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SQE’s Sunshine on Schools Ontario website made #7 on the list of Education Reporter’s top posts for 2009!
The EQAO 2009 results have been posted. Stay tuned as we will continue to update the site as new information becomes available.
The Ontario government has announced that the province’s schools are to eliminate the fall report card, in favour of an informal progress report. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario explains that the fall report card is not very useful, since three months is not enough time for teachers to get a good handle on their students’ academic progress.
If it is true that teachers are still not in a position to make judgments about their students’ progress by December, then we agree there is a problem, although not what the problem is. Far from being a question of timing, the real problem is teachers’ lack of tools and skills to evaluate their students’ learning. It’s actually quite frightening to contemplate the possibility that children can sit in a classroom for three months or even longer, in serious need of special support, without anyone knowing. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Precision teaching is a teaching approach that, combined with direct instruction, is probably the most effective teaching method ever invented. Precision teaching clearly and sequentially sets out a very detailed curriculum, and the learner’s progress is tested several times an hour. With this approach, the teacher assesses each learner’s status on the very first day of school, and then is able to track his or her daily progress. It would be theoretically possible for a precision teacher to issue report cards every singe day from September 1 onwards.
By eliminating the fall report cards instead of finding ways of making them more meaningful, the Ontario government is throwing the report cards out with the baby.
Most people think that kids have different learning styles - you know, he's a visual learner but she's an auditory learner... leading to a need for different teaching approaches for different students. And so many teachers work hard to identify their students' learning styles and then cater to them. A whole industry has grown up around this notion: learning style tests, manuals, professional development courses, specialized teaching materials, and so forth. Now a major new report from the Association for Psychological Science says that "there is no adequate research base to justify incorporating learning-style assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number."
We will be greatly surprised, however, if Ontario education leaders were to heed this advice. From our observations, we are forced to conclude that our decision-makers have their very own special learning style, one that unfortunately renders them blind to research evidence.
"With 809, California leads the nation in the number of charter schools. In less than 20 years, education activists have started nearly 5,000 of these institutions, which are publicly financed and free for students to attend but independently operated. The charter schools boom is expected to grow as states remove or increase the caps on the number of such schools permitted to operate in each state. There are still 11 states that have no charter schools at all." (from the chart)
Only one Canadian province (Alberta) permits charter schools, and its legislation caps the total number at 15.
School for Thought is not saying that charter schools are THE answer to the problems in Canadian education, but we think they might be one of the answers and, as such, deserve at least a chance. Recent research on New York's charter schools by a Stanford professor finds that "lotteried in" charter school students do far better academically than "lotteried out" students who are forced to attend conventional public schools. The most successful charter schools had a longer school year, spent more time on English, had a small rewards/small penalties disciplinary policy, paid their teachers somewhat on the basis of performance and/or duties, and had a mission statement that emphasized academic performance.
Many well-meaning educators and parents believe that it is important to build up children's self-esteem by praising them and making them feel special. According to The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising confident and compassionate kids in an age of self-importance, encouragement and advantages don't guarantee happiness in childhood or success in adulthood. In fact, according to the author, the reverse is often true. Unrealistic expectations of fame, power, and achievement can set children up for "the self-esteem trap" - a condition that afflicts young adults with difficulty in meeting the ordinary challenges of life, a lack of empathy and the ability to collaborate with others, and a tremendous fear of humiliation. The following excerpt is taken from pages 21-22.
"Obsessive self-focus, restless dissatisfaction, pressures to be exceptional, unreadiness to take on adult responsibilities, feelings of superiority (or inferiority), and excessive fears of being humiliated are the pervasive symptoms of the self-esteem trap... Even in very young children, we can witness the beginning of these symptoms - for instance, when a child seems unable to step back from her own needs when they are in conflict with another's more important needs... The self-esteem trap, in its least troubling form, leads to unhappy adult children who feel defective because they are unable to have or be what they imagined for themselves. At its worst, unchecked over childhood and young adulthood, and reinforced by other social conditions, it can lead ot chronic emotional disorders such as depression, narcissism, and addiction.
"Jason, a young man in his early twenties, came to see me in therapy because he had a distinct feeling that he was superior to others. He didn't like the feeling. He didn't know how he had gotten it, but it made him uncomfortable socially. When Jason met new people, at first he was interested and enthusiastic about getting to know them. But then within a month or so, he would notice himself judging them. He would quickly and gleefully identify their flaws and weaknesses. Eventually he would find himself to be superior, better, or more capable than others who had initially intrigued him. He felt a pressure to succeed, to be better than others, almost all the time. he was uncomfortable around, and uninterested in, those whom he secretly found lacking, yet he felt ashamed of his incessant judgments. This whole range of thoughts and feelings was terribly upsetting to him on many different levels.
"Jason is stuck in the self-esteem trap. The special self demands that its owner constantly measure up to extraordinary standards, try to win every competition, and fulfill a specific or vague grand fantasy about what the self and its life should be. As this young man sensed, this identity becomes a prison, an eternal trap from which the person feels there is no escape and no chance of rescue. After all, who else is capable of rescuing you if you're better than everyone else? The special self is a lonely and scary place to live."
If you believe that teacher-led direct instruction is soul-deadening and creativity-killing, watch this short video. See Dick learn. See Dick smile. See Dick succeed.
