SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Giving Them a Fighting Chance

A while back I asked if anyone could explain the increased incidence of bullying in schools. As no one has responded, I am putting forward my own hypothesis.

Roy Baumeister is a professor of psychology at Florida State University. Back in the early seventies when he was an undergrad at Princeton, Dr. Baumeister became interested in the concept of self-esteem. At that time, the term was almost unknown; certainly no one considered self-esteem important or worth bolstering. Dr. Baumeister hypothesized that high self-esteem would lead to improvement in many personal and social problems and, perhaps partly because of his efforts, by the mid-eighties a lot of people had jumped on his bandwagon, working hard to boost children’s self-esteem.

Ironically, it was around that time that it began to dawn on Dr. Baumeister that a growing body of research was indicating that the new emphasis on self-esteem wasn’t producing any positive outcomes. By the ninties, many researchers had come to think that the promotion of self-esteem was actually associated with some negative outcomes, especially a tendency to bullying and violence. Although people used to think that bullies acted the way they did because they suffered from low esteem, the truth turned out to be exactly the opposite. Actually, people with artificially-high self-esteem tend to have trouble coping with anything that threatens their good opinion of themselves, causing them to lash out angrily.

This new understanding of the effect of self-esteem that is out of proportion to accomplishment may offer some insights into the bullying phenomenon in schools. Perhaps the campaign to boost kids’ self-esteem has created an unusually-high percentage of little emperors who are prone to anger and aggression.

The last word goes to Dr. Baumeister. “After all these years, my recommendation is this: Forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline. Recent work suggests this would be good for the individual and good for society - and might even be able to fill some of those promises that self-esteem once made but could not keep.”

Update to this post: SQE was quoted in the York Region news on August 3, 2010 in this article Region Parents Worry About Anti-bullying Watchdogs.

When Hell Freezes Over

This article reports on the Ontario government’s plans to ask the province’s public sector unions, including the teachers’ unions, to accept wage freezes when their current contracts expire.

Using Lemon Juice to Make Lemonade

This BBC article quotes Zenna Atkins, England’s Chair of the Office for Standards in Education, as saying that “every school should have a useless teacher” and that it’s good for kids to learn to cope with bad teachers. She apparently also told the Sunday Times that schools should not try to get rid of every inadequate teacher. The interview was in response to the revelation that only 18 UK teachers have been fired for incompetence over the past 40 years. 

Apparently many Ontario education leaders share Ms Atkins’ views - although it seems likely they believe that every school should have multiple useless teachers. In fact, if bad teachers are so good for kids, maybe we should start firing the good teachers. What do you think?

Give Boys a Chance

In a comment to “Why Boys Fail”, Susan suggests a read of Bonnie Macmillan’s book Why Boys Are Different, available from our lending library. According to Dr. Macmillan, there are essentially two kinds of beginning reading instruction: the multi-focus approach (now called Balanced Literacy) and the single-focus approach (systematic phonics), and boys learn much better if they are taught by a single-focus approach. Here’s an excerpt from the section on reading research (p. 119).

“A large body of reliable research consistently demonstrates that the more a method is focused on the direct teaching of the two sets of information and the two skills  used during reading, the faster and better children learn to read. The more time a teacher spends on teaching other things, the slower and the lower the reading achievement.

“Large classroom studies in Scotland, Canada, England and the USA that have compared the effects of different teaching methods are particularly convincing: they show that single-focus-taught children end up with reading ages as much as one to two years above their actual ages, whereas those taught by other methods can often wind up reading or spelling well below their age level.

“In a large classroom study in Canada, conducted by Karen Sumbler and Dale Willows in 1996, it was found that time spent engaged in the following six activities makes no difference to beginners’ reading achievement: phonological awareness training; sight word learning (memorizing words); shared reading; class chanting of patterned or rhyming books; any attempt to write text; the learning of letter names. 

“Sex differences are eradicated by the single-focus method, and sometimes boys even outperform girls. For example, Scottish research examined the long-term effects of this form of instruction. Five years on, boys taught by the single-focus method were reading at a level not only two and a half years above their age but also seven months ahead of similarly taught girls. 

“British government surveys confirm these results. In England, multi-focus methods swept into use in the last 1960s and early 1970s, but infiltrated Scottish schools much later. After the introduction of these methods in England, it was discovered that the average English child was reading at a level 18 months below that of the average Scottish child. During this same period, significant sex differences in reading began to appear. These were apparent by the late 1970s and early 1980s in England, but did not appear in Scotland until the late 1990s.”

Summer Poll Question

Our last survey asked whether you supported school vouchers. The response was 79% in favour, 21% opposed.

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

This Education Reporter posting discusses a new venture in Deep River, ON that will see the creation of a JK-12 school. In a time of shrinking enrollment, the concept makes a lot of sense, and there are already a few other JK-12 schools sprinkled in small communities around the province. It’s great to see even timid steps away from standard big-box schools. Necessity is the mother of invention!

Big Education

This Education Next article describes the enormous political power of American teachers’ unions. This power is arrived at by means of two different tactics: spending and mobilizing teachers. In terms of spending, in the 2007-08 election cycle American teachers’ unions spent $71.7 million on candidate and issue campaigns, considerably more than any other federation, association or mega-corporation. In terms of mobilizing teachers, each election sees the union marshalling hundreds of thousands of their members to knock on doors, stuff envelopes, staff phone banks, attend rallies, and make donations in support of the unions’ preferred candidate (almost always left-leaning).

