Society for Quality Education

Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2011. ISSN-1201-215

FROM THE PRESIDENT

In this issue, you'll find the usual great information. Aunt Malkin explains how to find a good public school for your children. The letters to the editor contain the usual wide-ranging assortment of news and opinion from a variety of viewpoints. There's a book excerpt with an amazing insight on how to reach autistic children. And for Ontario residents, we provide information on the political parties' education platforms for the coming election.

Our blog is always fun and interesting, and you can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

If you enjoy reading our newsletter, you can help pay for the ink by clicking on the donate button conveniently located at the top of the screen.

Best regards, Malkin

ONTARIO ELECTION - OCT. 6, 2011

Ontario goes to the polls on Thursday, October 6. There are 12 registered political parties in the province. Here, in alphabetical order, is each party and its highlighted position(s) on education policy, in 25 words or less.

Communist Party of Ontario: No education policies found online

Family Coalition party of Ontario: Favours school choice

Freedom Party of Ontario: Favours prohibition of religion in public schools

Green Party of Ontario: No education policies found online

Ontario Liberal Party: Stands on its record, promising to stick with smaller class sizes and full-day kindergarten

Ontario Libertarian Party: Favours the end of government involvement in education

Ontario New Democratic Party: Favours mandatory physical education in high school

Ontario Provincial Confederations of Regions Party: No education policy found online

Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario: Favours increased spending, all-day kindergarten, increased teacher autonomy, crackdown on bullying, and paycheque protection for teachers so union members are not forced to pay fees towards political causes they don't support.

Reform Party of Ontario: No education policies found online

Republican Party of Ontario: No information found online

Party for People With Special Needs: No education policies found online

This month, our poll (scroll down) is asking Ontarians how they plan to vote in the coming provincial election. So far, it looks like a Conservative sweep!

ASK AUNT MALKIN

A veteran of the school wars herself, with the scars to prove it, Malkin Dare has had lots of experience dealing with education problems. If you want some been-there-done-that advice, give her a call at 519-884-3166 or e-mail her.

Question

My children's school doesn't do very well on the provincial tests. My principal says I shouldn't pay any attention to the results, since they are not measuring the things the teachers are teaching. Should I worry? Christie, London

Answer

Do you really expect the principal to say, "Yikes, we must be doing a bad job. We'll get on it right away"? So obviously, you must take his or her comments with a grain of salt.

Ontario's provincial tests are designed to measure students' mastery of the provincial curriculum. It would be reasonable to expect the school's teachers to teach the provincial curriculum (despite its flaws) - since they are legally required to do so. You would certainly be justified in asking the principal why his or her teachers are not teaching the provincial curriculum..

It is also true that the tests are not ideal. They are subjective, biased against boys and disadvantaged students, expensive, and time-consuming, and their feedback is delayed and limited. Nevertheless, they are all we have at present, and they do tell us something. Generally speaking, and taking into consideration the students' backgrounds, good schools tend to do well on the tests and bad schools don't. There can be quite a difference among schools.

Two institutions have compared the performance of individual Ontario schools with similar student populations and characteristics. They are the Fraser Institute and the C. D. Howe Institute. The Fraser institute has also compared schools in Alberta, BC, Quebec, and Washington. As well, the Montreal Economic Institute has compared Quebec schools, and the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies has compared schools in Atlantic Canada.

You wouldn't pick your lawyer on the basis of her office location, would you? Why then would you automatically choose your children's school just because it's handy? In most communities today, you can - and should - shop for your children's school. Just as some lawyers are better than others, so too are schools. It may be time for some retail therapy!

MAIL BAG

Underprepared Undergraduates

Although I support the universities' remedial writing programs and think they're doing an excellent job, it very much annoys me that they have to offer such programs. It's far too late and far too expensive to give universities the responsibility of teaching the kind of skills I learned before I entered high school. I gather that numeracy is in the same sad state.... Etobicoke, ON

Allies of Good Education

I'm glad to learn that you support the efforts of people who try to mitigate the negative effects of the education system, but I'd like to add another category of participant in the process - the tutor or peer assistant. We're not certified teachers, we're not parents, we're not paid by the schools (some of us aren't paid at all), but we definitely participate in the fight to get kids the education they deserve. Hamilton, ON

