SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

First Position

Here’s a trailor of a new documentary, First Position, that follows six hopefuls in ballet’s Grand Prix, the world’s largest ballet competition. Here’s a review of the documentary. Does anyone here think there’s a reason why the same intensity and high standards should not be applied to academics?

Children - and Grandchildren - of Special Me

The other day, Margaret Wente did a column on teacher bullying, this time profiling a teacher who spent a month at home falsely accused of forcing a kid to eat a squishy banana. This is very similar to Lou D’Amore’s story. It’s worth reading Margaret’s entire column, because there is more wrong here than just an educational bureaucracy making the bumbling mistakes we have come to expect from bureaucracies. Something is rotten in the state of parenthood as well. The comments to Margaret’s column (266 of them at press time) are even more enlightening. They paint a picture of out-of-control kids whose shenanigans are backed by their parents.

Here’s what one person wrote: “The teacher is frightened of the school board. The school board is frightened of the parents. The parents are frightened of the kids. The kids are frightened of no one!”

What has happened? Why are things so different from when I first taught in the mid-sixties and was expected to strap misbehaving kids?

Here’s my theory, and I’d be interested in hearing from the educators still reading us, if there are any left (bye, Steven, sorry to see you go). Could it be that all the chidlren swaddled in the preserve-their-self-esteem-at-all-costs treatment from the seventies onwards have grown up to become today’s parents – parents with swelled heads about their own self-worth, convinced they’re pretty special themselves and of course with kids who must be even more special?

Choosing Wisely

The recent news articles about two controversial Toronto schools, one public and one private, had me searching through the SQE newsletter archives.  The alternative public Grove School has been accused of teaching eight-year-olds to be political activists and a private Muslim Sunday-school (that rents space from the Toronto board) had anti-Semitic content on its website, since removed.  The school has also since appologized but is being investigated.

This gem, Choosing Wisely, written by Dr. Mark Holmes, former OISE professor and SQE advisor, outlines how school choice can work under criteria that schools would have to adhere to in order to be elligible for support.  The criteria follow, but the full article is worth reading.

• Access to the school must not be limited on the basis of religion, race, or ethnicity. This does not disallow Christian, Muslim, or Black cultural schools, provided that admission is not limited to Christians, Muslims, or Blacks (as it is not to Catholic high schools).
• The school must not deny entry on the basis of academic ability, but it must have the right to determine the grade and the program level, based on the student’s demonstrated competence. This prevents élite schools from skimming off the talented.
• The school must use either English or French (or both) as the first language of instruction. This introduces the important matter of society’s obligation to ensure that all children, irrespective of their parents’ culture or religion, prepare themselves for full participation in Canadian adult life.
• The school must provide instruction towards the official provincial goals and objectives in all major fields of study. This ensures that all children have the right to choose programs leading to post-secondary education or employment such that they may choose a future in accord with their own abilities and interests. It does not require independent schools either to follow detailed provincial curricula or use provincially-approved instructional methodology.
• The school must provide access to and recognition of a broad, age-appropriate representation of human knowledge and to bona fide versions of the truth other than its own. A good, readily-accessible library will generally satisfy this requirement. This prevents a narrow and blinkered form of indoctrination.
• The school must not inculcate, promote or approve ideas and behaviour that are incompatible with a liberal, democratic society and the rule of law, e.g., hatred of others based on their own or group characteristics, superiority of one religion or race over another, or the use of violence to achieve political goals within a democracy such as Canada.
• The school’s public funding should be related to its commitment to equality of opportunity. Practical expression of this principle means that grants should be tied to per-pupil expenditure, with schools spending very much more than the public schools receiving little or no public support, and schools spending the same as or less than the equivalent public school receiving close to full funding.

I agree with the Sun, third-graders are too young to go to protests.  I also think that how the science is taught needs to be scrutinized, considering some of the comments from the children. (See our look at cross-Canada science curricula.)  You can’t force-feed the kiddies An Inconvenient Truth on one hand and then expect young children to question its content accuracy on the other if they don’t get the other side too. Media studies anyone?  If the ultimate goal of education is to teach students knowledge in order to become critical thinkers, how can this happen when they do not receive a full balance of knowledge with which to do so?  As far as the private religious school goes,  Dr. Holme’s second-last point covers that one.  No school sould preach hatred.

