SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

There Are Credits And Then There Are Tax Credits

Ontario Premier McGuinty has floated the idea of a $50 tax credit for parents who have there kids enrolled in sports or other activities, similar to the the plan the federal government has in place.  Well now that the littlest ones are at school all day, what’s left for the government to spend our money on? (It’s an election year, fill in the blank here ______.)

SQE would rather that the Education Tax Credit be reinstated.  It probably would have been cheaper in the long run for the province to to keep it. Considering it was taken away, rather cruelly AFTER parents had already committed themselves to use it, this nickname may start to stick.

How Good Will My Kid’s Teacher Be?

As you send your child off to start a new school year today, you may be pondering that very question. This New York Times Magazine article on teacher accountability looks at new ways that teacher accountability is going to be measured and reported on in Los Angeles. What was once a guessing game and schoolyard gossip is now going to undergo unprecedented scrutiny and a sort of “Consumer Reports” analysis of schools and teachers is being undertaken:

“A few months ago, a team of reporters at The Los Angeles Times and an education economist set out to create precisely such a consumer guide to education in Los Angeles. The reporters requested and received seven years of students’ English and math elementary-school test scores from the school district. The economist then used a statistical technique called value-added analysis to see how much progress students had made, from one year to the next, under different third- through fifth-grade teachers. The variation was striking. Under some of the roughly 6,000 teachers, students made great strides year after year. Under others, often at the same school, students did not. The newspaper named a few teachers - both stars and laggards - and announced that it would release the approximate rankings for all teachers, along with their names.

“The articles have caused an electric reaction. The president of the Los Angeles teachers union called for a boycott of the newspaper. But the union has also suggested it is willing to discuss whether such scores can become part of teachers’ official evaluations. Meanwhile, more than 1,700 teachers have privately reviewed their scores online, and hundreds have left comments that will accompany them.”

Electric reaction is probably an understatement! Can readers imagine what a similar report in Canada would lead to? (Can you say Days of Action?)

“One way to think about the Los Angeles case is as an understandable overreaction to an unacceptable status quo. For years, school administrators and union leaders have defeated almost any attempt at teacher measurement, partly by pointing to the limitations. Lately, though, the politics of education have changed. Parents know how much teachers matter and know that, just as with musicians or athletes or carpenters or money managers, some teachers are a lot better than others.”

So it will be interesting to see, in these times of scarce public funding and declining enrolments, has the politics of education really changed?

The Early Bird Gets the Worm

It’s back to school tomorrow, and Dan Willingham suggests you make sure your kids get to bed at a decent hour tonight. When he polled teachers what the number one thing parents could do to support their child’s learning, it was: make sure they get enough sleep!  Although sleep may seem like a waste of time, in fact it plays an important part in learning.

Real Literacy

“Much depended on Ponting and the new Wizard of Oz, Mike Hussey, the two overnight batsmen. But this duo perished either side of lunch - the latter a little bit unfortunate to be adjudged leg-before - and with Andrew Symonds too being shown the dreaded finger off an inside edge, the inevitable beckoned, bar the pyrotechnics of Michael Clarke and the ninth wicket.

How are you doing so far?

This passage, quoted by one of the authors of this article, graphically illustrates the premise that reading comprehension is not a transferable skill, but rather depends heavily on vocabulary and domain-specific knowledge. The conclusion is that schools should stop exposing students to “scattered, trivial and incoherent reading” and start exposing them to rich and systematic curricula that build “the broad background knowledge that enables them to become stronger readers in general”.

Who Needs Schools?

We’ve mentioned the Khan Academy before, but there are three good reasons to mention it again.

• It’s so excellent.
• It has now been enthusiastically endorsed by Bill Gates.
• It has expanded its offerings.

What the site does is present short but elegant videos that clearly explain educational concepts. At last count, there were 1,630 of them, but Mr. Khan is aiming to produce a total of 10,000. The lessons were originally confined to math topics, but there are now videos on biology, chemistry, physics, economics, history, brain teasers, and much more.

