More on the Diane Abbott story, in the Guardian today:
The veteran campaigner for state school education Diane Abbott yesterday admitted that her decision to send her son to an independent school was "indefensible".Commenting for the first time on her decision to send her 12-year-old son to the City of London school at the cost of £10,000 a year, the MP for Hackney north and Stoke Newington said she would not, and could not, defend the decision.
"At the end of the day, when I'm on my deathbed, would I regret having been skewered on this show at 12 o'clock at night or doing the right thing by my son?," she told the BBC's This Week programme last night.
"In my position everything you say just sounds self-serving and hypocritical, and there is no point in defending the indefensible. I know it's an indefensible position and I have spent five days not defending it – what more can I do?"In the past, Ms Abbott has been critical of decisions made by her Labour colleagues - including the prime minister – to send their children to fee-paying schools.
Last night she said: "In Hackney schools, only 9% of black boys get five decent GCSEs against a national average of 50%. I really wasn't prepared to put my son through that system.
"I have campaigned for nearly 10 years on what happens to black children in British schools, but at the end of the day I had to put my reputation as a politician against my son, and I chose my son."
Commenting on my previous reference to this story, Paul Coulam said this, with which I agree:
The point about Diane Abbott's hypocrisy here is not so much that she sent her child to private school while arguing for state education but that she denounced both Tony Blair and Harriet Harman for not sending their children to the local comp and then went on to do precisely the same thing herself.If I denounced you for cashing cheques from the BBC and then went and did it myself then I would certainly be a hypocrite.
But better to be this kind of hypocrite, than the kind of monster politician who sends her own child to a lousy school just to avoid admitting it. (See my first piece concerning this regularly recurring argument.)
However, before Paul Coulam says it again, she is still not getting it right. And nor is the Guardian for saying that she "admitted" that her decision was indefensible, because that implies that it was.
But Diane Abbott, in sending her child to the best school she can, is now doing the right thing, and apologising for that. Instead, she should be apologising to Tony Blair and to Harriet Harman, for having said the wrong thing about them.
Via the Guardian, news of a how a campus newspaper made a classic cock-up, and had to grovel. I'm sure the blogosphere has already had a good chortle about this, but I missed it back in September when it happened.
In case the links don't work. They at first had a picture of the University's Dean of Student Life which was actually a picture of Osama bin Laden, and then they said sorry.
Who's bankrolling vouchers? This is an article written by the sort of schmuck (I think that's the American technical term) who believes –and for the sort of organisation which believes – that "bankrolling" anything is automatically evil. But I was interested. Who is bankrolling vouchers? Here's the (bank)roll of honour.
There are some very wealthy folks out there – many of whom work together – who fuel America's pro-voucher movement. Some names for your file:
1. Wal-Mart heir John Walton, the movement's most prolific giver, gave seed money to the pro-voucher group CEO America and $2 million to Michigan's 2000 voucher ballot initiative. Walton bankrolls a massive private voucher program along with financier Ted Forstmann and runs a charter school management company. And through the Walton Family Foundation, Walton supports advocacy groups, think tanks, and legal nonprofits that promote vouchers and tax credits.2. Financier Ted Forstmann recently funded a multimillion-dollar ad campaign attacking public education. Forstmann wants to scrap public schools in favor of an ATM-like system that would dispense taxpayer-funded vouchers for tuition at schools run by anyone who wanted to start one.
3. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper spent more than $26 million last year on an unpopular California initiative - defeated by a 70-30 margin - to give publicly funded vouchers to children from even the wealthiest families.
4. Alticor Inc. President Dick DeVos directed the 2000 Michigan voucher initiative and, with family members, spent $5 million on this measure - which voters rejected by a 70-30 margin. DeVos and his wife, Betsy, are continuing their anti-public education assault through a new nonprofit organization that promotes a skewed report claiming that 90 percent of Michigan's public schools are failing.
5. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee makes generous gifts to provide a reliable funding stream for vouchers, from courtroom to the classroom. Among the beneficiaries of the Bradley Foundation's largesse: Milwaukee's privately funded voucher program, Harvard researcher Paul Peterson, and the Institute for Justice, a pro-voucher legal defense group.
