SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

For whom the bell tolls

I was at Canadian Tire the other day and made a purchase of $73.46. My request for $60 cashback threw the young clerk into total confusion until I rescued her by telling her that $73.46 plus $60 was $113.46. 

Here and here are a couple of articles that talk about a similar lack of simple arithmetic skills in incoming university students.

Arithmetic is important - whether it be at the university level where we can’t graduate enough engineers and computer experts, or at the Canadian Tire level where the clerks can’t make change, or at the citizen level where voters can be easily bamboozled by the specious statistics of fast-talking political candidates, or at the home-owner level where people lose their homes because they can’t understand interest rates.

Bad math teaching is dragging us all down. This is not someone else’s problem.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

H/T TB

Summertime and the living is easy

It’s June, and in many schools the teachers are just going through the motions. Lest you think this is a new phenomenon, here are some excerpts from an article by David Hillen, published in the Hamilton Spectator in 1975. H/T DH

• As a teacher with ten years’ experience, I have annually found the month of June the most professionally embarrassing. The taxpayer seldom seems to be getting his money’s worth. (For an average high school, about $3,000 worth of work should be turned in every day in June.)...
• A lot of the time, the students are simply not there to teach ... Your class is changed by the absence of up to half a dozen or more students. Others leave a ‘little early’ to get the best summer jobs ... Absenteeism is notoriously bad all year, but it is overwhelming in June. My observations suggest that many classes, especially the senior ones, have been running with an absentee rate close to 30% for the last three or four weeks. ... Ever tried to have ‘oral presentations’ when the students giving the oral are away? ...
• Frequently, the teachers are not in the school either. They are on field trips or field days or fielding a little ‘mental health’ time at home in the garden. One day recently, we had 11 teachers out of the school from a staff of 30….
• One of the signs of the less progressive schools is that they save their ‘professional development days’ until the end of June, usually because the administration couldn’t or didn’t bother to think of anything creative to do with them. The school I teach in does this. And what did ‘professional development’ consist of last year? One department out of seven in the school had an organized program of any sort. The contention that the rest of the staff was engaged in ‘evaluation’ or ‘curriculum planning’ is hypocritical deceit. ‘Professional development’ in the main involved a lot of bridge, long lunches, early afternoon golf games, and absenteeism….
• The most significant activity of the administration in most schools in June is to run the anti-climactic and well-named ‘promotion meetings’. Well-named because their only intent seems to be to promote, promote, promote over the dead bodies of angry teachers and burned-out ideals….
• We are very likely observing in our schools in June one more facet of a society in the act of taking its own life, a society deluding itself with a soft, romantic, lop-sided vision that overlooks the stark harshness and brutal competitiveness of life in the real world of 1975.

Danger - or opportunity?

The Avon Maitland District School Board has just voted to close two more small rural schools, even though the loss of these schools will devastate their communities. Now a city councillor who fought the school closures is asking some hard questions - like, for example, what’s the point of having school boards if they just do what the Ministry of Education tells them to do.

For some reason, it is very appealing to bureaucrats to close schools - perhaps they think huge consolidated schools with lots of bells and whistles provide a better education to their bussed-in students, who knows? - but, whatever the reason, it doesn’t have to be like this.

It’s probably not an overstatement to describe the pending closure of dozens of Ontario schools as a crisis for many communities. But the written word for crisis in Chinese consists of two characters – one representing danger and the other representing opportunity. The school closure crisis is in fact offering school boards an opportunity – if they can only see it. Here’s a newspaper article Paul Bennett and I wrote outlining creative, no-cost ways to keep schools open.

And here’s an SQE article on how parents can fight threatened school closures, sort of. H/T CC

Sunday at the Movies (Early childhood education)

This video discusses Head Start, an American program similar to Ontario’s all-day JK. The US government is delaying the release of the second phase of its evaluation of Head Start’s effectiveness, but it looks as if Head Start is having zero effect. In Ontario, things are even worse: so far there has been no discussion whatsoever of investigating whether all-day JK is making any difference. LINK

Don’t count on calculators

The proponents of modern math pedagogy play down the importance of fluency in things like fractions and long division, holding that the advent of calculators makes these skills obsolete. Now comes a study from Carnegie Mellon University suggesting that grade 5 students' understanding of fractions and division predicted high school students' knowledge of algebra and overall math achievement.

Here's an interesting excerpt from the linked-to article.

