SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Report Card Edu-babble

If you thought those standard Ontario report cards were supposed to end the edu-babble, think again.  Joe Fiorito reports, in the Toronto Star no less, that the "canned" comments section of the report card continues to keep parents scratching their heads over what exactly is being communicated. 

Parents will find these examples typical:

"Little Johnny sometimes explains how the particular characteristics of various text forms help communicate meaning, with a focus on literacy, graphic and informational texts."

"On occasion, Little Johnny represents fractions using concrete materials, words, and standard fractional notation, and explains the meaning of the denominator as the number of the fractional parts being considered."

Say that again?  Maybe if Little Johnny is so good at explaining "particular characteristics of various text forms" he could figure out his own report card.  

Global Cooling?

Most students are being taught there is a scientific consensus that global warming is taking place and that the world faces severe problems as a result. In fact, the science of global warming is far from unanimous, as this short YouTube video demonstrates. School for Thought draws this information to your attention for two reasons: firstly, we are appalled by the brainwashing about global warming going on in most schools; and secondly, we want to spread the good news that there is probably no need to panic.

Faith in Better Schools

This C.D. Howe site shows that some Ontario school boards are adding much more value to their students' education than others. The top boards are: Eastern Ontario Catholic, Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic, Niagara Catholic, St. Clair Catholic, Thunder Bay Catholic, and York Catholic. In fact, 11 out of the 13 top-performing school boards are Catholic, and most of the Catholic boards outperform their public school counterparts in the same geographical area. In other words, Catholic schools tend to get better academic results with students of similar socio-economic backgrounds. 

As any real estate salesman will tell you, it is common for parents to choose their residence on the basis of the neighbourhood school's reputation. Perhaps some parents will also start choosing their religion on the same basis! 

Single-Cueing Model of Teaching Reading

Most North American teachers believe in the "three-cueing model" of teaching reading, whereby skilled reading is dependent on the combined use of three different strategies: semantic cues (what makes sense based on what is known about the text and illustrations); syntactic cues (what makes sense based on the preceding words); and grapho-phonic cues (sounding out the words). This article clearly shows that the three-cueing theory is incorrect, and that beginning readers should instead simply be taught to sound out every single unknown word. It turns out that many of the strategies encouraged by the three-cueing theory (guessing, looking at the illustrations, skipping words, etc.) are not only unproductive, "they actually deflect students away from the path to reading facility. Sadly, many parents do not discover until about grade 4 that their children have been taught moribund reading strategies and, to their dismay, that recovery is unlikely."

Do You Think Rationally?

Keith Stanovich's new book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The psychology of rational thought convincingly argues that IQ tests are severely incomplete as measures of cognitive functioning, since they fail to assess important abilities such as the ability to make decisions that further one's personal goals or form beliefs that correspond with reality. It is unfortunate that our society emphasizes IQ far more than rational thought, since the latter can be taught to a significant extent. The following excerpt (pp. 145-146) allows you to test your own ability to deal with probabilistic information.

"Imagine that the XYZ virus causes a serious disease that occurs in 1 in every 1000 people. Imagine also that there is a test to diagnose the disease that always indicates correctly that a person who has the XYZ virus actually has it. Finally, imagine that the test has a false-positive rate of 5 percent. This means that the test wrongly indicates that the XYZ virus is present in 5 percent of the cases where the person does not have the virus. Imagine that we choose a person randomly and administer the test, and that it yields a positive result (indicates that the person is XYZ-positive). What is the probability (expressed as a percentage ranging from 0 to 100) that the individual actually has the XYZ virus, assuming that we know nothing else about the individual's personal or medical history?

"Don't read on until you have taken a stab at the problem. Do not feel that you must calculate the answer precisely (although if you think you can, go ahead). Just give your best guesstimate. The point is not to get the precise answer so much as to see whether you are in the right ballpark. The answers of many people are not. They show a tendency to overweight concrete and vivid single-case information when it must be combined with more abstract probabilistic information.

"The most common answer is 95 percent. The correct answer is approximately 2 percent! People vastly overestimated the probability that a positive result truly indicates the XYZ virus. Although the correct answer to this problem can again be calculated by means of Bayes' rule, a little logical reasoning can help to illustrate the profound effect that base rates have on probabilities. We were given the information that, of 1000 people, just one will actually be XYZ-positive. If the other 999 (who do not have the disease) are tested, the test will indicate incorrectly that approximately 50 of them have the virus (.05 multiplied by 999) because of the 5 percent false-positive rate. Thus, of the 51 patients testing positive, only 1 (approximately 2 percent) will actually be XYZ-positive. In short, the base rate is such that the vast majority of people do not have the virus. This fact, combined with a substantial false-positive rate, ensures that, in absolute numbers, the majority of positive tests will be of people who do not have the virus."

Stimulating Ideas

Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has an education idea for that U.S. stimulus money--and it's not just to blindly throw it at school boards as is currently happening.

