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The Sunshine website was profiled in today’s National Post and we have been interviewed by CFOB Fort Frances.
I just wish that media would stop calling us a lobby group. I remind our readers that SQE does not lobby.
On a grey day in Ontario, treat yourself to a little sunshine at SQE’s latest microsite. Sunshine on Schools is a great new online tool that will allow you to easily and quickly compare the effectiveness of Ontario’s publicly-funded school boards in terms of things like funding, enrollment, and academic achievement.
Following on on Doretta’s posting below, be sure to read the online comments (98 of them as we went to press) to Wente’s column. For the most part, the comments are either strongly in favour of her column or else they are violently opposed.
Which is exactly the point that School for Thought wishes to make! Since some people want traditional teaching methods for their kids and other people want progressive teaching methods for their kids, then why are public schools almost exclusively using progressive teaching methods? Even if the parents who want progressive teaching methods were in the majority (a moot point, to be sure), it doesn’t follow that ALL public schools should be using progressive methods in order to cater to them. This should not be an all-or-nothing situation. Just as we have some schools that are painted white and some schools that are painted green, so too should we have some schools that use progressive methods and some schools that use traditional methods. That way, more students have a better chance of finding a school that is right for them.
The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente profiles this radical school in her column today. What is this revolutionary school doing? It is teaching using traditional methods practically banned in most schools. Heavens, Direct instruction! The Howlett Academy teaches kids that the school’s founder, Jan Howlett, calles NBT: Never Been Taught.
“The Howlett Academy, housed inside a plain red building in Toronto’s Annex, offers a radical alternative to the public-school approach. Its teaching methods are heavily discouraged in today’s public schools. It stresses penmanship and spelling, accuracy and focus. Every mistake in every essay is corrected - in red ink. The school’s three Rs are resilience, rigour and repetition.
Not all the kids here are like Paul. Some arrive with straight As. “My daughter was getting great grades,” one mother told me, “but she wasn’t learning anything.” When she expressed concern about her daughter’s growing indifference to school, she was told not to worry.
I watched as a teacher took her students through a quick vocabulary and spelling drill. “Threadbare,” they spelled aloud in unison. “This would be a no-no with the board of education,” said Ms. Howlett. “It’s called direct instruction.” In the age of “child-centred” education, direct instruction is thought to stifle children’s inherent creativity. They’re supposed to discover math and spelling, not memorize the times tables.”
She suggests that perhaps the public education system consider more alternative schools that offer tried and true methods:
“The public system pays lip service to educational diversity. It has schools that focus on sports or arts, schools for gay and lesbian students, schools for students who want to protest against global capitalism. What it doesn’t have is any schools like the Howlett Academy. That would be too radical.”
Consider that in Alberta, Calgary’s Foundations for the Future Charter School (profiled in SQE’s charter school DVD in a previous post), with its traditional curriculum and effective teaching practices has a waiting list of thousands, maybe the time for revolution has come.
(Note: For those of you who can’t find a Foundations or Howlett type of school where you live, there is always our Stairway to Reading and Stairway to Math for the time being.)
The American Federation of Teachers publishes an excellent quarterly magazine called American Educator. The jewel in the magazine’s crown is the regular column by Dan Willingham, a professor of cognitive psychology and neuroscience at the University of Virginia. In each issue, Dr. Willingham tackles a different topic of interest to classroom teachers and parents, such as reading comprehension, memory, practice, and praise. For example, the Winter 2004/2005 column deals with ADHD. In addition to explaining what the disorder is and how to recognize it, Dr. Willingham lists six effective steps that classroom teachers can take to help their ADHD students get the most out of school. As an added bonus, many of these strategies will likely prove helpful to non-ADHD students as well.
This National Post column refers to several recent studies suggesting that fewer and fewer Canadian high school graduates are adequately prepared for university. The column assigns primary blame to a policy in the early grades whereby students are automatically promoted to the next grade regardless of whether they have a prayer of being able to do the work there. As a result, high schools are receiving hordes of woefully-unprepared students, giving the high schools no choice but to water down their standards.
School for Thought agrees that automatic promotion is a large part of the problem, but we’d also like to make the point that the reason so many students need the policy is that they have been so poorly taught. If better teaching methods were being used in the early grades, there would be much less scope for automatic promotion in the elementary grades, much less watering down in high school, and many fewer unprepared high school graduates.
To its credit, last year the New York City School Board authorized an experiment involving ten Core Knowledge schools. This month, the Chancellor announced very strong early results for the Core Knowledge schools. “The progress of the students in the ten participating schools was more than five times greater than the also-significant performance of students at ten peer schools with comparable student populations, and was reflected in students at all levels of literacy. Additionally, teachers surveyed as part of the pilot rated the program highly, and nine of the ten participating schools have selected to use the Core Knowledge program with their new kindergarten classes, in addition to continuing with the program with their first graders, who remain in the pilot.” To learn more about Core Knowledge, click here.
There are three Core Knowledge schools in Canada: Touchstone Community School in Rothesay, NB; Richland Academy in Richmond Hill, ON; and Fieldstone School in Toronto, ON.
The Khan Academy, a private not-for-profit organization whose mission is to provide free high-quality math instruction, has posted more than 800 short videos to YouTube that clearly explain everything from basic arithmetic operations to differential equations, trigonometry, algebra, physics, and finance. The featured video teaches how to add decimal numbers. For a list of the entire video library, click here.
Many status-quo educators dismiss the superior results of school choice programs on the basis that they cream off the best students. A brand-new study out of Stanford University takes advantage of the fact that in New York State, admission to charter schools is decided by means of a lottery. By comparing “lotteried-in” students with “lotteried-out” students, the researchers were able to determine whether the students who won the chance to attend a charter school are learning more than the students who lost the lottery. It turns out that the lotteried-in students are learning significantly more than their unlucky peers. Each year spent in a charter school equals a three-point gain on the state exams. “On average, a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through grade 8 would close about 86 percent of the ‘Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap’ in math and about 66 percent of the achievement gap in English.” This amounts to a huge advantage to the lottery winners in terms of attending a post-secondary educational institution and achieving a satisfying career.
Given that New York charter schools cost roughly only 60 percent of what regular public schools cost, it’s hard to explain why Alberta is the only Canadian province that allows them. Even Alberta permits only 15 charter schools? Why?
Read our letter to the editor in today’s Globe & Mail in response to Marcus Gee’s column on Why School Rankings Help Parents Make Better Choices.
He wrote: “For parents, the EQAO data is an invaluable tool. Those looking for a school for their kid can base this critical decision on something more than rumour and hearsay. Others can approach the principal and ask “Why don’t our Grade 3s do better at reading?” without being waved off with we’re-doing-our-best excuses.” and then: “In an ideal world, the province would use the EQAO results to rank every school in the province, best to worst. Imagine the pressure that would put on bottom-ranked schools to pull up their socks? Imagine the spotlight it would put on the top schools?”
Hurrah. Finally, some honesty.
Contrast Gee’s column to this press release from the Elementary Teachers’ Federation which is full of the usual cliches and excuses.