SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Denver School Choice Works

Looks like Denver has started a similar program to Edmonton’s. 

According to this Smart Brief report from the Denver Post, “Students in Denver are increasingly choosing to attend school outside their neighborhood as part of the district’s school-choice program, which allows students to attend a school that best meets their individual needs and learning goals. While there are concerns that low-income students don’t have the same transportation options to take advantage of school choice, advocates say it has helped schools. ‘If there is no choice, then every school and every building has to figure out a way to be everything for everyone who lives in their boundaries,‘ one supporter said.“

Jim Griffin, the president of the Colorado League of Charter Schools went on to say, “We don’t expect that for other public bodies; why schools? It’s also made parents and students into consumers.“  Gee what a novel idea!  It’s exactly what the Edmonton Public School Board thought when they moved to school choice within their system.

Brains and the School System

For the past week the Toronto Star has been publishing “Brainstorm, a series about the brain and the education system“, written by Alanna Mitchell, the 2008 winner of the Atkinson Fellowship.  The articles have focused on the latest brain studies and how they could affect education and classroom learning. She writes:

“And that means scientists can start explaining why, biologically, certain types of teaching work and others don’t. They are piecing together the science of learning. And therefore teaching.“

The series has prompted letters about how bad ‘drill and kill’ is for our students and that we should be focusing on creativity.  Too bad Ms Mitchell didn’t read the studies about what works in teaching reading or interview Dan Willingham, who talks about brain-based education below and here.  Cognitive scientists have long known how the brain works to learn fundamental skills.  See Malkin’s entry on Success for All below.  In the video, Professor Willingham says that the most effective teaching methods use direct instruction.

School For Thought worries that this will become another fad that will be misinterpreted by the school system, and ten years from now we will still be lamenting that our kids can’t read or do math without counting on their fingers.

Dateline: East Hampton, NY

At last - a news item that couldn’t have been found in an Ontario newspaper! Among the usual reports of class trips, fundraising endeavors, sports teams, and so on, appears the following item. “Toni Ann Schmitt was a guest speaker at a PTA meeting held in the school library. Ms Schmitt is the program facilitator for Success for All, the reading program that the school has used for the past decade. She spoke about the program’s principles of prevention, early intervention, and relentlessness.“ Success for All is a highly-scripted systematic phonics reading program that is one of a handful of reading programs with a strong research base. To the best of our knowledge, Success for All is not used in any Canadian publicly-funded school.

A full-page ad in the New York Times honours Peter Grauer, Chairman of Bloomberg, for supporting the Inner-City Scholarship Fund which guarantees inner-city students “a first-rate education by attending a Catholic school of their choice”. In the US, unlike in Ontario, the Catholic schools are private schools and provide a much superior service to that of Ontario’s publicly-funded Catholic schools; for example, New York Catholic schools have a 98% graduation rate, and 96% of their students attend post-secondary institutions. Canadians, too, can make it possible for a disadvantaged child to get a life-changing education - by supporting the Children First Scholarship Fund. 

Lowering the Bar

It seems that in order to improve achievement, some states in the U.S. simply lowered the bar.  A U.S. Federal study found that nearly a third of states lowered academic standards in order to meet proficiency criteria.   Eight states actually raised standards. 

Let’s hope our Canadian counterparts aren’t tempted to lower standards or change the curriculum (dare we say “dumb it down”). That would REALLY be a new low.

Dateline: New London, CT

Six of the seven candidates (the other did not appear) for the Stonington Board of Education say they want to reach out to skeptical voters in an effort to prevent cuts to the board’s budget. As is common in Ontario, these would-be trustees view their role as that of representing the school board to the community - as opposed to representing the community to the school board. Yet the very existence of school board trustees is frequently justified on the grounds that they keep the system democratic and responsive. Unfortunately, it is very common for trustees to be co-opted by board staff once they have been in place for a while. However, trustees who have been co-opted even before they are elected take co-option to a new level and remove any pretence of democratic representation.

More than 100 companies submitted bids for the $42 million Kelly Middle School renovation and expansion project. The money will buy a two-story 12-classroom wing, a hallway to connect it to the existing building, and an 800-seat auditorium. Why on earth would there be so much interest in this project?

Community Schools Alliance

For our readers around the province of Ontario who are in small communities whose schools face possible closure, you might want to take a look at the Community Schools Alliance.  I had a chance to speak with Doug Reycraft, the chair of CSA, who talked to me about the economic and cultural importance of the local school, among other issues.  The CSA is looking for greater accountability of school boards and a more inclusion of local decision-making.

Dateline: Newport, RI

In an effort to strengthen and transform the state’s troubled education system, last year Governor Carcieri appointed a special task force to come up with ways to raise the state’s low test scores. This week, the task force announced its recommendations: more pre-kindergarten programs; expanded instructional time; alternative schools for struggling students; and zones of innovation. As faithful School for Thought readers already know, there is no reason to think any of these measures will yield much if any improvement. Nor did the task force come up with any recommendations with the potential to yield significant improvement: for example, programs to increase students’ vocabularies and general knowledge, or the use of better teaching methods and materials. Sigh.

The Rhode Island legislature is considering a bill that would make it mandatory for stalemated teacher contract negotiations to go to binding arbitration. As usual, the taxpayers’ associations are opposing the bill, while the teachers’ unions are supporting it. So now one of the teachers’ unions is flooding the local TV stations with cuddly advertisements in favour of binding arbitration. This is something of a David (taxpayers) and Goliath (teachers’ unions) situation. It’s almost impossible for grassroots organizations to prevail against the teachers’ unions, since the unions are tremendously rich and powerful. Smart money is on the passage of the binding arbitration bill.

Dateline: New Bedford, MA

Both Freetown Elementary and Assawompset Elementary have asked for additional teachers, citing class sizes in the 30s. This website, however, shows the student/teacher ratio at Freetown to be 17:1, while this website shows the student/teacher ratio at Assawompset to be 16:1. A discrepancy between class size and student/teacher ratio is normal because most schools have teachers on the payroll who don’t in fact have a class of their own but rather act as support for classroom teachers - perhaps by taking over their classes for brief periods, acting as consultants, or working with small groups of students. However, a discrepancy between class sizes in the 30’s and a student/teacher ratio of 17:1 seems excessive.

The Rochester town council has voted in favour of renovating and expanding the overcrowded Rochester Memorial School. The cost of the project is calculated to be $26.5 million - a large amount, possibly enough to build a modest castle. This posting from Jay P. Greene’s blog discusses school construction costs, pointing out that the per-square-foot costs for schools are much higher than the per-square-foot costs for factories and houses. Surely if we can put a man on the moon we can figure out how to build schools for the same amount as factories. And don’t even get me started on the sense of building huge centralized schools that most kids can’t walk to - versus small, flexible neighbourhood hubs.

It’s Not Always About The Money

Now here’s a change from the norm—parents who don’t think the problem is not enough money!  A  B.C. school advisory council refused to be strong-armed by their local board into blaming the B.C. government for their school funding woes.  The parents refused to sign a complaint letter written by the board, which the parents think is part of the problem.  

Careful, this can lead to revolutionary things like accountabilty.

Time Out For Tenure?

With a $24.7 billion deficit in Ontario, will we see something like what is happening in Rhode Island?  Check out this video here.

The financial situation has led the school district authority to re-examine teacher union contracts.  It’s all about tenure and performance.  In Rhode Island, it means teachers getting less of the former and the district requiring more of the latter from them.