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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Read It And Weep
Today's posting is for anyone who believes that there is a consensus among the experts that Whole Language/The Balanced Literacy, not systematic phonics, is the best way to teach kids to read. Children of the Code is a massive project to bring together experts from a variety of disciplines (neuroscience, linguistics, education policy, pedagogy, anthropology, etc.) and reveal the convergence of research in favour of systematic phonics. There is a huge amount of information at Children of the Code - transcripts of interviews, videos, information, and links to other sites. A good starting place might be the interview with Dr. Reid Lyon.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
School Choice - A Basic Human Right
There are three main justifications for school choice. The first and second have received quite a bit of attention in School for Thought - namely, the social justice angle (how it isn't fair that only savvy, affluent parents are able to choose better schools for their kids) and the competition angle (the fact that monopolies are inefficient and unresponsive - but improve their service when competition is introduced). The third justification is often ignored - but it is the most compelling as far as I am concerned. It concerns the rights of parents - indeed their responsibility - to determine their children's education.
Canada is a signatory to the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26 (c) of which states: "Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children". When I visited the UN in New York a few years back, I read these words in big letters on the lobby wall, and it sent a chill up my spine. It's serious!
Parents are responsible for all aspects of their children's upbringing - and of course education is one of the most important elements of this responsibility. When parents are prevented from determining their children's education - by being forced to send their children to the school assigned by the school board, even when the school is harmful to their children - in effect, these parents are being prevented from carrying out one of their most important duties.
Parents know and love their children and are thus far more likely to make good decisions about their children's education than school board bureaucrats who have never laid eyes on them. Most children will be better off if their parents can choose their schools.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Look Before You Leap
In response to a request, here are figures from Macleans Magazine on retention and graduation rates in Canadian universities. The first column reports the percentage of 1999 undergraduate students who had received a degree by 2006. The second column reports the percentage of 2007 full-time, first-year students who returned to university in 2008. The figures, of course, fail to convey the staggering amount of wasted money, not to mention the heartache, suffered by the unsuccessful students.
McGill 83.9% 92.2%
Montreal 82.4 88.3
UBC 81.8 88.2
Waterloo 80.8 87.9
McMaster 80.4 87.2
Wilfred Laurier 80.4 89.8
Toronto 79.8 90
Western 79.2 91.1
Alberta 79.8 88.4
Sherbrooke 78.3 91.2
Ottawa 77.2 87.8
Guelph 76.9 90.2
Bishop's 74.7 84.2
Saint Mary's 74.6 87
Lethbridge 73.8 72.4
Simon Fraser 73.3 80.6
Lakehead 73 86.7
New Brunswick 72.9 78.5
Windsor 72.2 82.3
Victoria 72.1 86.6
Brock 72 86.6
UPEI 71.1 83
Cape Breton 70.8 85.1
Ryerson 70.5 87.4
Saskatchewan 70.2 83.4
York 68.6 86.8
Calgary 68.3 83.9
Manitoba 66.2 86.2
Trent 65.6 81.5
Acadia 65.4 82.5
Laurentian 64.9 83.4
Mount Allison 64.7 77.5
St. Francis Xavier 64.5 85.1
Carleton 62.8 86.7
Memorial 59.1 80.5
St. Thomas 58.5 77.5
Mount St. Vincent 58.4 76.8
Winnipeg 56.2 75.6
Regina 55 78.9
Brandon 50.6 72.4
UNBC 43.6 72.2
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Education - And Then Some!
Today's posting is for education junkies, as it provides a link to the top 20 education blogs. School for Thought unfortunately doesn't make the list (no Canadian blog does), but we sure would like to one day. So if you enjoy following our blog, please spread the word!
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Education Myths: Part II
Most people assume that certified teachers are better than uncertified teachers, but the research shows that there is very little relationship between teacher quality and teacher credentialing. This disconnect is due to the fact that most faculties of education offer training that is virtually useless and, in some cases, even counter-productive. As well, virtually every student enrolled at a faculty of education gains a teaching certificate - meaning that there is no weeding out process. This excerpt from Education Myths by Jay Greene discusses the crucial difference between teacher certification and the certification process for other professionals such as doctors or lawyers (pp. 68-69)
"It is certainly true that certified teachers are not looked upon in the same way that licensed doctors are, and it is worth looking at the reasons why professional credentials are regarded so highly in professions such as medicine and law. Credentials in these fields are difficult to obtain, but that is not the main reason people value them so highly. It takes about twice as many years to get a Ph.D. as it does to get an M.D. or J.D., and professional training in some other fields takes even longer still. Yet most of these other credentials are not nearly as highly respected as an M.D. or J.D.; there is no medical or legal equivalent of the common belief that Ph.D. stands for 'Piled High and Deep'. Medical and legal credentials are valued so highly not because of the years required to obtain them but because the professions of medicine and law have proven that they can successfully control the quality of their practitioners through meaningful licensure. Such controls are useful and appropriate in these fields because we know that the M.D. and the J.D., along with the procedures for board licensure and admission to the bar, reliably indicate the possession of necessary professional skills and are consistent predictors of on-the-job performance."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Education Myths: Part I
Things have been kind of quiet around here lately, and so we thought that over the next few days we'd treat you to a few excerpts from Jay P. Greene's Education Myths: What special-interest groups want YOU to BELIEVE about our SCHOOLS - AND WHY IT ISN'T SO. (This book is available for borrowing from our lending library.)
