WI's election is a template for future elections - 25:1 corporate support for any candidate does not bode well FOR THE NATION. From what I hear, the race in WI is 50-50 after all the crap WI's gov pulled...for some reason it appears WI voters prefer corporations run their state, not WI citizens.
The former High Court Justice Michael Kirby has urged a defence of the public school system and an end to the inequity between public and private education.
The former High Court Justice Michael Kirby has urged a defence of the public school system and an end to the inequity between public and private education.
I am here to applaud public education and the central ideas that accompanied its spread throughout Australia in the 1870s and '80s. What a debt Australia owes to the founders of public education. They had to face strong opposition at the time, mainly from churches and private investors that had earlier enjoyed predominance in colonial schooling. Public education had to negotiate compromises by which limited classes for "scripture" were permitted as a trade off for non-denominational education. It had to endure the scoffing of those who thought that education was properly a privilege only for the wealthy and that public schools were the dire results of "socialism". But in the late 19th century, a great movement swept Australia to establish the public education system. It was a movement that coincided with our advances to federation. It was anchored in three great principles stated in the early public education acts. It would be free, compulsory and secular.
A large part of the success story of Australia as a modern nation can be traced to the establishment of public schools across our continental country, based on these principles. To them, in the 20th century, were added two more principles. These involved the inculcation of the values of egalitarian democracy, upon which our federal government was founded. And the embrace of the principle of excellence, so that public education would offer schools as good as, and better than, the most expensive private and religious schools.
During my 13 years of service on the High Court of Australia, completed earlier this year, I was, for most of the time, the only Justice whose entire education was received in public schools. Now Justice Susan Keiffel is in the same position. One out of seven. Like Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, prime minister John Howard and prime minister Bob Hawke, I was educated in public schools. Advertisement: Story continues below
In my case, I attended the local infants' school at North Strathfield in Sydney. Later I graduated to the "big school" in the 1880s building that still stands on Concord Road. The quality of education was outstanding. My debt to my teachers and to my fellow students is deep. I never cease to acknowledge it.
In 1949, 60 years ago, as a result of intelligence and aptitude tests, I was transferred to the Summer Hill Opportunity School, five miles from my home. In NSW, since the 1930s, the public education system has offered an extensive system of selective primary schools for children, chosen for special support because of identified gifts and talents.
At Summer Hill, I received the standard education. But to it were added well-designed courses aimed at encouraging particular interests in mathematics and English, drama and music, drawing and visits at a young age to the institutions of government. By the end of 1950, based on my performance, I was accepted into Fort Street Boys' High School in Sydney. It is one of the equivalents in NSW to Melbourne High. Fort Street School is, in fact, the oldest public school still operating in Australia and it is now co-educational. In its earliest form, the school was established in 1849. Only one school in our nation is older: The King's School, now at Parramatta, Sydney.
In my high school, we were constantly reminded of our famous alumni, of their public service and of our obligation to go and do likewise. Sir Edmund Barton, Sir Douglas Mawson, Dr. H.V. Evatt, Sir Garfield Barwick. The list was very long and we were all proud of it. I still am.
I am fed up with media, and some politicians, criticising public education in Australia. I am fed up with suggestions that public schools neglect education in values. I am fed up when I go to wealthy private schools, with substantial supplementary funding, and I see the neglect of the facilities of famous public high schools. Canterbury Boys' High School, in Sydney, was the school of former prime minister John Howard. A principal of a fine private school said to me recently that, in most other countries, the high school of a former prime minister would be celebrated and well endowed. Yet the funds in Australia tend to flow in other directions. My own old school in Sydney, Fort Street, lacks the swimming pools, manicured lawns and overpayments that seem to have flowed away from public schools. I hope that this attrition will end and soon. It is unjust. It is certainly undeserved, as the record of public school achievements demonstrate. The schools where 63 per cent of Australians are educated deserve better. The time has come for all citizens to make it clear that they demand an end to the underfunding of public education: where the future of the nation is chiefly written.
