SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Where are the boys?

Here’s another thought-provoking excerpt from Campus Confidential, this one on the academic gender gap. After documenting the trend towards fewer men in university (fully 60% of graduates are female), they go on to say the following (p. 187).

“So what happens to the young men who, in large and growing numbers, are not doing well in school, have trouble finding high-paying, stable jobs and a marriage partner, and don’t seem to fit into the service-oriented twenty-first century economy?

“We’re in the midst of finding out. One segment of Canadian society - First Nations people - provides a grim warning. First Nations women are far more likely to go to university than men. Once educated, they tend to stay in urban centres and often marry outside their First Nation. The young men, in turn, are educationally disenfranchised, without work or prospects, and often live in communities where many of the most talented, well-educated and active women have left. They often feel they have no future. The result? Frustration, anger, abuse, and self-destructive behaviour.

“Elsewhere in Canadian society, many families know exactly where these young men have gone. When you tell an audience that you have found the missing young men - they are in their parents’ basements playing video games and working just enough to keep themselves in male toys - the bitter laughter from a sizable portion of the audience lets you know you are right. Add to this the reality of boomerang children - kids who return home after a period of time of near independence - and you have pinpointed one of the most serious generational challenges of the early twenty-first century.”

To find out what you can do to guard against this fate for the young boys in your life, visit our site dedicated to this problem.

Sunday at the Movies (The Importance of Spelling)

Only in other provinces and states? Pity!

In the wake of a new study showing that Milwaukee school choice students were more likely than their public school counterparts to graduate from high school and proceed to a four-year college, I thought I would provide an up-date on the progress of school choice programs in the US.

February 8 VIRGINIA New tax credit scholarship program

March 10 ARIZONA Expansion of tax credit program

March 10 UTAH Expansion of voucher program

March 15 COLORADO New voucher program

March 16 OKLAHOMA New tax credit scholarship program

March 30 INDIANA New voucher program

March 30 DC Expansion of voucher program

March 30 MINNESOTA New voucher program

The research on existing school choice programs suggests that these expanded/new programs will improve students’ lives, and so more programs will be expanded and created. Eventually, the weight of the evidence will become too heavy to ignore. And Canadians can hardly say this is just an American phenomenon, since the students in Canadian provinces that already have significant school choice programs (Alberta, BC, and Quebec) do better than students in other provinces. 

Basking in the Sunshine

The 2010 Sunshine List is out. This is the list of all the Ontario public sector employees who earned more than $100,000 in 2010. There are quite a few of them!

Of course, our primary interest is the school board employees, the list of which can be found here. This year, there are not quite 9,000 education sunshiners listed (more will follow, since addenda are always published later in the year listing the late-filers). In 2003, when the present Ontario government took office, there were 788 sunshiners. Over the same period, student enrollment fell from just under 2 million to about 1.9 million, a loss of about 100,000 students. In 2003, there were about 2,500 students for every well-paid bureaucrat, but by 2010 there were only about 200 students per well-paid bureaucrat. 

At this rate, every student will soon have his or her very own well-paid bureaucrat. And that's not an April Fool's joke!

V is for victory over the system

I'm reading this great book, Campus Confidential, and I will be formally reviewing it one of these days. Today, however, I want to show you part of a section on Ontario's victory lap phenomenon.

"This may seem hard to believe, but it's true: a quarter of students who qualify to graduate from high school don't graduate. Instead they come back to school and take some of their courses over again - not because they have to, but because they want to. This costs them nothing and is a ridiculous waste of public funds that distorts the university admissions proccess.

"The standard scenario is simple. Mary and John both get 78% in Grade 12 math. Both want to be accountants. Mary's parents encourage her to graduate. She does so and applies to her top three universities. She is turned down by all of them and either goes to a lower-ranked school or shifts into a less competitive program. John and his parents want into the top school. So he registers in Grade 12 again, takes a couple of courses, including math 12, and gets his grade up to 85%. He applies to university a year later, and armed with two or three higher grades, he is accepted.

"Both students have the same abilities in math. But John, having spent thousands of dollars of public funds, gets a higher grade on the second pass (easy to do, since it's the same material) and so gets into the premium university program. Since most universities accept the higher of the grades, he has played the system well, even though he has the same potential as Mary.

"It's not just the public system that offers the victory lap. There are many private high schools, some entirely credible and offering top-quality education, others little more than grade-selling education mills. Students sign up for the extra courses in these private institutes, secure the higher grade though some combination of hard work, excellent tutelage, or teacher complicity and apply to university with better scores."

Part of Finnish school success: abolishing “teacher colleges”?

Although I seldom agree with him politically, I find Rick Salutin’s takes on many issues to be worth reading because they are well thought out and moderately stated.  I was sorry to see him leave the Globe and Mail’s op ed page where he was the token “leftie” columnist.

He has now resurfaced at the Toronto Star (quelle surprise!) in a big way with two articles, one on the importance of teachers and another arguing against school choice.

