SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Ideas on how to move the teaching profession out of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first

Right now I’m reading The Same Thing Over and Over: How school reformers get stuck in yesterday’s ideas by Frederick M. Hess, and I will be reviewing it soon, but I thought you might be interested in Dr. Hess’s view of teaching as being a profession built in and for the nineteenth century (p. 132 and pp. 159-161). 

• Today’s teaching profession is the product of a mid-twentieth-century labor model that relied on a captive pool of female labor, presumed educators to be largely interchangeable, and counted on male principals and superintendents to micromanage a female teaching workforce. Teaching has clung to these industrial rhythms while recruitment, professional norms, and the larger labor market have shifted underfoot….
• Schooling, however, is an exception. The old rules and norms have kept the traditional framework locked firmly in place, and the teaching job itself has remained remarkably undifferentiated over the last century. Across the land, from Syracuse to Seattle, a visitor can stroll into a school and be confident that all fourth-grade teachers in that district will be expected to cover the same subjects, instruct about the same number of students, and take on roughly the same number of ancillary duties. This may have made sense when little data was available with which to track teacher strengths or student needs, but under modern conditions it represents a careless waste of skill and expertise.
• Is it possible to rethink the traditional boundaries of the teaching role, to alter responsibilities, or to tap educators who spend much of their time outside of K-12 schooling? Is it possible to rethink the teaching role and to use new tools to attract talent and allow educators to do more of what they do best? Let’s take up three illustrative examples of what these ideas might look like once we have emancipated ourselves from our current system.
• For one thing, rather than continuing to accept the notion that one either is a ‘teacher’ or is not, schools might embrace hybrid positions to allow talented educators to grow by leveraging their skills in new ways, even as they continue teaching. A district might ask talented veterans to take on half-time teaching loads and spend the other half of their time on professional development, curriculum development, or parent outreach. In addition, schools could employ community members as instructors to augment the capacities of school staff. Boston-based Citizen Schools, for example, provides highly regarded after-school instruction and career-based learning by arranging for local volunteers to work with students on a regular basis. Rather than simply mentoring or tutoring students, participants teach weekly modules that tackle complex projects with interested students. When an engineer steps off the fast track to start a family, she might consult, freelance, or find some other part-time role with her old employer or a savvy nonprofit. Yet, of those schools that might desire to scoop up such professionals by the bushel, they have no mechanism for recruiting, incorporating, or compensating them.
• Second, we need to think very differently about the opportunities offered by specialization, in which elementary reaching instruction might be recognized as a role distinct from other tasks, for example, and be buttressed with specialized training programs that help teachers diagnose, instruct, and support early readers. Other professions use precisely this model to ensure that they are squeezing maximum value out of their most talented and most highly trained professionals. In medicine, for example, the American Medical Association now recognizes 199 specialties. While there are 7 million medical professions in the United States, only 500,000 are physicians. The remainder are trained practitioners with talents that complement those of doctors. In a well-run medical practice, surgeons do not spend time filing out patient charts or negotiating with insurance companies; these responsibilities are left to nurses or support staff. Schools might find more thoughtful ways to employ lead instructors who have had more intensive training and complementary staff who have had less, and then apportion instructional or administrative roles accordingly.
• And third, technology offers another menu of options to change the way some education services are delivered. Today’s staffing model assumes enough talented teachers that every community will be able to fill all of its classrooms with effective teachers. This expensive ‘people-everywhere’ strategy limits the available talent pool, as some potentially effective educators may be unwilling to relocate to the communities in need. Technology may make it possible to pipe in expertise to complement and compensate for the limitations of any local teaching force. Perhaps the most significant impact of education technology is its potential to eliminate obstacles posed by geography. Web-based delivery systems can take advantage of the wealth of highly educated, English-speaking people in nations like India willing to tutor children at relatively inexpensive rates. For example, Washington, D.C.-based SMARTHINKING Inc. uses American and international tutors to provide intensive instruction to students. Students can log on to the company’s website twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and work in real time with experts in various academic subjects.

The Number Devil

I haven't read this book, but it looks like a very interesting approach to turning kids on to math.

Sunday at the Movies (Direct Instruction)

Here's a video featuring Siegfried Engelmann, the father of Direct Instruction. Notice how engaged the children are in every example (completely ignoring the cameras). And there are related videos down the right-hand side for those who want more.

How Many Other $143 Pencil Sharpeners Are Out There?

The Toronto District School Board has been much in the news lately and there seems no end to the spending outrage.  Now the Toronto Star had originally been told it would cost $3.6 million to get a FOI request fulfilled in order to garner more dirt on how money is spent at the board.  After some public eyebrow-raising, the board backed down on that figure, which would have been in keeping with how the maintenance costs are charged!  I’m sure all of this is to stall for time. The whole mess makes past trustee spending scandals pale in comparison.

