SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

It’s Movie Time!

One of the perennial calls for education reform involves lengthening the school day/year. But this is a mug's game. When Elizabeth Witmer was the Ontario Minister of Education, she increased the school year by five instructional days, but it didn't take long before this measure had been finessed by creative educrats - by establishing ten "half days" throughout the year when the students were sent home early for various reasons. This article in the KW Record talks about another way that instructional time is frittered away - watching Hollywood movies in class. 

There is no point lengthening the school year in order to spend more time doing the wrong things. The only way to ensure that people will behave in a particular way is to change their motivations. At present, education leaders have little or no incentive to bring about better academic results but if, for example, their jobs depended on it, you can be sure that they would change their ways. This could be accomplished by the introduction of competition to the education system.

Comparing Apples to Apples

The Fraser Institute has just released its annual report card on Ontario secondary schools. The inclusion of several years of data permits users to see ongoing trends in school performance. In tandem with the report card, the institute has also created an interactive web-site that allows comparison of Ontario (as well as Alberta, BC, and Washington) elementary and secondary schools on the basis of eight key academic indicators, as well as demographic factors. This means that schools with similar populations and characteristics can be readily compared.

Can You Understand This?

In the "Taste for School Choice" thread, there has been some discussion about reading comprehension. When students fail to understand what they are reading, there can be a number of different reasons - as the numerous articles on this topic in our newsletter archives attest. 

Jo-Anne will like this article from 1937, by Anna Gillingham and Bessie Stillman, stressing the importance of good reading habits. Here's a related article on how laboured word identification blocks comprehension. Equally important are sufficient vocabulary and background knowledge to understand the passage, as E. D. Hirsch, Jr. explains in this article. Lastly, this article explains how some students have to be taught how to pry the meaning out of dense text. 

Because all these elements need to come together before students can read and enjoy complex reading passages, it is very important that reading be taught carefully and correctly. Have we mentioned this before?

A Taste for School Choice

The state of Florida is a national leader in providing educational choices or its families. Its former governor, Jeb Bush, brought in several different school choice measures - over 400 charter schools; scholarships for low-income children, children with disabilities, four-year-olds, and military families; corporate tax credit scholarships; and virtual education options. Here's a video that demonstrates what happens when people get a taste of what school choice offers.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY

On behalf of the children who owe you so much.............

When the “Experts” Get It Wrong

In the course of history, there have been literally millions of examples of "expert" opinion being wrong. Take medicine, for example - the belief that ulcers were caused by worry; the notion that malaria was caused by bad air (the literal definition of the word 'malaria'); the use of bleeding and leeches even though they often hastened the patient's death; the resistance to new discoveries, such as the importance of aseptic conditions; the advice that smoking was okay for one's health, and on and on. The worth of many great artists' work, such as that of Boticelli, Vivaldi, and Kafka, went unrecognized by the experts, such that these artists died in obscurity. Experts believed for a long time that the earth was the centre of the universe, and they forced Galileo to recent his heliocentric views and spend the rest of his life under house arrest. (It is worth noting that Galileo wasn't right either, but at least he was less wrong than the "experts".) There are uncounted other examples - the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, plate tectonics, the Vietnam war, Y2K, the death of the dinosaurs, Christopher Columbus, the Truman election, sub-prime loans, the Wright Brothers.... 

The bottom line is - the experts can be, and often are, wrong. Just because most of the experts in Ontario support the Balanced Literacy approach to teaching reading is no reason to reject systematic phonics. As in other cases of erroneous expert consensus, the truth will eventually surface - although, unfortunately, too late for the millions of unfortunate students whose life chances have been blighted because of the experts' mistaken support of Balanced Literacy.

A Little Loss

Our vision for School for Thought was that it would be a forum where individuals with varying points of view could help each other make sense of educational developments and, with a little luck, contribute to the betterment of some kids' schooling. The desire to hear from people with opposing educational orientations has caused us to lean over backwards in the case of one of our most frequent commenters, Doug Little.

Mr. Little has obliged us by presenting a different perspective on most educational topics, and for this we are grateful. However, his manner of presentation has frequently been condescending and insulting. He has made a number of personal attacks on commenters with whom he disagrees. Many of his assertions are made repeatedly, with no documentation offered, such as "Canada has the second-best education system on earth" and, even when other commenters produce documentation refuting his claims, Mr. Little persists in his assertions. This is not the way to build an educational forum where each new piece of information advances the debate and leads to better insights.

After repeated protests from a number of other commenters, we have come to the conclusion that the value of Mr. Little's different perspective is outweighed by the harm caused by the manner in which he presents it.

This, therefore, is an ultimatum. Mr. Little, we are putting you on notice that one more offensive posting will result in your being banned from posting to this blog.

Who Has Missed Something?

Click here to find out what the province of Ontario considers good teaching. Every award is for things like innovative kinesthetic learning techniques or creating authentic, rich, and engaging learning experiences or building wheelchair ramps. 

There are two possible explanations for the absence of, say, good math or language arts teaching:

• 1.  the belief that academics are less important than empowering students to be leaders for global change; or
• 2.  the assumption that academics are being taught adequately by most teachers.

Since the chronic 35% failure rate on provincial math and language tests puts the lie to the second assumption, there remains only the belief that academics are relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Have we missed something? Or have they?

No More Mr. Nice Guy

I have just deleted two comments because they were insulting. 

Sunshine on Schools Updated

More Sunshine on Ontario Schools
Interactive Online Tool Illuminates Some Dark Corners

The Society for Quality Education is pleased to announce that Sunshine on Schools Ontario, our interactive website, has been updated with the latest 2009 data. Ontario taxpayers, policymakers, and parents can easily and quickly compare the effectiveness of publicly-funded school boards on education funding, spending, and academic achievement from 2003 through 2009. The site can be accessed at www.sunshineonschools.ca.

Visitors to the Sunshine on Schools site will be able to compare, at one time, up to five school boards’ data on a wide variety of indicators such as: enrolment, class sizes, school board debt, and academic achievement. Users are able to see and compare the diverse range of each board’s per-student spending, amounts raised through fundraising, taxation revenues, transportation costs, salaries, and numbers of employees earning over $100,000, to name a few. Provincial averages are also included.

Except for a few GTA -surrounding boards, enrolments are declining but costs are growing at rates far above inflation. “There are some indicators that are particularly concerning” says “Doretta Wilson, executive director of the SQE. “For example, the total amount of retirement benefits payable by all boards has doubled since 2003 and has risen to over $3 billion.”

Sunshine on Schools makes it easy to penetrate the fog that obscures important school board facts. Some examples: there is no correlation between the percentage of small classes and student achievement; the Catholic school boards are getting much better academic results; and the largest board, the Toronto District School Board, has almost 1,000 employees who earn more than $100,000.

Note and update:  If you haven't seen Chris Spence, new Director of education of the Toronto District School Board, watch his interview with Steve Paikin here on The Agenda.  Sunshine on Schools was mentioned in the interview.