SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Where there’s a will, there’s a way

Back in 1999, I had an article published in "Professionally Speaking", a publication of the Ontario College of Teachers. This article stressed the awesome responsibility of grade 1 teachers in terms of teaching all of  their students to read and discussed some good ways to accomplish same.

Now comes a study suggesting that kids who are deficient in number knowledge when they start grade 1 tend to struggle with math forever afterwards. 

The article suggests that it's all the parents' fault and that there's nothing grade 1 teachers can do with improperly-prepared kids. But I reject this premise for two reasons.

1.  I'm simply not prepared to write off the large cohort of kids whose parents can't or won't teach their preschoolers number fluency. Denunciations of and exhortations to this group of parents may be morally satisfying and make the denouncers and exhorters feel good, but they are highly unlikely to make much of a difference.

2.  There are lots of grade 1 teachers who are successfully bringing all of their students to a high level of math achievement. It can be done. Age 5 is not too late. But more teachers need to believe they can do it and learn how.

Differing views of the mission of schools

I once was talking to a parent who matter-of-factly told me that her kids' school had failed to teach them to read, and so she did the job herself. Clearly, she saw nothing wrong with this picture.

To me, it was kind of like - oh well, the dentist failed to deal with my kids' cavities so I fixed them - or - oh well, the grocery store didn't have any food so I got a cow and planted a garden. 

However, perhaps I am in the minority in thinking that schools' job number one ought to be teaching kids to be good readers.

My latest Huffington Post blog has attracted a couple of comments along these same lines - in that it's basically up to parents to teach their kids to read.  This leads me to wonder what these parents think the mission of schools ought to be. 

The winds of change are blowing in Canada

The Big Shift, by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, is a provocative new book that argues that the very high numbers of immigrants to Canada (fully 20% of Canadians are foreign-born) is creating a powerful new political coalition based in the West and supported by immigrant voters in Ontario and beyond. According to the dust jacket, "politicians and businesspeople have greatly underestimated how conservative these newcomers are, and how conservative they are making our country. Canada, with its ever-evolving economy and fluid demographic base, has become divorced from the traditions of its past and is moving in an entirely new direction."

The big shift has implications for education. Here's an excerpt from page 239 concerning charter schools.

"We believe that the proscription on charter schools in Canada could be about to shift. Asian immigrant voters have little time for the union-cosseted approach to teaching. The conservative mindset of Westerners favours strong curriculums and standardized testing over the fuzzy and feel-good nostrums still embraced by much of the Central Canadian education establishment."

Cherchez l’argent and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the power

Tunya poses a number of questions in her comment on yesterday's blog and I will do my best to answer two of them.

1. Why are the teachers' unions opposed to school choice.

Would you expect a hungry tiger to take pity on those cute little gazelle babies and not eat them? Would you expect goutweed not to invade your gorgeous garden with its lush, rich soil? These are rhetorical questions designed to demonstrate that everybody and everything pursues his/her/its own best interest. In the case of the teachers' unions, school choice would result in reduced membership and power. QED, they oppose it.

2. Why do legislators knuckle under to the teachers' unions?

See above. The teachers' unions are very rich and powerful. They have lots of money to contribute to political campaigns, as well as armies of foot soldiers to knock on doors and participate in mail-outs. Politicians who cross the teachers' unions risk not being re-elected.

Sunday at the Movies (Crossing Party Lines)

Watch this to learn why Jamar Shumate, Democratic state rep in Oklahoma, backs school choice measures - along with the state's Democratic former governor and his teacher union rep wife.

Don’t accept a first-year teacher for your child

Imagine if medical school focused mainly on the history and philosophy of medicine, doctor pay and working conditions, tips on cutting toenails, the inadvisability of smoking, and other similarly peripheral matters. Then imagine that newly-graduated doctors were placed in medical practices where they are assigned the heaviest caseload and the most difficult patients and are expected to learn on the job. 

Although it sounds ridiculous when applied to medical training, nevertheless this is the reality for most new teachers. Their pre-service training pays virtually no attention to the skills and knowledge they are expected to teach. Most teacher training is of little practice use. Prospective teachers learn how to make leaf collections but not how to teach children to read, this history of education but not how to write report cards. Few are taught effective classroom management skills or strategies to teach hard-to-teach students.

Without their practicums, new teachers would be totally overwhelmed when they are dropped into their first classroom. As it is, they are only almost totally overwhelmed. Here's a column on how new teachers are welcomed.

Luckily, some teachers figure it out by themselves and eventually become good at the job. Unluckily, some don't. And even more unluckily, the latter group can't be fired. The whole thing is just nuts.

Who’s in charge of Ontario?

