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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
To Kill a Book
Dear A. Parent:
Tonight, the Toronto District School Board will be debating your request to ban To Kill a Mockingbird from all its schools on the grounds that it contains the word "nigger". School for Thought wonders why you wish to protect your child from this word. After all, it's not as if he or she has never heard it!
To Kill a Mockingbird is a wonderful book. It explores the themes of honour, mercy, justice, and fairness, and presents a terrific role model in the person of Atticus Finch. The book won a Pulitzer Prize.
An important purpose of education is to expand children's horizons. To restrict them to the safe and the known is to encourage them never to move beyond the circumstances of their birth. In the novel, Atticus Finch explains that he would like to be able to shield his daughter from the world's evils, but knows it would be impossible. The next best strategy, he concludes, is to teach her about evil in such a way that she is well equipped to deal with it when the need arises, as it inevitably will.
When children are very little, they need their parents to keep them completely safe from danger but, as kids get older, it's important for their parents to gradually back off and give them the space to start growing up and becoming their own persons. Since you are obviously a caring and conscientious parent, we would be astonished if your teenager is not now mature enough to handle the issues of racism and sexuality in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Regards,
School for Thought
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The Expanding Role of Schools
A new School District of Philadelphia policy will hold its principals accountable for the number of students who eat breakfast at their school. It is still unclear how many bites a child must take in order to be counted or whether a child who eats only FrootLoops will qualify. We confidently expect the School District of Philadelphia to clarify these important points in the next few days. We are also anticipating the announcement a number of other enlightened policies, for example holding principals responsible for the activity levels of each child, students' personal hygiene, and the incidence of dental cavities. No doubt the following year, once the board has succeeded in achieving custody of all of its students for breakfast and lunch, it will begin serving dinner to them as well. Full-day kindergarten and nursery school will then be brought on stream. And once these students are eating all of their meals at the school, they might as well just move right in and sleep there as well. After all, many parents are just as remiss in overseeing their kids' sleep habits as they are in overseeing their eating habits. Before long, Philadelphia parents of children over the age of two will have been relieved of all parental duties. And then the children of Philadelphia will be much better off. Won't they?
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Are You Smarter Than a Ninth-Grader?
When the EQAO reports on the results of Ontario's grade 9 math tests, it always breaks them down into "academic" and "applied" streams (last year, 77% of academic students passed, while 38% of applied students passed), making it hard to understand exactly what the results mean. After all, if only 10% of students take the academic test, a 77% pass rate isn't all that great. In order to help you know what the results are saying, School for Thought has done the math, multiplying the percentage of students in the two streams by the percentage that passed each one, and then ranking the major English-speaking school boards on the basis of each board's percentage of successful test-takers.
Using this method, we found the provincial average of successful test-takers to be 64.79%, but that's not the whole story. It turns out that not all of the province's grade 9 students are represented in the EQAO reports. According to the Ontario Ministry of Education's enrollment statistics, there were 162,945 students in grade 9 last year; yet the EQAO tested only 149,474 students. What happened to the missing 13,371 students? For one thing, approximately 6% of eligible academic and applied students were not tested at all, presumably because they were absent on the day of the test. In addition, there is a group of students who have such a poor grasp of math that they are placed in "locally-developed courses". These students do not attempt the provincial math test either. Once these missing students have been subtracted, it seems likely that fewer than 60% of Ontario's grade 9 students passed the math test last year.
When you take into consideration the easiness of the provincial tests, that's just not good enough.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The Suppression of Dissent
In E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s latest book, The Making of Americans, he makes a powerful and convincing case for a common national curriculum. In this excerpt (pp. 49-50), Dr. Hirsch describes the intellectual monopoly within American teaching training institutions. (Everything in the excerpt applies equally to the vast majority of Canadian faculties of education.)
"About twelve years ago I began teaching in the School of Education at the University of Virginia. It was the twilight of my university career. My teaching reputation at the university was pretty high. I had taught for many years in the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, in the English department, where my courses on literary theory and the Romantic period continued to be oversubscribed and to get top ratings from students. I had arranged with the dean of the education school to teach a course on the causes and cure of the achievement gap between, on one hand, blacks and Hispanics, and, on the other, whites and Asians - a hot topic.
