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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The Trouble with Politics
The Ontario government is wild to lower the province's high school drop-out rate, and it also really really wants to improve the worryingly-low number of students who pass the provincial tests. To this end, it has already spent a great deal of money on expensive programs like class size reduction and it is now embarking on another massively-expensive program, this time the expansion of all-day kindergarten. Now comes strong evidence from Harvard of a low-cost way to raise test scores, reduce drop-out rates and crime, and increase college attendance. Manna from heaven for the Ontario government, surely? Well, maybe not.
The problem is that the Harvard researchers were analyzing the results of a public school choice program in Charlotte, North Carolina in which students were entered into a lottery to attend the school of their choice. The researchers compared the outcomes of the lottery "winners" with the outcomes of the lottery "losers", and found that seven years after their random assignment, the lottery winners were doing much better than the lottery losers.
Unfortunately, it's very unlikely that the Ontario government would even contemplate the introduction of school choice, as the province's teachers' unions are adamantly opposed. Isn't politics fun?
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The Class Size Myth
There are all sorts of myths out there about education, for example:
- The Money Myth - schools perform poorly because they are underfunded;
- The Helplessness Myth - some students are so disadvantaged or immature or emotionally troubled that it's impossible for schools to give them a solid academic education;
- The Inconclusive Research Myth - the evidence on the effectiveness of school choice is mixed and inconclusive; and
- The Draining Myth - school choice harms public schools.
Another of the useful books available for borrowing from our library is Education Myths: What special-interest groups want you to believe about our schools - and why it isn't so by Jay P. Greene. This book debunks 18 education myths. The excerpt is taken from the Class Size Myth chapter (pp. 49-57).
"Just about everybody agrees on the Class Size Myth: that smaller classes would produce much better results and that class size reduction is a badly needed reform. In fact, the research that shows benefits from class size reduction finds effects that are smaller than most people realize, and there is some reason to doubt whether class size reduction really produces even these benefits. There are also problems with implementing class size reduction on a broad scale because of the limited teaching labor pool - what works in a small, controlled experiment may not work when applied wholesale to millions of students because there may not be enough good teachers to go around.
"What's more, any serious reduction in class sizes would require us to invest a very large amount of money, so we could only produce smaller classes by taking resources away from other educational priorities such as teachers' salaries....
"In the end, even if all the claims made to promote the Class Size Myth were right, improving student performance by reducing class sizes is a little bit like driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco by way of Pittsburgh. Given that there are other reform strategies that are more promising and less costly, the modest benefits of class size reduction simply can't justify the very large sacrifices that would have to be made."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Potentially Talented
A comment to our "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves but in our schools" posting mentioned a project in Venezuela to teach music to slum kids and asked School for Thought to track it down. Here is a short excerpt from a BBC documentary, and it's an amazing story - one that speaks to the talent latent in all of us.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The Cost of Bondage
The Waterloo District School Board has decided to take another run at solving one of its most troublesome and controversial issues, the question of defining catchment areas for its 16 high schools. Because the board's approximately 2000 support staff are "too busy" to tackle the problem, its trustees have just voted to spend $100,000 on an outside consultant to come up with recommendations. Now, $100,000 is a respectable chunk of change, and the Society for Quality Education plans to be first in line with its application for this contract. However, since we are aware that there's a slight possibility we won't get the job, we're giving our faithful readers a sneak peak at our recommendations regarding school attendance boundaries.
Abolish them. Eliminate them. Get rid of them. Eradicate them.
School attendance boundaries give schools a guaranteed supply of students and funding, which is more or less the definition of a monopoly. This policy could have been taken right out of a Soviet central planner's manual, and it works about as well as the rest of the Soviet policies. Instead of trying to centrally control the enrollment decisions of every one of its approximately 20,000 secondary students, the Waterloo DSB should eliminate school attendance boundaries and encourage its schools to compete for students. The schools will be the better for it and the board will have saved $100,000.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The Cartel Canadian Premiere
I have written about The Cartel documentary in the past and, lo and behold, it had its Canadian première in Winnipeg last week. Kudos to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy for sponsoring this prize-winning film. It would be great if more of us in Canada could see it too. What do readers think? Is it time for The Cartel Tour?
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Time for Post-Secondary Reform?
While post-secondary education has normally been not part of SQE's mandate, the result of poor K-12 education is certainly felt at the post-secondary level. Lack of preparation of students and pressure to lower standards at the university level have taken their toll. More and more universities and colleges must provide remediation for even the most fundamental skills.
