SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Go Gators!

Here I am in Everglades City, a tiny hamlet deep in the Everglades with a population of about 500. Amazingly, Everglades City has its own preK-12 school, with a population of only 154 students - but 19 teachers and 26 support/admin staff. I guess with class sizes like this they should do really well, eh Doug?

A provincial province?

Yesterday, the education conference wrapped up, and in the afternoon my husband and I took a very educational cruise along the Fort Lauderdale canal and intracoastal waterway system, learning all about the homes and yachts of the rich and famous, like Cher and Steven Spielberg and so forth. Today, we head into the Everglades. For today’s blog, I thought I would tell you what I have learned about school systems around the world.

The bottom line is that most countries have some kind of school voucher program, with the government fully or partially funding non-government schools. Thailand, for example, has a universal voucher system. In Ireland, all of the elementary schools are privately operated, with the government fully funding them. Chile, Brazil, Australia, almost every European country - all encourage the private delivery of schooling. Even Finland has a small voucher program. This information is being compiled by the World Bank, and it will be released shortly.

We all tend to accept the way things are done locally as the norm and assume this is how it is done everywhere else too. I expect that most parents in Ontario assume that our set-up, with fully-funded Catholic and secular schools but no support for non-government schools, is the way most countries do education. Not so! We are the exception, not the rule.

Repeat After Me: School choice advocates are saints

So the school choice conference wraps up today. I unfortunately don’t have any more scoops for you, so I thought I would just say a few words about how nice the people are at this conference. These are people who do what they do because they care about kids and want to help them. You might think that people who promote school choice are mistaken and that their policies will in fact hurt kids, whatever, but there is just no way that they are selfish, ruthless privatizers out to enrich themselves on the backs of children. Au contraire - many (most?) of them have chosen career paths that ensure they earn a modest living but which allow them to try to help kids - especially poor kids.

Vouching for school vouchers

You heard it here first! The University of Arkansas’ longitudinal evaluation of the Milwaukee parental choice program, which to date has shown only modest benefits, will report much stronger effects when its fifth year results are published next month. 

Sunday at the Movies (School Choice Conference)

Your roving reporter is now in Fort Lauderdale to attend the school choice conference described in the clip. Stand by for breathless reporting of breaking news!

Choosing better schools in Florida

At the Palm Beach chamber of commerce I picked up a glossy 72-page magazine that lists all the schools in South Florida. Fronted by an endorsement by the state’s governor Rick Scott, the magazine gives 8-10 indicators for every public school, including scores on various state tests and the school’s overall grade in 2009 and 2010. Some schools were graded F. The charter schools tend to do better than the conventional public schools, although a few of them get a D or even an F.

All of the private schools are listed along with helpful information about such things as enrolment, tuition, and programs, although the results of testing are not given. There is also a page about alternative education in Florida, including homeschooling - and Florida is said to have one of the country’s largest home education movements with more than 55,000 registered students and an unknown, but significant, homeschooled students enrolled in non-traditional private schools that serve as an umbrella for the home-education prorgram. To help homeschoolers, the state has established the Florida Virtual School, a nationally recognized, accredited e-learning model for K-12, offering more than 100 courses. 

Clearly, many Florida parents use this magazine (and other similar resources) to choose their children’s schooling (there’s a full-page ad for a Miami realty company). Here’s Jay Greene on the effect of Florida’s policies on its student achievement scores. H/T BD

Methinks the lady doesn’t protest enough

Greetings from West Palm Beach, FL, and here’s an article in The Palm Beach Post about how hundreds of parents, some of them taking the day off work, lined up for hours so their kids could have a chance to audition for a public school of the arts. We’ve blogged about this sort of thing before - there’s a special public school of some kind with limited places and so parents in that area jump through hoops to get their kids into the school - and, amazingly, no one ever seems to complain or wonder why the school board doesn’t open a second campus to handle the overflow. In the Palm Beach story, one parent was quoted as saying she didn’t mind taking the time off work or waiting in line. Really?

Imagine if you owned a very popular restaurant that people had to line up for. Wouldn’t you think about expanding your capacity in some way - maybe putting on an addition or opening a second restaurant or creating franchises? I mean, think of all the extra money you could make!

Of course, there’s no extra money to be made in public enterprises, and no doubt that explains why school boards don’t think in terms of expanding the capacity of popular schools (in fact, in some cases, they regard popular schools as a pain in the neck and are motivated to close them, but that’s another story). But the lack of profit motive doesn’t explain why parents meekly accept the imaginary capacity limitations imposed by the school boards.

Teaching that really schmecks

So here I am in Florida. I’ll be here for two weeks and, during this time, I hope to be able to bring you Florida stories - since this is a happening state when it comes to school choice and educational improvement. But first, a story from Darlington County in South Carolina where the teachers are implementing Explicit Direct Instruction (explained in the video clip). If you think about it, this really shouldn’t create headlines - explicit direct instruction is really just a fancy way to say good teaching - but such are the times, everyone gets quite excited at the prospect of teachers who actually teach.

Choice is for the few—for now

Seems that People for Education have been reading the pages of the Society for Quality Education all along!  This National Post article about the York Region school board’s decision to possibly axe an elementary arts school program makes me wonder.

