SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Reeling and Writhing and Fainting in Coils

Just in case our “Not Doing the Math” posting left our faithful readers with the impression that Ontario high school graduates are poorly prepared in math but okay in reading and writing, School for Thought would like to draw this Parent Central article to your attention. In corroboration of this article, there is a host of indications that the average literacy ability of incoming university students is just as worrisome, if not more so, as their math ability. One example is this excerpt from Ivory Tower Blues (pp. 22-23), by Professors James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar of the University of Western Ontario.

“A useful voice to add to this analysis comes from a Western professor, Thomas Collins, who spent twenty-one years as an administrator, first as chair of the English Department, then as dean of Arts, and finally as provost and vice-president academic of Western (the second-highest position in the university). These posts took him out of the classroom entirely from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Thus, we have a rare case study in which someone’s institutional memory is untainted by the experience of having to adjust his teaching year after year to increasingly unprepared and disengaged students, as appears to be the case for many professors, as we shall see in chapter 2. In a paper written for the Council of Ministers of Education, Collins admitted to some naivety when he returned to the classroom in the mid-1990s, and considerable shock at how standards had slipped in twenty years and how ill-prepared students were for the English courses he taught, especially his first-year courses. From his experiences in the trenches during his first year back, he concluded that he could not ‘assume even a moderate level of literacy from [these students] ... presumably because they think, or have been led to believe, that they are at least proficient in’ English.“

We thus can have confidence that university freshmen are weak in reeling and writhing, but we have no information regarding fainting in coils. Can anyone help?

Let’s Make It About The Kids

Not Doing the Math

The Ontario Legislative Library recently contacted 173 department chairs of math, science, and engineering departments at Ontario universities, asking whether incoming students are equipped with the numeracy skills necessary to succeed in their programs. More than 30 responses were received. Overwhelmingly, these university chairs replied that, while there was a huge variability in preparation from student to student, on average their freshmen have inadequate math skills and the situation is getting worse all the time. The majority of comments were on the record as representing the university’s official position, and the authors were happy to have their responses raised publicly in the Ontario legislature. Here’s a quick sample of some of the comments.

• “The Mathematics Department has a skills test that students must complete prior to registering in the required Calculus courses. Many students have trouble passing the skills tests without significant extra study.“ (Brock University)
• “We are surprised how poorly prepared these students are - makes us wonder about the safety of our bridges.“ (Carleton University)
• “The level of numeracy preparation has been reducing over the years.“ (Queen’s University)
• “Students having taken International Baccalaureate or Advanced Placement exams are ahead, but there are those at the other end of the spectrum that struggle to do simple chemical yield calculations in first/second year organic labs.“ (University of Toronto)
• “We have had to expand the (previously) remedial mathematics and our students have major difficulties in the required math courses (especially calculus) for Science in general and Biology specifically.“ (University of Waterloo)
• “I have been raising many of these issues in as many different forums as possible….Thank you for the opportunity to comment on this.“ (Wilfred Laurier University)
• “Knowledge of trigonometry and geometry, in particular, is abysmal, with only a 35% success rate.“ (York University)
• “Over the past many years we have observed a decrease in the fundamental numeracy skills of entering students.“ (Guelph University)

A Bolt from the Blue

Breaking news! The Ontario government has just clarified that school boards’ top priority is now student achievement. School for Thought imagines the following conversations taking place in school boards as we speak.

• Bureaucrat #1:  My word! And all along I thought our priority was to create jobs and alleviate unemployment in the community! I guess now we’ll have to fire hundreds of our useless consultants, co-ordinators, superintendents, and other worthless hangers-on and spend the money on good teaching materials and training instead.
• Bureaucrat #2:  Fancy that! I was under the impression that we were supposed to be providing an incubator for trustees who have ambitions to move into provincial or federal politics. I wonder if we should start putting meaty topics - like test scores or graduation rates - on the trustees’ agendas. 
• Bureaucrat #3:  Holy smokes! All this time I have been thinking that our most important job was to keep the schools open every day because parents are relying on us to babysit their kids, and that that’s the reason we’ve been leaning over backwards to keep the peace with the teachers’ unions. Maybe we should stop giving them virtually everything they ask for, since many of the provisions in teachers’ contracts - for example seniority and tenure - are bad for kids.
• Bureaucrat #4:  Amazing! My impression was that our top priority was to give each other a comfortable existence, with stellar salaries, interesting travel opportunities, relaxed hours, generous pensions, and early retirement, Does this mean we should start paying ourselves less and working harder? Perish the thought!