Today's myth is dubbed "The Myth of Helplessness" - the transformation of difficulties caused by social problems into excuses for inaction. Dr. Greene points out that the plausibility of this myth can easily be tested by looking to see if there are any schools or school districts that have managed to overcome their students' desperate social problems. If even one school has succeeded with low-income students, then this is proof that schools are not helpless in the face of their students' disadvantages. It turns out that, while no school is able to completely overcome its students' problems, some schools are coming tantalizingly close. Schools are definitely not helpless.
The following excerpt discusses the author's research into variations in the effectiveness of the different US states (pp. 44-45).
"Jay Greene and Greg Forster of the Manhattan Institute performed a simple analysis to test the evidence on this question. First, they developed a systematic method for measuring levels of advantages and disadvantages in the student population. They combined measurements of sixteen social factors that researchers agree affect student outcomes, such as poverty, family structure, health, and students who don't speak English well. They call their combined measurement the Teachability Index, since it measures the overall 'teachability' of the student population. Then they tested its validity by examining its statistical relationship with student outcomes; they found that the Teachability Index is a reliable predictor of student outcomes, indicating that it does in fact measure students' teachability.
"Armed with this tool, they compared each state's student characteristics to its level of academic achievement. Specifically, they used each state's Teachability Index score to predict the level of achievement its students would be expected to reach given their level of disadvantages, and then compared each state's actual achievement to its predicted achievement. They found a large degree of variation in how well the school systems in the vairous states overcome student disadvantages....
"Greene and Forster's finding suggest that student achievement depends on more than just the levels of advantages and disadvantages that students face. This would naturally prompt us to ask what factors other than student advantages might produce higher educational outcomes. If we examine the evidence, we find that a number of school strategies have been shown to raise student achievement, even among particularly disadvantaged student populations."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
It Turns Out Kids Don’t Learn More in Small Classes
In light of the Ontario government's expensive initiative to reduce class sizes in the primary grades by requiring a maximum of 20 students per class, the failure of a similar initiative in Florida bears close scrutiny. By a legislative quirk, one group of school districts was forced to reduce their class sizes by an average of 3 more students than a different group of school districts - making it easy to compare test scores in the two groupings. It turns out that there was absolutely no detectable benefit to reducing class sizes, and that the huge amounts of money involved in class size reductions might be more profitably spent in other ways.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The Golden Ticket
Today's Globe and Mail editorial calls reading and writing for Canadian school children a Golden Ticket and suggests that in trying to achieve it we are doing it all wrong:
"Take a typical classroom of 25 pupils, anywhere in Canada. At the back, seven boys and girls slouch in their seats, unable to understand most of what they read, or to express their thoughts in writing. The problem of poor literacy skills is a scandal in plain view.
"At some point the schools have to say, Enough. Enough pretending that poor readers are actually benefiting from social studies or novel studies or even science or mathematics. Enough of this charade of teaching and learning."
Who would disagree with that? Where we do disagree with The Globe is that they want to intervene in Grade 7. School for Thought readers know that is unnecessarily late to help a struggling child, while Stairway to Reading users know it can be done. So, while not impossible, it sure makes it much more difficult to fix bad habits and poorly-developed neural pathways.
SQE believes that schools need to practice the "preventative medicine" that proven-effective instruction can provide. This means teaching beginning readers phonics and phonemic awareness, systematically and explicitly right from the beginning.
From The Globe editorial:
"Even as British Columbia and Ontario prepare to allocate billions of dollars to full-day kindergarten, in the absence of any real evidence that it will boost literacy results, educators are realizing how destructive it is to ignore weak literacy in the middle years. Vancouver is rolling out a non-fiction reading assessment for Grade 8 and 9 students. In Halifax, every junior high school has a resource teacher to help struggling students.
"It's hardly a secret that reading and writing are the golden ticket to school success. What could be more heartbreaking than to have young people waste years of their time in classrooms without one? The provinces, school boards and individual schools need to say to students in Grade 7: If you don't have the ticket by now, we will move Heaven and Earth and timetables to help you get one."
What is tragic is that Heaven and Earth don't get moved sooner...
