SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

It Still Doesn’t Add Up

One of the worst obstacles Canadian education reformers face is the widespread complacency about our public schools, especially in light of Canada’s good showing on the PISA international comparisons. It is my impression, however, that most Canadian public schools are still not offering a very good service. If I thought otherwise, I would happily go off and play more tennis and bridge. But worries about an uneducated citizenry, failed children, and my own grandchildren keep me hunched over my computer.

This recent article from the Canadian journal University Affairs bears out my worries about the state of math education. If you read down far enough, you’ll see why good results on the PISA comparisons are not in fact reassuring.

It’s still not about the money

Further to Malkin’s post on November 24th about the disparities in spending on education in Ontario, I found some interesting discussion that backs up the assertion that just spending more money won’t translate into improved academic outcomes.  Chester Finn writes about the 1965 Coleman Report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, which shaped much of current education policy. He writes:

     “The Coleman Report and its data have been exhaustively analyzed and reanalyzed. But this key finding has never been successfully challenged: School inputs-money, teachers, teacher credentials, etc.-have little correlation with pupil achievement and differences in achievement cannot be significantly accounted for by differences in school resources.

     “Pre-Coleman, the formula was simple. More money plus more teachers (and more whatever) made for better schools which yielded better results. Nearly everyone took this for granted. Yet Coleman showed that, by and large, it isn’t true. For Lyndon Johnson was still president and had spent the previous two years persuading Congress that the way to end poverty and equalize achievement in America was to lavish federal dollars on the education system (and particularly its poorest corners) via a host of big new programs like Title I and Headstart. Coleman said, in effect, that such programs wouldn’t do much good. Which meant, of course, that if one cared about boosting achievement one had to find other ways to do it, beginning with a new focus on the achievement itself rather than on resources.”

 In the U.S. the huge amounts of stimulus spending (much of it in education) has added more to the argument.  This from Reason.com:

     “The stimulus isn’t working because it is based on faulty economics. Using historical spending data, the Harvard economist Robert Barro and recent Harvard graduate Charles Redlick have shown that in the best case scenario, a dollar of government spending produces much less than a dollar in economic growth-between 40 and 70 cents. They also found that if the government spends $1 and raises taxes to pay for it, the economy will shrink by $1.10. In other words, greater spending financed by tax increases hurts the economy. Even if the tax is applied in the future, taxpayers today adjust their consumption and business owners refrain from hiring based on the expectation of future tax increases, which worsen the economy today.

      “There are other reasons the stimulus bill has hurt rather than helped the economy. Four of every five jobs reported ‘created or saved’ are government jobs. That’s far from the 90 percent private sector jobs the administration promised. Also, the Department of Education claims it has ‘created or saved’ at least seven jobs for every job ‘created or saved’ by any other agency. In other words, federal stimulus funds have been used to keep teachers on state payrolls. By subsidizing public sector employment, the federal government is getting in the way of addressing the issue of overspending in the states.”

Sunday at the Movies (Unresponsive School Boards)

This video is built around an amazing story from Oklahoma where some school boards are refusing to obey a new state law that provides private school scholarships for special-needs students. There are certain parallels to a battle currently being waged by the London-area parent of an autistic child.

Jack of All Trades, Master of None?

The Huffington Post is pointing out that the salary bonus teachers are paid for a master’s degree is a waste of money - since possession of this degree has little or no correlation with teacher effectiveness. Bill Gates has even joined in the fray, pointing out that his own state of Washington is wasting something like $300 million a year on the bonus.

In Ontario, too, teachers are paid more if they have a master’s degree, but I couldn’t find out how much the bonus is. The Ontario public high school teachers’ union (OSSTF) published an interesting document entittled “Where to Work in Ontario” a few years back and, although it is now out of date, the document still provides an insight into how teacher contracts work. It would be wonderful if our teacher readers were to weigh in and explain how the salary grids work and any other helpful information. I’d like to be able to estimate how much the master’s salary bonus costs Ontario annually.

A Win-Win Proposition

Greetings from Key Biscayne, FL, where I am on a brief visit. Being in Florida, I am paying attention to the state’s various programs to make it possible for low-income parents to choose their kids’ schools. One of these is the Florida State Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTC) which began in 2001 and provides tax credits for corporations that make donations to scholarship funding organizations. It is the largest private school scholarship program in the US, last year sending almost 29,000 disadvantaged children to better schools, and it is set to grow to a possible 75,000 students by 2015.

