SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Choice is for the few—for now

Seems that People for Education have been reading the pages of the Society for Quality Education all along!  This National Post article about the York Region school board’s decision to possibly axe an elementary arts school program makes me wonder.

The quote that is used, and highlighted in the print version (“Choice is open to those with the capacity to choose.”) is taken almost verbatim from a speech given by renowned black educator and school choice advocate, Dr. Howard Fuller, during an SQE-sponsored Toronto trip.  It’s not the first time either.

Fuller’s full speech to the Economic Club of Toronto can be found on our website here.  Here is the pertinent excerpt:

        “Those of us with money have the capacity to choose and the great hypocrisy that operates are those individuals who would never put their own children in certain schools denying poor parents the capacity to do it. We have teachers who teach in schools they would never put their own children in, demanding that other people’s children stay there. I find that to be hypocritical. We’ve got politicians running around talking about how important the public school structure is and then you ask them, ‘Well, where do your children go to school?’”  — Dr. Howard Fuller, January 2008 address to the Economic Club of Toronto.

That is particularly interesting since Ms. Kidder herself has taken advantage of similar public alternative schools for her own children—to which she has always admitted.

It is not clear if People for Education is advocating for alternative schools or opposing them?  Do they want to retain the status quo, where only the wealthy can pay tuition or afford a house in a pricier neighborhood?

Of COURSE people with money have more options. That is self evident.  The Society for Quality Education has been a long-time advocate for parental school choice so that ALL parents have access to mechanisms that allow them to choose the sort of schooling they want for their children, especially disadvantaged and low income families. 

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PS to the above post:  This is the same school board that closed Flowervale traditional model school in Thornhill.  See Malkin’s past post here and our original newsletter story on Flowervale here.

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Quick note to readers: Cathy Cove and Elizabeth Bundy-Cooper have co-edited a book of first-hand stories of victims of the Goderich, Ontario tornado.  Not Like Any Other Sunday can be purchased by emailing: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  Proceeds go to Victim Services of Huron County.  You can read more about the book in Moira MacDonald’s SUN column here.

The OK Plateau

Most people assume that world-class performers in most fields - chess, sports, public speaking, music, you name it - are great because of some genetic quirk, some inborn difference that allows them to achieve at higher levels than almost everyone else. But this is not borne out by recent research which is finding that greatness is primarily the result of intensive purposeful practice. Moonwalking with Einstein: The art and science of remembering everything (a book which I will review in due course) is just the latest in a long line of corroborating evidence. It is a first-person account of a journalist who covered the US Memory Championship and then, with no previous aptitude or interest in memory training, decided to train for the contest - which he ended up winning the following year. This excerpt (pp 169-172) covers a period in the author’s training when he hit a plateau and couldn’t seem to improve. His method of getting out of his rut is very instructive.

• When people first learn to use a keyboard, they improve very quickly from sloppy single-finger pecking to careful two-handed typing, until eventually the fingers move so effortlessly across the keys that the whole process becomes unconscious and the fingers seem to take on a mind of their own. At this point, most people’s typing skills stop progressing. They reach a plateau. If you think about it, it’s a strange phenomenon. After all, we’ve always been told that practice makes perfect, and many people sit behind a keyboard for at least several hours a day in essence practicing their typing. Why don’t they just keep getting better and better?
• In the 1960s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by describing the three stages that anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the ‘cognitive stage,’ you’re intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second ‘associative stage,’ you’re concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach what Fitts called the ‘autonomous stage,’ when you figure that you’ve gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you’re basically running on autopilot. During that autonomous stage, you lose conscious control over what you’re doing. Most of the time that’s a good thing. Your mind has one less thing to worry about. In fact, the autonomous stage seems to be one of those handy features that evolution worked out for our benefit. The less you have to focus on the repetitive tasks over everyday life, the more you can concentrate on the stuff that really matters, the stuff that you haven’t seen before. And so, once we’re just good enough at typing, we move it to the back of our mind’s filing cabinet and stop paying it any attention. You can actually see this shift take place in fMRI scans of people learning new skills. As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the ‘OK plateau,’ the point at which you decide you’re OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.
• We all reach OK plateaus in most things we do. We learn how to drive when we’re in our teens and then once we’re good enough to avoid tickets and major accidents, we get only incrementally better. My father has been playing golf for forty years, and he’s still - though it will hurt him to read this - a duffer. In four decades his handicap hasn’t fallen even a point. How come? He reached an OK plateau.
• Psychologists used to think that OK plateaus marked the upper bounds of innate ability. In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius, Sir Francis Galton argued that a person could only improve at physical and mental activities up until he reached a certain wall, which ‘he cannot by any education or exertion overpass.’ According to this view, the best we can do is simply the best we can do.
• But Ericsson and his fellow expert performance psychologists have found over and over again that with the right kind of concerted effort, that’s rarely the case. They believe that Galton’s wall often has much less to do with our innate limits than simply with what we consider an acceptable level of performance.
• What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled ‘deliberate practice.’ Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the cognitive phase.’
• Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces. The best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered. Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.
• When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. In fact, in every domain of expertise that’s been rigorously examined, from chess to violin to basketball, studies have found that the number of years one has been doing something correlates only weakly with level of performance. My dad may consider putting into a tin cup in his basement a good form of practice, but unless he’s consciously challenging himself and monitoring his performance - reviewing, responding, rethinking, rejiggering - it’s never going to make him appreciably better. Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