No one doubts the value of private and religious schools. Advocates of public education accept that choice is important. Pupils in private schools are Australians too. Their parents are taxpayers. Some competition in education is a good thing for public schools. However, an imbalance has crept in. It behoves those who enjoyed the benefits of public education in their youth to speak up for the schools that educate the majority of citizens. They provide the melting pot of all races, cultures, religions and intellectual abilities. These are the schools that need vocal advocates and lobbyists to put their case to government.
It constantly amazes me that leaders of government in Australia, who have themselves benefitted from public education, go along with inequity in the distribution of public funds for schooling. Parents and citizens in public schools must learn the arts of advocacy. They must blog, twitter, text, lobby and argue. Be sure that the lobbyists for private and religious schools are highly skilled and well organised. They have certainly been more than rewarded in recent years. For the children in the nation's public schools, this lack of balance must stop.
I said that two values were added to public education's core principles in the 20th century, namely democracy and excellence. I want to speak in praise of excellence. This outstanding school, year after year, produces some of the best in secondary education in Victoria. Its students go on to fame and fortune at university, in the sciences and professions. But why has Victoria not established a full network of such schools? Why are there no primary opportunity schools in Victoria for gifted and talented students? Why are there so few selective high schools in the public system with only Melbourne High, University High and MacRobertson Girls' High remaining from earlier times? Several other such schools were established in the 1920s and '30s; but they did not survive the Second World War. Even University High School lost its full selective status in the 1970s. Whose enmity or political correctness extinguished these special schools that added such diversity and excellence to the public system?
I have never received satisfactory answers to these questions. Some opponents argue that creating selective schools diminishes the egalitarianism of public education. It does nothing of the sort. It recognised that, within the egalitarian and democratic ethos of public schools, gifted students have certain special educational needs and therefore entitlements. A society questing for its own excellence, will invest in their advancement. Creative minds have special needs. A wise society invests in them.
Then it is said that there are differences over the criteria for selection. Let it be so. But if it can be so successful in a small handful of such schools, like Melbourne High School, the model needs to be spread more equitably to the outer suburbs and to regional and rural areas of the state. Putting it bluntly, it is not good enough for Melbourne High to rejoice almost alone in its success. It should long since have become the flagship for many similar schools. It must do this now. This is a right of students and of their parents. It also happens to be good for public education and for our society.
Next, it is said that education bureaucrats and unions do not like it. Well, they should have a voice; but not the final say. Diversification will help to arrest the drift to better funded private schools. Success will breed success. The parents and students of this great school must lift their voices for the other students of this state who have lost the chance to get into similar schools, as is their right in NSW. These are rights of citizenship. Melbourne High must support them.
Finally, and most unpersuasively, it is said that in Victoria, unlike in NSW, there are many scholarships that take clever students into private and religious schools. Yet such students have a right to the whole range of education in public schools, including education for the gifted and talented. Relying on scholarships to private schools is a confession of the failure of public education to deliver for those students.
Not before time, Victoria is re-visiting selective schools. It should do so urgently to ensure the ongoing strength and excellence of public education. It should do so to further the precious aims of education that is free, compulsory and secular, democratic and excellent, suitable for all according to their talents. Ultimately, what is at stake is the future role of students from public education in the exercise of power in our country. Give them excellence and they will take it through life into positions of responsibility and influence. They will bring with them the values of public schools. In the High Court of Australia there will be more than one alumnus. And in other branches of government, in business, the arts, universities and international bodies, people trained in Australia's public schools will reflect the principles of secularism, tolerance, democracy and excellence that lie at the core of public education in this country. The best of them will never forget the students and teachers with whom they shared the precious years of education. These special experiences gave me a life-long dedication to community involvement, social justice, equality of opportunity and human rights for all.
Lift your voices. Raise them in praise of excellence in public education.