In his speech to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Gates calls for state legislators to:

1. Embrace common standards and data systems so we can know where we stand and how to move forward.
2. Raise the quality of teaching by measuring teacher effectiveness, encouraging innovation, and spreading best practices.

Good luck.  Where have we heard all that before? However, he does praise KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools and urges that caps on charter schools be lifted.  In light of the previous post on the state of Detroit schools, looks as if they could use some of Gates' intervention:

"But I want to ask you to consider two different schools. In one school, student achievement is low, morale is low, and nothing ever changes -- because nobody expects anything better. In the other school, minority students from low-income families take the toughest classes, get the best teachers, and go on to get college degrees.
Both kinds of schools exist in America. How many of each depends on you.
"You could be tempted to shrug off this responsibility if the schools in your district are pretty good. But America's schools are not pretty good, and they're your schools too.
"This is a national challenge.
"It doesn't really matter whether you are driven by an ethical commitment to equal opportunity or by a long-term economic vision for the country. Both lines of reasoning lead to the same conclusion. We need to measure progress. We need to hold teachers and schools accountable. We need to give all students a chance to make the most of their lives."

Doomed to Failure

John Stossel's post on the abysmal performance of the Detroit Board of Education casts light on the probable success of the Ontario government's fumbling attempts to manage its own school boards. The lesson here is that educational vested interests are so determined to advance their own agendas that even the most Draconian of measures will not force them into putting students' interests first. The only hope for kids is to have a way of escaping their clutches.

Who’s Minding the Store?

The Ontario Government has released a discussion paper around Bill 177 asking for input from "stakeholders" (translation: the usual school boards' associations and teachers' federations) on how the Ministry of Education should take over school boards if they don't meet their responsibilities, particularly those related to improving student achievement.  Moira MacDonald at the Toronto Sun has written about it in her column today. She outlines more problems in the making with some of the proposals.

While we at SQE are not considered one of the worthy stakeholders, we have managed to get a look at the discussion paper and we have some serious concerns as well.  To begin with, input is being solicited from the very people that will be under scrutiny from Bill 177's regulations in the first place.  This is almost like asking a naughty child what their punishment should be and when it should be meted out.

In the regulations, boards will be required to plan and set multi-year goals and report annually (maybe) on a number of indicators which will include, for example: suspensions, graduations, and student achievement outcomes.

The paper then outlines a series of criteria termed "triggers", which may cause the minstry to intercede in a school board.  The most troubling are two proposed triggers that "may" cause a ministry response, "if a board ...iii) has 40% or more if its schools in the bottom 20% of the schools in the province based on EQAO Grades 3 and 6 scores in reading, writing, and math; iv) has 40% or more of schools with 35% or more students that earned less than 8 credits in Grade 9, and 40% more of schools with 35% or more students that earned less than 8 credits in Grade 10."  The stages of minstry response range from a letter of concern to outright take-over and supervision of the board.

First of all, criterion iii) is way too high.  If a board has this many poorly performing schools, they've long been in crisis.

School for Thought has lots of questions.

Who exactly is being taken to task here?  The board of trustees?  The director of education? Other board staff?  Who is going to be held responsible?

Where is the political accountabilty for locally elected trustees?  Or, conversely, what happens if the problem is that board staff are not carrying out policy?  Why should local democracy suffer when a take-over under supervision happens?  Will anyone ever be fired?

How is this all going to be audited?  There is reliance that school boards will be honest in their reporting.  As MacDonald points out in her column, "When there's more pressure on schools to hit numerical targets, there's greater temptation to cut corners or fudge the numbers." There is already pressure on teachers to pass kids with the "no-fail" policy.  Will this get worse?  Will we see more cheating?

This is a far cry from the minister's Citizen for Local Democracy days. Seems to us more and more that local control of education is being slowly eroded away. School boards are becoming irrelevant as bodies of local representation.  Will the future of school boards be the education version of Local Health Integration Networks?

Word Power

When it comes to academic preparation, one of the biggest - and most crucial - differences among young children is the size of their vocabularies. To say the same thing another way, the number of words a child knows is closely related to his or her IQ. Children who start school with impoverished vocabularies are at a terrible disadvantage. Though they may be perfectly capable of learning new things, their limited vocabularies mean that they fail to learn at the same rate as other children. The average child learns about 3,000 new words a year. So what can parents and teachers do to make sure their students continue to add at least eight or nine new words to their vocabularies every day? It's not really rocket science!

• Expose the students to lots of different experiences and ideas.
• Have frequent conversations with them, not speaking down.
• Read to them.
• Teach them to read when they are preschoolers. 
• Explicitly teach them new vocabulary, for example using Internet games such as the ones here or using vocabulary workbooks such as these. 

Public School Lemons

The Ontario Ministry of Education provides a searchable list of the province's 906 independent (private) schools. That's a lot of independent schools, and there are more all the time. It's quite telling that so many parents are willing to reject the free education provided by their school board and instead pay out probably $10,000 per child for independent school tuition. It's like an employee who turns down a free company car - you know there has got to be something pretty wrong with the company car!