challenged the adequacy of the state’s method for funding school construction and renovations. A handful of Latah County districts were among the first to join the group.

The court’s ruling did not offer a solution for fixing the system. It simply returned responsibility to the Legislature. Lawmakers have been regrouping since the decision was handed down, looking at options before the next session gets under way in January.

“I’ve had a call from two legislators already today for what we might do,” Sen. Gary Schroeder said Thursday. The Moscow Republican said conversations are taking place all over the state. He has spent 14 years on the Senate Education Committee, spending a lot of time trying to get things done, he said. “It’s been very, very frustrating.”

The state’s system is unconstitutional because it doesn’t provide an environment conducive to learning, according to the state Supreme Court. School districts have struggled for decades to pass bonds in districts where issues such as per capita income and market values can make overcoming the required two-thirds majority impossible. Many of these same districts also grapple with older buildings in dire need of repairs.

“It’ll be interesting to see what happens when we get to Boise,” Schroeder said.

Legislators will convene Jan. 9 with a $200 million surplus that agencies and lobbyists throughout the state are vying for, already submitting $400 million in requests.

“The odds of coming up with a permanent fixture are not too good with the other issues flying around the Legislature,” state Rep. Tom Trail predicted.

Trail, also a Moscow Republican, said property tax relief and a sales tax initiative from the Idaho Education Association will be demanding time. “It’s going to be a really interesting session to follow.

“If I were betting on this, the record of the Legislature is to try and come up with a patchwork proposal that will supposedly dazzle the eyes of the Supreme Court — not a concrete, long-term solution,” Trail said.

Idaho is one of a handful of states that does not provide funding for school facilities, “except for the nickel and diming we’ve done for some of the schools in the worst shape” and the temporary 10 percent interest on bonds for new bonding that expires Dec. 31, Trail said.

He said Gov. Dirk Kempthorne has vowed not to spend any of the surplus for current programs. But Trail said there are still ways to capture the excess money, like creating an endowment.

A set of proposals from a facilities task force that were left on the back burner in 2003 might be resurrected, Trail said. Back then, Marilyn Howard, superintendent of public instruction, and Kempthorne organized the task force to find a resolution to the drawn-out lawsuit.

The task force identified four major problems with the current funding system, they said:

• The super majority approval of two-thirds to pass a school bond levy can be a barrier.
• Serious safety hazards can exist in schools and there is no fail-safe method for local school boards to fix the problem.
• There is a large disparity among school districts in their ability to retire long-term debt on their own.
• Substandard and negligent maintenance are two of the leading causes of school facility deterioration.

A short list of proposed solutions also emerged from the task force.

• Lowering the approval needed to pass a bond to 60 percent
• Creating a mechanism for local school districts to impose an emergency safety levy without voter approval.
• Modifying the bond levy equalization program.
• Creating a maintenance fund for districts with matching funds from the state.

The Legislature didn’t act on any of the task force’s suggestions.

“We never got anywhere with any of it,” Schroeder said.

He said discussion always would come down to the fact that some legislators believed some districts weren’t “bellying up to the bar” when it came to getting bonds passed. They did not focus on a school district’s ability to pass bonds because of variables such as market values, per capita income, the amount of public land in a district, and voter reluctance or apathy.

Since the ruling, Stan Kress, president of the ISEEO and superintendent of the Cottonwood School District, said he expects the proposals will come back on the table, maybe with a few minor changes. “We worked hard at trying to point out what the problems were and what potential solutions might work,” said Kress, who also served on the task force.

Kress said some legislators, such as Trail, Rep. Shirley Ringo and Schroeder, have been supportive and helpful, but they haven’t been in the majority.

“I think some people in the Legislature have felt if they just kept appealing it they wouldn’t have to do anything,” Kress said. “I think they did that as a stalling technique, if you want to know the truth.”

He said he was pleased with the ruling even though the court didn’t provide specific solutions. “I think it indicates what we’ve been saying for the last 15 years. I just hope the Legislature will take the ruling seriously and work with us to try and solve that problem. History has pointed out that doesn’t happen very often, so we’ll have to see.”

The Supreme Court retained jurisdiction in the case, which Schroeder takes as a reservation to get tough if the ruling is ignored. “I don’t know what that would be ... we’ve always entertained the possibility they would hold the Speaker and Pro Tempore in contempt if they didn’t do anything.”

Patti Tobias, administrative director of the courts, declined comment on possible repercussions of legislative failure to take the ruling to heart. She directed inquiries on potential penalties and possible punitive action back to the Supreme Court’s 21-page opinion.

In the last lines of the opinion, the court wrote that it retained jurisdiction to monitor legislative efforts to comply with its decision. The judges said they may “exercise their constitutional role in interpreting the Constitution and assuring that its provisions are met.”