This is an edited version of a speech, In Praise of Public Education, by former High Court justice Michael Kirby, AC CMG, at Melbourne High School's speech night last night.
Michael Kirby was a High Court judge in Australia from 1996 until his retirement on 2 February 2009. He has since established a personal website.
He made his homosexuality public by acknowledging his long-term partner (from 1969) Johan van Vloten in the 1999 edition of 'Who's Who'. [Mentioned on the glbtq encyclopedia entry for Kirby.] The section 'Speeches, articles, incidents' provides links to speeches and media reports.
Michael Kirby has also spoken out against Christians who oppose the promotion of homosexuality on the basis that the Bible says it is sin. He has claimed that the science is settled and that homosexuality is genetic.
As a practising homosexual, he has made a number of speeches promoting the homosexual cause. A list of speeches/articles, from the 1970s to the present, is on his website - click here. His website contains a more up-to-date and detailed list.
In 2000, we printed an article titled ' Justice Michael Kirby and Homosexual Rights', documenting several occasions when he had spoken out against Christians.
Over the intervening years Justice Kirby has continued to make public statements about the acceptance of homosexuality - both in Australia and overseas.
Since his retirement, Kirby has begun to speak even more publicly about homosexuality. Speeches and statements
The following statements and speeches document Michael Kirby's statements about homosexuality.
Michael Donald Kirby AC, CMG, (born 18 March 1939) is an Australian retired judge, jurist, and academic who is a former Justice of the High Court of Australia, serving from 1996 to 2009. .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Kirby_%28judge%29
Michael Kirby is an informed, caring, erudite and intelligent human being .. sadly, he and others like him, make Mitt, an uninformed, uncaring, ideologically fixed, unintelligent, lying, utterly cynical politician.
Rachel M. excellent as usual on the importance of Wisconsin .. Ed was great on education .. 2 good videos in yours ..
Jimmy Dugar on his first day in 1978 at a mostly white elementary school in Cincinnati. Natalie Fobes/Corbis
By DAVID L. KIRP Published: May 19, 2012
AMID the ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court’s ruling that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned “Black Monday” and vowed “massive resistance [ http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/brown-aftermath.html ].” But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974 [ http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=418&invol=717 ], the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.
A generation later, public schools that had been ordered to integrate in the 1960s and 1970s became segregated once again, this time with the blessing of a new generation of justices. And five years ago, a splintered court [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-908.ZS.html ] delivered the coup de grâce when it decreed that a school district couldn’t voluntarily opt for the most modest kind of integration — giving parents a choice of which school their children would attend and treating race as a tiebreaker in deciding which children would go to the most popular schools. In the perverse logic of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., this amounted to “discriminating among individual students based on race.” That’s bad history, which, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in an impassioned dissent, “threaten[s] the promise of Brown.”
To the current reformers, integration is at best an irrelevance and at worst an excuse to shift attention away from shoddy teaching. But a spate of research says otherwise. The experience of an integrated education made all the difference in the lives of black children — and in the lives of their children as well. These economists’ studies consistently conclude that African-American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools. They were more likely to graduate from high school and attend and graduate from college; and, the longer they spent attending integrated schools, the better they did. What’s more, the fear that white children would suffer, voiced by opponents of integration, proved groundless. Between 1970 and 1990, the black-white gap in educational attainment shrank — not because white youngsters did worse but because black youngsters did better.
Not only were they more successful in school, they were more successful in life as well. A 2011 study by the Berkeley public policy professor Rucker C. Johnson concludes that black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools have earned 25 percent more than those who never had that opportunity. Now in their 30s and 40s, they’re also healthier — the equivalent of being seven years younger.
Why? For these youngsters, the advent of integration transformed the experience of going to school. By itself, racial mixing didn’t do the trick, but it did mean that the fate of black and white students became intertwined. School systems that had spent a pittance on all-black schools were now obliged to invest considerably more on African-American students’ education after the schools became integrated. Their classes were smaller and better equipped. They included children from better-off families, a factor that the landmark 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity study had shown to make a significant difference in academic success. What’s more, their teachers and parents held them to higher expectations. That’s what shifted the arc of their lives.