"We suspected that early knowledge in these areas was absolutely crucial to later learning of more advanced mathematics, but did not have any evidence until now," said Siegler, the Teresa Heinz Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Carnegie Mellon. "The clear message is that we need to improve instruction in long division and fractions, which will require helping teachers to gain a deeper understanding of the concepts that underlie these mathematical operations. At present, many teachers lack this understanding. Because mastery of fractions, ratios and proportions is necessary in a high percentage of contemporary occupations, we need to start making these improvements now."  H/T Chas

Correlation does not equal causation

Mr. Wainscotting asks why students do better in states with strong public service unions. For a discussion on this point, I turned to Special Interest: Teachers' Unions and America's Public Schools, by Terry Moe, a professor of political science at Stanford University. Dr. Moe begins by explaining why correlation does not equal causation (first two paragraphs) (pp. 208-209). He then goes on to look at data (two studies, one by the author and the other by Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economics professor) that suggest that in fact collective bargaining has a negative impact on performance (last three paragraphs) (pp. 211-212). I'm providing just the highlights - there's a lot more detail there - and I would be happy to post additional excerpts from the book on request. (One discussion, which I reluctantly sacrificed on the altar of space considerations, concerns a lament over the low level of an education debate that confuses correlation with causality.)

• There is no logical basis for this kind of causal inference. Finland has collective bargaining and also has high levels of student achievement, but that says nothing about the causal impact of collective bargaining on achievement. Countless other factors that affect achievement - Finland's small size, homogeneity, culture, investment in education, recruitment of teachers, family structure, virtual absence of poverty, and so on - are simply being ignored. It is entirely possible that, if Finland had no collective bargaining at all, its schools would do even better. Moreover, the very nature of collective bargaining is starkly different in Finland, where labor relations are founded on broad national agreements among national organizations and look nothing like the U.S. system of district-level bargaining and detailed local contracts: indeed, the hallmark of Finnish schools is their autonomy from detailed formal rules specifying what they must do and how. To talk about the impact of 'collective bargaining' on student achievement in Finland and the United States, then is to be talking about two very different things. 
• A similar logic applies to Weingarten's spurious comparisons across American states. While it is true that the southern and border states have less collective bargaining (of the U.S. type) than the remaining states, they are also quite different from these states in all sorts of other ways too: their educational histories, segregation and low funding, among other things, the minority composition of their students, their political cultures (which help explain why they don't have collective bargaining in the first place), and much more. Simple comparisons can tell us nothing about the impact of collective bargaining on achievement unless these other factors and their various effects are taken fully into account.
• -----
• Hoxby explores the impact of collective bargaining by looking at changes in school districts over time. She includes all of the nation's districts in her analysis and employs a methodological design - entirely novel for this literature - that allows her to determine (while correcting for endogeneity problems) what difference it makes when districts become unionized and engage in collective bargaining. In the literature's most sophisticated statistical analysis, she shows that collective bargaining leads to increases in total spending, teacher salaries, and teacher-student ratios. That is to say, unions are able to use their power in collective bargaining to get more of the inputs they care about most, money, and jobs. She also shows that, although collective bargaining increases school inputs, it also decreases their productivity, so that the unions' overall impact on school performance is actually negative, as measured by the student drop-out rate.
• My own study carried out on a large sample of California school districts, approaches the subject from a different angle. I explore the actual contents of the labor contracts themselves, coding them according to how restrictive their rules are. Because all districts in the sample regularly engage in collective bargaining, I avoid the problem of comparing the 'normal' districts that have it with the unusual districts that don't. My focus is on the 'normal' districts themselves and on whether their contract rules have consequences for student learning.
• The baseline finding is that, controlling for a long list of variables that account for student backgrounds and the characteristics of schools and districts, the restrictiveness of the contract has a large negative impact: the more restrictive the contract, the lower the gains in student achievement. The size of the impact, moreover, is greater than that of any other organizational aspect of schools and districts. Collective bargaining matters for the effectiveness of schooling, and it matters a lot.

More than just a pretty face

Here's another excerpt from Clear Teaching (see my June 7 post) on possibly-unexpected benefits of Direct Instruction programs (pp 35-36).

