SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

“If You Don’t Get Something, It’s My Fault” What a Concept!

I thought this article in today’s Globe and Mail deserved a read not just because it is a great look at JUMP math and its creator John Mighton (his Myth of Ability is a must-read as well), but it also sums up the idea that the teaching is the most important indicator of student success.   Malkin’s recent post on teachers’ unions and my previous one on Houston’s value-added assessment approach brings this concept of no excuses under the spotlight.  In fact, there is an movement called NO Excuses Schools.

Mighton tells his students, “If you don’t get something today, it is my fault, so stop me.“ What a concept indeed!  In an education environment that blames poor outcomes on everything from income level, social background, class size, lack of money, (pet excuse here) to the phases of the moon, this is mind blowing.  Also from the Globe article: “The program has met with more resistance in Ontario, where it began. Many school board officials prefer the current approach, which helps students discover and understand mathematical concepts through problem solving. Still, JUMP is getting attention there: Mr. Mighton has trained more than 100 teachers in the public and Catholic boards since September.“

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Further to my previous post, the Houston Chronicle reports:

 “One of every 300 teachers in the Houston school district was fired for poor performance last year - a number likely to rise under a new policy to hold them more liable for student achievement. The district’s superintendent, Terry Grier, said there’s no “magic number” of teachers who should be ousted in a given year, but suggested that the school district’s rate seems low given some academic shortcomings.  Last school year, 36 teachers out of nearly 12,000 - about 0.3 percent - were fired for performance reasons, according to data from the Houston Independent School District.

‘Quite frankly, if we were that good, why do 100,000 of our kids read below grade level?‘ Grier said.

The school board on Thursday gave initial approval to a policy that allows the district to dismiss teachers whose students consistently perform below expectations on standardized tests. The change represents a move to make personnel decisions based more on student learning instead of relying solely on principals’ classroom observations of teachers. Grier and school board members have emphasized that the district’s goal is not to fire teachers but to help them improve. Teachers’ job evaluations now will include their so-called value-added scores, a statistical measure of their effectiveness in helping students reach their potential on standardized exams.“

It seems to me that Houston is taking the no excuses approach.

In Ontario, the passage of Bill 177 could mean a real shift in responsibility for making sure kids learn.  If it means not blaming the children, then there may be hope yet. If the usual excuses get used, then the amended Education Act will mean diddly squat.

Teacher Evaluation

Further to my earlier post about long-term trends in education, this article that appeared in the Houston Chronicle piqued my interest.  Seems that the Houston Independent School District is ready to approve a plan to use their Texas state testing to evaluate teacher effectiveness based on their “value-added score.“  Teachers could be fired for failing to improve student learning over a three- to four-year period, although every effort would be made to help teachers improve their teaching.

As you would expect, the local teachers’ union is not a happy camper. The paper quotes Steve Antley, president of the Congress of Houston Teachers:  “There are so many factors that influence scores—school climate and leadership, not to mention how students woke up feeling on test day.“   Oh please!  Enough of the excuses.  What about the most important factor in learning—the actual teaching? 

The Tennessee Value-Added study showed that of all the factors affecting learning, the quality of the teaching was the most crucial:

      Research conclusions utilizing data from the TVAAS database have shown that race, socioeconomic level, class size, and classroom heterogeneity are poor predictors of student academic growth. Rather, the effectiveness of the teacher is the major determinant of student academic progress.

By the way, the same “value-added score” is used to determine performance bonuses for Houston teachers.  Mr. Antley doesn’t like that either. The concept of value-added is new one for Canadian educators and one that ensures better accountability so that ALL children can be expected to learn.

1 Man, 12 Dogs, 12,000 kilometres

The article in today’s Globe and Mail with the above headline mentioned that some guy was dogsledding to commemorate Manitoba’s 140th birthday but what I couldn’t understand was why he was going all the way to Peru? Wouldn’t going through the Central American rain forests be a little tough on the huskies? Of course, a quick glance down to paragraph two indicated that the distance should have been 1,200 kilometres. But nobody caught the error because when it comes to facts and arithmetic, we’re losing our ability to apply simple “smell” tests.

