SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The Unusual Suspect

An article in the Sunday Star reports on the difficulties that incoming university students are having with math. At some campuses, up to half of student fail or quit first-year math! Many of the unusual suspects for students’ math difficulties are blamed in the article - the elimination of grade 13, too much multi-tasking, poor work ethic…. However, School for Thought would like to suggest an unusual suspect - namely, the “progressive” teaching methods and materials used in most modern public schools, especially in the primary grades where many children are failing to get the basic skills necessary for advanced math performance.

Most people presume that children who struggle with math have received first-class instruction at school. It therefore follows that he source of their math problems must lie somewhere else. But what if the assumption that they have received first-class math instruction is wrong? If this assumption is wrong (and much mainstream research indicates that this is the case), then adding extra years of school, eliminating multi-tasking, or asking kids to work harder will not help. Better teaching methods and materials are called for.

Click here for a list of recommended math teaching materials.

The Customer is Always Right

This Toronto Sun column discusses the Toronto Public School Board’s four new alternative schools - one Africentric, two Waldorf-based (a very “progressive”, holistic approach), and one with an environmental/peace-making theme. Do you see a pattern emerging? A glance at the other alternative schools confirms that the board’s willingness to offer alternatives is confined to trendy options, like for example, the Scarborough Village Alternative School which offers a “problem-solving, independent, creative, and co-operative” learning approach. Yet when the Society for Quality Education sponsored a survey of parents who choose Ontario private schools, we learned that disappointment with publicly-funded schools was a very important factor in their choice. One of the main things these parents were looking for was an emphasis on academic quality. 

Given that the Toronto Public School Board continues to hemorrhage students, wouldn’t it make sense for the board to start offering the kind of schools that so many parents apparently want?

Something Doesn’t Add Up

An article in yesterday’s The Globe and Mail discusses a perception that school parent groups are facing increased pressure to fundraise because of government cutbacks. Schools are so cash-strapped, according to the article, that fundraising money is sometimes being used for supplies as basic as paper. Yet according to the Ontario Ministry of Education’s report, education funding has been steadily rising for many years. In 2002-03, Ontario spent $14,737,216,411. Every succeeding year showed a substantial increase, such that the estimated school board funding for last year is $19,205,601,169. Thus, there has been an increase of approximately four and a half billion dollars over a six-year period - about a 30 percent increase. At the same time, student enrolment has been steadily decreasing: from 1,997,479 in 2002-03 to 1,908,414 last year - a loss of 89,605 students, or about five percent. So where did the money go?

A Better Way to Fail

An ‘F’ for Social Promotion is a new backgrounder from the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. It makes a very persuasive case for ending rigid no-fail policies, citing their many undesirable consequences - for example: graduates who lack necessary skills and knowledge; ever-widening ability disparities within classrooms; and a decrease in students’ motivation to work hard. On the other side, however, it is undeniable that it can be very upsetting to students to fail a year, and in many cases a second exposure to the same old same old doesn’t do them much good anyway. In short, as currently presented, neither alternative is very palatable. It’s time to start thinking outside the box. Here are a couple of ideas to prime the pump, and we hope our readers will weigh in with others. 

• We might look to France where it is so common for students to be held back or jumped ahead that there is little or no stigma attached to failure. 
• We might consider monthly student promotion decisions.
• We might think about creating homogeneous ability classes in several subjects, such that a student might take grade 6 language but grade 8 math.
• We might let parents make promotion decisions.

Pearls Before Swine

Non-Ontario readers will probably find it hard to believe that the province has been twice condemned by the United Nations for its disciminatory practice of providing free schools to its Catholic citizens but to those of no other faith. The province’s premier, who is Catholic, has so far ignored the United Nations condemnation. One way to end this discrimination would be to extend public money to families of other faiths, but this idea was shot down in flames during the last provincial election. So far, only one other possiblity has been put forward - namely, to stop funding Catholic schools and force everyone to attend non-secular schools. But this seems kind of crazy, given that the Catholic schools are on average far superior to the public schools. Why in the world would we want to keep the Trabant and throw away the BMW? School for Thought has a modest proposal. If we are going to have only one school system, then for goodness’ sake, let’s eliminate the public one, not the Catholic one.