The teachers’ unions are the number one political player in the United States, frequently playing the role of king-maker in both controlling who gets elected and then influencing what he or she does once elected. Of course, the unions work to influence education policy in terms of opposing such things as school choice, testing, and merit pay, but they also take an interest in many other issues - including higher taxes, liberalized labour laws, wide-open campaign spending regulations, single-payer health care, legal gay marriage, and much more.

If you think that things are different in Canada, I have this bridge I’d like to sell you. To the best of my knowledge, there is no database of political spending in Canada (and, because I’m on dial-up at the cottage all summer, I can’t research this), but it’s clear that Canadian teachers’ unions have proportionately just as much as or more money than their American counterparts, and they are equally active in Canadian politics. 

The question we need to ask is whether democracy is well served when a single group can wield so much political power. Paraphrasing the famous quote by Georges Clemenceau to the effect that war is too important a matter to be left to the military, we say that education is too important a matter to be left to the teachers’ unions.

Why Boys Fail

Newest in our lending library is Why Boys Fail: Saving our sons from an educational system that's leaving them behind. This book first presents the evidence that boys are struggling in school (and it is overwhelming). The author then examines the usual suspects (for example, feminized classrooms, video games, dearth of boy books, ADHD, etc,) and concludes that they are by no means the whole story. He then looks at an unusual suspect, namely the lack of systematic phonics in primary classrooms, and makes the case that this lack plays a significant role in boys' problems. Unfortunately, the book rambles and does not present as compelling a case as it might. The following is an excerpt from the section that asks why no one is sounding the alarm (pp. 37-28).

"One of the starkest missed opportunities to learn of the boy troubles arose in 1988, when California educators embarked on a misguided experiment to shift wholesale to 'whole language' instruction, where children attempt to pick up reading skills naturally, absent phonics instruction, from reading literature. Not until 1997 did the state reverse course by banning texts that shunned instruction on basic reading techniques. 'For too long, teachers have had to secretly sneak phonics-based textbooks into the classroom,' said then governor Pete Wilson. By hindsight, academic investigators now pinpoint that shift as the beginning of California's plunge in academic achievement, a remarkable decline documented by PBS correspondent John Merrow in his broadcast 'First to Worst'. That disastrous decade-long fad was an ideal opportunity to draw some lessons about what happens when boys, who are less adept than girls in picking up literacy skills absent phonics, are deprived of any phonics instruction. Learning those lessons, however, never happened.

"The next missed opportunity arose in the mid-1990s, when National Institutes of Health researcher Reid Lyon, who oversaw a reading research program there, warned that tens of thousands of young black boys were being diverted to special education for reading disabilities (a near-certain ticket to dropping out in later grades) that essentially didn't exist. Their teachers simply didn't know how to teach them reading....With the backing of President George W. Bush and prominent Republicans in Congress, Lyon's star rose quickly, culminating in the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program. By 2007, however, the program began collapsing from the weight of abusive management and lackluster evaluations. What had seemed like an ideal opportunity to learn the impact research-based reading programs could have on boys ran aground.

"Yet another missed opportunity arose in 2000 when conservative think tanker Christina Hoff Sommers burst onto the scene with her book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men. Sommers deftly laid out the problems boys were having, but then detoured into gender politics by blaming feminists for the problem, a dubious proposition that even she steers clear of today. Playing the ideological blame game blunted what could have been a timely warning. Over the same time period, book writers such as Michael Gurian, Leonard Sax, Jeffrey Wilhelm, and Michael Smith pointed to male literacy problems and offered corrections, but it was never enough to elevate the issue to the national agenda. For the most part, that left the issue to on-the-ground educators to uncover, one at a time."

What Happened to Studying?

Malkin's July 9th post on How High Schools are Setting Their Students Up for Disappointment and this Boston Globe article on how college students are "cracking the books less and less", makes this Toronto Catholic Board student's achievement even more remarkable.

Brianna Smrke scored perfect marks in her eight International Baccalaureate program courses, which are far more rigorous than the regular high school program.   "How did she do it?", the interviewer asked.  Her response:

     "Putting in the effort and doing the work and staying on top of things. Once I got started, it was easier to maintain and do my absolute best. I'm just so happy it happened."

That part of that effort was studying seven hours a night.  So what happened to studying when it obviously pays off when done properly?

Maybe it's because homework is looked upon as a burden to young students and seems to be going the way of the dodo.  There was quite a bit in the media over the past few years about how kids get too much homework.  We heard horror stories of poor six-year-old Johnny or Janie forced to spend hours of coloring worksheets or gluing projects together.  Alfie Kohn, the progressive education guru, has become the anti-homework icon people like to quote when they want to make homework the evil step-sister in the education story.  For a insight at what good homework should look like, read our SQE Quick Study on Homework written by teacher, Marjorie Gann.

Truth is, a lot of the homework kids get is poorly designed.  Studying gets a bad wrap later in high school because kids don't know how to do it well starting from the elementary years.  They get to university and are suddenly bombarded with what is now "study overload shock" because they have not, as Malkin wrote, been prepared for the rigour and discipline that is required to keep up.

Without School Boards

Warming to the subject, another expendable feature of modern education delivery systems is school boards, as this article from the London Free Press demonstrates. The story concerns a parent who is very involved in and supportive of her kids' public school, but who has just been notified that two of her children will not be able to go to the school any more - as a result of the school board's policies. How's that for customer care? 

School boards are expensive, undemocratic, bureaucratic nuisances that basically get in the way of classroom teachers. Here's an article from our archives that shows what happened in New Zealand when it abolished school boards about 20 years ago.