SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

You can’t make this stuff up

The cover story in this week’s Macleans Magazine is 99 Stupid Things the Government Spent Your Money On. Although there are only 18 listed on this web-site so far, there’s already lots to shock and appall, but still to come is #50: B.C. school boards paid an estimated $350,000 to mail out blank report cards after teachers refused to fill them out as part of a job action. Now, it’s true that the grade 12 students’ report cards were filled out, but the report cards for all the other students were mailed out blank. Some were even sent out special delivery! The math, by the way, includes only the postage costs - it does not include, for example, the cost of printing the blank forms or the time spent by office staff assembling the mail-out.

I’m sure the whole exercise makes perfect sense to someone - and I’d love to have been a fly on the wall in the room when the decision was made. H/T DH

Sunday at the Movies (Movies)

This short clip lists 10 good movies for teaching science. teachwithmovies.org provides lists like this for other subjects as well. Youtube link. 

Make Love Not War

In an ongoing discussion of Not a Perfect World, John pleads "Read carefully, be thoughtful, be informed....be civil, be polite, and do not badmouth those who would wish to be your allies". I could not agree more.

School for Thought is a place where people with an interest in education can exchange views and information. I'm very pleased to say that we have contributors with all kinds of perspectives - parent, teacher, union, reading specialist, administrator, taxpayer, and more. I learn something new about education from our commenters just about every day. I hope that those who participate in our blog will see it as an way to update and enrich their own understanding of this very important topic. Zingers, put-downs, and categorical statements serve to shut down a valuable exchange of information. I know of at least two very knowledgeable and sympathetic people who have walked away because of our antagonistic atmosphere. We are the less for it.

Now we have John who is willing to give us an insider's view of an Ontario faculty of education. Wow! This is great! Just read John's latest on how the textbook approval process operates in Ontario. Who knew how random it is! I had no idea. Now I'm thinking textbook selection would be better left to the marketplace.

With Valentine's Day coming up, I therefore send you all this valentine. We really do need you and value you, all of you, and we sincerely hope you will need and value each other just as much.

Occupy Schools!

A new report from the OECD finds that the gap between rich and poor in its 22 member countries is increasing (Canada is roughly in the middle of the pack). A related report in the Huffington Post indicates that Canadians are increasingly segregating themselves according to income. In terms of major cities, Calgary is the worst offender, followed by Toronto, Edmonton, Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Quebec. 

"What does this have to do with education?" you ask. Two things.

First, the more segregated neighbourhoods become, the more homogeneous neighbourhood schools become and the less likely they are to be places where children from all walks of life can rub shoulders. As a result, school choice policies actually increase the incidence of heterogeneous schools: as more schools of choice become accessible to more poor parents, the chosen schools become more socially integrated. And when parents choose private schools on the basis of academic or extra-curricular factors that have nothing to do with their cultural backgrounds, the chosen schools become more and more diverse.

Second, the OECD talks about "upskilling" the workforce as a good way to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Naturally, I agree with this assessment, but the OECD is silent when it comes to how to accomplish this feat. At the risk of repeating myself, here is my modest proposal: allow schools to use research-based methods and materials that are known to be best for children from disadvantaged homes.

Not a perfect world

In response to yesterday's posting, John made a comment that I would like to examine more closely - to wit, why does SQE use American stories and assume they apply to Canada.

It is true that there are important differences between the US and Canada - the huge racial problems there, the greater achievement disparities, the terrible inner city schools, the federal presence - but there are also a lot of similarities. In both countries, the students and teachers breathe oxygen, the school boards are organized similarly, the teachers are supposed to be teaching more or less the same things, the teachers' unions are very powerful, and so on.

My point is - you are never going to find educational jurisdictions that correspond one to one. Even within Canada there are differences among provinces - Alberta with all its school choice programs, Quebec with its majority French speakers, Newfoundland with its sparse population... And what about Finland, often cited on this blog by certain commenters? The Finnish written language is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn, and comparing the reading ability of Finnish students to the reading ability of English-speaking students is like comparing apples to oranges.

