SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Sunday at the Movies or Talkies (Michael Zwaagstra)

SQE held its annual general meeting yesterday, and Michael Zwaagstra, our feature speaker, delivered a fantastic address that had the audience eating out of his hand. For those of you who missed it, you can get a quick idea here by clicking on “Merits of Homework”. In this five-minute clip, Mr. Zwaagstra is interviewed about sensible homework policies. To get a fuller idea of what he had to say at our meeting, click here and then choose one of the audio clips in the second-from-the-top box in the centre column. The 27-minute Regina talk is probably the most representative one if you have the time.

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Update:  Here’s a report of the SQE AGM at Our Kids Publications here.

Teachers’ Unions Versus Students

The financial crisis has meant that many municipalities are struggling to balance their books, leading to layoffs in many sectors - including the education sector. In Petaluma, CA, this has meant cut-backs in non-teaching areas such as lunchtime and recess supervisors, office secretaries, and library assistants. But when well-meaning Petaluma parents came forward as volunteers to fill the void, the union said no. Here is a stark choice between the welfare of students and the union’s self-interest - with the union making it very clear that its own well-being comes first. Keep this in mind the next time a teachers’ union justifies its demands on the basis that it’s good for kids. For the whole story, including some interesting musings on the importance of volunteers in the last two paragraphs, click here.

In case you think this couldn’t happen in Canada, I believe Tunya has a personal story that might indicate the opposite. H/T to Tunya for this story - and it would be great if you (or anyone else) would elaborate on what happened when you tried to volunteer at a Canadian school.

People for Education

For readers who live in Ontario, Parents for Education publishes an informative newsletter. The current issue, for example, has information about Ontario’s Child Advocacy Project (CAP) which provides “free legal services to low-income families who can’t afford a lawyer”. CAP’s Education Law Program helps students who are unable to access special education services, face suspension or expulsion, or feel unsafe at school. 

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Reminder to Readers - If you are in the GTA Saturday December 4th, please drop by Metro Hall at 55 John St. in Toronto at 12:30 p.m. to meet the SQE team and hear author and teacher Michael Zwaagstra (What’s Wrong With Our Schools and How We Can Fix Them) cut through the edu-babble.

An Early-Childhood Program That Actually Works!

The Ontario Government’s new all-day kindergarten programs are being sold on the promise that they will be good for disadvantaged children - but we think this is pretty unlikely (see here, for example). This is not to say we don’t favour help for disadvantaged kids or doubt that something can be done to help them - just that governmental all-day kindergarten programs aren’t the answer. Now comes an article in The Record about a successful program that has got excellent results in three Ontario disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This was “a four-year program that spanned junior kindergarten to Grade 2, and gave children things like in-school help, nutrition and behavioural programs”.

I would like to underline the following vitally-important sentence from the article. “Their parents and neighbourhoods got to choose what was offered, hired staff, and received programs ranging from job search help, parenting and language training.” Enough said.

Give Ontario Kids a Chance

Speaking of shortfalls in math, here's an interesting posting from the blog Do The Math. Approaches to teaching math tend to be either "constructivist" (emphasizing understanding), or "traditional" (emphasizing fluency in math algorithms). The US Department of Education is sponsoring a comparison of textbooks in order to see which approach is more effective. Preliminary results support the traditional approach - which will come as no surprise to most readers of this blog. 

The textbooks being compared are, of course, American, but Ontario parents may be interested to know that all of the textbooks approved for class use in the province emphasize the constructivist approach to teaching math.

It Still Doesn’t Add Up

One of the worst obstacles Canadian education reformers face is the widespread complacency about our public schools, especially in light of Canada's good showing on the PISA international comparisons. It is my impression, however, that most Canadian public schools are still not offering a very good service. If I thought otherwise, I would happily go off and play more tennis and bridge. But worries about an uneducated citizenry, failed children, and my own grandchildren keep me hunched over my computer.

This recent article from the Canadian journal University Affairs bears out my worries about the state of math education. If you read down far enough, you'll see why good results on the PISA comparisons are not in fact reassuring.

It’s still not about the money

Further to Malkin's post on November 24th about the disparities in spending on education in Ontario, I found some interesting discussion that backs up the assertion that just spending more money won't translate into improved academic outcomes.  Chester Finn writes about the 1965 Coleman Report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, which shaped much of current education policy. He writes:

     "The Coleman Report and its data have been exhaustively analyzed and reanalyzed. But this key finding has never been successfully challenged: School inputs-money, teachers, teacher credentials, etc.-have little correlation with pupil achievement and differences in achievement cannot be significantly accounted for by differences in school resources.

