SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Go west, young man

Education is kind of like the weather, in that everyone complains about it but no one does anything about it. But there is a crucial difference between education and the weather - in the sense that in fact there are a few people who are doing something about education.

Although I am not a conspiracy theorist, sometimes I wonder why governments are ignoring the abundant evidence right under their noses. Here is an excellent article about education in Alberta, the Canadian province universally acknowledged to get the best results. 

In Ontario, the political parties all profess to believe that the route to better academic achievement involves costly measures like all-day junior kindergarten and smaller classes, while the school choice measures adopted by Alberta cost little or nothing. Yet there is no large-scale evidence to suggest that all-day junior kindergarten and smaller classes lead to better academic achievement, while there is abundant evidence that school choice does. Go figure. H/T to DJ.

The Narcissism Epidemic

Here’s a link to information about an interesting new book: The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the age of entitlement. This book hypothesizes that the child-centred emphasis on self-esteem that started in the sixties has resulted in “a lot of young people too self-infatuated for their own good”. Here are a few examples cited in the book.

“On a reality TV show, a girl planning her Sweet Sixteen wants a major road blocked off so a marching band can precede her grand entrance on a red carpet. Five times as many Americans undergo plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures as ten years ago, and ordinary people hire fake paparazzi to follow them around to make them look famous. High school students physically attack classmates and post YouTube videos of the beatings to get attention. And for the past several years, Americans have been buying McMansions and expensive cars on credit they can’t afford.”

Please note the possible connection between inflated self-esteem and bullying. You read it here first

All in all, it doesn’t look as if it’s good for kids to try to build up their self-esteem. H/T to JE.

Sunday at the Movies (Steve Jobs)

In tribute to Steve Jobs’ death from pancreatic cancer last Wednesday, here is his 2005 Stanford commencement address, in which he offers some unconventional advice taken from his own life (and, as it turns out, death). As a bit of a bonus, here are some selected remarks on education by Steve Jobs.

“We could make sure that every young child in this country got a great education. We fall far short of that…. The problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible.”

“I believe very strongly that if the country gave each parent a voucher for forty-four hundred dollars that they could only spend at any accredited school several things would happen. Number one schools would start marketing themselves like crazy to get students. Secondly, I think you’d see a lot of new schools starting. I’ve suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track. You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have twenty-five year old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they’d start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would. The third thing you’d see is I believe, is the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise.”

“I used to think when I was in my twenties that technology was the solution to most of the world’s problems, but unfortunately it just ain’t so… We need to attack these things at the root, which is people and how much freedom we give people, the competition that will attract the best people. Unfortunately, there are side effects, like pushing out a lot of 46 year old teachers who lost their spirit fifteen years ago and shouldn’t be teaching anymore. I feel very strongly about this. I wish it was as simple as giving it over to the computer.”

The Sword of Damocles

At the beginning of the recent Ontario election campaign, the Progressive Conservative Party enjoyed a large lead in the polls but, as the campaign progressed, its lead dwindled and then vanished - with the result that in the end the Liberal Party won a close-to-majority victory. Naturally, there will be many reasons advanced for the Conservatives’ decline, but there is no doubt that the province’s union bosses poured millions of dollars into advertising campaigns to defeat the Conservatives. Here’s a Maclean’s article on this topic.

So what is a discussion of electoral financing doing in an education blog, you ask? Well, it turns out that Ontario’s teachers’ unions were major players in the recent election.

Although not named in the Maclean’s article, Ontario’s teachers’ unions were very active during the past campaign, and of course they too were trying to defeat the Conservatives. In case you don’t believe it, here are some excerpts from an Oct. 7 letter sent to OECTA (Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Assocation) members, rejoicing in the Liberals’ electoral victory.

“First and foremost, ‘Speak for Children’ put education issues on the agenda, from which they were absent at the start of the campaign. With the combination of a centralized provincial planning team, a coherent message and a striking, consistent visual identity, OECTA made our presence felt throughout the province. This could not have happened without the work and collaboration of provincial office and local units.

“OECTA’s local leaders and members deserve a great deal of credit for the way they embraced the ‘Speak for Children’ campaign and engaged their communities. Energy and creativity were the order of the day. An unprecedented number of members volunteered to work for the candidate of their choice.

“Before and after AGM 2011, provincial staff, particularly in Government Relations and Communications, tirelessly guided our election activities. Always aware of the ebb and flow of the campaign, they kept OECTA on message and motivated us all to get involved.”

Now if you believe that this teachers’ union was speaking on behalf of children during the campaign, then I have this bridge I’d like to sell you. In fact, the union was preparing the ground for its contract negotiations next summer, and it is way more likely to be able to stay on the gravy train if the government owes it big time for getting elected.