Professor Johnson takes this story one big step further by showing that the impact of integration reaches to the next generation. These youngsters — the grandchildren of Brown — are faring better in school than those whose parents attended racially isolated schools.
Despite the Horatio Alger myth that anyone can make it in America, moving up the socioeconomic ladder [ http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/Hertz_MobilityAnalysis.pdf ] is hard going: children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich, who have about a 22 percent chance.
But many of the poor black children who attended desegregated schools in the 1970s escaped from poverty, and their offspring have maintained that advantage. Of course desegregation was not a cure-all. While the achievement gap and the income gap narrowed during the peak era of desegregation, white children continued to do noticeably better. That’s to be expected, for schools can’t hope to overcome the burdens of poverty or the lack of early education, which puts poor children far behind their middle-class peers before they enter kindergarten. And desegregation was too often implemented in ham-handed fashion, undermining its effectiveness. Adherence to principle trumped good education, as students were sent on school buses simply to achieve the numerical goal of racial balance. Understandably, that aroused opposition [ http://www.issr.ucla.edu/sears/pubs/A068.pdf ], and not only among those who thought desegregation was a bad idea. Despite its flaws, integration is as successful an educational strategy as we’ve hit upon. As the U.C.L.A. political scientist Gary Orfield points out, “On some measures the racial achievement gaps reached their low point around the same time as the peak of black-white desegregation in the late 1980s.”
And in the 1990s, when the courts stopped overseeing desegregation plans, black students in those communities seem to have done worse. The failure of the No Child Left Behind regimen [ http://www.youthlaw.org/publications/yln/2009/april_june_2009/no_child_left_behind_fails_to_close_the_achievement_gap/ ] to narrow the achievement gap offers the sobering lesson that closing underperforming public schools, setting high expectations for students, getting tough with teachers and opening a raft of charter schools isn’t the answer. If we’re serious about improving educational opportunities, we need to revisit the abandoned policy of school integration.
In theory it’s possible to achieve a fair amount of integration by crossing city and suburban boundaries or opening magnet schools [ http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/2 ] attractive to both minority and white students. But the hostile majority on the Supreme Court and the absence of a vocal pro-integration constituency make integration’s revival a near impossibility.
Colleges for Profit Are Growing, With Federal Help
The New York Times
By FLOYD NORRIS Published: May 24, 2012
There are a lot of government subsidies, and in the current fiscal atmosphere many are shrinking by necessity. What appears to be lacking is any rational way of deciding which should shrink.
The volume of federally guaranteed student loans to students at so-called proprietary colleges — the ones that intend to operate at a profit and get nearly all their revenue from the government — continues to grow.
At the same time, state and local governments across the country are slashing spending on higher education, and community colleges [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/community_colleges/index.html ] — the ones most likely to offer alternatives to the students recruited by the far more expensive proprietary schools — are suffering some of the largest reductions.
“When you look at what’s going on right now from a community college perspective,” he said, “we’re seeing a lot of state budgets being constrained. We’re seeing dollars being pulled from their budgets and they’re really capped in terms of their enrollment opportunities.”
ITT Educational, on the other hand, opened four new campuses in the first three months of this year, raising its total to 148 locations in 48 states. It expects to open at least four more later this year. It has 71,000 students enrolled.
In Washington, the Obama administration has been trying to write rules that would stop loans going to students at the most exploitative of the schools, ones whose students are most likely to default on the loans and least likely to get jobs if they graduate. The Department of Education is expected to announce within a few weeks which programs at which schools are failing, but that determination will have little immediate impact. The earliest that any school will lose financing is 2014.
ITT Educational Services, which runs ITT Technical Institute, used to be part of the international phone company known as ITT, but it was spun off years ago. It issues associate’s and bachelor’s degrees, and even some master’s degrees. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange and it advertises heavily.
