SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Fighting a losing battle against junk food

There are a lot of new regulations in Ontario, governing everything from mandatory security guards at functions where alcohol is served to requirements for safety equipment in boats to mandatory sexual harassment training to how thorough auditors have to be and on and on. Here's a libertarian take on the new regulations that control what kinds of foods and beverages may be sold in schools. H/T to AS

I reproduce here some examples of the unanticipated side effects that have cropped up in other similarly-regulated jurisdictions.

• Last week, Van Nuys High School juniors, Iraides Renteria and Mayra Gutierrez told the LA Times, they considered the new school fare "nasty, rotty stuff," as they pulled three bags of Flamin' Hot Cheetos and soda from their backpacks – which they very well may have purchased from one of the junk food “dealers” on campus. At Van Nuys High, a Junior ROTC officer and an art teacher have been caught selling candy, chips, and instant noodles to students.
• Following the passage of the Texas Public School Nutrition Policy, which banned candy, enterprising students at Austin High began selling bags full of candy at premium prices, with some reportedly making up to $200 per week.
• Similarly, young entrepreneurs at one Boca Raton (Florida) middle school make runs to the local Costco and buy candy bars, doughnuts, and other high-calorie snacks in bulk. They then offer these goodies for sale in an environment that has supposedly eradicated such goodies.
• An eighth-grade student body vice president in Connecticut was forced to resign after buying Skittles from an underground "dealer."
• The U.K. has also seen its share of black market trade in banned foods, snacks, and beverages, with schools in Oxford, Dorset, and Essex reporting healthy underground markets trading in food contraband. The plots ranged from kids selling McDonald's hamburgers in playgrounds to bicycle-riding entrepreneurs hauling bags of soft drinks and milk chocolate for sale.

The Importance of Rote Learning

Guest Editorial by Frank Gue, a member of the SQE board and a retired engineer

In the  December 17 issue of The Economist entitled The One-Shot Society, one reads "[South] Korean education results are the envy of the world."  A few pages later appear the words: "[South Korea] cannot become creative with a school system that stresses rote learning above creative thinking."

Without discussing the separate subject of pressures and suicides, one must note that these two statements are incompatible.  Every human creative accomplishment springs from a platform of rote learning with which it is inextricably linked when one operates creatively.

Consider a jet airliner, than the designing of which there are few activities more creative.  Its engineer, thinking at a very high, abstract level, speculates:  "We could improve fuel efficiency if we ... " and there floods into her consciousness a veritable tsunami of rote learned facts and formulae that are instantly available from her well-stocked mind.  Into this rote-learned stew she blends the new, creative, original idea that ends up as a faster, more comfortable, less expensive method of flitting about the globe as we so casually do.  Without her rote-learned knowledge of such abstracts as centres of gravity, lift, and drag, of leverages and aerodynamic centres, and a thousand similar things, her creative processes would never have a chance.

How did she get there?  Certainly not by avoiding rote-learned multiplication tables as some Western elementary school students are forced to do, sometimes with tears of frustration, when they perform a fiddly finger-counting exercise in order to multiply 6 x 7.

So don't casually dismiss rote learning as you drive home tonight on the correct rote-learned side of the road, signaling your turns in a rote-learned manner, obeying signs the meanings of which you have rote learned, and ............

Sunday at the Movies (Merry Christmas)

I didn't want anything saccharine, and this fills the bill nicely, trust me. I do hope you and yours experience similar Christmas joy.

Our Christmas Wish List

Dear Santa,

SQE boys and girls have been very good and so very patient, so this year we wish for:

         1. A genuine, authentic phonics program for the Trillium List.
         2. Less centralized control from Mowat Block and more control at the school around the block.
         3. That kids would get the education they needed in the first place, so they wouldn't have to do a "victory lap" fifth year of high school.
         4. Freedom for parents to choose from a variety of schooling options.
         5. And mostly, Santa, SQE wants every child, no matter his or her learning difficulties, to succeed in school.

If not this year, then soon, Santa, soon...

Merry Christmas from SQE to all our supporters and contributors!

Who’s on first?

As usual, the truth ought to be somewhere in between the two extremes.

Watch your language!

This is not strictly-speaking on topic, but it's so funny I just had to write about it. Today's Globe and Mail has an editorial about a computer censor that got carried away with its task of inserting asterisks for strategic letters in naughty words - for example, s**t or "b*****d. But then the axe fell on Alfred Hitchc**k, and the British soccer team A***nal (Arsenal). 

The Mop and Pail suggests a few more candidates for sanitation - cockatoo and dicker - but perhaps our faithful readers can suggest a few more. Here are a few ideas to prime the pumps - b*****plate, b***on, tromb***r, embarra**, and ent*ty. 

