SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Where would you send your child - Camp Arowhon or St. Brother Andre Catholic School?

Joanne Kates had an interesting article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail. Ms Kates is the director of Camp Arowhon, a children’s summer camp in Algonquin Park. As she explains, she was appalled at the amount of bullying that had developed at the camp during the years between her idyllic summers there as a child and her return as the camp’s director in 1989. And so she set out to do something about all the bullying - with sensitivity sessions, vigilance, workshops, interventions, and a lot of diligence and hard work. Things are not perfect at the camp in terms of bullying these days, but they are far better, so much so that a research report on the camp found that “eighty per cent of campers reported standing up for a victimized peer the last time they witnessed bullying. This is a very high rate of intervention, as compared to observational studies conducted on school playgrounds, as well as other survey-based studies, which have found that only 17 to 25 per cent of peers intervened during a bullying episode.”

A diametrically-opposed approach is being tried out at St. Brother André Catholic School in Markham, ON. Here the principal thinks that the best way to deal with bullies is to accommodate them and to ask their victims to forgive their tormentor’s behaviour. As this newspaper report shows, Fraser Sutherland - who has suffered three concussions at the hands of one particular tormentor - is now afraid to go to school, fearing that the educators at the school won’t protect him from the bully. The principal, however, thinks that the bully has reformed. He kindly suggests that Fraser just suck it up.

So, gentle readers, I would be very interested in your opinions as to which approach is likely to yield the best results: Door #1 (Camp Arowhon) or Door #2 (St. Brother André Catholic School) by recording your vote in the comments section of this blog. If we get enough votes, I will forward the results to the camp director and the school principal.

Attacking unions where it hurts most - in the pocketbook

Perhaps given new courage by Governor Scott Walker’s big win in Wisconsin (after taking on the public sector unions and winning), the Ontario Conservative Party is proposing a number of labour law reforms that would render Ontario the freest workplace in Canada. The most spectacular reform would be a rollback of the Rand Formula, such that workers would not be required to join the relevant union or pay union dues if they wanted to work in a unionized profession. 

This would have a profound impact on the province’s education sector, saving teachers more than $1,000 a year and drastically reducing the wealth and power of the teachers’ unions. 

It is an understatement to say that the teachers’ unions don’t like this proposal. It’s going to be all-out war, for sure, and there figures to be a sneak preview shortly in my own Waterloo riding with the bye-election resulting from Elizabeth Witmer’s resignation. I’ll send you bulletins from the front when the time comes.

The letter of the law

I bet you didn’t know that most US states have laws that forbid teachers from applying sunscreen to their students without a doctor’s note. I wonder if it’s the same story in Canada. Anybody know?

Anyway, here’s a story from the US about a couple of mildly-albino sisters who suffered severe sunburns because their teachers refused to put sunblock on them during their field day activities. In a way, it’s the same problem as the zero hero - teachers torn between their marching orders and what they know is right.

Most of the time, I have some sympathy, but not here. I mean, this is child abuse. At a minimum, the teachers could have kept the girls indoors. Or called their mother. Or applied the damn sunblock, with no one being the wiser. These teachers ought to be fired. H/T MW

Zero Heroes

On June 1, I blogged about an Edmonton teacher who had been suspended for giving a zero to students who hadn’t handed in their assignments. Well, this teacher, still suspended, has become a pop hero of sorts. It turns out that most Edmontonians had no idea about the board’s no zero policy, and when it became public, most people thought it was nuts. More or less the same thing happened in Ontario a few years back, by the way.

In fact, this is not an isolated case. Education leaders are constantly implementing crazy policies that mostly fly under the radar but which outrage the public when they find out about them. I think of too-explicit and premature sex education curricula, too-high teacher pay and benefits, too-easy and non-standardized tests, virtually-guaranteed high school graduation policies, irrelevant PD day activities, benighted teacher hiring and firing policies, and much more. 

The bottom line is - our education leaders are way out of touch with what the public wants and what taxpayers think they are paying for. Unfortunately, our education leaders are unelected and unaccountable, and there are very few teachers like the zero hero - who, although a hero, is likely out of a job and a profession he loves - who are in a position to stand up for what they think is right. H/T LDA

All Justin needed to know he learned in high school

In case you’ve been living on Mars for the past few years, Justin Bieber is a Canadian hearthrob from Stratford, ON. This clip of an interview by David Letterman includes a hat tip to the Canadian education system - although I’m not sure it’s justified….....

