SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Public education apparently has a bad case of Baumol’s Disease

It has always amazed me that most people think public education is underfunded even though Ontario spends more than $11,000 per student, but I suppose this is due to things like the teachers’ unions’ brilliant propaganda campaigns and the fact that a lot of the money gets creamed off before it reaches the classroom. 

In this connection, Dr. Matthew Ladner has started an interesting blog series on Baumol’s Disease - “the tendency of labor-intensive organizations to become more expensive over time but not any more productive”. First blog. Second blog. If you’re interested in more on this, you’ll have to keep checking back to the edfly blog.

The bottom line so far: “So, in summary, the world is getting better and cheaper while American K-12 education has been getting much more expensive with precious little to show in the way of improved learning. Disadvantaged students are the primary victims of this productivity implosion in K-12, and will be the primary beneficiaries once we reverse the trend.”

Sunday at the Movies (Success)

Here’s a quickie TED talk on the not-so-secret secrets of success.

The Writing Revolution

There’s a very interesting article in this month’s Atlantic Magazine about a struggling New York high school that had tried a bunch of reforms over the years - removal of bad teachers, breaking up of the student population into smaller learning communities, after-school programs - but nothing had worked. Then in 2008, the principal decided to focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing.

It turned out that a significant percentage of the school’s students were lacking some very basic elements of writing. For example, a sizable group of students could not use simple words like “for”, “and”, “nor”, “but” and “yet” effectively. According to the article, “about 25 years ago, in an effort to enliven instruction and get more kids writing, schools of education began promoting a different approach. The popular thinking was that writing should be ‘caught’, not ‘taught’, explains Steven Graham, a professor of education instruction at Arizona State University. Roughly, it was supposed to work like this: Give students interesting creative-writing assignments; put that writing in a fun, social context in which kids share their work. Kids, the theory goes, will ‘catch’ what they need in order to be successful writers. Formal lessons in grammar, sentence structure, and essay-writing took a back seat to creative expression. The catch method works for some kids, to a point. ‘Research tells us some students catch quite a bit, but not everything,’ Graham says. And some kids don’t catch much at all.”

Although the new focus on teaching analytic writing has not solved all of the students’ problems (their high poverty rate gives them multiple handicaps), nevertheless there has been a dramatic turnaround - “an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject - one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform”.

The article concludes: “The school’s success suggests that perhaps certain instructional fundamentals - fundamentals that schools have devalued or forgotten - need to be rediscovered, updated, and reintroduced. And if that can be done correctly, traditional instruction delivered by the teachers already in classrooms may turn out to be the most powerful lever we have for improving school performance after all.” H/T JB

All this at no cost to the taxpayer…..

Cardus has published the results of a huge study that looks at the outcomes of the various types of Canadian education available - government and non-government - and compares them to each other and to the stated aims of every provincial education ministry. You can access the report here (for free, although you need to register).

The bottom line is that the graduates of non-government schools tend to do better on virtually every criterion measured: less likely to be divorced or separated; more engaged with their neighbourhoods and communities; more generous; more satisfied with their jobs; and more civically-engaged. 

As the study sums up: “In other words, this study shows that the claim that religious and other independent schools do not prepare their students to contribute positively to Canada’s multicultural society is unfounded.”

Out of the mouths of babes

There’s an article in this month’s Atlantic Magazine that recommends an ingenious education reform - namely, ask students for their opinions about how good their teachers are. It sounds kind of simplistic, I know, but it turns out that students’ ratings do strongly correlate with student learning. 

“Measures Effective Teaching”, a massive survey by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, found that student responses do “indeed help predict which classes would have the most test-score improvement at the end of the year. In math, for example, the teachers rated most highly by students delivered the equivalent of about six more months of learning than teachers with the lowest ratings….Students were better than trained adult observers at evaluating teachers. This wasn’t because they were smarter but because they had months to form an opinion, as opposed to 30 minutes. And there were dozens of them, as opposed to a single principal.”

It turns out that the following five items correlate mostly strongly with student learning.

• Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.
• My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.
• Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.
• In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.
• In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes.

At a time when education reformers are realizing just how important good teachers are, this tool may turn out to be a very important arrow in their quiver. H/T JB

Politically-correct education reform

CFRB’s Jerry Agar has published an intriguing idea recently, namely education reformers might make inroads if they infiltrate education decision-makers’ territory of “politicial correctness and the ideology of victimhood”. I mean, it would be very hard for education decision-makers to oppose things like Africentric schools or schools for gay or transgendered kids. And what about schools devoted to fighting global warming or developing social activists? These schools would of course be the thin edge of the wedge, ideally leading in time to acceptance for schools that specialize in - gasp - academic excellence.

Mr. Agar ends with a rousing call to arms, as follows.

“Bold new ideas are held back by the shackles of the dull, plodding, monolithic, one-size-fits-all system we have now. Brilliance springs forth from experimentation striving toward the bright light of possibility. Unions only want more money and bureaucrats love the easy status quo. Entrepreneurs spring out of bed every morning after a few hours of sleep and run all day long toward possible success. If you would allow school choice, then you believe in people.” H/T LL

Common Sense Education

If any of you missed teacher and author Michael Zwaagstra speak at our AGM a couple of years ago, here’s a chance to hear him again.  I never get tired of hearing a real live classroom teacher tell it like it is—and it’s not what their unions tell them to say either.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable,  must be the truth

Back in the nineties when Ontario introduced legislation mandating school councils, there was huge interest all over the province. The vast majority of schools had dozens of capable, committed candidates for their school council that first year, and the elections had a robust turnout. The next year was a different story. Few schools had enough candidates to force an election, and the school councils were mostly acclaimed. What happened, you ask? Well, the capable, committed candidates on the first-year school councils quickly discovered that the principal had no intention of allowing them to have any meaningful input or carry out any meaningful function other than raise money, and so they got tired of wasting their valuable time and moved on. The second year, for the most part, it was only candidates who were content with going through the motions, and so there were so few candidates that they automatically were appointed to the council. And so it has continued to this day.

This is confirmed by a recent Parents for Education survey, as noted in Educhatter’s latest blog, where 90% of school councils spend on average less than 10% of their time working on the school improvement program - even though that is what the Ontario legislation created them to do.

So we are left with the question of why principals and other education leaders don’t want capable parents as part of their team to raise education standards. Essentially, it boils down to two possibilities: either the education leaders don’t think capable parents would be helpful in a drive to raise education standards or else the education leaders don’t want to/don’t think they can raise education standards.

The former possibility (namely that education leaders don’t think capable parents have anything to offer) is not at all plausible, as it is well accepted that parental involvement - of any kind - leads to enhanced student learning. Furthermore, school improvement schemes are far more likely to be successful if they have input/buy-in from all of the stakeholders.

Which leaves us with the explanation that education leaders don’t want to/don’t think they can raise education standards. Is this possible?