I guess Houston is headed for a teacher shortage since they simply don’t understand the complexity of this situation.

This is the policy you get when people just don’t understand education.

Mr. Little - with all due respect, may I ask what attracts you to post here? I’m genuinely curious because you sure don’t support this organization. Why do you feel you need to contribute snide comments that do nothing to add to anything positive to the discussion.

Is it the plan of OSSTF to plant trolls at all blogs that challenge the public system, or are you contributing to the work of the “fact police?”

If you, as you have suggested feel that nothing here an no one here pose a threat to your public school system…why bother? Unless you’re blowing smoke.

I don’t work for OSSTF. I work for myself. I simply believe your members deserve to hear the counter argument to the prevailing wisdom on sites like this and others. There is a great deal of misinformtion and misunderstanding here. As a former Communications officer for the fed it is my goal to place the opposing view in places like this.

It would be a shallow organization indeed that said “we don’t want to hear opposing views” we have our minds made up and our fingers in our ears. Sandy Crux for example has encouraged me to continue to keep posting on Crux of the Matter because she believes the truth is more likely to emerge from dialogue and debate than from sterile one sided postings. Don’t you agree?

Hi Doug
So would you agree that it’s because of a lack of funding the school system is incompetent at teaching special education or “at-risk” students?
Why can other school boards have better success than ours by using techniques such as direct instruction?
Or do they just have better and/or more qualified teachers and administrators?

Thanks

Which other school boards are better than which boards at what?

Are you an educational specialist? Where do you get this stuff that DI provides better instruction? Thin air?

Far more students go much farther in jusrisdictions which:

1) Spend the most money
2) Have the smallest class sizes
3) Minimize or eliminate streaming
4) Do a great deal of teacher in-service and demand high levels of education of incoming teachers
5) Use unionized teachers
6) Eliminate tuition for post-secondary education
7) Offer high quality early learning opportunities
8) Allow for high levels of parent involvement

Jurisdictions need not do every single one of these if they do most of the others to the maximum. Finland is the best system in the world and it does all of these things and more such as free hot lunches but it is weak on #7.

Hey Chuck,

I do believe that your answer lies in Mr. Little’s shopping list.

I’m pretty sure it’s not SQE demonstrating a closed mind OR a closed shop, eh Doug?

Can’t wait until SQE opens its first traditional school in Ontario. I can see the lines forming already.

Maybe it will reintroduce the strap and the dunce cap, that would be great eh. They can teach traditional roles for men and women, bolt the straight line desks to the floor and salute the Union Jack and the Red Ensign. They can drill phonics totally outside of reading for meaning. They can reenforce sexism, and homophobia. They can humiliate kids who get answers wrong as they did in my day, perhaps each kid can be given a slate and a piece of chalk. The teacher can come in early to start the fire in the potbellied stove and scrub the floor once a week as they did before unions. Women can do all the teaching but the principal will be a man of course. The teachers will be paid pathetic wages and have a very small pension and no benefits.

Gee I can hardly wait, sign me up.

talk about a closed mind and misinformation.

You sure protest a lot about a group you says is no threat to the public system.

Am wondering why on your own blog Doug you allow for no comments?

I don’t allow comments on my newsletter because it is not a blog it is an enewsletter. I don’t intend to spend my life monitoring comments from people who are not sheep.

Gee Doug, with that logic I guess you’re all for getting rid of summer vacation, seeing as not to many city folk need the kids to bring in the crops these days.
If you want proof on DI you don’t have to go much further than the program by Toronto Sick Kids hospitial. Even Jump Math by the UofT is a form of DI. But what would those amateurs know right?
Just what we need, more PD days and lets throw even more money at a bad system.

I’m more qualified than you can imagine, I’m a 48 year old new homeschool dad who had to quit my job to do the school boards. My grade three was being bullied and his teacher told him not to be a ‘tattle tail” not to mention the fact he couldn’t even spell his full name. My 10 year old can’t subtract 2 digit numbers. Is this your idea of a quality education?
Forty years ago I was a “special education” or IEP student. I’m sorry to see not much has changed in that time, the pubic board is still inept at teaching a large percentage of their students. Further evidence that they work in a total bureaucratic vacuum. Even though I am “special ed” a board certified “slow learner” with Stairway to Reading, JUMP Math and Google I’m a more qualified teacher to my children than anything the Kawartha Pine Ridge board has to offer.