Every Day A Special Day

Two years ago, a Liberal MP tabled a private members’ bill to proclaim the first Monday in February Mathieu Da Costa Day. This is probably the first time you will have heard of Mr. Da Costa, whose claim to fame is that he was a navigator of African origin who accompanied Samuel de Champlain on his first voyage to Canada in 1603. However undeservedly obscure Da Costa may have been in the past, political correctness has brought him to the fore in schools. For example, the Toronto Catholic District School Board is hosting a book signing on January 26, 2011 so that the board’s students can meet Itah Sadu, the author of Mathieu Da Costa, First to Arrive - a book written for young students. I have a feeling we are going to be hearing more about Mathieu Da Costa as time goes on.

But to me this feels discriminatory. I mean, what about honouring Canadian Norwegians by proclaiming Eric the Red Day? After all, Mr. Red was likely the first European to arrive in Canada. Perhaps I’ll write a book Eric the Red, Even More First to Arrive, and then take it around to schools. And how about honouring our British heritage by proclaiming James Cook Day? Mr. Cook was the first European to land on Vancouver Island, don’t you know. And we must never forget the contribution of our Jewish compatriots. After all, when General Geoffrey Amherst won Canada for the British in 1760, there were four Jews among his officer corps: Aaron Hart, Emmanuel de Cordova, Hananiel Garcia, and Isaac Miramer. We could call that one Hart-deCordova-Garcia-Miramer Day.

There are 203 sovereign states in the world, and untold ethnicities. Perhaps with a little effort, we could manage to honour them all.

Competition in Education—The Last Sacred Cow

The National Post kindly printed my letter in response to this article which reports on the mediocre Ontario provincial test results. The article quotes Peter Cowley of the Fraser Institute’s famous school comparison reports. 

Cowley calls on schools to be run more like businesses:

“‘Competition’ is a word you never use when talking about education because once you use the word competition, people stop listening to you—which is odd since one of the first things you see when you walk into a school is the trophy case,” said Mr. Cowley, author of the education handbook” The Parent’s Guide”.

Mr. Cowley advised educators to seek out successful school models and replicate them in the same way successful businesses replicate themselves.

“In some areas, the replication of a successful school is exactly like the replication of a successful coffee shop: You figure out what works.”

A Bottomless Pit

So the Ontario premier finds it “unacceptable” that Ontario parents are having to fundraise so that their children’s schools can buy essential supplies such as textbooks. (As an aside, it’s quite amazing that he made this announcement solely in reaction to a report from his pals at People for Education. We wish we got this kind of reaction when we ask for more important things like the use of proven teaching methods and school choice.) 

And if you are wondering why the schools don’t have enough money to buy essential supplies, given the fact that the province has increased their total funding from $16,257,066,889 in 2003 to $20,790,348,435 in 2009 (an increase of almost 28%), then we refer you to this CBC news story about how the Toronto District School Board just spent $125,000 on a “conference” at the Air Canada Centre where their employees enjoyed performances by, among others, teenage jazz singer Nikki Yanofsky and the Canadian Tenors. That $125,000 would have bought an awful lot of textbooks!

The Golden Mean

Here’s an interesting video from the 40’s that explains the thinking behind “progressive” education trends. Of course, it’s impossible to tell from the little bit shown, but it looks as if schooling in the 40’s probably struck the right balance between traditional methods and progressive methods. No one could have predicted, however, that educators would have gone to such extremes as they have today. One gets the feeling that the main proponent of progressive methods, John Dewey, would have been appalled if he could have foreseen where his ideas would lead.

If Taught Properly

Further to yesterday’s posting, Ontario’s premier is now saying that Ontario set the bar too high and that it is unreasonable to expect 75% of the province’s students to be able to master the curriculum for their grade. 

Here’s what the ever-popular George Bush had to say on this topic. “Some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to require anything less - the soft bigotry of low expectations. Some say that schools can’t be expected to teach, because there are too many broken families, too many immigrants, too much diversity. I say that pigment and poverty need not determine performance. That myth is disproved by good schools every day. Excuse-making must end before learning can begin.”

As a reading tutor, I know that virtually every child can learn to read at grade level, if taught properly. John Mighton over at JUMP says the same thing about math. Three very important words.