SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Parents are voting with their feet in BC

The Fraser Institute has just published a study entitled "Wait Lists for Independent Schools in British Columbia's Lower Mainland". There is lots of good information in the study, perhaps the most interesting being that "public school enrolment decreased by 11.3 percent since its peak in 1997-98, but in that time, independent school enrolment increased by 22.4 percent, which indicates that parents are clearly demanding education outside of the public system."

Furthermore, independent schools' market share would be even higher if these schools had the capacity to meet the demand. "In a survey of independent schools in the Lower Mainland, 57.3 percent of respondents indicated they had a waiting list in 2011-12".

The report recommends some actions that the BC government could take to remove the barriers that are preventing many independent schools from increasing their capacity, and the cash-strapped BC government is highly likely to look favourably on these recommendations - since every child that attends an independent school saves the BC government a significant amount of money.

Learning machines

I'm not sure what to make of this story out of Ethiopia. Does it imply that all we need to do to make poor kids learn is to give them computers? H/T JE

Are you conscientious?

Today, an excerpt from How Children Succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character, by Paul Tough. The excerpt (pp. 66-67) deals with the curious power of of an obscure test of "coding speed" to predict life success - as much as or more than IQ! The coding-speed test requires participants to match four-digit numbers to simple words. It's so easy a monkey could probably do it. But it's mind-numbingly boring.

"Segal located two large pools of data that included scores from thousands of young people on both the coding-speed test and a standard cignitive-skills test. One poool was the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, or NLSY, a huge survey that began tracking a cohort of more than twelve thousand young people in 1979. The other was a group of military recruits who took the coding exam as part of a range of tests they had to pass in order to be accepted into the U.S. Armed Forces. The high-school and college students who were part of the NSLY had no real incetive to exert themselves on the tests - the scores were for research purposes only and didn't have any bearing on their academic records. For the recruits, though, the tests mattered very much: bad scores could keep them out of the military.

"When Segal compared the scores of the two groups on each test, she found that on average, the high-school and college kids did better than the recruits on the cognitive tests. But on the coding-speed test, it was the recruits who did better. Now, that might have been because the kind of young person who chose to enlist in the armed forces was naturally gifted at matching numbers with words, but that didn't seem too likely. What the coding-speed test really measured, Segal realized, was something more fundamental than clerical skill: the test takers' inclination and ability to force themselves to care about the world's more boring test. The recruits, who had more at stake, put more effort into the coding test than the NLSY kids did, and on such a simple test, that extra level of exertion was enough for them to beat out their more-educated peers.

"Now, remember that the NLSY wasn't just a one-shot test: it tracked young people's progress afterward for many years. So next Segal went back to the NLSY data, looked at each student's cognitive-skills score and coding-speed score in 1979, and then compared those two scores with the student's earnings two decades later, when the student was about forty. Predictably, the kids who did better on the cognitive-skills tests were making more money. But so were the kids who did better on the super-simple coding tests. In fact, when Segal looked only at NLSY participants who didn't graduate from college, their coding-test scores were every bit as reliable a predictor of their adult wages as their cognitive-test scores. The high scorers on the coding test were earning thousands of dollars a year more than the low scorers.

"And why? Does the modern American labor market really put such a high value on being able to compare mindless lists of words and numbers? Of course not. And in fact, Segal didn't believe that the students who did better on the coding test actually had better coding skills than the other students. They did better for a simple reason: they tried harder. And what the labor market does value is the kind of internal motivation required to try hard on a test even when there is no external reward for doing well. Without anyone realizing it, the coding test was measuring a critical noncognitive skill that mattered a lot in the grown-up world.

"Segal's findings give us a new way of thinking about the so-called low-IQ kids who took part in the M&M experiment in south Florida. Remember, they scored poorly on the first IQ test and then did much better on the second test, the one with the M&M incentive. So the question was: What was the real IQ of an average 'low-IQ' student? Was it 79 or 97? Well, you could certainly make the case that his or her true IQ must be 97. You're supposed to try hard on IQ tests, and when the low-IQ kids had the M&M's to motivate them, they tried hard. It's not as if the M&M's magically gave them the intelligence to figure out the answers; they must have already possessed it. So in fact, they weren't low-IQ at all. Their IQs were about average.

"But what Segal's experiment suggests is that it was actually their first score, the 779, that was more relevant to their future prospects. That was their equivalent of the coding-test score, the low-stakes, low-reward test that predicts how well someone is going to do in life. They may not have been low in IQ, but they were low in whatever quality it is that makes a person try hard on an IQ tests without any obvious incentive. And what Segal's research shows is that that is a very valuable quality to possess."

