SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The New Face of Educational Competition

This week’s The Economist has an interesting article on Malaysia’s plans to become an Asian hub for Western education. In a nutshell, Malaysia has managed to get a number of prestigious Western schools and universities to come and set up branch campuses there. These new educational institutions will turn out hundreds of thousands of very well educated, English-speaking graduates.

This is the new face of competition in a global world. Not only will the educational institutions be competing with one another - and with educational institutions all over the world, but also their graduates will be competing in a very real way with other graduates all around the world. May the fittest survive!

Public Education - A Right or a Privilege?

Nobody seems to be paying much attention to the trend in public schools towards worse and worse student behaviour in class. We have blogged on it a few times - for example, this posting. 

The elephant in the room, rarely discussed, is schools' inability to expel - or even discipline in any meaningful way - misbehaving students. Here's a commentary that tackles the issue head on, blaming "the Left" for ensuring that chronically-disruptive students remain in classrooms, even when they are "plunging classrooms into chaos and preventing dozens of students from learning". The commentator believes that schools should be able to expel badly-behaved students.

Such a philosophy would beg the question of whether attendance in public schools is a right or a privilege. Piranhas - feel free to attack this question!

Who will bell the cat?

Although everybody knows that good teachers matter, most educational administrators profess helplessness when it comes to identifying who they are. The Blob (a newly-coined name for the thousands of institutions, boards, companies, federations, alliances, departments, faculties, councils, commissions, panels, offices, and colleges that control public education) resists the use of test scores to separate the sheep from the goats, and somehow they just can't seem to come up with any other way to identify good teachers.

It shouldn't be this hard! After all, private enterprises (including private schools) routinely identify and reward good employees.

Be that as it may, here's a modest proposal, recently published in the New York Times, for an objective way to assess teacher performance. The author cites research showing that the amount of time teachers spend delivering relevant instruction is strongly correlated with how much students learn, and suggests that we evaluate teachers on the basis of how much relevant instruction they deliver.

But how can we find out how much time teachers are spending on relevant instruction you ask. The author proposes that administrators simply videotape a few minutes of instruction a day and evaluate the results. 

Surely the Blob could have no possible objection to this notion!

The Carnival of Home-Schooling

The second most-common reservation people seem to have about home-schooling their kids (after socialization) is their fear that they would mess up. In responding to their doubts, the first thing I always point out is that it would be hard to do a worse job than their children's school - and they immediately see the wisdom of this, no problem. 

The second thing I point out is what a wealth of resources are now available for home-schoolers, starting with local support groups. And then there's the Net, where the problem is more information overload than the reverse. Just to get you started, here's one portal to the vast home-school information network. This particular posting is ostensibly for the purpose of listing ten excellent family movies but, as usual, the posting is just a vehicle for providing links to endless other resources.

Playing politics with kids’ futures

You may recall that President Obama was soundly criticized when he moved to shut down the DC school vouchers that are a lifeline to thousands of poor black children in Washington - all the while shunning the public school that his own daughters would have been assigned to if the Obamas hadn't been able to afford the $32,000 tuition at the exclusive private school they chose instead. As this article from the Wall Street Journal reports, President Obama has now reversed himself, signing a budget deal with Republicans that includes a renewal and expansion of the DC voucher program. 

If you suspect, as I do, that the President really does care about poor black kids, it must have just about killed him to oppose the DC voucher program. But politics is a blood sport, and the reality is that the President needs the support of the teachers' unions to get re-elected. The teachers' unions, arguably the most powerful political lobbying force in the country, are adamantly opposed to any measure that would allow kids to escape their failing public schools. 

Politics, it appears, is not a game for sissies.

All’s Fair in Love and Math War

Weapons of Math Destruction is an excellent site for the parents of kids who are struggling with math in school. The site is, after all, dedicated to peacefully disarming fuzzy math. If you're not sure if your child has fuzzy math radiation poisoning, click here to find out. The page contains information about diagnostic tools, as well as a list of effective medications. 

Someone at this site has a great sense of humour. For example, you can get free math cartoon wallpaper/screensavers here, provided on the grounds that "fighting fuzzy math is never an easy battle, but with Weapons of Math Destruction screensaver, it's never been as enjoyable". 

Sunday at the Movies (Healthy Living)

Mom was right: you should eat up your vegetables and do your push-ups. And SQE is right: it's not what you're given - it's what you do with it.

It’s for the good of the unions

I am currently reading a very interesting book, The Problem of Union Power, and I will be reviewing it soon, but I thought I would share with you an interesting section (pp. 21-22) on why the teachers’ unions pretend that their activities are for the good of the kids - when that it patently false. If you doubt this, consider for a moment the unions’ determination to keep bad teachers in the classroom. The author is a Stanford professor of political science who specializes in political institutions.

