SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

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...

It’s not about the kids

Educhatter's latest topic is Reading Recovery, and at the bottom of his column he asks why RR continues to be popular in education circles despite its lack of effectiveness and its huge expense. None of the 51 comments really deals with this question, and so I thought I would take a shot at it.

First, a word of explanation. Reading Recovery is a one-on-one program for struggling readers in the primary grades. There is a range of interpretations but, generally speaking, it uses a whole language/balanced literacy sort of approach, involving a bit of phonics and a lot of guessing. Reading Recovery doesn't work well for most kids and the cost of one-on-one interventions is staggering. So why are school boards continuing to support Reading Recovery?

The thing is, Reading Recovery is very pleasant for everyone involved (except, of course, the students, but I'll get to that in a minute). The RR teachers themselves have a great job: they get paid, say, $90,000, deal with only a handful of students every day, require little preparation, and get to go home at 3:00 pm. The classroom teachers like it because they think their struggling students are getting individual help which they can't give, plus their class size is reduced while the students are withdrawn for the program. Principals, consultants, and school board administrators like it because the additional staff build their empires. The teachers' unions like it because the additional RR teachers have to become members of their unions. And the various institutions that develop materials and promote RR like it because they have great jobs and big salaries. 

Obviously, if the criterion for adoption of educational measures were whether or not they were good for students, Reading Recovery would have died an early death. But public education has been captured by its producers, and the vast majority of public education policies are decided on the basis of whether or not they are good for educators. Reading Recovery is but one example of a policy that is good for educators but bad for kids. Others include short and few instructional days, progressive teaching methods and materials, dumbed-down curricula, teacher certification, the Ontario College of Teachers, and the list goes on. 

Comme il faut

In a comment to yesterday's posting, Bev asks for sites that teach grammar, composition, and other languages. I'm pleased to report that SQE is hoping to develop a Stairway to Grammar (but don't hold your breath). Composition I'll tackle one of these days.

Today, though, I want to tell you about an excellent site for teaching grammar to French immersion and core French students. Here's an article about the "Frenglish" problem, written by an Ontario French immersion teacher, and here's a link to her site which offers a multitude of resources for classroom teachers. The bottom line is that students of a second language, unless they are truly immersed at a very young age, benefit from grammar instruction.

Sunday at the Movies (The Khan Academy)

I've mentioned the Khan Academy several times already, and here it is again. It just goes from strength to strength. The Khan Academy offers over 2,100 free educational videos on topics that range from math to chemistry to economics to history, along with more than 100 self-paced exercises and assessments. This video features the Salman Khan, the genius behind the Khan Academy, talking about how he morphed from a hedge fund analyst to the genius behind the Khan Academy. He also shows how his videos and exercises are being used to very good effect in classrooms. Bill Gates pops up towards the end of the video, revealing himself to be a huge fan of the Khan Academy.

East meets West

Our friends at Atlantic Institute for Market Studies are hosting Putting Our Students First: Fixing Our Schools public education forum on March 28th in Halifax, NS.  The evening will feature Michael Zwaagstra, author of Fixing Our Schools and Frontier Centre Fellow, who spoke at our AGM in December.  Yours truly will be travelling to Halifax to be a panelist at the event.  Halifax area readers who are interested in attending can find out more information here and can register online at the AIMS website here.  The event is co-sponsored by the Schoolhouse Institute with the co-operation of the Frontier Centre.  Cudos to Paul Bennett (aka Educhatter) and Charles Cirtwill at AIMS for all their work organizing this.

AIMS has also teamed up with our Winnipeg colleagues at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy to provide a look at how Western Canada high schools are doing with the soon to be released Report Card, Behind the Classroom Door.  The interim Report Card for individual high schools can be found here.

Oakville Chit Chat

Readers who live in the Mississauga, Milton, Oakville & Burlington area may be interested in Oakville Chit Chat, a blog for local residents. There is an education corner, and if you put your cursor on the education tab, you get a drop-down menu for public, Catholic, and private. There seems to be a fair amount of anger directed towards the school boards per se, especially the public board…

Teaching-Disabled Students

In England, 21% of all students are labelled “special education needs” (SEN), for a total of 1.7 million children, with the attendant army of specialist teachers. Now the government has announced that students must have been formally diagnosed with specific diagnoses such as autism or dyslexia in order to receive SEN support. Saying that many of the identified students have been so labelled in order to cover up poor teaching, the Education Secretary expects the new measure to reduce the percentage of SEN students by at least 10%. The teachers’ union, predictably, is crying bloody murder, since the new measure will result in fewer specialist teachers. 

We will monitor this new policy with great interest, especially with regard to what percentage of students lose their SEN designation. In Ontario, approximately 13% of students are provided with special services, with about two-thirds of them having a formal designation. 

What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

In a comment to Saxon Math, Anyone?, Chuck asks what we think of the Ontario Premier’s announcement that Ontario high school graduation rates have risen to 81%. 

Well, our first reaction is that it’s a bit weird for him to be bragging about this, since his original pledge had been to raise high school completion rates to 85% by 2011.

Our second reaction is fairly well summed up by the comments to the newspaper announcement, namely that more students are passing because standards have been lowered - as opposed to more students attaining the former standard. Over the past several years, the Ontario Ministry of Education has had a number of initiatives along these lines - from a dumbed down curriculum, to credit recovery programs, to automatic bumps for marks as low as 39%, to a requirement that teachers formally defend every failing mark, to prohibitions against deducting marks for late or incomplete assignments, to co-op placements that count as high school credits, and on and on. 

As Lowering Higher Education, the new book by two UWO professors (soon to be reviewed), so aptly puts it: “A system can certainly ensure that virtually all students complete high school by ignoring non-compliance with basic academic standards and behavioural requirements, but what kind of education are these students receiving?”