SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The Verdict Is In

CHOICE IS NOT ELITIST

Well the verdict is in:  Parents. Like. Choice.  TVOntario’s Steve Paikin said so quite emphatically on last night’s edition of the Agenda.   It’s not elitist either, according to Moira MacDonald at the Toronto Sun.  

The last two evenings of The Agenda (here and here) have been devoted to the topics of alternative public schools and funding for religious schools, probably two of the hottest topics concerning choice in Ontario.  The former issue has been in the media both because of the York Region District School Board’s decision to close the arts-integrated Baythorn School and the Toronto District School Board’s plan to expand alternative schools such a boys’ academy and a sports-focused school, to name a few.   The religious funding issue continues to be in the media since an individual recently decided to mount a Supreme Court challenge around the extended funding of Catholic schools in Ontario.

Supreme Court and Separate Schools— In her Supreme Court challenge, retired lawyer Reva Landau, wants to return separate school funding to how things were back at the time of the 1867 BNA Act.  In a nutshell, her agrument is that all the subsequent legislative changes to education funding were “unconstitutional” (even though they have already been tested at the SC) because that’s not what was meant by the original spirit of the 1867 Constitution.  By that logic, practically none of the constitutional rights Canadians now enjoy would be legal (e.g., women’s rights, gay marriage). Ms. Landau would not have the vote or even have the ability to argue this case in the first place because that’s how things were back in 1867. Further, she commented that Quebec made changes to their education system to eliminate separate schools—-going against the 1867 Constitution provision (even though they still fund accredited private schools to 40% of the student grant and students can still receive funded Catholic education under the public Francophone system.) So why was it OK for Quebec to act outside of the spirit of the Constitution but not Ontario? Sorry, it’s just not logical.

Alternative Schools—Chris Spence, the director of education for the TDSB, was a breath of fresh air. While the York Region board is the perfect example of the tall poppy syndrome in action, the Toronto director takes a very different attitude. (I guess to the YRDSB equity means everyone gets nothing, equally.) Expanding choices is one way to satisfy parents and students who do not fit the cookie-cutter approach at the local school.  See more in Moira MacDonald’s column. Ms. Kidder, on the other hand, espouses the “choice for me, but not for thee” attitude and did a very good job of spouting just about every myth about school choice that has been busted long ago. Creaming?  Really?  Is anyone listening to her anymore?  It was nice to see Dr. Patricia Allison, one of the authors of SQE’s demographic study of Ontario parents who choose private schools, included in the discussion.

Religious School Funding—Probably the biggest hot potato, but I really thought each panelist did an excellent job of making their case.  I just can’t agree with Ontario Green Party President, Mike Schreiner, that having one school system would save money. Been there, done that. It doesn’t.  Bureaucracy finds a way to sustain itself and worse. Patrick Daly correctly noted that it is salaries and benefits that are the biggest costs of school boards (see www.SunshineOnSchools.ca).  Gila Martow pointed out that other Canadian provinces fund religious and private schools and do just fine.  It also was emphasized that students and families of religious schools aren’t “fragmented”, as the myth goes, but the evidence is that they participate more fully in society than average. Another myth busted.

It was Paikin though that noted off the top that it’s parents who are driving the choice train.  They like it and they want it.

Comme il faut

This Wall Street Journal article brings an idea from France on how to raise happy, well-behaved children. Although it is presented in terms of parenting, the idea applies equally to classroom management. H/T DW

Monday at the movies (Visual Phonics)

Here’s a video showing Visual Phonics hand cues which are very effective in teaching the common sound/letter correspondences to deaf and hard-of-hearing students. They will also be helpful to other students who are hard to teach for other reasons, especially the ones who have trouble hearing the sounds in words. YouTube link. H/T TB

If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all

Sunday at the Movies has been moved to Monday at the Movies because of the following important announcement.

The discussion in the comments section of our blog has got totally out of hand. We at SQE hoped that our comments section would be a place where people with an interest in education - educators, parents, taxpayers, trustees, administrators, book publishers, education professors, union officials, etc. – could come together and exchange views and information. Like the five blind men who touch an elephant to find out what it is like and then come to completely different conclusions on the basis of the body part they happened to connect with, we are all doomed to have incomplete information about the education beast – unless we can find a way to pool our points of view and knowledge of the system.

Genuine information exchanges are couched in language such as “I read what you wrote and I can see that it is valid in certain circumstances, but have you considered…..?” or “Wow, I never realized that a teacher might view this situation in such a way – thanks for this great insight – but here is how it looks from the point of view of a taxpayer…” or “Could you please elaborate on your statement about the usefulness of testing, especially with regard to how to evaluate the curriculum?” or “Would the following study (link provided) cause you to modify your views?” or "That's an interesting argument, but how can you square it with the fact that..."