The school boards are full of very nice and highly educated individuals, I don’t even blame individual teachers (some are wonderful), but as a collective they operate under an east German (pre-90’s) style of hierarchy of meddling governments and their ministries, unions, greed, ego’s and tenure. It’s much akin to a huge undulating brain with almost no synapses. The state of the disarray is so apparent in their total lack of effective remedial English, math and IEP (Individual Education Plan) programs. Most classroom teachers do not even have any training in this area and these children are just dumped on them. These children are tested using only the best pseudoscience techniques, offered drugs, given constantly interrupted, lip service lesson plans and useless computer programs that the instructor has no clue how to use. They don’t have any real plans, just a jumble of lame attempts to pat the parents hand. They omit information like your right to have your child held back grades because it will “hurt their self-esteem”. News flash! What do you think being illiterate does to their “self-esteem”? Homework is a joke punishment for the parents to do and never comprehensibly focuses (with a plan, what a concept) on the the child’s real problems. Children in this day and age are still labeled “slow learners”.
EQAO is needed, but even their standards stink of politics. They’ve dumb-ed down the literacy and math requirements,and it has no grade exit exam requirements. All the IEP scores are exempt, further fudging the test scores numbers in the systems favour, but then they need to cheat every way they can.

The burn is we still have to pay school taxes and we’ll get no financial help (without meddling). I had to quit my job and my wife is working at least 20hrs overtime per pay, so I can teach my children. This is a major financial hit, but my children’s education is worth more than the money. We won’t be buying any new cars, we have cancelled satellite TV, cell phones and not much was under the Christmas tree this year.
My children’s right to a quality education has been squandered and I am going to do something about it. I don’t need your school board.

Sorry for your situation Mark but your experience is not that common. The vast majority of parents have a very positive experience with the school system which is why it is second in the entire world and not far behind #1. Your children sound as if they have fairly severe learning problems. Although the system could do a great deal more to help you will have a tough road ahead.

You can take cheap shots all you want but the teachers have never “negotiated” the summer off. It came with the job as far back as public education and when Snobelen tried to cut it by one week he was pulverized by the parents and the vacation industry so I expect that will be staying a while longer. PA Days? You think they are a day off? Most teachers would rather be in front of a class on those days.

Yep, keep blaming the kids Doug. It’s what the system’s good at.

Kudos for Mark for making the best education decision for his kids. Many are doing exactly that.

>>PA Days? You think they are a day off? Most teachers would rather be in front of a class on those days.

Doug Little has *that* right.

Mark H. is correct that special education teachers receive practically no useful training on how to teach special needs kids. The MOE courses are c*** and mostly about definitions and paperwork not about instruction.  Sometimes the instructor is very good but even the best instructor can’t do much with the syllabus.

I learned absolutely nothing *useful* from the MOE courses, and when I taught special ed I learned from fellow teachers and what I could read and study on my own. My best source was parents—THEY knew a lot about special needs kids, the research, the methods, and were generous about sharing.  At an IPRC meeting it turned out that not a single person from the board special education department (a raft of consultants, coordinators and psychologists were present) was familiar with the research or the proven programs for a particular disability. Never even HEARD of them.

Not teaching sped now but have seen the same ignorance over and over.  Nice and caring is good but not sufficient.

There is a very strong relationship all over North America between conservative education groups and parents of special education students. Some experts I have read connect this with hard working parents who have done everything asked of them, paid their taxes, stayed out of trouble and they now have a special education child. They have a great deal of difficulty accepting the fact that this child may have limitations in how far they can go in an academic sense. There is a sense of denial operating here.

I am not saying parents should ever give up on their child. My only daughter suffered from anxiety and we therefore had to limit our expectations from university to community college. We had been saving to make sure she went as far in university as she could. She was at the top of her class in elementary school.  Parents should be demanding of the system in terms of resources. If they want home schooling go for it, but they need to accept at the end of the day that many children suffer from mild to severe learning disabilities that nobody can make go away. That is just the long and short of it.

My daughter today is happy. She is a trained dental assistant in Ottawa, a successful mother with a great husband. She is happy with her life and I am very happy for her.

the retired teacher in my family tells me that out of all the teachers she’s been asked to substitute for in 2009, ALL we getting MOE in-service training. Her last call was to substitute for a Kindergarten where the lesson for the day was to teach the 5 year olds the meaning and concept of the word “schema” through action song. The regular teacher was away for in-service that day learning more nonsense.

The other professionals in my family who have to take regular upgrading to do their jobs do so on weekends and after business hours.

Why are our tax dollars going to education our children twice because that’s what it amounts to when we’re paying the regular classroom teacher and then paying for a substitute too. If this is going on province-wide then we have way more problems in education than the McGuinty gov’t is letting on.