Here's his post including the chart.

Think hard before letting your children opt-out of a college degree (and, yes, Mark, I do know that correlation ? causation...).

I thought I’d follow up on the FT story from earlier this week which noted that manufacturers claim that, even though they are laying off large numbers of workers (generally their less-skilled workers, they say), they are still very interested in hiring more highly educated workers such as technicians, engineers, and so forth.

Unsurprisingly (at least to economists), the aggregate data suggests that firms have put their money where their mouth is, in a big way. The phenomenon of substituting away from relatively low-skilled workers and toward relatively highly-skilled workers is widespread and massive. The chart below (source: Census) provides some measures of how more education is rewarded in the labor market. Clearly, getting more education means that you will be far more highly demanded by firms.

This reward to education has grown over time. For example, a Census Bureau summary of major economic trends in the US over the past half century reported that the median income of workers with at least a Bachelor’s degree was only 35% higher than those with only a HS diploma in 1963. By 1997 that premium had risen to 88%. And in 2003 the earnings gain from having at least 4 years of college was over 100% of a HS graduate’s earnings, according to the data cited above.

Q: What did the English major say to the Engineering major after they graduated?

A: You want fries with that?

HT: Jane Galt

Princeton University’s "Prostitute, Cross Dressing, and Same-Sex Eroticism" course ranked the most bizarre class.

Parents: congrats on money well spent on a college education.

From YAF:

As tuition rates climb to an average of over $21,000 per year, today’s college students study prostitution, teeth whitening, and Beavis and Butthead. The following Dirty Dozen highlights the most bizarre and troubling instances of leftist activism supplanting traditional scholarship in our nation’s colleges and universities.

1. Princeton University’s The Cultural Production of Early Modern Women examines “prostitutes,” “cross-dressing,” and “same-sex eroticism” in 16^th - and 17^th - century England, France, Italy and Spain (emphasis added).

2. The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie: Race and Popular Culture in the United States at Occidental College in California explores ways “which scientific racism has been put to use in the making of Barbie [and] to an interpretation of the film The Matrix as a Marxist critique of capitalism.”

3. At The John Hopkins University, students in the Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ancient Egypt class view slideshows of women in ancient Egypt “vomiting on each other,” “having intercourse,” and “fixing their hair.”

4. Like something out of a Hugh Hefner film, Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offers the class Lesbian Novels Since World War II.

5. Alfred University’s Nip, Tuck, Perm, Pierce, and Tattoo: Adventures with Embodied Culture, mostly made up of women, encourages students to think about the meaning behind “teeth whitening, tanning, shaving, and hair dyeing.” Special projects include visiting a tattoo-and-piercing studio and watching Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding film, Pumping Iron.

6. Harvard University’s Marxist Concepts of Racism examines “the role of capitalist development and expansion in creating racial inequality” (emphasis added). Although Karl Marx didn’t say much on race, leftist professors in this course extrapolate information on “racial oppression” and “racial antagonism."

7. Occidental College—making the Dirty Dozen list twice—offers a course in Stupidity, which compares the American presidency to Beavis and Butthead.

8. Students at the University of California—Los Angeles need not wonder what it means to be a lesbian. The Psychology of the Lesbian Experience reviews “various aspects of lesbian experience” including the “impact of heterosexism/stigma, gender role socialization, minority status of women and lesbians, identity development within a multicultural society, changes in psychological theories about lesbians in sociohistorical context.”

9. Duke University’s American Dreams/American Realities course supposedly unearths “such myths as ‘rags to riches,’ ‘beacon to the world,’ and the ‘frontier,’ in defining the American character” (emphasis added).

10. Amherst College in Massachusetts offers the class Taking Marx Seriously: “Should Marx be giving another chance?” Students in this course are asked to question if Marxism still has any “credibility” remaining, while also inquiring if societies can gain new insights by “returning to [Marx’s] texts.” Coming to Marx’s rescue, this course also states that Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot misapplied the concepts of Marxism.

11. Brown University’s Black Lavender: A Study of Black Gay & Lesbian Plays “address[es] the identities and issues of Black gay men and lesbians, and offer[s] various points of view from within and without the Black gay and lesbian artistic communities.”

12. Students enrolled in the University of Michigan’s Topics in Literary Studies: Ancient Greek/Modern Gay Sexuality have the pleasure of reading a “wide selection of ancient Greek (and a few Roman) texts that deal with same-sex love, desire, gender dissidence, and sexual behavior.”

Just picked up a copy of Jay Greene's Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools and Why it Isn't So. 

A friend heard an interview on the radio with Greene and highly recommended the book to me.