The quote that is used, and highlighted in the print version (“Choice is open to those with the capacity to choose.”) is taken almost verbatim from a speech given by renowned black educator and school choice advocate, Dr. Howard Fuller, during an SQE-sponsored Toronto trip.  It’s not the first time either.

Fuller’s full speech to the Economic Club of Toronto can be found on our website here.  Here is the pertinent excerpt:

        “Those of us with money have the capacity to choose and the great hypocrisy that operates are those individuals who would never put their own children in certain schools denying poor parents the capacity to do it. We have teachers who teach in schools they would never put their own children in, demanding that other people’s children stay there. I find that to be hypocritical. We’ve got politicians running around talking about how important the public school structure is and then you ask them, ‘Well, where do your children go to school?’”  — Dr. Howard Fuller, January 2008 address to the Economic Club of Toronto.

That is particularly interesting since Ms. Kidder herself has taken advantage of similar public alternative schools for her own children—to which she has always admitted.

It is not clear if People for Education is advocating for alternative schools or opposing them?  Do they want to retain the status quo, where only the wealthy can pay tuition or afford a house in a pricier neighborhood?

Of COURSE people with money have more options. That is self evident.  The Society for Quality Education has been a long-time advocate for parental school choice so that ALL parents have access to mechanisms that allow them to choose the sort of schooling they want for their children, especially disadvantaged and low income families. 

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PS to the above post:  This is the same school board that closed Flowervale traditional model school in Thornhill.  See Malkin’s past post here and our original newsletter story on Flowervale here.

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Quick note to readers: Cathy Cove and Elizabeth Bundy-Cooper have co-edited a book of first-hand stories of victims of the Goderich, Ontario tornado.  Not Like Any Other Sunday can be purchased by emailing: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  Proceeds go to Victim Services of Huron County.  You can read more about the book in Moira MacDonald’s SUN column here.

The OK Plateau

Most people assume that world-class performers in most fields - chess, sports, public speaking, music, you name it - are great because of some genetic quirk, some inborn difference that allows them to achieve at higher levels than almost everyone else. But this is not borne out by recent research which is finding that greatness is primarily the result of intensive purposeful practice. Moonwalking with Einstein: The art and science of remembering everything (a book which I will review in due course) is just the latest in a long line of corroborating evidence. It is a first-person account of a journalist who covered the US Memory Championship and then, with no previous aptitude or interest in memory training, decided to train for the contest - which he ended up winning the following year. This excerpt (pp 169-172) covers a period in the author’s training when he hit a plateau and couldn’t seem to improve. His method of getting out of his rut is very instructive.

• When people first learn to use a keyboard, they improve very quickly from sloppy single-finger pecking to careful two-handed typing, until eventually the fingers move so effortlessly across the keys that the whole process becomes unconscious and the fingers seem to take on a mind of their own. At this point, most people’s typing skills stop progressing. They reach a plateau. If you think about it, it’s a strange phenomenon. After all, we’ve always been told that practice makes perfect, and many people sit behind a keyboard for at least several hours a day in essence practicing their typing. Why don’t they just keep getting better and better?
• In the 1960s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by describing the three stages that anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the ‘cognitive stage,’ you’re intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second ‘associative stage,’ you’re concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach what Fitts called the ‘autonomous stage,’ when you figure that you’ve gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you’re basically running on autopilot. During that autonomous stage, you lose conscious control over what you’re doing. Most of the time that’s a good thing. Your mind has one less thing to worry about. In fact, the autonomous stage seems to be one of those handy features that evolution worked out for our benefit. The less you have to focus on the repetitive tasks over everyday life, the more you can concentrate on the stuff that really matters, the stuff that you haven’t seen before. And so, once we’re just good enough at typing, we move it to the back of our mind’s filing cabinet and stop paying it any attention. You can actually see this shift take place in fMRI scans of people learning new skills. As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the ‘OK plateau,’ the point at which you decide you’re OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.
• We all reach OK plateaus in most things we do. We learn how to drive when we’re in our teens and then once we’re good enough to avoid tickets and major accidents, we get only incrementally better. My father has been playing golf for forty years, and he’s still - though it will hurt him to read this - a duffer. In four decades his handicap hasn’t fallen even a point. How come? He reached an OK plateau.
• Psychologists used to think that OK plateaus marked the upper bounds of innate ability. In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius, Sir Francis Galton argued that a person could only improve at physical and mental activities up until he reached a certain wall, which ‘he cannot by any education or exertion overpass.’ According to this view, the best we can do is simply the best we can do.
• But Ericsson and his fellow expert performance psychologists have found over and over again that with the right kind of concerted effort, that’s rarely the case. They believe that Galton’s wall often has much less to do with our innate limits than simply with what we consider an acceptable level of performance.
• What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled ‘deliberate practice.’ Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the cognitive phase.’
• Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces. The best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered. Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.
• When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. In fact, in every domain of expertise that’s been rigorously examined, from chess to violin to basketball, studies have found that the number of years one has been doing something correlates only weakly with level of performance. My dad may consider putting into a tin cup in his basement a good form of practice, but unless he’s consciously challenging himself and monitoring his performance - reviewing, responding, rethinking, rejiggering - it’s never going to make him appreciably better. Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.