Starting immediately, any commenter who violates this protocol will be banned indefinitely. I'm going to be away all day today and so I won't be able to act until tonight, but after that.....

The black box of teaching methods

Continuing with yesterday's theme, bolstered by the unanimous agreement with my point of view (joke), I have been pondering why teaching methods continue to fly largely below the radar - despite their obvious importance. Here's a posting that grapples with this puzzling phenomenon. In a nutshell, the author says that no one in the education world has an incentive to improve teaching methods. This is a sweeping claim obviously, but there must be some truth to it - otherwise, there would be a focus on better methods, which there clearly is not. Piranhas, attack!

There are none so blind as cannot see

Those who read the comments section of our blog will see ample proof of the entrenched attitudes of status quo educators - for example, the resistance to the research evidence that systematic phonics will enable students to become better readers. It turns out that this kind of resistance to new discoveries is not at all unusual. Of course, everyone knows about the creationists who to this day deny the validity of evolution or the persecution suffered by Galileo for teaching that the earth revolved around the sun. So I thought you might be interested in the discussion of the resistance to new discoveries about the cause of scurvy, found in Bill Bryson's latest book At Home: A short history of private life. After establishing the seriousness of the disease (as many as two million sailors died of scurvy between 1500 and 1850), Bryson begins by discussing efforts to discover what was causing it (pp 166-167).

• In roughly the same period, James Lind, a naval surgeon, conducted a more scientifically rigorous (and personally less risky) experiment by finding twelve sailors who had scurvy already, dividing them into pairs, and giving each pair a different putative elixir - vinegar to one, garlic and mustard to another, oranges and lemons to a third, and so on. Five of the groups showed no improvement, but the pair given oranges and lemons made a swift and total recovery. Amazingly, Lind decided to ignore the significance of the result and doggedly stuck with his personal belief that scurvy was caused by incompletely digested food building up toxins within the body.
• It fell to the great Captain James Cook to get matters onto the right course. On his circumnavigation of the globe in 1768-71, Captain Cook packed a range of antiscorbutics to experiment on, including thirty gallons of carrot marmalade and a hundred pounds of sauerkraut for every crew member. Not one person died from scurvy on his voyage - a miracle that made him as much a national hero as his discovery of Australia or any of his other many achievements on that epic undertaking. The Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific institution, was so impressed that it awarded him the Copley Medal, its highest distinction. The British navy itself was not so quick, alas. Even in the face of all the evidence, it procrastinated for another generation before finally providing citrus juice to sailors as a matter of routine.
• The realization that an inadequate diet caused not only scurvy but a range of common diseases was remarkably slow to become established. Not until 1897 did a Dutch physician named Christiaan Eijkman, working in Java, notice that people who ate whole-grain rice didn't get beriberi, a debilitating nerve disease, while people who ate polished rice very often did. Clearly some thing or things were present in some foods, and missing in others, and served as a determinant of well-being. It was the beginning of an understanding of 'deficiency disease', as it was known, and it won Eijkman the Nobel Prize in medicine even though he had no idea what these active agents were. The real breakthrough came in 1912, when Casimir Funk, a Polish biochemist working at the Lister Institute in London, isolated thiamine, or vitamin B1, as it is now more generally known. Realizing it was part of a family of molecules, he combined the terms vital and amines to make the new word vitamines. Although Funk was right about the vital part, it turned out that only some of the vitamines were amines (that is to say, nitrogen-bearing), and so the name was changed to vitamins to make it 'less emphatically inaccurate', in Anthony Smith's nice phrase.
• Funk also asserted that there was a direct correlation between a deficiency of specific amines and the onset of certain diseases - scurvy, pellagra, and rickets in particular. This was a huge insight and had the potential to save millions of shattered lives, but unfortunately it wasn't heeded. The leading medical textbook of the day continued to insist that scurvy was caused by any number of factors - 'insanitary surroundings, overwork, mental depression and exposure to cold and damp' were the principal ones its authors thought worth listing - and only marginally by dietary deficiency. Worse still, in 1917 America's leading nutritionist, E. V. McCollum of the University of Wisconsin - the very man who coined the terms vitamin A and B - declared that scurvy was not in fact a dietary deficiency disease at all, but was caused by constipation.

The true value of teachers

A while back in our blog, there was a discussion of the legitimacy of judging teachers on the basis of the value they add to their students' test scores (how much teachers raise or lower their students' test scores, adjusting for the students' characteristics). The main objections were that (a) the use of value-added assessment may unfairly penalize teachers who are assigned hard-to-teach students and (b) that student test scores are not a valid measure of teacher effectiveness.

Now comes a Harvard study that looks at these two objections. Tracking one million children from grade 4 to adulthood, the researchers tracked the impact of teachers who had already been identified as adding value (VA) on their students' test scores and their students' long-term outcomes.