Here's the book's description:

In Education Myths, Jay P. Greene takes on the conventional wisdom and closely examines twenty myths advanced by the special interest groups dominating public education. In addition to the money myth, the class size myth, and the teacher pay myth, Greene debunks the special education myth (special ed programs burden public schools), the certification myth (certified or more experienced teachers are more effective in the classroom), the graduation myth (nearly all students graduate from high school), the draining myth (choice harms public schools), the segregation myth (private schools are more racially segregated), and a dozen more.

And here's what Booklist had to say about it:

Researcher Greene debunks several purported myths at the heart of assumptions about efforts to reform troubled public schools. He begins with the conventional wisdom that increased spending on schools leads to improved education. Citing national statistics on school spending, Greene asserts that most arguments about inadequate spending are based on anecdotes not facts. He concludes that even if schools in poor urban areas were provided with more funds, there is no guarantee they would use the funds effectively. Other myths that he debunks: social problems such as poverty contribute to low academic performance, smaller class sizes produce improvements, certified teachers are more effective, teachers are underpaid, public schools’ performance has declined, private schools are more racially segregated than public schools. These myths are perpetuated by powerful interest groups, including teachers’ unions, asserts Greene. Whatever readers may think of Greene’s research, he provides an interesting perspective to the ongoing debates about what ails public schools and how to improve them.

This press release is from the U.S. Department of Education.

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), released today by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), found little change between 1992 and 2003 in adults' ability to read and understand sentences and paragraphs or to understand documents such as job applications.

"One adult unable to read is one too many in America," said U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who today announced plans to coordinate adult education efforts in 2006 across multiple federal agencies. "We must take a comprehensive and preventive approach, beginning with elementary schools and with special emphasis in our high schools. We must focus resources toward proven, research-based methods to ensure that all adults have the necessary literacy skills to be successful."

African Americans scored higher in 2003 than in 1992 in all three categories, increasing 16 points in quantitative, eight points in document and six points in prose literacy. Overall, adults have improved in document and quantitative literacy with a smaller percentage of adults in 2003 in the Below Basic category compared to 1992. Whites, African Americans and Asian/Pacific Islanders have improved in all three measures of literacy with a smaller percentage in 2003 in the Below Basic category compared to 1992.

Hispanic adults showed a decrease in scores for both prose and document literacy and a higher percentage in the Below Basic category. The report also showed that five percent of U.S. adults, about 11 million people, were termed "nonliterate" in English, meaning interviewers could not communicate with them or that they were unable to answer a minimum number of questions.

NAAL in 2003 assessed a nationally representative sample of more than 19,000 Americans age 16 and older, most in their homes and some in prisons. NCES, which is part of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, conducted the assessment in both 1992 and 2003.

NAAL uses three categories to define English-language literacy: prose, document and quantitative. Prose literacy includes the skills needed to understand continuous text, such as newspaper articles. Document literacy is the ability to understand the content and structure of documents such as prescription drug labels. Quantitative literacy involves using numbers in text, such as computing and comparing the cost per ounce of food items.

Greg Lukianoff at FIRE writes:

The invaluable Daphne Patai, who serves on FIRE’s Board of Directors, recently sent me some interesting thoughts on the abuse of “dispositions” and other vague, political standards in the modern academy. As loyal Torch readers know, students like Ed Swan at Washington State University and Bill Felkner at Rhode Island College have been the victims of universities’ attempts to require students to show a commitment to concepts like “social justice” seemingly without understanding that no two people likely agree exactly on what terms like that even mean. Such standards are an excuse for, and an invitation to, establishing official political orthodoxies in academia—and only impoverish the academy’s “marketplace of ideas.”

Here is what Daphne recommends to students faced by these attempts at imposing ideological uniformity. Note: she makes the same observation that we've made here before: the liberals in academia today are not classical liberals. Talk to a classical liberal and they shake their heads at what is going as liberalism today.

In this age of challenging binaries, polarities, and other fixed categories, it would be hard for most academics (adhering as they do to postmodernist intellectual games) to defend equating “social justice” or a “progressive” disposition with their particular politics (in opposition to some other purported politics) without falling into major intellectual contradictions. Classical liberals have no trouble making such distinctions, but few adherents to a “social justice” or “dispositions” agenda these days would label themselves as classical liberals. 

 

Given this reality, one obvious way of undermining current campus orthodoxies is for students to use their wit and ingenuity to act on their own visions of what “social justice” or a “progressive” agenda might be. I.e., since when is fighting censorship not progressive? Or defending high intellectual standards and refusing to reduce them all to politics? Or working for some political party that may not be the one supported by one’s professors? Is there anyone in the country who does not believe their own politics promote “social justice?” It’s not the label, but its definition—which have been narrowed in a way incompatible with genuine education (vs. indoctrination)—that is the problem. Why should students (or anyone) allow an institution to determine which of their activities, dispositions, and endeavors are appropriate to someone else’s understanding of “social justice?” To capitulate to this seems to be giving up before the fight has even begun. 