6. Texan James Leininger has poured money into political campaigns to promote a conservative agenda that includes vouchers. Leininger provides the bulk of the funding for the Horizon program in Texas, a privately funded voucher program that's draining money from San Antonio's Edgewood public schools.
7. Insurance company executive J. Patrick Rooney, the founder of an early privately funded voucher program, went national after unsuccessful attempts to push vouchers in his home state of Indiana. Rooney has been a key figure in several pro-voucher groups, including CEO America, the American Education Reform Council, and the Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation.
8. Economist Milton Friedman uses his modest-sized foundation to supplement his four decades of voucher advocacy. Friedman supports ad campaigns, conferences and publications, think tanks, and advocacy groups to promote public school "alternatives."
9. Richard Mellon Scaife exerts his financial reach through four family foundations. Scaife, who joined other voucher regulars in supporting the 1993 California voucher initiative, provides core support for think tanks and advocacy groups, private organizations that offer vouchers, and public interest law firms that promote vouchers and tuition tax credits.
10. In 2000, the voucher movement found itself new benefactors. Univision CEO Jerrold Perenchio gave more than $1 million to the California voucher initiative. Former Circuit City CEO Richard Sharp gave $100,000 to both the California and Michigan initiatives. Michigan's big-giver list included Wolverine Gas & Oil CEO Sidney Jansma, at $470,000; Domino's Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan, $350,000; and the computer company Compuware, $361,000.
And that's all of it. The whole thing.
Is this supposed to cheer up the people who are opposing vouchers? Why don't they just put a giant sign up at their website saying: "WE ARE LOSING AND THERE'S BUGGER ALL WE CAN DO ABOUT IT!"
Time was when these people knew how to do propaganda, and from those far off lefties of the time when time was, I have personally learned a lot. But this is extraordinarily inept. It's just a list of how big and powerful and just plain mean the opposition is, with no explanation whatever of what is going to be done about it.
I particular liked the bit at the beginning about how many of these "very wealthy folks" actually "work together". What swine! They believe in the same thing. They're on the same side. They work together. Is their no limit to the perfidy of these monsters?
This is only a little question, not a plea for a two day course at no cost. Simply, if I do a posting with a link in it to another Movable Type blog (Samizdata, say), but then revise it a couple of times after it's already been put up on my site (as I have just done), does the linkee (Samizdata) receive three separate "trackback" messages? It sometimes does happen that Samizdata will apparently get four trackbacks, but on inspection three of them will turn out to be the same trackback. Have I just described how that happens, or is some other mechanism involved to create that pseudo-impressive effect?
However it happens, it's not good, I say.
My problem is that I find it hard to really proof-read unless the thing is already published for real, and, theoretically at least, already being looked at by The World. Something then happens inside my brain to make me really notice mistakes, the way I don't when it's only in draft. (Something to do with it being in a different format?) My defect, I'm sure. Must I learn better habits?
Mike Alissi of Hit & Run comments, and then Robert Clayton Dean of Samizdata follows up, on how New York's inner city school system is failing to make use of the many high quality applicants who apply to it for teaching posts. Excerpt from the Washington Post report:
A new report on the study, "Missed Opportunities: How We Keep High-Quality Teachers Out of Urban Schools," concludes that those school systems alienate many talented applicants because of rules that protect teachers already on staff and because of slow-moving bureaucracies and budgeting delays."As a result, urban districts lose the very candidates they need in their classrooms . . . and millions of disadvantaged students in America's cities pay the price with lower-quality teachers than their suburban peers," wrote researchers Jessica Levin and Meredith Quinn, who were given rare access to the inner workings of school districts in four U.S. cities.
It was standard procedure to let impressive applications sit in file drawers for months, the researchers found, while the candidates, needing to get their lives in order, secured work elsewhere. One district, for example, received 4,000 applications for 200 slots but was slow to offer jobs and lost out on top candidates.
This is a classic illustration of how fallacious the Fixed Quantity of Education Fallacy is. Here are lots of people wanting to supply more education but the system doesn't allow it to actually be supplied. This education doesn't go elsewhere. It goes nowhere.
Joanne Jacobs has added a special and separate list to her sidebar of teachers who blog, as she reports here.
I looked at the top one, here, and was somewhat taken aback by the complete absence of capital letters.