Slow Apparent Progress

I'd like to add a comment regarding the girl whose progress on decoding wasn't showing up on the school's tests. In my learning center, I find that students with inconsistent attention may appear to make little or no progress according to testing - even though I, the student, and the parents know that he or she is making dramatic progress. Sometimes, the problem is the student's poor test taking skills. In the long run, however, the progress does show up on the tests. Chicago, IL

Direct Instruction

My appreciation for your organization began in the mid-90s when I was working as a teacher assistant in charge of remedial reading in a whole-language school system. I realized my teaching efforts were not successful and went looking for other approaches. I kept an eye on your website and through the information I found there, I was able to better interpret what I learned in college. Through SQE, I also became aware of Project Follow Through and Zig Engelmann's work, and I later used this information as I participated with my neighbours to start a charter school in my home community. It is the first public school in Alberta to implement a Direct Instruction reading program. Valhalla, AB

Technology

Educators are really suckers for technology. In my community college, so much money is being spent on technology that tuition is going up. In my classroom, they even have a BLU-RAY player. Ridiculous. Barrie, ON

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

THE FOLLOWING IS A GUEST EDITORIAL BY MARK HOLMES, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, ONTARIO INSTITUTE FOR STUDIES IN EDUCATION

The Food for Thought column in the last issue seemed to reflect a change in policy on the part of SQE. The Heart of the Matter, in endorsing non-government-run schools, appears to promote a libertarian world view.

There are two reasons why it would be folly for SQE to adopt this (or any other ideology). The first is substantive. Libertarian/laissez faire ideas are essentially selfish, opposing most programs that involve government action to help those most in need (paid for by those with least need). I shall not expand on that.

The second reason is pragmatic. Libertarian ideology is supported by only a tiny proportion of the population, perhaps 5% in Canada (and not much more in the U.S.). Ontario has already experienced two totally-unsuccessful efforts to introduce more parental choice of school. They were not failures because they were libertarian (although one was not far from it) but because, in common with libertarians, they failed to comprehend the support for choice. The first approach (twice tried by the Harris government) was seen (obviously, if inaccurately) as a plan to help rich children attend private schools. The second (John Tory's campaign) was seen as support for three groups against which there is widespread negative prejudice (Muslims, "fundamentalist" Christians, and Orthodox Jews).

The Ontario government agrees with the principle that parents should have the major say in the education of their children. At the same time, in practice most oppose any proposal that schools for minorities they do not much care for (including the rich and religious groups) should have support for their schools. A successful policy for choice must deal with both sides of the choice coin. There are several different possible approaches, perhaps the best being Alberta's, more specifically Edmonton's (followed by Calgary). Alberta, like B.C., Manitoba, and Quebec, gives limited funding to independent schools, but within the public system there are much more abundant choices based on what parents want (unlike Toronto which provides choices that are politically-correct or desired by educators). If parents get what they want, they are less inclined to grudge others' choices. Albertans, given many choices that are free, choose private options less frequently than Ontario parents - who have much less choice.

A non-starter is the introduction of large-scale privatization. In the western democracies, choice is increasingly common. There is no case of large-scale privatization except in developing countries where only the rich have access to good schooling. A voucher system immediately hits a hurdle: Will added fees be permitted? If not, the rule will be hard to enforce. Moreover, true libertarians will still be dissatisfied - they follow James Tooley and many free market economists - arguing that differential pricing is the key to success. If additional fees are allowed, then equality of opportunity for all students, regardless of family background, is denied. Few of those who most want school choice want to buy into extremist, libertarian plans, never mind those who believe that the same size (theirs) fits all.

BOOKS OF INTEREST

Teaching Needy Kids in our Backward System: 42 years of trying. Siegfried "Zig" Engelmann.

This is a great read, telling the story of Project Follow Through, an idealistic project conceived in the sixties (think Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson and their desire for a just society). Project Follow Through was designed as a sort of a contest to find out which teaching approach would best help disadvantaged five-to-eight-year-olds follow through on the gains they had presumably achieved from Head Start. The project involved 180 communities and over 200,000 at-risk children; 22 teaching models were compared over a ten-year period. The teaching programs (called "Direct Instruction") created by the author won the contest hands-down, at which point Zig braced himself for an onslaught of enquiries about and orders for his programs. They never came - since Direct Instruction is viewed by status quo educators as too prescriptive. They didn't care that Direct Instruction allowed its students to catch up to their advantaged peers and have their lives transformed, nor did they care that the program was wildly popular with parents. All they knew was that they didn't like Direct Instruction, and nobody could make them use it. Here's an excerpt from the book (p. 204) which illustrates the author's genius when it comes to instruction. He is writing about an experience he had teaching autistic children at Thistletown, just outside Toronto.

