SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The Trouble with Teacher Training

The New York Times op-ed piece on the problems with teacher training generated a huge amount of reaction, with the Times publishing a record number of letters to the editor on the topic. This not-yet-published letter to the editor reinforces the thrust of our Whack-a-Mole posting below, but makes its point far more eloquently.

Boys and Reading

There is a piece in The Globe and Mail today about another project aimed at getting boys to read. 

Once again, as usual the project’s sponsors assume that the reason boys don’t read is that they don’t like to read.  School for Thought would like to point out that the reason many boys don’t like to read is because they can’t read.  After all, who likes to do something that is too hard or impossible to do in the first place?

We see widespread test results showing that boys do not read as well as girls.  We see many more boys with reading disabilities.  We see that boys, when surveyed, don’t like reading as much as girls do.  Connection? 

However, across the ocean in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, the landmark longitudinal study by Johnson and Watson showed that when children were taught with systematic phonics when they started school, there was NO GAP between boys and girls in their reading.  This result was observed even years later when the children were in the middle grades.  In fact, the boys slightly outperformed the girls and there was no difference in their attitudes towards reading.

So maybe the problem is not the boys and the books but rather the way they are taught to read (or not).

Dateline: Rochester, NY

New York State’s new educational commissioner is in town as part of a “listening tour”. The commissioner is especially concerned about high drop-out rates. He also raised the issue of too-great emphasis on testing and teaching to the test, and received vigorous agreement from local officials. The Rochester superintendent asked for more leverage to close failing schools quickly. It strikes us that the commissioner could as well have travelled to Toronto or Windsor or Timmins on his listening tour, since he would have heard exactly the same things wherever he went. All of which ties a neat bow around this mini-series. No matter where we went (with the exception of East Hampton, NY) in New York State, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, a few changes of place names and presto - the newspaper articles could have appeared in The Globe and Mail. Clearly, many of our education problems are systemic.

Vote for Stairway to Reading

We just submitted an idea for Stairway to Reading, our free remedial reading program, to the Aviva Community Fund, a competition that could result in positive change for struggling readers. If our idea receives enough votes, it will have a chance at sharing in $500,000 to bring our idea to life. I would really appreciate your help in pushing our idea to the finals. Please feel free to forward this to all and sundry!

Please vote for our idea at http://www.avivacommunityfund.org/ideas/acf3006.

Thanks!

Dateline: Newburgh, NY

This op-ed piece in the New York Times deals with some of the very serious problems with the way teachers are selected and trained in the US. In Canada, there isn't a problem with the way teachers are selected - in fact we get mostly very bright and motivated recruits to the teaching profession. However, the criticisms regarding teacher training are spot on. And there's nothing wrong with the piece's recommendations for improving teacher training, except that their implementation will inevitably cause new and different problems to pop up. For example, if students are required to continue studying the subject they hope to teach, there might be issues concerning scheduling all of the pedagogical topics deemed necessary by the faculties of education. Furthermore, school administrations often find it very difficult, given things like seniority agreements and timetabling concerns, to assign teachers to teach their subject areas - making further study in their own field moot. The concept of solutions causing new problems is well illustrated by the Whack-a-Mole game in the picture, whereby pounding down one mole causes two or three others to pop up elsewhere.

Denver School Choice Works

Looks like Denver has started a similar program to Edmonton's. 

According to this Smart Brief report from the Denver Post, "Students in Denver are increasingly choosing to attend school outside their neighborhood as part of the district's school-choice program, which allows students to attend a school that best meets their individual needs and learning goals. While there are concerns that low-income students don't have the same transportation options to take advantage of school choice, advocates say it has helped schools. 'If there is no choice, then every school and every building has to figure out a way to be everything for everyone who lives in their boundaries,' one supporter said."

Jim Griffin, the president of the Colorado League of Charter Schools went on to say, "We don't expect that for other public bodies; why schools? It's also made parents and students into consumers."  Gee what a novel idea!  It's exactly what the Edmonton Public School Board thought when they moved to school choice within their system.

Brains and the School System

For the past week the Toronto Star has been publishing "Brainstorm, a series about the brain and the education system", written by Alanna Mitchell, the 2008 winner of the Atkinson Fellowship.  The articles have focused on the latest brain studies and how they could affect education and classroom learning. She writes:

"And that means scientists can start explaining why, biologically, certain types of teaching work and others don't. They are piecing together the science of learning. And therefore teaching."

The series has prompted letters about how bad 'drill and kill' is for our students and that we should be focusing on creativity.  Too bad Ms Mitchell didn't read the studies about what works in teaching reading or interview Dan Willingham, who talks about brain-based education below and here.  Cognitive scientists have long known how the brain works to learn fundamental skills.  See Malkin's entry on Success for All below.  In the video, Professor Willingham says that the most effective teaching methods use direct instruction.

School For Thought worries that this will become another fad that will be misinterpreted by the school system, and ten years from now we will still be lamenting that our kids can't read or do math without counting on their fingers.

Dateline: East Hampton, NY

At last - a news item that couldn’t have been found in an Ontario newspaper! Among the usual reports of class trips, fundraising endeavors, sports teams, and so on, appears the following item. “Toni Ann Schmitt was a guest speaker at a PTA meeting held in the school library. Ms Schmitt is the program facilitator for Success for All, the reading program that the school has used for the past decade. She spoke about the program’s principles of prevention, early intervention, and relentlessness.” Success for All is a highly-scripted systematic phonics reading program that is one of a handful of reading programs with a strong research base. To the best of our knowledge, Success for All is not used in any Canadian publicly-funded school.

A full-page ad in the New York Times honours Peter Grauer, Chairman of Bloomberg, for supporting the Inner-City Scholarship Fund which guarantees inner-city students “a first-rate education by attending a Catholic school of their choice”. In the US, unlike in Ontario, the Catholic schools are private schools and provide a much superior service to that of Ontario’s publicly-funded Catholic schools; for example, New York Catholic schools have a 98% graduation rate, and 96% of their students attend post-secondary institutions. Canadians, too, can make it possible for a disadvantaged child to get a life-changing education - by supporting the Children First Scholarship Fund. 

Lowering the Bar

It seems that in order to improve achievement, some states in the U.S. simply lowered the bar.  A U.S. Federal study found that nearly a third of states lowered academic standards in order to meet proficiency criteria.   Eight states actually raised standards. 

Let’s hope our Canadian counterparts aren’t tempted to lower standards or change the curriculum (dare we say “dumb it down”). That would REALLY be a new low.