Objection #1
The researchers found that "when a high VA teacher joins a school, test scores rise immediately in the grade taught by that teacher; when a high VA teacher leaves, test scores fall. Test scores change only in the subject taught by that teacher, and the size of the change in scores matches what we predict based on the teacher’s VA."

Objection #2
The researchers found that "students assigned to higher VA teachers are more successful in many dimensions. They are more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in better neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers."

Among other things, the researchers found that "overall, our study shows that great teachers create great value and that test score impacts are helpful in identifying such teachers". H/T LJCD

More Beat-the-odds schools

Yesterday, I promised more examples of schools that succeed with low-socioeconomic students. When I googled no-excuses schools, I turned up lots of examples in the US. Here's a site that leads to lots of such schools. And here's Marva Collins, a Marvallous educator who has been doing it for more than 45 years - proving that there's nothing new under the sun. Lastly, just to show the phenomenon isn't confined to the US, here's a link to a school in England that has been lifting up its mostly-immigrant, mostly-ESL, mostly-impoverished students for more than 10 years. I don't know of any current examples of Canadian no-excuses schools (although I'm sure they exist), but I found an article in our archives that is relevant.

Schools that beat the odds

In a comment to yesterday's blog, Andrew asked for examples of schools that are succeeding in teaching basic skills to low-socioeconomic kids. I will plan to give a few more examples tomorrow, but I decided to start with the KIPP schools since there are now 109 of them and all are apparently succeeding. Rather than provide some dull statistics (available on the KIPP website), I thought I would give a couple of excerpts from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. 

• KIPP Academy seems like the kind of school in the kind of neighborhood with the kind of student that would make educators despair - except that the minute you enter the building, it's clear that something is different. The students walk quietly down the hallways in single file. In the classroom, they are taught to turn and address anyone talking to them in a protocol known as 'SSLANT': smile, sit up, listen, ask questions, nod when being spoken to, and track with your eyes. On the walls of the school's corridors are hundreds of pennants from the colleges that KIPP graduates have gone on to attend. Last year, hundreds of families from across the Bronx entered the lottery for KIPP's two fifth-grade classes. It is no exaggeration to say that just over ten years into its existence, KIPP has become one of the most desirable public schools in New York City. (p. 251)
• The student's name is Marita. She's an only child who lives in a single-parent home. Her mother never went to college. The two of them share a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. Marita used to go to a parochial school down the street from her home, until her mother heard of KIPP. 'When I was in fourth grade, me and one of my other friends, Tanya, we both applied to KIPP,' Marita said. 'I remember Miss Owens. She interviewed me, and the way she was saying made it sound so hard I thought I was going to prison. I almost started crying. And she was like, If you don't want to sign this, you don't have to sign this. But then my mom was right there, so I signed it.' With that, her life changed. (pp. 263-264)
• [Marita] has made a bargain with her school. She will get up at five-forty-five in the morning, go in on Saturdays, and do homework until eleven at night. In return, KIPP promises that it will take kids like her who are stuck in poverty and give them a chance to get out. It will get 84 percent of them up to or above their grade level in mathematics. On the strength of that performance, 90 percent of KIPP students get scholarships to private or parochial high schools instead of having to attend their own desultory high schools in the Bronx. And on the strength of that high school experience, more than 80 percent of KIPP graduates will go on to college, in many cases being the first in their family to do so. How could that be a bad bargain? (p. 267)

It’s a tough job but somebody has to do it

I don't know how many of our readers follow the comments in our blog, but just so's you know - an ongoing (and ongoing and ongoing) argument has been ongoing seemingly forever. That is the question of whether demographics are destiny - in other words, is it impossible to teach low socioeconomic kids to a high standard. 

Margaret Wente has just written an interesting column on this topic, showing just how intransigent the differences are between well-educated affluent Canadians and poorly-educated lower-class Canadians. Their entire lifestyles are radically different, including what they eat, their divorce rates, how they exercise, and what schools they send their children to. 

On the one hand, it is probably unfair and unrealistic to expect schools to completely overcome such entrenched problems. On the other hand, we can't just throw up our hands in despair and condemn unlucky poor kids to oblivion.

It seems to me that the best shot at lifting kids out of poverty is to equip them with good basic skills - especially the ability to read, write, and add up. Without these skills, they have virtually no chance. With these skills, other things become possible.

The good news is - poverty need be no barrier to teaching low socioeconomic young kids basic skills. While it may well be harder (they change schools much more, their vocabularies are impoverished, they lack familiarity with the conventions of print, and so forth), it is definitely possible. We know this because a handful of schools are doing it.

A modest proposal: schools should make teaching the three R's their number one priority.