Society for Quality Education

Volume 19, Number 2, June 2010. ISSN-1201-215

FROM THE PRESIDENT

The Society for Quality Education is the only group dedicated to improving the quality of Canadian schools. Because we receive no government funding, we rely completely on the financial support of hundreds of people like you - people who want to make it possible for every Canadian child to succeed in school. Your gift is tax-deductible and, if you choose to donate shares to SQE, we can issue a tax receipt that lets you claim a deduction in the amount of the stock's current value but exempts you from capital gains tax on its appreciated value. To donate to SQE, click here.

If you wish to honour someone on a special occasion, such as a birthday or Father's Day, you can do this through CanadaHelps by including this information when you make your donation. We will send an e-card to the honouree informing him or her that you have made a donation in his or her name. If you are marking a life passage, such as a wedding or a funeral, and would like people to make a donation to SQE in lieu of gifts or flowers, we would be happy to set up a special CanadaHelps page for this purpose.

If you know of a friend or relative who would be interested in something in this newsletter, you can forward it to him or her by clicking here.

Last issue, we polled you about your use of paid tutors, with the majority of respondents (61%) indicating that they had done so. If you would like to express your opinion regarding school vouchers, please vote in this month's poll, by clicking here and then scrolling down to the bottom of the page. At the moment, the poll is showing 84% of respondents in favour of school vouchers.

Best regards, Malkin

MAIL BAG

School Choice in Rural Communities

In reading this month's FOOD FOR THOUGHT on the number of different kinds of schools that are possible, I thought I would write to pre-empt the inevitable protestations from people who live in rural communities. My rural Vermont school district has just over 3,000 inhabitants and for more than 30 years we have had school choice in our middle school program (grades 7 and 8). There are only 100 students in the program, and we provide a voucher for approximately $10,000 to each student. This year, we have a dozen public and independent schools servicing these 100 students. Some of the schools educate only one of our students! Interestingly, we find that the school choice provision is a much less expensive way (30% less) for our small community to provide the diversified education our parents and their children have come to enjoy. In one instance, an entirely new independent school was created to satisfy a specific demand, and it has been very successful over the ten years of its existence. Students who prefer to focus on arts and humanities attend schools with that emphasis. Students who prefer boarding schools use the voucher to migrate out of town. Students who prefer regular public school (primarily for the athletic competition, it seems) choose local public schools. Westminster, VT

Assessing Private Schools

I was inspired by your Aunt Malkin column to send for your free book, and I must say I just couldn't put it down. It was far more readable and funny that an education reform book is supposed to be! Anyhow, the most relevant part to me was the section on how to evaluate private schools, as we are currently shopping for a better school for our two children. There is a bewildering variety of schools out there, 944 of them in Ontario as we speak, and more every day it seems. It's really hard to get a handle on whether a particular school is doing a good job or not. I wish these schools were required to administer standardized tests and make the results public. Toronto, ON

Spoiled Kids

I'm a graduate engineer who recently made a mid-life switch into teaching high school, and already I have a reputation of being a "hard-ass". I guess that means I don't put up with any crap, and that is true. The fact that my students actually have to work to pass my classes appears to offend some of my students, and unfortunately in some cases their parents support their slothful children. Last month, one of my students was talking while others were writing a test. After I had asked him several times to stop talking, I picked up the end of a table and banged it on the floor to get his attention. I also told him that if he was unable to follow instructions he would go nowhere in life (I thought, and still think, that this is an excellent bit of information), but he told his mom that I tried to scare him with the table banging and told him he would go nowhere in life. His mom refused to accept my version of the story and laced into me saying I had been very unprofessional. It made me feel like quitting teaching. London, ON

Class Size

As with so much in the education field, there are polar-opposite opinions to be found everywhere. One of the much-cited class-size studies, "STAR" from the state of Tennessee, purports to who big performance differences, but in fact does no such thing. They compared the performances of a group of classes with 16 students with those of a group of classes with 23 students. The main conclusion was displayed in a bar graph with a suppressed zero that exaggerated the visual difference by a factor of five to one. The actual differences in performance were in the 1-2% range, well within the efforts of measurement - a fact not mentioned in the report but obscured by paragraphs of pseudo-scientific statistical bafflegab. Also not mentioned was the fact that, if the recommended changes were made, system costs would rise by 57%. This was a disgracefully disreputable report. Burlington, ON

ASK AUNT MALKIN

A veteran of the school wars herself, with the scars to prove it, Malkin Dare always has lots of advice to offer. If you want some been-there-done-that advice from Aunt Malkin, call her at 519-884-3166 or e-mail her.