"I expected to attract a lot of curious students and expose them to heterodox views in the literature. I had by then written two books on K-12 education. One of them, Cultural Literacy (1987), was a best seller, and the other, The Schools We Need, was placed by the New York Times on its rarified 'Notable Books of the Year' list for 1996. Given the normal curiosity of students to take a course from the author of a best seller, I expected to draw quite a few students even though my work was critical of the dominant ideas in American education schools. I was surprised when I drew just a handful - ten or so students and no auditors. The next year the story was the same, as it was the year after that. In the third year, one of my students mentioned to me privately that I should be proud of the courage shown by my students; they were all in my class despite having been explicitly warned by members of the education faculty not to take the course.
"I was astonished. This would not normally have happened over in Arts and Sciences, where professors, instead of shunning and shunting dissent, tended to exploit it. The controversialists would have held a big symposium and tried to create as many intellectual fireworks as possible. At the history department, even Thomas Jefferson, the university's revered founder, was the subject of various symposia in which anti-Jeffersonians were encouraged to have their say.
"I am still stunned when I think about how students are being shielded from heterodox ideas in education schools, which are less like university departments than theological institutes where heresy is viewed as an evil that its members have a civic duty to suppress....Anyone interested in the schooling of our children should be aware of the ideological indoctrinations that our prospective teachers are currently required to undergo."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The 180 Degree Syndrome
If you are going to be in Winnipeg on October 26, plan to attend Lunch on the Frontier with Ben Chavis, a Lumbee Indian from North Carolina. Dr. Chavis will explain how he turned a failing charter school for Indians into one of California's top schools. Entitled "Do We Want to Educate Children or Destroy Their Future?", his talk will include the message that schools that focus on diversity and self esteem actually cheat their students out of an education. Dr. Chavis is a real maverick in the education world, saying things like: children want to learn and shouldn't be seen as victims; schools get too much money; kids need old-fashioned teaching and emphasis on the basics; there should be no tolerance for slacking; there should be a dress code, and on and on. The success of Dr. Chavis' methods suggests that to arrive at the truth about educational principles, all you have to do is believe the exact opposite of whatever the public schools are doing and saying. Frank Gue, one of SQE's directors, calls this the 180 Degree Syndrome.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
What Really Matters in Education?
Our Sunshine on Schools website has attracted quite a lot of attention - some favourable, some not so favourable. In the latter category is a thought-provoking comment left on the Sunshine site by Cory, who writes as follows. "We forget that what really matters in education cannot be 'measured'. A student's creativity self esteem character building love of learning and school and community spirit are just a few areas that should matter most."
School for Thought disagrees with Cory on a number of levels. Firstly, we think that what "really matters in education" are things like literacy, numeracy, general knowledge, and rationality, as opposed to creativity, self esteem, character building, and so on. Secondly, the areas that Cory considered important can be measured - instruments do exist to measure them (although such tests are not used very much). Thirdly, we think that it would be a mistake for schools to focus on Cory's essentials, since they are mostly by-products of a solid academic education. Placing an emphasis on love of learning, for example, would be like creating an industrial process to make sawdust and not worrying overmuch about the leftover lumber.
Despite our disagreements with Cory however, we want to make it clear that we have no desire to impose our educational philosophy on him or anyone else. All we ask is that schools with a variety of educational orientations be made available so that all parents can send their kids to the type of school they prefer.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Oh! Canada!
This video, captured by a cell-phone camera, shows the handcuffing of a 16-year-old black male student at Toronto's Northern Secondary School. Northern is one of 50 Toronto high schools with a full-time armed police officer stationed at the school. Northern is well-regarded, and attracts students from across Toronto. Is this the new normal?
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
For the Grammar Buff
This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek piece from the New York Times Magazine. Error-Proof tells how to defend against language pedants.
We are human after all.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Parent Power
As this video shows, it is possible for parents to put tremendous pressure on politicians - if the parents are organized and determined. The parents in the video successfully pressured the Los Angeles school board trustees for more charter schools. In most of Canada (excluding Alberta), charter schools are not possible because the provincial governments have not passed the necessary legislation. Consequently, parents who want charter schools for their children will need to make their case to their provincial representatives.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
US State School Board Spending
If Ontarians think that our Sunshine On Ontario Schools website is inflammatory, they should take a look at what kind of data reporting is done south of the border.
The Intercepts blogger has rankings for each state based on enrolments, per pupil spending, and cost of teacher compensation per-pupil. Whew.