Donal the enforcer; a Catholic Schools visionary
February 27, 2009
No not Donal McKeown the auxillary bishop in charge of all Catholic education delivery. This Donal is Donal Flanagan, chief executive of CCMS.
In a recent Irish News article Donal Flanagan seems to have donned the mantle of Caitriona Ruane’s enforcement chief for her “visionary proposals”
In language reminiscent of the Troubles Donal Flanagan announced that those who willfully disgregarded her guidance would be subject to the Sinn Fein minister’s “battery of arms”.
Donal Flanagan also attempted to shift the responsibility for the education chaos widely permeating the school landscape to a “political battleground” . This statement must be considered in the context of his own involvement in the reform agenda.
Perhaps it may also help to refer back to Donal Flanagan’s views on integration of schools published in the Irish News in April 2006.
The man tasked with developing new models of schooling should examine the process of ‘transformation’ and say “it does not work”, Catholic school leaders have said.
By Simon Doyle Education Correspondent
07/04/2006Let’s hope Caitriona Ruane takes note of Donal Flanagan’s views prior to making her announcement on Parkhall College in Antrim.
Urgent Guidance for Primary School Teachers
February 25, 2009
No high quality study in education research has ever established that inclusive education is best delivered through child-centered pedagogy.
Selection or Selection Fortnight Magazine No 463 Dec 08/Jan 09
Carefully designed and evaluated studies have demonstrated that such child-centered curricula are particularly damagin to the poor.
Donald Myers who was charged with evaluating the impact of child-centered curricula in the United States shares PACE’s concern about educationalists.
The time has come in American education when teachers should stage a walkout when education evangelists propose innovations which have not been validated by careful research over a long period of time. Instead of being paid and applauded, these hucksters should be sent packing and should be thankful that they are not jailed as would representatives of a pharmaceutical house for dispensing a drug before it has been tested.
Donald Myers quoted in Left Back by Diane Ravitch 2000
The reforms proposed for Northern Ireland schools are addressed in two highly regarded studies – one centred on assessment, the other on curriculum – and both draw the same unequivocal conclusion which should interest the Catholic Church and Sinn Fein: the poor will lose out dramatically if Sinn Fein have their way. This has already been hinted at in research on the early years “Enriched Curriculum” in Northern Ireland, where a “Matthew Effect” was identified; in progressive curricula – the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Notice how all reference to this work is avoided by the empty vessels insisting on changing the education system for the 21st century. If they are not careful they will be into the 22nd century before coming up with evidence based validation of their proposals.
“A Catholic Test for a Catholic people.”
February 24, 2009
On February 4th 2009 Frank Bunting, from the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, welcomed the establishment of the NICCE working group.
“The Catholic sector is showing social responsibility and the working group reporting back in five weeks is much more timely than the years of wasted time spent on this issue to date,” he said.
“In the interests of cohesion it would be helpful if all schools could move in a similar direction but maybe that is asking too much.
“I welcome that practitioners from within schools are going to sit down with the Catholic Commission to devise a way forward which will be a move towards an education system that all children can benefit from.”
On February 23rd The Irish National Teachers Organisation announced support for their members refusing to teach for or assist in the administration of some tests for entry into grammars.
So now INTO are exposing the Catholic education systems introduction of verbal reasoning. In doing so they reveal the nonsense talked about concern for the child and the issue of social justice. The NICCE working group must face up to their determined refusal to embrace their non-denominational colleagues and support the provision of a testing arrangement to measure attainment in numeracy and literacy. Such testing conforms to parental wishes and is a measure of the effectiveness of teaching in primary schools. The teaching unions hate accountability and their opposition to testing exemplifies this.
Bishop McKeown said ““We are trying to manage the chaos by ensuring that the needs of (Catholic) primary schools, grammar schools and secondary schools are all met.
“We are asking three (Catholic) grammar principals and three secondary principals how we can manage this in the interests of all. (Catholics)
“We want to find a practical way forward in the context of a clear Catholic sector policy and are looking for ways to hold the sector together,”
So what next from Bishop McKeown? An attribution similar to one made by Bishop Daniel Mageean, in his Lenten pastoral, when he stated that prime minister, Lord Craigavon had adopted the words A Protestant parliament for a Protestant people as his slogan. The implication was that Catholics had no status in their native land.
So is Bishop McKeown and his band of brothers seeking and about to announce:
A Catholic Test for a Catholic people.
With the implication that Protestants have no education philosophical status in their native land.
Teachers risk accusation of unprofessionalism on refusal to teach
February 23, 2009
Teachers in Northern Ireland claiming to refuse to teach primary children for grammar school tests are risking their careers in public education.