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
The Ontario government has announced a new round of grants for projects designed to get parents more involved in their children's education. A glance at the projects funded last year reveals the usual suspects involving, primarily, things like workshops and presentations to parents about how they should be more engaged. Full disclosure - SQE applied a few years ago for a grant to show parents how to use our remedial reading program, Stairway to Reading, but we got turned down. The government apparently would like parents to be more supportive of their children's schools, perhaps doing some fund-raising and the like, but not interfere with the teaching side of things.
The vast majority of parents start the schooling game with great enthusiasm, eager to take part and help their kids be successful. Before long, however, they have become the apathetic bunch of parents educators proceed to complain about. Why?
The answer is deeply embedded in the current culture of the education system. There are four main disincentive to meaningful parental involvement.
- Complex And Remote Administrative Structures: Parents (and teachers too) often feel they have no control over the policies and practices imposed on their school from on high, and so they pull back from a process that they feel they have no hope of influencing.
- Educators' Unwillingness to Share: Many educators worry that inexpert parents will have educationally-unsound suggestions that might be damaging to children, viewing themselves as progressive, up-to-date experts who are infinitely more knowledgeable than the old-fashioned parents who advocate higher and clearer standards and more formal instruction and, as a result, only the most intrepid parents persist in their willingness to be involved after a few rebuffs along these lines.
- New Teaching Methods: Most parents are bewildered and alienated by all the new jargon, the lack of clear expectations and reporting, the confusing textbooks (where they exist), the poorly-defined homework assignments, and educators' strictures against helping children at home on the grounds that the children will only be confused by conflicting approaches.
- Lack of Out-Reach Orientation: Few, if any, educators have received any training or guidance on how to communicate with parents, let alone how to reach out to them.
If the Ontario government truly wishes to foster more parental involvement, it might consider giving some of its grant money to projects that address these built-in disincentives to parental engagement.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
There Should Be No Left or Right in Education
I know of many political liberals who like the concept of school choice. To them it is a social justice issue. I agree. So why then are those of us who promote parental school choice branded as George W. Bush Ronald Reagan Sarah Palin loving pearl-wearing Mrs. Cleaver conservatives??
This post at Core Knowledge tries to explain it:
Education Conservatives and Political Liberals
by Robert Pondiscio
April 28th, 2010
"Education conservatives and political liberals are - or at least ought to be - natural allies, writes Mark Bauerlein at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm blog.
"'Education conservatives believe that liberal education should be centered on a core body of knowledge. In the humanities and "softer" social-science fields, all students should study a set of books, ideas, artworks, theories, events, and personages more or less stable over time. Those items are chosen on a variety of grounds: aesthetic excellence, historical impact, intellectual brilliance, ethical positions, etc. They may contradict one another and represent vastly different people and places and outlooks. The important thing is that the learning of them produces a thoughtful, informed, and responsible intelligence.'
"Education conservatives catch a lot of flack from both the left and the right however.'One ideology does jibe nicely with education conservatism,' Bauerlein notes, 'political liberalism'. This is a point that's at the heart of E.D. Hirsch's work, and indeed Bauerlein quotes from Hirsch's most recent book, The Making of Americans, to explain the natural alliance:
"'I am a political liberal, but once I recognized the relative inertness and stability of the shared background knowledge students need to master reading and writing, I was forced to become an education conservative. The tacit, intergenerational knowledge required to understand the language of newspapers, lectures, the Internet, and books in the library is inherently traditional and slow to change. Logic compelled the conclusion that achieving the democratic goal of high universal literacy would require schools to practice a large measure of educational traditionalism.'
"'To Hirsch, educational conservatism is the best curriculum for ensuring the kind of social mobility and access essential to liberty and equality,' writes Bauerlein. 'One way to keep low-income and disadvantaged youths in that downward place through adulthood is precisely to deny them the knowledge that would allow them to enter and remain in college, and to join middle- and high-income spheres that do, indeed, demand a certain level of cultural literacy,' he concludes."
HT Fixing Our Schools
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Malkin and I attended the State Policy Network education conference in Milwaukee several years ago. It was where we first heard Dr. Howard Fuller, the renowned U.S. black educator and school choice advocate, who gave the keynote address. During his speech I began to look around the room and noticed that the waiters and servers, most of whom were visible minorities, had stopped, trays in hand, to listen to Fuller speak. I believe he was not really preaching to the converted in attendance, most of whom were visible minorities themselves, but that he was really speaking to those men and women who wanted more for their kids than waiting tables. Readers can find many references to Fuller in this blog and on this website. Fuller believes that parental school choice is a matter of social justice.
We also came across a panelist during one session at the same conference who was an avowed leftist, but said he was a convert to choice because he believed it was the right thing to do to help lower-income families get access to better education outcomes. Truly shocking: a lefty for choice!