A recent study sought to  determine whether the FTC, by making it possible for more parents to flee failing public schools, is prompting those public schools to improve their service. Although the study is quite sophisticated, it basically compared the test scores of public schools in areas with a lot of private schools with the test scores of public schools in areas with few private schools.

The study found that “the increased competitive pressure public schools faced following the introduction of Florida’s State Tax Credit Scholarship Program led to general improvement in their performance. Both expanded access to private school options and greater variety of options that students have in terms of religious (or secular) affiliations of private schools are positively associated with public-school students’ test scores following the introduction of the FTC program. The gains occur immediately, before any students leave the public schools with a scholarship, implying that competitive threats are responsible for at least some of the estimated effects. And the gains appear to be much more pronounced in the schools most at risk to lose students (elementary and middle schools, where the cost of private school attendance with a scholarship is much lower and in the schools that are on the margin of Title I funding.”

As a result of the FTC scholarships, everyone wins - both the students who enroll in private schools and the students who stay behind. 

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Don’t forget to register for SQE’s AGM featuring author Michael Zwaagstra (What’s Wrong With Our Schools) Saturday, Dec. 4th 12:30 p.m. at Metro Hall, Toronto. It’s FREE! 

Register online HERE.

Becuz its crewel, innit?

The Writing’s On the Wall

HT to Jo-Anne for this sobering article from the Telegraph in the UK.  The great phonics debate continues over the pond, despite some of the most convincing evidence from UK reading research showing that systematic phonics instruction is the way to go.  SQE has often cited the Clackmannanshire study, and other similar studies, for example.    Diane Pearson’s article is a response to a white paper has just been released in the UK which calls for a complete overhaul of how teachers are trained.   UK Education Secretary, Michael Gove, proposes, for instance, that teachers be trained outside of the usual faculties of education and do more in-school, hands-on training similar to how medical interns train.

Diane Pearson, recalls her own experience as a novice teacher thirty years before who was instructed during her teacher-training days not to help her student sound out words.  “We don’t do that here,” she was told, but was to encourage “kids to ‘become active constructors of their own learning.”  Of course we know the disastrous results that ensued decades later.  Fast-forward thirty years and she notes that the current crop of novice teachers who learned under the same ineffective methods are now not even aware of their own ignorance when it comes to language.  It’s a case of the blind leading the blind. 

Pearson adds her solutions for teacher training in reading instruction: “Rid the Education department of anyone clinging to discredited theories.  Make the failure to teach phonics in primary schools illegal.”   SQE says, hurrah to that.

While most educrats wring their hands over why boys don’t like to read, Pearson writes, “Point out to your critics there is nothing that puts a child off reading quite as much as the inability to read.”  She concludes, “At long last, the writing is on the wall.  The tragedy is that so many cannot read it.”

Problem is, it’s the educrats who can’t see it either.

More Money Is Not The Answer

There are those who blame the poor performance of Ontario schools on under-funding, even though it is very easy to demonstrate that the amount of money schools boards receive has little or no correlation with their students’ achievement. 

Here’s an article from the North Bay Nugget showing a wide disparity in the amount of per-pupil funding among the four local boards: Near North ($12,474), Nipissing-Parry Sound Catholic ($13,809), Catholique Franco-Nord ($16,831), and Nord-Est de l’Ontario ($20,728). Yet on the Ontario Literacy Test, the pass rates at the same four boards bore no relation to the amount of money they were receiving: Near North (81%), Nipissing-Parry Sound Catholic (75%), Catholique Franco-Nord (79%), and Nord-Est de l’Ontario (68%). 

All of this information (and much more) is available at our Sunshine on Schools web-site. H/T to Chuck.

Are Canadian Parents Done Waiting Yet?

In the wake of the film “Waiting for Superman”, a national bi-partisan coalition of more than 200 grassroots education groups has formed in the US. Called “Done Waiting”, their first initiative is a petition that demands the following:

• Expansion of proven models, such as charter schools
• More professional and better-treated teachers
• Priority to kids’ interests over the politics of special interests

It will be interesting to see what Done Waiting does with its petition once it gets enough signatures. (H/T to Chas)

A Progress Report on Report Cards

You can access information about Canada’s murky policies on reporting to parents, especially the evolving situation in Ontario, on Educhatter’s blog, along with a number of pertinent comments. H/T to Peggy for the video, which kind of sums up most kids’ report cards.

Do You Know What Your Child Is Watching At School?

Some parents may not be aware of this, but it is very common for teachers to squander hours and hours of class time showing movies to their students. Here’s a refreshing counterpoint to this practice.