Question

I have an 11-year-old boy who has a lot of difficulty reading. He's interested in hockey, drums, mystery, etc., but I can't find good books for him at the proper level. The books he CAN read are all way too young for him. I cannot afford to buy a program, but I am interested in finding out what books I can get for him. Rosy, Regina, SK

Answer

Without knowing more about your son's reading profile, I can make only general comments.

Here is an article on struggling readers that you might find of interest, along some of the links on the page. The type of books you're looking for are called "high-interest low-vocabulary" (HiLo) books, and most school and public libraries have a good selection of them (reflecting the huge numbers of reluctant readers out there). If you want more leads in this area, just say the word.

But my first question is always - exactly why does your son prefer not to read? If the answer is that he finds reading too hard, then my recommendation would be that you start providing him with remedial teaching. After all, how much would you enjoy watching even the most fascinating movie if the whole thing was in slow motion with muffled sound? That's what reading is like for people who have to struggle to decode the words. Click here for an explanation of what is happening in readers' brains as they develop into fluent readers (or not).

I would be able to be much more specific if I knew how your son fared on our free diagnostic reading test (it takes only a few minutes). If you do decide to go ahead with this, just let me know how he does and then I will be able to make more personalized recommendations.

Regards, Aunt Malkin

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

The following is a sort of guest editorial, which we adapted slightly with permission from an article by John Carpay of the Canadian Constitution Foundation. The adaptation involved primarily the substitution of the word "education" or "schools" for the words "health care" and the removal of specific medical examples.

Shortages of toilet paper were a regular occurrence in Poland under communism. As a Canadian teenager visiting friends behind the Iron Curtain in 1984, I found the level of poverty in this 'planned economy' shocking.

Waiting lists for even the most basic consumer goods were the inevitable result of replacing prices in a free market with bureaucratic edict. Poland's central planners were probably highly educated, and they probably did their very best to determine how many rolls of toilet paper should be produced each year, and where and when and how they should be distributed and ultimately 'sold' for money that had little real value. But the problem with a planned economy is that no single person - or even a group of people - can acquire all the economic information that is necessary to ensure that everyone gets the goods and services they need, in a timely manner, as cheaply as possible.

When it comes to laundry detergent, vegetables, steaks, houses, cars, and thousands of different goods, Canadians benefit from free market competition each day. The same goes for services. Canada's lawyers, auto mechanics and massage therapists operate freely (more or less), and they price their supply to match consumer demand. There are no shortages of accountants, carpenters and counsellors. Nobody waits for months to see a hairdresser, or to take Fido to the veterinarian. Competition in a free market keeps prices as low as reasonably possible, and the quality as high as reasonably possible. Over time, the prices of computers have come down, while their capacity and quality have improved.

Yet, mysteriously, the positive results of the free market - demonstrated anew each day - are instantly forgotten when it comes to education. People who would otherwise recognize and understand the benefits of supply, demand, prices and competition will suddenly abandon all reason and common sense when the topic is education.

A large percentage of Canadians actually believe that high-quality, cost-effective and readily available schools will flow magically from the amazing minds of education bureaucrats who centrally plan the spending of tax dollars.

In 1984, Poland's central planners, having legislated supply, demand and prices out of existence, tried to ensure adequate supplies of toilet paper to all people at all times in all parts of the country. It didn't work. In 2010, Canada's education bureaucrats, equally ignoring supply, demand and prices, are trying to ensure excellent schools for all students at all times. It, too, can't work, and won't work.

Regardless of how smart and educated and sincere Canadian bureaucrats might be, like the Polish central planners they lack the necessary information that comes from millions of voluntary interactions between buyers and sellers in a market economy.

But what about people who couldn't afford to pay for education on the free market? Students in Chile, Holland, Australia, Sweden, and dozens of other countries have access to excellent schools regardless of ability to pay. These countries have found ways for government to fund education for all, but without ignoring - or trying to abolish - the reality of supply, demand, competition and prices. Their public and private education systems operate harmoniously side by side. Canada should follow these examples.

WHAT'S NEW?

Go to School for Thought for breaking education news, helpful teaching tips, and heated debates. Join in the conversation.

