SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Playing politics with taxpayers’ money

In an ideal world, the people who run the country would do their level best to be responsible stewards of taxpayers' money. That's certainly how the people who run my neighbourhood association behave, also the people who run my bridge club. However, in my experience - possibly because of their much attenuated face-to-face accountability - many politicians make their spending decisions on the basis of things like re-election prospects or even personal ideology - as opposed to what's best for the country as a whole.

This editorial in the Wall Street Journal provides a case in point. It cites the repeated research evidence that Head Start (a program for disadvantaged preschoolers) has virtually no lasting effect, and then reports that the US government has actually increased Head Start spending. Worse, the government would apparently prefer to suppress the evidence that Head Start doesn't work - releasing the latest evaluation more than a year late on the Friday afternoon before Christmas.

Perhaps someone can explain to me why the US government clings to its discredited Head Start program, spending $180 billion on it to date, even though they know it's a waste of money. And while you're at it, please also explain why the Ontario government continues to support its expensive all-day junior kindergarten program, even though the province can't afford it and there is absolutely zero evidence it will do a bit of good.

Cupboard Love

The Huffington Post has asked us to blog for them, and so here is our first offering. It's about the ingratitude of the Ontario teachers' unions, and you're welcome to read it - although you already know my thoughts on this topic. But what is really interesting is the comments. It's a revelation to me how rude and ignorant most of them are - it must be because the commenters were given inferior public school educations, poor things. 

Late to bed, early to rise

It's Monday morning and teenagers all over Canada are struggling out of bed, grumpy and sleepy and not very interested in learning. Click here for an article by cognitive scientist Dan Willingham on the effects of sleep deprivation - why teenagers are especially susceptible, how it affects their learning, and some measures for mitigating the problem.

Sunday at the Movies (Space Station)

This is a fascinating tour of the international space station in orbit around our planet. YouTube link. H/T JE

The gorilla in the picture

Today, I'm following up on the video where you were to count how many passes the white team made. Did you notice the gorilla? If you didn't - and about half of people don't - you demonstrate our limited attention budget. People can focus on only one thing at a time.

I came across this example - and many other fascinating examples of "systematic errors in the thinking of normal people...traced...to the design of the machinery of cognition" in Thinking Fast and Slow, a book that explains that humans use two discrete systems that drive the way we think and the way we make choices. We mostly rely on System 1, a kind of automatic pilot that is fast, intuitive, and emotional", but we can choose to engage System 2, a slower, more deliberative, and more logical mode.

When you were counting the passes in the video, you were using System 2. Quoting from page 23:

• The often-used phrase 'pay attention' is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyhond your budget, you will fail. It is the mark of effortful activities that they interfere with each other, which is why it is difficult or impossible to conduct several at once. You could not compute the product of 17 X 24 while making a left turn into dense traffic, and you certainly should not try. You can do several things at once, but only if they are easy and undemanding. You are probably safe carrying on a conversation with a passenger while driving on an empty highway, and many parents have discovered, perhaps with some guilt, that they can read a story to a child while thinking of something else.

Everybody wants to reinvent the wheel

Our posting a few days ago, A Big Mistake About Small Schools, highlighted the Gates' Foundation billion-dollar mistake in promoting small schools. Jay Greene has a scathing column about their next major initiative, Measuring Effective Teachers (MET), Although MET cost only $335 million, it too is a failure and waste of money. And those of you who click through to Jay's column will notice that the foundation has also spent a lot of money on bricks and mortar (or perhaps I should say steel and marble). 

We find it interesting how resistant the Gates Foundation is to school choice, choosing instead to pursue a series of weird crackpot ideas in a futile search for the holy grail. Perhaps the powers-that-be will take note of Florida's scores on the latest round of TIMSS/PIRLS and get on the school choice bandwagon. After all, if the Gates Foundation had elected to spend $2 billion on school choice instead of pouring it down the drain as they did, millions of children's lives would have been changed for the better. 

Maybe Bill Gates should have talked to Walter Annenberg who squandered $500 million on a similar folly.

How well can you concentrate?

Here's a short video that tests your powers of concentration. Feel free to let us know how you did on the test. And look for more on this in the near future. YouTube link

Grade 8 students are not a captive audience in Ontario

The public school teachers' unions would do well to heed this article in today's Globe and Mail. In Ontario, you don't have to be Catholic to send your kids to a publicly-funded Catholic high school, heightening the competition between the two systems. The article reports that this year's crop of Grade 8 students, who are currently deciding where to attend high school, are being influenced by the prospect of no extra-curricular activities in the public high schools. 

Nor are the Catholic schools the only market share challenger. There are also the French publicly-funded schools and, of course, the private schools, both of which would be wise to play up their continuing extra-curricular offerings.

The bottom line is that the public school teachers' unions may be jeopardizing their members' livelihoods with their antics. 

Some assembly required….....

Here's a very short video that shows how versatile the new technology can be. The daughter asks her father how he likes his new i-Pad. It's in German, but you'll get it, don't worry. link H/T LL

A big mistake about small schools

I'm currently reading a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on judgment and decision making, and I will be reviewing this book after I finish it. I am finding much of the book quite fascinating, and I thought our readers might be interested in this excerpt (pp. 117-118) from the chapter entitled "The Law of Small Numbers". It deals with why some large American foundations came to waste $1.7 billion on an initiative to promote small schools. That's an expensive mistake!

"Many researchers have sought the secret of successful education by identifying the most successful schools in the hope of discovering what distinguishes them from others. One of the conclusions of this research is that the most successful schools, on average, are small. In a survey of 1,662 schools in Pennsylvania, for instance, 6 of the top 50 were small, which is an overrepresentation by a factor of 4. These data encouraged the Gates Foundation to make a substantial investment in the creation fo small schools, sometimes by splitting large schools into smaller units. At least half a dozen other prominent institutions, such as the Annenberg Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trust, joined the effort, as did the U.S. Department of Education's Smaller Learning Communities Program.

"This probably makes intuitive sense to you. It is easy to construct a causal story that explains how small schools are able to provide superior education and thus produce high-achieving scholars by giving them more personal attention and encouragement than they could get in larger schools. Unfortunately, the causal analysis is pointless because the facts are wrong. If the statisticians who reported to the Gates Foundation had asked about the characteristics of the worst schools, they would have found that bad schools also tend to be smaller than average. The truth is that small schools are not better on average; they are simply more variable. If anything, say Wainer and Zwerling, large schools tend to produce better results, especially in higher grades where a variety of curricular options is valuable."