Baby Einsteins

The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik is a new book reporting on recent research that reveals that babies learn more, create more, and care more than we could ever have imagined. The following excerpt shows that very young babies already understand probability. In order to understand the experiment, you need to know that babies rapidly become habituated to old things and turn away from them, and so when babies look at something for longer, it indicates that they find something novel about it.

“In a particularly dramatic recent study, Fei Xu at the University of British Columbia showed that even nine-month-olds understand some important statistical ideas. She showed babies a transparent box full of mixed-up red and white Ping-Pong balls. Sometimes the balls were mostly white with a few red ones mixed in, sometimes they were mostly red with a few whitte ones. Then she covered the sides of the box to hide the balls. The experimenter took five balls out of the now opaque box in succession, either four red ones and one white one or vice versa. If you think about it, it should be surprising, though of course possible, that you just happen to pull mostly red balls out of a mostly white box. It could happen but it’s not very likely, and certainly much less likely than pulling out mostly white balls.

“Very young babies seemed to reason about probabilities in the same way. They looked longer at the experimenter when she pulled out mostly red balls from a mostly white box than when she pulled out mostly white balls from a mostly white box, or mostly red balls from a mostly red box.”

Rubber Rooms

This article in this week’s The New Yorker reveals what happens to New York City teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence. Because of a union contract clause that requires they receive full salaries and benefits until their charges have been heard by an arbitrator (a process that typically takes years), these teachers end up together in a sort of a detention room (dubbed the Rubber Room) for seven hours a day, five days a week, playing board games and reading newspapers. The cost to city taxpayers probably approaches one hundred million dollars a year. In Canada, there are no rubber rooms (that we know of), but accused teachers are typically “re-assigned to administrative duties” at board headquarters until the charges have been resolved. It would probably take a forensic audit to discover how productive these administrative duties actually are.

Choice for Me, But Not for Thee

Malkin Dare has an editorial in today’s National Post. 

It is reprinted at the Libertas Post as well.

Switchtasking

A new study suggests that frequent multitaskers may be compromising their response time, because they become more easily distracted by irrelevant information and clog up their short-term memory with it. By trying to pay attention to a lot of things, multitaskers end up less able to zero in on what’s important. It turns out that people don’t multitask - they switchtask, as no one can do two things at once that use the same part of the brain. So the next time your kid claims he can study while watching TV or texting his friends, tell him to think again!

Alternative School Choices - Making Things Better

For a select few anyway…

This article by Diane Peters about alternative schools in the weekend National Post has twigged some interesting discussion over at Crux-Of-The Matter.

To suggest that having alternative schools doesn’t improve things, as suggested by some quoted in the NP article, flies in the face of just about every study on school choice. 

Thank you Sandy, for raising the topic and the hypocrisy elephant in the room that School For Thought reported on in this earlier post.

Dr. Howard Fuller, whose visit SQE sponsored to Toronto last year, said the issue is not choice itself, it is who has it.  His comments echo those of former UK education minister Walden.  This from Fuller’s speech to the Economic Club of Toronto which can be viewed here:

”...Those of us with money have the capacity to choose, and the great hypocrisy that operates are those individuals who would never put their own children in certain schools denying poor parents the capacity to do it. We have teachers who teach in schools they would never put their own children in, demanding that other people’s children stay there. I find that to be hypocritical. We’ve got politicians running around talking about how important the public school structure is and then you ask them, ‘Well, where do your children go to school?’

I actually happen to be a strong supporter of public schools, but I’m also a strong supporter of giving people a choice so that they can determine whether a public school or private school will be best for their children…It is ludicrous for us not to provide a way for kids to go to schools that work because at the end of the day a democracy can’t sustain itself unless it has an educated populace.