SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Going By the Book

Textbooks, according to the Ontario Minister of Education, are old-fashioned and should be de-emphasized. In our opinion, the Minister of Education would be correct, but only if she changed the word “old-fashioned” to the word “flawed” and the word “de-emphasized” to the word “improved”.

Good textbooks are worth their weight in gold, and by that I mean old-fashioned gold. Textbooks offer huge advantages to teachers, students and parents.

• Teachers benefit from textbooks, because they reduce the amount of time needed to gather materials and prepare questions. Good teaching has always required preparation. However, beyond the activities which have always been necessary, modern teachers must spend hundreds of hours finding or creating their own materials. Good textbooks give teachers more time to do what they do best - teach!
• Students benefit from the structure and standardization offered by good textbooks. They ensure that students in different classes learn the same material, can be tested in the same way, and are not disadvantaged when they move to another school. And good textbooks ensure that students learn from materials that have been field tested, are based on sound learning principles, and are paced appropriately.
• Textbooks allow parents to support and enrich what their children are learning at school, thereby leveraging the teachers’ efforts. Textbooks are an important way to involve parents - and everyone agrees that parental involvement is an important component of effective education.

Unfortunately, however, good textbooks are in short supply in Ontario these days. Most of the books on the Ministry of Education’s list of approved texts, the Trillium List, have one or more of the following flaws.

• They have not been field-tested; in other words, new textbooks are not used on small groups of students to see if they work.
• They are full of pictures, cartoon, and graphics, making them bulky and expensive.
• They are seldom written by subject-area experts.
• Their content is often poorly-explained, out-of-sequence, and/or inaccurate.
• The reading texts are based on the “balanced literacy” approach to teaching reading, while the math and science texts are based on the flawed “spiral curriculum” concept whereby topics are revisited year after year.
• Most texts contain insufficient and inappropriate opportunities to practise the new concepts.
• They are designed to meet current fashions in education, not to provide a basis for effective instruction.

Today, textbooks are used much less than in the past. The resulting photocopying of materials is expensive, wasteful, and inefficient, and sometimes illegal.

One of the conditions of the Trillium List is that its textbooks must have been published in Canada, and this is a very harmful restriction. There are some excellent international texts which are suitable for use in Ontario, and schools should be able to buy them. Canadian publishers are surely not so inept that they must be protected from publishers in other countries. If publishers are encouraged to compete with one another and if they know that schools will be purchasing their texts on the basis of low cost and effectiveness, they may be motivated to produce inexpensive, compact, and useful texts such as are used in Germany, Holland, Japan, Singapore, and elsewhere. See this article from our newsletter archives for further information.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul?

Caroline Smith is a trustee on the Simcoe County District School Board, one of Ontario’s larger public schools boards, in the Barrie area. Her May 23 blog entry gives some insight into that board’s struggle to balance its budget - given the fact that revenues are down (due primarily to declining enrollment and provincial cuts to certain budgets, such as textbooks and transportation) - while costs are up (due primarily to salary increases, the new Early Learning Program, and Full-Day Kindergarten). It seems likely that this board’s budget difficulties are similar to those in other school boards, as they struggle to implement provincially-mandated programs like the Early Learning Program without the matching funding.

Also of interest is the comment that the Ontario Minister of Education has justified the province’s 15% cut to boards’ textbook budgets on the grounds that textbooks are old-fashioned. This opens up a whole new can of worms, which I will tackle tomorrow.

An Apparent Paradox

This University Affairs article is interesting in that it offers more evidence that Ontario high school graduates are more and more poorly prepared for university. The author believes that there was an abrupt change (for the worse) about five years previously. He goes on to offer six possible explanations: changes to the curriculum; the introduction of standardized testing; the elimination of grade 13; grade inflation; the popularity of video games; and Internet reliance.

It’s hard to understand how any of these explanations could have caused an abrupt change five years before, given that they had all occurred more than ten years previously. The author thinks that “the rapid decline in performance over the last five years has its roots in the teaching at the elementary level” and assigns primary blame to the changes to the curriculum and the introduction of standardized testing. He believes that the new curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep, such that teachers don’t have time to teach conceptual understanding and analytical skills. Furthermore, the provincial tests induce teachers to focus on teaching students to memorize formulae and other similar strategies. 

