SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Ask Aunt Malkin

Dear Aunt Malkin, I’m worried that my grade 1 son is in a Balanced Literacy classroom, even though the teacher assures me that she teaches phonics. How can I be sure?  Signed, Flummoxed in Florida

Dear Flummoxed, There are two ways to test whether a teacher is using an effective reading program.

• The first way is to look at the readers being used. (If there are no readers at all, this is a very bad sign indeed.)  Balanced Literacy almost always uses “levelled readers”, readers which start out using mostly easy words and gradually move into harder words. Systematic phonics, on the other hand, uses readers that contain only words the children can already sound out.
• The second test is to ask how the children are told to tackle unknown words. A Balanced Literacy teacher will say that the children should use three cues: semantic, syntactical, and grapho-phonemic (phonics) cues, always in that order. A Systematic Phonics teacher, on the other hand, will tell her students to sound out every single unknown word. 

This is an abbreviated version of the Ask Aunt Malkin column in every Society for Quality Education e-newsletter. If you have a question about your child’s schooling, send us an e-mail. Your question will be answered within 24 hours and, you never know, your issue may get printed in the next SQE Forum!

24/7 Kindergarten

An interesting article in The Globe and Mail speculates on the extent to which the Ontario government is going to honour its promise to institute all-day junior and senior kindergarten in the province. The author thinks that the government is likely to scale down its very ambitious program considerably. We agree. For one thing, the province is projecting an $18.5 billion deficit this year. Given that the teachers’ unions are insisting on expensive certified teachers in every classroom, all-day junior and senior kindergarten would add several billions to the current deficit. 

Furthermore, we are very skeptical that the government will succeed in implementing even a scaled-down program. It is still nowhere near fully implementing its years-ago promise to put a hard cap on primary class sizes - for example, the two Toronto boards have only 78% and 77% of classrooms in compliance even now. The province really doesn’t have a whole lot of control over its school boards, it seems. Also, with an election getting closer, the government’s attention will probably start to shift from governing to campaigning. After all, if it loses the election to the Conservatives, there goes all-day kindergarten! Finally, as The Globe and Mail article points out, the province needs to be sensitive to the ripple effects of an all-day kindergarten policy that might well put existing day-care centres out of business and put three-year-olds out on the street. All in all, we doubt that pregnant Ontario women should base their child-care plans on the assumption that all-day kindergarten will be in place when the time comes.

Vouchers Do Make A Difference

This study looked at the positive economic effect of private school vouchers.  The results also reinforced private school voucher positive effects on racial integration and educational outcomes.  For a fascinating description, see the author of the study, Dr. Maria Ferreyra explain it herself on this video.

Charter Schools: Alberta’s Best-Kept Secret

A recent poll shows that almost two out of three Americans support charter schools - even though they have only the sketchiest idea of what they actually are. Canadians are no better, even in Alberta where they are lucky enough to have charter schools! This three-part YouTube video profiles three Alberta charter schools and in the process makes it clear what a charter school is. 

Same-Sex High Schools

A recent study by professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago looked into why American grade 1 girls start out equal to the boys in math, but then lose ground and end up being much worse at math by the time they get to high school. The researchers explored a variety of possible causes, including biased tests and reduced parental expectations, but found little support for any of them. They do note that the girls do not lag behind boys in countries, such as Bahrain, which have same-sex high schools. 

The same gender gap appears to hold true for Ontario as well. The EQAO results show that Ontario girls are actually ahead of the boys in grade 3 and grade 6 math, but by grade 9 the boys have taken a decisive lead. One possibility is that girls are more sensitive to peer pressure. Perhaps the Toronto District School Board might consider adding some same-sex high schools to its roster of alternative schools. As it is, a lot of female mathematical talent may be going untapped.

The Real Reason for Reading Aloud to Kids

If there’s one thing everyone agrees on, it’s that parents should read aloud to their kids. And School for Thought agrees too, but not because we think it guarantees reading success. It doesn’t. While it’s true that some kids will pick up reading almost effortlessly if their parents read to them, these kids are in the minority - say a third of kids. The rest of the kids need to be taught.

