SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Tax Credit Scholarships

Florida scholarships help poorer kids

For anyone who supported Ontario’s now defunct Education Tax Credit this St. Petersburg Times article will make you wish it still existed. 

This Florida program is helping 23,400 low-income students.  The tax credit scholarship amounts to about $1,000 ($US).  The average family income of the students is $25,000 for a family of four.  Two-thirds of the students are visible minorities and three-fifths are from single-parent families.

“We hear moms tell us their children to longer fake illness to avoid school, that their children don’t get into fights anymore, and that they are doing homework and setting goals for the first time. We see promising schools such as Miami Union Academy, which has achieved a graduation rate of 96 percent and college placement of 90 percent with largely poor Haitian students. Or Yvonne Reed Christian School in St. Petersburg, run by a 34-year public school veteran who started her own school because she was determined to make sure young black males could read.“

It seems to School For Thought that the cost of running such a program in Ontario would have been a lot less than the costs of implementing class size caps or ineffective reading programs that do not translate into significant achievement gains.

For opponents to such a plan, the words of Dr. Howard Fuller come to mind:

“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 peoples’ children stay there. I find that to be hypocritical.

I actually happen to be a strong supporter of public schools, but I’m also a strong supporter of giving people a choice so that they can determine whether a public school or private school will be best for their children…It is ludicrous for us not to provide a way for kids to go to schools that work because at the end of the day a democracy can’t sustain itself unless it has an educated populace.“

Dancing Disability

Click here to watch a short video that might prompt you to reconsider your pessimism over a child’s “learning disability”.

D.C. Council Wants Vouchers

It would rather help poor children than unions.

School for Thought has been keeping an eye on the story of the soon to be cancelled Washington, D.C.school voucher program.  Seems that even the local government thinks that maybe President Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan are putting unions before poor kids.  This Wall Street Journal editorial says it all:

The life and death saga of the D.C. voucher program for low-income families continues. A majority of the members of the D.C. Council recently sent a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan expressing solid support for continuing the program. “We strongly urge you to stand with us in supporting these children and continuing the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program,“ says the letter. “We believe we simply cannot turn our backs on these families because doing so will deny their children the quality education they deserve.“

Earlier this year Illinois Senator Dick Durbin added language to a spending bill that phases out the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program after next year. The program provides 1,700 kids $7,500 per year to use toward tuition at a private school of their parents’ choosing. Mr. Durbin’s amendment says no federal money can be spent on the program beyond 2010 unless Congress reauthorizes it and the D.C. Council approves.

The D.C. Council’s letter shows that support for these vouchers is real at the local level and that the opposition exists mainly at the level of the national Democratic Party. Mr. Durbin has suggested that he included the D.C. Council provision in deference to local control. “The government of Washington, D.C., should decide whether they want it in their school district,“ he said in March. Well now we know where D.C. stands. We will now see if the national party stands for putting union power and money above the future of poor children.

We urge readers to view this video of D.C voucher parents asking President Obama—WHY?

Who Owns the Schools?

When Gerard Kennedy was Ontario’s Ministery of Education about four years ago, he requested school boards to create a moratorium on school closings - a politically-smart move that worked for Mr. Kennedy and helped propel him into federal politics. Now Mr. Kennedy’s chickens are coming home to roost, and Ontario school boards are trying to close hundreds of schools. In response to this activity, the Community Schools Alliance has been formed - a blue chip group of municipality leaders who are concerned about the effect of school closings on their communities. 

As What You Can Do When the School Board Threatens to Close a Community School makes clear, School for Thought believes that all communities should be able to keep their schools provided that the parents are prepared to be flexible. Clearly, it isn’t financially possible to keep every school open as currently configured, with all the bell and whistles parents and teachers have come to expect. However, if the parents in a small community school are prepared to make compromises (for example, pitching in with the janitorial services, sharing a principal with another school, foregoing expensive programs like strings, renting part of the school out, etc.), then School for Thought thinks they should be allowed to keep their school. After all, it’s their taxes, and it’s their children.

Economic Lessons from California—NOT!

In an article by Andrew Coulson at The Cato Institute, Coulson shows how the state’s education spending contributed to California’s near bankruptcy. He argues that education spending has exploded but student achievement has not grown in relation to per student spending. The Cato’s solution is the concept of public education tax credits. 

