SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

History Contest: Are You Smarter Than a 10th Grader?

The Dominion Institute has been at the forefront of trying to ensure that Canadian students have a proper grasp of our country’s history.  In 2007, one of their studies found that only 26% of students knew the date of Confederation!  This prompted a cross-Canada comparison of K-12 history curricula similar to that of SQE’s science curricula comparison.

Now the Historica-Dominion Institute, famous for its Canada Day Quiz, is launching “The Canadian Citizenship Challenge”.  The challenge is a contest designed to test the history knowledge of students to see if they could pass the Canadian citizenship exam and is part of a national program for grade 10 students across the country.  Prizes will be awarded to the winners.  

“The Institute believes that schools have a responsibility to prepare students to be the citizens of tomorrow”, says Marc Chalifoux, Executive Vice-President of The Historica-Dominion Institute. “The Canadian Citizenship Challenge is a fun and interactive way to help strengthen students’ understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.”

Boys’ academies: The new trend?

Picking up on Malkin’s post from yesterday, this article appeared in the National Post over the weekend.

The Edmonton Catholic School Board will be looking at opening an all-boys academy.  Calgary Catholic recently offered gender-segregated classrooms in some schools.  Toronto Public is considering an all-boys academy to help boys in high-needs areas.  No doubt the concept is going to be controversial.

“Single sex schools do not confer an advantage in terms of student achievement for boys or for girls,” said Charles Ungerleider, a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia and former B.C. deputy minister of education, who has studied the performance of students in single-gender versus co-educational schools.   He says the evidence is clear: “When you have carefully controlled comparisons of single-sex and mixed-sex schooling, we find that girls and boys perform about the same.”

But educators in schools experimenting with single-gender classes say, at least anecdotally, that boys’ attention spans are improved when they are segregated, partly because teachers can tailor programming to cater to similar interests that may exist between boys, and because there are fewer distractions, ie. girls.”

The trend towards same-sex schools seems to be on an upswing.  While many private schools are still boys- or girls-only, this is a fairly recent concept for public schools.  Catholic schools in Ontario at one time were single-gender and many of the original ones still are, despite going public. 

Is this a way for public schools to compete with their private school counterparts as a way to deal with declining enrolments?  Or is this really a public system truly trying to providing more real choices for families?  You decide.

Dr. Sax, who is also the founder of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education in the U.S., says critics of all-boys schools miss the point.

“‘Single sex education is not the objective, it’s a means,” he said. “The objective is to help every child to achieve their full potential academically and intellectually.”

Part of the rationale for public boards offering single-sex education where teachers can create an alternative culture where “it’s cool to be smart,” he says, is that private all-boys or all-girls schools are too expensive for the average family.

“The argument isn’t about which option is better. That’s the wrong question,” Dr. Sax said. “Children are diverse and parents ought to have a choice. Why not offer single-sex education as a choice? It’s about social justice.”

 Too true.

An Unusual Suspect

Boys used to do as well as (or better than) girls in school, but now they’re doing much worse. This is the message in this week’s series in The Globe and Mail (click here for Saturday’s kick-off feature article). Many theories are being advanced in the series, but I don’t find any of them particularly convincing - mainly because none of them is something that is true now but wasn’t the case in the old days. Take, for example, today’s theory that it’s because of a lack of male teachers. Personally, I didn’t have a male teacher until I was in high school, but the boys in my classes did as well as the girls.

A theory that isn’t being considered, however, is the change in the way kids are taught to read. In most fifties and sixties schools, teachers used a mixture of Look Say and phonics - not the best way to teach beginning reading, but better than the current Balanced Literacy, which typically contains even less phonics instruction. It probably sounds kind of crazy to say that such a seemingly tiny difference could have such huge ramifications - and I’m not claiming that the reduction in phonics is the only factor in boy’s decline - but it’s well accepted that students’ reading ability at the end of grade 1 is a powerful predictor of academic achievement in high school and beyond. To say the least, it would likely be a good idea to ensure that boys learn to read in grade 1.

Here is an excerpt from our newsletter archives that explains why a lack of phonics makes it a lot harder for the typical boy to learn to read. To read the whole article, click here.

“First, boys do mature at slower rates than girls. Australian research shows that young boys are eight months behind girls in their ability to remember some letters in a word. At the age of five, boys can remember on average only one letter in a word. Yet in England, boys of this age are expected to remember words such as ‘crocodile’ or ‘slippers’.

“In Scotland, where teaching focuses more on phonic-processing skills, boys are given the opportunity to process letters one at a time and to transfer visual information to auditory memory (an area where they are not at such a disadvantage). Thus their low visual memory skills become relatively unimportant.

“Second, boys and girls do appear to use different areas of the brain when reading. Areas predominantly in the left hemisphere are activated in boys, whereas areas in both hemispheres are activated in girls. Evidence suggests that methods that encourage the use of pictures, word shape and world length as reading strategies (largely activating right-brain processes) put boys - who have all their eggs in one basket, so to speak - more at risk of failing to use the appropriate left-hemisphere skills.”

Missing Inaction

During the 2008-2009 year, 272,000 Los Angeles County students, or 16% of all students, were truant from school. For more depressing statistics and background commentary, click here. As the article points out, it is important to monitor truancy rates, since most of these kids are at high risk to struggle in school and eventually drop out.

