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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Do You Think Rationally?
Keith Stanovich's new book What Intelligence Tests Miss: The psychology of rational thought convincingly argues that IQ tests are severely incomplete as measures of cognitive functioning, since they fail to assess important abilities such as the ability to make decisions that further one's personal goals or form beliefs that correspond with reality. It is unfortunate that our society emphasizes IQ far more than rational thought, since the latter can be taught to a significant extent. The following excerpt (pp. 145-146) allows you to test your own ability to deal with probabilistic information.
"Imagine that the XYZ virus causes a serious disease that occurs in 1 in every 1000 people. Imagine also that there is a test to diagnose the disease that always indicates correctly that a person who has the XYZ virus actually has it. Finally, imagine that the test has a false-positive rate of 5 percent. This means that the test wrongly indicates that the XYZ virus is present in 5 percent of the cases where the person does not have the virus. Imagine that we choose a person randomly and administer the test, and that it yields a positive result (indicates that the person is XYZ-positive). What is the probability (expressed as a percentage ranging from 0 to 100) that the individual actually has the XYZ virus, assuming that we know nothing else about the individual's personal or medical history?
"Don't read on until you have taken a stab at the problem. Do not feel that you must calculate the answer precisely (although if you think you can, go ahead). Just give your best guesstimate. The point is not to get the precise answer so much as to see whether you are in the right ballpark. The answers of many people are not. They show a tendency to overweight concrete and vivid single-case information when it must be combined with more abstract probabilistic information.
"The most common answer is 95 percent. The correct answer is approximately 2 percent! People vastly overestimated the probability that a positive result truly indicates the XYZ virus. Although the correct answer to this problem can again be calculated by means of Bayes' rule, a little logical reasoning can help to illustrate the profound effect that base rates have on probabilities. We were given the information that, of 1000 people, just one will actually be XYZ-positive. If the other 999 (who do not have the disease) are tested, the test will indicate incorrectly that approximately 50 of them have the virus (.05 multiplied by 999) because of the 5 percent false-positive rate. Thus, of the 51 patients testing positive, only 1 (approximately 2 percent) will actually be XYZ-positive. In short, the base rate is such that the vast majority of people do not have the virus. This fact, combined with a substantial false-positive rate, ensures that, in absolute numbers, the majority of positive tests will be of people who do not have the virus."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Stimulating Ideas
Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has an education idea for that U.S. stimulus money--and it's not just to blindly throw it at school boards as is currently happening.
In his speech to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Gates calls for state legislators to:
1. Embrace common standards and data systems so we can know where we stand and how to move forward.
2. Raise the quality of teaching by measuring teacher effectiveness, encouraging innovation, and spreading best practices.
Good luck. Where have we heard all that before? However, he does praise KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools and urges that caps on charter schools be lifted. In light of the previous post on the state of Detroit schools, looks as if they could use some of Gates' intervention:
"But I want to ask you to consider two different schools. In one school, student achievement is low, morale is low, and nothing ever changes -- because nobody expects anything better. In the other school, minority students from low-income families take the toughest classes, get the best teachers, and go on to get college degrees.
Both kinds of schools exist in America. How many of each depends on you.
"You could be tempted to shrug off this responsibility if the schools in your district are pretty good. But America's schools are not pretty good, and they're your schools too.
"This is a national challenge.
"It doesn't really matter whether you are driven by an ethical commitment to equal opportunity or by a long-term economic vision for the country. Both lines of reasoning lead to the same conclusion. We need to measure progress. We need to hold teachers and schools accountable. We need to give all students a chance to make the most of their lives."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Doomed to Failure
John Stossel's post on the abysmal performance of the Detroit Board of Education casts light on the probable success of the Ontario government's fumbling attempts to manage its own school boards. The lesson here is that educational vested interests are so determined to advance their own agendas that even the most Draconian of measures will not force them into putting students' interests first. The only hope for kids is to have a way of escaping their clutches.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Who’s Minding the Store?
The Ontario Government has released a discussion paper around Bill 177 asking for input from "stakeholders" (translation: the usual school boards' associations and teachers' federations) on how the Ministry of Education should take over school boards if they don't meet their responsibilities, particularly those related to improving student achievement. Moira MacDonald at the Toronto Sun has written about it in her column today. She outlines more problems in the making with some of the proposals.
While we at SQE are not considered one of the worthy stakeholders, we have managed to get a look at the discussion paper and we have some serious concerns as well. To begin with, input is being solicited from the very people that will be under scrutiny from Bill 177's regulations in the first place. This is almost like asking a naughty child what their punishment should be and when it should be meted out.
In the regulations, boards will be required to plan and set multi-year goals and report annually (maybe) on a number of indicators which will include, for example: suspensions, graduations, and student achievement outcomes.
The paper then outlines a series of criteria termed "triggers", which may cause the minstry to intercede in a school board. The most troubling are two proposed triggers that "may" cause a ministry response, "if a board ...iii) has 40% or more if its schools in the bottom 20% of the schools in the province based on EQAO Grades 3 and 6 scores in reading, writing, and math; iv) has 40% or more of schools with 35% or more students that earned less than 8 credits in Grade 9, and 40% more of schools with 35% or more students that earned less than 8 credits in Grade 10." The stages of minstry response range from a letter of concern to outright take-over and supervision of the board.
First of all, criterion iii) is way too high. If a board has this many poorly performing schools, they've long been in crisis.
School for Thought has lots of questions.
Who exactly is being taken to task here? The board of trustees? The director of education? Other board staff? Who is going to be held responsible?
Where is the political accountabilty for locally elected trustees? Or, conversely, what happens if the problem is that board staff are not carrying out policy? Why should local democracy suffer when a take-over under supervision happens? Will anyone ever be fired?
How is this all going to be audited? There is reliance that school boards will be honest in their reporting. As MacDonald points out in her column, "When there's more pressure on schools to hit numerical targets, there's greater temptation to cut corners or fudge the numbers." There is already pressure on teachers to pass kids with the "no-fail" policy. Will this get worse? Will we see more cheating?
This is a far cry from the minister's Citizen for Local Democracy days. Seems to us more and more that local control of education is being slowly eroded away. School boards are becoming irrelevant as bodies of local representation. Will the future of school boards be the education version of Local Health Integration Networks?
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Word Power
When it comes to academic preparation, one of the biggest - and most crucial - differences among young children is the size of their vocabularies. To say the same thing another way, the number of words a child knows is closely related to his or her IQ. Children who start school with impoverished vocabularies are at a terrible disadvantage. Though they may be perfectly capable of learning new things, their limited vocabularies mean that they fail to learn at the same rate as other children. The average child learns about 3,000 new words a year. So what can parents and teachers do to make sure their students continue to add at least eight or nine new words to their vocabularies every day? It's not really rocket science!
- Expose the students to lots of different experiences and ideas.
- Have frequent conversations with them, not speaking down.
- Read to them.
- Teach them to read when they are preschoolers.
- Explicitly teach them new vocabulary, for example using Internet games such as the ones here or using vocabulary workbooks such as these.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Public School Lemons
The Ontario Ministry of Education provides a searchable list of the province's 906 independent (private) schools. That's a lot of independent schools, and there are more all the time. It's quite telling that so many parents are willing to reject the free education provided by their school board and instead pay out probably $10,000 per child for independent school tuition. It's like an employee who turns down a free company car - you know there has got to be something pretty wrong with the company car!
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...
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
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....
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
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."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
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.