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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Betting on a Long Shot
Adam Radwanski has a thought-provoking column in today's Globe and Mail, in which he reports on an interview with Dalton McGuinty on the Premier's plans to implement full-day kindergarten in Ontario. According to Mr. Radwanski, "It is natural for a leader in his second term to seek a legacy. But he is also struggling to avoid going down as the premier who fiddled while the economy burned, and so he has responded to Ontario's precipitous industrial decline by attempting to refashion himself as a risk-taking activist."
Now, there are those who might prefer not to have a risk-taking activist at the helm of a province which is in danger of joining the Rust Belt, but this is not our primary concern at School for Thought. The thing is: if you're going to take risks, especially with other people's money, you should be choosing bets with favourable odds. This is unfortunately not the case with all-day kindergarten. This column in the Ottawa Citizen discusses the negligible cognitive benefits of full-day kindergarten as implemented in other jurisdictions. And in the few cases where exemplary (and expensive) early childhood programs have been successful in yielding (modest) cognitive benefits, those benefits had totally faded away by grade 3 or 4.
It's hard to believe that Mr. McGuinty can implement a full-day kindergarten policy that will succeed where everyone else has failed. The chances of his ambitious gamble paying off are vanishingly small.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Media Heads Up
Doretta Wilson will be appearing on Kitchener radio 570 News AM Gary Doyle Show tomorrow at 12:30 p.m.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
They Hate Us! They Really Hate Us! Good.
The Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation (OSSTF) is "concerned" with the Society for Quality Education's new Sunshine on Ontario Schools website data (www.sunshineonschools.ca). Could it be because the public will see exactly how much salaries, benefits, and sick leave retirement payouts eat up school boards' budgets?
If they are concerned, then SQE must be on the right track.
The OSSTF's press release states:
"At OSSTF/FEESO, our goal is to protect and enhance education. To this end, we approve of and encourage the discussion and sharing of information relevant to our education system. However, we are wary of any presentation of such information, no matter how statistically accurate, which presents a misleading picture of that system."
Huh? So how are school board financial statements misleading? In this era of renewed accountability, when the spotlight is on public agencies and institutions, including how school boards spend and the results they achieve, value for money is important. We prefer to let the public decide.
Visitors to the Sunshine on Schools Ontario site will be able to compare, at one time, up to five school boards' data in a variety of fields such as: enrolment, class sizes, school board debt, and academic achievement. They will be able to see and compare the diverse range of each board's per-student spending, along with ever-increasing amounts raised through fundraising, and the growing trend of declining enrolment versus increased spending.
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Not everyone is concerned about the Sunshine site providing useful information.
Moira MacDonald really nailed it in her column today in the Toronto Sun. She writes: "With a school system whose budget has grown more than 30% since the McGuinty Liberals took over it's useful to know where all that money's been going."..."And in time tools like these should give us a better picture of whether our massive spending on Ontario schools has hit the mark -- or not."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Everyone Can Learn Music
As this video clearly shows, good musical skills are invaluable. Unfortunately, music is taught very badly in most Canadian public schools, and so parents would be wise to take their children's musical education into their own hands. In addition to sending their children for music lessons, parents may wish to take advantage of some wonderful online resources. SQE's May newsletter outlines some of the possibilities (scroll down to EVERYONE CAN LEARN MUSIC).
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Working Smarter, Not Longer
Earlier this week, President Obama urged educators to add more time to the school calendar. On the surface, this notion makes perfect sense. The kids aren't learning enough? Well then, obviously they need to go to school longer. Right?
Wrong. The problem with President Obama's proposal is that there is no guarantee that the extra hours would be used productively. In Ontario, about 10 years ago the government added five days to the school year. Educational administrators responded by removing most of the teachers' professional development days. Then lo and behold, bit by bit, year by year, the extra time was recaptured in the form of half-day "curriculum days", report card days, test days, professional activity days, and other ingenious excuses to keep the students at home. It seems that in most Ontario school boards the extra five days have now been totally eroded, with interest.