 

So, next time students are told they must participate in a “progressive” internship, promote “social justice,” or have their “professional disposition” evaluated—I propose that they not waste time challenging the labels but focus quickly on their own definitions of such activities and proceed to creatively comply with the assignment. I’d like to see a school actually punish someone who complies with the schools’ apparent demands but infuses them with their own politics and ethics. This would certainly be a clarifying exercise.

More on Ed Swan and WSU from Fox News:

“Over one’s inner mind, and self, no one has coercive power.”

So write attorneys Jordan Lorence and Harvey A. Silverglate, authors of the just-published Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

The Guide is yet another indication that political correctness is faltering on campuses across North America. To those who value the right of individuals to a conscience—that is, to judge right and wrong for themselves—this is welcome news.

Political correctness is the belief that certain ideas and attitudes are improper and, so, should be discouraged or prohibited by punishing those who advance them. Conversely, ideas and attitudes that are proper should be encouraged by being enforced.

An example of a politically incorrect idea: inherent biological differences between the two sexes explain why there are more male than female scientists. The correct version: discrimination against women explains the ‘gender imbalance’ in science, and the discrimination must be remedied.

Both preceding explanations may have merit but PC is not interested in weighing evidence. It acts to quash the ideologically incorrect idea and to champion the correct one.

Last January, when Harvard University President Lawrence Summers raised the mere possibility of biological differences as an explanation for the ‘gender imbalance’ in science, a vicious PC backlash forced him to apologize publicly no less than three times. After what some called his “Soviet-show-trial-style apologies,” Summers made an act of contrition by pledging “to spend $50 million over the next decade to improve the climate for women on campus.”

The most important aspect of the sad episode is not whether the explanation of biological differences is correct. It is that the idea cannot be so much as suggested without the ‘offender’ paying a terrible price in public humiliation and in his career.

The cost to society is high; creativity and intellectual progress wither. The cost to individuals is higher; without competing ideas, people cannot adequately judge for themselves what is true and false, right or wrong, moral and immoral. For me, that private judgment is what constitutes a conscience, to which every human being has an indispensable and inalienable right.

The Summers debacle was a high-profile example of a PC process that has proceeded more quietly across North American campuses for decades.

The ability of students to judge for themselves is restricted by limiting the ideas upon which those judgments would be passed. In turn, this impoverishes the quality of conscience.

FIRE’s new Guide—the fifth in a series of ideological survival manuals for college students—describes both the manner in which the right of conscience is being attacked on campus and how the tide is turning toward individual rights.

Three common ways in which universities limit a student’s access to ideas are speech codes, mandatory ‘diversity’ tests or training, and ‘non-discrimination’ policies.

Speech codes prohibit expression that could give offense on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, race or other ‘historical disadvantage.’ The codes are used primarily to protect women, minorities and gays from words or ideas that they might experience as insulting. The guidelines are often so vague as to prohibit the open discussion of issues like affirmative action or religious objections to homosexuality.

Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania offers an example. In April 2003, the university defined harassment as any “unwanted conduct which annoys, threatens, or alarms a person or group.” “[E]very member of the community” was required to adopt the administration’s guidelines not only in his or her behaviors but also “in their attitudes.” In 2004, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania issued a preliminary injunction against the university’s codes as unconstitutional and they were repealed.

Mandatory diversity tests and training attempt to correct the unacceptable political views of students. The experience of Ed Swan, a self-described conservative Christian at Washington State’s College of Education, offers an example.

Swan expressed the belief that white privilege and male privilege do not currently exist in our society. In 2004 he was given low scores on a “dispositions criteria” by which some universities rank the “social commitment” of students. The university threatened to disenroll Swan if he did not sign a contract that committed him to further political screening and re-orientation. Due to a letter from FIRE and a high-profile protest, the contract requirement was dropped.

Non-discrimination policies, which are ostensibly inclusive, have been used to ban “dissenting” groups from campus and from receiving the student funds to which their members are required to contribute. Christian groups seem particularly vulnerable.

For example, in April 2005, the group Princeton Faith and Action sought official student status. Its application was denied because FPA is connected to an outside organization (the Christian Union) that was not yet established at Princeton University. Other groups were not required to meet a similar standard.

On May 13, the student newspaper the Daily Princetonian reported, “Nassau Hall has reversed its policy on the recognition of religious student groups after being contacted by an outside civil liberties organization that protested the treatment of one such group as an ‘ongoing injustice’.”

The right to judge for yourself what is true and false, what is right and wrong is a prerequisite for both freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The right of conscience is the bottom line of personal liberty itself. And it is being reasserted.

All current and future Washington 10th graders must pass the WASL test in order to graduate from high school.

