SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The Testing “Plateau Effect”

This study sponsored by the U.S. Center on Education Policy  looks at the 'plateau effect' seen in large-scale accountability testing.  This effect can be described that after the first year or two of testing, teachers may "teach to the test" so that students gain practice with the same format and scores shoot up.   If nothing else significantly changes, such as improving instructional methods, there are no more gains, scores level off and the dreaded plateau is achieved.

Of the 55 testing trend lines for reading and math tests that the researchers examined, only 15 showed the plateau effect. The rest had a variety of patterns. When there were "high-stakes" policies present (such as No Child Left Behind) in addition to the testing, the achievement results were better. 

One other finding may explain what is happening here in Ontario with our own dreaded plateau:

States also alter tests when they revise their content standards, make their tests more
or less difficult, or move to different testing formats. It may well be that by the time a state
would start to show a plateau effect, it changes its tests.

Considering Ontario results had reached a plateau long ago, hmm...

An Apple for Some Teachers

Even really bad high schools and universities have some good teachers and professors, and even bad school boards have some good schools. By compiling the votes of millions of students, these two sites (high school teachers and professors) help students get a handle on which ones to seek out (and which ones to avoid). Just out of interest, the highest-rated teacher in Ontario is Lucia Tiberio (#31 out of hundreds of thousands of teachers), a music teacher in Mississauga. The highest-rated high school (#2 out of tens of thousands of schools) is Thorold Secondary School in Thorold, ON. Some of the comments are hilarious: "She hates you already." "Emotional scarring may fade away, but that big fat F on your transcript won't." "Evil computer science teaching robot who crushes humans for pleasure." And lots more....

Food for Thought

Excerpted from The Street Stops Here: A year at a Catholic High School in Harlem, by Patrick J. McCloskey (pages 54-55):

"But the first hurdle is the basics, without which dire consequences are sadly predictable, as T. Willard Fair, president of the Urban League of Greater Miami, illustrates at speaking engagements around the country. Fair recounts a chance meeting with two men in an airport bar on his way to an engagement. He learned that the two men worked for the Florida state prison system and were responsible for planning future prison needs. Fair asked them how they determine the number of prison cells a community will need in fifteen or twenty years. At first, the men evaded answering, but several drinks later, they confided that they looked at the fourth-grade reading and math scores on statewide tests. The number of students performing below standard, even this early in a child's life, follows a strict correlation with the number of future inmates. The overwhelming majority of prison inmates, Fair notes, are functionally illiterate high school dropouts. As a growing number of black leaders contend, Fair proclaims that education is the civil rights issue of the twenty-first century."

The Future of the Toronto School Board?

Jay Greene has an excellent education blog and, as an added bonus, he's a big film buff and makes interesting postings on movies from time to time. Today, Jay's entry concerns the Detroit Public School Board which is bleeding students and considering seeking bankrupty protection. The Toronto District School Board is not nearly as far down the road as this yet but, given that for years the Toronto board has been losing students to the tune of about 5,000 a year, it is certainly moving in that direction.

Politics of Envy

This article in the St. Catharines Standard reports on a local controversy whereby supporters of a failing high school in Niagara-on-the-Lake are trying to close down neighbouring Eden High School, which they see as siphoning off their potential students. Eden High School, the board of which is composed entirely of members of the Mennonite Brethren community, is the only non-Catholic publicly-funded religious school in Ontario. A Ministry of Education spokeswoman says that Eden High School does not contravene the Education Act.

Given Eden High School's enormous popularity (750 students, despite the cancellation of its courtesy busing) compared to the competing high school (250 students and falling), you would think that the school board would be going out of its way to bolster Eden High School and even create additional religious schools, perhaps for other other religions that are being discriminated against. But that's not the way the politics of envy operate. 

Stairway to Reading

If you're using our free remedial reading program, you might want to try out the online games that support it. To get the access code for one month's free trial, e-mail Doretta Wilson. More good supplementary resources are listed here.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Because we education reformers tend to be too serious, School for Thought suggests you take a break from all the anguish at the Illinois Loop's education humour page. 

List of Shame

School for Thought is collecting the names of Canadian education policy-makers who either attended special schools themselves or sent their children to them or both, all the while opposing policies that would make it possible for poor parents to have the same privileges. So far, our list of shame includes Michele Landsberg and Stephen Lewis, Bob Rae, Gerard Kennedy, Dalton McGuinty, Moe Sihota, and Annie Kidder. We would be grateful if our readers could send us the names of other Canadians who belong in this elite group.

Retail Therapy

It never even occurs to most parents to wonder about enrolling their preschoolers at the nearest school. But would you choose your lawyer or dentist on the basis of the location of his or her office? As CD Howe analyst David Johnson shows, the are enormous differences among schools, and it's just about impossible to turn a bad school around. Far better to choose a good school in the first place. Go shopping!

Tax Credit Scholarships

Florida scholarships help poorer kids

For anyone who supported Ontario's now defunct Education Tax Credit this St. Petersburg Times article will make you wish it still existed. 

This Florida program is helping 23,400 low-income students.  The tax credit scholarship amounts to about $1,000 ($US).  The average family income of the students is $25,000 for a family of four.  Two-thirds of the students are visible minorities and three-fifths are from single-parent families.

"We hear moms tell us their children to longer fake illness to avoid school, that their children don't get into fights anymore, and that they are doing homework and setting goals for the first time. We see promising schools such as Miami Union Academy, which has achieved a graduation rate of 96 percent and college placement of 90 percent with largely poor Haitian students. Or Yvonne Reed Christian School in St. Petersburg, run by a 34-year public school veteran who started her own school because she was determined to make sure young black males could read."

It seems to School For Thought that the cost of running such a program in Ontario would have been a lot less than the costs of implementing class size caps or ineffective reading programs that do not translate into significant achievement gains.

For opponents to such a plan, the words of Dr. Howard Fuller come to mind:

"Those of us with money have the capacity to choose and the great hypocrisy that operates are those individuals who would never put their own children in certain schools denying poor parents the capacity to do it. We have teachers who teach in schools they would never put their own children in, demanding that other peoples' children stay there. I find that to be hypocritical.

I actually happen to be a strong supporter of public schools, but I'm also a strong supporter of giving people a choice so that they can determine whether a public school or private school will be best for their children...It is ludicrous for us not to provide a way for kids to go to schools that work because at the end of the day a democracy can't sustain itself unless it has an educated populace."