James Cotes' Ivory Tower Blues opened this Pandora's Box. This past week he writes about the dumbing down of degrees and the trend to give a degree for just about anything. Don't believe him? Australian and UK universities now offer degree programs such as BA Adventure Recreation and "BSc (Hons) in Surf Science, which shows how very far British universities have come from the stodgier days. This degree is advertised at the University of Plymouth as ‘a rigorous academic study of the scientific, technical and business aspects of the international surfing industries.'...this programme ‘would surely be a lure to some sixteen-year old males who would otherwise be first in the dropout queue.'" Hello Dr. Dude, PhD.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The End of Ignorance
SQE has an extensive collection of education books available for borrowing, one of which is The End of Ignorance: Multiplying our human potential by John Mighton. The author, an award-winning playwright, mathematician and the founder of JUMP Math, diplomatically but convincingly demolishes the myth of ability - the belief that leads educators "to neglect the majority of children by educating them in schools in which only a small minority are expected to naturally love or excel at learning". Dr. Mighton holds that all children can be good at math - given the proper teaching. The excerpt (pp. 54-55) looks at one of progressive educators' mistaken assumptions - namely, they forget that there is a "vast difference between the things people do to become experts and the things they do when they are experts".
"Some educators assume that students who don't know their times tables or operations can still learn mathematics, as long as they can find the information they need on a calculator or computer. In many schools teachers now spend much more time teaching general concepts and methods for finding mathematical information with calculators and computers than they spend teaching specific facts or procedures. A person who doesn't know how to locate the notes on an instrument can't play music, let alone compose symphonies. People rarely make the mistake of thinking that basic knowledge and skills aren't important in music, probably because the only thing an untrained musician can produce from an instrument is noise. Mathematics, writing and reading, however, are so much part of our daily lives that kids usually pick up some basic skills at home or in public, so they can usually produce something that looks like reading, writing or arithmetic even if they were never taught any basic skills at school. This state of affairs has kept us from seeing the need for rigorous training in these subjects. The basic skills kids happen to pick up outside of school are, unfortunately, not usually sufficient to guarantee success at school.
"It is a serious mistake to think that students who don't know number facts can get by in mathematics by using a calculator or other aids. students can certainly perform operations and produce numbers on a calculator, but if they don't have a sense of numbers, they will not be able to tell if their answers are correct, nor can they develop a talent for solving mathematical problems. To solve problems, students must be able to see patterns in numbers and make estimates and predictions about numbers. A calculator cannot provide these abilities. Trying to do mathematics without knowing basic number facts is like trying to play the piano without knowing where the notes are."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Yossarian the Grammarian
Many parents have noted with dismay that their children's writing is riddled with grammatical errors - run-on sentences, not enough commas and too many apostrophes, misplaced modifiers, and so forth. And when parents try to explain what the problem is, they discover that their children lack even the most rudimentary understanding of sentence structure and parts of speech. Trying to teach a non-grammatical child how to avoid run-on sentences is like trying to teach a Hottentot how to make a soufflé. Without the necessary background and vocabulary, it's an exercise in frustration.
Yossarian the Grammarian to the rescue! In a series of 24 short videos, Yossarian teaches the basic elements of English sentence structure and grammar. The series starts, as it should, with the verb.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Are Ontario Teachers’ Unions Bad for Your Health?
Today, Adam Radwanski is writing about Ontario's $24.7-billion deficit and the danger that it will turn into a long-term structural one. Speculating on what the government will do, Radwanski notes that the only two portfolios with potentially-significant savings are Education and Health. Of the two, Education has more room for cost-cutting, Radwanski writes, but the premier is "not about to pick a fight with teachers, whose salaries would offer the main opportunity for belt-tightening". As a result, Radwanski thinks the government is likely to try to find its savings in the health care portfolio.
There is, of course, no evidence that the huge increases in teachers' salaries year after year after year (teachers can earn almost $100,000 now) has led to higher academic achievement or increased parental satisfaction. It's kind of like raising the cost of low-octane gas. We just pay more, without anything to show for it.
So if Ontario patients start finding it even harder to get a family doctor or the wait times for specialists start getting even longer, they can thank their not-so-friendly teachers' unions. Of course, few union officials will be personally affected by the consequences of their actions, since their own salaries are high enough that they can afford to go to the States when they get sick.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
L’Etat, C’est Moi
In Quebec, where francophones and immigrants are already prevented from sending their children to English-language public schools, the leader of the Parti Québécois has come out in favour of extending the policy to daycare centres as well. Such a policy would be easy to implement, since Quebec has an extensive program of government-subsidized daycare. It will be interesting to see whether Quebec parents welcome this further incursion into their children's upbringing.
Quebec parents are well aware that the ability to speak English is a definite asset in an English-dominated world and, if they can, they often ensure that their own children become fluent in English. Both Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard, former leaders of the PQ and premiers of Quebec, sent their own children to private English-speaking schools.
To what extent can a state legitimately restrict the rights of its citizens in the name of the public good? There are difficult trade-offs here, but our two cents' worth is that the preservation of the French language is not as important as the preservation of the right of parents to decide their children's education.