SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The Cost of Bondage

The Waterloo District School Board has decided to take another run at solving one of its most troublesome and controversial issues, the question of defining catchment areas for its 16 high schools. Because the board’s approximately 2000 support staff are “too busy” to tackle the problem, its trustees have just voted to spend $100,000 on an outside consultant to come up with recommendations. Now, $100,000 is a respectable chunk of change, and the Society for Quality Education plans to be first in line with its application for this contract. However, since we are aware that there’s a slight possibility we won’t get the job, we’re giving our faithful readers a sneak peak at our recommendations regarding school attendance boundaries.

Abolish them. Eliminate them. Get rid of them. Eradicate them.

School attendance boundaries give schools a guaranteed supply of students and funding, which is more or less the definition of a monopoly. This policy could have been taken right out of a Soviet central planner’s manual, and it works about as well as the rest of the Soviet policies. Instead of trying to centrally control the enrollment decisions of every one of its approximately 20,000 secondary students, the Waterloo DSB should eliminate school attendance boundaries and encourage its schools to compete for students. The schools will be the better for it and the board will have saved $100,000.

The Cartel Canadian Premiere

I have written about The Cartel documentary in the past and, lo and behold, it had its Canadian première in Winnipeg last week.  Kudos to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy for sponsoring this prize-winning film.  It would be great if more of us in Canada could see it too.  What do readers think?  Is it time for The Cartel Tour?

Time for Post-Secondary Reform?

While post-secondary education has normally been not part of SQE’s mandate, the result of poor K-12 education is certainly felt at the post-secondary level. Lack of preparation of students and pressure to lower standards at the university level have taken their toll.  More and more universities and colleges must provide remediation for even the most fundamental skills. 

James Cotes’ Ivory Tower Blues opened this Pandora’s Box.  This past week he writes about the dumbing down of degrees and the trend to give a degree for just about anything.  Don’t believe him?  Australian and UK universities now offer degree programs such as BA Adventure Recreation and “BSc (Hons) in Surf Science, which shows how very far British universities have come from the stodgier days. This degree is advertised at the University of Plymouth as ‘a rigorous academic study of the scientific, technical and business aspects of the international surfing industries.‘...this programme ‘would surely be a lure to some sixteen-year old males who would otherwise be first in the dropout queue.‘“  Hello Dr. Dude, PhD.

The End of Ignorance

SQE has an extensive collection of education books available for borrowing, one of which is The End of Ignorance: Multiplying our human potential by John Mighton. The author, an award-winning playwright, mathematician and the founder of JUMP Math, diplomatically but convincingly demolishes the myth of ability - the belief that leads educators “to neglect the majority of children by educating them in schools in which only a small minority are expected to naturally love or excel at learning”. Dr. Mighton holds that all children can be good at math - given the proper teaching. The excerpt (pp. 54-55) looks at one of progressive educators’ mistaken assumptions - namely, they forget that there is a “vast difference between the things people do to become experts and the things they do when they are experts”.

“Some educators assume that students who don’t know their times tables or operations can still learn mathematics, as long as they can find the information they need on a calculator or computer. In many schools teachers now spend much more time teaching general concepts and methods for finding mathematical information with calculators and computers than they spend teaching specific facts or procedures. A person who doesn’t know how to locate the notes on an instrument can’t play music, let alone compose symphonies. People rarely make the mistake of thinking that basic knowledge and skills aren’t important in music, probably because the only thing an untrained musician can produce from an instrument is noise. Mathematics, writing and reading, however, are so much part of our daily lives that kids usually pick up some basic skills at home or in public, so they can usually produce something that looks like reading, writing or arithmetic even if they were never taught any basic skills at school. This state of affairs has kept us from seeing the need for rigorous training in these subjects. The basic skills kids happen to pick up outside of school are, unfortunately, not usually sufficient to guarantee success at school.

“It is a serious mistake to think that students who don’t know number facts can get by in mathematics by using a calculator or other aids. students can certainly perform operations and produce numbers on a calculator, but if they don’t have a sense of numbers, they will not be able to tell if their answers are correct, nor can they develop a talent for solving mathematical problems. To solve problems, students must be able to see patterns in numbers and make estimates and predictions about numbers. A calculator cannot provide these abilities. Trying to do mathematics without knowing basic number facts is like trying to play the piano without knowing where the notes are.“

Yossarian the Grammarian

Many parents have noted with dismay that their children’s writing is riddled with grammatical errors - run-on sentences, not enough commas and too many apostrophes, misplaced modifiers, and so forth. And when parents try to explain what the problem is, they discover that their children lack even the most rudimentary understanding of sentence structure and parts of speech. Trying to teach a non-grammatical child how to avoid run-on sentences is like trying to teach a Hottentot how to make a soufflé. Without the necessary background and vocabulary, it’s an exercise in frustration.