Here's Governor Christie of New Jersey talking about how the teachers' unions use their vast wealth to control politicians. Just for comparison purposes, the OSSTF (one of three major Ontario teachers' unions) received almost $45,000,000 in union dues alone last year (total revenues $53,211,206). In Ontario, there is no opting out or paying 85% as Mr. Christie explains is the case in New Jersey. If you want to teach in Ontario, you have to belong to one of the teachers' unions and pay dues that average more than $1000 annually (1.3% of gross salary). Furthermore, the unions don't need to spend a penny on collecting dues, as the school boards do it for them.

The OSSTF, by the way, takes credit for denying the Liberal government a majority, forcing the premier to resign, and forcing a Liberal leadership convention (click here). Enough said.

Making public schools competitive

One of the arguments by charter school opponents is that charter schools would induce the more able students to leave their conventional public schools, crippling those schools and making them even less able to serve the students who have been left behind. This is of course betrays their rather contemptuous view of conventional public schools.

However, a new study from Utah suggests that a contemptuous view of the teachers in conventional public schools is not justified after all. When Mike Martineau compared the progress of conventional public schools on the basis of how close they were to a charter school, he found:

• "School districts with 5 percent of their students attending charter schools showed a 1.2 percent gain in math proficiency, as compared to schools without charter school competition, within two years of the charter school existing.
• Traditional [conventional] public schools with at least four charter schools within five miles showed a 1.8 percent increase in statewide language arts proficiency within the same year.
• School districts with at least 6 percent of students attending charter schools showed a 2.0 percent increase in science proficiency within two years of the charter school existing."

It appears that competition makes schools competitive. Who'd a thunk it?

It’s all about the adults

Following on from yesterday's posting about how good teachers are made not born, today I want to share another insight from Mission Possible. 

Many (most?) educators fervently believe that there's not much they can do about demographics - you know, some kids are doomed - and I suppose that's a useful belief when it comes to letting them sleep at night. It's kind of like Lester Maddox, the former segregationist governor of George, when he explained his inability to improve the state prison system: "There's not a lot more we can do unless we start getting a better class of prisoner."

Educators with this attitude often also have the attitude that it's not fair to put all the responsibility for academic achievement on teachers - after all, if students don't care and won't try, then there's nothing teachers can do, and anyway students need to accept responsibility for their own growth.

Mission Possible emphatically rejects this attitude as well. In fact, one of the most important tenets of Success Academies is: "IT'S ALL ABOUT THE ADULTS". Excerpting from page 37:

• "This simple but profound idea is totally radical and at odds with almost every other approach that's been tried to fix America's schools. It's the basis, however, for everything we do at Success Academies, where we're showing that with world-class teaching, kids from distressed communities like Harlem and the South Bronx can compete with and even outperform children from New York City's wealthiest zip codes....Achieving excellence isn't about the students. It's about the grown-ups. When the grown-ups are running on all cylinders, they bring the kids along for the swift, exhilarating ride. There have always been isolated schools with inspiring teachers who help youngsters beat the odds in difficult circumstances. We're doing it in every Success Academy with hard work, study, perspiration, and inspiration BY THE ADULTS."

Creating Great Teachers

Beginning reading is taught poorly in most Canadian schools, and the results are much as you would expect. Some students, especially those with strong auditory abilities or superstar teachers, become good readers. Some students stagger along the road to literacy propped up by help from home or outside tutoring agencies - perhaps they become adequate readers but terrible spellers. The rest, perhaps 40%, never learn to read adequately.

This is the pattern you would expect in any learning endeavour with inadequate teaching. It applies to learning to play the piano, learning to swim, learning to ride a bicycle - and learning to be a teacher. There are some great teachers in Canada, but few of them got that way because of their professional development training. The instruction at Canadian faculties of education is almost uniformly awful. It's a crying shame, because - despite the widespread belief that good teachers are born, not made - good teachers can in fact be made.

Mission Possible: How the secrets of the Success Academies can work in any school by Eva Moskowitz and Arin Lavinia outlines how these 14 New York charter schools all transform their lottery-selected slum-dwelling students into college-going graduates. This seeming miracle is wrought by excellent teachers (how else?) 

It's hard to convey the amount and degree of the training and support provided to the teachers at the Success Academies. New teachers receive an intensive four-week-long training session  (principals go for eight weeks), and then receive the equivalent of nine more weeks of apprenticing and training during the school year. There is also frequent and ongoing classroom support. Here's a short excerpt of one very small part of the process (p. 55).

"New teachers get to witness highly effective teaching by observing live classes and by watching videotaped classes from our EduTube digital library (a repository of more than fifteen thousand YouTube-like videos of internal 'best practice' techniques). They also practice teaching under the eyes of master teachers and mentors and learn how to accept direct feedback."