“In the grander scheme of things, it should hardly come as a surprise that union leaders are special interest advocates and that the teachers unions are special interest organizations. The same is true of all unions. And in the private sector, the unions themselves are quite transparent about it. What’s to hide? The United Auto Workers pushes hard to secure good wages and benefits for employees on the auto assembly lines, and it doesn’t pretend to be concerned, first and foremost, with the welfare of the millions of consumers who buy cars. The Retail Clerks Union is concerned about the wages, benefits, and job protections of supermarket cashiers, not about the welfare of the consumers who buy food. Unions are special interest advocates. They know it, and everybody knows it.

“The teachers’ unions, however, are in the public sector. And in the public sector the rules of the game are different than in the private sector. The unions still have incentives to be special interest advocates for their members. But as organizations of employees who work for government, they are heavily dependent on the political process and thus on gaining democratic support for what they do and want. So to behave wisely in this institutional setting, they have incentives to convince the voting public that they are not self-interested, but in fact are fundamentally concerned about children and quality education - and that whatever they do to promote their own interests is actually good for children and schools too.

“In the realm of politics, this camouflaging of special interests is quite normal. The teachers unions have incentives to do it. But so do all political interest groups, whether their interests are in guns or pharmaceuticals or telecommunications or agriculture. The drill is a familiar one: they all claim that the policies they favor are in the public interest, and they all routinely provide arguments (backed by cherry-picked evidence) about how ordinary Americans will be better off as a result. This is simply how the game of politics is played. The reality is that these arguments often have little or no bearing on why they take the policy positions they do. They know where they stand from the outset, because their stands are dictated by their interests. The arguments they make are simply tools for achieving those interests, and are chosen to try to convince other people to take the same stands. By and large, they often say anything that works. So as any sophisticated observer knows, it is best not to take what interest group leaders say at face value. To understand politics, we need to focus on what these groups do. And the way to explain what they do is to pay close attention to their interests. 

“All of this applies across the board to the teachers unions. When they argue, for example, that charter schools should be opposed because of their poor academic performance, they may or not be saying something accurate about the actual performance of charter shcools. The more important fact is that this is not why they oppose charter schools in the first place. They oppose them because charters give kids alternatives to the regular public schools - allowing them to leave and threatening the jobs of unionized teachers. In the democratic arena, it obviously wouldn’t go over well for them to simply say that. So their challenge, for this educational issue and all others, is to look around for arguments - any arguments - that might convince voters and potential allies to support their predetermined position. The themes, accordingly, are all about what’s good for children and schools. Their special interests are carefully hidden inside a public interest package. That’s how the game is played.”

Owed to a Spell Chequer

Sometimes our critics characterize us as old fogies mired in the past and unable to change with the times. For example, they say, the advent of spell checking means that kids don’t need to learn good spelling any more. We offer the following for your delectation.

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my Pea See
It planely marques four my revue
Miss steaks aye ken knot sea.

There’s more, but you get the idea. There are a number of additional reasons why it is important to teach kids to be good spellers, and some of them are listed in this article from our archives (the article includes a test that allows you to determine what grade level kids are spelling at). If your child tests out below par, then you should start working on his or her spelling. More information on how to go about this can be found in the Spelling section of our archives.

Snake Oil, Education Style

The written word for crisis in Chinese consists of two characters - one representing danger and the other representing opportunity. The latest crisis in Canadian classrooms (pace John Snobelen) is the very wide disparity of learning abilities within a single classroom - easily a 12-grade range in your typical grade 8 classroom, for example. This disparity is the result of several misguided policies, each of them making its own special contribution: social promotion (which makes illiteracy and innumeracy no barrier to advancement), child-centred learning (which allows children to progress at their own pace, even if their own pace is a crawl); inclusion (which places even the most severely-disabled students in regular classrooms); and the list goes on.

Now a 12-grade range in a grade 8 classroom is no joke for the teacher. Obviously, there is no way that he or she can teach lessons that are at the right level for more than a few students at a time. Enter the opportunity!

Differentiated instruction is the latest buzzword, and it is THE ANSWER for teachers who are floundering in “differentiated” classrooms. Like other education fads, differentiated instruction offers wonderful money-making possibilities for thousands of education authors and consultants who are busily conducting workshopss and churning out books and DVDs. Here is a typical example: a DVD on sale for only $575 that promises, among other things, to show teachers how to lead, rather than to manage, differentiated classrooms. 

It all sounds great, but there is one catch - differentiated instruction doesn’t work (read this column by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham). Furthermore, this has been known for going on 50 years now. 

The peddling of this sort of snake oil is outlawed in most professions - I mean imagine a pharmaceutical company being allowed to sell a pill that not only didn’t work but also actually killed some patients! Yet quacks and fake nostrums are the norm in the field of education.