SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Sunshine on unions

Not much talked about, at least in my circles, is a bill before the federal parliament (having passed second reading) that would require all Canadian unions to disclose how much of their members’ union dues they spend on political activity. The amount of money in play is significant - $4.5 billion every year, representing about two weeks’ pay for each union member. more

My hope is that the bill would also force the unions to disclose how much they pay their staff. I think union members and the public in general might be gobsmacked by how much the union bosses pay themselves - both in terms of lavish salaries, benefits, and pensions, and also fabulous travel perks, vacations, and other goodies of that nature. They are definitely living the good life.

If the unions didn’t have something to hide in terms of how much they spend and on what, they wouldn’t be fighting Bill C-377 so hard. I say - let’s find out what they’re trying to hide. H/T JE

Gamification, Part II

GUEST BLOG BY TOM BEREND

I’m now two weeks into the free Coursera gamification course. It’s as rich and demanding as any graduate course I’ve taken at York, and the level and quality of participation in the discussion groups is amazing. Of course, you only get out what you put in, and I’m working hard, but I’m shocked at how excellent that course is. (I’m not sure why I’m surprised - this course is from the Wharton School of Business after all. I guess it’s because I merely signed in and started taking free courses).

Now the bad news: 13,000 students (of more than 76,000) completed the first assignment, which was sent out for peer-review this morning. I have reviewed 10 of them (I only had to do 5, but the course encourages you to do more). I cannot do justice to how poor these submissions were. Eight of them are in the category “didn’t read the question, or didn’t understand the question, or didn’t answer the question” (it’s hard to tell which). Another was disorganized and poorly drafted; it answered the question but the answers were not recognizably drawn from the course materials. The last one was borderline acceptable for college or university work - this one at least attempted to answer the question and provide supporting reasons. What is going on?

Here’s my analysis. The final enrollment was over 76,000. Only 13,000 handed in the first assignment - about 1 in 6. The rest were likely tourists - people who signed up, watched a few minutes of video, and got bored. Perhaps there was a slice of non-English speakers who are engaged but could not write the assignment, but I think that group would be vanishingly small.

Only a small number - my crude guess is 100 or less - are ‘fully engaged’ at the academic level of a Wharton MBA course, putting in the work and getting the full benefit of the course. I count myself in that group; I am as attentive as if I was actually enrolled at Wharton, tracking down outside readings, and engaging peers in forum discussions and private emails. I have a notebook already half-filled with lecture notes and ideas for the specific design project that I hope to try these techniques on. I am organizing a meetup specifically to brainstorm real-world projects with fellow classmates. Perhaps another 2,000 are ‘interested-practitioners’ - perhaps teachers looking to improve their classrooms, HR managers looking for motivation tips, and web designers looking for ideas. These students are taking the course seriously, employing study habits that enable them to absorb the materials, and engaged in the forum discussions. At the end, they will have a broad understanding of the subject and their practice will benefit. Perhaps these are the life-long learners that our society so badly needs. The rest aren’t getting any benefit from the course. The 63,000 who signed up but didn’t last to the first assignment can be dismissed. That’s not a problem, as there was no cost in serving this group; they did not even load on the peer-marking resources.  Perhaps some got a general idea of what the course was about.

The other élite students are discussing the reasons behind the poor quality of most submissions. Here’s an interesting comment. “It is exactly this mentality that has created a generation of unemployable kids who don’t know how to motivate themselves or apply themselves. They expect their employer to make things fun for them, and cannot be content with entry-level jobs. I speak partly from experience. I was used as part of a classroom experiment involving games and ‘making education fun’. Re-entry into the real world was like ice water in the face. It took me years to teach myself all the skills my teachers neglected. I think the problem has gotten worse since then - the teachers are less inclined to take responsibility, the parents are more inclined to justify their kids’ laziness, and the job market is less forgiving. I would not want to be a coddled student entering today’s job market.”

Who’s in charge of Ontario?

I’m sorry to keep on harping on this, but I am still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that the teachers’ unions determined the outcome of last week’s bye-election in Waterloo and thus denied the hated Liberal government its longed-for majority. Today, I pass on an e-mail message from a teacher in the Waterloo riding.

“Teachers are instructed to follow the union’s directive tomorrow to wear black (arm bands, T-shirt etc.) and cancel all extra-curricular activities (including Grade Nine nights, except for parent/teacher meets) for one day to protest the Liberals’ legislation that would suspend collective bargaining. And, as a ‘show of solidarity’, teachers are encouraged to meet collectively and leave the school at the same time - wearing black of course.
“Is this an example of bringing politics into the classroom, do you think? 
“Also, a student, according to what she had heard, told me that if the Liberals had won the bye-election in Waterloo, there would be no school plays etc. But since the NDP won, a play is now possible…”

If the teachers’ unions get their way on this issue, they are more powerful than the premier of the province.

Putting parents in charge

I’m still reeling from the kingmaker role played by the teachers’ unions in my home town of Waterloo last Thursday. I find it worrisome that the teachers’ unions are so powerful. If they can determine the outcome of this hotly-contested bye-election, then other politicians of all stripes - if they want to be re-elected - will need to have policies that cater to the teachers’ unions. 

As Mitt Romney points out: “The teachers unions don’t fight for our children.That’s our job. And our job keeps getting harder because the unions wield outsized influence in elections and campaigns.”

More from the same article: “Romney argued that President Obama was hamstrung when it came to the issue of education reform because 90 percent of the money given to political campaigns by teachers unions went to Democrats in 2008. ‘Most likely, he would have liked to do more,’ Romney said of Obama. ‘But the teachers unions are one of the Democrats’ biggest donors, and one of the President’s biggest campaign supporters. So, President Obama has been unable to stand up to union bosses, and unwilling to stand up for our kids.’”