.....

"There are two ways to work effectively with these children. One is ponderous, to plow through the program. The other is to trick the learner. To illustrate the trick technique, I asked the teacher to name some objects the child could not reliably identify. She listed six things, including a watch, a ring, a book, and a pencil. We got examples of all six objects from the teacher and people in the audience and put them on a table. Then I worked with the child. I did not review or even say the names of any of the objects on the table. I presumed that he actually knew the names of these objects. I tested that presumption with tasks that emphasized something other than the object name.

"For the first task, I pointed to a woman in the front row and said, 'You're going to give something to that person right there. Look at her.' I told the woman to raise her hand. 'That's the person, right there. Listen: give the watch to that person. That one, right there.'

"The child picked up the watch and gave it to a man sitting three seats from the woman.

"I did the same thing with all the other objects. For each task, the child picked up the object I named incidentally and gave it to the wrong person. I pointed out that he did know the names of these objects in some form but he didn't know how to mobilize his knowledge or link it to tasks that required him to focus attention on that object and the relationship of object to name. (If I had changed the task so that I acted as if the name of the object was important, and the person in the audience was secondary, the child would have picked up the wrong object and given it to the right person.) The child's problem was not one of compliance but of not being able to control his attention. When he attempted to attend to something he experienced something like a blind spot. Things on the periphery were clear, but the thing he tried to attend to wasn't accessible.

"The point was that the child needed work in plowing through the program so that he learned how to mobilize attention. At the same time, there were ways to accelerate the child or correct mistakes that did not involve repetition, but trickery. I demonstrated with a second child. For this one, I acted as if I was very concerned with his hands, which moved nervously. I kept reminding him to hold his hands down by his sides. I reinforced him for this behavior, and presented tasks from the language lesson with no particular reinforcement as if I was interested in his hands, not the tasks from the program. I made frequent comments about his hands. He performed flawlessly on material that he hadn't been able to do when the teacher had demonstrated with him. I skipped far ahead in the program. He performed flawlessly."

Too Simple to Fail: A case for educational change. R. Barker Bausell.

In his book, the author tries to convince his readers of the following premise: "The only way to increase school learning is to increase the amount of relevant instructional time we provide our children". In our opinion, the author is pulling a bit of a fast one here, since his premise requires the word "relevant" to carry a truckload of meaning. Relevant instruction, according to the author, involves not only excellent teaching, but also a sequential and challenging curriculum. In addition, the instruction must be pitched at exactly the right level for each learner in the classroom. Easy for Dr. Bausell to say perhaps, but not so easy for classroom teachers saddled with bad teacher training, ineffective teaching methods and materials, and extremely heterogeneous classrooms. The excerpt (pp. ix-x) illustrates what can go awry.

......

"Thirty-five students sit facing a single teacher. The teacher has just provided a brief but coherent introduction to a new topic, but one portion of her class couldn't follow what she was saying because they have had too little previous instruction on the subject at hand. Another portion of the class is terminally bored because they had previously learned 90% of everything the teacher said (or will say during the upcoming school year). A third contingent is distracted by two misbehaving boys seated at the rear of the room.

"Recognizing these problems, and hoping to reinforce the main points of her lecture, she reseats the two boys on opposite sides of the room and has all the students open their textbooks to read the same page. Unfortunately, the same part of her class who couldn't follow her lecture, along with a significant portion of the students who were distracted, also has trouble reading the textbook. And of course the students who already knew what she was talking about already know everything contained on that particular page in their textbook.

"Sensing that something is amiss, the teacher decides to vary her routine a bit and have everyone come to the front of the room and sit on the floor surrounding the chalkboard. Following a few minutes of jostling and confusion, the class then watches a student attempt to solve a math problem based upon what has just been taught and read about (by some). This particular student fails miserably and can't follow the teacher's attempts to help him 'discover' his error. The remainder of the class isn't at all interested in this process since some of them would have never made such an egregious mistake, some of them can't follow the teacher's explanation, and some simply aren't paying attention."

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

Children of the Code is a site that provides everything you ever wanted to know - and then some - about how children learn to read. The site includes interviews with the stars of the learning-to-read world, including Zig Engelmann, Marilyn Jager Adams, Reid Lyon, Keith Stanovich, and Sally Shaywitz. Warning: you may find yourself spending hours on this site!