SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

This Elephant Didn’t Forget

Time to get into the Christmas spirit by watching this short video. The education connection is pretty tenuous, but the message is uplifting and might be considered relevant to some of our commenters. Make sure you have the Kleenix handy though….

What Fools These Mortals Be

A couple of weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times stunned the education world by ranking the city’s teachers and publishing the results - by name (see our posting on this). Now the Times has done it again, this time analyzing the effects of the school board’s budget cuts. Because of union contracts, the school board has to lay off teachers on the basis of their seniority, as opposed to their effectiveness. It found that this policy is harmful in three main ways.

• Hundreds of the school board’s most promising young teachers lost their positions.
• Schools in the city’s poorest areas were disproportionately hard hit.
• Many more teachers were cut than would have been the case if the decision had been made on the basis of effectiveness (because more senior teachers are paid much more).

Since the same seniority provisions are found in all Canadian teacher (and support staff) contracts, the same situation prevails here. Imagine what a Martian would think of a system-wide deliberate policy of rooting out the better yet less-expensive teachers!

There Is No Joy In Mudville

The 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results were released yesterday. The big news is the stunning success of China whose students - despite the country’s poverty and relatively low spending on education - scored higher than every other country in every category and by a convincing margin. Here are the highlights expressed in terms of Ontario students (scroll to the bottom).

Comparing the performance of Ontario students on this test with their performance three years ago on the 2006 test, their raw scores dropped 3 points in reading, stayed the same in math, and dropped 6 points in science. The combination of this drop in raw scores and the entrance of two very successful countries (China and Singapore) means that Ontario dropped from 5th place in reading to 6th place, from 10th place to 13th place in math, and from 5th place to 10th place in science.

Although the Ontario government is doing its best to put a positive spin on these results, it begins to look as if the Liberal government’s education reform efforts are backfiring.

All Together Now

Modern teaching methods and the resulting problems have been with us for so long now that most people have come to take them as normal and inevitable. Some examples are behaviour problems, bullying, and the poor performance of boys and disadvantaged children. This article from "Education Next" discusses another of the consequences of modern teaching methods, namely the enormous disparity in children's academic performance. This disparity widens with each subsequent grade, and a useful rule of thumb is that the number of years separating the best and the worst students is at least the same as the grade, if not more. In other words, in grade 3 the spread in achievement is roughly three years (with some students still performing at a grade 1 level and some students performing at a grade 4 level), and by grade 8 the eight-year disparity might have the bottom students performing at a grade 3 level and the top students performing at a grade 11 level.

The "Education Next" article is mostly about how best to cope with such a wide disparity - whether to use ability grouping or differentiated instruction. But these are just Band-Aids. A more sensible approach would be to eliminate the root cause of the problem. Just as malaria could not be dealt with effectively until mosquitoes were identified as the causative agent, so too it is necessary to understand that modern teaching methods are actually causing the enormous disparity in children's academic performance.

You Will Be Tested On This

Critics of testing are fond of pointing out that weighing a pig doesn't fatten it, the inference being that testing doesn't increase learning. But, as this article from The Globe and Mail and this article from our archives report, testing in fact DOES increase learning. It turns out that regular and frequent quizzing is a powerful method for increasing retention - and its power is increased when immediate feedback is provided.

Unfortunately, testing has fallen out of favour in modern educational circles. As one cognitive scientist points out, "The way we typically do things in education seems almost reverse-engineered to produce the least learning."

Sunday at the Movies or Talkies (Michael Zwaagstra)

SQE held its annual general meeting yesterday, and Michael Zwaagstra, our feature speaker, delivered a fantastic address that had the audience eating out of his hand. For those of you who missed it, you can get a quick idea here by clicking on "Merits of Homework". In this five-minute clip, Mr. Zwaagstra is interviewed about sensible homework policies. To get a fuller idea of what he had to say at our meeting, click here and then choose one of the audio clips in the second-from-the-top box in the centre column. The 27-minute Regina talk is probably the most representative one if you have the time.

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Update:  Here's a report of the SQE AGM at Our Kids Publications here.

Teachers’ Unions Versus Students

The financial crisis has meant that many municipalities are struggling to balance their books, leading to layoffs in many sectors - including the education sector. In Petaluma, CA, this has meant cut-backs in non-teaching areas such as lunchtime and recess supervisors, office secretaries, and library assistants. But when well-meaning Petaluma parents came forward as volunteers to fill the void, the union said no. Here is a stark choice between the welfare of students and the union’s self-interest - with the union making it very clear that its own well-being comes first. Keep this in mind the next time a teachers’ union justifies its demands on the basis that it’s good for kids. For the whole story, including some interesting musings on the importance of volunteers in the last two paragraphs, click here.

In case you think this couldn’t happen in Canada, I believe Tunya has a personal story that might indicate the opposite. H/T to Tunya for this story - and it would be great if you (or anyone else) would elaborate on what happened when you tried to volunteer at a Canadian school.

People for Education

For readers who live in Ontario, Parents for Education publishes an informative newsletter. The current issue, for example, has information about Ontario’s Child Advocacy Project (CAP) which provides “free legal services to low-income families who can’t afford a lawyer”. CAP’s Education Law Program helps students who are unable to access special education services, face suspension or expulsion, or feel unsafe at school. 

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Reminder to Readers - If you are in the GTA Saturday December 4th, please drop by Metro Hall at 55 John St. in Toronto at 12:30 p.m. to meet the SQE team and hear author and teacher Michael Zwaagstra (What’s Wrong With Our Schools and How We Can Fix Them) cut through the edu-babble.

An Early-Childhood Program That Actually Works!

The Ontario Government’s new all-day kindergarten programs are being sold on the promise that they will be good for disadvantaged children - but we think this is pretty unlikely (see here, for example). This is not to say we don’t favour help for disadvantaged kids or doubt that something can be done to help them - just that governmental all-day kindergarten programs aren’t the answer. Now comes an article in The Record about a successful program that has got excellent results in three Ontario disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This was “a four-year program that spanned junior kindergarten to Grade 2, and gave children things like in-school help, nutrition and behavioural programs”.

I would like to underline the following vitally-important sentence from the article. “Their parents and neighbourhoods got to choose what was offered, hired staff, and received programs ranging from job search help, parenting and language training.” Enough said.

Give Ontario Kids a Chance

Speaking of shortfalls in math, here's an interesting posting from the blog Do The Math. Approaches to teaching math tend to be either "constructivist" (emphasizing understanding), or "traditional" (emphasizing fluency in math algorithms). The US Department of Education is sponsoring a comparison of textbooks in order to see which approach is more effective. Preliminary results support the traditional approach - which will come as no surprise to most readers of this blog. 

The textbooks being compared are, of course, American, but Ontario parents may be interested to know that all of the textbooks approved for class use in the province emphasize the constructivist approach to teaching math.