What’s just the norm in the private sector leaves all of us speechless when it happens to teachers:  staff being fired for not doing their jobs, either willfully, or because they’re incompetent.
Quite frankly, if average income is only $22,000/annum, educaon has no business burdening the taxpayers in RI with teachers’ salaried averaging $75,000/annum.

perhaps Ontario should invest in their trustee training manual? I wish ours had that kind of authority/clout.

authority, clout, nerve, and the right agenda, Chuck.

1) You will notice that this is one of the poorest communities in Rhode Island. I rest my case on the poverty/achievement link.

2) The boards behaviour is totally outragous. They need to be paying extra for extra time and it should be at a premium rate. You don’t get something for nothing.

The teachers union ought to warn every teacher thinking of working at that school tht they will be considered to be scabs and the next time the contract is up they should not sign until all the eachers are restored to their positions.

The board is acting as if the teachers had something to do with the low achievement. How stupid are they?

The board is saying exactly what likely that whole community is intimately aware of.

That while the teachers may not have had anything to do with the low achievement, neither did they do anything to help it.

They did the right thing - the union has no power in this case. The power to help this community is in exactly the right place.

Helloooo…
some of these arguments defy logic—if teachers are ineffectual when it comes to educating children from poor backgrounds, then why do we have teachers in the first place?
Obviously if the household income is the deciding factor, then the other side of the coin is that the teachers aren’t doing anything for the well-to-do children either—it’s the home environment. 
So again, why do we have teachers?

Bev you are so far out, it is hard to know where to start with you. Almost every expert on education you will ever find anywhere will tell you that the greatest preditor of education success is the SES of the family. Why do we have teachers? Listen very carefully, “because it would be even worse if we did not have teachers”.

Wealthy areas get teachers as well because it is a public system.

Can we do something about it? Sure lots of things, ECE, slash class sizes again, get a good principal in there, recruit the best teachers you can find and pay a bonus to work in Central Falls but most of all fix the health, housing and income supports in the community. A nice “PUBLIC OPTION” health system would be a good start.

Bev is asking a very logical question.

If the the schools on the average - I don’t want to hurt the few good people that I’m sure exist in any system - don’t make a difference as shown by the very high correlation between achievement and household income, what public service do they deliver, what common good do they serve?

Mr. Little, I find the way you address Bev impolite because you talk down to him and label him.

Also, Mr. Little you do make logically contradictory statements.

It is not so much talking down as talking across the Grand Canyon. Funny, I assumed Bev was a woman but Bev is one of those names that can go either way.

From Europe, There is no jurisdiction on earth where the poor on average, out perform the middle class let alone the rich in education. None, not even one. Not China, Russia, USA, UK, Canada, France, Africa, not one. The point is that the poor would be doing EVEN WORSE if not for public education. Can they do even better? Yes but this requires a much more significant investment in the poor both inside and outside of school.

In school, we require bonus payments to attract the best teachers to the worst schools but we also require much smaller classes, much more ECE, much better resources (text, science labs, etc…). The good news is that massive educational investments in the poor are free because the cost recovery in productivity, and reduced social cost FAR outweigh the initial costs in far better schools. The intelligent elements of the business community is beginning to realize that the public school system is the nations incubator of human capital which for the future of business, is the only variable factor. More money spent on public schools = higher profits and more jobs in business before we even consider the spin off benefits of equity and sheer human happiness. The sky should be the limit on education expenditure.

We just saw the benefits of an “Own the Podium” human capital development of our athletes. We need to see the same effort put into our schools.

“I assumed Bev was a woman but Bev is one of those names that can go either way.”

  You just blew it Doug. That’s a best admission yet of being blinded by one’s own puffery.

Chuck,
What the heck are you talking about? Who would know whether someone named Bev, or Pat or any other number of names is a man or a woman or whether it makes any difference unless they were to tell us one way or another. If that is some kind of “gotcha” in your head Chuck then that is the only place it exists. Why don’t you debate the issues Chuck? Cat got your tongue?

Chuck,

Ask yourself if “blinded by one’s own puffery” is the type of language that you want to use or model for the board. I was just admonished for “talking down to Bev by “talking down to him” somehow by pointing out that she/he was far off from any expert opinion.

