SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Why we do what we do

Your daily overdose of cuteness…..  H/T LL

Maybe truant officers were a good idea after all…........

There are three main determinants of student achievement: what is taught, how it is taught, and how long it is taught for. School for Thought mainly focuses on effective teaching, but perhaps we should be paying more attention to the other two elements. A new analysis from Johns Hopkins University makes the point that the most effective teaching in the world won’t help absentee students. 

The fact that most education systems don’t track absenteeism (it’s the same in Canada) shows educators’ surprising lack of concern over chronic absentees. The Johns Hopkins University study reports that some American states have begun tracking absenteeism and then moving heaven and earth in an effort to ensure that all students attend school every day. Perhaps Canadian authorities could take a leaf from their book. H/T TB

Magical thinking at the Hamilton public school board

The Hamilton public school board is apparently planning to close eight of its high schools and replace them with three new ones. According to this article, the thinking is that by closing schools located in low-SES areas and moving their students into schools with a lot of students from higher-SES areas, the low-performing students will do better.

I have my doubts. For one thing, there is little or no evidence that big schools work better than small schools - and lots of evidence that they do not. For another, the Hamilton decision-makers were influenced by a trip to Raleigh, NC, where a similar policy is claiming success. But the Raleigh initiative also established more than two dozen “magnet schools” - schools that offer specialized programs and draw students from all over the city. There is no mention of magnet schools in the article about the Hamilton plan.

This reminds me a bit of cargo cult thinking - whereby unsophisticated people mimic the behaviour of successful cultures but miss some essential aspect, with the result that they have no chance of attaining the desired result. As long as the Hamilton decision-makers fail to grasp the essential aspect of Raleigh’s success - the power of specialization and competition among specialized schools - they will unfortunately fail to help their low-SES students. H/T DH

More than just words

The magazine of the American Federation of Teachers always contains some good articles, and the most recent edition is no exception. Click here for an excellent article about the importance of teaching content knowledge. The article makes the point that, while it’s essential to teach children how to decode words, the children also have to understand what the words mean. The article outlines the success of a pilot program in teaching vocabulary and general knowledge to low-income students in two New York schools, making interesting - and exciting - reading. 

Remember Kosovo

Greetings from Kosovo where my husband and I are visiting our son who is serving with the UN mission here. As you may know, Kosovo’s struggle to achieve independence from Serbia was prolonged and acrimonious, involving a bitter war and atrocities on both sides. Now the challenge is to get Kosovo back on its feet, including restoring peace between the majority Albanian population and the minority Serb population. 

This effort is being hampered, according to this article in a local paper, by the textbooks used in Kosovan, Albanian, and Serbian schools. These textbooks are riddled with errors, all in the direction of highlighting “the crimes of the other side, while remaining mute about their own….Instead of facts, figures and arguments, you find hate speech. The Kosovan books talk about state genocide against the Albanians. The Serb books, on the other hand, present the Kosovo Albanians as terrorists and fascists.”

This is an extreme example, but it illustrates the power - and the dangers - of government-controlled schooling. As much as we would like to think that schools stick to the presentation of objective and correct facts and attitudes, we should be aware that schools can and do indoctrinate their students - and not just in terms of history. There are many many topics where the presentation of objective truth is simply not possible - for example, sex education, environmentalism, religion, family values, nationalism, the arts, and substance abuse. We should remember Kosovo when we invite the government to teach our kids about these topics.

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