SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Friday at the Movies (Boorish Behaviour)

This video speaks to the departure from our blog of John Myers. The video gets a bit repetitive and tedious in the middle, and the language is very offensive, but please keep watching. There is a point to the video, and its point directly relates to some of the commenters to our blog. You know who you are.

It’s comedy, true enough, but it’s not divine

A human rights organization that advises the UN on racism and discrimination is recommending that Dante’s Divine Comedy be removed from school curricula on the grounds that it is racist, homophobic, anti-Islamist, and anti-Semitic. No doubt, The Merchant of Venice and The Bible are not far behind. 

Of course, this is business as usual in the politically-correct world. My question is: why on earth would anyone think he needs to ban the Divine Comedy from schools? I mean, this assumes that it’s actually on the curriculum of some high schools. Really? I’m not sure how one would go about checking it out, especially in Ontario which doesn’t mention any works of literature in its curriculum, but I’ve never heard of any high school students who are studying the book. My sense is that we long ago passed the point of exposing high school students to the canon, instead preferring politically-correct stuff like the following (taken from the Ontario Grade 11 and 12 English curriculum). H/T CT

• Learning resources that reflect the broad range of students’ interests, backgrounds, cultures, and experiences are an important aspect of an inclusive English program. In such a program, learning materials involve protagonists of both sexes from a wide variety of backgrounds. Teachers routinely use materials that reflect the diversity of Canadian and world cultures, including those of contemporary First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples, and make them available to students. Short stories, novels, magazine and newspaper articles, television programs, and films provide opportunities for students to explore issues relating to their self-identity. In inclusive programs, students are made aware of the historical, cultural, and political contexts for both the traditional and non-traditional gender and social roles represented in the materials they are studying. Stories, novels, informational texts, and media works relating to the immigrant experience provide rich thematic material for study, as well as the opportunity for students new to Canada to share their knowledge and experiences with others. In addition, in the context of the English program, both students and teachers should become aware of aspects of intercultural communication – for example, by exploring how different cultures interpret the use of eye contact and body language in conversation and during presentations.

Why run pilot studies if nobody understands what they’re telling us?

There was an interesting article in The New York Times the other day that illustrates two of my favourite themes. The article is about a pilot study in New York that compared, among other things, the reading comprehension of primary students in Balanced Literacy classrooms and students in Core Knowledge classrooms. The students in the Core Knowledge classrooms performed significantly better. 

The author of the article then concludes that the Core Knowledge approach is better than the Balanced Literacy approach when it comes to teaching reading comprehension - primarily because kids learn better if they read non-fiction books as opposed to fiction. Of course, as faithful readers are no doubt thinking, this is total rubbish. Core Knowledge is not at all a method of teaching reading; it is a general philosophy that all students deserve equal access to the common knowledge base that holds their societies together. 

So how were the children in the New York Core Knowledge schools taught to read, you ask? It turns out that the Core Knowledge students in this pilot were taught using systematic phonics-based instruction in decoding skills (more on the Core Knowledge reading approach here). So in fact, the New York pilot was comparing systematic phonics with Balanced Literacy, and systematic phonics won.

Theme #1:  Systematic phonics is superior to Balanced Literacy.

Theme #2:  Most reporters writing about education know almost nothing about their topic, and this fact is partly responsible for the education debacle.

Luckily, a lack of math proficiency is no bar to becoming a teacher

The cover story in this week’s Maclean’s Magazine deals with the fallout from the new new math. Although designed to foster deep understanding, the new approach turns out to foster deep frustration instead. Far from deeply understanding math, most students aren’t even learning basic arithmetic. As the article makes clear, many parents (even math professors and engineers) sometimes get bogged down when trying to help their kids with homework. Many parents are turning to paid tutors (according to the article, more than 30% of Canadian parents supplement their children’s education). The result is a two-tiered education system, whereby the children of affluent, savvy parents manage to survive their public schools - but the less fortunate children flounder.

The article leaves us with a depressing thought, quoting math professor Anna Stokke: “If they [students] don’t know their math facts, she says, they won’t be able to do fractions, which means they won’t be able to handle algebra, which means calculus is out, which means they can’t be engineers, doctors, pharmacists, economists, programmers, or any discipline that requires math, including skilled tradeswork. But one thing they can become? Teachers.” H/T RC

The Middle-School Cliff

In Ontario, it has become quite common for school boards to segregate their grade 7 and 8 students in a separate school called a middle school. But when a Harvard professor decided to investigate the effectiveness of middle schools, his findings cast serious doubt on the wisdom of this practice.