Despite the diagnostic potential of truancy statistics, however, to the best of our knowledge no jurisdiction in Ontario keeps track of them. Of course, it's in schools' interests to ignore truancy, since the government bases its funding on attendance.

I expect most people just assume there is very little truancy in Ontario, but I'm not so sure of this. I would be grateful if some of our teacher readers, like TDSBNW and Mr. Wainscotting and maybe even the Dean, could enlighten us regarding this phenomenon.

The Emperor Has Shed a Few Clothes: He’s in danger of catching a chill!

Whenever I post something that calls the theory of global warming into question, SQE supporters - and even one non-supporter - caution me/us that we are risking our credibility. But really, global warming is by no means as cut and dried as most people seem to believe. A case in point is this article about a very embarrassing - and huge - error in basic calculations on carbon dioxide by the Royal Society, the world's oldest and arguably most venerated scientific institute. Talk about a loss of credibility!

The point is - the jury is still out on the science of global warming. And it is misguided, even irresponsible, for teachers to present it as indisputable. 

Canadian Blog Awards

If readers enjoy School for Thought, consider us for the Canadian Blog Awards. You can nominate under Best New Blog or Other. 

Many thanks to our loyal readers and posters!

Who Will Guard the Guardians?

Further to yesterday's posting, this article from the Waterloo Region Record reports that the local teachers' unions have been allowed to use the public board's courier system to inform some 2000 teachers about recommended school trustee candidates. Although a spokesman for the board said this happened "inadvertently", the unions say it's been going on for years. Over at the Catholic school board, the teachers' union is permitted to place their recommendations in teachers' mailboxes at individual schools - a privilege unlikely to be extended to other groups. 

Because the average voter is hard-pressed to be well informed about all of the electoral races and issues - mayor, local councillor, regional councillor, referenda, school board trustees - many teachers gratefully accept their union's recommendations and vote the party line. While lots of people mark their ballot only for mayor and maybe councillor, leaving the school trustee part at the bottom of the ballot blank, most teachers do get all the way down the page and vote for the trustees too. And of course, many retired educators run for office, increasing the chances that their former colleagues will make the effort to vote for them: this is reflected in the fact that a higher percentage of teachers vote in elections than most other occupations. All in all, it's safe to say that education providers are well represented at the polls. 

Media Advisory:  If you are in the Kitchener-Waterloo listening area, Doretta Wilson is going to be on Gary Doyle's 570AM News show at noon today or listen over the web at www.570news.com/listen

Who Controls the School Boards?

The City of Toronto kindly provides voters with financial information on the campaigns of its candidates for public office, including the names of those who financed their campaigns. A search of the data on the school board candidates proves quite rewarding. Of the 22 successful candidates for the Toronto public school board in 2006, 15 received donations from the teachers' unions and/or the union-linked Campaign for Public Education (at one time, the CPE even had its offices in the Local 12 high school teachers' union offices). Irene Atkinson, one-time chair of the board and current chair of the board's budget committee, had 81% of her campaign costs covered by the unions/CPE. It's the same story over at the Catholic school board.

And it's not surprising that so many union-backed candidates manage to get elected. After all, the teachers' unions go on to endorse these candidates and encourage their members to vote for them. In some cases, the local union provides volunteers to help with the campaigns of their preferred candidates, arranges for helpful questions to be asked at all-candidates meetings, gives free legal advice, and so forth. With the voter turn-out so low for school board elections, the union contribution can make the crucial difference.

So why does it matter that so many school board trustees are beholden to the teachers' unions? Well, for starters, school board trustees sit on the management side of the table at collective agreement bargaining sessions and, to some extent, this often means that the unions have representatives on both sides of the table - going a long way towards explaining the generous provisions in teachers' contracts. Then there are all the other union-friendly policies school boards can adopt - like lots of time off for union reps, frequent "curriculum days" and other student-free times, seniority provisions, and protection for bad teachers.

Given the teachers' unions' huge (and guaranteed) revenues, the pittance they spend on school board elections is money well spent. In their opinion anyway.

Survey Question on bullying

SQE's study of the demographic characteristics of Ontario families who choose private schools showed that the top reason for choosing private schools common to parents at both academically-defined and religiously-defined schools was safety.  Bullying is often the reason why parents move their children to other public schools or into private schools.  The next survey question asks about your personal experience with bullying either with your own child or grandchild, or friend's child,  for instance.   There is an opportunity to leave your comments as well by clicking on View Results.  Results will be posted in the next newsletter. 

Last term's survey question asked readers "Do you support school vouchers?"  79% said YES and 21% said NO

Why The Unwillingness To Debate Global Warming?

As a counterpoint to the horrors of global warming as presented in our schools, I suggest you read this letter from Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and many other important offices. Among other things, Dr. Lewis writes: “Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud that I have seen in my long life.”

Dr. Lewis is resigning from the American Physical Society because the APS refuses to sanction an open discussion on the scientific underpinnings of global warming science, alleging that the APS is motivated to behave in this unscientific way by the money flood to scientists who support the global warming theories. If the verdict on global warming is so cut and dried, why is the APS going to such lengths to evade its constitutional obligation to set up a Topical Group on Climate Science?

This is an important letter. As of this posting, there are 2494 comments on this site alone, and it is being discussed all over the Internet.