SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Putting parents in charge

I’m still reeling from the kingmaker role played by the teachers’ unions in my home town of Waterloo last Thursday. I find it worrisome that the teachers’ unions are so powerful. If they can determine the outcome of this hotly-contested bye-election, then other politicians of all stripes - if they want to be re-elected - will need to have policies that cater to the teachers’ unions. 

As Mitt Romney points out: “The teachers unions don’t fight for our children.That’s our job. And our job keeps getting harder because the unions wield outsized influence in elections and campaigns.”

More from the same article: “Romney argued that President Obama was hamstrung when it came to the issue of education reform because 90 percent of the money given to political campaigns by teachers unions went to Democrats in 2008. ‘Most likely, he would have liked to do more,’ Romney said of Obama. ‘But the teachers unions are one of the Democrats’ biggest donors, and one of the President’s biggest campaign supporters. So, President Obama has been unable to stand up to union bosses, and unwilling to stand up for our kids.’”

The first video in the article is well worth watching. If elected president, Mr. Romney would expand school choice to make it possible for every low-income parent and every parent of a special-needs child to choose his or her school, be it a regular public school, a charter public school, or a private school.

Sunday at the Movies (The Political Power of Public Sector Unions)

This video is appropriate in the wake of the triumph of the public sector unions, especially the teachers’ unions, in electing the NDP candidate in the Waterloo riding on Thursday. 

How children succeed

I’ve just started reading a very interesting book - How Children Succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character - and I will review it in due course. But right near the start, the book tackles an issue that has long puzzled me - namely, why the kids in the famous Perry Preschool Project lost their cognitive gains before long, yet did better in later life than the control children. The Heckman referenced in the excerpt is James Heckman, a Nobel prize winning economist at the University of Chicago.

“The Perry Preschool Project is famous in social science circles, and Heckman had encountered it, glancingly, several times before in his career. As a case for early-childhood intervention, the experiment had always been considered something of a failure. The treatment children did do significantly better on cognitive tests while attending the preschool and for a year or two afterward, but the gains did not last, and by the time the treatment children were in the third grade, their IQ scores were no better than the control group’s. But when Heckman and other researchers looked at the long-term results of Perry, the data appeared more promising. It was true that the Perry kids hadn’t experienced lasting IQ benefits. But something important had happened to them in preschool, and whatever it was, the positive effects resonated for decades. Compared to the control group, the Perry students were more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to be employed at age twenty-seven, more likely to be earning more than twenty-five thousand dollars a year at age forty, less likely ever to have been arrested, and less likely to have spent time on welfare.

“Heckman began to rummage more deeply into the Perry study, and he learned that in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers had collected some data on the students that had never been analyzed: reports from teachers in elementary school rating both the treatment and the control children on ‘personal behavior’ and ‘social development’. The first term tracked how often each student swore, lied, stole, or was absent or late; the second one rated each student’s level of curiosity as well as his or her relationships with classmates and teachers. Heckman labeled these noncognitive skills, because they were entirely distinct from IQ. And after three years of careful analysis, Heckman and his researchers were able to ascertain that those noncognitive factors, such as curiosity, self-control, and social fluidity, were responsible for as much as two-thirds of the total benefit that Perry gave its students.

“The Perry Preschool Project, in other words, worked entirely differently than everyone had believed. The goodhearted educators who set it up in the sixties thought that they were creating a program to raise the intelligence of low-income children; they, like everyone else, believed that was the way to help poor kids get ahead in America. Surprise number one was that they created a program that didn’t do much in the long term for IQ but did improve behavior and social skills. Surprise number two was that it helped anyway - for the kids in Ypsilanti, those skills and the underlying traits they reflected turned out to be very valuable indeed.”

This is Nuts!