If you know that Canada is approximately 5,000 kilometres coast-to-coast 12,000 sounds like an awfully (unbelievably?) long way. But how do you apply “higher order thinking skills” to a report like the one above if you don’t have the basic facts (in your head) with which to start your analysis? Sure you can look them up in Wikipedia, but try that in a meeting at work when you’re discussing relative maritime shipping distances from Mumbai and Shanghai to Vancouver without looking stupid!

Education Trends for the Next Decade

In line with the natural look back at the decade past, several papers have published a look at trends for the coming decade.  According to the Brookings Institute, not only is school testing here to stay, but also it will get more complex. Here are the three biggest trends forcasted (USA Today):

1. Techology that allows more online learning, particularly for high school students.

2. Less "tyranny of localism."  "Technology will reduce the power of locally elected, highly political school boards. School boards could shift from regulating and controlling input to monitoring outcome."  (Hmm. Can you spell Bill 177?)

3. More sophisticated standardized tests. According to the Brookings Institute, " Accountability isn't going to stop. Testing is going to get more sophisitcated."  "States are developing systems that can potentially trace a student's knowledge--or lack thereof--back to a single teacher.  Parents might someday be able to compare teachers head-to-head, much as they now compare schools."

What real world “difficult conversations” tell us about student evaluation

Every year, employers everywhere pay more than they need to in order to dismiss incompetent employees. Why is that? Nine times out of ten it’s because the employee’s manager did not provide the underperforming employee with formal notice of the problem. Why doesn’t the manager provide the notice? Because that would involve having a “difficult conversation” and people, whether they are managers or employees parents or teachers, avoid these types of conversations like the plague. When a student is struggling at school, a parent-teacher interview becomes a “difficult conversation”.

The easiest thing for the teacher (and the parent) to do is to pretend that there isn’t a problem and focus on some of the student’s positive behaviours and achievements. As a result, problems fester and remediation becomes increasingly difficult. Many parents who turn to SQE for help are the victims of avoided “difficult conversations” with their children's teachers.

If a teacher is strong enough, he or she can attempt to address the student’s misbehaviour or underachievement in an interview with the parents, but how can they do that credibly if they don’t have data to back up what they’re saying? Just how often is Stacey running around the room screaming like a banshee? Just how weak are Syed’s arithmetic skills? Educators who promote narrative report cards and parent-teacher interviews over report cards with letter or percentage grades are assuming that teachers are going to be able to handle these “difficult conversations” far better than most senior managers in both the private and public sectors. And that’s just not a realistic expectation. (If you’re interested in learning more about this fascinating topic that applies to both our work and personal lives, I recommend that you read the book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Patton et al.)

Could your daughter be a very happy car mechanic?

For ten years now, I've been fortunate to have been involved in a grade 8 technical skills challenge that involves a number of public schools in West Toronto. Teams of students are given a problem to solve that involves building a mechanism that (typically) moves objects from one location to another. This has been quite a learning and confirming experience for me and the other business people that get involved every year.

What's been confirmed: Classroom teachers are no better or no worse than employees in many workplaces. Sure there are a few slackers, but the majority of the teachers are keen and truly grateful to have their students get hands-on experience applying concepts from the Science and Technology Curriculum. Also no surprise is that the principals that the better teachers work for are often superior. They show up on competition day to support their teacher and students. They're both good leaders and managers.

What's been learned: The trustees and senior administrators in our public school systems (and, not surprisingly our Faculties of Education) are clueless about the role of technology in our society and what our schools should be doing to prepare students for opportunities in technology careers. In the 90's, school boards decided that the only kind of technology that mattered was computer technology. They shut down shops and sold off machinery at many middle schools. (Some principals saw the folly of this and stored their machinery out of sight knowing that it would be needed again one day.) Then in the late 90's experienced machinists and other skilled technology workers began to retire in droves. Sure manufacturing plants have shut down, but many continue to thrive even in the face of fierce global competition and many are desperate for skilled technology workers.

A big part of the problem is that the people running our education system are clinging to some very outdated stereotypes. When they think "technology" education they see a student that can't "cut it" in the academic stream building birdhouses in a carpentry shop. They should get out more and visit a modern manufacturing plant. People don't stand at drill presses all day robotically pulling down levers to drill holes in blocks of metal any more. They use touch screens to program multiple machining centres. They use statistical techniques to analyze production processes looking for ways to reduce cycle times and scrap rates. The other part of the problem is that the education system moves so slowly in response to developments in technology. While some public education apologists claim that our public schools can accommodate different approaches, the misguided and lethargic actions of the public systems relative to technology education provide yet another strong argument for school choice.