Let a thousand flowers bloom

In the vein of different strokes for different folks, there's an article in today's Globe and Mail about a Calgary private school that uses their students' love of sports as a way to reach them academically. Obviously this kind of school would work for some students, but not for others. My own children, I'm sure, would have responded well to a school that specialized in video games. I'm joking, but the truth is that kids (and teachers) have different interests and motivations, and so the more schools with different specialties, the better the chances that there will be a good match for everyone. Just a few possibilities - Montessori schools, chess schools, all-girls schools, hi-tech schools, Spanish-immersion schools, IB schools, auto mechanics schools, dance schools, science schools, year-round schools, intensive academic schools, music schools, virtual schools, Girl Guide schools, traditional schools, Waldorf schools, horticultural schools, and the list goes on.

Sunday at the Movies (Evolution of a species)

This TED talk wonders whether human beings are undergoing unprecedented evolution, and cites the increased incidence of autism as possible evidence. It's certainly thought-provoking, and he has some great jokes. TEDlink

Too big to succeed

When I found out that the Toronto District School Board (tedious board) employed 8 plumbers, 2 sprinkler fitters, 1 insulation mechanic, and 1 steamfitter who made the Sunshine List (earning more than $100,000), I was shocked and appalled. Now I find out that almost all of the tedious board’s maintenance work is done by the Maintenance and Construction Skilled Trades Council, whose excesses make the tedious board’s sunshiners look like pikers. Click here and here for details about a $143 charge for screwing in a pencil sharpener, almost $3,000 for installing a simple electrical outlet, and $19,000 for installing a sign on a school’s front lawn - as well as the council’s involvement in electing complacent politicians so that the golden goose would keep on laying its wonderful eggs.

This is just the latest in a long list of scandals at the tedious board. Over the years, I’ve also heard lots of rumours about other abuses that stayed out of the limelight - for example, a highly-placed board bureaucrat whose swimming pool was built for him by board employees and a huge boondoggle involving the forced (and very expensive) installation of pa systems in every school.

The point is - the Toronto District School Board is too big. This kind of waste is inevitable and, even though every once in a while someone gets caught and a scapegoat gets blamed, there is no way that the tedious board can ever spend taxpayers’ money responsibly. At the risk of repeating myself, school boards should be abolished, and the money sent directly to individual schools.

Exclusively public

Click here for a short newsclip about Connecticut parents being sued for illegally enrolling their daughter in a Westport, Connecticut public school. Two well-groomed Westport mothers in expensive cars justify the lawsuit on the grounds that Westport taxpayers are footing the bill for the school. Westport in 2008 was the tenth-wealthiest town of its size in the US, and I’m guessing King’s Highway Elementary School is located in a pretty exclusive area where you need lots of money to buy a house.

It surprises me that status-quo educators, most of whom are egalitarian in their outlook, would nevertheless defend closed boundaries for school enrolment. It clearly leads to two-tier education.

Beware of Bandwagons

There’s an excellent article in the OSSTF’s latest newsletter, although the navigation is quite cumbersome (use the arrows in the upper right-hand corner). The author is a high school geography and history teacher, and he tells an interesting story about university librarians who took it into their heads that their books were in danger of crumbling, and so they should quickly microfilm them all - even though that meant cutting the books along their spines. They spent something like $39 million on this process, not to mention the destruction to the books, only to find that the books were actually more resilient than the microfilm. 

The author then suggests that the education world may be labouring under some similarly-flawed assumptions, for example the emphasis on self-esteem, the reluctance to insist on correct spelling, and the assumption that technology is good. Here’s his powerful ending. H/T WSN

• People have been teaching other people since long before Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and frankly, the methodologies that owrk have not changed all that much. We seem to get locked into the idea that because something is new it is good. In fact that assumption might actually be the most potentially dangerous trap we could fall into, since ‘old’ ways of learning are the ways we learned and we know they work.
• We have to challenge those who claim to have new knowledge about how to educate. Failing to do so leaves us with an entire generation of kids who have no idea how to deal with failure, criticism (constructive or otherwise), or how to push themselves through challenges and obstacles when they leave the safety and protection of the education system. If we get it wrong, the blunder made with those microfilmed books will seem minuscule by comparison.