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"Badman Report" in England

Jude sent this from England:

UK
home educators are currently threatened with the draconian recommendations
of Graham Badman's report to the government - link below

Included are compulsory registration, monitoring including automatic right
of entry into the home on pain of criminal charges, and the enforcement of
a 'suitable education' (whatever that's supposed to mean). And the
recommendations are particularly short-sighted and plain ill-informed with regard
to autonomous approaches. Worse still is the conflation of home education
with child welfare issues - we're all being smeared as abusers, and the
onus seems to be on us to prove our innocence.

I wonder if the delightful (!?!) Mr Badman might appreciate an invite to
the London Unschooling Conference to hear some properly informed debate.

This is not the link Jude sent; this is a summary from the government press release site:
http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2009_0105

What Jude sent is a PDF of the entire "Report to the Secretary of State on the review of Elective Home Education in England by Graham Badman"

http://www.freedomforchildrentogrow.org/8318-DCSF-HomeEdReviewBMK.PDF

These seem to be still at the level of formal recommendations, but if people have follow-ups, please do leave comments. Also, clarification of whether this will affect other parts of the UK or just England itself would be good. —Sandra

The gradual demise of SAT requirements

Loyola College Latest to Dump SAT

Loyola College in Baltimore is the latest of over 800 four-year institutions to make their admissions criteria SAT (and ACT) results optional. The change comes about six months after Monty Neill of Fair Test submitted invited testimony to the Maryland Board of Education on the "Limits and Dangers of High-Stakes Graduation Tests."

FairTest's testimony on graduation tests to the Maryland Board of Ed.

Better assessment methods are needed if high schools are to develop higher level skills students need for college and work. Unlike standardized exit exams, the use of assessment methods such as performances, exhibitions and portfolios has been shown to promote the development of skills, knowledge and disposition actually valued in college and employment (Wood, Darling-Hammond, Neill and Roschewski, 2007; Darling-Hammond and McCloskey, forthcoming). Employers have said they are more interested in examples of student work and problem-solving, such as portfolios, than they are in test results [or grades] (Peter D. Hart, 2008). Similarly, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (n.d.) has outlined a range of knowledge and skills students should acquire, much of which clearly cannot be measured with traditional paper-and-pencil tests – but can be assessed using other means. Only with a range of strong and flexible assessments can students or schools be fairly and comprehensively evaluated and learning outcomes improved

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These links were sent by Kathryn, an unschooling mother of four. Thanks!

"The Impending Demise of the University"

THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY
By Don Tapscott

For fifteen years, I've been arguing that the digital revolution will challenge many fundamental aspects of the University. I've not been alone. In 1998, none other than, Peter Drucker predicted that big universities would be "relics" within 30 years....(the rest of it)

"101 Reasons I'm an Unschooler"

I've just bought and happily read a new book by PS Pirro called 101 Reasons Why I'm an Unschooler. It's sweet, it's short, and it's full of irrefutable information about school in the first section (school-related reasons to unschool) and life at home and in the real world in the second.

Those who have wished for something they could give relatives to read might have found the answer in this.

Holly Dodd video by Lee Stranahan

Item on the Huffington Post site:

Who Needs School? Interview With A 17 Year Old "UnSchooler" (Video)

"In a society that often considers the act of parents teaching their children at home to be something bizarre, the idea of unschooling is about as radical a parenting strategy as one can imagine. It's homeschooling without the artificial structure of formal education...."

Mothers' talk is key to kids' social skills, study says

CNN article on a British study:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/05/15/mother.children.social.skills/index.html

You can predict even from when the children are 3 or 4 what their social understanding will be like when they're 8 or 9," said Nicola Yuill, lead author and senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Sussex in England.

This effect becomes weaker from ages 10 to 12, perhaps because as children get older, they spend less time at home, and their peers and teachers influence them more, she said.

The 12-year-olds, however, generally did as well as their mothers on social understanding tasks, indicating that children at this age can be as "socially sophisticated" as adults, the authors said.

Oh, Yeah, School. About That…

Oh, Yeah, School. About That…
May 3, 2009 by Mary Jessica Hammes

An article on homeschooling, with statistics, which turns toward unschooling, describes a few families, and has several paragraphs about Ren Allen and her family. Some of what Ren said:

“We started as very eclectic home schoolers and hit lots of bumps along the way, before finally realizing that when we went with the flow everything, well, flowed,” says Allen.... . . . "I don’t believe my husband and I would be as connected to our children’s joy, to their dreams and daily activities the same way if we hadn’t chosen unschooling."

(More by Ren Allen)

"Minimally Invasive Education: Lessons from India"

Minimally Invasive Education: Lessons from India

This is from an article by Pater Gray on Psychology Today's site. I don't know if it's also in the magazine.

At first it's about the study in India ten years ago of what kids would do if a computer were left out where they could get to it. What they did was learn like crazy.

Here's a portion of this new article:

Why don't school lessons spread in the same wildfire way that Mitra observed in his experiments on minimally invasive education? It is not hard to think of many answers to this question. Here are a few that pop to mind:

• Children in school are not free to pursue their own, self-chosen interests, and this mutes their enthusiasm.

• Children in school are constantly evaluated. The concern for evaluation and pleasing the teacher--or, for some children, a rebellious reaction against such evaluation--overrides and subverts the possibility of developing genuine interest in the assigned tasks.

• Children in school are often shown one and only one way to solve a problem and are told that other ways are incorrect, so the excitement of discovering new ways is prevented.

• Segregation of children by age in schools prevents the age mixing and diversity that seem to be key to children's natural ways of learning. Mitra observed that the mix of abilities and interests in the age-mixed groups that gathered around the outdoor computers ensured that different functions of the computer were tried out and played with by different children and that a wide variety of discoveries were made, which could then spread from child to child.

Learning is so easy, and such fun, when it occurs naturally. ...

http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200901/minimally-invasive-education-lessons-india

Britain and US: worst places for children

2.10 Britain and US: worst places for children

An UNESCO report places the UK an the US on the lowest places of a list of countries, looking to the well-being of children, and places the Netherlands on the top of the same list.

As we know, UK and US are usually quite proud on their policy of 'protecting' children - against myths, as we saw in the articles here before - and usually have lots of critics on the policy of the Netherlands with its liberal climate, including sexual openness and education. Now, the Netherlands may be proud, and let the UK and the US think twice or more about their policy.

Three articles here below give more details.

(the full summary: http://www.ipce.info/newsletters/e_22/2_10_unicef_report.htm )

link sent by Schuyler Waynforth