SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Back to the drawing board

A hot fad in education circles these days is "differentiated instruction". If you have the time and a heightened ability to tolerate frustration, you can read about differentiated instruction in this Wikipedia entry. The idea is that teachers should bend themselves into pretzels so that they can deliver the exactly-right personalized instruction to every single student in their class. I suppose differentiated instruction was invented in the wake of another hot education fad, namely the inclusion of special needs students in regular classrooms. As well, modern "child-centred" practices mean that even ordinary students get more and more spread out in terms of their academic capabilities as they rise through the grades. As a result, there is a tremendous spread in academic preparation in a typical classroom: for example, a grade 6 classroom might easily have students achieving at a grade 1 level, along with students achieving at a high school level. 

This kind of spread makes life very hard for classroom teachers, and I expect some of them complained. So then the geniuses who come up with the various fads invented differentiated instruction. Unfortunately, differentiated instruction is quite impossible to implement, as this Education Week article attests, and it has no research basis. 

So if differentiated instruction is not the answer, what is? It seems to me that there is no solution to a 10-grade spread in a grade 6 classroom. Ergo, the solution lies in abandoning the practices that lead to the 10-grade spread: no more child-centred pedagogy and no more mandatory inclusion of special needs students. Or am I missing something?

Sunday at the Movies (Sex Education)

This video is not terribly educational, but it does provide a bit of light relief from our usual heavy fare....

Good writers are made, not born

OK, here’s the promised posting on composition skills.

There are three main components to competent writing. The first is automatic mastery of the mechanical skills - spelling, punctuation, and grammar - as explained in this article from our archives. The second is automatic mastery of the conventions of written language, such as the grammar and basic structure of sentences and paragraphs, along with ways to vary them in interesting ways - as explained in this article from our archives. (The resources recommended in this article can be found at web-sites other than the ones listed: all of the EPS materials are available here; and the Instructional Fair materials are available here.) The third is the ability to put oneself in the readers’ shoes, providing clear information and sufficient background knowledge, as explained in this article from our archives. 

All three components can be, and should be, taught in schools. 

The winds of education change are blowing

Further to Doretta’s posting on charter schools in Detroit, I thought it might be appropriate to list a few other developments in various US jurisdictions. As a result of the intractability of school systems there, some surprising people - of surprising politics - are coming to support reforms that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. A few examples:

Wisconsin - the elimination of most collective bargaining rights for public employee unions

Florida - a major overhaul of teacher pay and tenure

Colorado and Indiana - new school voucher programs

More school choice is pending in Florida, Virginia, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Georgia and Oklahoma

The winds of education change are swirling all over the United States. How long can Ontario stay mired in the past?

A solution for school closures

The Detroit school district is considering a proposal to turn 41 schools (almost one third of the city’s regular public schools) into charter schools in order to fend off their closure.  Considering that a couple of years ago one third of Detroit’s best schools were charter schools, this seems like a viable and positive alternative.

Blink your lights if you believe in freedom for Canadian students

There's a lovely story from 1980's Poland at a time when the country was enduring the harsh Soviet rule. Most Poles hated the regime, but it was very dangerous to speak out and therefore hard to be sure of the level of resistance, One brave couple ran an underground radio station. They could broadcast for only about eight minutes at a time, then moving to a different place to escape detection. Because it was impossible to know how many people were listening to their radio, one night they asked people to blink their lights if they believed in freedom for Poland. For hours, all of Warswaw was blinking.

I relate this story because I am wondering how many people believe in freedom for Canadian students. Also how to bring them together...

It’s not about the kids

Educhatter's latest topic is Reading Recovery, and at the bottom of his column he asks why RR continues to be popular in education circles despite its lack of effectiveness and its huge expense. None of the 51 comments really deals with this question, and so I thought I would take a shot at it.

First, a word of explanation. Reading Recovery is a one-on-one program for struggling readers in the primary grades. There is a range of interpretations but, generally speaking, it uses a whole language/balanced literacy sort of approach, involving a bit of phonics and a lot of guessing. Reading Recovery doesn't work well for most kids and the cost of one-on-one interventions is staggering. So why are school boards continuing to support Reading Recovery?

The thing is, Reading Recovery is very pleasant for everyone involved (except, of course, the students, but I'll get to that in a minute). The RR teachers themselves have a great job: they get paid, say, $90,000, deal with only a handful of students every day, require little preparation, and get to go home at 3:00 pm. The classroom teachers like it because they think their struggling students are getting individual help which they can't give, plus their class size is reduced while the students are withdrawn for the program. Principals, consultants, and school board administrators like it because the additional staff build their empires. The teachers' unions like it because the additional RR teachers have to become members of their unions. And the various institutions that develop materials and promote RR like it because they have great jobs and big salaries. 

Obviously, if the criterion for adoption of educational measures were whether or not they were good for students, Reading Recovery would have died an early death. But public education has been captured by its producers, and the vast majority of public education policies are decided on the basis of whether or not they are good for educators. Reading Recovery is but one example of a policy that is good for educators but bad for kids. Others include short and few instructional days, progressive teaching methods and materials, dumbed-down curricula, teacher certification, the Ontario College of Teachers, and the list goes on. 

Comme il faut

In a comment to yesterday's posting, Bev asks for sites that teach grammar, composition, and other languages. I'm pleased to report that SQE is hoping to develop a Stairway to Grammar (but don't hold your breath). Composition I'll tackle one of these days.

Today, though, I want to tell you about an excellent site for teaching grammar to French immersion and core French students. Here's an article about the "Frenglish" problem, written by an Ontario French immersion teacher, and here's a link to her site which offers a multitude of resources for classroom teachers. The bottom line is that students of a second language, unless they are truly immersed at a very young age, benefit from grammar instruction.

Sunday at the Movies (The Khan Academy)

I've mentioned the Khan Academy several times already, and here it is again. It just goes from strength to strength. The Khan Academy offers over 2,100 free educational videos on topics that range from math to chemistry to economics to history, along with more than 100 self-paced exercises and assessments. This video features the Salman Khan, the genius behind the Khan Academy, talking about how he morphed from a hedge fund analyst to the genius behind the Khan Academy. He also shows how his videos and exercises are being used to very good effect in classrooms. Bill Gates pops up towards the end of the video, revealing himself to be a huge fan of the Khan Academy.

East meets West

Our friends at Atlantic Institute for Market Studies are hosting Putting Our Students First: Fixing Our Schools public education forum on March 28th in Halifax, NS.  The evening will feature Michael Zwaagstra, author of Fixing Our Schools and Frontier Centre Fellow, who spoke at our AGM in December.  Yours truly will be travelling to Halifax to be a panelist at the event.  Halifax area readers who are interested in attending can find out more information here and can register online at the AIMS website here.  The event is co-sponsored by the Schoolhouse Institute with the co-operation of the Frontier Centre.  Cudos to Paul Bennett (aka Educhatter) and Charles Cirtwill at AIMS for all their work organizing this.

AIMS has also teamed up with our Winnipeg colleagues at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy to provide a look at how Western Canada high schools are doing with the soon to be released Report Card, Behind the Classroom Door.  The interim Report Card for individual high schools can be found here.