It is going on because your elected MPPs and trustees endorse it and teachers have negotiated it in their collective agreements. I really don’t want to be rude notasheep but you do sound like someone who does not really understand the basics of how the education system works. Most teachers dedicate most of their summers to upgrading from the time they begin teaching until well into their 40s. Huge numbers of teachers take MOE courses at the faculty every night of the week. The in-service you talk about is above and beyond all of this.

To the contrary Mr. Little. Please don’t make assumptions about what I do and don’t know about the education system. In suggesting that I don’t know means that I shouldn’t believe what I’m told by teacher relatives, friends and neighbors whose experience I value more than yours I’m afraid.

“Most teachers dedicate most of their summers to upgrading from the time they begin teaching until well into their ‘40s” - yes, and if you believe that you’re not as tuned in to individual educators as you lead on.

I would say to you that “some” teachers dedicate “part” of their summers to upgrading. What you fail to disclose is that some of these courses are simple weekends or can be done at home over the internet in the comfort of home.

Before you make more excuses I’d really like to find out how much boards are spending on substitute teachers needed to fill the void left by the MOE’s in-service?

My how the discussion has moved away from the original post! 

The FACTS are as reported:
1. Houston is going to evaluate teachers on how well students have learned. 
2. The union doesn’t like it.
3. The quality of teaching is the most important indicator for learning.
Period.

To address Mr Notasheep quickly, he is wrong about the amount of career time most teachers take from their own time to upgrade.

1)The quality of teacher IS the single most important of many factors effecting educational outcomes.

2) Standardized tests are a pathetically weak way to measure teacher effectiveness. Results from the very same teacher can very widely from year to year. Affluent and middle class students traditionally are not only ahead of poor and working class students but also make more gains during the school year. This is well documented.

3) Of course the union does not like it. They are quite likely to go to the teacher training institutions and leaflet them with “don’t work in Houston they are unfair to teachers” literature which will have a strong effect on the city’s ability to recruit new teachers.

Also, Doug, your comments of Jan 14 4:39 pm are ridiculous and, frankly, insulting to thousands of professional teachers who teach in what have been called, perhaps with the misunderstood term,  “traditional” model schools, and to the the parents who choose them.  They are nothing like this and you know it.

—SQE

“Maybe it will reintroduce the strap and the dunce cap, that would be great eh. They can teach traditional roles for men and women, bolt the straight line desks to the floor and salute the Union Jack and the Red Ensign. They can drill phonics totally outside of reading for meaning. They can reenforce sexism, and homophobia. They can humiliate kids who get answers wrong as they did in my day, perhaps each kid can be given a slate and a piece of chalk. The teacher can come in early to start the fire in the potbellied stove and scrub the floor once a week as they did before unions. Women can do all the teaching but the principal will be a man of course. The teachers will be paid pathetic wages and have a very small pension and no benefits.

Gee I can hardly wait, sign me up.”

Let’s just say that there are some teachers who do work to upgrade each and every year, and just as many who don’t.

For those that do, why are they doing so if they can’t be recognized as doing more than those who choose to play hooky on the upgrading in the summer months?

Let’s reward the good teachers based on how they can demonstrate that what they’ve learned in their upgraded training in how it manifests itself into improved achievement shall we?

Then you just don’t get how value-added assessment works.  It doesn’t matter how poor or wealthy a student is.  It measures how each student learns respective to where they started from at the beginning of the school year. 

Actually, what is well documented is just the opposite to what you say.  With the right teaching, students with lower expectations can improve much more, relatively speaking, than their more affluent counterparts.  I’ve seen lots of kids in affluent area “good” schools do rather poorly when compared to what their expectations should be.

my post was responding to Doug’s and not yours notasheep.  I guess we got crossed in the mail!

I know exactly how value added assessment works or actually doesn’t work. Students are tested in September and again in May and teachers are paid on “the gains” The work of Daniel Willingham devastates the argument that this is fair. Teachers understand that the gains have very little to do with their efforts and a great deal to do with the students they are dealt each year. Average teachers often make much larger gains than excellent teachers on so-called value added systems due to the nature of the students put in front of them and every single teacher knows in is inherently unfair and will not sit still for it. Houston has been the home of a number of failed attempts at teacher performance pay and this will be just one more failed attempt.

Merit pay or performance pay is not a new concept. It has been tried and failed many times before including so-called value added testing.

Set your watch for a huge fight, a teacher shortage and another abandoned plan. Sigh.