However, Governor Christine Gregoire yesterday pledged more money to help tutor students who fail the test.

Note: they could spend 100% of the GNP and still not have 100% of the Washington students pass the WASL. But it's a good excuse to spend like crazy!

From Northwest Public Radio:

The 38-million dollar request is part of Governor Gregoire's supplemental budget. The money would go to school districts for all manner of WASL prep: including summer school, Saturday classes and individual tutoring. Doctor Barbara Mertens with the Washington State Association of School Administrators says the money is needed to ensure a hundred percent of students pass the WASL.

Dr. Mertens: "There's grave concern on the part of everyone that kids are actually being given the opportunity to pass that test. So that is why we're seeing this strong emphasis on work with those students who have not passed the WASL at the end of this school year."

Only 47-percent of 10th graders passed the WASL last school year. It's expected the January legislative session will bring a fierce debate over whether the WASL graduation requirement should be postponed.

See our previous post: Feds Fine Idaho Board Of Education For Not Meeting Testing Requirements.

Hey, they were only six months from meeting the law passed 12 years ago...

As reported in today's edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

The Idaho Department of Education will get $104,000 taken out of its budget for one year because it didn’t meet the demands of a federal law that’s nearly 12 years old.

The fine, 25 percent of the education department’s administrative budget, will not directly affect students in Latah County, said Dwight Johnson, the State Board of Education interim executive director. But it will deliver a painful blow to staff in Boise who support local schools.

The fine stems from Idaho’s failure to meet the provisions of the 1994 Improving America’s School Act. The act pre-dated the No Child Left Behind Act and launched some of the first assessment requirements for the state.

The State Board of Education is frustrated with the fine because Idaho was just six months shy of meeting the requirements, said Luci Willits, SBOE spokeswoman. “It’s a timing issue for us.”

Allison Westfall, spokeswoman for the state department of education, said the issue did not arise overnight.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Marilyn Howard negotiated and signed a compliance agreement in 2002 to extend the time frame for meeting IASA regulations that demanded implementation of a standardized testing system. The No Child Left Behind Act entered the equation in 2001, heaping more testing requirements on the state.

“Considering that we had upwards of $42 million in Title 1 funds that could have been taken away this is a relatively small amount,” said Willits. Title 1 is a reading program that gives struggling students a concentrated boost. She said the board believes any fine is counterproductive to the mission of the U.S. Department of Education.

Willits said the state is working to meet the standards, with a public review phase starting Jan. 15. Plus the Idaho State Achievement Test is undergoing a makeover. She estimated Idaho will be in compliance within six months.

“We’ve made so much progress,” Willits said. “I’m amazed we’re not being recognized for our progress and are being fined.”

• What happened: The Idaho Supreme Court ruled the state’s method of funding school buildings is unconstitutional.
• What it means: The state must come up with a new way to fund public school buildings, instead of relying on a local bonding system.
• What’s next: Idaho lawmakers likely will take up the issue during the next legislative session, starting in January. Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden has not yet said if he will appeal the ruling.

Watch the statist mindset below: "It’s a firm declaration that the days of saddling districts with the responsibility for financing their projects appears to be over". So the tax payers in the district don't have to pay for it. Rather, the taxpayers in the State have to pay for it. The difference is?

As reported in today's edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

Idaho’s method of funding school construction is unconstitutional, according to an Idaho Supreme Court ruling Wednesday.

The 4-1 decision is a huge victory for a group of school districts led by Moscow, Potlatch and Whitepine. Kendrick and Genesee districts also were involved in the 15-year-old case that bounced back and forth between the state Supreme Court and the 4th District Court.

“It’s a great day for public education in Idaho,” said Keely Emerine Mix, a Moscow School District board member who worked on the team that tried to convince voters to pass a $29 million bond levy that failed in April.

“It’s a firm declaration that the days of saddling districts with the responsibility for financing their projects appears to be over,” Emerine Mix said. “I think that is a great thing.”

The case began in 1990 when a group of 10 school districts formed the Idaho Schools for Equal Educational Opportunity. They filed a lawsuit to challenge the adequacy and method of funding public education facilities in the state.

“Eventually we had 32 school districts — some drop out and others come in — most recently we had about 21 school districts,” said Robert C. Huntley, attorney for the ISEEO and a former Idaho Supreme Court justice.

He said the districts united because some of the schools were built as long ago as 1906 and 1908 and were desperate for funds.

Emerine Mix said Idaho schools are the only ones in the nation that don’t receive assistance from the state for facility construction and remodeling. The districts also must receive two-thirds majority approval from voters in bond elections.

Huntley said the case is likely the hardest and probably most significant he has ever taken on.