I went to the second one in Joanne's list, here, and finally came across (on the left hand side) something I've been … not looking for exactly, but waiting to find, which is students blogging. Not older students complaining about their college professors being lefties, but younger people writing short entries with their thoughts, in order to get better at writing and thinking.
This guy, for example:
I liked working on the internet in my weblog. It was a lot of fun. I got to work on the computer. Mrs . Pritchard tought me alot about computers. It was alot of fun working on the computers.I liked when the teachers wrote to me in my weblog. It helped me work better . It was cool knowing that teachers wrote to me. My weblog helped me work better because I would try to work harder because anybody could read it and I don't want them to think I was dumb.
That was the latest entry, on June 5th. It sounds a bit dutiful and "What am I going to put?" to me. He doesn't really sound like he's having alot of fun. But if he learns to spell better because he doesn't want people thinking he's dumb, that would be cool I suppose. And see also Feb 21: Girls Can Be Good At Computers. You learn something new every day.
At least he knows about capital letters.
Also (see immediately below) at the ASI blog Alex Singleton weighs into the debate about pro-comprehensive politicians (this time it's Diane Abbott) who send their own children to private schools, as does David Carr at Samizdata.
I have already said my piece about this sort of thing here.
A new slant on what for this blog is perhaps getting to be a very repetitious argument, from Eamonn Butler:
In 2001, UK police recorded 870,000 violent crimes, far more than the next worst, France, at 279,000, and nearly five times Germany's 188,000. Burglaries, at 470,000, were again well ahead of France (210,000) and Germany (133,000).You can probably suggest reasons why things have got so bad. I can think of several possibilities – and they start with a state-monopoly school system that is no longer prepared to instil in kids that some ways of living are simply wrong, because - as we are now discovering to our cost – they are socially pathological. Insist on parental responsibility and, through parental choice and competitive supply, put parents back in charge of education: that, I think, would have more long-term effect on crime than any number of razzmatazz government "initiatives".
So there.
I'm in a rush today, or rather this evening late in the evening, and have no thoughts of my own to offer. But I started reading what looks like a very fun book over the weekend, by Bernard Levin, called Conducted Tour. It's about Levin's travels to and attendance at a succession of music festivals during the summer months of 1980.
If I have any more to say about this book, it will almost certainly be at my Culture Blog, in other words. But in the Introduction, there is this little (musical) educational aside:
In 1980, the educational authorities of one or two of the English counties discontinued, as an economy measure, the provision out of the rates of individual tuition for children whose parents wished them to learn to play an instrument, and a very great fuss was made about it, from which it would have been perfectly possible to deduce that the counties in question had made it illegal, on pain of summary execution, for any child to learn to make music, rather than that they had done no more than decide that one form, and only one, of the learning in question should no longer be paid for by other people. I mention this to show what a long way we have come in a fairly short time; my mother certainly must have found it very difficult to pay for our music lessons, but it would never have occurred to her to ask her neighbours to foot the bill.
This is in connection with a music teacher who was hired by Levin's family to teach him, when he was aged 7, to play the violin.
When I think of what now followed, and by what hair's breadth I avoided acquiring a lasting hatred of the very thought of music and an even more intense loathing of its sound, I offer up a Heilige Dankgesang to St Cecilia, and beseech her to intervene, as she surely must have done for me, on behalf of I know not how many other children who, with no innate musical aptitude, fall into the hands of teachers who are quite unable to convey to them any sense whatever of what music actually is, apart from the notes on the paper and the horrible noises that the unprodigious infant makes in an attempt to reproduce them. Such a teacher was the well-meaning soul who took my musical tuition in hand, and who, for two and a half years, before I finally struck work and refused to spend another minute practising in such torment, left me in complete ignorance even of the fact that there were such things as works of music - sonatas, quartets, concertos, even symphonies - let alone that it was possible to go and listen to them, and derive much enjoyment from doing so. For two and a half years I laboured at this joyless thing they called music without so much as learning the name of a single composer, or indeed discovering that such people existed. Up and down the scales I went, progressing in the end as far as a rendition of 'The Bluebells of Scotland'; I have detested that tune ever since, and it is a mercy I have not grown up with a similar abhorrence of bluebells, or even Scotland.
What does that prove I wonder? Well, I guess one thing it proves is that the customer, when it comes to education, is not always right. Because the customer is the parents and the product is what some ghastly teacher does to a child.
