SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

It’s for the good of the unions

I am currently reading a very interesting book, The Problem of Union Power, and I will be reviewing it soon, but I thought I would share with you an interesting section (pp. 21-22) on why the teachers’ unions pretend that their activities are for the good of the kids - when that it patently false. If you doubt this, consider for a moment the unions’ determination to keep bad teachers in the classroom. The author is a Stanford professor of political science who specializes in political institutions.

“In the grander scheme of things, it should hardly come as a surprise that union leaders are special interest advocates and that the teachers unions are special interest organizations. The same is true of all unions. And in the private sector, the unions themselves are quite transparent about it. What’s to hide? The United Auto Workers pushes hard to secure good wages and benefits for employees on the auto assembly lines, and it doesn’t pretend to be concerned, first and foremost, with the welfare of the millions of consumers who buy cars. The Retail Clerks Union is concerned about the wages, benefits, and job protections of supermarket cashiers, not about the welfare of the consumers who buy food. Unions are special interest advocates. They know it, and everybody knows it.

“The teachers’ unions, however, are in the public sector. And in the public sector the rules of the game are different than in the private sector. The unions still have incentives to be special interest advocates for their members. But as organizations of employees who work for government, they are heavily dependent on the political process and thus on gaining democratic support for what they do and want. So to behave wisely in this institutional setting, they have incentives to convince the voting public that they are not self-interested, but in fact are fundamentally concerned about children and quality education - and that whatever they do to promote their own interests is actually good for children and schools too.

“In the realm of politics, this camouflaging of special interests is quite normal. The teachers unions have incentives to do it. But so do all political interest groups, whether their interests are in guns or pharmaceuticals or telecommunications or agriculture. The drill is a familiar one: they all claim that the policies they favor are in the public interest, and they all routinely provide arguments (backed by cherry-picked evidence) about how ordinary Americans will be better off as a result. This is simply how the game of politics is played. The reality is that these arguments often have little or no bearing on why they take the policy positions they do. They know where they stand from the outset, because their stands are dictated by their interests. The arguments they make are simply tools for achieving those interests, and are chosen to try to convince other people to take the same stands. By and large, they often say anything that works. So as any sophisticated observer knows, it is best not to take what interest group leaders say at face value. To understand politics, we need to focus on what these groups do. And the way to explain what they do is to pay close attention to their interests. 

“All of this applies across the board to the teachers unions. When they argue, for example, that charter schools should be opposed because of their poor academic performance, they may or not be saying something accurate about the actual performance of charter schools. The more important fact is that this is not why they oppose charter schools in the first place. They oppose them because charters give kids alternatives to the regular public schools - allowing them to leave and threatening the jobs of unionized teachers. In the democratic arena, it obviously wouldn’t go over well for them to simply say that. So their challenge, for this educational issue and all others, is to look around for arguments - any arguments - that might convince voters and potential allies to support their predetermined position. The themes, accordingly, are all about what’s good for children and schools. Their special interests are carefully hidden inside a public interest package. That’s how the game is played.”

Owed to a Spell Chequer

Sometimes our critics characterize us as old fogies mired in the past and unable to change with the times. For example, they say, the advent of spell checking means that kids don’t need to learn good spelling any more. We offer the following for your delectation.

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my Pea See
It planely marques four my revue
Miss steaks aye ken knot sea.

There’s more, but you get the idea. There are a number of additional reasons why it is important to teach kids to be good spellers, and some of them are listed in this article from our archives (the article includes a test that allows you to determine what grade level kids are spelling at). If your child tests out below par, then you should start working on his or her spelling. More information on how to go about this can be found in the Spelling section of our archives.

Snake Oil, Education Style

The written word for crisis in Chinese consists of two characters - one representing danger and the other representing opportunity. The latest crisis in Canadian classrooms (pace John Snobelen) is the very wide disparity of learning abilities within a single classroom - easily a 12-grade range in your typical grade 8 classroom, for example. This disparity is the result of several misguided policies, each of them making its own special contribution: social promotion (which makes illiteracy and innumeracy no barrier to advancement), child-centred learning (which allows children to progress at their own pace, even if their own pace is a crawl); inclusion (which places even the most severely-disabled students in regular classrooms); and the list goes on.

Now a 12-grade range in a grade 8 classroom is no joke for the teacher. Obviously, there is no way that he or she can teach lessons that are at the right level for more than a few students at a time. Enter the opportunity!

Differentiated instruction is the latest buzzword, and it is THE ANSWER for teachers who are floundering in “differentiated” classrooms. Like other education fads, differentiated instruction offers wonderful money-making possibilities for thousands of education authors and consultants who are busily conducting workshopss and churning out books and DVDs. Here is a typical example: a DVD on sale for only $575 that promises, among other things, to show teachers how to lead, rather than to manage, differentiated classrooms. 

It all sounds great, but there is one catch - differentiated instruction doesn’t work (read this column by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham). Furthermore, this has been known for going on 50 years now. 

The peddling of this sort of snake oil is outlawed in most professions - I mean imagine a pharmaceutical company being allowed to sell a pill that not only didn’t work but also actually killed some patients! Yet quacks and fake nostrums are the norm in the field of education. 

Measuring UP Makes Some Waves

SQE’s board would like to thank all those who attended our Measuring Up Seminar on School Accountability in Toronto.  Here are some brief highlights.