“We think this decision is a good resolution to the case,” said Bob Cooper, public information officer for the Attorney General’s Office. “It gives a firm legal basis from which we can advise the Legislature. The court has properly placed the question of how to structure a system for education funding back into the hands of the legislative government.”

The case before the Supreme Court was an appeal of a 2001 ruling by Judge Deborah Bail of the 4th District Court, who ruled the funding system established by the Legislature was unconstitutional.

The state responded to Bail’s ruling by taking the case through multiple appeals that ended Wednesday with the Supreme Court’s decision. The state’s challenge included one attempt by the Legislature to pass a bill that would have ended the case by imposing restrictions on lawsuits related to school funding.

Justice Linda Copple Trout wrote for the majority in Wednesday’s scathing 21-page opinion: “the district court explored the funding problems in great detail, and concluded the ‘glaring gap’ in the funding system was the lack of any mechanism to deal quickly with major, costly, potentially catastrophic conditions by districts which are low in population, have a low tax base and are in economically depressed areas.”

Justice Jim Jones, the lone voice of dissent, said he did so in part because the plaintiffs failed to present competent evidence to establish systemwide failure. But Jones also wrote the state failed to present evidence that facility problems identified earlier in the case had been remedied, and that funding mechanisms provided by the Legislature were adequate to meet constitutional requirements.

“The underlying issue in this case,” Copple Trout wrote, “is whether the Legislature has provided the proper level and method of funding school facilities to create a safe environment conducive to learning, not whether particular districts need additional funds for facility improvements.”

Inadequate fire alarm systems, dead-end fire-trap hallways, over-crowding, no air conditioning, toxic mold, crumbling foundations are just some of the challenges facing local districts, Huntley said.

“They are deteriorating badly ... when you have buildings that are 85, 90, 100 years old, pretty soon they’re not adequate,” he said.

Emerine Mix said she is unsure of how the ruling will affect districts like Moscow that are in the midst of considering facilities bonds.

“It’s no reason to hurry a bond, but also no reason to delay planning for the very real needs that many of our school buildings and school population have,” she said. “The failure of the bond in April doesn’t mean we have no needs. We need to see what the Legislature does and what their timeline is in terms of doing it.”

The ruling says that’s the state’s — not the court’s — duty, Emerine Mix said.

The Court offered suggestions for the Legislature including:

• Reducing the majority necessary to pass a bond;
• Allowing taxpayers to designate a portion of their income tax refund to cover repairs of school facilities;
• Funding school facilities out of the state general fund;
• Authorizing a study to determine the actual cost of providing a thorough education;
• Establishing a school facilities fund supported by a percentage of corporate income tax revenue; or
• Creating an emergency school building repair program to fund school districts’ urgent repair needs.

The court’s suggestions stemmed from similar cases in other states such as New Jersey, Kansas and North Carolina. Copple Trout wrote the court looked at the fact that other legislatures grappling with the same issue have come up with a number of alternatives to help school districts in providing a safe environment conducive to learning.

From the Associated Press:

The states method of funding schoolhouse construction is unconstitutional, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled today.

The scathing, 21-page ruling scolds the Legislature for quibbling over the details of a few crumbling schools while failing to look at the big picture

- that the local bonding system established by lawmakers to pay for school buildings is insufficient under the Idaho Constitution, leaving many students without a safe place to learn.

The ruling means the Legislature must come up with a new system for paying for school construction.

The list of safety concerns and difficulties in getting funds for repairs or replacements is distressingly long, Justice Linda Copple-Trout wrote for the majority. The overwhelming evidence not only supports, but compels the district courts conclusion of law: The funding system in effect in 2001 was simply inadequate to meet the constitutional mandate to provide a thorough system of education in a safe environment.

Idaho is the only state that provides no direct support for public school construction and still requires a two-thirds majority to approve local construction bonds.

The lawsuit began in 1990, when a group of 22 school districts calling itself Idaho Schools for Equal Educational Opportunity banded together to sue the state over public school funding. The class-action lawsuit has bounced from court to court over the past 15 years, even making it to the Idaho Supreme Court a handful of times. In 2001, 4th District Judge Deborah Bail finally ruled the states levy system was unconstitutional, prompting the state to bring a bevy of issues on appeal to the Supreme Court.

In a 4-1 decision, the high courts ruling today struck down those issues, stripping the case to a simple question of funding.

In short, the state fails to grasp the relevance of the adage the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, Copple-Trout wrote.

Idaho Schools for Equal Educational Opportunity is a proper party to bring the class-action lawsuit, the high court found, and as such is entitled to show the statewide safety problems that resulted from the states funding methods. Even though some of the states most damaged schools have been repaired or replaced since the lawsuit began, the high court ruled that the repairs did not render the lawsuit moot.