Since it has been confirmed by CCEA that the numeracy and literacy aspects of the revised curriculum remain the same as those in the preceding curriculum there can be no basis for any teacher refusing to teach the required elements. Indeed it may be illegal not to do so.
The N.I. General Teaching Council Code
Any parent concerned about their childs’ primary school teacher’s compliance with the law should make a complaint to the General Teaching Council if they become aware of a particular refusal to adhere to their obligations.
The General Teaching Council For Northern Ireland
www.gtcni.org.uk
Albany House
73-75 Great Victoria St, Belfast,
BT2 7AF
028 90333390
Parents should not be bullied by the teacher unions. Teachers must understand their professional responsibilities and place the best interests of the pupil and the wishes of the parents first.
Anything less cannot be acceptable.
Stanley Poots the anti-selection principal
February 22, 2009
The Belfast Telegraph gave prominence to yet another set of primary school Quislings
Mr Poots tells the Education Committee chairman :
As chairman of the Education Committee you should reflect the wider educational opinion – you have not done so to date.”
Perhaps Stanley was asleep or otherwise engaged when the results of the Household Survey were published. Over 60% of parents and teachers wanted to see academic selection retained.
Mr Poots was a signator to an anti-selection petition published just prior to last year’s 11-plus tests. His name is tuckedin just close to Professor Tony Gallagher’s signature. You will recall that Gallagher was paid by the DENI for his research on the Effects of the Selective System of Education in Northern Ireland. No bias there then.
More bad press for Sir Kenneth Bloomfield
February 22, 2009
Despite his panicked effort in the Newsletter
http://www.newsletter.co.uk/politics/Schools39-body-denies-39chaos39-claim.4990126.jp
to deny the incompetence of the AQE ,Sir Kenneth Bloomfield is not able to rally his school principal troops to rush to his defence. Indeed Portora Royal School and Ballymena Academy, members of the GBA have chosen a verbal reasoning test in place of Sir Kenneth’s CEA. Patricia Slevin of Victoria College has gone much further that Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, patron of the Integrated Education Fund, and has announced that the girls grammar with a similar intake profile will offer both tests!
To cap off her integrationist credentials Patricia Slevin has introduced Gaelic games to the genteel ladies school. A fawning BBC reporter even went so far as to tip the school for the McKenna Cup in a few years. A descent into chaos some claim, it now has descended into farce.
Ruane’s enthusiasm and determinism and obvious relish in her job as Minister of Education, have added a whole new dimension to Northern Ireland’s gloomy political climate. She has galvanised 11 plus abolitionists. Grammar school lobbyists seem to be in disarray. Association for Quality Education (AQE) president, Sir Ken Bloomfield claims that 31 grammar schools have signed up for an ‘unregulated’ common entrance exam. But as Caitriona points out, entrance tests are nonsense when so many grammars are already failing to fill their quotas – or soon will be.
Fortnight Magazine Issue 463 Shared Education for All
Fortnight Magazine, the Catholic Church and Sinn Fein
February 22, 2009
Fortnight Magazine interviewed the Minister for Education about her mission to destroy the principal of academic selection. Illustrating the ease with witch educationalists remain unchallenged by journalists Chris Moffat for Fortnight Magazine opens with the following:
Whatever your point of view, you have to acknowledge that with her record as a human rights campaigner, equality and fairness have to be the priority for Caitriona Ruane. After a career of human rights activism in Nicaragua, Dublin and West Belfast, how could she not conclude that academic selection is ‘wrong, unfair and unjust’?
Perhaps Chris Moffat of Fortnight Magazine didn’t carry out any fact checking prior to or after the interview in which case he would have discovered the Minister’s proclivity for hypocrisy.
The Parental Alliance for Choice in Education make the case for parental suspicion and scepticism of proposals from educationalists, including the Sinn Fein Minister.
Why have the Catholic Church and Sinn Fein got it in for the poor?
It seems that these days no public official can discuss education reform in Northern Ireland without referring to “educationlists.” The four Churches issued their recent statement after consulting extensively with “educationalists,” and Sinn Fein’s John O’Dowd rarely completes a sentence without the word “educationist” cropping up. Who are these “educationalists” who seems to play such a fundamental role in determining the direction of policy in education reform?
The most likely candidates are the various professors of education at Queen’s University’s School of Education. The vast majority of these professors have never taught in a school but are social scientists, anthropologists or products of the University of Ulster’s UNESCO Centre. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) might, for example, insist that children have rights in respect of how they’re taught and assessed, but only those with direct experience of the classroom know the problems associated with implementing such progressive ideas. David Ackerman notes that although “progressivism is dominant in most schools of education, it is rejected in most high schools.”