• Engelmann's programs are so carefully designed to reach the hard-to-teach that even his admirers often miss how well they teach everyone else. Likewise they are so good at teaching basic skills that few teachers appreciate how well they teach the more-advanced knowledge a literate society demands.
• A recent major review of the research literature found that Direct Instruction is in fact similarly effective for students whether they are in regular education, special ed, elementary school or high school. The review also found DI to be similarly effective at teaching both early reading skills and high-level comprehension. No other method of instruction showed such consistently strong effects with students of different ability levels and ages, and with different subject matters. (The review, Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement, by John Hattie of University of Auckland in New Zealand, was published by Routledge in 2009.) (Note: Dr. Hattie's book is available for borrowing from our lending library.)
• The federal Follow Through study, which looked at young at-risk children, found that the biggest differences separating DI (the only effective model) from the 21 other models was not on rote learning but on cognitive higher order skills. Forty years later and on the other end of the curve, in Gering, Nebraska, a rural district which uses DI, elementary students classified as gifted are out-performing their gifted peers in non-DI schools in the rest of the state. They have learned so much that Gering's junior high has had to rewrite its curriculum for them, raising standards to make it more like high school.
• Any teacher flipping through Engelmann's lesson plans would see that they tackle sophisticated skills page after page and are content-rich.
• The upper levels of Reading Mastery focus on great literature, such as Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Jack London. Earlier levels focus on non-fiction, and contain many things DI teachers confess they themselves never learned. Third graders read about Nancy who becomes less than 1 centimeter tall. Before reaching the story, they are taught the science concepts that enable them to predict what will happen when she falls from a counter (she won't get hurt), what problems she will have drinking water (because of the surface tension fo a drop of water), and why her voice changed so that her mother could not hear her when she called. In the context of other selections, children learn how rivers change their course and why tire tracks are visible on the road after it rains. They learn the principles of convection and propulsion.. They learn Archimedes' law of buoyancy. They learn the difference between induction and deduction, similes and metaphors, and (often mistaught!) facts and opinions.
• Reasoning and Writing teaches how to identify misleading claims in advertising and to draw appropriate conclusions from evidence. Essentials for Writing (for middle and high school) teaches the principles of argument and debate. Corrective Reading (a remedial program for students who are behind) teaches economic principles and how to apply them. Morphographic Spelling teaches rules and techniques for analyzing word parts that most adults do not know.

I’ve got a little list

Mr. Wainscotting thinks I hate the teachers' unions more than the other education perps. But that's not exactly true.

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I've got a little list — I've got a little list
Of education offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!
There's the faculties of education who corrupt prospective teachers — 
The ministry of education that leads us down the garden path — 
The EQAO that makes bad tests, the school boards that interfere — 
The textbook publishers that churn out lots of junk — 
And the OCT that ensures bad teachers are still here — 
They'd none of 'em be missed — they'd none of 'em be missed! 

Best of British Luck!

In light of the ongoing concern over the way math is taught in Canada, it's interesting to learn that more or less the same discussions are taking place in England, as outlined here. Just as in Canada, the battlelines are drawn between those who want more rote learning and those who oppose it on the grounds that rote learning turns kids off.

From a strictly logical standpoint, it's hard to understand why the proponents of fun math cling to their point of view. After all, they've had at least 50 years to try out their theories, and the results are conclusive: their theories don't work. And there's no mystery why their theories don't work either. Novices need rote learning to get up and running, and it's only after kids exerience success that they find joy in the subject. If novices are denied the rote learning they need to become proficient in math, they are bound to find the subject frustrating and difficult. 

The English Education Secretary says he is determined to shake up maths teaching, but the fun math culture is deeply entrenched in English schools, just as it is in Canadian schools. The crucial difference is - in England, the education secretary understands the problem and is trying to fix it. In Canada, not one minister of education appears to understand the problem, and for sure no one is trying to fix it. H/T CT

The decline and fall of public sector unions

Neil Reynolds has an interesting column in today's Globe and Mail. Talking about the popularity of Wisconsin's governor in the wake of his curtailment of the power of the state's public sector unions, Mr. Reynolds provides more detail about this curtailment, as well as how much money the reforms have saved the state - more than $3.5 billion in a single year. He also argues that the extraordinary pay and wages of unionized workers doesn't do even them any good in the end.

• Workers have indeed done the math – which explains the huge southward migration, millions strong, of the past decade. Yes, union workers earn more than non-union workers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average pay in Collective Bargaining States exceeds the average pay in RTW states by $1.58 an hour – $3,386 a year. But the cost of living in a CBS state (index: 117.03) exceeds the cost of living in a RTW state (index: 94.46) by 20 per cent. The non-union worker finishes far ahead.

The comments to Mr. Reynolds' column are worth a look as well. They suggest that Canadian public sector unions are not very popular with the general public.