Dogs in the manger?

Here's a disingenuous proposal from a Tennessee teachers' union president to restrict school board trustees to people who have worked in the education field. The three-minute video clip makes the point that at election time most teachers' unions identify sympathetic school board candidates and support them in various ways, including financial support. So I asked myself - does this happen in my school board?

Sure enough, when I looked at the Waterloo Region District School Board, I found that 7 of the 10 non-acclaimed trustees had been supported by the local teachers' unions and every single one of them had strong education and/or union ties. I would be interested to find out if this is true in other Canadian school boards.

Assuming it is the case most everywhere, you have to wonder why the Tennessee teachers' union president wants to cut out non-educators completely. What more could the unions possibly want than they are already getting? H/T to Chas

Putting the foxes in charge of the henhouses

Have you ever noticed school boards' tendency to shut down their most successful schools? I tell the story of two such schools in my book, How to get the right education for your child. I'm guessing that the reason behind this tendency may be that the exceptional schools make the rest look bad.

In this vein, I offer a story from Georgia, where the school board is trying to shut down its award-winning Fulton Science Academy Middle School. The details are complicated - they always are - but the bottom line is that the Fulton County District is trying very hard to find reasons to close Fulton Science Academy, as opposed to finding reasons to keep it open and, for that matter, creating more schools like it. 

The bottom line is - there are not enough incentives for the Fulton County District to keep its good schools open and too many incentives for it to close its good schools. This doesn't make any sense. 

Unfortunately, the same sort of upside-down incentive structure exists in Ontario. It doesn't make any sense here either.

Making Sense of the Class Size Debate

This is a guest blog by Elaine Hirsch, a writer for onlineschools.org, who frequently writes for other blogs. 

These days, everyone is looking for ways to increase student achievement. There are innumerable factors that contribute to a student's success, but many believe the focus should be on class size. From elementary school classrooms to PhD programs, class size studies have looked at the relationship between class size and student success.

Project STAR looked at whether 12,000 K-3 students in 300 classrooms from 1985-1989 in Tennessee had higher academic achievement in small classes (13-17 students) or larger classes (22-26 students). Researchers found that students who spent three years in small classes, were on average 4.5 months ahead of their peers in Grade 4, 4.2 months in Grade 6 and 5.4 months in Grade 8. The study also found a relationship between class size and college aspirations. All students in small classes were more likely to take college admission courses such as the SAT than students who had been placed in regular size classes, although the difference in scores was not statistically significant.

Evaluators of Project STAR study have deduced that young learners may benefit from smaller class sizes because they need time to discover how to learn alongside other learners. In addition, smaller class sizes can increase student participation and engagement, leading to positive learning outcomes. Finally, smaller class sizes lead to decreased disciplinary problems, which contribute to a more positive learning environment in which there are fewer distractions from academics.

A 2008 study by University College London and Institute for Fiscal Studies looked at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain) for whether class size had a significant effect on student achievement at the university level. Most college students would agree with the results of the study, which found that class size has no significant effect on student achievement. This is due to the lecture-style nature of college courses, where retaining information was based on individuals instead of class discussions. While smaller classes encourage positive teacher-student interaction, larger classes encourage independent learning and positive student-student interaction in the form of study groups, which offer greater diversity of backgrounds and opinions.

When discussing class size reduction strategies, critics are quick to point out that increasing teacher quantity is no substitute for teacher quality. Wisconsin's Student Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE) Program reveals that teachers of small classes are able to spend more time actively teaching, less time on classroom management and student discipline, and more time providing students with individual attention. In short, smaller classes provide teachers opportunities to specialize their teaching efforts, while larger class settings allow students to dictate how much they learn.

Elaine's blog is in my opinion a fair representation of the point of view of the woman on the street. Against it, I offer the following.  POSTING   POSTING   POSTING   BONUS PARAGRAPH ON SMALLER CLASS SIZES (TOP OF SECOND PAGE)

It takes a village

A recent article in the Halifax Chronicle Herald encourages parents to let their kids walk to school. The article points out many obvious advantages - the exercise, the diminished hazard of parents dropping off and picking up their kids at the school, the reduced car emission pollution - and adds another one: the kids' enhanced connection to their environment and chance to smell the roses along the way. 

Of course, the modern tendancy towards megaschools means that many kids live too far away from their school to walk there. Perhaps we could learn something from the Swiss canton of Aargau where there are no school buses and virtually all of the children walk or bike to school. As this Swiss schooling article from our archives points out, there are additional advantages to having small local schools.