[Oh, and bravo! to the Sun’s editorial: “We advocate school vouchers instead — where parents who pay school taxes wanting an education for their children outside the public system, are given a voucher representing the cost of their child’s education, which they can apply to the school of their choice.”]

No Numbers Land

Just to take a break from the heavy stuff, here’s a light-hearted video about the importance of numbers. YouTube link.

Teachers Matter

The latest addition to our lending library is the book I have been liberally excerpting from lately - Teachers Matter: Rethinking how public schools identify, reward, and retain great educators by Marcus A. Winters. Here are the key points identified as essential for any effective reform.

• Systematically identify the best and worst teachers.
• Use the data to prevent potentially-bad teachers from entering the classroom and remove them before they become entrenched.
• Remove unnecessary barriers to becoming a teacher.
• Remove ineffective teachers. 
• Pay great teachers more.

"The proposals above reflect what we have learned over the past two decades from empirical research: teachers are important; teacher quality varies enormously; we must evaluate each teacher directly, and compensate teachers for outstanding results. Those basic and obvious facts are pushing us toward a system that distinguishes and values great teachers." (p. 129)

Sunday at the Movies (Merit pay)

Here's the ineffable Chris Christie, this time speaking on merit pay. Always watchable, always thought-provoking.

Faculties of Education: Part of the problem, not part of the solution

My first teaching gig was when I was 18 years old. Armed with a letter of permission, I taught from May to September for a couple of summers in a small, one-room schoolhouse down the bay from Parry Sound (there were no roads in this small community and the students and I were transported back and forth to school in the school boat). This experience got me hooked on teaching, and I subsquently finished my university degree, completed teachers’ college, and got a job teaching grade 5 in North York.

Looking back, I realize that I probably did a better job in the one-room schoolhouse than I did in North York, at least at first - because teachers’ college had filled my head with virtually no useful information and lots of harmful information. The year I spent at teacher’s college was a total waste of my time and taxpayers’ money. And I am not alone in this belief: when the Ontario College of Teachers surveyed the province’s teachers about the source of their teaching skills, courses at a faculty of education ranked dead last - well below common sense and lessons from their families (see Table 4.1).  

The educators who are expressing outrage over yesterday’s posting are assuming that teacher training adds to teacher effectiveness. When I say that I don’t think teacher training is adding to teacher effectiveness, that is not to say I don’t think good teacher training could add to teacher effectiveness - in fact, I know it can and should. What I am saying is that I don’t think Ontario teacher training adds to teacher effectiveness. What’s more, my opinion is that the problems with teacher training are so entrenched, what with tenure and institutional inertia, that I doubt existing faculties of education can be reformed in my lifetime. I believe that alternate (and better) paths to teacher certification should be authorized.

Checking the unnecessary box of teacher certification

This is the second-last in the Education Matters series about the importance of good teachers - and how to attract and keep them. Today's excerpt (pp 105-107), while a bit wordy, deals with the misguided policies concerning teacher certification.