To notasheep,

The teachers who upgrade ARE rewarded on the pay grid as they move up much faster to higher pay catagories. Promotions also are given to those who have demonstrated a commitment to upgrading. Your solutions have been woven into the fabric of teaching a long time ago. I also did research on the % of teachers in the TDSB with graduate degrees and the positions they occupy. About 20% have a Masters Degree or better. 90% of those are in positions of added responsibility.

You need to familiarize yourself with the system a little more notasheep. All of your concerns have been addressed long ago.

I want to point out that Doug chooses NOT to respond to “urbantech” who clearly speaks from experience of having had to take those glorified MOE courses but instead responds to the person he believe he can dazzle with facts, figures, quotes and reports from those who are in lock-step with him.

“You need to familiarize yourself with the system a little more notasheep” - No Doug he doesn’t.

No. I don’t, and let’s be clear shall we. Teachers are rewarded just for taking the course not for having proven that what they’ve taken improves student learning.

Proven that is to a)the parents b) school community and c) post-secondary institutions and employers

So what, this is the system sanctioned by the province, the boards and the unions. It is your opinion only that they have not improved instruction in the world’s best school system.

The system cannot respond to every Tom, Dick or Harriet. We need to solve our problems democratically. The losers will always complain but that is how it goes.

We can trace a lack of satisfaction with the younger generation back to Plato. Everybody complains about it but like the weather, little is done about it.

If you don’t like it vote for the Tories. They hate public education so they might be right up your alley.

Urbantech on ministry courses? Some are good, some not so good. We know many of you want them to instruct in such areas as phonics and DI but there is very little in the literature to support these directions so there is not much about that.

“Some are good, some are not so good”...and some are a serious waste of money and teacher’s time.

  “the losers will always complain”...and children will continue to fall through the cracks, but you can spin the numbers any which way you like but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re against Conservatives which you assume are those gathered here at the invitation of SQE. How wrong you are, but keep on thinking that way because it just sends more parents running into the arms of alternatives and private schools.

  You claim not to be OSSTF yet at Sandy Crux’s blog you have posted that Ben Levin wasn’t too impressed with the OSSTF’s rejection of the “no fail” policy. Pretty darn close to that action, eh Doug?

I retired from a six year career at the provincial office of OSSTF Jan 30, 2009. I have also been a school trustee, a teacher of elementary and secondary and a professor at community college and university levels. I founded a magazine Our Schools Our Selves, I was the NOW magazine education writer and I have been an active parent when my daughter was younger. Want to know anything else? My bio is on my newsletter in the ABOUT section if you are interested. My Newsletter
The Little Education Report http://www.thelittleeducationreport.com is now getting over 32000 hits per month and goes to every school in Canada, most federation reps, faculty of ed profs, trustees, MPPs, and labour leaders. I work part time for Vector Polling and Research and I am a political and educational consultant.

That’s enough for me Doug.

Yes they rewarded, I overheard two of my child’s teachers talking about which courses to take. In their conversation they were not talking about which course would best benefit their students, they were indeed talking about which courses to take that would best benefit their pay scale.

How much money do the boards get for each IEP student? My child got 1 hour twice a week plopped in front computer with a useless talking word processing program. I have the program, I wouldn’t use it if it was freeware, This is the standard for all this schools IEP students. We shamed them into teaching Stairway to Reading, My wife went in and taught them how to use the program. She was teaching more than just our child and of course were not suppose to talk about these other students. I assure you it’s worse than you can imagine. The public has no idea how systemic this issue is because the system hides behind the confidentiality shield.
That’s neglect.

We asked several times to have our child held back a grade and got the same “Oh no we do not like to do that!”. Not once were we told it was our right to demand that she be held back.
That’s deceit.

Bottom line is last summer it took us 6 weeks to get to lesson 30 of Stairway to Reading. It took her school less than 3 weeks to destroy all her hard work and self-esteem. We’ve had to start from day one again, we now have her back to lesson 22 with retention.

Mark H, boards don’t get money for IEP’d students, they get money based on enrollment.  Students with identified learning issues and many others too are very badly served in many schools, due largely to the Ministry’s refusal to ensure that teachers of special education actually *know* anything about the special methods needed for particular disabilities and the Ministry’s policy of “including” every child with same-age peers whether that is in the child’s best interest or not. They even have a policy of discouraging parents from seeking special ed identification. Parents are often lied to about their rights and the services available and told that there is nothing that can be done. Children with the mental age of 2 may sit in a Grade 7 class of 34, unable to do any of the work and with no friends and no assistance from paraprofessionals or sped teachers. I have seen this again and again in several schools and more than one board. The only money directed at a particular child is something called a SIP grant for kids who are very violent, or the Special Equipment Allowance (technology) which is often treated as some kind of panacea. Give the kid a computer and everything will be hunky dory. They even recommend this for kids who can’t read or type or verbalize well enough to make any use of the computer!  Lots of those computers end up sitting in their boxes. They refuse to customize the software according to the students’ needs, too.  Kid gets a standard package irregardless. You did the right thing by taking matters intoi your own hands. I have recommended this step to parents who could do it, even if it was a short-term solution, for 6 months to a year, to get the child on track.