School for Thought is not convinced that these explanations are accurate. In fact, we have noted a very strong emphasis on higher-order skills, both in the revised Ontario curriculum and in the provincial tests. We wonder whether there is not TOO MUCH emphasis on conceptual understanding, and not enough on basic skills, in elementary classrooms. As this American Federation of Teachers article, Basic Skills Versus Conceptual Understanding: A bogus dichotomy in mathematics education, explains, “the precision and fluency in the execution of the skills are the requisite vehicles to convey the conceptual understanding. There is not ‘conceptual understanding’ and ‘problem-solving skill’ on the one hand and ‘basic skills’ on the other. Nor can one acquire the former without the latter.”

School for Thought suggests that the decline in university entrants’ conceptual understanding and analytical ability may - ironically - have its roots in an increased emphasis on conceptual understanding and analytical ability in elementary classrooms.

Turnitin to patrol Ontario high school essays?

Ontario's Ministry of Education has OK'd the use of the online plagiarism program, Turnitin, now used by Canadian universities, for use in high schools.  As reported in this NP article, Turnitin is not without controversy.

School boards would have the option of using it and would not be mandated by the province to do so. Frankly, School for Thought can't see any board actually wanting to use it.  After all, what would it do for those "inflated" graduation rates if it was found out that a significant number of students were handing in essays printed off the web?  What would the penalty be for plagiarism when nobody fails?

Are Teachers’ Unions Selfish, Greedy, and Disgraceful?

The governor of New Jersey thinks they are.

The Me Generation

This story goes to show just how far the self-esteem protectors are willing to go. The Gloucester Dragons Recreational Soccer League has brought in a rule that any team that wins a game by more than five points loses the game by default.

This possibly-related story reports that today’s college students are much less empathetic than they were 20 years ago. The article introduces various hypotheses as to why this is so, but it fails to mention the recent reverence for kids’ self-esteem. Could it be that high self-esteem leads to self indulgence and lack of empathy? Researchers are now finding that self-esteem isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

To Immerse or Not to Immerse: That is the question

Dear Aunt Malkin,
I am wondering whether to enroll my six-year-old daughter in French immersion. I am worried that she will lose out in terms of her English-language skills, and also whether other subjects like math and science will suffer.
Signed, Gary

Dear Gary,
There are two main reasons for choosing French immersion (FI). The first reason is because you want your child to learn French, and the second reason is so that your child will receive an enriched education.
With regard to the first reason, you should be aware that few children emerge from FI with fluent French. For one thing, the vast majority drop out along the way, with only a tiny percentage of students actually graduating from high school with a FI diploma. And even the survivors tend to speak French with a heavy English accent and many ungrammatical Englishisms - partly because French immersion is typically taught using a whole language approach, and partly because most FI teachers are not native French speakers. On the other hand, students with some FI typically understand spoken French well and are supremely confident of their ability to make themselves understood to some extent.
With regard to the second reason, an enriched education, it is true that there are huge cognitive benefits to learning a second language. Furthermore, since the weaker students tend to drop out of FI over the years, most FI classes end up being composed of mainly “gifted” students who can be taught at a higher level than non-FI classes. This is of course great for the survivors, but it is quite hard on the drop-outs, who tend to regard themselves as failures.
As well, the English-language spelling of FI students takes terrible hits, as the students tend to randomly add the letter ‘e’ here and there, nor do they ever really master the concept of double letters. A word like “address” might show up as “addresse”, “adresse”, or “adress”, for example. When it comes to other subjects like math and science, FI students tend to do about the same as or slightly better than non-FI students - but, bearing in mind that surviving FI students tend to be strong students, they probably should be achieving significantly better results than non-FI students in these subjects.
For more background information on FI, read the articles in the French Immersion section of our newsletter archives. The bottom line is that the FI option is deeply flawed but, given that the other options are also deeply flawed, FI may be the best option for some kids.
Signed, Aunt Malkin