The first video in the article is well worth watching. If elected president, Mr. Romney would expand school choice to make it possible for every low-income parent and every parent of a special-needs child to choose his or her school, be it a regular public school, a charter public school, or a private school.

Sunday at the Movies (The Political Power of Public Sector Unions)

This video is appropriate in the wake of the triumph of the public sector unions, especially the teachers’ unions, in electing the NDP candidate in the Waterloo riding on Thursday. 

How children succeed

I’ve just started reading a very interesting book - How Children Succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character - and I will review it in due course. But right near the start, the book tackles an issue that has long puzzled me - namely, why the kids in the famous Perry Preschool Project lost their cognitive gains before long, yet did better in later life than the control children. The Heckman referenced in the excerpt is James Heckman, a Nobel prize winning economist at the University of Chicago.

“The Perry Preschool Project is famous in social science circles, and Heckman had encountered it, glancingly, several times before in his career. As a case for early-childhood intervention, the experiment had always been considered something of a failure. The treatment children did do significantly better on cognitive tests while attending the preschool and for a year or two afterward, but the gains did not last, and by the time the treatment children were in the third grade, their IQ scores were no better than the control group’s. But when Heckman and other researchers looked at the long-term results of Perry, the data appeared more promising. It was true that the Perry kids hadn’t experienced lasting IQ benefits. But something important had happened to them in preschool, and whatever it was, the positive effects resonated for decades. Compared to the control group, the Perry students were more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to be employed at age twenty-seven, more likely to be earning more than twenty-five thousand dollars a year at age forty, less likely ever to have been arrested, and less likely to have spent time on welfare.

“Heckman began to rummage more deeply into the Perry study, and he learned that in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers had collected some data on the students that had never been analyzed: reports from teachers in elementary school rating both the treatment and the control children on ‘personal behavior’ and ‘social development’. The first term tracked how often each student swore, lied, stole, or was absent or late; the second one rated each student’s level of curiosity as well as his or her relationships with classmates and teachers. Heckman labeled these noncognitive skills, because they were entirely distinct from IQ. And after three years of careful analysis, Heckman and his researchers were able to ascertain that those noncognitive factors, such as curiosity, self-control, and social fluidity, were responsible for as much as two-thirds of the total benefit that Perry gave its students.

“The Perry Preschool Project, in other words, worked entirely differently than everyone had believed. The goodhearted educators who set it up in the sixties thought that they were creating a program to raise the intelligence of low-income children; they, like everyone else, believed that was the way to help poor kids get ahead in America. Surprise number one was that they created a program that didn’t do much in the long term for IQ but did improve behavior and social skills. Surprise number two was that it helped anyway - for the kids in Ypsilanti, those skills and the underlying traits they reflected turned out to be very valuable indeed.”

This is Nuts!

GUEST BLOG BY NANCY WAGNER

This morning, I was packing lunches. It is always a struggle finding food to send that is not only nutritious but also something that will actually get eaten. Peanut butter, that protein-rich staple of childhood is of course out, as is any snack containing nuts. So as I am placing a tangerine in each boy’s bag, Charlie tells me they are not allowed to bring oranges to school. I thought he was kidding, but Aidan joined in and said they’re banned. Not only that, but if they eat an orange before going to school, they have to brush their teeth or a “helper” at the school will die.

I phoned the school to confirm, and sure enough was told that a staff member has a severe allergy (this person is not involved in either of my grandson’s classes). Even so, 500 kids cannot eat oranges any longer.

They’re Baaaaaack!

In a stunning demonstration of how failed educational trends get recycled, three brand new open plan schools opened their doors yesterday. more

Open plan schools are a byword in educational circles for expensive fads that fail (here’s an article from our archives). 

George Santayana remarked that those who can’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it. In the case of educators, it’s too recent for them to have forgotten the failure of open plan schools - so it’s not that these educators can’t remember the past. Rather, they are rejecting the past. I wonder what George Santayana would say about that?

Winning the battle but losing the war

A new Ipsos Reid poll finds that 58% of Canadians believe private school education is better than public school education. Even more telling, 63% of Canadians would send their children to a private school if money were not a concern.

A couple of snippets from the Global Toronto report

• Dissatisfaction with schools varies from province to province, however. People in the Prairies tend to give their schools top marks. Fifty-three per cent of people living in Saskatchewan and Manitoba would grade their schools with an “A” or a “B.” 
• Labour unrest does seem to be a significant factor affecting people’s overall perception of the school system. The lowest-graded schools are in British Columbia where 26 per cent of people gave the school system a “D” or “F”, and Ontario where 23 per cent of people gave those same low marks. 

This ought to give the Ontario and BC teachers’ unions pause, since their militancy runs the risk of driving away more parents from the public schools, accelerating the province’s enrolment decline and the associated need for teachers.

More Pot Stirring

With the debate raging in Ontario about teacher compensation, this column by Jay Greene is very timely. Are teachers fairly compensated? Dr. Greene starts with the following premise.

• If teachers are underpaid relative to their skills, teachers who leave the profession should, on average, earn more in their new jobs. Likewise, new workers coming into teaching should, on average, take a pay cut from their previous jobs.

Dr. Greene found that “individuals get an average salary increase of 8.8 percent when they enter the teaching profession and a pay cut of around 3.1 percent when they leave”.

The argument is a bit more layered - read the article for more context - but the bottom line is that perhaps US public school teachers are already being paid too much. Given that Ontario teacher salaries are significantly higher than the US average, it would be reasonable to wonder whether Ontario teachers are already being paid too much as well.