I got interested in ITT Tech after I watched one of its commercials, full of promise of bright career opportunities for students who sign up. At the end of the commercial, the following words flashed on the screen, in small type and for only a few seconds:
“Credits earned are unlikely to transfer.”
If you enroll in a public community college and get a two-year associate degree, you can almost certainly transfer to a four-year college and complete your bachelor’s degree in two more years. If you drop out, as many do, you can return to the same or another college years later and complete a degree. But it appears that ITT Tech students are stuck. ITT Tech will award degrees to students who complete enough classes, but any student who wants to transfer will probably have to start over.
How many students who enroll at ITT Tech go on to get a degree?
That sounds like a simple question, but it is not one that ITT Educational wants to answer.
The company does disclose a lot of numbers. But many of those numbers are not very useful. From the Web site, I learned that half the students who earn associate’s degrees in business administration do so within the normal period, while the other half take longer. For that two-year diploma, I learned that they pay an average of $48,000 in tuition and fees. Similar numbers are available [ http://programinfo.itt-tech.edu/ ] for the myriad other programs ITT Tech offers. But there are no hints as to how many students actually get degrees, or how many drop out. The company would not provide any overall figures.
It did, however, point me to a government Web site [ http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/ ] that lets you check graduation rates campus by campus. Some of ITT Tech’s campuses had no information available, but the headquarters location in Indianapolis said that 16 percent of students who entered the school in 2004 earned degrees within three years of enrolling in associate degree programs or six years of enrolling in bachelor’s degree programs. In the fall of 2010, the Indianapolis campus had 7,619 undergraduate students. By the end of that school year, it had awarded 538 associate’s and 336 bachelor’s degrees. Last year, ITT Educational had revenue of $1.5 billion, of which 89 percent came directly from the government through grants and loans. Some of that money came from states, but a large majority came from Uncle Sam. Students and their parents put up about 4 percent, and 7 percent came from nongovernment loans.
Raising that 7 percent has been an issue. Last year, the company was able to arrange such nongovernment guaranteed loans by promising lenders it would repay the loans if the students did not. This year it could not renew that arrangement and is having to finance the loans itself. In effect, that means it gets less than full tuition from some students, with a promise they will pay the money later.
ITT Educational has impressive profit margins. In 2009 and 2010, pretax profits exceeded what it spent on educating students. Even in this year’s first quarter, when revenue and profits were off from a year earlier, pretax profit amounted to just under 30 percent of revenue.
The decline in earnings did not slow the flow of money to shareholders. During those three months, the company spent $135 million on education costs and paid nearly $147 million to buy back shares. Those education expenses were down 2 percent from a year earlier, while spending on share buybacks rose 5 percent. Marketing costs were up 6 percent.
All those profits would dry up and vanish were government support to wither away, but so far there is little sign of that. In the 2010-11 academic year, the government guaranteed nearly $24 billion in loans to students at proprietary schools and provided almost $9 billion more in grants. All that money went to the schools.
Critics of the schools say that many students, even those who graduate, are unable to earn enough to repay the loans. Students who attend such colleges are far more likely to default on their loans than are students who attend other types of schools.
It is far from clear whether the Obama administration’s effort to cut off loans to particularly unsuccessful schools will have much impact, or even if it will happen. A trade group of proprietary schools has filed suit to halt the rule, calling it an unjustified “regulatory excess.”
That group used to be called the Career College Association, but it changed its name to the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities and proudly proclaims that “the market” has determined the success of its members. If so, it is a market in which the government pays nearly all the bills but leaves students with debts many cannot pay.
Whatever the case used to be for subsidizing these highly profitable companies, it ought to be a lot less compelling now when the country is slashing subsidies for other types of schools — ones that generally do a better job for their students but that spend far less on lobbyists.