I can see Doug has been out of touch, and of course maybe he never saw these things or has forgotten them. Research something called “inattentional blindness”—people don’t see things if they believe the things are impossible or very unlikely.. He can deny the problems if he wants but they are very real and plenty of *teachers* know it.  I am not a conservative either, but I am not impressed with either the liberals or the NDP where education is concerned.

Doug needs to go back to the library and do some research. He doesn’t seem familiar with the research into the fact that low SES students can make the same progress as middle class students during the school year but lose ground over the summer.  I am surprised at these NDPers who profess to be champions of the downtrodden but who maintain that family income is destiny. They sound like social darwinists. Teachers know kids from less advantaged backgrounds can do very well but we need to teach them in a vigorous manner, not wait for their parents to do it. Thei parents often trust us, maybe too much, and are working multiple jobs to survive. Something I hear from many co-workers is the opinion that the system is seriously flawed, not “the best in the world.”  I see too many kids left to fall not between the cracks but into gaping crevasses to be so complacent. 

I thought “Our Schools, Ourselves” was George Martell’s baby, back in the 70’s or 80’s.

George Martell’s baby was This magazine is about schools. He was a cofounder of OSOS with David Clandfield and I. I am highly familiar with all of the research above.

You need to look at the actual results before you call someone a social Darwinist. Until there are serious interventions, income is destiny. Any exceptional individual can succeed but the class based results of any educational outcome measure is totally accurate. It is so accurate it is scary.

You people have far more faith in EQAO than I do. Look at the results on a rich poor basis. The connection is virtually 100%

I think the debate can be summed up by a quote from John Mighton in an article about JUMP Math in today’s Globe & Mail.  When he starts a lesson he says,
“If you don’t get something today, it is my fault, so stop me.”

For those who are unfamiliar with Mighton, he is a mathematician, playwright, and developer of the highly effective JUMP math program.  SQE has long supported JUMP since it is based on direct instruction methods and sequential teaching of math. 

The underlying philosophy behind Mighton’s approach to teaching is NOT blaming the kids.  It doesn’t matter what their SES is, it’s about expecting all children to be able to learn.  If a child doesn’t get it, it is the teaching, not the kid.

Which takes us back to Houston and the value-added concept.  It fits right in with the expectation that the education system should stop making excuses for the type of students they must deal with and find the best methods to teach them.

“It fits right in with the expectation that the education system should stop making excuses for the type of students they must deal with and find the best methods to teach them.” 

So, it blows the whole notion of socio-economics out of the water? Is that what you’re saying Doretta?

Is education always about the money? More and more and more of it?

Seems to me there will come a tipping point at which the public wants to see exactly that value-added product
that Houston is adopting.

Everybody likes JUMP math and John Mighton.

Of course everybody attempts to do everything they can to mitigate the educational situation of the poor but to attemt to deny there is a relationship flies in the face of all legitimate educational research.

Nobody is saying poor people are inherently less capable but the lives they are forced to lead with constant moving, lack of nutrition, low birthweight babys, late to get glasses, late to have teeth fixed, often poor role models, no place to study, often few books or newspapers in the home, lack of stimulating summer activities, and many more reasons take a severe toll on students academic prospects. These can be offset to a considerable degree by smaller classes, good teachers and principals, ECE, organized enriching summer programs free tuition, and many other reforms but if we are going to make real progress we need to reduce poverty at the same time. Canada lags many other countries in the % of children in poverty. Higher minimum wages, and more social supports are a major part of any long term solution.

The New York Times is soliciting readers’ opinions on the what and how of teacher evaluation.

Go here:
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/teacher-q-how-should-teachers-be-evaluated/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Doug, these “excuses” for poor learning can be offset best by proven effective teaching.  ‘nuff said on this today.

Everybody familiar with schools knows these are not excuses they are reality. These conditions CAN be offset at least to a large extent by effective teaching yes everybody agrees with that, there is no consensus on what proven effective teaching is and the consensus that does exist does not make much room for phonics and DI. I know the majority of people behind SQE just plain believe that these are the facts but you have to get out more and stop just talking to each other.