The states pedantic focus on such details as whether it would cost $7 million to build a new school as opposed to the district courts finding of $10 million distracts from the overwhelming evidence in the record documenting serious facility and funding problems in the states public education system, Copple-Trout wrote.

Still, the Supreme Court only ruled that there was a problem, and left the method of fixing it in the hands of the Legislature.

Cross-posted from EIA. Look for the Idaho and Washington numbers. And see exactly what "social programs" the NEA is supporting.

Last week, EIA reported on the salary portion of the 2004-05 labor organization financial disclosure report (LM-2) filed by the National Education Association. This analysis concentrates on contribution, grants, political expenditures, and other outlays made by the union during the year.

The U.S. Department of Labor now requires unions to itemize expenditures in the following categories:

• Representational activities – NEA spent $47 million.
• Political activities and lobbying – NEA spent $25 million.
• Contributions, gifts and grants – NEA spent $65.5 million.
• General overhead – NEA spent $64 million.
• Union administration – NEA spent $56.8 million. 

Each category contains details of expenditures, though it isn't always clear why an expenditure was placed in one category and not another. NEA also employed a mob of consultants during the 2004-05 school year, and space simply won't allow listing them all, or guessing at what they were hired to do.

Below I have listed a sampling of NEA expenditures in each category, along with information about, or a web link to, the recipients.

Representational activities

• JBL Associates, Bethesda MD: $129,269
• Bredhoff & Kaiser, the law firm of NEA General Counsel Robert Chanin, received funds in a number of different categories, totaling $1,143,316
• Consortium for Educational Change, Lombard IL: $40,000
• B-Line Express of Columbia MD ($10,000 for software) and the Source Group of Richmond VA ($21,291 for consulting) received funds for "opposition and anti-privatization" projects.
• National Coalition on Health Care: $25,000
• Generations United: $10,000
• NB Yacht Charters: $11,797

Political activities and lobbying

First, I list the money that went to NEA state affiliates last year for various ballot and legislative initiatives, as well as other grants with a political aim. Remember, these are all expenditures from NEA's national budget from September 2004-August 2005, and do not include whatever expenditures were made by the state affiliate itself, or by NEA after August 2005.

• Alabama Education Association: $150,806
• Arizona Education Association: $273,015
• Arkansas Education Association: $24,750
• California Teachers Association: $2,562,778
• Colorado Education Association: $233,477
• Connecticut Education Association: $76,500
• Delaware State Education Association: $27,000
• Education Minnesota: $27,201
• Florida Education Association: $206,125
• Georgia Association of Educators: $295,273
• Hawaii State Teachers Association: $13,203
• Idaho Education Association: $192,930
• Indiana State Teachers Association: $25,000
• Iowa State Education Association: $57,950
• Kentucky Education Association: $250,690
• Louisiana Association of Educators: $165,719
• Maryland State Teachers Association: $47,900
• Massachusetts Teachers Association: $255,000
• MEA-MFT: $151,564
• Michigan Education Association: $660,287
• Mississippi Association of Educators: $21,260
• Missouri NEA: $38,434
• NEA New Hampshire: $21,684
• NEA New Mexico: $24,544
• NEA New York: $51,400
• Nebraska State Education Association: $178,086
• Nevada State Education Association: $29,837
• New Jersey Education Association: $791,715
• North Carolina Association of Educators: $130,000
• North Dakota Education Association: $107,000
• Ohio Education Association: $877,962
• Oklahoma Education Association: $65,600
• Oregon Education Association: $47,230
• Pennsylvania State Education Association: $50,000
• NEA Rhode Island: $173,000
• South Carolina Education Association: $125,600
• South Dakota Education Association: $176,000
• Tennessee Education Association: $30,794
• Texas State Teachers Association: $250,915
• Washington Education Association: $12,324
• West Virginia Education Association: $164,594
• Wisconsin Education Association Council: $180,439

The sum of the above is almost $9.25 million. However, NEA also gave money in this category directly to various groups or campaigns, rather than through state affiliates.

• Education Commission of the States: $10,000
• National Association of Legislative Political Specialists: $12,459. I had never heard of this group, even though it is located nearby. Their office, however, happens to be in the same room as the California Teachers Association Region II office.
• National Conference of Black Mayors: $5,000
• NCSL Foundation for State Legislatures: $8,200
• Greenberg Quinlan Research: $302,670. A big outlay for polling services.
• Malchow, Schlackman, Hoppey & Cooper: $542,398
• Ballot Initiative Strategy Center: $75,000
• League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC): $45,000
• Terris & Barnes: $368,038
• Wisconsin Citizen Action Fund for Nonpartisan GOTV Projects: $20,000
  Winning Directions: $413,291
• Protect Our Public Schools: $500,000. The anti-charter school campaign in Washington state.
• North Carolina Democratic Party Building Fund: $25,000
• Floridians Against Inequities in Rates: $25,000
• The Fund to Protect Social Security: $400,000
• Trust Lands for Education Committee (Arizona): $200,000
• Rock the Vote Education Fund: $10,000
• Missouri Progressive Vote Coalition: $14,000
• Citizens United to Protect Public Safety (Maine): $300,000
• Kids Count Coalition (Oklahoma): $100,000
• Floridians for All Committee: $249,000
• Alliance for Nevada's Working Families: $250,000