Here are two quotes from two 40-ish Harvard Law School graduates back in 2005. They make for a very interesting comparison now. First, a few words of set-up:
The Post story discussed the motives and rationales of the leading Democrats in the Senate for voting the way they did, and considered the ramifications for the later ambitions of several of them, including Sens. Biden, Bayh, Clinton, etc. It also discussed the views of Sens. Chuck Schumer, Lindsey Graham, Jon Kyl, et al -- but did not even mention one of the Democrats opposed to Roberts. This was of course the 44-year-old freshman senator from Illinois whom Chief Justice Roberts would swear in as president less than three and a half years later. It is one more reminder of the out-of-nowhere quality of Barack Obama's rise.
A reader has just sent in a link to a WSJ item [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124390047073474499.html ] from 2009, which quoted Obama's stated reasons in 2005 for opposing the Roberts choice. Given what we know about Roberts from his six-plus years on the Court, and what we have learned about Obama, it makes worthwhile reading now. Here are passages from Obama's 2005 statement of opposition to Roberts, with emphasis supplied by the reader:
"The problem I face...is that while adherence to legal precedent and rules of statutory or constitutional construction will dispose of 95% of the cases that come before a court... what matters on the Supreme Court is those 5% of cases that are truly difficult.
In those cases, adherence to precedent and rules of construction and interpretation will only get you through the 25th mile of the marathon. That last mile can only be determined on the basis of one's deepest values, one's core concerns, one's broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one's empathy.
In those 5% of hard cases, the constitutional text will not be directly on point. The language of the statute will not be perfectly clear. Legal process alone will not lead you to a rule of decision.... In those difficult cases, the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart.
I talked to Judge Roberts about this. Judge Roberts...did say he doesn't like bullies and has always viewed the law as a way of evening out the playing field between the strong and the weak.
I was impressed with that statement because I view the law in much the same way. The problem I had is that when I examined Judge Roberts' record and history of public service, it is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak. In his work in the White House and the Solicitor General's Office, he seemed to have consistently sided with those who were dismissive of efforts to eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination in our political process. In these same positions, he seemed dismissive of the concerns that it is harder to make it in this world and in this economy when you are a woman rather than a man.
I want to take Judge Roberts at his word that he doesn't like bullies and he sees the law and the court as a means of evening the playing field between the strong and the weak. But given the gravity of the position to which he will undoubtedly ascend and the gravity of the decisions in which he will undoubtedly participate during his tenure on the court, I ultimately have to give more weight to his deeds and the overarching political philosophy that he appears to have shared with those in power than to the assuring words that he provided me in our meeting.
Now, compare this with what John Roberts said about himself in his opening statement at his confirmation hearings. Here I've added the emphasis:
My personal appreciation that I owe a great debt to others reinforces my view that a certain humility should characterize the judicial role.
Judges and justices are servants of the law, not the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them.
The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules.
But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.
Judges have to have the humility to recognize that they operate within a system of precedent, shaped by other judges equally striving to live up to the judicial oath.
I leave it to you to judge which of those statements from 2005 stands up better seven years later as a guide to John Roberts's temperament and jurisprudence. I will tip my hand in saying: whether or not you admire his role on the court, it is impossible to see how anyone could describe it as umpire-like or "reflecting a certain humility." In the Citizens United ruling, he and his allies set out to answer [ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/21/120521fa_fact_toobin ] questions the case itself did not necessarily raise, so as to overturn precedents they considered incorrect. If you're using the umpire analogy, it would be as if someone behind home plate suddenly yelled "Foot fault!" about a tennis match he saw out of the corner of his eye, with "Pass Interference!" and "Icing" calls thrown in to boot. The potential overturn of the Obama health care law may be desirable or not, according to your own views -- but it is anything but "humble."
I mention this mainly because of the apposite pairing. We have two men who now sit atop two of the three branches of the government. They both laid down markers seven years ago on how one of those men was likely to perform once in office. One of the predictions seems a lot more prescient than the other.
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