If we demand perfect correspondence before we start to make comparisons, then we will probably never make comparisons - and that generally leads to insularity and complacency. My point is - we have to make comparisons and try to learn from others, even though we realize that there are pitfalls. So we will continue to write about American (and Canadian and international) phenomena - while doing our best to make sense out of what is inevitably an imperfect example. And of course I'm confident that we can rely on our faithful readers to point out any problems with our comparisons. You do keep us grounded, that's for sure. 

Turn the camera on

This video, and the related newspaper article, speak to the frustration felt by those who try to interact with stonewalling school boards. Been there, done that.

Wrong on faith

I just sent in the following letter to the editor to The Globe and Mail in response to this editorial in today’s paper. Wish me luck in getting published!

• Most people assume, as you do in your editorial (Wrong on Faith - Jan. 3, 2012), that government support of private religious schools would undermine the important assimilation of different cultures and religions that occurs in government schools. This assumes that government schools are more integrated than private schools, but the evidence suggests just the opposite.
• Studies in the US have found that private school classrooms are more racially-integrated than neighbouring government schools, while private school students are more likely to eat lunch with children of other races. It turns out that neighbourhood schools tend to be stratified because people generally live in the same area with people of similar backgrounds, while many parents choose private schools on the basis of academic or extra-curricular factors that have nothing to do with their cultural backgrounds.
• In the Netherlands, a country with a previous history of religious strife, the introduction of fully-funded denominational and secular schools almost a century ago resulted in a lessening of religious divisions. Yugoslavia, on the other hand, had one state school system under the Communists for over five decades - yet the ethnic hatred there became worse than ever. 
• There is no evidence that Ontario’s Catholic schools, or government-funded religious schools in Alberta, Quebec, B.C., and Manitoba, are producing religiously-intolerant or disconnected citizens. In fact, several recent studies suggest that private schools are more successful than government schools in installing civic values in their students. Many graduates of private religious schools, such as Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Jean Chretien, and Dalton McGuinty, went on to dedicate themselves to public service.
• It may seem counter-intuitive, but the best way to develop societal unity might just be to encourage children to attend private religious schools.

Thinking outside the big school box

Here’s a wonderful story from BC about a kindergarten in a retirement home: it’s good for the seniors, it’s good for the kids; and it saves money. Let’s hope this idea spreads - not only in terms of locating kindergartens in other retirement homes but also in terms of thinking outside the big school box.

We could have half-day high school placements - automobile service centres for tech students; newspapers for aspiring journalists; YMCA’s for jocks; university research labs for kids with a scientific bent, and so forth. We could have home-schooler support centres which offer supplementary courses like French-as-a-second-language, choirs and orchestras, and sports teams. We could have one-room schoolhouses in remote - and not-so-remote - communities. We could have hi-tech learning centres which offer individualized computer-aided learning programs and distance learning programs that allow students to learn from home.

The possibilities are endless once one grasps that the modern big-box school is a fairly recent invention - and that it doesn’t have to be like this.

Sunday at the Movies (Teachers’ unions)

Here’s Professor Terry Moe talking about how the powerful teachers’ unions are blocking school reform - for now - but keep watching to the end of this clip to discover what he thinks the unions’ nemesis will be. And btw, stay tuned for our release later this month of a paper that reveals how the Canadian teachers’ unions are already trying to block the coming threat.

Spelling it out

There’s an interesting discussion going on at Kitchen Table Math about how a strong ability to memorize can mask crucially-important learning deficits - which come back to bite students later on. In this case, the discussion is mostly about spelling/reading deficits. This related Kitchen Table Math posting lists a bunch of resources to deal with this problem. And here’s a link to our quick and easy test for establishing a student’s approximate spelling level in the first place.