Basically, the researchers found that “moving to a middle school causes a substantial drop in student test scores (relative to that of students in who remain in K-8 schools) the first year in which the transition takes place.” As well, they found that “the relative achievement of middle-school students continues to decline in the subsequent years they spend in such schools”, nor was there any evidence that these losses were ever recouped in high school. In fact, there was evidence that a higher percentage of middle-school students went on to drop out of school.

The researchers suggest two main (possibly inter-related) explanations: a) school transitions lower student achievement; and b) the overall climate for student learning is worse in middle schools. Here is a more nuanced discussion of the study’s findings.

We find little evidence that the negative effects of attending a middle school are attributable to differences in resources, cohort sizes, or educational practices. We do, however, find suggestive evidence that the overall climate for student learning is worse in middle schools than in schools that serve students from elementary school through the 8th grade. This suggests a final potential interpretation of our results that is directly related to the choice of grade configuration: students may benefit from being among the oldest students in a school setting that includes very young students, perhaps because they have greater opportunity to take on leadership roles. This interpretation could account for both the gains in relative achievement made by students in K-5 and K-6 schools prior to entering middle schools and the superior performance of K-8 students relative to their peers in middle schools….

Taken as a whole, our results suggest that school transitions lower student achievement but that attending middle schools in particular has adverse consequences for American students. Especially when considered along with those of other recent studies, our findings clearly support ongoing efforts in urban school districts to convert stand-alone elementary and middle schools into schools with K-8 configurations.

Sunday the Movies (The Agenda - Austerity and Ontario’s Teachers)

In case you missed it, here’s The Agenda episode that I participated in as a panelist.  You might recognize an old “friend” as one of the other guests.  Notice he sits to my left!

Non-Spongy Reading Information

There's a new blog on the block. Check out Phonics Talk.

So far, there's an interesting anecdote about systematic phonics, a link to an apparently-powerful way to improve students' public speaking, and don't forget to check out the FAQ's.

Plus, I threw in a cute cartoon for good measure.

There ought to be a law

It can be tricky evaluating whether school choice policies improve student outcomes. In Ontario, for example, the government is boasting about (slightly-) improved test scores - but the provincial tests are very subjective and vulnerable to manipulation. Similarly, the government is crowing about its improved graduation rates - but it has put in place all kinds of measures to make it easier to graduate. 

So here's an ingenious way of evaluating whether school choice is improving student outcomes in North Carolina, one that cannot be manipulated. In the school district of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the district has conducted an open-enrollment lottery for the last ten years, and the researchers compared the criminal activity of students who had "won" the lottery, gaining admission to their preferred school, to the students who had "lost" the lottery. Here are the results.

"In this study, I find that winning a lottery for admission to the school of choice greatly reduces criminal activity, and that the greatest reduction occurs among youth at the highest risk for committing crimes. The impact persist beyond the initial years of school enrollment, seven years after the school-choice lottery was held. The findings suggest that schools may be an opportune setting for the prevention of future crime."

If other studies replicate these findings, it seems that open-enrollment policies may be a no-cost measure that results in significant financial and social savings in later years.

Time is on our side

"Our schools are run like a bunch of factories from the early industrial age. They have rigid work rules, negotiated for the benefit of management and labour (but not the parents or the kids). Seniority reigns, everyone has job security for life, and a distant, top-heavy bureaucracy decrees exactly what gets taught and how. Students of wildly varying talents proceed in lockstep down the assembly line until the system spits them out. Teachers, meantime, scramble to find textbooks for the kids as our bloated ministries of education crank out mountains of bumf that dictate everything from curriculum standards, learning objectives and approved teaching materials to anti-bullying policies, diversity initiatives and the very latest schemes to raise test scores."

So writes Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail today, making the point that any private enterprise run this way would have gone bankrupt long ago. But of course public education can't go bankrupt, and so we are still stuck with our antiquated public education systems. What will be the catalyst that will vault public education into the 21st century? Hmmm, could it be the coming clash between cash-starved 21st-century governments and antediluvian 19th-century teachers' unions?

Maybe private schools get better results because they teach better….

Critics of school choice often argue that the reason private schools get better results is that they pick and choose their students, excluding those with disabilities. Now a State of Wisconsin study suggests that, "while the percentage of students in the voucher schools with disabilities is substantially lower than the disability rate in the public schools, it is at least four times higher than public officials have claimed." As well, the study points out that public schools have an incentive to identify students as disabled (because they receive additional funding for disabled students), while private schools have no such incentive. Indeed, many private schools are relucant to identify their students as disabled - because of the danger that the children will be stigmatized. This means that private schools may actually have an even higher percentage of students with special needs.

This was similar to the findings of a 2004 Canadian study, which found that at least 13% of Ontario schools serve exceptional students.