You can’t make this stuff up

The cover story in this week’s Macleans Magazine is 99 Stupid Things the Government Spent Your Money On. Although there are only 18 listed on this web-site so far, there’s already lots to shock and appall, but still to come is #50: B.C. school boards paid an estimated $350,000 to mail out blank report cards after teachers refused to fill them out as part of a job action. Now, it’s true that the grade 12 students’ report cards were filled out, but the report cards for all the other students were mailed out blank. Some were even sent out special delivery! The math, by the way, includes only the postage costs - it does not include, for example, the cost of printing the blank forms or the time spent by office staff assembling the mail-out.

I’m sure the whole exercise makes perfect sense to someone - and I’d love to have been a fly on the wall in the room when the decision was made. H/T DH

Sunday at the Movies (Movies)

This short clip lists 10 good movies for teaching science. teachwithmovies.org provides lists like this for other subjects as well. Youtube link. 

Make Love Not War

In an ongoing discussion of Not a Perfect World, John pleads "Read carefully, be thoughtful, be informed....be civil, be polite, and do not badmouth those who would wish to be your allies". I could not agree more.

School for Thought is a place where people with an interest in education can exchange views and information. I'm very pleased to say that we have contributors with all kinds of perspectives - parent, teacher, union, reading specialist, administrator, taxpayer, and more. I learn something new about education from our commenters just about every day. I hope that those who participate in our blog will see it as an way to update and enrich their own understanding of this very important topic. Zingers, put-downs, and categorical statements serve to shut down a valuable exchange of information. I know of at least two very knowledgeable and sympathetic people who have walked away because of our antagonistic atmosphere. We are the less for it.

Now we have John who is willing to give us an insider's view of an Ontario faculty of education. Wow! This is great! Just read John's latest on how the textbook approval process operates in Ontario. Who knew how random it is! I had no idea. Now I'm thinking textbook selection would be better left to the marketplace.

With Valentine's Day coming up, I therefore send you all this valentine. We really do need you and value you, all of you, and we sincerely hope you will need and value each other just as much.

Occupy Schools!

A new report from the OECD finds that the gap between rich and poor in its 22 member countries is increasing (Canada is roughly in the middle of the pack). A related report in the Huffington Post indicates that Canadians are increasingly segregating themselves according to income. In terms of major cities, Calgary is the worst offender, followed by Toronto, Edmonton, Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Quebec. 

"What does this have to do with education?" you ask. Two things.

First, the more segregated neighbourhoods become, the more homogeneous neighbourhood schools become and the less likely they are to be places where children from all walks of life can rub shoulders. As a result, school choice policies actually increase the incidence of heterogeneous schools: as more schools of choice become accessible to more poor parents, the chosen schools become more socially integrated. And when parents choose private schools on the basis of academic or extra-curricular factors that have nothing to do with their cultural backgrounds, the chosen schools become more and more diverse.