School for Thought is very grateful to the Ontario government for helping these school board bureaucrats see the light. No doubt we will be seeing important changes shortly.

Remind Me.  Why Do We Need a Literacy Secretariat Again?

The Ontario Provincial Auditor General has really slammed the work of the Ontario Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat.  His report can be found here. Moira MacDonald at the Toronto Sun highlights some of the findings in her column today.  School For Thought has always wondered what the heck these people were actually doing with the $340M of taxpayer dollars they’ve spent so far.

While the auditor, naturally, pointed out the lack of fiscal responsibility, his value-for-money analysis looked at what is nearer and dearer to our own hearts—is the Secretariat and the programs they encourage actually effective? Well, it seems no one knows because no one has actually taken the trouble to find out.

      “Government guidelines for transfer-payment accountability require that ministries have the oversight capacity to ensure that recipients (in this case, the school boards) are using the funds for the intended purpose and achieving the desired results. Appropriate oversight would include communication with the school boards on a regular basis, ongoing monitoring to ensure that objectives are achieved (including receiving reports from school boards), and taking corrective action when necessary. The school boards we visited had not carried out sufficient assessments of secretariat initiatives and how these contributed toward improving student achievement.“*

      “As a result, we questioned whether the Secretariat or school boards have adequate information to know whether secretariat resources are being directed to the program initiatives that provide the most benefit.“*

Considering that literacy among our Grade 3’s and 6’s has flatlined over the last few years, we conclude that all the library books, literacy workshops, inservicing, balanced literacy programs, smaller classes, etc. have not translated into the hoped-for results.  On the other hand, if some schools and boards have been successfully using direct instruction of systematic, explicit phonics, we wouldn’t know that either. 

      “While acknowledging the Ministry’s position, we still believe that it would be useful to identify which programs and initiatives work-and do not work as well-in schools.“*

Thank you, Mr. McCarter, so do we!

*Taken from the Auditor General’s report

Just Pointing Out the Obvious

The Ontario government has given the province’s school boards $25 million to buy books for school libraries. While it’s hard to argue with the soft and fuzzy video of cute kids talking about how much they love books, nevertheless School for Thought would like to point out a few of the problems surrounding this initiative. First, as is common with rushed government programs of this sort, there have apparently been problems with the implementation. For example, school librarians are complaining that the timelines have been far too short, sometimes resulting in their being forced to spend $2000 in one afternoon. In some cases, the processing of the books (getting them ready to go on the shelf) has been delayed, meaning that the books sit at board headquarters for months and months.

But in addition to the problems with implementation, School for Thought takes issue with the concept itself. The government claims that schools with up-to-date library collections will foster “strong literacy skills and a love of learning”. One might legitimately ask why the books have to be up-to-date to work their magic. Heidi? Harry Potter? Charlotte’s Web? Narnia? And let’s not forget that school libraries are already well stocked - for more generously than most private schools (which get significantly better results). But even more fundamentally, we ask exactly which students are expected to develop strong literacy skills and a love of learning as a result of the extra library books. Certainly not the students who are already proficient readers, since they will read whatever they can get their hands on and, if they can’t get their hands on books, they will read cereal boxes or menus. Certainly not the students who can’t read or who have very limited reading skills. It seems probable that the only category of students who might benefit are reluctant readers, those students with adequate reading skills who always choose to play video games or baseball over reading but might be tempted by a fantastic book. We have no idea whether the presence of a few hundred extra books in the school library would change their habits - you never know, it’s possible - but it seems likely that the gains would be minimal at best.

The real paydirt, the greatest potential gain in reading scores, is to be found in changes to beginning reading instruction. When schools adopt a systematic phonics program in grade 1, the children’s reading scores typically jump something like 30 percentage points in one year and the scores continue to improve, albeit less dramatically, for several years as the teachers become more familiar with the new approach. Compared to the adoption of systematic phonics, the gains to be gleaned from additional library books are negligible.

Buying additional books for the library when more than a third of elementary students can’t read well enough to cope with the work of the next grade is like planting flowers in the yard of a burning house.

A Better Class of Schools

When Lester Maddox, the bigoted ax-wielding former governor of Georgia was asked how he proposed to improve Georgia’s state prisons, he replied that there wasn’t much he could do unless he started getting “a better class of prisoner”. Similarly, many educators excuse their failures by pointing to their students’ disadvantaged backgrounds, drugs and alcohol, television, and so forth. This video on the KIPP schools demonstrates unequivocally that all students can learn - if taught properly.