SQE has voiced similar concerns about Ontario education spending, in light of declining enrolment, that does not translate into similar increases achievement productivity.  Our annual Sunshine List Reports come to mind.  Stay tuned for more on this in September…

Boy oh Boy!

Everyone agrees that boys are doing much worse than girls in school, but there is no agreement on how to solve this problem. We at School for Thought believe that one of the most important, if not THE most important, sources of boys’ difficulties is the way that they are being taught to read in school. After all, it is almost impossible for students with poor reading skills to succeed academically. Click here for a compelling explanation of why modern methods of teaching reading are worse for boys than for girls.

Better Teacher Training

Although Ontario doesn’t have the problem of new teachers with barely grade 8 literacy and math skills, they way they do in Arkansas and Mississippi, the province does share the US problem of faculties of education that focus on political correctness and trendy teaching fads. Ontario would do well to consider introducing the successful Teach for America program that recruits top university graduates and provides them with a context of shared values and mission that focuses on student achievement.

If It Ain’t Broke….

The Ontario government has announced planned to introduce full-day daycare/kindergarten for all Ontario three- to five-year-olds. As Kate Tennier points out, Ontarians already have access to a “rich tapestry of opportunities for care and education they are currently using”. If anyone thinks the Ontario government can operate a monolithic one-size-fits-all system that will serve parents and children better, then School for Thought has this really cool bridge we would like to sell him or her.

Questions for School Board Trustees

Discussion on other education-related blogs over the past few days surrounding the Ontario School Board Accomodation Reviews (ARC’s) got me thinking about the role of trustees in school board governance.  The recent introduction of Ontario’s Bill 177, which attempts to clarify the governance roles of various players in school boards, also spurred friendly debate on what the role of trustees should be.  Some thought they should represent parents.  Some thought they should behave as corporate board directors.  Many thought that accountability will be greatly reduced or that trustees would not be able to voice local concerns, perhaps in opposition to the whole board.

So, are trustees’ powers going to be eroded by the passage of Bill 177? What exactly is the role of a school board trustee?  Probably somewhere in between a corporate governor and a politico.

Frankly, voters (parents, non-parents, and taxpayers all) have a huge responsibility when they elect trustees.  The fact that some Ontario school board budgets are in the billion dollar range makes boards huge corporate entities that require specific skills in governance and oversight.  New challenges faced by enrolment pressures will require some entrepreneurial thinking as well.   At the same time, boards are governed by “politicians” who may or may not act in the best interests of the communities that elected them.

For too long, trustees -as well as many municipal politicians for that matter - have been elected because:

• They are either the first or last name on ballot.
• They are the candidate the local teachers’ federation endorses.
• No one votes for them at all because they get acclaimed.
• They are an incumbent who has been around for 30 years.

I propose that voters look at a short list of questions to ask potential trustees in the next round of municipal elections. Voters are entitled to know what skills a potential trustee brings to the board room table.  These sites are a pretty good start here, here, here, and here.  While some of the questions might not be relevant to your province or school board, most cover issues of curriculum, budgeting, parental rights, and staffing.  Here’s a brief sampling:

• Can you think of any district expenses that should be cut?
• Do you have any corporate board experience?  Do you know how to read a financial statement?
• Do you support merit pay?
• Are you in favour of phonics or whole-language instruction for reading in elementary schools?
• What endorsements, support or donations have you received from unions or other private organizations?
• Do/Did you have children that attended schools?  Where did they go to school?
• What are your long-range plans for the school board?  What are your top five objectives, if elected?
• Do you know how evaluate your board director’s perfomance?

Considering that voter turnout is miserably low for most municipal elections, the growing taxpayer money involved, school crowding or closures, and the risk of underachievement of students, these decisions become crucial at the local level.

Has Teaching Gone to the Dogs?

This just in from England where some teachers have found that their students read better if they are allowed to read to a dog. This discovery is of course just a natural extension of the Whole Language/Balanced Literacy philosophy whereby students are expected to gradually and naturally become readers by simply being immersed in a stimulating and literate environment. In fact, the role of dogs in teaching reading is so obvious that School for Thought is surprised it’s taken this long to be discovered.

We confidently expect that further development of this breakthrough will lead to huge savings on teacher salaries, as the role of canine reading teachers is expanded. Of course, taxpayers will still have to foot the bill for kibbles and vet bills, but perhaps even this expense can be minimized if further research finds that reading to the classroom wall is as effective as reading to a dog. Walls do have ears, don’t you know!