The one about teachers contains a lot of references to education in Finland.  Buried in the middle of the article is the following nugget (caps added by me for emphasis): 

The training [for Finnish teachers] averages from five to seven-and-a-half years — and is comparable to other professional degrees. All teachers must have a master’s degree, and do a thesis. THERE ARE NO SEPARATE TEACHERS’ COLLEGES OR CERTIFICATION PROGRAMS. The university degree is the licence to teach.

If Mr. Salutin is arguing for the abolition of our faculties of education, or at least the teacher training portions of their mandates, he, probably inadvertently, has identified the one action that would have the most positive impact on the future quality of education in Canada.

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Small and religious schools are the way to go

The Fraser Institute has published school rankings for Ontario elementary schools. The rankings take into consideration the students' backgrounds, rating schools on the basis of how much value they add to their students' learning. Only schools that administered the provincial grade 3 and grade 6 tests are included in the tables, meaning that few private schools are ranked (they can't afford to pay the approximately $50 per student fee). 

I looked at the 22 top-ranked schools (p. 208) to see if there were any common themes, and indeed there were! Almost every school had fewer than 400 students, and most had considerably less than that. Of the 22, 4 were private religious schools and 6 were publicly-funded Catholic schools. Only 12 (just over half) were public schools, but even some of them had extenuating circumstances - for example, French immersion or gifted programs that drew students from afar or the school that is 99.99% Chinese. Considering that two-thirds of Ontario schools are public schools, the public schools are definitely under-represented in the top ranks. 

Debunking destreaming

A new study from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation finds that Massachusetts schools that track (stream) their grade 8 students get better math results. The executive summary can be found here and the full report here (registration required).

Some of our readers may remember Ontario's ill-fated experiment with destreaming grade 9 in the early 90's. The policy was ideologically driven by ivory-tower theorists in the ministry of education, and their plan was to destream grade 10 in a few years once the destreaming of grade 9 had proved to be a roaring success. Well, the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglay, and the destreaming of grade 9 was universally acknowledged to be a disaster. There were tales of grade 9 math students crying in the back of the class, for example. It was awful. One Toronto high school was the darling of the ideologues because it destreamed all of its grades. I spoke to a teacher at that school a few years later, asking him how destreaming was going. "Oh", he said. "We're not doing that any more. It didn't work."

Consistent with common sense, homogeneous groups are easier to teach and the kids learn more. This is one reason why child-centred learning should be de-emphasized, as it results in much less homogeneity.

Time to try something else

This column from today's Toronto Sun points out that Ontario's Liberal government has increased its spending on education from about $14 billion in 2003 when it took office to about $20 billion this year. These numbers exclude spending on capital programs, which roughly doubled over the same period - from $670 million to $1.3 billion. (For more detailed information, click here. The funding for the whole province is on page 5, and the funding for individual boards follows. It's worth noting, although the Toronto Sun column did not, that enrollment shrank over the same period, from about 2 million students to about 1.8 million students.) So the spending increases are even greater than they appear.

The Toronto Sun column makes the point that despite the increase in spending, Ontario students are doing only very slightly better on the provincial tests. Another thing that the column doesn't mention is the provincial tests are based on the provincial curriculum and, because the curriculum has been dumbed down over the same period, the tests have become easier. As well, test conditions have been relaxed, with students being allowed more accommodations and time to write the tests. It's no wonder there has been a slight improvement in test results. Of course, it's impossible to be sure, but I will go out on a limb here and guess that Ontario students are actually learning less than they did in 2003.

So let's sum it up. More money = fewer students and less learning. Something is fishy here. We are going to try to get to the bottom of this apparent paradox at our symposium on accountability on April 26 in Toronto. Please come out to our symposium and help us find the way forward.

The high cost of non-transparency

On Thursday, People for Education released a report documenting the fees that Ontario high schools are charging their students for a wide variety of things, including course fees and charges for extra-curricular activities and optional programming. On Friday, the Ministry of Education released guidelines on school fees. This is a remarkably speedy response from the education bureaucracy! However, that's not what I want to focus on.

First, a personal tale. Back in the 1990's, one of my children attended a public school that was rolling in money. In addition to extorting money from the parents for the usual stuff like school photos, pop machines, mandatory $1.00 dances (in school time), fund-raisers, yearbook fees - it seemed as if there was a new request at least once a week - the school also bussed the kids to Toronto twice a year to see a musical (at approximately $75 a pop), plus there was an annual ski trip to Quebec (at approximately $350 a pop) for the approximately 200 grade 8 students. I'm guessing that the school took in between $150,000 and $200,000 from these money-making activities every year. That's a lot of money.

It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that the school should have been accountable for this money. Along with a member of the school council, I asked to see a record of income and expenses, but the principal refused to provide this information. My friend and I did not pursue it, because of course we were powerless, but I believe that the principal was in the wrong. Even if no one was stealing from the school's money pot, and of course I have no indication that anyone was, the principal should have prvoided a scrupulous accounting of the fund-raised money in order to ensure that no one was exposed to temptation. With huge amounts of unaccountable money sloshing around in some 4,800 schools in Ontario, the chances are very high that someone somewhere has his or her hand in the cookie jar.

So, for what it's worth, that's my take on the People for Education report. Yes, certainly make fund-raising fair - but go further: require every school to publish financial statements scrupulously documenting how much money was received and what it was spent on.