GUEST BLOG BY NANCY WAGNER

This morning, I was packing lunches. It is always a struggle finding food to send that is not only nutritious but also something that will actually get eaten. Peanut butter, that protein-rich staple of childhood is of course out, as is any snack containing nuts. So as I am placing a tangerine in each boy’s bag, Charlie tells me they are not allowed to bring oranges to school. I thought he was kidding, but Aidan joined in and said they’re banned. Not only that, but if they eat an orange before going to school, they have to brush their teeth or a “helper” at the school will die.

I phoned the school to confirm, and sure enough was told that a staff member has a severe allergy (this person is not involved in either of my grandson’s classes). Even so, 500 kids cannot eat oranges any longer.

They’re Baaaaaack!

In a stunning demonstration of how failed educational trends get recycled, three brand new open plan schools opened their doors yesterday. more

Open plan schools are a byword in educational circles for expensive fads that fail (here’s an article from our archives). 

George Santayana remarked that those who can’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it. In the case of educators, it’s too recent for them to have forgotten the failure of open plan schools - so it’s not that these educators can’t remember the past. Rather, they are rejecting the past. I wonder what George Santayana would say about that?

Winning the battle but losing the war

A new Ipsos Reid poll finds that 58% of Canadians believe private school education is better than public school education. Even more telling, 63% of Canadians would send their children to a private school if money were not a concern.

A couple of snippets from the Global Toronto report

• Dissatisfaction with schools varies from province to province, however. People in the Prairies tend to give their schools top marks. Fifty-three per cent of people living in Saskatchewan and Manitoba would grade their schools with an “A” or a “B.” 
• Labour unrest does seem to be a significant factor affecting people’s overall perception of the school system. The lowest-graded schools are in British Columbia where 26 per cent of people gave the school system a “D” or “F”, and Ontario where 23 per cent of people gave those same low marks. 

This ought to give the Ontario and BC teachers’ unions pause, since their militancy runs the risk of driving away more parents from the public schools, accelerating the province’s enrolment decline and the associated need for teachers.

More Pot Stirring

With the debate raging in Ontario about teacher compensation, this column by Jay Greene is very timely. Are teachers fairly compensated? Dr. Greene starts with the following premise.

• If teachers are underpaid relative to their skills, teachers who leave the profession should, on average, earn more in their new jobs. Likewise, new workers coming into teaching should, on average, take a pay cut from their previous jobs.

Dr. Greene found that “individuals get an average salary increase of 8.8 percent when they enter the teaching profession and a pay cut of around 3.1 percent when they leave”.

The argument is a bit more layered - read the article for more context - but the bottom line is that perhaps US public school teachers are already being paid too much. Given that Ontario teacher salaries are significantly higher than the US average, it would be reasonable to wonder whether Ontario teachers are already being paid too much as well.

Stirring the pot a bit…......

Here’s a letter to the editor about Ontario teachers’ pensions that should start an exciting debate. H/T DH

Sunday at the Movies (YouTube)

Here’s a short video that outlines YouTube’s educational videos service. Who knew?  YouTube link

Nazi youth were the products of a socialization process

Most parents consider it very important that their kids get “socialized” and give that as a reason why children should go to school. The principle is often extended to kindergarten and preschool as well, the idea being that the earlier the socialization process begins the better. 

Now comes a challenge to this notion. The whole article is worth reading, but in a nutshell, this is what it says. During the first five years of a child’s life, it is critically important that he or she form a strong affectionate bond with adults who stay in their lives. When young children form stronger attachments to their immature peers as a result of premature socialization, their individuality doesn’t have a chance to develop - as these children’s seemingly-socialized behaviour is simply copying, as opposed to an expression of their own identities. “The more children are peer attached, the less attached they are to adults—and this can result in children becoming very hostile to being parented or taught.”

As a result, parents may be misled about their child’s development. “The three-year-old who can’t wait to be with his friends in daycare may in fact be on his way to becoming peer rather than parent attached, because being attached makes us want to be with those we are attached to.”

Maybe the home-schoolers are on to something. I have spoken with many home-schooling parents, and to a man they are puzzled by the concept of teenagers with attitude - since apparently home-schooled teenagers are uniformly pleasant and co-operative.