SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Cutting Off One’s Nose to Spite One’s Face

Further to yesterday’s posting concerning the Montreal Jesuit high school, the comments to The Globe and Mail article are quite revealing. Almost to a man, they disapprove of religious schools. Yet, as previous postings have shown, on average religious schools are getting much better results than non-religious schools. For example, there were only two private schools with 100% of their eligible grade 10 students able to pass the province’s literacy test - and both of them were religious schools. Why do people want to get rid of our best schools? I don’t get it.

Having Your Cake and Eating It Too

Yesterday, a Quebec Superior Court justice ruled that the provincial government could not force Montreal’s Loyola High School to offer a secular ethics course to its students. Loyola High School is a Jesuit-run private high school which, like most Quebec private schools, receives provincial government subsidies. Now the Jesuits offer a very fine education and have made it possible for many of their graduates to rise to great prominence, among them Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Jean Chrétien, Fidel Castro, Bill Clinton, Brian Mulroney, Maurice Duplessis, and many many more. Loyola High School, for example, boasts Jim Flaherty, the Canadian Finance Minister, and Georges Vanier, a former Canadian governor-general, among its alumni.

It turns out that another proud son of Loyola High School is Warren Kinsella, self-proclaimed “Prince of Darkness” and one of the masterminds behind Dalton McGuinty’s successful election campaign in 2007. You may recall that the issue of funding for faith-based schools was mentioned during that election, with Dalton McGuinty arguing that giving money to faith-based schools would splinter the public system and harm our children. Mr. McGuinty himself attended faith-based schools, his wife teaches in a faith-based school, and his children all attended faith-based schools. Mr. Kinsella also, by the way, sends his children to faith-based schools. 

Most people think that Dalton McGuinty won the 2007 election on the basis of his opposition to funding faith-based schools. So what would you guess Mr. Kinsella’s position to be on the Quebec ruling that Loyola High School doesn’t have to offer a secular ethics course? You can find out here. (Be sure to note the line: “I fundamentally believe in the separation of church and state, as regular readers will know.”)

UPDATE:  Score one for Religious Freedom, Barbara Kay in the NP: “This is an excellent decision and sends a clear, strong message that secular institutions should stay out of the business of instructing children in how to think about religion.”

School Choice 101

When people hear the term school choice, they think of charter schools or vouchers. School For Thought believes it is time for a quick refresher course in School Choice.

School choice is defined here as:  ”a matter of form, school choice does not give preference to one form of schooling or another, rather manifests itself whenever a student attends school outside of the one they would have been assigned to by geographic default. The most common options offered by school choice programs are open enrollment laws that allow students to attend other public schools, private schools, charter schools, tax credit and deductions for expenses related to schooling, vouchers, and homeschooling.”

Many Canadians are familiar with public school choices such as alternative public schools, magnet schools, or open school boundaries.  These choices are limited by the whim of the local school authorities, or in the case of Edmonton, enhanced by the competition offered by other school choice options.  Today’s lesson is on the main forms of school choice currently being offered in the U.S. and parts of Canada.

CHARTER SCHOOLS

Charter Schools are autonomous public schools that operate under a specific educational focus that enhances choice within the public system. They are directly funded and operate autonomously, outside of the school board bureaucracy. They are free to spend their funding as they see fit, but must be accountable for their results. They usually governed by a small board. They cannot exclude students and must be accessible to all. They cannot charge tuition fees. They are non-profit.

Charter schools are freed from bureaucracy so that innovative teachers and educational leaders can serve students’ needs in ways not served by the regular public system. They might have a particular teaching approach (direct instruction or Montessori). They might be same-sex schools, arts, sports, or science schools. They might be special needs schools-for at risk students, or special education, or drop-out students. There could be as many charter school types as the community desired. The best charter schools are also freed from staffing and collective bargaining restraints. They are then free to hire the right teacher or principal for the position.

Charter schools are granted their ‘charter’ either from a school board or from the provincial education authority. This charter is granted for a limited time period, three to five years, and is renewable as long as they meet the mandate of their charter. Any entity may apply for a charter-an individual, an organization, a group of parents or teachers, a trades organization.

Charter schools must be accountable for their academic results, for their finances, and for meeting the mandate of their charter. As public schools, they must meet the requirements of any provincial curriculum and participate in any testing. In Canada, they are not affiliated with any religious organization, but can provide religious instruction, much as the publicly-funded Catholic system does.