Dr Ron Paige, the secretary of education under Bush has a new book out, you can see the discussion at the Thomas Fordham website. I’m sure some of you know about it. His book is about challenging the black leadership in America to take up the cause of the Achievement Gap. Paige, a black conservative, points out that what NCLB DRAMATICALLY shows is that there is an achievement gap in America that follows the contours of race and class. He acknowledges that there are 3 explanations of the gap. 1) The liberal explanation is based on SES in that American black people are also much poorer than white people on average. He says, for liberals, SES explains the gap sightly compounded by the embers of residual racism in the USA. 2) He says that there is a conservative arguement that situates failure within black culture. It would involve too many fatherless families, too much emphasis on rap and basketball and not enough on science and math, lack of drive etc. Paige acknowledges a third argument which he says is the residual racist argument explored in the Bell Curve book which attempted to show that black people are just academically inferior. He dismisses the 3rd argument for what it is racist.

I would say people should take their pick of the liberal, conservative or racist arguments on the class/race issue in education but the denial of the existence of the gap has a certain Flat Earth Society quality to it. Just not credible in any serious circles.

Very glad that you raised the “Own the Podium” comparison Doug because one of the program’s developers was just on TV and said that the success of the program wasn’t the money, it was how the money was spent.

Athlete choose their coaches and trainers freely, not at all like the school system.

Given that the Olympics is the EQAO in the athletic skills excellence department, and the goal of every athlete who competes is that gold medal, competition and rankings have a very important role to play.

If coaches don’t perform, and that performance isn’t measured by wins, or hardware, coaches are fired.

Money is no measure of quality, either in sport or in education.

Money is no measure of quality.

A steak dinner= a happy meal
A CEO=a shop floor worker
A Cadillac= A Chevy

Money buys quality notasheep. Better teachers cost more. Better books, buildings spots equipment, science labs, smaller classes, ECE, and every single imput into the education program costs more if you want quality.

The idea that we are going to have some kind of privatized education system without unions, where you can take public money and do whatever you like with it is just not going to happen and I think the thinking people on the board know it.

You can have tirades and jump up and down but Ontarians want their public dollars invested in their public schools. Those who propose anything else will get the John Tory answer real quick. Keep dreamin though.

I agree notasheep—it’s how the money is spent, and didn’t ‘Own The Podium’ method work well, with our Canadian athletes breaking records winning 14 gold!

Your using Own the Podium was a non-starter in this discussion Doug. That was what I addressed. You seem to pull the rest out of thin air.

The reason Little’s comparison doesn’t hold water is that athletes and their families can choose and pay for quality coaches and trainers, AND the expectation is excellence, in Own the Podium’s case gold medals.

I found it rich that Little uses OTP and EQAO is evil - not many can speak out of both sides of their mouths.

Darling-Hammond in her latest book says lets put an end to these false dicotomies in education like spending. The debate should not be between, “we need a lot more money” and “we need to spend more wisely”. She combines the two to say “we need a lot more money spent wisely.”

The money needs to be spent on teacher salaries, teacher training and in-service training and class size reduction.

We are the world’s silver medal holder in education as the world’s second best education system. With a national effort like the Olympics we can take the gold medal and have the best education results in the world. We are close now.

No successful country in education or even rapidly emerging country uses choice as anything but a tiny sidebar in its educational efforts. Diane Ravitch is rapidly destroying the choice/testing regime south of the border.

there we have it folks. The “EQAO is evil” touter is measuring and ranking because it suits his argument.

one mouth = both sides

case closed.

So approximately 40% of Ontario students don’t know how to read, spell and do basic math at grade level in grade3 and Canada has the second best education system in the world ...

Must I add that that is Ontario’s grade3 expectations which are lower than the ones in other countries?

Mr.Little, I have no ideea if you are indeed representative of teacher thinking or not, but if you are then it is scary, really scary because you have no connection to parent’s reality.
You have very low standards for the children’s you profess to care about!

‘we need a lot more money spent wisely’ in the context above is ambiguous.  Is the rest of Darling-Hammond’s book the same?  Perhaps she’s just another tragedy of our current educational system…

To not a sheep,
Testing increases the dropout rate, proven by multiple studies = case closed
Testing narrows the curriculum jamming the arts, social sciences and other subjects = case closed
Testing and Choice are the two factors ruining American education, Diane Ravitch = case closed.
20 years of NCLB has not helped America improve, in fact it is falling internationally = case closed
Testing is not good or even neutral for the system it actually makes the situation worse.

