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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Politics of Envy
This article in the St. Catharines Standard reports on a local controversy whereby supporters of a failing high school in Niagara-on-the-Lake are trying to close down neighbouring Eden High School, which they see as siphoning off their potential students. Eden High School, the board of which is composed entirely of members of the Mennonite Brethren community, is the only non-Catholic publicly-funded religious school in Ontario. A Ministry of Education spokeswoman says that Eden High School does not contravene the Education Act.
Given Eden High School's enormous popularity (750 students, despite the cancellation of its courtesy busing) compared to the competing high school (250 students and falling), you would think that the school board would be going out of its way to bolster Eden High School and even create additional religious schools, perhaps for other other religions that are being discriminated against. But that's not the way the politics of envy operate.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Stairway to Reading
If you're using our free remedial reading program, you might want to try out the online games that support it. To get the access code for one month's free trial, e-mail Doretta Wilson. More good supplementary resources are listed here.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
And Now for Something Completely Different
Because we education reformers tend to be too serious, School for Thought suggests you take a break from all the anguish at the Illinois Loop's education humour page.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
List of Shame
School for Thought is collecting the names of Canadian education policy-makers who either attended special schools themselves or sent their children to them or both, all the while opposing policies that would make it possible for poor parents to have the same privileges. So far, our list of shame includes Michele Landsberg and Stephen Lewis, Bob Rae, Gerard Kennedy, Dalton McGuinty, Moe Sihota, and Annie Kidder. We would be grateful if our readers could send us the names of other Canadians who belong in this elite group.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Retail Therapy
It never even occurs to most parents to wonder about enrolling their preschoolers at the nearest school. But would you choose your lawyer or dentist on the basis of the location of his or her office? As CD Howe analyst David Johnson shows, the are enormous differences among schools, and it's just about impossible to turn a bad school around. Far better to choose a good school in the first place. Go shopping!
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Tax Credit Scholarships
Florida scholarships help poorer kids
For anyone who supported Ontario's now defunct Education Tax Credit this St. Petersburg Times article will make you wish it still existed.
This Florida program is helping 23,400 low-income students. The tax credit scholarship amounts to about $1,000 ($US). The average family income of the students is $25,000 for a family of four. Two-thirds of the students are visible minorities and three-fifths are from single-parent families.
"We hear moms tell us their children to longer fake illness to avoid school, that their children don't get into fights anymore, and that they are doing homework and setting goals for the first time. We see promising schools such as Miami Union Academy, which has achieved a graduation rate of 96 percent and college placement of 90 percent with largely poor Haitian students. Or Yvonne Reed Christian School in St. Petersburg, run by a 34-year public school veteran who started her own school because she was determined to make sure young black males could read."
It seems to School For Thought that the cost of running such a program in Ontario would have been a lot less than the costs of implementing class size caps or ineffective reading programs that do not translate into significant achievement gains.
For opponents to such a plan, the words of Dr. Howard Fuller come to mind:
"Those of us with money have the capacity to choose and the great hypocrisy that operates are those individuals who would never put their own children in certain schools denying poor parents the capacity to do it. We have teachers who teach in schools they would never put their own children in, demanding that other peoples' children stay there. I find that to be hypocritical.
I actually happen to be a strong supporter of public schools, but I'm also a strong supporter of giving people a choice so that they can determine whether a public school or private school will be best for their children...It is ludicrous for us not to provide a way for kids to go to schools that work because at the end of the day a democracy can't sustain itself unless it has an educated populace."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Dancing Disability
Click here to watch a short video that might prompt you to reconsider your pessimism over a child's "learning disability".
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
D.C. Council Wants Vouchers
It would rather help poor children than unions.
School for Thought has been keeping an eye on the story of the soon to be cancelled Washington, D.C.school voucher program. Seems that even the local government thinks that maybe President Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan are putting unions before poor kids. This Wall Street Journal editorial says it all:
The life and death saga of the D.C. voucher program for low-income families continues. A majority of the members of the D.C. Council recently sent a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan expressing solid support for continuing the program. "We strongly urge you to stand with us in supporting these children and continuing the District's Opportunity Scholarship Program," says the letter. "We believe we simply cannot turn our backs on these families because doing so will deny their children the quality education they deserve."
Earlier this year Illinois Senator Dick Durbin added language to a spending bill that phases out the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program after next year. The program provides 1,700 kids $7,500 per year to use toward tuition at a private school of their parents' choosing. Mr. Durbin's amendment says no federal money can be spent on the program beyond 2010 unless Congress reauthorizes it and the D.C. Council approves.
The D.C. Council's letter shows that support for these vouchers is real at the local level and that the opposition exists mainly at the level of the national Democratic Party. Mr. Durbin has suggested that he included the D.C. Council provision in deference to local control. "The government of Washington, D.C., should decide whether they want it in their school district," he said in March. Well now we know where D.C. stands. We will now see if the national party stands for putting union power and money above the future of poor children.
We urge readers to view this video of D.C voucher parents asking President Obama--WHY?
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Who Owns the Schools?
When Gerard Kennedy was Ontario's Ministery of Education about four years ago, he requested school boards to create a moratorium on school closings - a politically-smart move that worked for Mr. Kennedy and helped propel him into federal politics. Now Mr. Kennedy's chickens are coming home to roost, and Ontario school boards are trying to close hundreds of schools. In response to this activity, the Community Schools Alliance has been formed - a blue chip group of municipality leaders who are concerned about the effect of school closings on their communities.
As What You Can Do When the School Board Threatens to Close a Community School makes clear, School for Thought believes that all communities should be able to keep their schools provided that the parents are prepared to be flexible. Clearly, it isn't financially possible to keep every school open as currently configured, with all the bell and whistles parents and teachers have come to expect. However, if the parents in a small community school are prepared to make compromises (for example, pitching in with the janitorial services, sharing a principal with another school, foregoing expensive programs like strings, renting part of the school out, etc.), then School for Thought thinks they should be allowed to keep their school. After all, it's their taxes, and it's their children.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Economic Lessons from California—NOT!
In an article by Andrew Coulson at The Cato Institute, Coulson shows how the state's education spending contributed to California's near bankruptcy. He argues that education spending has exploded but student achievement has not grown in relation to per student spending. The Cato's solution is the concept of public education tax credits.
SQE has voiced similar concerns about Ontario education spending, in light of declining enrolment, that does not translate into similar increases achievement productivity. Our annual Sunshine List Reports come to mind. Stay tuned for more on this in September...