SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Two contests for the price of one!

1.  When was a video of John Snobelen explaining the need to “invent a crisis” in education made public?

2.  Which political party actively promotes a “single school system” that would eliminate the Catholic system?

3.  Name the three reporters/columnists who cover provincial politics for the Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun and The Globe and Mail.

4.  How many teachers marched to Queen’s Park in January 1996 to protest cuts to education by the Harris government?

5.  What year was Bill 160 (regarding the ability of Catholic schools to raise taxes separately) debated?

If you can answer all five questions correctly, you might win an iPad. For more information, click here.

If you can guess which political party the contest sponsor favours, enter your guess in a comment to this posting. You might win an autographed copy of my book How to get the right education for your child. And if you can guess who the sponsor of the iPad contest is without peeking, you might win a free ticket to SQE’s Accountability seminar on April 26.

School Vouchers: A win-win solution

These graphs summarize the findings of a recent survey of the effect of school vouchers in several US jurisdictions - both how they impact the participating students and how they impact the students in the schools they left behind.

Clearly, everyone is better off when some students can receive school vouchers.

In the author's words, "The benefits provided by existing voucher programs are sometimes large, but are usually more modest in size. This is not surprising, since the programs themselves are modest - curtailed by strict limits on the students they can serve, the resources they can provide, and the freedom to innovate. Only a universal voucher program could deliver the kind of dramatic improvement our public schools so desperately need."

The complete study can be accessed here.

Entitled disengagement

The latest addition to our lending library is Lowering Higher Education: The rise of corporate universities and the fall of liberal education. The authors are professors at the University of Western Ontario. Basically, they are  chronicling the modern trend towards the de-emphasis of liberal arts and science education in universities in favour of credentialism and job training. They examine the corporatization of universities within the context of a range of contenious issues in higher education, from lowered standards and inflated grades to the overall decline of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences instruction. The excerpt (pp. 91-93) outlines the scope of the problem, and then zeroes in on the very new phenomenon of students who feel entitled but who are disengaged from the learning process.

"In broad strokes, this crisis is unfolding as follows: Government policies promoting mass access to universities have addressed the supply side of labour, rather than the demand side of creating more jobs. Consequently, there is an oversupply of university graduates in relation to the demand for them. In conjunction with a decline in funding, universities have attempted to survive by embracing corporate management principles, and these measures, in turn, have helped to create the credentialist approach to universities on the part of both students who are seeking job opportunities and courses of study that are hungry for recruits. In the past two decades, universities have seen an influx of students whose primary purpose for being there is to receive a credential, and they have a less than keen interest in the courses they must take to get that credential. In turn, classrooms have been affected by a culture of disengagement as more students assume the mindset of entitled disengagement: they have paid for their credential and assume that the product will be delivered to their satisfaction. As this culture has taken hold, professors who are sensitive to these changes have reacted in a number of adverse ways that do not bode well for the future of the profession."

.....

"Many students have a rough time when they attend university. There is ample empirical evidence of increasing stress levels (especially for female students, who now predominate by a ratio approaching 60/40). There is also widespread alientation. The alienation discussed above in chapter 2 is manifested in numerous ways, from a detachment from the (daily process of learning, to a disdain for the product of learning (the outcomes). The detachment from learning shows up in the disengagement statistics, but can be experienced as an inability to 'be in the moment' and experience university-level learning as an intrinsically gratifying experience that produces a sense of fulfilment. And, alientation can be stressful: being forced to enter or remain in alienating situations can simply compound that stress.

"The disdain that many students develop for the product of learning is discernible in the mindset of entitled disengagement."

Mrs. Enigma

From time to time, I give a plug for my free book, How to get the right education for your child. So today, I decided to reproduce a few paragraphs from my book. This excerpt is taken from the chapter entitled "Exhausting the System" (pp. 20-22) and concerns what parents should do when they finally realize that their child is in serious trouble academically.

"Looking back, you realize that Jack's primary teachers were all worshipping at the altar of child-centred learning. Whenever you would summon up your courage and ask about Jack's reading problem, these teachers would assure you that Jack was developing appropriately. Further, they would warn you not to communicate your foolish worries to Jack, lest you damage his self-esteem. As a result of their well-intentioned claptrap, Jack has lost three years. There's nothing you can do about that now. But perhaps his new grade 4 teacher is more open-minded? Will she provide Jack with the kind of teaching he so desperately needs? How to find out?