UNESCO emphasises children’s rights and campaigns for “inclusive” child-centred education. UNESCO’s Salamanca Statement of 1994 uses the absolutist language of rights to require that the curriculum be designed around the child’s interests: “those with special educational needs must have access to regular schools, which should accommodate them within a child-centred pedagogy capable of meeting these needs.” Parents who feel left out of the debate on the future of academic selection, for instance, are probably unaware that Northern Ireland’s schools’ current focus on children’s rights and child-centred education effectively excludes them from the consultation process. (Why consult the parent when the curriculum already takes account of the interests of the child?) An examination of the early documentation which gave form to the Revised Curriculum reveals extensive consultation with “educationalists,” teachers and pupils, but almost no parental involvement.
Critics have also highlighted that UNESCO’s insistence on child-centred approaches owes more to evangelism than the outcomes of carefully designed large-scale studies. For example, no high quality study has established that inclusive education is best delivered though child-centred pedagogy. More worrying, carefully designed studies have demonstrated that such curricula are particularly damaging to the poor. In Left Back, published in 2000, Diane Ravitch quotes Donald Myers who was charged with evaluating the impact of child-centred curricula in the USA. Myers shares Ravitch’s concerns about “educationalists”:
“The time has come in American education,” he declared, “when teachers should stage a walkout when education evangelists” propose innovations that have not been validated by careful research over a long period of time. Instead of being paid and applauded, these hucksters should be sent packing and “should be thankful they are not jailed as would representatives of a pharmaceutical house for dispensing a drug before it has been tested.”
What if the Catholic Church and Sinn Fein were to take Myers’ advice and ignore our local “educationalists”? What do high quality studies that have been “validated by careful research over a long period of time” have to say? The reforms proposed for Northern Ireland schools are addressed in two highly regarded studies – one centred on assessment, the other on curriculum – and both draw the same unequivocal conclusion which should interest the Catholic Church and Sinn Fein: the poor will lose out dramatically if Sinn Fein have their way! This has already been hinted at in research on the early years “Enriched Curriculum” in Northern Ireland, where a “Matthew Effect” was identified; in progressive curricula – the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
“Project Follow Through” is arguably the largest and most sophisticated educational project ever undertaken to discover, once and for all, the type of curriculum that maximizes the academic achievement of the poor. To give a sense of the scale of this study, it lasted 20 years, cost a billion dollars to fund, and involved 79,000 children from 180 low-income communities living in poverty. The conclusion was that the curriculum which helps children out of poverty is a traditional curriculum in which the teacher determines what is to be taught and children work in learning environments which are orderly and highly structured. (The reader can find details of this study by googling the words Project Follow Through.) The Revised Curriculum currently being implemented in Northern Ireland (the one the Minister is demanding that all primary school children must follow) was shown to be damaging to the development of the numeracy and literacy skills of disadvantaged children.
Richard Nadler noted that poor children taught by traditional methods, when compared to those following more progressive curricula, were “first in reading, first in math, first in spelling, and first in language. No other model came close.” No Northern Ireland “educationalist” seems to have directed the Catholic Church or Sinn Fein to this project, despite its strong association with the American Civil Rights movement. Siegfried Engelmann is not surprised: “Decision-makers don’t choose a plan because they know it works … They choose a plan because it’s consistent with their vision of what they think kids should do. Most educators, he says, seem to have a greater investment in romantic notions about children than they do in the gritty detail of actual practice or the fact that some things work well.”
Finally, turning to the Minister’s preference for election via Pupil Profile over selection via objective test score, once again this aspect of reform damages rather than enhances the life chances of the poor. Again, a large scale, meticulously designed study (see “Inequality in the transition from primary to secondary school: school choices and educational disparities in Germany” by Marcus Pietsch and Tobias Stubbe, published in 2007 in the European Educational Research Journal) is at odds with the counsel offered by our local “educationalists.” Consider two children, one rich, one poor, both with a score of 542. Pietch and Stubbe (p. 437) show that these children will be treated as equals in a selective system but when a discussion between parent and teacher determines school choice the poor child loses out:
For a student with an average German reading achievement (542), the probability of attending a Gymnasium [German grammar school] is more than twice as high if his or her family are higher grade professionals (55.57%) than if they are semi-skilled manual workers (21.36%).
The lessons of the study for the Catholic Church and Sinn Fein are clear: a move from selection via test to election via Pupil Profile will result in a decline in the number of disadvantaged children attending grammar schools. Where a child from a poor background may have a test history greatly superior to that of a middle class child, the confusing, vague and ambiguous language of the Pupil Profile will allow the articulate middle class parent to “talk away” the difference in test scores. The Catholic Church and Sinn Fein should listen to that great communist champion of the poor, Antonio Gramsci, who argued, in his Prison Notebooks, that “the less objective the testing, the more the working-class child or peasant child would be at a disadvantage.”
