SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Across the Country Wednesday

In education news going on across the country:

British Columbia education minister George Abbott is holding a twitter chat today at noon PT on the Education Improvement Act @georgeabbottbc at #bced.  BC has been experiencing a very prolonged teachers’ union work to rule.

Saskatchewan wants to hear feedback on their mathematics curriculum.  Click on this link and fire away with your praise or concerns. HT to Wise Math.

Nova Scotia continues to debate the special education needs private school voucher, with the usual suspects making the usual excuses to eliminate it.

Here in Ontario, the story of the Waterloo family who had their lives turned upside down, when their four-year old drew a picture of a gun, continues.  Now the school superintendent says, “We do work hand-in-hand with these families because we co-parent.”

Do “co-parents” get Co-Mothers’ and Co-Fathers’ Day cards?

Question Answered

Thank you to those who responded to our question about the comments section, both on and off line.   We have decided to keep the comments, moderated of course, according to Malkin’s Rules.  We think Mad Teacher’s #1 and a bit of #2 are just about right—the comments are a place to brainstorm and share with some constructive debate.   The School For Thought posts, however, will always reflect SQE’s position on a number of issues, particularly as they relate to school choice and effective teaching practices, as well as bringing to light what is happening in education other places in the world. So, starting today, feel free to share and discuss, in a safe place without fear of antagonism and provocation.

So on that note, I am happy to report an interesting development in Nova Scotia.  The choice message is spreading!  Some very vocal grassroots organizations, Students First Nova Scotia and its Facebook group Choice Words Nova Scotia are having an impact in Atlantic Canada. I had the pleasure of speaking to them last year in Halifax.  Most people do not know that in Nova Scotia, parents of children with special needs receive a voucher (Nova Scotia Tuition Support Program) so that they may send their children to specially designated private schools.  Here’s an example.  They are fighting to retain and expand similar alternative schools for their children.  SQE’s fellow, Paul Bennett, was interviewed about this issue on the CBC here.  Paul has authored an AIMS Institute report that recommends more school choice to meet the needs of students in the province. 

Comments Anyone??

School for Thought has a question for our readers who do not regularly comment in the space provided.  We are considering closing the comments section of this blog because of the often antagonistic nature of the replies that do not really add to the discussion at hand, but require us to monitor constantly for spam and potentially actionable responses.  I just had to edit a recent comment because, well, it was borderline offensive.

So what do our "silent" readers say?  Would you miss the comments? or, do you enjoy reading them?  Let us know either here or by private email to info AT SocietyForQualityEducation.org

Sunday at the Movies (Alberta’s Best-Kept Secret)

This week's offering is an oldie, but goodie.  I don't think we will be featured on tonight's Oscar awards as our first project was definitely a learning curve.  Readers may recognize author Andrew Nikiforuk as our host.

Ladies and gentlemen we present--Charter Schools: Alberta's Best-Kept Secret Part I.  Parts II and III can be found on our research resource page here, or you can watch the full video here.   The envelope please...

Not only can it be done, it is being done - and here’s how

Continuing with Wendy Kopp’s inspirational book about schools that offer new hope for disadvantaged students, here are a few quotes from Brett Kimmel, the school leader of the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (WHEELS) in New York.

“Many of the schools that are ahead of us are well established and make no bones about being selective at their front door. They are only taking in the kids they want to. We are just four years old and we are taking everyone who shows up, and we’re on our way to outperforming those schools.” (p 52)

“Our mission is to prepare our kids to excel in college. We work backwards from that. Being ready for college informs the whole school curriculum – what we study, how we study it, what study and life skills we emphasize. And when we work backwards from that, we realize that kids have to leave eighth grade ready for a rigorous college-preparatory high school experience. That’s a critical mile marker along the way of our planned path to college preparation, and that’s where we are this year with the eighth graders. We bust our tails to get them there by the end of the eighth grade because then they can embark on our rigorous high school curriculum as we built out our high school. Every decision is steeped in college preparation methodology and philosophy.” (p 54)

“Everything starts with teacher quality. There are many factors at play, but I’m dead in the water if I don’t have great teachers. It all comes down to the two-sided coin of teacher recruitment and retention.” (56)

“We’ve been really purposeful – very thoughtful about mapping out the structures, policies, and procedures that generate the school culture.” (p 63)

And for dessert, here’s a thought-provoking quote from Reid Whitaker, the director of the very successful YES Prep charter school in Port Houston, Texas.

“I believe in data – I believe in its impact on kids’ lives. When I first suggested that as a school we commit to weekly progress assessments, some teachers were taken aback. They said, ‘But that’s going to take away instructional time.’ But I assured our team that if we do this right, the data from those weekly assessments will be so valuable for instruction. If we don’t know each week what kids have and have not understood, then so much of our instructional time is wasted. We simply have to know whether a student got this concept or did not get this objective. Now, today, our whole team is so into it. I think everyone sees the value of those weekly assessments to their instruction, and the teachers, not me, run the whole system.” (p 67)

Scaling the ladder of success

I am currently reading A Chance to Make History: What works and what doesn’t in providing an excellent education for all by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. I am finding this book tremendously heartening because Ms Kopp thinks that great strides are being made in terms of ensuring that all children have access to an equal education. Here are some excerpts on this topic (pp 3-8).

Twenty years ago, the prevailing assumption in most policy circles was that socioeconomic circumstances determined educational outcomes. We had not found a way to provide children growing up in poverty an education that overcame its effects on any significant scale, and many assumed that fixing education would require fixing poverty first.

