SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

What Makes Rabbit Run?

A Brampton high school principal has bowed to a parent’s complaint and yanked “To Kill a Mockingbird” from its curriculum because it contains the word “nigger”. School for Thought is amazed to see such responsiveness from a public school employee, since none of our requests - for example, for things like higher academic standards, uniforms, real standardized testing, no tolerance for bullying, and so on - has ever been honoured. Perhaps we’d get further if we couched our requests in terms of political correctness, as opposed to quality education….

Report Card Comments Petition

A while back, School for Thought posted an article about those “edu-babble” canned comments on the Ontario Report Card.  Well, retired principal Tom Sullivan, who was quoted in the piece, has decided to do something about them.  He has started a petition here requesting changes to the structure of the report card.

What do readers think about the report card?  Does it tell you clearly what you need to know about your child’s achievement? 

Finding a Good School in Ontario

Many people assume that a school is doing a good job if its students do well on the provincial tests. But schools that draw their students from high-income, well-educated families should be expected to do well, since these factors are associated with student success. Fortunately, it is possible to strip away these socio-economic variables from school comparisons, and compare schools solely on the basis of how well they are educating their students. It turns out that when you compare schools with students from similar backgrounds, there is an astonishing difference in school performance. The CD Howe Institute, which has just published an up-to-date ranking of Ontario’s 4000 publicly-funded schools, finds that something like half of the variation is due to factors other than students’ backgrounds!

Special Ed Vouchers and Funding Incentives

This latest study out of the Manahattan Institute shows that offering private school vouchers for special education actually reduces the number of identified special education students in public schools.  This is the opposite of what might be expected. 

According to the researchers, “Voucher programs allow disabled students to attend a private school, which receives payments in the form of full or partial tuition that would have otherwise been directed to the transferring student’s public school. Special-education voucher programs appear to reduce a local public school’s financial incentive to diagnose a marginal student who is merely struggling academically as suffering from an SLD by offering him the chance to leave the public school, enter a private school, and take all of his funding with him.”

Considering that in Ontario special education funding no longer is tied to the student and goes into the larger school board funding pot, the “incentives” that the study’s authors describe could be at work here too.

Throwing the Baby Out With the Bathwater

Several Ontario elementary teachers’ locals are calling for an end to the province’s EQAO tests, pointing out that they are expensive ($32 million a year), unfair, inaccurate, and prejudicial to student learning. All of which is of course true. But, instead of asking for better tests, the locals are asking for no tests. What they apparently fail to take into consideration is the fact that excellent standardized tests already exist, for a fraction of the cost, which yield more detailed, more reliable, more useful, and more timely information. School for Thought respectfully draws their attention to the Canadian Tests of Basic Skills and the Canadian Achievement Tests.

Brains Are Fun

Brains Are Fun is a comprehensive site for parents and teachers with a plethora of resources to promote academic success and positive character and behaviour development in students. The author is an experienced parent and educator who has made this web-site a personal project to share effective and proven teaching strategies and helpful resources (such as sample contracts and homework management plans). There is so much information that the reader is advised to start here and click on the link near the top - “How to get started - fast!” and go from there.

But Can They Read Their Diplomas?

The Better Business Bureau has exposed on-line diploma mills by assisting a cat to achieve a high school diploma. It’s probably not yet possible for a cat to graduate from high school in Ontario, but it’s getting easier all the time with new programs like U-Turn, Salem, and Credit Recovery. The latest scam is a program called “Over the Top Co-op”, whereby students who need three or so credits to graduate can get a paying job, use it for a co-op placement, and get paid with credits as well until they graduate.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

A new MIT study should give pause to proponents of modern teaching methods. The study finds that brain neurons are able to remember recent learning better if they had succeeded in the task than if they had got it wrong. In other words, our brains learn more from success than from failure, and we perform better after successful practice. Unfortunately, modern teaching methods seek to minimize repetitive exercises, calling them “drill and kill”. In the light of the MIT study, School for Thought is looking for a slogan to replace “drill and kill”. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started:  “Churn and Learn” and “Drill and Skill”. We’re confident our readers can come up with something even better. 

Cheating Themselves Out of an Education

The Internet has opened up wonderful new possibilities for dishonest students, including high-tech devices that permit cheating during exams and online services that provide students with original essays. CTV reports that Simon Fraser University is proposing to introduce a new grade - FD, for failure with dishonesty - for students who have been caught more than once or whose cheating is particularly egregious. This mark is to stay on a student’s transcripts for two years after graduation and then be reduced to an F. Amazingly, there are those who think Simon Fraser’s new policy is too heavy-handed. School for Thought wonders if these same people think that we should turn a blind eye to the fact that a surgeon had to cheat on his exams in order to graduate. What about an accountant caught cooking the books? Just asking!

Back to the Drawing Board

Can you imagine a civilization in which the communication of visual knowledge is no longer a problem - a society in which the teacher, when a visual description is called for, would merely pick up a piece of chalk and draw the picture on the board? Imagine what it would be like if all educated people - all teachers, carpenters, electricians, physicians, biologists, machinists, and other skilled and professional people from all walks of life - were able to use drawing to exchange visual ideas to the same extent which they now use writing to exchange verbal ideas.

Most people think that you’re either born with the ability to draw or you aren’t - but that’s not the case at all. In fact, drawing can and should be taught - and it’s easier to learn than mathematics! The truth is that teaching drawing effectively is not so different from other good teaching. Like math, drawing should be taught in a sequential, rule-based fashion. Trying to teach drawing without an organized system is like trying to teach music without a scale, a staff, a clef, and notes. An excellent yet inexpensive program for teaching drawing can be purchased here.