The Purpose of Educational Jargon

“Peter’s well-known principle was obviously discovered by a man who knew nothing at all about schools. It just isn’t true that the people who can actually do their jobs get promoted until they find themselves, at last and forever, in the jobs they can’t do. This is because the most difficult and demanding jobs in education are what industry calls “entry-level positions”, teaching in classrooms. That’s the bottom rung of the school ladder, and there are many people who just can’t do that work.

“Partly because so many have incompetence thrust upon them, and party because so many are born to incompetence, in every faculty there will be people who just can’t handle the entry-level position. In industry, or even in a fast-food restaurant, they would be washed out; but we don’t do that kind of thing in the schools. In the schools, those who cannot do the work at the lowest rank are simply promoted into higher ranks. Weirdly enough, given the nature of the educational enterprise, this makes perfect sense.

“In those realms where the Peter Principle prevails, it is often true that higher rank and higher pay do go along with harder work. In the schools, where there is no harder work than teaching in a classroom, exactly the opposite is true. In fact, it is not at all absurd to imagine a perfectly-splendid school in which there are only teachers and one clever and industrious handyman who can also type. On the other hand, think for a moment about the school toward which, as all the statistics suggest, we might be moving, a school made up almost entirely of administrators and their own support services.

“In such a school, we would see clearly what we now can see only darkly through the frosted glass of governmental dogma: that almost all of the work done by those above the rank of teacher is contrived so that there may be more workers. Thus it is that so much of the administrative work done in schools is intended not to do work, as a physicist would use the term, but to occupy time and justify the existence of some administrative post. It turns out, not surprisingly therefore, that the mindless and inflated jargon, superbly suited to the darkening of logic and the interminable belaboring of the obvious, is exactly the language that an educationistic administrator needs in order to conceal the fact that the work he does simply doesn’t need doing.“

(Excerpted with permission from The Graves of Academe, by Richard Mitchell, 1980)

Education is Learning What You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know

In our posting “A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing” a few days ago, we discussed the plan to dumb down the Ontario curriculum. The reasoning behind this decision is apparently well summed up by the Toronto District School Board’s description of the current curriculum as “a series of overly robust subject-based documents which are disconnected, overwhelming and full of content reflective of 20th century knowledge. The curriculum does not engage students within their current realities nor does it effectively balance and integrate the required skills and content society hopes to see in a successful 21st century learner.“

Where to begin? It would be a piece of cake to debunk the “overly-robust” part - since the curriculum clearly is not very robust at all and anyway robust is good. Subject-based? Well, hello? Content reflective of the 20th century? Last time we checked, two and two was still four and oxygen still had two atoms. Most of the idiocies in the Tedious Board’s diatribe are readily apparent, but we would like to spend a little time on their contention that the curriculum “does not engage students within their current realities”, since the problems with this criticism take a bit of thought.

Education should introduce students to an exciting new world of ideas and knowledge and give them a chance to become more aware and cultured than they would otherwise be. If a curriculum restricts itself to elements of students’ present world, it unnecessarily limits their chances to expand their horizons. It is common for elementary curricula to begin with the children’s immediate environment in grade 1 and gradually ripple outward to include less familiar environments and happenings as the children advance through the grades. This is a mistake. Children of all ages greatly enjoy learning about far-away events and places. The Core Knowledge Foundation makes available an excellent core curriculum that exposes young children to interesting and mind-expanding topics right from the start, engaging them in their education and enriching their school experience. The Core Knowledge curriculum is currently being used in hundreds of schools with great success. 

Like most of the other twaddle in the Tedious Board’s rant, the criticism that the Ontario curriculum does not engage students within their current realities is completely wrong-headed.

A Word to the Wise

This article in The Globe and Mail reports on several young Somali-Canadians who recently disappeared without a word of warning to anyone and are believed to have joined al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist movement in Somalia. At least two of the young men were born in Canada and all were educated in Canadian public schools from primary school onwards. Their families are bewildered by their sons’ disappearance, and the only foreshadowing they can think of is the chastisement some received for not being sufficiently religious. 

Clearly, these men’s schooling in Ontario public schools did nothing to foster their cultural assimilation. The same thing goes for the Toronto 18, one of whom has now been convicted and four of whom who have pleaded guilty to conspiring to attack targets in Ontario in the name of Islam. 

In sharp contrast, there has never been a whisper of anything amiss with any of the tens of thousands of students who currently attend or have graduated from one of Ontario’s 24 Islamist private schools. Perhaps the world would be a safer place if more students could attend Islamic schools.