     "Pre-Coleman, the formula was simple. More money plus more teachers (and more whatever) made for better schools which yielded better results. Nearly everyone took this for granted. Yet Coleman showed that, by and large, it isn't true. For Lyndon Johnson was still president and had spent the previous two years persuading Congress that the way to end poverty and equalize achievement in America was to lavish federal dollars on the education system (and particularly its poorest corners) via a host of big new programs like Title I and Headstart. Coleman said, in effect, that such programs wouldn't do much good. Which meant, of course, that if one cared about boosting achievement one had to find other ways to do it, beginning with a new focus on the achievement itself rather than on resources."

 In the U.S. the huge amounts of stimulus spending (much of it in education) has added more to the argument.  This from Reason.com:

     "The stimulus isn't working because it is based on faulty economics. Using historical spending data, the Harvard economist Robert Barro and recent Harvard graduate Charles Redlick have shown that in the best case scenario, a dollar of government spending produces much less than a dollar in economic growth-between 40 and 70 cents. They also found that if the government spends $1 and raises taxes to pay for it, the economy will shrink by $1.10. In other words, greater spending financed by tax increases hurts the economy. Even if the tax is applied in the future, taxpayers today adjust their consumption and business owners refrain from hiring based on the expectation of future tax increases, which worsen the economy today.

      "There are other reasons the stimulus bill has hurt rather than helped the economy. Four of every five jobs reported 'created or saved' are government jobs. That's far from the 90 percent private sector jobs the administration promised. Also, the Department of Education claims it has 'created or saved' at least seven jobs for every job 'created or saved' by any other agency. In other words, federal stimulus funds have been used to keep teachers on state payrolls. By subsidizing public sector employment, the federal government is getting in the way of addressing the issue of overspending in the states."

Sunday at the Movies (Unresponsive School Boards)

This video is built around an amazing story from Oklahoma where some school boards are refusing to obey a new state law that provides private school scholarships for special-needs students. There are certain parallels to a battle currently being waged by the London-area parent of an autistic child.

Jack of All Trades, Master of None?

The Huffington Post is pointing out that the salary bonus teachers are paid for a master’s degree is a waste of money - since possession of this degree has little or no correlation with teacher effectiveness. Bill Gates has even joined in the fray, pointing out that his own state of Washington is wasting something like $300 million a year on the bonus.

In Ontario, too, teachers are paid more if they have a master’s degree, but I couldn’t find out how much the bonus is. The Ontario public high school teachers’ union (OSSTF) published an interesting document entittled “Where to Work in Ontario” a few years back and, although it is now out of date, the document still provides an insight into how teacher contracts work. It would be wonderful if our teacher readers were to weigh in and explain how the salary grids work and any other helpful information. I’d like to be able to estimate how much the master’s salary bonus costs Ontario annually.

A Win-Win Proposition

Greetings from Key Biscayne, FL, where I am on a brief visit. Being in Florida, I am paying attention to the state’s various programs to make it possible for low-income parents to choose their kids’ schools. One of these is the Florida State Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTC) which began in 2001 and provides tax credits for corporations that make donations to scholarship funding organizations. It is the largest private school scholarship program in the US, last year sending almost 29,000 disadvantaged children to better schools, and it is set to grow to a possible 75,000 students by 2015.

A recent study sought to  determine whether the FTC, by making it possible for more parents to flee failing public schools, is prompting those public schools to improve their service. Although the study is quite sophisticated, it basically compared the test scores of public schools in areas with a lot of private schools with the test scores of public schools in areas with few private schools.

The study found that “the increased competitive pressure public schools faced following the introduction of Florida’s State Tax Credit Scholarship Program led to general improvement in their performance. Both expanded access to private school options and greater variety of options that students have in terms of religious (or secular) affiliations of private schools are positively associated with public-school students’ test scores following the introduction of the FTC program. The gains occur immediately, before any students leave the public schools with a scholarship, implying that competitive threats are responsible for at least some of the estimated effects. And the gains appear to be much more pronounced in the schools most at risk to lose students (elementary and middle schools, where the cost of private school attendance with a scholarship is much lower and in the schools that are on the margin of Title I funding.”

As a result of the FTC scholarships, everyone wins - both the students who enroll in private schools and the students who stay behind. 

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Don’t forget to register for SQE’s AGM featuring author Michael Zwaagstra (What’s Wrong With Our Schools) Saturday, Dec. 4th 12:30 p.m. at Metro Hall, Toronto. It’s FREE! 

Register online HERE.