Second, the OECD talks about "upskilling" the workforce as a good way to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Naturally, I agree with this assessment, but the OECD is silent when it comes to how to accomplish this feat. At the risk of repeating myself, here is my modest proposal: allow schools to use research-based methods and materials that are known to be best for children from disadvantaged homes.

Not a perfect world

In response to yesterday's posting, John made a comment that I would like to examine more closely - to wit, why does SQE use American stories and assume they apply to Canada.

It is true that there are important differences between the US and Canada - the huge racial problems there, the greater achievement disparities, the terrible inner city schools, the federal presence - but there are also a lot of similarities. In both countries, the students and teachers breathe oxygen, the school boards are organized similarly, the teachers are supposed to be teaching more or less the same things, the teachers' unions are very powerful, and so on.

My point is - you are never going to find educational jurisdictions that correspond one to one. Even within Canada there are differences among provinces - Alberta with all its school choice programs, Quebec with its majority French speakers, Newfoundland with its sparse population... And what about Finland, often cited on this blog by certain commenters? The Finnish written language is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn, and comparing the reading ability of Finnish students to the reading ability of English-speaking students is like comparing apples to oranges.

If we demand perfect correspondence before we start to make comparisons, then we will probably never make comparisons - and that generally leads to insularity and complacency. My point is - we have to make comparisons and try to learn from others, even though we realize that there are pitfalls. So we will continue to write about American (and Canadian and international) phenomena - while doing our best to make sense out of what is inevitably an imperfect example. And of course I'm confident that we can rely on our faithful readers to point out any problems with our comparisons. You do keep us grounded, that's for sure. 

Turn the camera on

This video, and the related newspaper article, speak to the frustration felt by those who try to interact with stonewalling school boards. Been there, done that.

Wrong on faith

I just sent in the following letter to the editor to The Globe and Mail in response to this editorial in today’s paper. Wish me luck in getting published!

• Most people assume, as you do in your editorial (Wrong on Faith - Jan. 3, 2012), that government support of private religious schools would undermine the important assimilation of different cultures and religions that occurs in government schools. This assumes that government schools are more integrated than private schools, but the evidence suggests just the opposite.
• Studies in the US have found that private school classrooms are more racially-integrated than neighbouring government schools, while private school students are more likely to eat lunch with children of other races. It turns out that neighbourhood schools tend to be stratified because people generally live in the same area with people of similar backgrounds, while many parents choose private schools on the basis of academic or extra-curricular factors that have nothing to do with their cultural backgrounds.
• In the Netherlands, a country with a previous history of religious strife, the introduction of fully-funded denominational and secular schools almost a century ago resulted in a lessening of religious divisions. Yugoslavia, on the other hand, had one state school system under the Communists for over five decades - yet the ethnic hatred there became worse than ever. 
• There is no evidence that Ontario’s Catholic schools, or government-funded religious schools in Alberta, Quebec, B.C., and Manitoba, are producing religiously-intolerant or disconnected citizens. In fact, several recent studies suggest that private schools are more successful than government schools in installing civic values in their students. Many graduates of private religious schools, such as Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Jean Chretien, and Dalton McGuinty, went on to dedicate themselves to public service.
• It may seem counter-intuitive, but the best way to develop societal unity might just be to encourage children to attend private religious schools.

Thinking outside the big school box

Here’s a wonderful story from BC about a kindergarten in a retirement home: it’s good for the seniors, it’s good for the kids; and it saves money. Let’s hope this idea spreads - not only in terms of locating kindergartens in other retirement homes but also in terms of thinking outside the big school box.

We could have half-day high school placements - automobile service centres for tech students; newspapers for aspiring journalists; YMCA’s for jocks; university research labs for kids with a scientific bent, and so forth. We could have home-schooler support centres which offer supplementary courses like French-as-a-second-language, choirs and orchestras, and sports teams. We could have one-room schoolhouses in remote - and not-so-remote - communities. We could have hi-tech learning centres which offer individualized computer-aided learning programs and distance learning programs that allow students to learn from home.

The possibilities are endless once one grasps that the modern big-box school is a fairly recent invention - and that it doesn’t have to be like this.