From the government’s point of view, the support of the province’s labour unions is a two-edged sword: on the one hand, the unions are very helpful in terms of getting elected but, on the other hand, they do expect to be paid back at contract renegotiation time. A government with a debt of well over two hundred billion dollars and a chronic deficit in the neighbourhood of fifteen billion dollars may find itself between the devil and the deep blue sea when negotiating new contracts. H/T to LDA.

Are Ontario schoolkids starved for learning?

Guest Blog by Nancy Wagner

Elementary school children have had the old “lunch hour” replaced by two nutrition breaks.

I have no personal knowledge as to whether or not this is a better system for children. In many ways it seems to make sense to me, especially since children don’t seem to go home for lunch anyway. What concerns me is the number of times the kids in my family come home with lunches half-eaten, due, they say, to lack of time.

I know that the union contract requires that each teacher also have a certain number of minutes for their breaks. Is this creating a scheduling problem? Are the kids being hurried outside after only a few minutes of lunchtime so that their teachers can eat their lunches in peace?

To other parents out there: what is your experience?

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Vote early and vote often

Today is election day in Ontario. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. Wait, for some reason I’m thinking of a different typing drill….

Four Silver Bullet questions about test scores

There have been some disparaging comments about test scores recently, and of course they are by no means the be-all and end-all. Here’s an excerpt (p. 70) from an interesting book, The Good School: How smart parents get their kids the education they deserve, by Peg Tyre, which outlines what the author calls “the four Silver Bullet questions that test designers say you should ask when you are looking at test scores”.

“Ask to see scores broken out by subgroups. A mean test score - even if it is rising - means almost nothing. Really. Nobody who knows statistics would find a mean score for an entire grade of students meaningful.

“Make sure you look at long-term trends. A one-year test score change, even when it is going up, also means next to nothing.

“Scores (not means) for subgroups still rising over the long term? Great. Now it is time to find out what’s creating that upward trend. Ask the principal these two questions: what are the three decisions that you’ve made in the last two years in an effort to impact student achievement in your school? What are the results?

“Still want to get a better measure of the school? Ask this: What is your intervention plan for the lower-quartile students - the bottom of the class? And how are you progressing with that plan? Even if your kids are not in the lowest quartile, this matters to you. If the school has a solid plan for hard-to-teach kids, they are likely to have a solid plan for your kid, too.”

You can’t have your garden and eat it too

In her usual take-no-prisoners style, this month Jan Wong takes on school gardens - arguing that students should not be spending hours working in their school’s garden when their test scores suggest they should have their noses to the grindstone. Predictably, 9 of the 10 comments to the article strongly disagree, reflecting the widespread belief that school gardens are part of a well-rounded education. Here’s a typical comment: “Gardening can teach math, etc if it is do right. This is proven beyond any doubt.”

And yet and yet. To reprise a previous post, there are nominally 178 days of mandated instruction in Ontario. At 300 instructional minutes a day, that translates into a maximum of 890 hours available for teaching. Of course, much time is lost to professional development days, transitions, administrative chores, class trips, fundaising activities, announcements, popcorn parties, assemblies, field days, working in the school garden, and we can pretty much write off the entire month of June. On average, only an estimated 38% of available time is actually devoted to academics. Realistically, that leaves only about 338 hours of learning time a year. And when you consider how inefficiently academics are taught when teachers get around to them, it is no wonder so many students fail the provincial tests.

It’s hard to oppose warm and fuzzy things like gardens - you risk ending up looking like the grinch who wants to steal Christmas. But in the final analysis, you have to make a hard choice between a focus on students with academic skills and knowledge that will allow them to compete in a global economy or students who know how to grow their own food. Everything else being equal, you can’t have both.

A system steeped in mendacity and pusillanimity

Here’s a story that’s outside our usual beat - it’s from the post-secondary panel - but nevertheless relevant to any discussion of accountability. SQE honorary patron Rod Clifton, a professor of education at the University of Manitoba, was removed from a thesis committee because he insisted that the thesis contained “fundamental errors in the analysis of data”. Here’s a Maclean’s report on this story. In the end, the student was granted his PhD without changes to his statistical analysis.

It’s aparently a bit more sophisticated at the university level, but nevertheless it’s the same phenomenon as elementary and secondary principals changing their teachers’ marks (see this article from our archives). If teachers’ marks can be “turned to ashes by the stroke of a principal’s pen”, we might as well strip away the trappings of accountability and give principals the responsibility of determining students’ marks in the first place - thereby saving teachers considerable effort. And, following this logic, we might as well give university deans the responsibility of deciding which students are granted a degree. 

Sunday at the Movies (The Bottom Line)

Here’s a reminder of why we do what we do. YouTube link.