To “Europe” according to PISA and the OECD no nation on Earth has a higher % of literate 15 year old than Canada except Finland and they are only ahead by a tiny margin.

I want to do better, much better of course but we must acknowledge honestly where we actually are. I advocate spending much more money on teacher education, smaller classes and ECE earlier, and in the summer.

To Bev, Do you understand what LDH is saying? She is saying first we need to spend a great deal more money but we must spend that money + what we already spend better. Better means investing in teacher training, salarys and class size. It is not a question of spend more OR spend better. It is a matter of spend more AND spend better.

you can hang on whatever spin you wish Doug, but when all is said and done you used comparison and measurement to forward your own agenda(I say that because you sure as heck aren’t representative of anything but your own views.).

The flip-side of that of course is that you see the measurement via EQAO as “evil” because it does what yo don’t want it to, which is show less than stellar results even after the continual drip,drip,drip money infusions.

You tried to run these same arguments at every blog you’ve decided to visit. The Mended folks didn’t buy what you’re selling so it’s no surprise to me at all that the folks here don’t either. Even the common sense RetDir
admitted that quality is not about money.

More money?
You must be kidding.
At about $10.000 per student and salaries between 45.000 to 70.000 and good benefits I think there is enough money in the system.

At this price points if there were magnet schools in the public system where principals had real power to make decisions about hiring and spending and the parents could choose and commit the school their child is attending you would have better results than 40% of the students not knowing the basics.
Why don’t we look at the public system in Edmonton, here in Canada?

There is enough money in the system.
At $10.000 per student per year or more if the student has problems there would be some charter schools.

More teacher training? What kind of teacher training? We need different teacher training.
Teachers currently have at least a batchelor degree plus teacher’s college.
So there’s at least 5 to 6 years of training.
Being such a big investment of their lives and being young and idealistic I’m sure most students studying to become a teacher are studying hard.
So it must be how the to be teachers are selected and what they are studying.

Even smaller class sizes?
Can we please look at the root of the problem ....

If you had all the students in a class at roughly grade level you could teach one lesson to all and give feedback on the knowledge in that one lesson to all students.
The problem is not class sizes, the problem is that the students in a class are not at grade level due to poor teaching and social promotion in the past.
If you had clear expectations of the end of each grade level and social promotion will be stopped, the problem would go away.

FYI - You may be familiar with the high level of math proficiency chinese and coreean and east-european students have compared to canadian students in the same grade.
A lot of such immigrant students are evaluated and made to skip a grade even though their English may be very basic.
Class size in China are 30s-40s and even 50s, in eastern Europe mid 30s.

So, the money is there in my opinion.
The important thing is how we spend it and what kind of teaching methods we employ.

“The Mended people are quite mixed NAS, some on both sides.

“Quality is not about money?” You actually believe that? You are very naive my friend.

The studies are in on testing which is why Diane Ravitch (among hundreds of other experts) says testing is destroying educaton but I’m sure you know more.

In fact the EQAO results show great results. I don’t believe them because they are not the same test every time, not the same rules every time, many other changes.

Go tell you parent friends that since money doesn’t buy quality we have decided to spend more money on other schools but not yours since you don’t need it. Your argument is a joke.

Even the business community, and you know how much they love taxes, is beginning to realize that if we don’t SPEND A LOT MORE MONEY on education, we will just not be internationally competitive.

Do you have any idea how many engineers and scientists China and India are graduating these days? Do you? Guess what, for us to compete we need more secondary students to enter university in more buildings that are bigger with more profs in them than ever before. Guess what noasheep- it ain’t free. It ain’t free from K-university.

Depends what you want I guess. You want Canada to move ahead and create a nation where more people are useful and happy there is a BIG price tag for that.

1) Your argument is full of holes. Koreans (I assume you mean the south) are in classes of 30 now to which they attribute a great deal of their spectacular gains in recent years.
2) If you want to attract the best people to any field you need to pay wages that actually attracts them out of other fields. Teachers make less for the same education than almost anybody in their education bracket.

