SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Value-Added Stats revealed in LA

There’s an interesting battle taking place in Los Angeles that centres on using value-added statistics to evaluate teacher performance. The LA Times, despite pleas from the school board and others, has released the figures and that’s truly sad, but not for the reasons (such as the unfortunate invasion of individual teacher privacy) that the opponents of this move are stating.

If the LA public school system was working in the best interest of the students, these types of statistics would be gathered annually and disseminated to school principals. That way teachers under-performing, but still retrievable, could be given the help they need, while those found irretrievably incompetent could be removed from the teaching profession.

However, no one in Los Angeles, (or Toronto, or Winnipeg, or Vancouver for that matter) believes that either of these things is being done or can be done in an environment where the board staff and teacher unions are hostile to any objective measures of student – and by extension – teacher performance.

That in turn forces the LA Times to do the right thing which is to provide the numbers to the public so they can see for themselves the incredible variability in learning outcomes that can’t be explained away by the socioeconomic excuses so dear to virtually all public school systems. As the article points out:

“But there were often large disparities among instructors who taught similar students in similar schools — even within the same schools. The differences among teachers were more than three times as great as those among schools.”

The S Word

Those of us who have home-schooled are all-too-familiar with the socialization question. For some reason, most people appear to think that children need to spend several hours a day together in a classroom with other children of the same age in order to learn how to get along with other children. Now comes this story from Quebec wherein “a judge has ordered a three-year-old and a five-year-old to attend state-funded daycare following claims that the children lacked proper ‘socialization’”.

There are eight million stories in the Naked City: this is one of them.

The year that I home-schooled my daughter (grade 6) had one expected benefit and three unexpected side benefits. The expected benefit - that she would learn a lot - was achieved (in spades). The first unexpected benefit was how happy she was. The second unexpected benefit was how healthy she (and the rest of the family) was - not one cold or flu all year. And the third unexpected benefit was how she blossomed in her interaction with other children.

Home-schoolers, as a group, are terrific. They provide tremendous support for one another, and they arrange wonderful outings and group experiences for their kids. My daughter went roller-skating and bowling, took swimming and baby-sitting lessons, enjoyed science demonstrations and a visit from William Shakespeare, participated in a French conversation group, and on and on. In the course of these activities, my daughter came to interact happily and confidently with other home-schooled children of all ages. These kids are great! They are kind and welcoming, and a bit unsophisticated in a charming way. Away from the cliquish, dog-eat-dog atmosphere of her public school, my daughter was able to relax and enjoy herself.

Read my lips: in terms of socialization, home-schooled kids are on average better off than public-schooled kids.

Sunday at the Movies (Union Power)

This video is about how American public sector unions have used their immense power to hold taxpayers to ransom and push governments deeply into debt. The same thing is happening in Ontario, as this National Post editorial attests. It has recently come to light that, in a particularly distasteful maneuver, the Ontario government negotiated “only” a 2% annual raise with the province’s largest public sector union, bragged about its acumen in bargaining - all the while concealing a secret agreement to pay the union an extra percentage point raise in 2012 after the next provincial election. As the editorial points out, the Ontario government has increased its spending by 50% since it took office in 2003, leaving the province $200 billion in debt and reducing it to “have-not” status.

The New Face of Educational Competition

This week’s The Economist has an interesting article on Malaysia’s plans to become an Asian hub for Western education. In a nutshell, Malaysia has managed to get a number of prestigious Western schools and universities to come and set up branch campuses there. These new educational institutions will turn out hundreds of thousands of very well educated, English-speaking graduates.

This is the new face of competition in a global world. Not only will the educational institutions be competing with one another - and with educational institutions all over the world, but also their graduates will be competing in a very real way with other graduates all around the world. May the fittest survive!

Public Education - A Right or a Privilege?

Nobody seems to be paying much attention to the trend in public schools towards worse and worse student behaviour in class. We have blogged on it a few times - for example, this posting. 

The elephant in the room, rarely discussed, is schools' inability to expel - or even discipline in any meaningful way - misbehaving students. Here's a commentary that tackles the issue head on, blaming "the Left" for ensuring that chronically-disruptive students remain in classrooms, even when they are "plunging classrooms into chaos and preventing dozens of students from learning". The commentator believes that schools should be able to expel badly-behaved students.

Such a philosophy would beg the question of whether attendance in public schools is a right or a privilege. Piranhas - feel free to attack this question!

Who will bell the cat?

Although everybody knows that good teachers matter, most educational administrators profess helplessness when it comes to identifying who they are. The Blob (a newly-coined name for the thousands of institutions, boards, companies, federations, alliances, departments, faculties, councils, commissions, panels, offices, and colleges that control public education) resists the use of test scores to separate the sheep from the goats, and somehow they just can't seem to come up with any other way to identify good teachers.

It shouldn't be this hard! After all, private enterprises (including private schools) routinely identify and reward good employees.

Be that as it may, here's a modest proposal, recently published in the New York Times, for an objective way to assess teacher performance. The author cites research showing that the amount of time teachers spend delivering relevant instruction is strongly correlated with how much students learn, and suggests that we evaluate teachers on the basis of how much relevant instruction they deliver.

But how can we find out how much time teachers are spending on relevant instruction you ask. The author proposes that administrators simply videotape a few minutes of instruction a day and evaluate the results. 

Surely the Blob could have no possible objection to this notion!

The Carnival of Home-Schooling

The second most-common reservation people seem to have about home-schooling their kids (after socialization) is their fear that they would mess up. In responding to their doubts, the first thing I always point out is that it would be hard to do a worse job than their children's school - and they immediately see the wisdom of this, no problem. 

The second thing I point out is what a wealth of resources are now available for home-schoolers, starting with local support groups. And then there's the Net, where the problem is more information overload than the reverse. Just to get you started, here's one portal to the vast home-school information network. This particular posting is ostensibly for the purpose of listing ten excellent family movies but, as usual, the posting is just a vehicle for providing links to endless other resources.

Playing politics with kids’ futures

You may recall that President Obama was soundly criticized when he moved to shut down the DC school vouchers that are a lifeline to thousands of poor black children in Washington - all the while shunning the public school that his own daughters would have been assigned to if the Obamas hadn't been able to afford the $32,000 tuition at the exclusive private school they chose instead. As this article from the Wall Street Journal reports, President Obama has now reversed himself, signing a budget deal with Republicans that includes a renewal and expansion of the DC voucher program. 

If you suspect, as I do, that the President really does care about poor black kids, it must have just about killed him to oppose the DC voucher program. But politics is a blood sport, and the reality is that the President needs the support of the teachers' unions to get re-elected. The teachers' unions, arguably the most powerful political lobbying force in the country, are adamantly opposed to any measure that would allow kids to escape their failing public schools. 

Politics, it appears, is not a game for sissies.

All’s Fair in Love and Math War

Weapons of Math Destruction is an excellent site for the parents of kids who are struggling with math in school. The site is, after all, dedicated to peacefully disarming fuzzy math. If you're not sure if your child has fuzzy math radiation poisoning, click here to find out. The page contains information about diagnostic tools, as well as a list of effective medications. 

Someone at this site has a great sense of humour. For example, you can get free math cartoon wallpaper/screensavers here, provided on the grounds that "fighting fuzzy math is never an easy battle, but with Weapons of Math Destruction screensaver, it's never been as enjoyable". 

Sunday at the Movies (Healthy Living)

Mom was right: you should eat up your vegetables and do your push-ups. And SQE is right: it's not what you're given - it's what you do with it.