Finally, in a spirit of fairness, I have to point out that the misconceptions about technology are not exclusive to our school systems -- the media and parents are just as clued out. A number of teachers have recounted stories to me of students of theirs who had an obvious aptitude and love for hands-on work but were being blocked by their parents from pursuing a career in that direction. As one teacher lamented, "I had one girl that wanted to be a car mechanic and she would have made a great mechanic. But there was no way that her parents would let that happen." Just what the world needs: another surly physician or unhappy lawyer.

Should report cards “value” students?

In case we needed further proof that Canadian faculties of education seem intent on getting students in Canadian schools ready for life on another (not yet identified) planet, we now have fresh pronouncements from the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE) on the upcoming discontinuation of graded fall report cards in Ontario. In a Dec 23rd Globe and Mail article, OISE Associate Professor Linda Cameron says that "educators should be exploring a grade-free report card" because "[the] root of evaluation is to value" and (I'm paraphrasing the rest of her words for brevity's sake) "you can't honestly value a child using letter grades".

This is a peculiar interpretation of the word "evaluate" that, to my knowledge, has not been adopted outside of OISE and teacher union offices. Everywhere else in the world, when the word "evaluate" is used relative to education or training, it means comparing (as objectively as possible - usually using some form of grade) what an individual has learned against what he or she was expected to learn. I'm sure most teachers would be appalled to think that when they give Omar a C+ in Mathematics that this might be interpreted as saying that his "value" as a person is "average".

Isn't this just another case of educators broadening their mandate so that they don't have to be responsible for the more specific (and measurable) learning outcomes that should be the core (but not sole) focus of our schools?

It’s a Tough Job…...

As School for Thought deems it essential to undertake a thorough investigation of the Barbados education system, we have decided to station a researcher there for the next two weeks. Malkin has kindly volunteered to travel to Barbados and take on the arduous task of scanning the local newspaper for education items - despite the hardships of gentle breezes ruffling the pages and the dangers of being dazzled by the sun. All this research is unlikely to leave time or energy for making blog postings, and so School for Thought's faithful readers can look forward to a most worthy substitute - John Bachmann, SQE's vice president. John is a former high school math teacher, a parent and a grandfather, a businessman, and a gifted writer. Happy reading!

Teaching Kids To Be Smart

Dear Aunt Malkin,
I have two children, aged three and four. I am wondering what I can do to prepare them for success in school, but I am worried about jumping the gun.
Yours truly,
Conscientious in Cinncinati

Dear Conscientious,
If I were you, I would definitely start in on teaching your kids right now, as a solid foundation of basic skills makes it possible for kids to benefit from progressive teaching methods. Of course, you should not force your children to sit at desks and learn in a structured way, but rather you should teach them with a playful, fun type of approach in short sessions that leave them begging for more. The materials listed as being for preschoolers on our schoolproofing site are recommended. It is particularly important that you get things right from the beginning, for example making sure that your children hold their pencils and crayons using a tripod grip and form their letters correctly (top to bottom and left to right). 
In addition to giving your children a good grounding in reading, writing, and math, you would be wise to take steps to enlarge their vocabularies and fund of general knowledge. You will find a number of useful ideas in our newsletter archives, especially under the headings "General Knowledge and Vocabulary" and "Preschoolers". 
You may be interested to learn that the vast majority of the children in gifted programs arrived at school already able to read. 
Yours truly,
Aunt Malkin

Whose Interests Do the Teachers’ Unions Truly Represent?

The teachers' unions often try to justify their actions by claiming that they are standing up for the students. But the teachers' unions' mission is to represent the interests of their members, and not those of the children. Of course, sometimes the interests of the children and the interests of the teachers do align, and in those cases the unions are being truthful. However, in many circumstances the interests of the children and the interests of the teachers diverge, and in those cases the unions are actually taking positions detrimental to student learning. This 13-minute video discusses some of these situations, for example the unions' protection of bad teachers; the poisoning of the relationship between teachers and administrators; and the unions' opposition to merit pay. The video also touches on some union policies that promote the interests of union officials - at the expense of the teachers they claim to represent.