This utter lack of transparency is an indication of how little accountability really exists.  For a humble effort at providing SOME sort of transparency, SQE has put whatever school board financial information there is publicly available in one place at www.SunshineOnSchools.ca.  Without having to go through FOI requests, Sunshine on Schools Ontario is a one-stop search and comparison tool.  (Believe me, in some cases it takes quite a bit of digging to find a particular school board’s financial statements.) 

For true accountability on school board finances, the Ministry could start by making all of this publicly available—on every penny from the ministry to the classroom.

So readers, how do your school boards fare?

More magical thinking from the usual suspects

Today’s Globe and Mail has an article that harks back to Rousseau, with a wistful, romantic tone to it. The article advocates for eschewing formal schooling during the summer months, implying that the hiatus will enhance kids’ cognitive performance in the rest of the year.

This is obvious nonsense. These people probably think that their wish will come true when they blow out their birthday candles.

If there is one thing that the research tells us, not to mention common sense, it’s that kids learn what they’re taught. Of course, kids benefit from unstructured enriching experiences like boating or dressing up as a child from 1910. And kids who are already doing well in school will not suffer much of a setback if they take the summer off doing this stuff. 

But for kids who are struggling in school, a summer off will cause their learning deficits to snowball even more. There are 24 hours in a day. If kids sleep 10 of those hours and devote 2 hours to schoolwork, that still leaves 12 hours for the unstructured learning and play advocated by the Globe article. In fact, depending on how severe the child’s learning deficits are, I might go for 3 hours of schoolwork and only 11 hours of unstructured learning and play….

Crumbling ivory towers

GUEST BLOG BY TOM BEREND

E-learning is coming to higher education, and at least three consortiums are racing to develop a platform for online university courses:

https://www.coursera.org
https://www.edx.org
http://www.udacity.com

At edX, you can sign up for a free course from MIT, Harvard, or Berkeley, and get a certificate of completion.  150,000 students from around the world enrolled in MIT’s brutal ‘Circuits and Electronics’ course when  it was first offered.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/education/edlife/anant-agarwal-discusses-free-online-courses-offered-by-a-harvard-mit-partnership.html

U of T is one of 12 members of Coursera, a group of universities that includes Stanford, CalTech and Princeton.   1.6 million students have enrolled in their free courses so far this year.

These are just fireflies before the coming storm, it won’t be long before private degree-granting institutions emerge.  When courses from top universities are widely available, then there is a straightforward business in providing tutors, marking, libraries, labs, study carrels, examination services, and certification that the student has passed the course.  Perhaps a future transcript will state that the student got such a mark on this course from Princeton and on that course from Harvard; the only limit is the credibility of the business offering the certification.  Some businesses may start by offering in-house degrees for their employees and then expand: imagine an engineering degree from Toyota or Apple based on courseware from MIT and CalTech.

Taxpayers should be asking hard questions about the future of our provincial universities.  Ontario provides roughly $7.5 billion for higher education; for that we get big campuses with ranks of tenured professors and armies of administrators.  Maybe there’s a smarter way to deliver more for less.

Not reading the writing on the wall

Many years ago I went on CFRB radio talking about problems with teaching reading and trying to recruit people to join our fight. I was surprised when every single telephone call (there were at least 50 of them) were from parents looking for advice on how they could teach their own kids to read.

Today, Doretta went on CFRB talking about problems with teaching reading and trying to recruit people to join our fight, and lo and behold exactly the same thing. But at least now we can offer help - our Stairway to Reading remedial reading program. As soon as Doretta went off the air, our Stairway to Reading registrations exploded.

This doesn’t make any sense. Taught properly, virtually every child can learn to be a competent reader. See, for example, this interview with Dr. Reid Lyon, the former Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institute of Health. There is no excuse for schools that don’t teach their students to read, and it is a scandal that nothing has changed in 20 years.

Helpful information for the Ontario minister of education

We have blogged before on how the Ontario government has succeeded in lowering the high school drop-out rate by making it easier to graduate from high school (“from a dumbed down curriculum, to credit recovery programs, to automatic bumps for marks as low as 39%, to a requirement that teachers formally defend every failing mark, to prohibitions against deducting marks for late or incomplete assignments, to co-op placements that count as high school credits, and on and on”), but we have to admit that the Ontario government look like pikers compared to some New York high schools, according to this article. 

Somebody should tell the Ontario education minister about New York’s credit recovery program, which lends itself to all kinds of abuses, including letting students Google the answers, write the same test over and over again, or even get friends to write the tests on their behalf. With this approach, students can complete an entire course in just one week.  Clearly, Ontario is missing the boat.

Good teaching ought to matter

From the Students First (Michelle Rhee) blog, here’s a short column on the destruction wrought by seniority-based layoffs. It includes a short but impactful video.

Sunday at the Movies (Online Learning)

This interview makes it clear that students of any age can get their entire education online, no need for bricks and mortar whatsoever. Remarkable.