Communities for Quality Education received $600,000 from NEA out of this category, but a quick peek at the "union administration" expenditures shows CQE received an additional $1.9 million from NEA for "public relations costs." Again, this is in addition to whatever funds CQE raised from individual NEA state affiliates.

Contributions, gifts and grants

What hasn't been clear from previous disclosure reports is that NEA is active in the world of philanthropy. While the NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education has been issuing education grants for many years, the union itself also doles out contributions to nonprofits and advocacy groups that may or may not have a direct education mission. Listed here are those grants, plus payments to groups holding special events, and other outlays.

• Valis Associates: $200,000. This lobbying firm was hired by NEA for the particular purpose of outreach to the Republican Party.
• AFSCME: $5,000
• Amnesty International: $5,000
• Aspira Association: $5,000
• Center for Women Policy Studies: $5,000
• Congressional Black Caucus Foundation: $39,940
• Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute: $35,000
• Economic Policy Institute: $45,000
• Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies: $10,000
• MALDEF: $5,000
• National Association for Bilingual Education: $5,000
• National Council of La Raza: $7,900
• National Women's Law Center: $5,000
• National Alliance of Black School Educators: $30,000
• Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Media Awards: $5,000
• Leadership Conference on Civil Rights: $13,000
• Center for Law and Education: $45,000
• AIDS Walk Washington: $5,000
• Human Rights Campaign: $15,000
• HEROS, Inc.: $20,000
• Everybody Wins! DC: $7,903
• Rainbow PUSH Coalition: $5,000
• United South and Eastern Tribes: $5,000
• Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN): $5,000
• Rebuild America's Schools: $20,000
• The Ripon Society: $10,000
• Learning First Alliance: $51,350
• Food Research and Action Center: $5,000
• LULAC: $5,000
• The King Center: $10,000
• Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute: $20,000
• Gephardt Legacy Fund: $10,000
• Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association: $30,000
• Democratic Leadership Council: $25,750
• Wellstone Memorial Fund: $5,000 

General overhead

This category mostly contains the union's phone bills, UPS charges, etc. However, there are a few interesting entries:

• Initial Tropical Plants, Inc.: $42,472
• Joe Ragan's Coffee, Ltd.: $25,962
• Morris Costumes: $5,421. A second payment of $54,225 appears in the "union administration" category.

Union administration

The expenditures from this category are not easily distinguished from the previous category, however, one assumes they are more directly related to union operations. 

• American Labor Education Center: $25,000
• Children's Defense Fund: $10,648
• Committee for Education Funding: $8,157
• Home and School Institute: $36,942
• NCATE: $311,722
• People for the American Way: $51,200
• Public Agenda Foundation: $7,132
• NCSL Foundation for State Legislatures: $13,000
• Consortium for Educational Change: $5,682
• US Hispanic Leadership Institute: $10,000
• National Board for Professional Teaching Standards: $6,363
• NTL Institute: $170,188
• Partnership for 21^st Century Skills: $35,000
• Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: $200,000. This is the nonprofit formed by the NEA state affiliates in the north central part of the U.S.
• Harvard University: $25,000. Listed as pertaining to "research services and statistics," it is unclear whether this is a grant to The Civil Rights Project or for something else. NEA is, nevertheless, a contributor to the CRP.
• Center for Teaching Quality: $122,696
• U.S. Action: $6,000
• Council on Foreign Relations: $6,000 

Also in this category are payments to Media Strategies and Research of $2,966,123, The Mellman Group of $106,400, and Brazile and Associates of $40,148.

On October 17, EIA reported that the New Jersey Education Association chose not to contract with Aramark Corporation for food services during the union's convention in Atlantic City. "Aramark has a history of privatizing public school and public college/university food services, facilities, management/custodial services, and auxiliary services such as warehousing and mailroom operations…. NJEA cannot allow Aramark to profit from our convention," the union informed its members.

Well, maybe Aramark executives weren't too distraught with NJEA's decision because they were busy counting the $145,766 they received from NEA on June 20.

Finally…

NEA's membership numbers are listed at 2,731,419, of whom 2,378,955 are active employees.

Two state affiliates are in debt to NEA. The Mississippi Association of Educators owes $204,000 on a 10-year loan and the Washington Education Association owes $804,000 on a three-year loan.