SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

What Segregation?  The myth of “poor” schools.

Lately, there has been quite the media buzz over schools for "poor" kids such as the Niagara School for low SES and the proposed Christo Rey school private school. Critics talk about segregation.  Well, low income families are already segregated by the neighborhoods they live in to begin with. 

School for Thought believes that, while low SES poses challenges, it should not be the excuse for academic failure.  Here's a good news story from Chicago:  all of Chicago's Urban Prep Academy (a charter school) seniors were accepted to college for the second year in a row.

This is quite an accomplishment considering that only 11% of the school's graduating cohort were reading at grade level four years ago!  Just in case you were wondering if these boys were the cream of the crop:

        By now, Urban Prep's story has become a national wonder for its success in making college a reality for kids from tough, low-income neighborhoods where college rarely is an option. In Chicago Public Schools, the high school dropout rate for African-American males hovers at 60 percent, and only 1 in 40 black male grads earn a bachelor's degree by the age of 25.

 Give credit to those school boards and schools that want to ensure that ALL students succeed by giving families choices for better schools.  

Mark your calendars

Please plan to be in Toronto on Tuesday, April 26 for our seminar on accountability. This promises to be a lively session. For one thing, we will be hosting the Canadian première of The Cartel, a film about what happens when schools are not accountable. The film will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by Gerry Nicholls, one of Canada's top five political minds. The lunchtime keynote speaker will be Theo Caldwell, author, columnist and businessman, who will speak about what the public sector can learn from the private sector (and vice versa) about accountability. In the afternoon, there will be a panel discussion on the failure of to-date accountabilty measures like testing and monitoring to raise student achievement - and what other options are still available. It will be moderated by CFRB's Jerry Agar, and will include John Snobelen (former Ontario minister of education). Kevin Gaudet of the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation, and one panelist still to be announced. If you register today, you can get the early bird price. Hope to see you there!

Don’t wait for superman

If you didn't see the film "Waiting for Superman" when it was in theatres, you can now rent the DVD. Don't miss it.

Can one school fit all?

From time to time we post a new poll on our home page. Last time, we asked about bullying: 85% of respondents reported that they knew of a child who had been bullied in school to the extent that his or her parents had to intervene. There were some heart-rending comments. 

This month, we ask about your goals for your children’s education. If it turns out, as we suspect it will, that respondents vary greatly in their preferences, it will bolster the argument for school choice. (H/T to Dr, Mark Holmes for the poll categories.)

Semestered out

A sort of a sub-thread of discussion about semestering has developed in the “It’s the difference between night and day” comments.

FromEurope wonders how semestering got started in Ontario schools. The answer can be found in this article from our archives.

Mr. Wainscotting lists several advantages of semestering and talks about how he initially heeded its siren call. Once it was implemented in his school, however, he soon saw that semestering was a rose with a very sharp thorn - namely, it cut deeply into student learning. For chapter and verse on the academic costs in BC semestered schools, read this article from our archives.

Lastly, click here for a very amusing article by a retired Ontario high school science teacher wherein he shows what goes wrong with student engagement and learning when schools are semestered.

One of our readers, Chuck, sent his kids to schools in an Ontario board that desemestered all of its high schools for a few years about ten years ago. Chuck, would you like to tell our readers what happened to student test scores during the short time that desemestering was in effect in your school board?

Provincial exit exams, anyone?

Picking up where I left off yesterday, Professor Collins was very dismayed at the variability of his students’ academic preparation. This moved him to analyze the difference between first-year students’ high school graduating average and the extent their grades had dropped by the end of their first year of university. He found that incoming students’ marks dropped an average of 15 percentage points. He also noticed that there was a considerable variation across secondary schools in terms of how much their students’ grades dropped.

Including only those schools from which a minimum of 10 students registered at Western and using three years of data, Professor Collins found that the first-year grade drop ranged from an average of 5% at some schools to 25% at others. He then sent a letter, emanating from the office of the provost & vice-president (academic), to every high school that qualified, informing each school of its students’ average grade drop. 

Quoting from the letter: “The data in the table raise a number of issues, including two that seem particularly important. The first concerns consistency in grading standards among high schools: for example, are the schools in Group 1 and Group 6 using the same standards for OAC grades? The second concerns fairness: is it fair to our applicants for admission to ignore significant and persistent differences in the grade drops among schools?”

Presumably Professor Collins hoped that this exercise would shock the worst offenders into reducing the extent of their grade inflation, but in fact what happened was ... nothing. The high schools and school boards did their best to hush the whole thing up.

I have a copy of the letter and the statistical data if anyone would be interested. 

Ivory Tower Blues

In a comment to "It's the difference between night and day", fromEurope asks how universities control for the lack of standardized high school graduation marks in Ontario. An interesting perspective on this issue can be found in one of the books in our lending library, Ivory Tower Blues: A university system in crisis. This excerpt (pp. 22-24) is taken from a section disucssing the importance of grades.

