SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Back to the Drawing Board

Can you imagine a civilization in which the communication of visual knowledge is no longer a problem - a society in which the teacher, when a visual description is called for, would merely pick up a piece of chalk and draw the picture on the board? Imagine what it would be like if all educated people - all teachers, carpenters, electricians, physicians, biologists, machinists, and other skilled and professional people from all walks of life - were able to use drawing to exchange visual ideas to the same extent which they now use writing to exchange verbal ideas.

Most people think that you're either born with the ability to draw or you aren't - but that's not the case at all. In fact, drawing can and should be taught - and it's easier to learn than mathematics! The truth is that teaching drawing effectively is not so different from other good teaching. Like math, drawing should be taught in a sequential, rule-based fashion. Trying to teach drawing without an organized system is like trying to teach music without a scale, a staff, a clef, and notes. An excellent yet inexpensive program for teaching drawing can be purchased here.

Dogs in the Manger?

The French Public School Board of Eastern Canada has landed in hot water with the province's high school teachers' union. In preparing for the anticipated second wave of H1N1 flu in its schools, the board is eyeing an obscure provision in the Education Act that would allow it to replace teachers with non-qualified individuals if there weren't enough supply teachers to go around. But the teachers' union claims to think it would be better to close schools than use non-unionized teachers. We at School for Thought are not convinced. For one thing, if kids are in school, they at least have a chance of learning something. For another, there are lots of non-certified individuals out there who nevertheless have lots to offer students - think a private piano teacher or a successful author or a university math professor or a retired auto mechanic. It sounds to us as if the teachers' unions are simply trying to keep out scabs - at the expense of student learning.

See Minister.  “Jump.  Jump Minister. Jump.”

And again, the Minister says, "How high?" As heard on today's Bill Carroll's CFRB AM morning radio show and reported by the CBC,  Ontario Education Minister Kathleen Wynne has responded to anecdotal evidence put forward by the Ontario Secondary Schools Teachers' Federation that kids who attend private summer schools have inflated grades.  The minister said that grades from private summer courses will now be flagged with a "P" on their report cards.

Now, ALL those grades will be tainted with the suspicion that they are inferior and not to be trusted.  While some grade inflation may be happening, this certainly cannot be the case in every situation.  Without concrete data properly collected and studied, this makes the "P" stand for punitive.

Why doesn't the minister flag grades of kids who take public school summer courses or who hang around for the "victory lap" fifth year of high school?  With the province's "no fail" policies perhaps those grades are inflated, or so I've heard, anecdotally.   Could it be that the minister is trying to keep secondary schools filled with OSSTF members?

Colleges and universities are already suspicious of grade inflation and unpreparedness of secondary students. (Read Ivory Tower Blues)  Remediation is the norm at post-secondary institutions.  A better solution would be to require all students to write high school exit examinations.  The Scarlet P will not help. 

More School Spending Not Equal to More Achievement

In these stimulus spending economic times, readers who have followed the work of Dr. Eric Hanushek, the noted expert on education finance, will appreciate his latest book, co-written with Alfred Lindseth. Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses blows away the myths of increased school spending, including across-the-board increases and lowering class-size.  Hanushek has long argued that spending more money is not the key to improved student achievement. 

While the book examines American school systems, the principles of education funding reforms are certainly applicable to our Canadian school systems.  The rush to get on the class-size cap bandwagon in Ontario is a case in point.  Why do our educrats and politicians fail to learn from the mistakes of their U.S. counterparts time and again?

What does work?--performance-based funding, accountability, merit pay, and school choice.

Shhhhh!

It has long been known that many classrooms, especially portables, have such poor acoustics that the children can't hear what the teacher is saying - seriously affecting their learning. This new study documents the effect of noisy classrooms on beginning reading.

School Vouchers - What’s Not to Like?

So imagine somebody tells you about this great education policy that would cost taxpayers far less, yet would result in better results and vastly-greater parental satisfaction. It sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? However, in Florida's school voucher program, each participating student costs taxpayers just over half the amount paid for non-voucher students ($3950 versus approximately $7,000). With more than 23,000 students receiving the Florida vouchers, the savings are significant (something like $93,000,000 every year). And a new study of 800 participating parents found that 80% of parents are "very satisfied with the academic progress their children are making in their current private schools, compared to 4% in their previous public schools". And, if you're worried about non-voucher students getting shafted by being stranded in worsening public schools, this study shows that Florida public schools are actually improving their service in direct proportion to the challenge they face from voucher competition. 

A Conflict of Interest

In New York, a teachers' union tried to stop parents from using their fund-raising money to hire additional teacher aides. In Baltimore, a teachers' union went after the city's highest-performing school, forcing it to lay off staff and shorten its school day. And in Los Angeles, a teachers' union is trying to block the creation of 50 more charter schools. These are but three illustrations of the unfortunate fact that teachers' unions everywhere give priority to their own interests. To hear a senior teachers' union official proudly and explicitly admit the unions' willingness to sacrifice children on the altar of their own desires - amid loud cheering from the union members in the audience - listen to this two-minute video.

It Just Doesn’t Add Up!

The National Academy of Sciences has published a comprehensive report on early childhood instruction in math. "The committee found that, although virtually all young children have the capacity to learn and become competent in mathematics, for most the potential to learn mathematics in the early years of school is not currently realized....The relative lack of high-quality mathematics instruction, especially in comparison to literacy, reflects a lack of attention to mathematics throughout the childhood education system, including standards, curriculum, instruction, and the preparation and training of the teaching workforce". (excerpted from the report's summary) 

Click here for a list of recommended teaching materials.

What a Difference a J Makes!

Dalton J. McGuinty, the father of Ontario's premier, was strongly in favour of public funding for independent schools. In a 1984 submission to the Shapiro Commission he wrote, "My father worked at a lumber mill, and he worked hard and long to raise his six children. He served his country well and loved it - a lot more uncritically than I do. You know about what his salary was. But he worked extra hard and long to pay our fees through an independent alternative high school. We helped him all we could - knowing full well that he was in a sense paying double taxes for our schooling - that he was a second-class citizen not permitted by law to direct his taxes to the school of his choice....In a free and just society, the rights of all are diminished if the rights of any one are infringed."

Of course, Dalton McGuinty Senior could afford to send Dalton Junior to an independent school. Too bad Premier McGuinty supports policies that prevent poor families from doing the same.

New Hope for Learning-Disabled Students

Norman Doidge is a Toronto psychiatrist and researcher who writes about the new science of neuroplasticity. In this TVO interview, Dr. Doidge discusses such things how IQ can be raised, blindness reversed, and learning disabilities cured. His book, The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science, contains fascinating personal narratives showing how the brain has remarkable powers of compensating for even the most challenging neurological conditions. This excerpt (pp. 41-42) discusses the relationship between modern educational practices and the new understanding of brain plasticity.

"The irony of this new discovery is that for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children's brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words. Then in the 1960s, educators dropped such traditional exerciess from the curriculum, because they were too rigid, boring, and 'not relevant'. 

"But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematicallty exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brain power unfamiliar to us now. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, the debaters would comfortably speak for an hour or more without notes, in extended memorized paragraphs; today many of the most learned among us, raised in our most elite schools since the 1960s, prefer the omni-present PowerPoint presentation - the ultimate compensation for a weak premotor cortex."