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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
New York, New York
Now one of our commenters might think this is a new form of terrorism, but this is positive news out of NYC. As Malkin says below, this might empower more low-income parents by giving them access to better education for their children and improving all schools to boot.
JP Morgan Chase has created a $325 million fund to help high performing charter schools:
"The grants to help charter schools are part of JPMorgan Chase's larger $100 million grant initiative for CDFIs that also support small businesses, community healthcare centers, green initiatives and affordable housing. Details on the rest of the initiative will be announced later this year."
At the same time, the State of New York has just passed legislation to increase the number of charter schools from 200 to about 460. This move will garner them about $700 million in federal grants.
H/T to reader ML.
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More spelling
Picking up on the spelling discussion, this video says it all. The protest was organized by the school's language arts teacher!
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Harnessing Selfish Behaviour
One of our frequent commenters has condemned parents who try to work the system in order to give their own kids an edge, calling them "profoundly selfish". Of course, there is no shortage of such parents. They include Dalton McGuinty and Annie Kidder who send/sent their children to magnet schools; Bob Rae and Stephen Lewis who sent their children to private schools, Lucien Bouchard and Jacques Parizeau who sent their children to English-speaking private schools, and the list goes on.
Fulminating against such parents will accomplish nothing, change nothing - except, possibly, to make the fulminator feel smug. Parents are always going to try to do their best by their children. That's their job.
The solution is not to try to prevent savvy parents from working the system - by scolding them or by any other means - but rather to make it easier for all parents, including less sophisticated parents, to work the system to their own children's advantage. In other words, make it possible for everyone to choose from a wide array of school choices, public and private. When schools are forced to compete for students, they have an incentive to improve (become "more competitive"), and the pool of good schools increases. Everybody is better off.
Selfish parents = better schools. More selfish parents = more better schools.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
It’s Not A Secret
In Sunday's Toronto Sun, Lorrie Goldstein has written a great column, Secret to Their Success, about how private schools can help troubled black youth in Toronto. He wrote about how Crawford Academy has had a very good success rate with their students, of which 70 to 80 per cent are black and the rest are mostly from other visible minorities. He writes:
"To be sure, it's unfair to compare Crawford to public schools because, unlike them, Crawford can pick and choose its students. But Crawford's success indicates why former Ontario Conservative leader John Tory's proposal to publicly fund faith-based schools had merit, even if it ended his political career and cost the Tories the 2007 election. At the time, Premier Dalton McGuinty - who, ironically, sent his own children to Catholic schools - charged faith-based schools "segregate" and "sequester" young people and threaten "social cohesion." Nonsense. Crawford's students aren't 'segregated' or 'sequestered', they're 'succeeding', and because they're succeeding, they will become fully integrated members of our society. It's black kids living in troubled neighbourhoods who drop out of public school at the first opportunity to become gang members, drug dealers and baby mothers, who end up "segregated" and "sequestered" from society."
I first met the fine staff at Crawford when SQE sponsored the visit of Dr. Howard Fuller back in 2009. Dr. Fuller spoke to Crawford parents one January evening. Lest you think that parents at Crawford are rich, élitest snobs, nothing could be further from the truth. Goldstein reports that 30 per cent of Crawford's students come from single-parent families. As many other parents at private schools do, these parents make huge financial sacrifices to make sure their children get an excellent education in a safe, caring, but disciplined environment.
I recently had a chat with Crawford's high school principal and we talked about the poverty factor in education outcomes. He agreed with me that poverty should not be used as an excuse. The cure for poverty is education.
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On a related note, I'd like to think the expansion of alternative schools in Toronto such as the Africentric school, same-sex schools, and a choir school had its incubation way back when SQE arranged a meeting between the TDSB Trustees and Angus McBeath, the former director of education of Edmonton Public Schools.
To readers who are new to the Edmonton model of public choice, McBeath was responsible for running public education as though they weren't a monopoly. Boundaries were eliminated, parents were given a passport to any school, schools directly got 90% of all education funding, principals were directly accountable to the director for acheivement and finances, and many alternative schools were offered, including religious schools.