A comment to The True Cost of a Free Lunch pointed us to an excellent article in City Journal which discusses the characteristics of kindergarten education that actually confers academic and social gains on disadvantaged students. Unfortunately, the type of teaching approach (highly-scripted direct instruction) that is identified as being best for disadvantaged students is out of fashion in Ontario, and thus unlikely to be used here. Unless Ontario education leaders experience a sudden conversion on the road to Damascus, we stand by our prediction that the province’s fancy new all-day kindergarten will end up costing Ontario taxpayers an arm and a leg, enriching the coffers of the teachers’ unions but making no difference whatsoever to student success.
We wish we had a big nickel for every time a defender of the Ontario status quo bragged that Canada has the second-best education system in the world. This is, of course, a reference to the 2005 PISA tests. But test results are never black and white, and the PISA tests are particularly gray.
The 2005 PISA test looked at three subjects - science, math, and reading. Several Canadian provinces participated as separate jurisdictions, and their results were averaged together to yield a score for Canada. As a country, Canada ranked 2nd in reading, 5th in science, and 6th in math. In the Canadian context, Ontario's results were not particularly stellar: in science and math, Ontario ranked below Alberta and BC, and in reading, Ontario ranked below Alberta, BC, and Quebec. Furthermore, many of the Asian tigers, like China, Singapore, India, and Korea, chose not to participate in the PISA.
In addition, as Jay Mathews points out, the PISA tests do not measure what students learn in school, but rather how well students are prepared "to meet the challenges of the future". PISA focuses on skills like estimating and interpreting as opposed to the ability to carry out advanced mathematical calculations, and the ability to get the gist of a passage as opposed to being able to spell words correctly or even get the right answers. The nature of the PISA tests means they neutralize much of the superiority of students with advanced skills and knowledge. It's as if the Canadian kids were in a figure skating competition that tested only the ability to do bunny hops. Well, the Canadian kids have been doing bunny hops for years, and they are still doing them all the time, and so they can do them perfectly. Some of the other kids from other countries are very fine skaters, but they're a bit rusty at bunny hops because they haven't done them for a very long time. They can do them of course, because bunny hops are very easy, but just at first they look kind of rusty and awkward. As a result, the Canadian kids do fairly well in the contest. Of course, it would be a different story if the competition were based on the ability to do triple axels and forward camels!
If we want to know how well Canadian students are prepared in terms of more difficult material, we must look at other international tests, such as the TIMSS or the PIRL. Ontario ranks roughly in the middle of the countries that choose to participate in these tests. It is important for Canada's future that we not be lulled into a false sense of complacency by our good results on the PISA.
The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC) has just released The Cost of a Free Lunch: The real costs of the Pascal early learning plan for Ontario, a thoughtful analysis of how much more it will really cost to introduce full-day kindergarten throughout the province. Although the Pascal report estimated the incremental cost to be just under $1 billion a year, the IMFC thinks that a more realistic estimate would be an additional $1.5 to $1.8 billion annually. The discrepancy arises because, unlike the Pascal report, the IMFC takes into consideration the higher salaries of certified teachers, the probability of higher operating and capital costs, and the increased bureaucracy. In addition, the IMFC identifies six cost alerts that have the potential for spending overruns: the risk that early childhood educators will unionize and achieve higher salaries; the likely need for heightened security in schools; the possibility that full-day kindergarten will attract additional special-needs children; the as-yet-ignored cost of feeding the children; the chance that the ratio of younger-to-older kindergarten children will increase; and the probability that some teachers will need additional training.
The IMFC report points out that "if, instead of implementing a province-wide system, Ontario decided to send that money directly to parents of four-and five-year-olds for them to use at their discretion, it would represent at a bare minimum, $9,199 dollars per child annually." This calculation is done on the basis of the IMFC's lower estimate and ignoring the possibility of cost overruns.
School for Thought takes the position that even this huge expenditure would be justified if it made it possible for all children, especially disadvantaged children, to succeed in school. The trouble is, though, that public education's poor track record makes it very unlikely that it will be able to meet such a challenging goal. Why would we expect an organization that currently offers programs that are at best mediocre to suddenly pull a rabbit out of a hat and start delivering excellent full-day kindergarten? The chances are very high that Ontario taxpayers are about to be saddled with a very expensive program that doesn't come close to living up to its extravagant promises.
In Reeling and Writhing, we documented the disappointing results of "Balanced Literacy", the approach that most Ontario schools use to teach language arts. One of the principal failings of Balanced Literacy is its tolerance for imprecision. For example, Balanced Literacy teaches that it is acceptable for students to read "pony" instead of "horse", since the student has got the gist of the passage. Similarly, students are encouraged to believe that the content of their compositions is much more important than the spelling, punctuation, and grammar. It is obvious to most normal people that these beliefs are ridiculous. Even beyond the fact that reading "pony" instead of "horse" harms students' decoding skills, it is clearly better for children to access the author's nuanced meaning. And compositions that are riddled with errors are very difficult for readers to understand - yet the whole point of writing things down is to communicate them to others!
Fuzzy teaching approaches are troublesome in and of themselves since they harm students' academic achievement. But there are further implications in terms of the students' general attitude towards accuracy and precision. Even though sloppiness is acceptable in the early grades, the rules do change somewhere along the line. Children who are encouraged to think it's okay to be careless ultimately have a cruel awakening. Suddenly, they have to break the habits of a lifetime - or fail.
As adults, most of us are well aware of the importance of high standards. We know that authors and musicians spend years polishing their work. We trust our lives to the professionalism of pilots and surgeons. We realize that computers won't obey our instructions if a single letter is wrong. Many parents see this problem clearly, knowing that it will be easier on their children in the long run if they are started off on the right foot, with an emphasis on accuracy and high standards from kindergarten on. It can be very hard to buck the trend, but there are some things that enlightened parents can do.