• Jane was accepted to the college of her dreams due to her hard work (a high GPA and lots of AP classes), stellar SAT scores, and a magnetic personality that came through in her interviews. Her university experience dunfolded much as she hoped - she made lots of new friends, became editor of the school newspaper, acquired a long list of professors eager to recommend her for any job she chooses to pursue, and graduated near the top of her very competitive class.
• Since she was a little girl she has dreamed of becoming an engineer and she was excited when she was offered a position in a mid-sized firm. But as graduation approaches she is getting cold feet. She is thankful for all the advantages she has had in life and feels compelled to give something back. She likes the challenges that her new firm has promised and likes the idea of earning a corporate salary, but to Jane money isn't everything.
• Sometimes Jane envies her roommate, Alice, who after graduation will start her first year teaching in a public school. Thorughout their four years living together, Jane always considered Alice's education school course work to be less than rigorous, and that didn't appeal to her competitive nature. But Jane finds the idea of helping kids very appealing, especially if she can work with disadvantaged students. She is passionate about mathematics and wants to instill that passion into young people who are likely to believe math plays no meaningful role in their lives.
• After some careful thought, Jane decides that she's willing to give teaching a try. At worst, she will work helping kids for a few years, and if she doesn't like it she will surely find another engineering job without too much difficulty. Or, perhaps she will love it and decide to make it her career. She meets with a principal in a local middle school who would love to make her an offer.
• There's only one problem. According to the public school system, Jane isn't qualified to teach mathematics. Her mastery of the subject, strong interpersonal skills, obvious talent, and her desire tdo not compensate for her lack of a teaching degree. She is simply not allowed a chance unless she goes back and earns a certification. Disappointed, Jane takes the job at the engineering firm and eventually makes partner....
• Before someone can become a public school teacher he or she must earn a license, usually by graduating from a college of education. It seems like a simple enough requirement: no one should teach in a public school before he or she has been exposed to the pedagogical training necessary for success in the classroom. However reasonable it seems on its face, that requirement has failed to keep bad teachers out of the schoolhouse door, and it unnecessarily eliminates many potentially excellent candidates....
• The reality is that what teachers are learning in those colleges doesn't translate into effective instructiion in the classroom. In fact, few seem to believe that teachers leave their college programs more prepared to teach than they would have been without the experience. Why, then, should we continue to insist that people check this unnecessary box before they enter a classrom?

Mrs. Crackerjack and Mr. Dud

Everyone agrees, I think, that there are some great teachers and there are some real duds. Yet teachers' skill and degree of effort are ignored on payday. Quoting from Teachers Matter (pp. 69-72)...

• The structure of the salary system determines the incentives that employees consider when they go to work each day. Unfortunately, in education the single salary schedule is completely at odds with what modern research suggests is even reasonable practice. At best, the current system misses an important opportunity ot maximize teacher quality by using the salary system to encourage teachers to engage in practices and behaviors that benefit students.
• Thoughtful employers can use the salary structure to solve what economists called the 'principal-agent' problem. At its core, employers (principals) and employees (agents) tend not to share the same goals. In the private sector, the employers prefers a very high level of production in order to maximize his profits. But such higher earnings come from the hard work of employees who don't personally benefit from putting forth high levels of effort and thus have little incentive to work as hard as they can. The employer can require that individuals put forth at least some minimally set amount of effort in order to keep their jobs, but the situation is complicated by the fact that the employer cannot truly observe the worker's effort level. Lacking the abilty to monitor effort, the employer's response is to adapt a pay structure that aligns his employees' incentives with his own. For instance, an employer might adopt some sort of profit-sharing agreement, which would provide the employee with an incentive to increase profits for the firm.
• Of course, the above is a simplistic description of a long-standing problem in economics. There are several important issues related to solving the principal-agent problem that are not to be discussed here. But what this framework helps us understand is that the structure of the compensation system almost certainly has implications for an employee's actions. The uniform salary structure based on credentials and experience used by the current public school system has clear incentives imbedded within it. The system's success requires those incentives to be related to the outcome in which society is interested....
• The current system rewards teachers for acquiring meaningless degrees, and teachers respond to that incentive by earning meaningless degrees - representing not only a faillure to improve education, but a huge sum of lost time and financial resources.
• What's even more distressing is that we fail to reward any attribute, behavior, out outcome that is linked to student achievement. Teachers receive no additional compensation for doing a good job. They earn no more money if they work hard into the night grading papers or preparing lesson plans. Effective senior teachers are not compensated for mentoring their struggling junior colleagues. Additional effort in the classroom, or attaining superior results, does nothing for a teacher's bottom line, and conversely, a teacher doesn't find herself earning lower pay if her students consistently struggle.
• For many teachers, this systemic failure is unfortunate but inconsequential. Many great teachers work tirelessly to help their students despite the fact that they are not directly compensated for doing so. Teachers might be motived by the hope of standing out among their peers, or they could just place a high personal value on the success of their students - after all, a big reason that people go into teaching in the first place is that they love kids and want to help them succeed.
• Nonetheless, expecting teachers to put forth their maximum effort level out of the goodness of their heart without any direct financial reward is an odd system indeed. It is also unjust for a system to treat great teachers the same as it treats mediocre ones.

Ted-Ed

There's a cool new site, with interesting teaching videos. Here's the intro page.