SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Switchtasking

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

Alternative School Choices - Making Things Better

For a select few anyway…

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Support for Apostrophe Warriors

Faithful readers who fume silently at rampant apostropheitis - be it missing apostrophes as in “St. Johns” or gratuitous apostrophes as in “banana’s for sale” - will be pleased to learn that some British municipalities have issued crib sheets on the proper use of apostrophes and other punctuation marks. This article from the Sunday Telegraph includes some amusing howlers.

Good Spellers Don’t Memorize

The American Federation of Teachers publishes an excellent quarterly magazine called “American Educator”. A case in point is this article on spelling which reports on recent studies which do not support the notion that visual memory is the key to good spelling. Rote visual memory for letter strings is limited to two or three letters in a word. Instead, spelling is a task that requires knowledge of sounds, word origins, meaningful parts of words, and letter patterns. 

Not Rocket Science

Further to Doretta’s posting on the Ontario test results, the Minister of Education has been quoted as saying that while she is “concerned by some of the results, the government has measures in place to help students, which include lowering class sizes in the early years, putting more money into literacy and math coaches, and an ambitious plan that would integrate full-day kindergarten and childcare programs for Ontario’s four- and five-year-olds.” But the first two reforms have been in place for years, yielding little or no improvement, and there is no reason to believe that the planned childcare programs will increase student learning, assuming they materialize. It’s actually kind of pitiful to see these Ontario politicians so desperately wanting better student achievement but having no idea how to make it happen. Yet a low-cost, fast-acting strategy is readily available - simply switch to proven teaching methods and materials.

EQAO Test Results - So What Else is New?

The latest Ontario EQAO test results are out and, surprise surprise, there isn’t significant improvement, but you’d never know it from the variety of headlines:

Toronto Star - More Grade 3 Kids Master 3Rs
National Post - Ontario Students Failing to Catch Up
Toronto Sun - More Kids Making the Grade
Globe and Mail - One Third of Pupils Failing Provincial Standards

What is most disturbing is that for the last three years, EQAO has been able to track individual students. There is a wide variation in performance with many students actually falling farther behind. The poor results are most prominent in the math testing.  According to the reporting in the National Post:

“Out of the approximately 36,500 students who took the applied math test, almost half who didn’t meet the standard in Grade 6 also didn’t meet it in Grade 9.  As well, almost a quarter of students who didn’t meet the standard in reading, writing and math in Grade 3 failed to make the grade in Grade 6.”

Seems that spending tons of money has not paid off in respective achievement increases.  As noted in a previous post and here,  it is certainly the teaching. Every year, SQE sings from the same hymnal—-use proven effective teaching methods! Is anybody listening?

Sharing Power - Oops, We Meant to Write - Sharing Space

This draft memo from the Ontario Ministry of Education makes it look as if the government wants to move in the direction of more community access to and involvement in the use of school buildings. The new plan sounds very good and sensible, but the proposals are so obvious that it makes us at School for Thought wonder why the school boards aren’t already doing them - things like co-building with community partners or sharing surplus space. And if the school boards aren’t already taking such obvious steps, naturally it makes us wonder why they aren’t. For what it’s worth, it also makes us wonder whether a ministry memo will prompt the school boards to begin taking these obvious steps. 

No Excuse for Bullies

This article in today’s The Globe and Mail profiles two moms’ radically-different approaches to helping their bullied children. In fact, bullying is a huge problem in Canadian schools, as the Society for Quality Education learned when it sponsored a study of the reasons parents withdraw their children from publicly-funded schools. However, there is no reason why schools should be hotbeds of bullying. The Society’s alphabetical newsletter archives (under the heading “Bullying”) have several articles that contain information about good programs that schools can use to nip bulllying in the bud. 

Creating an Educated Elite

A former British education minister has decided to speak out after 13 years of self-imposed silence.  His candid and scathing observations can be read in this UK Telegraph article here. 

Ex-minister George Walden observed, “Reforming education was like trying to disperse a fog with a hand grenade: after the flash and the explosion, the fog creeps back.” Seems that for all the efforts to improve education nothing has changed and things may actually be worse than ever. 

Considering that some of our notable Canadian education gurus were part of that UK reform movement we should have lots to worry about here.  The fog is creeping back on this side of the pond too.  Many of the reforms put in place here in Ontario are slowly being eroded—-school governance, choice, testing, standards, curriculum content.  No more failure, grade inflation, pressure to eliminate testing are becoming common topics for debate. 

Walden also poses this:

“Why is there so little honest discussion about the failings of the system, and their causes? Because the debate on education is mendacious and hypocritical to the point where it demeans our public life. The rot starts at the top, with the issue of selection*, to which all political leaders are opposed. The fact that they were selectively educated themselves is not the point; what matters is how they use the power and influence their privilege helped give them.”

Trying to reform an education system that was quite happy chugging along as usual was a challenging, time consuming, and exhausting effort for some of us too long in the trenches.  The system put up the appearance that it was changing, but it did it kicking and screaming all the way.  Some are still screaming.  School for Thought’s conclusion?  It’s the same as the UK’s Walden—-allow parents to choose their children’s schools. 

*Selection is the Brit term for school choice.

How Well Can Johnny Read?

Because many parents wonder whether their children are reading as well as they should be, the Society for Quality Education provides a quick and easy reading assessment. Part 1 tests children’s ability to decode unknown words: if a child makes two or more mistakes in Part 1, remedial phonics is indicated. The numbers in Part 2 of the assessment correspond to the mid-year reading level expected for that grade: a child’s approximate reading level is one grade below the level at which he or she made two mistakes. The Society also provides a free remedial reading program.