The event kicked off with the Canadian premiere screening of The Cartel.  While the award-winning documentary was a sobering look at a New Jersey school system that is largely unaccountable, it elicited many ohs and ahs of recognition to our own.   The film also caused a few tears to be shed by audience members at the sight of the tears streaming down the faces of a little girl and her mom who were desperate to get into a charter school.

After the film, pundit Gerry Nicholls moderated a panel discussion response to some of the realities and challenges faced by parents and educators who are looking for better school choices.  Bob Bowdon, The Cartel’s director; Virginia Walden-Ford, DC Parents for School Choice; Andrew Thomas, Principal of Crawford Adventist Academy; and Spider Jones, Believe to Achieve, shared their experiences.  Ms. Walden-Ford told us about her successful fight with President Obama to retain and enhance the Washington DC opportunity scholarship program, which provides vouchers to low income families.  Spider talked about how school choice is necessary to get at-risk kids into safer learning environments.  Crawford Principal Thomas busted the myth of private schools as elistist bastions who would waste funding—far from it.

Theo Caldwell, new host of SUN TV News, The Caldwell Account, gave spirited keynote address on what education system can learn about accountability from the private sector.

The afternoon panelists, moderated by Michael Coren, reflected on the effectiveness of accountability measures that are currently in place in Ontario:  EQAO, College of Teachers, and school councils.   John Snobelen, former Ontario Minister of Education; Andrea Mrozek, Institute of Marriage and Family Canada; and Dr. Paul Bennett, former trustee, educator, school reformer, and current director of Schoolhouse consulting all came to the same conclusion. While we have institutions that measure and provide transparency, there is ultimately no accountability.  There is no incentive for meaningful reforms to take place and that school choice is necessary to drive real improvement.

For those of you who asked where you can get your own copy of The Cartel, the DVD can be ordered through Amazon at www.thecartelmovie.com. 

Measuring Up panels and the keynote address will be streamed over our website in the weeks to come. Stay tuned!

Regulated Ineffectualness

People tend to have a trusting faith in government’s ability to solve problems. You think class sizes are too large? Pass a law capping enrolment! Kids aren’t learning to read and do math very well? Pass a law creating a literacy and numeracy secretariat that will enforce particular teaching methods! Kids are arriving at school woefully unprepared for the program? Pass a law bringing in more state-provided early education! On and on it goes.

And thus power is more and more centralized, and Ontario schools and school boards have less and less discretionary power, until now we have ended up with the situation described in this Globe and Mail article. The combination of capped class sizes with the requirement to offer full-day kindergarten has forced many schools to introduce kindergarten/grade 1 split classes. 

Of course, this may or may not be a bad idea - some schools can likely handle it beautifully and make it work well for kids, while others will have the opposite experience. The point is - circumstances vary from school to school, and the more you constrain individual schools, the less able they will be to offer their students a good education. 

It is well accepted in business circles today that successful managers try to push decision-making responsibility down to the lowest possible level, since it’s the people on the front line who know what’s working and what needs to be done to make it work better. The success of private schools is eloquent testimony to the wisdom of this approach.

The times they are a-changin’

On April 2, we reported on new and newly-expanded school choice programs in the US (see here). Since then, Tennessee has passed a school voucher program. Now comes this article in The Economist reporting on the rapid growth of “academies” (existing schools that convert to autonomous status) in England. And poised to mushroom there are “free schools” (state-funded schools founded by parents or charities). Like the governments in many US states, the English government is determined to expand choice and competition in schools. So much so that the English government may allow for-profit firms to found free schools too….

Measuring Up Conference Update

Our Measuring Up conference link above has been fixed.  If visitors still want to attend on April 26th, (and we hope you do!) please contact our offices directly 416-231-7247 or by email: info (at) societyforqualityeducation.org so that we can add your name to the list.

We will be able to register you at the door. 

For those who have already registered, thank you and we look forward to an exciting event!

Sunday at the Movies (The Real Purpose of Public Schools)

Some of you may remember TDSBNW, an Ontario teacher whose trenchant comments are invariably on the mark. A while back, TDSBNW mentioned that he or she was convinced by much of what was said by former teacher John Taylor Gatto, especially when it comes to his views on the real purpose of public schools. What do you think?

Our April 26 Conference

If you haven’t yet registered for our conference this Tuesday (and we hope you will), clicking on the conference link will lead you to believe that registration for the conference is closed. I am trying to get this fixed but even if I don’t succeed, the truth is that people can always register at the door. So if you happen to find yourself in Toronto next Tuesday, maybe doing a little shopping at the Eaton Centre - come on down to the Eaton Centre Marriott Hotel and say hello. We’d love to see you.

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink

More than 20 years ago when I was struggling with the wacky teaching methods at my children’s elementary school, I spent hundreds of hours at the local university pouring through the research in an effort to find evidence in favour of things like direct instruction and drill. In my naïveté, I thought that, if I could find research proof, the school would switch to more sensible methods. But there was precious little research being done on teaching methods at the time.

What a difference 20 years makes! Now there is a mountain of research on teaching methods, almost all of it supporting direct instruction and drill. A case in point is this recent Harvard study which found that grade 8 students learn more math and science when their teachers allocate more time to lecturing and less to group problem-solving activities.

Sadly, however, I was wrong in my belief that education leaders would endorse things like direct instruction and drill if they were presented with research about their merits. Obviously, something more galvanizing is needed.