In the U.S., charter schools are very popular and the laws governing them vary widely by state.  Alberta is the only Canadian province that allows charter schools.  For a look at Alberta’s charter schools, watch the SQE DVD here.

VOUCHERS

Voucher programs can take two forms, public or private.  Public vouchers allow families to take their per-pupil education tax dollars and use them towards a private school of their choice, similar to how a scholarship works.   Private vouchers essentially work the same way, but the funding comes from private sources rather than from the government.  In Ontario and Alberta, Children First School Choice Trust is a source of limited private vouchers for low-income families.  Vouchers are for limited amounts, usually considerably less than the regular per-pupil public school funding.  Public voucher programs may be limited to eligible schools or by family income.  In the U.S. voucher programs are limited by caps on the total number of vouchers offered in any year.

In Canada, some private schools are directly funded to a varying degree depending on the province.

TAX CREDITS

Tax credits are non-refundable amounts, based on tuition paid to eligible private schools, that can be deducted from income tax.  They can be partial or full tax credits up to a certain dollar limit and can be income contingent.  

A variation on the theme is the Universal Tuition Tax Credit concept whereby essentially any taxpayer - parent or grandparent, neighbour or friend - could contribute to the education of any elementary or secondary child, including their own children, and then qualify for a tax credit. Because some low-income families will may not have enough taxable income to qualify for a personal tax credit,  the Universal Tax Credit includes a feature that’s similar to the one already in operation in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Florida, whereby individuals or corporations can donate to scholarship granting organizations which in turn award scholarships to poor families. Thus, low-income families would have to pay only part of their children’s schooling costs, with the scholarship granting organizations, such as Children First, paying the rest.

A universal tax credit could be granted to home-schoolers as well.

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There are naturally pros and cons to all the above alternatives, but having a variety of choice mechanisms that people can take advantage of allows more families more choices.

The opposition to school choice is fierce because it puts control of education dollars in the hands of individuals.  In a 2006 essay, Choosing School Choice, Malkin Dare wrote:

       “The absence of school choice is primarily justified by people’s desire for one strong public school system where all children attend a common-denominator neighbourhood school. Unfortunately, the more children attend neighbourhood schools, the less satisfied parents tend to be with those schools. Monopolistic schooling has inherent defects, including the dominance of special-interest groups like teachers’ unions; excessively-uniform school policies; weak and inappropriate incentive structures; and inefficient, unresponsive bureaucracies. Even with the best of intentions and highly-qualified teachers, monopolistic school systems invariably disappoint.

        “The opponents of school choice argue that offering parents their choice of schools would lead to all kinds of undesirable effects such as a two-tiered education system; a mass exodus from publicly-funded schools; social and religious fragmentation; the emergence of fanatical and/or fraudulent schools; and inefficiencies resulting from duplication of administrative costs. None of these arguments holds up to an empirical assessment of education practices in jurisdictions with more school choice.”

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Quick Update to this post.  Here are two more examples of school choice in action and their effects on public schools:

Report finds KIPP students outscore public school peers. ”Middle school students in the Knowledge Is Power Program, a charter school network with a major footprint in the District and other cities, significantly outperform their public school peers on reading and math tests, according to a new study.” Read here.

Competition boosts public schools. “The study found public schools’ performance improved when they were faced with the possibility of losing students to private schools. At issue is the Florida Tax Credit Scholarships, which provide vouchers to children from poor families.”  Read the article here.

Faith in Private Schools

Yesterday, I posted “Faith in Literacy” which made the point that Ontario’s Catholic school boards had a much higher percentage of successful students on the province’s grade 10 literacy test than the public boards. Just for fun, I calculated the average percentage of successful students in the province’s private schools, by simply averaging the percentages of each school’s statistics. I made the point that the poor results of a minority of schools masked the superior results of the majority of private schools - resulting in an average that was slightly below the provincial average. Our resident socialist jumped on this, vowing to tell the world that Ontario’s public schools are getting better results than Ontario’s private schools.

As someone who had plodded through the results of all of the province’s private secondary schools, I can assure you that this is not the case. Grumbling, I laboriously went through the results again, this time basing the average on the number of students in each school - and came up with a 79% pass rate, somewhat higher than the provincial average but not as high as the Catholic boards’ average. This percentage too is misleading, however.