Yossarian the Grammarian to the rescue! In a series of 24 short videos, Yossarian teaches the basic elements of English sentence structure and grammar. The series starts, as it should, with the verb.

Are Ontario Teachers’ Unions Bad for Your Health?

Today, Adam Radwanski is writing about Ontario’s $24.7-billion deficit and the danger that it will turn into a long-term structural one. Speculating on what the government will do, Radwanski notes that the only two portfolios with potentially-significant savings are Education and Health. Of the two, Education has more room for cost-cutting, Radwanski writes, but the premier is “not about to pick a fight with teachers, whose salaries would offer the main opportunity for belt-tightening”. As a result, Radwanski thinks the government is likely to try to find its savings in the health care portfolio.

There is, of course, no evidence that the huge increases in teachers’ salaries year after year after year (teachers can earn almost $100,000 now) has led to higher academic achievement or increased parental satisfaction. It’s kind of like raising the cost of low-octane gas. We just pay more, without anything to show for it. 

So if Ontario patients start finding it even harder to get a family doctor or the wait times for specialists start getting even longer, they can thank their not-so-friendly teachers’ unions. Of course, few union officials will be personally affected by the consequences of their actions, since their own salaries are high enough that they can afford to go to the States when they get sick. 

L’Etat, C’est Moi

In Quebec, where francophones and immigrants are already prevented from sending their children to English-language public schools, the leader of the Parti Québécois has come out in favour of extending the policy to daycare centres as well. Such a policy would be easy to implement, since Quebec has an extensive program of government-subsidized daycare. It will be interesting to see whether Quebec parents welcome this further incursion into their children’s upbringing.

Quebec parents are well aware that the ability to speak English is a definite asset in an English-dominated world and, if they can, they often ensure that their own children become fluent in English. Both Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard, former leaders of the PQ and premiers of Quebec, sent their own children to private English-speaking schools.

To what extent can a state legitimately restrict the rights of its citizens in the name of the public good? There are difficult trade-offs here, but our two cents’ worth is that the preservation of the French language is not as important as the preservation of the right of parents to decide their children’s education.

The Fault, Dear Brutus, Is Not in Our Stars, But In Our Schools

Margaret Wente’s column today takes on Malcolm Gladwell’s thesis in his book Outliers that phenomenally-successful people owe their success to three factors: a combination of a fierce drive to succeed; 10,000 hours of purposeful practice; and extremely lucky circumstances. Wente, while agreeing with the first two factors, would substitute extraordinary talent for lucky circumstances. She thinks that all the ambition and practice in the world will not result in élite performance if talent is lacking.

In a way, there’s not all that much difference between the two positions, in that for both Wente and Gladwell extraordinary accomplishment depends on the luck of the draw - lucky genes or lucky circumstances, take your pick. But there is in fact a crucial distinction in terms of the percentage of the population who can become accomplished performers. If Wente is right, only the very talented can achieve high-level performance. If Gladwell is right, high-level performance is possible for virtually everyone - although of course only a few individuals will be lucky enough to become superstars.

This distinction has important implications for educators. If Wente is right, then schools should be pretty much sorting institutions - identifying and supporting talented students. After all, in Wente’s scenario, there’s not much point in trying to teach calculus to kids who don’t have a math gene! But if Gladwell is right and élite performance is possible for most people, then schools should be trying to motivate students to reach for the stars and then providing them with the means to do so.

At School for Thought, it is our perception that schools lean strongly to Wente’s position - to the detriment of their students.

Father Doesn’t Know Best Anymore

MSN is polling its readers as to whether or not they think parents should be able to negotiate no-homework contracts for their children. Only 20% of respondents think that parents know what’s best for their children. The remaining 80% of respondents say that the rules should be the same for all students. This implies that most people believe that remote bureaucrats - who have probably never even met the children for whom they are making policies - are going to make better decisions than parents who know and love their children intimately. To us, this shows a touching (but naïve) faith in authority.

Homework of Champions

Let's say you're a parent who is fed up with "helping" your young children complete their ridiculously-difficult homework (think creating model buildings or critiquing authors' writing styles). In this case, you will probably applaud the Calgary couple who have achieved a total ban on homework for their kids.

Part of the Calgary couple's thinking, of course, is that homework is a total waste of everyone's time. But that's true only of some homework assignments (the kind their kids appear to have been getting) - but not true of other kinds of homework. It's a bit like watching kids eat Twinkies and Coke for breakfast and then concluding that breakfast is bad for kids.

Just as a nutritious breakfast confers numerous benefits, so too do judicious homework assignments. The nature of good homework assignments is outlined here. In a nutshell, good homework is short and doable, practises newly-learned material, and receives timely feedback. When used properly, homework can leverage teaching time - doubling or even tripling the value of every instructional minute.