Important exam information for parents from the incoherent AQE
February 19, 2009
The descent into chaos for the Northern Ireland education system continues to plumb new depths. Many parents and their children are feeling the effects of the bends as they are dragged recklessly from regulation to deregulation and back again towards regulation.
If parents are considering which test is offered by their school of choice then the answer may be one, the other or both!
The Parental Alliance for Choice in Education have issued warnings on the educationalists’ plans for many years but understandably most have chosen to rely upon school representatives for guidance and information at a local level.. Such loyalty has been sadly misplaced evidenced by the increasingly inconsistent incoherent and erroneous information passed on by principals, teachers and spokespeople for various “Associations”
In December 2007, the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (Inst) was challenged on their polite platitudes towards socially disadvantaged local boys. The school refused to provide detailed answers. In addition their contradictory simultaneous support for the AQE test of numeracy and literacy and the CCEA Pupil Profile was laid at the foot of Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, Chairman of Governors. Again no clear response was provided. Bloomfield is a jockey out of many stables.
Recently Ballymena Academy published admission policy and aptitude test information for prospective pupils. This contingency plan for their “aptitude testing” would be implemented only in the event of an ‘unregulated’ transfer procedure – a hint of a possible move back towards regulation. The sample test items are clearly of the verbal reasoning type although the school do not indicate who provided their “contingency test” or who the chief examiner is. The guidance suggests should an acceptable alternative procedure gain the necessary support within the Northern Ireland Assembly, Ballymena Academy will comply with that procedure, their plan will not be implemented and parents will be advised accordingly.
Perhaps the Ballymena “contingency test” is similar to that of the Catholic grammar Lumen Christi. One can only wonder at why 69 schools could not agree a testing approach based on numeracy and literacy.
The most grotesque example of incoherence comes from Victoria College, the Belfast all girls grammar school in East Belfast. In the pages of the Irish News the principal, Patricia Slevin, announced:
“ pupils will gain entry to the college on the basis of their results in either of the tests which are being provided respectively by AQE and NFER”
Perhaps Ms Slevin should make contact with the examining bodies for advice on how to equate the two tests. Did the board of governors of Victoria College actually consider the problem before offering the criteria to prospective pupils.
Why have non-denominational grammar schools eschewed tests of numeracy and literacy in favour of a discredited obsolete verbal reasoning test?
Parents are entitled to have answers. Just don’t ask Sir Ken.
The continued amateur efforts of the AQE
February 18, 2009
Not satisfied with merely giving interviews with the Irish News education correspondent it seems that the AQE brain trust hope to convince the Catholic middle class of their folly by submitting letters to the editor arguing for a unified position on their private entrance test.
It is to be regretted that some years ago when AQE had the opportunity to expose the divisive nature of the Catholic authorities on education reform and grammar schools they chose to stay silent and pray for a reconciliation.
Too little, too late from the consensus seekers.
No prizes for identifying the source of this correspondence.
http://www.irishnews.com/articles/540/576/2009/2/17/610450_372649201501WhyareCa.html
AQE amateurs ridiculed in Irish News interview
February 17, 2009
The following interview appeared in the Irish News last Saturday 14th February,2009
http://www.irishnews.com/articles/540/5860/2009/2/14/610196_372339157417Entrancet.html
Setting the tone Education correspondent Simon Doyle said:
Grammar schools plan to save money by using volunteers rather than paying examiners to set and mark new entrance tests.
Those administering the Common Entrance Assessment (CEA) already have full-time jobs – some working as teachers.
PACE can reveal from impecable sources close to the Irish News the name of the AQE spokesman who gave the interview setting up the ridicule.
He is Marcus Patterson, a teacher of economics from Belfast Royal Academy. Mr Patterson has sometime held a key role in Concerned Parents for Education which claimed to represent parents supportive of academic selection. He manages the AQE website. He is also known to proffer advice to politicians.
Parents can only speculate on what was going through the teacher’s head when he agreed to give the interview. Perhaps he thought that the Irish News would laud the valiant efforts of those in AQE who set up a company seeking to profit from the deregulation of the post-primary transfer system. Perhaps he was the only spokesperson available for interview given the 6 nations rugby programme.
Unfortunately for AQE and for Mr Patterson the best mark possible for his latest contribution would be a resounding zero.
Perhaps the taxpayer will see some return on the £100,000 cost of the Minister’s withdrawn CCEA test in the near future.