The trouble is that there appear to be about three dozen schools, some of them quite large, that get poor results because they enroll mostly students whose second language is not English or French, and these students don’t speak English well enough to pass the literacy test yet. This is not to say that all of the other private schools are getting excellent results - not at all. But the majority of them are preparing between 90% and 100% of their students well enough to enable them to pass the grade 10 literacy test. Overall, the province’s private schools appear to be doing a somewhat better job than the public and separate schools - but of course it would be foolish to assume that all of them are.

Faith in Literacy

Last week, the EQAO released the results of this year’s grade 10 literacy test, expressed as the percentage of successful eligible students who took the test - as opposed to the percentage of successful eligible students. Since it would be possible for school boards to raise their scores by encouraging their weaker students to stay home on the day of the test, it is more meaningful to report the test results in terms of the percentage of successful eligible students. Here is our ranking of the major English-speaking Ontario school boards on the basis of the percentage of their eligible students who actually passed the test. 

The Catholic school boards are highlighted in orange. They did much better than the public boards - and even the private schools, as the sidebar shows. However, there was a very wide dispersion of private school test scores and the poor results of a minority of schools masked the superior performance of the majority. Perhaps three dozen private schools appear to enroll mainly new Canadians who are not yet fluent in English or French. Typically, 100% of their students attempted the test, but only a few passed. When it comes to the majority of the private schools however, most (but by no means all) appear to have enabled between 90% and 100% of their eligible students to pass the test. You can look at the private school results by going here, then clicking on “Select a School or Board Report” and selecting “Private Schools” from the drop-down menu.

The Moynihan Challenge: school choice variation

OK all you school choice opponents:  Matthew Ladner has a challenge for you.  If you don’t know Dr. Matthew Ladner, look it up.  Dr. Ladner has a variation of what has been termed the Moynihan Challenge.  The late U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (a democrat) issued it when faced by studies that often showed confusing results as justification spending for this or that program.

“The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) related an insightful anecdote in his book Miles to Go. Senator Moynihan asked Laura D’Andrea Tyson of the Clinton Administration for two supportive studies justifying the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on a favored program. Moynihan received two studies the following day, but after reading them, noted that both studies actually concluded similar programs had failed to produce any positive results. In response, Moynihan wrote the following in a letter to Tyson:

“‘In the last six months I have been repeatedly impressed by the number of members of the Clinton administration who have assured me with great vigor that something or other is known in an area of social policy which, to the best of my understanding, is not known at all. This seems to me perilous. It is quite possible to live with uncertainty, with the possibility, even the likelihood that one is wrong. But beware of certainty where none exists. Ideological certainty easily degenerates into an insistence upon ignorance.”

Ladner reflected, “Pronouncements by school-choice opponents are rife with such ideological certainty.” So Ladner issued a similar challenge four years ago.

“The first person in the nation who can send me two random assignment school-choice studies showing significant declines in either academic performance or parental satisfaction will win a steak dinner. I’ll even throw in drinks and dessert - the whole nine yards. You have one month to send the studies to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Feel free to forward this to your anti-school-choice friends and invite them to play. The more the merrier.”

I asked Ladner if any one has been successful yet, especially when year after year school choice brings academic success to students and satisfaction to parents as indicated once again here.  He says he is still waiting. 

You Can’t Beat the Bushes

The state of Florida is a national leader in providing school choices for families. During his tenure as governor, Jeb Bush brought in a number of school choice measures - more than 400 charter schools; scholarships for low-income children, children with disabilities, four-year-olds, and military families; generous corporate tax credit scholarships; and a wide variety of virtual school options. These measures have resulted in huge academic gains for Florida, especially among minorities and low-SES groups, and Mr. Bush has become an enthusiastic proponent of school choice. Earlier this month, he spoke in Moncton on the topic Choice Works: Educating Our Way to Self-Sufficiency. The videos show the Q&A portion of his talk.

Coming of Age

A comment to yesterday’s blog referred to “viral fads peculiar to education”. This article from our archives presents an interesting perspective on this subject. Briefly, it points out that in the past many professions - including pharmacology, accounting, and seafaring - were riddled with fads, but at some point intense pressure caused them to become evidence-based. For pharmacology, it was the Thalidomide disaster; for accounting, it was the great depression; and for seafaring, it was the sinking of the Titanic. 

The article refers to professions that rely on standardized and quantified data as “mature” professions. It’s high time the field of education joined the grown-ups.