BOOKS OF INTEREST

The Genius in All of Us: Why everything you've been told about genetics, talent, and IQ is wrong. David Shenk

This book makes the case that élite performance is the result of hard work, perseverance, and purposeful practice - as opposed to inborn gifts. While it may be tempting - even comforting - to think that the reason you aren't a great opera singer or golfer is because of the way you are wired, it turns out that almost anyone can achieve greatness if he or she is prepared to make the necessary sacrifices. The problem is not inadequate genetic assets, but rather the inability or unwillingness to tap into what we already have. The book presents cutting-edge research from a wide variety of disciplines - cognitive science, genetics, biology, and child development - to bolster this argument. The excerpt discusses the reasons why the Suzuki method of teaching violin works so well.

Excerpt (pp. 110-111)

"In 1931, a young Japanese violinist and instructor named Shinichi Suzuko was teaching a violin class composed mostly of young men. After class one day he was approached by the father of a four-year-old boy: would he consider teaching the gentleman's son?

"Suzuki was startled and dumbfounded. He had no idea if a four-year-old could learn to play violin and little idea how to instruct him. While rehearsing shortly afterward, though, a profound thought struck him: virtually all Japanese children learn to speak Japanese - early, and with precision. 'The children of Osaka speak the difficult Osaka dialect,' Suzuki thought to himself. '[They] are unable to speak the Tohoku dialect, but the Tohoku children speak it. Isn't that something of an accomplishment?'

"The obvious lesson, Suzuki surmised, was this: through extraordinary repetition, parental persistence, and strong cultural reinforcement, every young child masters this steep technical challenge Why couldn't this lesson apply just as directly to music?

"So Suzuki did accept four-year-old Toshiya Eto as a pupil and began to develop a method of instruction he called the 'mother-tongue method'. He emphasized heavy parent involvement, steady practice, memorization, and lots of patience. (In retrospect, the parallels between Suzuki's approach and young Mozart's musical development are uncanny.) Little Toshiya Eto responded beautifully, prompting Suzuki to recruit more young pupils and refine his methods further. He quickly came to believe, in fact, that early musical training has an overwhelming advantage over later training and that it was a gateway to an enlightened life.

"He also began to attract attention. A few years into his radical experiment, Suzuki featured seven-year-old Toshiya and several other young students in a public performance. A local newspaper became fixated on the marvels of three-year-old Koji Toyoda, who played one of Dvorak's 'Humoresques' on a one-sixteenth-size violin. 'A Genius Appears!' ran the headline. Suzuki was horrified by this interpretation. '[Before the concert], I had told journalists: talent is not inherent or inborn, but trained and educated...I had put emphasis on this and had repeated it.' The message was just as important to Suzuki as his method: gifts and talents, he was convinced, were not exclusive to the privileged few; with the right training and persistence, anyone could achieve remarkable success."

Nurture Shock: New thinking about children. Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman.

This fascinating book applies recent research about kids to current child-raising and child-educating practices - and finds that many of our current instincts are backfiring. It turns out that we are making mistakes on the basis of two key fallacies: The Fallacy of Similar Effect (the assumption that things work for kids the same way they work for adults); and the Fallacy of the Good/Bad Dichotomy (the tendency to think that things are either good or bad for kids and that if we could just instill supertraits like honesty and empathy in our children they would be impervious to problems). The excerpt discusses one example of the Fallacy of Similar Effect - namely, belief that telling kids that they're smart will bolster their self-esteem and motivate them to try harder.

Excerpt (pp 14-15)

"Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles - puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, 'You must be smart at this.'' Other students were praised for their effort: 'You must have worked really hard.'

"Why just a single line of praise? 'We wanted to see how sensitive children were,' Dweck explained. 'We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.'

"Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they'd learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck's team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The 'smart' kids took the cop-out.

"Why did this happen? 'When we praise children for their intelligence,' Dweck wrote in her study summary, 'we tell them that this is the name of the game: look smart, don't risk making mistakes.' And that's what the fifth-graders had done. They'd chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

"In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study's start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn't focused hard enough on this test. 'They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,' Dweck recalled. 'Many of them remarked, unprovoked, 'This is my favorite test.'' Not so for those praised for their smarts. 'They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren't really smart at all. 'Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.'

"Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck's researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significant improved on their first score - by about 30 percent. Those who'd been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning - by about 20 percent.

"Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. 'Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,' she explains. 'They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.'"

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

This site provides links to 100 webcams of interest to kids - some educational, some humorous, some just plain interesting. Enjoy virtual travel to the Hekla volcano in Iceland, the Panama Canal, a penguin enclosure at the Montreal biodome, New York's ground zero, a dog grooming school in San Marcos, and many more.