"Before deciding how to approach Mrs. Enigma, put yourself in her shoes for a moment. Every day, Jack's teacher stands in front of a class of 25 nine-year-olds, many of them with special needs. Mrs. Enigma has nine students with severe reading problems. Three of them have behaviour problems. One student has been very upset by her parents' recent divorce, and two don't speak English very well. One, severely-disabled and with his own teaching assistant, often shouts uncontrollably, drowning out the teacher's words.

"To add to her difficulties, Mrs. Enigma has never had special training on how to cope with challenges like these, and so she is just doing the best she can. Furthermore, she was away the day they mentioned phonics at her faculty of education - so she doesn't have a clue how to teach kids to read.

"Because Mrs. Enigma is teaching grade 4 for the first time this year, she has had to develop her entire course of study, finding or making the necessary teaching materials. (Despite spending almost $10,000 per student, her school board can't seem to afford textbooks. In any case, whole class sets of texts are against board policy.) Being the busy mother of two preschoolers, Mrs. Enigma hasn't a lot of spare time. She does find a few minutes now and then, however, to scan the newspaper headlines. She knows how much criticism the schools have been getting lately. Furthermore, you are not the only parent who has been in asking for special treatment for her child.

"Still want to visit her?"

Back to the drawing board

A hot fad in education circles these days is "differentiated instruction". If you have the time and a heightened ability to tolerate frustration, you can read about differentiated instruction in this Wikipedia entry. The idea is that teachers should bend themselves into pretzels so that they can deliver the exactly-right personalized instruction to every single student in their class. I suppose differentiated instruction was invented in the wake of another hot education fad, namely the inclusion of special needs students in regular classrooms. As well, modern "child-centred" practices mean that even ordinary students get more and more spread out in terms of their academic capabilities as they rise through the grades. As a result, there is a tremendous spread in academic preparation in a typical classroom: for example, a grade 6 classroom might easily have students achieving at a grade 1 level, along with students achieving at a high school level. 

This kind of spread makes life very hard for classroom teachers, and I expect some of them complained. So then the geniuses who come up with the various fads invented differentiated instruction. Unfortunately, differentiated instruction is quite impossible to implement, as this Education Week article attests, and it has no research basis. 

So if differentiated instruction is not the answer, what is? It seems to me that there is no solution to a 10-grade spread in a grade 6 classroom. Ergo, the solution lies in abandoning the practices that lead to the 10-grade spread: no more child-centred pedagogy and no more mandatory inclusion of special needs students. Or am I missing something?

Sunday at the Movies (Sex Education)

This video is not terribly educational, but it does provide a bit of light relief from our usual heavy fare....

Good writers are made, not born

OK, here’s the promised posting on composition skills.

There are three main components to competent writing. The first is automatic mastery of the mechanical skills - spelling, punctuation, and grammar - as explained in this article from our archives. The second is automatic mastery of the conventions of written language, such as the grammar and basic structure of sentences and paragraphs, along with ways to vary them in interesting ways - as explained in this article from our archives. (The resources recommended in this article can be found at web-sites other than the ones listed: all of the EPS materials are available here; and the Instructional Fair materials are available here.) The third is the ability to put oneself in the readers’ shoes, providing clear information and sufficient background knowledge, as explained in this article from our archives. 

All three components can be, and should be, taught in schools. 

The winds of education change are blowing

Further to Doretta’s posting on charter schools in Detroit, I thought it might be appropriate to list a few other developments in various US jurisdictions. As a result of the intractability of school systems there, some surprising people - of surprising politics - are coming to support reforms that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. A few examples:

Wisconsin - the elimination of most collective bargaining rights for public employee unions

Florida - a major overhaul of teacher pay and tenure

Colorado and Indiana - new school voucher programs

More school choice is pending in Florida, Virginia, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Georgia and Oklahoma

The winds of education change are swirling all over the United States. How long can Ontario stay mired in the past?

A solution for school closures

The Detroit school district is considering a proposal to turn 41 schools (almost one third of the city’s regular public schools) into charter schools in order to fend off their closure.  Considering that a couple of years ago one third of Detroit’s best schools were charter schools, this seems like a viable and positive alternative.

Blink your lights if you believe in freedom for Canadian students

There's a lovely story from 1980's Poland at a time when the country was enduring the harsh Soviet rule. Most Poles hated the regime, but it was very dangerous to speak out and therefore hard to be sure of the level of resistance, One brave couple ran an underground radio station. They could broadcast for only about eight minutes at a time, then moving to a different place to escape detection. Because it was impossible to know how many people were listening to their radio, one night they asked people to blink their lights if they believed in freedom for Poland. For hours, all of Warswaw was blinking.

I relate this story because I am wondering how many people believe in freedom for Canadian students. Also how to bring them together...