All Day Kindergarten - Sense v. Cents?

Maybe it’s because boomers are getting older (and don’t have young kids in school anymore) or are more concerned about health care and the economy than all-day kindergarten day-care, but it seems that the program has met with a mixed response.  Yesterday’s (admittedly unscientific) Toronto Sun Poll had readers 69% against the plan.   In addition, the government has slowed down the number of eligible schools in their latest announcement for Phase II.  

School for Thought has always questioned the necessity to make such a program universal for all Ontario kindergartners.  If the school system is trying to give low SES or at-risk kids a head start, making it universal will only negate that intent.  We talked about the real reason for this program here.

The Peel Board warns it has no money to implement it.  Now we’ve heard this from other boards around the province as well, but take it with a grain of salt because it is the usual cry for more money and funding. 

Regardlesss, depending on the board and/or the municipality, the ELP is not proving as popular with parents as originally thought.  While some like the concept of the kindergarten part, parents are not keen on using the day care component mostly because the costs are not clear.  In some boards the cost of the daycare portion is higher than what parents are currently paying.  Parents are also worried that the costs of daycare for their younger children will go up as privately run day cares are affected.  Some boards are continuing their current before-and-after school programs with outside providers like the YMCA.  So what’s the difference?

The Premier didn’t even know what the full costs will be for this program that is “estimated” to cost about $1.5 billion per year when fully implemented.  This is concerning.  With the Ontario economy still fragile and facing a huge deficit, we just wonder whether the ELP will just be quietly watered down from its original plan—AFTER the next election, of course.

Mistaking the Ends for the Means in Teaching Composition

In introducing John Mighton, professor of mathematics and founder of JUMP, we neglected to mention that he is also a Governor-General’s Award-winning playwright. The following passage from The End of Ignorance (pp. 55-57) has relevance to the continuing discussion about the abysmal writing samples from the grade 10 EQAO literacy test.

“One source of confusion around the role of training in education lies in the vast difference between the things people do to become experts and the things they do when they are experts. Experts develop the skills and characteristics that we look for in outstanding students: they love what they do almost to the point of addiction, they are self-motivated and creative, and - in their field - they can see and remember details that elude the untrained eye and solve problems that defeat the amateur. But these abilities often develop from activities that appear to have little in common with true expertise. It seems inconceivable that anyting original or inspiring could originate in things that are themselves mechanical or derivative, but the abilities of experts often emerge from exercises that involve a great deal of practice and copying of the styles and ideas of others.

“When I was a teenager, I desperately wanted to write short stories and poems, but I had trouble producing one tolerable sentence after several hours of work and I could never seem to find anything interesting to write about. After receiving the lowest mark in my creative writing class at university, I doubted that I would ever write anything that could be published. Like most university students, my critical abilities were much more highly developed than my creative ones.

“Shortly after I received my undergraduate degree I read a book of letters from the poet Sylvia Plath to her mother. The book was a revelation to me, because it showed quite clearly that Plath managed to teach herself to write through sheer determination. As a teenager she had practised, with a relentless will, the literary equivalent of the training that produces grandmasters: she learned everything she could about poetic metre and form, she read widely in mythology, she studied other poets obsessively and she memorized a thesaurus. She also did something that we would never tell young writers to do now, but that probably contributed the most to developing her talent: she wrote imitations of the poems she loved. Plath’s early poems were extremely derivative, but gradually, as she developed her craft, her own voice began to appear. Eventually she became one of the most original poets of the past century.

“Reading about the methods that Plath used to teach herself to write gave me a great deal of hope. For the first time in my life I saw a path I could follow towards developing a skill in something. I still remember the day, two years after I had started slavishly imitating the work of Plath and other writers, when I first saw a trace of my own voice in a poem I had written. And later I started the whole process of imitation all over again to learn how to write plays.”

“When I started having some success with my plays, I realized that I hadn’t known how to observe the world until I had learned some measure of craft. I couldn’t know which of my experiences were dramatic, or which things I had heard people say would be interesting or funny on stage, until I had spent a great deal of time learning the literary forms that my experiences would fit into. we tend to think that children will just look at the world and interesting stories and observations will pour out of them naturally. This sometimes does happen, and teachers should certainly encourage their students to write even when they don’t have any technical skills. But children can be helped to create and to feel that they don’t have to invent a style from scratch if they are taught about the formal tools that writers can use to convey their ideas.”