3) Ontario spends the least per student of any province west of us and even Quebec spends more. Newfoundland will pass us very soon, they are right behind us.

4) Charter schools have lower academic performance that public schools. They are no answer.

5) Social promotion? Are you still on that old chestnut? Every scrap of research says retaining kids at grade level causes them to do worse.

6) Our poor teaching has created the world’s second most literate 15 year olds and the highest rate in the world of post secondary education.

7) Smaller class sizes, 18 at the most, are directly related to academic achievement.

8) Nothing special in Edmonton, Calgary has better results.

9) Highest ranked nation on Earth does the most teacher training, guess who?

10) where do you get this skip a grade for immigrants stuff? Off the top of your head?

11) The spelling of Korean is just wild and Chinese gets a capital letter.

Mr.Little, I agree with you that a student that needs to repeat a grade level because he hasn’t learned would be hurt.

I would argue the child would be hurt less in the long run than if allowed to cruise and keep falling behind quietly and then two or three years later be told he has “learning disabilities” so he has to lower his expectations.

The question is: why, after being taught by a certified teacher and after $10.000 has been spent on his attending school that year, the student is not at grade level?

I am against social promotion because social promotion covers up problems and therefore allows them to grow bigger and hurt the student more.

I am against social promotion because parents don’t even know that their child is not at grade level.
That means that they are not able to seek help sooner rather than later.

I am against social promotion because it hurts the other students in that classroom.

It hurts the other students motivation by having different expectations for different students and therefore why work and study if it doesn’t seem to matter?
It hurts the other student’s fairness, because if they all pass anyway, why bother ?

It hurts the other students ability to learn as much as they should for the current grade level because now the teacher, if he is able and wants to do a good job, has to either:
a) divide the teaching time between the students at grade level and the ones that are not at grade level.
This results in less teaching time per group and in discipline problems
b) dumb everything down so hopefully each student would get something out of it.
This results in the students that are not at grade level falling further behind and in the students at grade level being bored.

These are the practical, real life problems of social promotion.

The question is: if the student has been taught why he hasn’t learned?
Could there be a problem with the teaching?

Why isn’t the student at grade level?
Why is this situation hidden from the parents? What good does that do?

There is a strong belief around here that “if the student has not learned, the teacher has not taught”.

People who are close to schools, not just teachers but proncipals, supers, directors, psychologists know that this is simply not true.

If the patient dies, did the Dr not heal? If the legal case is lost, did the lawyer not argue? if there is crime in the city, did the police not police?

Teaching and learning are two different things as anyone who has actually done it knows. I was a high school teacher for many years so I will use HS examples but ES is basically the same.

1) Some children have a great deal of difficulty learning.
2) Some children are very seldom in the building let alone the class
3) Some children resist learnng for a host of reasons
4) Some children are bone lazy
5) Some children have many more problems than just school, drugs, alcohol, divorce, abuse, FAS, etc
6) Some children are quite good at one subject and try quite hard but have a great deal of difficulty with another subject.

I am quite aware that the chorus around here will say “these are just excuses.” Try it some time, then talk. If you are not a teacher you just have no clue how difficult it is.

fromEurope, I’m sorry that someone on the blog insulted your spelling.  Of course other languages spell countries and nationalities differently than we do.  You have the good fortune to be fluent in more than one language.  (I wish our children here had the same opportunity.)
I’ve warned people from both Europe and Asia who were trying to decide whether or not to immigrate to Canada to beware of our educational system!  I hope that you send this blog to anyone in your country whom you know is considering settling here:  they need to see what it’s like before making a decision…

Ya that Canadian system is pretty bad. Second highest 15 year old literacy rate in the world, highest rate of post secondary grads in the world. Ya I would be nervous about a system like that.

Yes, my native language took over and my spelling was incorrect in this case.

I learned English in school, in a public school. The teaching approach was the “old-fashioned” one, we were taught spelling, reading, english grammar, we had big one hour tests at the end of each semester where we had to correcly solve grammar exercises and to retell Jerome.K.Jerome stories or to write compositions in English.

How many Ontario students are able to follow instructions or read papers written in French?