During my senior year in college, a hit movie, Stand and Deliver, made a national hero of Jaime Escalante, a teacher in East Los Angeles who coached a class of students to pass the AP Calculus exam. At the time, it seemed stunning that a teacher could get kids in a high-poverty community to excel at that level - so stunning that the Educational Testing Service questioned the validity of the test results of Escalante’s students, creating the drama that attracted the attention of Hollywood. Movie audiences around the country were moved by the depiction of a charismatic and heroic teacher who could miraculously beat the odds with his students. We saw Escalante as an outlier - not as an example that could be widely replicated….

In the early 1990s, there were in fact a small number of widely-heralded examples of schools that changed the trajectories of children growing up in poverty. One of the most acclaimed was Marva Collins’s Westside Preparatory School in Chicago, which she founded as a private school in 1975, initially to educate her own children and their neighborhood friends. the school’s results were extraordinary - its students, including those who had been labeled as learning disabled by their previous schools, excelled academically, and many went on to attend the nation’s finest universities. Yet while a handful of schools like Westside Prep were changing the lives of their students, the working assumption at the time seemed to be that if the school leaders left, the success would not continue. Indeed, in the case of Westside Prep, the school ultimately closed its doors in June 2008, citing enrollment and funding challenges….

Twenty years ago, we had a few visible examples of classrooms and schools in low-income communities that were changing the trajectories of children. Today, there are too many to count. In the Teach For America network alone, there are hundreds of teachers who, even in their first and second years of teaching, are proving it is possible for economically disadvantaged children to compete academically with their higher-income peers. Moreover, today dozens of communities also have growing numbers of schools that are putting whole buildings full of students on much more promising paths, year after year….

In fact, in dozens of communities around the country, there are growing numbers of classrooms and growing numbers of schools that are demonstrating that we don’t need to wait to fix poverty in order to ensure that all children receive an excellent education. We can partner with children and their families, in a way that is replicable, to provide an education that changes their likely paths - an education that is transformational.

Although there is certainly much more to be understood about how to provide urban and rural children with opportunities that will put them on a path to college and life success, today we do know that it is possible to provide children growing up in poverty with an education that transforms their academic outcomes and, in turn, life options. And we can describe what it takes. Unlike twenty years ago, the question today is not whether success is possible but instead whether success is ‘scalable’. Can we develop entire school programs that provide educaitonal opportunty for all students?

Even to this question, there is growing evidence that it is possible to realize significant progress. Just seven or eight years ago, New York City, Washington, DC, and New Orleans were on virtually everyone’s list of exterme microcosms of our failure to provide chidren with the opportunities they need and deserve. Todya, while the school districts in these cities have a long way to go, each has shown that it is in fact possible to scale the success we are seeing in some classrooms and schools.

The New Haven Experiment

Many people think that perhaps the most pernicious aspect of most teachers’ unions is their determination to protect bad teachers. These people will no doubt be heartened by an ongoing experiment in New Haven, CN, where - in exchange for higher pay and benefits - the teachers’ union is actually allowing weak teachers to be fired. Last year, 34 New Haven teachers (out of 1800 teachers) were shown the door, and this year another 50 teachers have been put on notice. Given recent advances in our understanding of just how crucial teachers are to children’s futures, this is a very important initiative.

Of course, it couldn’t happen in Ontario for all kinds of reasons - not least of which is the Ontario government’s economic-basket-case status. The province can no longer afford to bribe its teachers’ unions, and temperatures will have to drop to unprecedently-low levels in the place of everlasting fire before Ontario teachers’ unions would voluntarily surrender teacher tenure provisions.  H/T LJCD

Never Take the Music Outa Me

You may recall that there is a group of parents in York Region fighting the threatened closure of the arts program at Baythorn school. To refresh your memory, here is an article from the National Post on this topic. 

So now the York group has produced this very catchy song (here are the lyrics, in case you’d like to sing along).  Let’s hope it goes to the top of the charts! YouTube link

Magic of the Marketplace

The image shows the cost of two colour televisions in 1964, expressed in 1964 dollars and in 2010 dollars. It is taken from this blog posting, which goes on to outline what consumers can buy in 2010 with the same money. The same amount of money (in constant dollars) that you needed in 1964 to buy one television today can buy eight brand-new kitchen appliances and nine state-of-the-art electronic items. The "magic of the marketplace" (competition) is responsible for this amazing progress.

By way of contrast, education spending per student, in constant dollars, has approximately tripled since 1964. Has there been a corresponding improvement in what this money can buy? I'll let you be the judge.

Cabooses are gone now

SQE recently published a report on online learning in Canada, which found that the potential of online learning is to some extent being blocked by the usual suspects. It's reminiscent of the train employees' union ability to block the elimination of cabooses (and their staffing) for many years after cabooses were no longer necessary. Similarly, online learning has the potential to reduce the number of union-belonging teachers. And of course in light of the Drummond report and the need to curtail spending, politicians are likely to get very interested in online learning very soon.

Which makes this news from MIT really interesting - its latest online course (Circuits and Electronics) will be offered to students anywhere in the world without charge and without prerequisite courses. The article is also interesting in documenting the surprising (to me, at least) extent of online courses already available from other universities. This looks like a tsunami to me, one that is going to roll over old-guard educators whether they like it or not (I'm guessing they won't). H/T JE