"A useful voice to add to this analysis comes from a Western professor, Thomas Collins, who spent 21 years as an administrator, first as chair of the English Department, then as dean of Arts, and finally as provost and vice-president academic of Western (the second-highest position in the university). These posts took him out of the classroom entirely from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Thus, we have  a rare case study in which someone's institutional memory is untainted by the experience of having to adjust his teaching year after year to increasingly unprepared and disengaged students, as appears to be the case for many professors, as we shall see in chapter 2. In a paper written for the Council of Ministers of Education, Collins admitted to some naivety when he returned to the classroom in the mid-1990s, and considerable shock at how standards had slipped in 21 years and how ill-prepared students were for the English courses he taught, especially the first-year courses. From his experiences in the trenches during his first year back, he concluded that he could not 'assume even a moderate level of literacy from [these students] ... presumably because they think, or have been led to believe, that they are at least proficient in' English.

"Collins blamed this result on poor and inconsistent preparation in secondary schools in reading and writing, poor work habits, and low levels of critical thinking and learning skills. Given the high grades with whcih these students gained entry into university (Western, in this case), Collins clearly saw the negative consequences of grade inflation that we discuss here. He presented institutional data showing an average 14% grade drop for first-year students, who entered with a 79.5% average as a group, but finished first year at Western with a 65.3% average. Western's standards had not yet changed significantly from the traditional standards about which we write, but high school standards had obviously loosened, giving students terribly false feedback about their abilities, while selling them short by not preparing them for university-level learning.

"At the same time, Collins recognized how universities were contributing to grade inflation because, confronted with so many ill-prepared students, he and his colleagues could not grade them by traditional standards, because then they would have failed most of them. Consequently, they patiently corrected papers, but passed on a certain amount of false feedback with higher grades than the work deserved. For example, in his 1997-98 first-year tutorial, out of 17 students, 'only 4 wrote at an acceptable level of literacy,' by which he means the ability to 'construct basic sentences and paragraphs.' The remaining students struggled but could not move up a learning curve of literacy, so they made the same mistakes in assignment after assignment.

"To conduct a reality check on his own experiences, he talked with his colleagues and found that their experience was much the same as his, but they were just accustomed to it as a result of their adjustments over the years. He also looked for other evidence about hte decline in standards and student preparation. In one case, Collins gained access to the results of a chemistry test that had been administered each year in Introductory Chemistry from 1978 to 1996. On this test, which contained the same 40 questions over this two-decade period, there was a steady decline in average grades from 64% in 1978 to 48% in 1996."

Stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting installment, in which I reveal what Professor Collins did next....

You get what you pay for

A new German study of the PISA tests finds that students in countries with merit pay for teachers outscored students in countries without merit pay. The differences were quite large. The author of the study concludes that "by the age of 15, students taught under a policy pay regime that includes a performance pay plan will learn an additional year of math and reading and over a half a year more in science". 

Voting teachers out of the classroom

This three-minute video profiles a Florida mom whose son's teacher organized his fellow kindergarten students to vote him out of the classroom. Because it's just about impossible to fire bad teachers, this teacher is still in the classroom and continuing to abuse helpless children. The mom is now campaigning to end teacher tenure in Florida. Normally, I would rate her chances at a bit below zero, but Florida is not like other jurisdictions. We'll let you know if she succeeds.

They won’t build it

Two events in September, 1994 offered hope to Ontario parents and galvanized many of them into action. The first was the passage of charter school legislation in Alberta, followed by the establishment of the Foundations for the Future Charter Academy in Calgary. The second was the establishment of the Surrey Traditional School in BC. Ontario parents saw that it was possible for public schools to offer traditional schools that didn't charge tuition. The realization led to a flurry of activity around the province as parents sought to convince their school boards to give them a traditional school.

I was involved in one such attempt in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, but there were lots of others - off the top of my head I can think of ones in Guelph, London, Ottawa, Markham, Peterborough, and Mississauga. Only one succeeded (the late-lamented Flowervale). and that was the result of a trustee with extraordinary intelligence and determination who had been on that school board for many years and had managed to stack the board with like-minded trustees. Here's the Reader's Digest version of the Kitchener-Waterloo attempt, which I believe to be fairly typical of the rest.

Our group, which we called Parents for Learning, spent a lot of time developing a credible and detailed proposal for a traditional school. For example, we had a curriculum, school uniforms, a school crest, and the names of hundreds of parents who wanted to send their kids to our school. We also talked to many board officials and individual trustees before formally bringing our proposal to the school board. The first time we presented our proposal to the board, we were turned down flat. Moreover, some of the trustees were very rude, calling us names, for example Puritans, farmers, and élitists. We were very determined however, and continued to politely ask for our school. School board officials then appeared to adopt a policy of waiting us out, sporadically asking for more information and scheduling the occasional meeting. The project ended with a whimper, not a bang, as it gradually became clear to us that we would get our traditional school when pigs began to fly, if then.

This experience, and that of the other groups around the province, brought home to us the futility of asking for a traditional school. I suspect that we learned the hard way what other dissatisfied parents instinctively know - Ontario school boards will never never never never never set up traditional schools and there is no point wasting time asking for one.