No, the reason School for Thought endorses reading to kids, apart from all that bonding and role modelling, is that it is a powerful way to enhance their general knowledge and vocabulary. When it comes to academic preparation, one of the biggest and most crucial differences among young children is how much general knowledge they have and how big their vocabularies are. Children who start school with impoverished general knowledge and vocabularies are at a terrible disadvantage. Though they may be perfectly capable of learning new things, their limited backgrounds mean that they fail to learn at the same rate as the other children. 

Parents should choose interesting stories that contain words and information children are unlikely to encounter elsewhere. Stories should be at a challenging level and should continue long after the children become good readers themselves. There are several excellent books, such as those by Jim Trelease, that suggest suitable reading material, and there are dozens of Internet sites (here’s one example). Alternatively, consult the children’s librarian at your local library.

The Three R’s - Three Needles in a Haystack

In the beginning, public schools were created to teach all kids the three R’s - reading, writing, and arithmetic. And, for the most part, they did. But then someone in government thought that it would be a good idea for schools to also teach history and geography and science, and these subjects were added. And then came - and School for Thought doesn’t vouch for the order - music and foreign languages and physical education and art and drama and literature and economics. Then less academic subjects were added, like health and current events and sexuality and home economics and shop and keyboarding and agriculture and crafts and law and budgeting and computers and drug education and business studies. Trendy programs began to appear, like media studies, environmentalism, air bands, gay and lesbian studies, civics, fire safety, world religions, co-operative learning, social justice, healthy life styles, native studies, creativity, feminism, and anti-obesity programs. Time was set aside for assemblies, fund-raising activities, ethnicity demonstrations, reading buddies, field trips, sports days, dances, and the list goes on. 

The result is that modern schools typically have dozens of mandates, seemingly without prioritization. There is little evidence of how successful they are at achieving most of these mandates, but in Ontario the EQAO tests (and other evidence) seem to suggest that the public schools’ mandate to teach the three R’s is not particuarly fruitful. Since most of the latterly-added mandates depend at least in part on literacy and numeracy, then perhaps it would be in order for the Ontario government to consider reducing the number of mandates it is assigning its schools. It’s so easy for people to lose sight of three mandates out of dozens. Both teachers and students would benefit from the message that reading, writing, and arithmetic are JOB NUMBER ONE.

Wanted - A Better Class of Parents

There has been a huge response to Margaret Wente’s column (mentioned in yesterday’s blog posting). Many of the online comments were critical of Wente’s position on the grounds that it is actually the parents’ responsibility to teach their children to read before they start school. Of course, if we accept that teaching reading is not the responsiblity of the schools, then this begs the question of what the school’s fundamental responsibility actually is. But that is an issue for another day.

There is an even more basic problem with an expectation that parents will teach their children to read, namely that there are so many parents who can’t or won’t do it. It reminds us of a statement made by Lester Maddox, the ax-wielding former governor of Georgia. When asked what he was going to do about fixing conditions in state prisons, Maddox replied: “There’s not a lot more we can do unless we start getting a better class of prisoner”. Well, schools are not going to get a better class of parents any time soon. And sanctimonious statements condemning low-class parents, while perhaps making the pontificator feel good, are not going to do a thing for the children who have not been taught to read by their parents. If we have decided that it’s not the schools’ job to teach children to read, then we need to designate some other agency to do the job. Because otherwise, between 30% and 40% of kids are going to continue to slip through the cracks and end up illiterate. And that’s just unacceptable.

Reading Failure Epidemic

Margaret Wente has written about teaching today in her popular Globe and Mail column, especially in terms of kids who are struggling with reading and what their parents can do about it. Wente has clearly hit a nerve, as the online version of her article has already attracted 87 comments. And, as a result of our remedial reading program being mentioned in the article, our e-mail has gone wild, with hundreds of registrations just swamping us from all across Canada. Obviously, reading failure is a national epidemic.

Learning By the Seat of Their Pants

The notion that children learn in different ways - for example, that they might be visual learners or auditory learners or kinesthetic learners - has been around for at least a hundred years. And for something like 50 years, teachers have been trying to teach to each child’s presumed individual learning style - even though cognitive science has definitively proved that teaching this way has zero effect on educational achievement. Here’s a possibly-sarcastic column from The Onion that makes this point by pointing out that some children are discriminated against because they happen to be nasal learners. Just in case this article is too subtle, here’s another one from our archives about buttocks-based learning….