I used to believe in a centralized public system; there are such systems around that still seem to produce produce literate students in other places such as France for example.
But there, in France, most people share the same beliefs. There, in France they have a national curriculum, they all use the same textbooks across the country. Based on what people have told me, if you go to any school in France in any let’s say grade 3 class, in all these classes the students would be working on material in the exact same chapter within a few pages difference from one class to another.
The same performance is expected from all the students.
Parents can always tell what their children are working on and what they are expected to know.

They have the baccalaureat as an exit exam.

Personally, I would be very happy with a public school system like the French one.

I don’t think such a system is possible here.

It is a different culture in North America and people have different beliefs and backgrounds.

Moreover, at the present time, there is a belief that if something cannot be learned right away with very little effort, then that’s something that a person is simply not good at and cannot be learned. That’s one of the reasons that makes it very acceptable here for students to not be expected to learn things that would be considered basic in other cultures - things like grammar, geography, a second language.

Taking into account that here, in Canada the people have different expectations abouth how schools should do things I think the only fair way to spend the taxpayer’s money, our money, would be to set provincial or national minimum standards, enforced by exit exams or admission exams and give real autonomy inside the public system to have different types of schools or to allow charter schools.

Right now, standard tests at the end of each school year, exit exams and admission exams would very quickly give feedback both to students and to teachers and would let parents know about what exactly is expected and how their children are doing.

Check this one.

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/03/ravitch-on-central-falls-massacre.html/

More on Ravitch

Your link above is not working, Doug

I did get something here that’s very interesting.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/search?q=Ravitch

Ravitch admits that the testing business is rife with corruption and institutionalized fraud.  David Johnson from CDHowe said “gaming the system” goes on in standardized testing.

So, I think it’s not the idea of evaluations and accountability measures that’s wrong. It’s the fact that this is abused, undermined, manipulated in a 100 different ways by defensive educators and administrators.

If proper testing is to be done it should be done by disinterested third parties whose job it is to evaluate according to some understood and accepted standards. This audit should be done by qualified professionals who do not have a stake in the results.

I don’t know who these authorities are that can do this provincially.  Obviously the testing done for OECD, PISA, TIMMS testing must be credible, otherwise we wouldn’t be referring to these.

So, there goes Ravitch’s argument against testing.  She shouldn’t say she’s against accountability testing.  She should say she against the fraud that’s going on in the name of testing.

So, now about her opposition to choice.

I’ve just received her book and just had time to check my favorite topic: parent involvement.  I think my view that she is contemptuous of parents still holds, even though I’ve seen this attitude in other of her writings and presentations.  What I have seen in her book so far is the simple view that parents’ job is first, to get the kids school ready, and second, to read to them at home, support them, etc.

Nowhere do I see her endorsing parents as being instrumental in the education of their children, that it is parents’ right and duty to see that their children are educated. 

Her consistent view throughout her career, left, right or center, is that it is the education establishment that is to do the job.  I don’t think she would ever endorse a parents’ bill of rights in the education of their children!
http://education-advisory.org/Involved/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/parent-rights-and-their-children.pdf

As long as she is still wedded to the system her biases will remain. .  As long as she still is a Director of the Albert Shanker Institute which is funded and housed at the American Federation of Teachers HQ in Washington, DC, I will continue to see her as in the pocket of teacher unions.  Albert Shanker, president of the AFT from ’74-’97 never, to my knowledge, disavowed being a Marxist.

So as long as that is her bias and special interest, naturally she is not going to endorse vouchers or charters as part of any choice or alternatives for parents and students.

Albert Shanker died as a Neo-Con. Nobody considered him a Marxist for the last 20 years of his life. I see that Joe McCarthy is live and well here though.

The American reform movement has gone into a total funk over this book with all of the wind gone from their sails. Even Chester Finn now says NCLB and Charters have failed and reformers need new models.

It is all over for the testing/charter movement, here is some Kleenex.

Tunya, the reason even progressives support PISA and TIMMS is:

1) They are based on randomly selected kids. No school or student needs to be stigmatized. Even the teacher’s federations support this direction as opposed to EQAO.

2) They are based on inquiry, critical thinking and problem solving, the superior end of the curriculum.

3) Only countries and sometimes provinces are reported. They can take it.