SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The education sector is not exempt from the forces that apply to other sectors of the economy

In response to yesterday's blog, Doug Little wrote in that competition has no positive effect in education - in fact it makes things worse. Here is my response (excerpted from my book How to Get the Right Education for Your Child, pp. 99-100).

"It's a funny thing. Most people understand that competition is a good thing when it comes to businesses, and even quasi-governmental institutions like the post office or the beer store. Everyone knows that monopolies are unresponsive, inefficient, and expensive. We like the competition aomong drug stores, veterinarians, and cookie manufacturers because it means we get excellent service from those sectors. 

"However, for some reason, most people think that, even though it's bad to have a monopoly if you're selling software or providing banking services, it's okay to have a monopoly if you're providing education services.

"But there isn't really any reason to think that the education sector is exempt from the forces that apply to the other sectors of the economy. An education monopoly behaves just like any other monopoly. In an education monopoly, public schools have a guaranteed stream of students and the funding they generate. It doesn't matter whether a school is doing a good job or a poor job - all schools receive the same amount of funding regardless of the level of service.

"Even schools that are doing a horrible job can and do continue to short-change their students indefinitely. They literally have no incentive to improve their service. But things change dramatically when competition is introduced to the education sector. Other countries have more competition than Ontario, and their student achievement is better. Even within Canada, there are differences.

"Back in the late eighties and then again in the mid-nineties, the province of Alberta introduced legislation designed to increase the amount of educational competition. At first, the Calgary school board chose to turn its back on the changed educational landscape and tried to carry on with business as usual. As a result, Calgary parents started withdrawing their children from the public schools and sending them to the various alternatives that had now become available to them.

"In spite of the fact that the city was growing, the Calgary school board began to hemorrhage students and was forced to close one school after the other. Finally, things got so bad that the Calgary school board did a compete about-face and introduced dramatic improvements, creating new schools to compete with the rival schools. Not surprisingly, many of the newly-created schools resembled the competition.

"For example, to compete with a rival all-girls school, the Calgary public board started up an all-girls school of its own. The board also started a special science school similar to a school that was siphoning off a lot of its students, and fully five schools that used the very popular traditional approach used at the competing Foundations for the Future Charter School. These days, no surprise, the Calgary board is boasting that its enrolment is climbing."

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A PS to this segment is this recent SQE-sponsored study that shows that Edmonton (which embraced school choice faster, earlier, and more fully than Calgary) is still offering its students a much better education than Calgary.

Giving Low-Income Students a Chance to Succeed

I think we can probably all agree that schools, like all human endeavours, vary in effectiveness, and that some of them are downright lousy. Ohio State legislators, as in many other US states, believe that it is unfair to force low-income students to remain in lousy schools - since a good education is their golden ticket out of poverty. Now students at more than 250 of Ohio's worst-performing schools can receive up to $5,000 US to attend the private school of their choice. more

There are a number of points in favour of this program.

• The program saves taxpayers the difference between the cost of the school voucher and the per-student cost at publicly-funded schools (likely about $10,000 per child).
• The vouchers throw struggling students a lifeline.
• The competition spurs the left-behind schools to improvement, an incentive that was lacking when they had a guaranteed supply of students and the associated funding.

This program is very popular with voters, a fact that has not escaped legislators. The main opponents of the program are of course the teachers' unions and associated vested interests, since the number of unionized teachers is reduced.

Money Makes the Mare Go

In Boston, the teachers have voted overwhelmingly in favour of the addition of 40 minutes to the school day in some schools, saying that they need the time in order to better serve their students. more I'm impressed, but I would be even more impressed if the teachers weren't getting paid an additional $4,464 annually for their trouble. Altruism goes only so far!

Schoolproofing Your Child

Yesterday, we sent out our weekly blog round-up, and in perusing the report I was interested to find that by far the most popular item was the blog about how parents can work with their children at home. As a result, today's blog is a link to our "schoolproofing" micro-site, which provides information about and links to good educational materials. Although these resources are billed as "schoolproofing" materials (things parents can use with their preschoolers to ensure success once the kids enter school), they are also effective for children in the primary grades.

Sunday at the Movies (Stroke of Insight)

This is a riveting TED talk that, inter alia, discusses brain anatomy and suggests how we can be happier and attain world peace.

This is democracy?

This Toronto Star report on the Toronto District School Board's latest shenanigans proves the hollowness of the argument that school boards are important because they are democratic.

How much more democratic would be mini-school boards in every school, with the trustees elected by and accountable to the local community. In this scenario, the odd dysfunctional school board would soon get sorted out - especially if the parents were able to withdraw their children from the school and transfer them to a better one.

Only in the US - Pity!

If you agree that teaching kids to read is job number one for schools, then you probably agree that primary teachers should have received training in how to teach beginning reading. Yet in Canada, as far as I know, not one faculty of education offers its students anything more than a few bromides about good literature and the three-cueing system and the like. 

In the US, 14 states now "require teacher candidates to demonstrate knowledge of the science of reading instruction on a stand-alone assessment". more

In Canada, so far, the assumption (on almost everyone's part) is that teacher candidates are adequately prepared for teaching children to read, but it would be easy enough to test this assumption by simply counting the curriculum time devoted to reading instruction by faculties of education (hint, a few hours isn't enough).

The good news is - your child can learn. The bad news is - it’s up to you to make it happen.

Over the years, SQE and its precursor organization OQE have published a great deal of practical advice for parents, and it is organized by topic in our newsletter archives. 

The overall advice is well presented in my (free) book How to Get the Right Education for Your Child, and you can order a free copy or read it online here. The most commonly-sought topics are well summarized in the appendices to the book, starting on page 105 of the online version - General principles of good teaching, reading, number facts, printing, spelling, mapwork, vocabulary, care and precision, and homework.

Even King Canute couldn’t hold back the tide

The education industry has been slow to adopt the technological advances that have revolutionized many other industries. This article attributes the delay to limited budgets and slow procurement processes, but in my opinion the biggest roadblock is the active opposition of the teachers' unions who stand to lose a lot of members when the education industry finally is forced to adopt modern technologies. 

When school boards fail

SQE has been calling for the abolition of school boards for probably 15 years now, and at the beginning we were looked at slightly askance as it was regarded as a pretty radical policy back them. Now, however, the world is catching up with us, as detailed in this Toronto Star article. The article talks about how school boards all over the world have disgraced themselves and been taken over or totally abolished (in Australia and New Zealand). It cites a former Ontario Ministry of Education labour relations and governance director who is "calling for a review of the system in Ontario, not just Toronto, which would include studying whether the province could eliminate elected trustees or have the boards run by a combination of elected and appointed members". School boards are very expensive, and even if they were delivering good value, in these cash-strapped times such an expensive line item ought to come under scrutiny. Given that Ontario school boards are not delivering good value, maybe not even any value, their abolition would seem to be a no-brainer. 

PS  Does anyone know how much school boards in aggregate cost the taxpayer per year in Ontario?