In any case, there are still hundreds of ways to waste school time, for example movies, assemblies, trips to theme parks, parties, camps, softball tournaments, parades, long recesses, and on and on. And of course, there is always the question of how much the kids are learning even when they're in their child-centred seats.
SQE is opposed to lengthening the school calendar in order to spend more time doing the wrong things. The decision-making process on this issue should be as follows. First, design and implement a clear, focused curriculum. Second, permit - indeed encourage - teachers to use effective instructional methods and materials. Third, make efficient use of available school time (an absolute minimum of popcorn parties and cartoons). If standardized testing reveals that students are not mastering the new curriculum under these circumstances, then it will be time to look at lengthening the school year.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Seeing is Believing
Every year, SQE ranks the major Ontario English-speaking school boards on the basis of the average percentage of students who pass the province's grade 3 and 6 tests. Click here for the 2009 rankings.
Of course, these are pretty crude rankings, in that they lump the subjects and grades together and ignore demographics, but nevertheless they have a story to tell. Take a look, for example, at the 27 above-average school boards. Only six of the 27 are public boards, and most of the six above-average public boards are clustered together down near the provincial average. Now look at the 33 below-average boards. Only eight of them are Catholic, and most of the eight Catholic below-average boards are clustered together up near the provincial average. The Catholic school boards are getting stunningly better results.
Yet when SQE started ranking the school boards back in 1998, there was virtually no difference between the Catholic and public school boards. In thinking about why this is so, we can quickly rule out demographic differences, since contiguous school boards like, say, the Waterloo Region Catholic board (#18) and the Waterloo Region Public board (#39) serve the same students. Then there's Renfrew Catholic (#2) and Renfrew Public (#43), and Huron Perth Catholic (#5) and Avon Maitland Public (#45). Same kids, very different results.
School for Thought would be glad to hear your opinions as to why the Catholic school boards are able to get so much better results.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Free Schools
This article in Britain's prestigious Economist magazine, discusses the British Tories' campaign promise to fund 500 new schools, dubbed "free schools". Since the Tories are on track to win the next election, probably within about six months, this policy could be very important. The scheme is modeled after a 20-year-old successful Swedish reform whereby various institutions, such as charities or even groups of parents, are able to start their own schools, receiving the same amount of funding as state schools.
Imagine! If the Ontario government introduced such a policy, SQE could start its own schools - featuring systematic phonics, direct instruction, textbooks, uniforms, discipline, core knowledge, high standards, and so on. Free schools - free of government meddling, free of the teachers' unions, and free of tuition fees. Our worst problem would likely be how to handle the avalanche of applicants for admission!
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Handwriting Isn’t Dead Yet
A hopeful sign that educators still appreciate the importance of teaching handwriting skills is this training course offered to instruct teachers in the art of teaching the skill. In Virginia, teachers are following a program called Handwriting Without Tears where they learn how to teach kids to grip a pencil and form letters. You would think that the proper way to hold a pencil would be fundamental, but you would be surprised at how many children and young people never learn.
Malkin has written in our SQE Forum Newsletter (look under Penmanship or her article here) about the importance this skill is to academic development.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
It’s Not About the Money
Returning to the comments on Margaret Wente's column (now sitting at 168 comments), a number of people opined that we shouldn't expect publicly-funded schools to do a good job since they are so underfunded. Yet, as Sunshine on Schools shows, the Ontario government gave its schools an average of $10,650 per student last year - and that's not counting the more than $600,000,000 raised through fundraising. That means that an average class of 25 students generated more than $275,000! Let's say the teacher costs $100,000, what with salary and benefits, and then let's be generous and throw in another $100,000 for overhead, but that still leaves $75,000 to pay for books and gold stars. It should be enough to be going on with, that's for sure, and of course few private schools ever see this kind of dough.
Actually, the theory that all schools need is more money has already been tested. Back in 1985, a judge in Kansas City, MO forced the city to spend nearly two billion dollars on its schools over the next four years. With this money, the school board went on a spending spree. Among other things, it bought 15 new schools, an Olympic-size swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, higher teacher salaries, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capabilities, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was lowered to 13 to 1. Yet test scores remained stagnant, the white-black achievement gap stayed the same, and the schools became less racially-integrated.