Sunday at the Movies (The origin of state schools)

Here's John Taylor Gatto, three-time New York City teacher of the year and one-time New York State teacher of the year, on the motivations behind the creation of free universal schooling. There is no question that Gatto is historically correct about what was going on back in those days (and it was more or less the same for Canada), meaning that the only real question is whether Gatto is correct that the provenance of public schooling still controls - and will forever control - publicly-funded schools.

There’s fair - and then there’s fairer

One form of school choice that we don't talk about much (because it's not as powerful as school vouchers and tax credits) is open enrolment. Here's an interesting article from New Orleans explaining how the school authorities there use an algorithm to assign students to schools in a fair and transparent way. The district's 28,000 students (or their parents) list their top eight choices in order, but of course some schools are more popular than others, and the really popular schools can't accommodate all of the children who apply for them. Hence the algorithm, which is very sophisticated (I believe its inventors won a Nobel economics prize for it).

Of course, another solution would be to replicate the very popular schools. I'm just saying.

Teachers: Ask yourself if your union speaks for your benefit

The other day I asked someone what he thought of the Ontario teachers' unions, and he replied telling me what he thought of teachers. When I specified that I was asking about teachers' unions - as opposed to teachers - he didn't really understand what I meant. To him, it was splitting hairs, a distinction without meaning.

Which leads me into a discussion of the latest directive from the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (EFTO) to its members. Having already boycotted the provincial math testing and advised its members to "take a pause" on voluntary activities, now the union is advising its members to minimize their report card comments. This has attracted lots of flak - for example  for example - suggesting that people are getting fed up with teachers.

Here's a typical rant (from today's KW Record): "I don't begrudge anyone a decent salary and the benefits that tag along. I don't begrudge teachers their summer holidays. If I wanted to have the pay, benefits and security associated with the teaching profession, I should have become a teacher. But at the end of the day, I think the public is fed up with the complaints, given that most other Canadians are taking it on the chin."

Personally, I see a huge distinction between the teachers' unions and the teachers. I think that most teachers want to co-operate with the provincial testing. I think that most teachers hate having to curtail their extra-curricular volunteering. I think that most teachers want to give full reports to parents. But they have to toe the party line if they want to teach in publicly-funded elementary schools.

Teachers are thus getting a double whammy from their union. Not only are they being prevented from serving their students as well as they wish to, but also they are getting a black eye courtesy of their union. H/T CC

The lesser of two evils

This post is for the political junkies among us who are following the US presidential race. You may know that President Obama has championed some mild education reforms, such as merit pay and charter schools. You may also know that Governor Romney proposes "to turn more than $25 billion in federal education funding for special education and disadvantaged children over to parents, who could then spend the money at any school they choose, including a private school". 

Of course, the teachers' unions don't like merit pay and charter schools, but they hate school choice even more, and so they are holding their noses and supporting President Obama. This Education Week article outlines the unions' ambivalence, suggesting that they may be taking a calculated risk that by supporting the president they will be in a position to rein him in a bit during his second term. 

There's a message here for Ontario politicians who are worried about antagonizing the powerful teachers' unions - it's safe to support educational reforms as long as they are less drastic than the other guy's. The teachers' unions are not going to sit out any elections, and so they will always support the less-threatening candidate.

A tide that no one can command

Tom Berend reports that he has finished the Coursera course on gamification and LOVED it. The content was very rich and superbly organized, as you would expect from a top teacher from a top institution. The second-tier universities need to be VERY worried.

And perhaps they are, as this report from Minnesota attests. That state's Office of Higher Education would prefer that Minnesotans not take massive online courses. (They since backed down, but still.)

About 80,000 students enrolled in Tom's free gamification course, and 8,280 earned a Statement of Accomplishment by receiving at least 70% of the total available points for the course. This is definitely a game changer.

Our Children, Our Choice: Miracles

The latest video in our series shows how lack of school choice is unfair to less-affluent parents. 

Teaching actual history, as opposed to “historical skills”

Quick now, who was England's monarch when the Spanish armada attacked in 1588? Who was Martin Luther? Who led the British army at Waterloo? 

Because so many of its students can't answer these questions, the English government is bringing in a new knowledge-driven curriculum for high school students. It will be interesting to see how hard it is resisted by England's educational establishment who prefer teaching "historical skills" as opposed to historical facts. H/T CT