The Toronto leg of McBeath's speaking tour was sponsored by SQE, but the main North American tour was co-ordinated by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies. AIMS is celebrating their 15th anniversary with a dinner in Moncton, NB next month. The keynote speaker for that event is Jeb Bush, the former governnor of Florida who is also related to a couple of presidents. Jeb Bush was instrumental in establishing school choice programs and other education accountability measures in the state of Florida.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Ostensibly Yours
Buried in undeserved obscurity among the comments to our "The Secrets of Direct Instruction" posting is this link to an article on the popular policy of "full inclusion" - the practice of including all students in regular classrooms, even students with very severe disabilities.
The ostensible reason for full inclusion is that it is in best interests of disabled students, even though this is demonstrably not true for a great many students. As the article points out, however, the ostensible reason masks the real reason - to wit, inclusion results in classes with a very wide range in academic ability and so the teachers are forced to use progressive methods like group work and discovery learning.
Education leaders are very good at coming up with ostensible reasons that mask their real agendas - for example, the push for small classes that purport to support student learning (even though the advantages are vanishingly small) but which are really designed to generate more teaching jobs and increase the unions' and school boards' clout. Other examples include calls for higher teacher salaries, shorter working hours, more money, and government school monopolies - all justified on the basis that they're good for kids!
The next time you hear an education leader justifying his or her stance on the basis that it's good for kids, be skeptical. He or she may be having an ostensible moment!
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Examining Grade Inflation
In 1959 when the Ontario Scholar program was introduced, there were only 4,117 Ontario scholar and bursary winners. After the provincial exit exams (the "departmentals") were abolished in the late sixties, the number of Ontario Scholars began a steady rise. In the 1992-93 year, there were fully 21,072 Ontario Scholars - almost 20% of all secondary school graduates. We can't find any current statistics, but it's a safe bet that the percentage is now closer to 40%.
The grade inflation in Ontario high schools has consequences for Ontario universities. This Ivory Tower Blues posting discusses the pressure on professors to give good marks and the resulting culture of entitlement and disengagement among students at Ontario post-secondary institutions. Standards are dropping and, on average, Ontario university students are learning ever less.
Grade inflation is just as destructive to institutions of learning as price inflation is to the economy. The Bank of Canada does a wonderful job of protecting us from price inflation. Perhaps we need to establish an Examination Board to protect us from grade inflation.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
More Honey, Less Vinegar
Ahem, well yesterday's blog turned out to be an urban legend that I credulously swallowed hook, line and sinker. 
TDSBNW was good enough to straighten me out, providing a link to its origins in Pacific Palisades High School in California. This school ran into parental outrage when it tried to fail students who had missed too much class time. The school was forced to back down.
Schools that want to improve their student attendance statistics might consider less heavy-handed approaches that depend on changing the parents' and students' motivations, as opposed to trying to force students to attend. Here are a few ideas.
- Offering a tightly-sequenced, dense curriculum that would put absentees behind very quickly
- Keeping the school small so that every child and parent feels his or her presence is important
- Ensuring that struggling students get the teaching they need in order to be able to succeed academically
- Encouraging parents to volunteer in the school and thus become part of the team
- Providing incentives for perfect attendance
- Arranging for teachers to make home visits where the importance of school attendance is emphasized
- Contacting the home within minutes of every unexplained absence
Here's an example from Granger High School in Granger, WA (from It's Being Done: Academic success in unexpected schools, by Karin Chenoweth, p. 120) Granger is populated mainly by the children of agricultural workers, one-third of them migrants, the vast majority Hispanic. Yet at the time of writing, attendance by parents or guardians at student conferences had been 100% for five years running.
"Another example of the ethos of transparency and shared information is the line of big posters in the hallway listing every student who 'owes' the school academic time and how much time is owed. The idea is that any student who has an unexcused absence must make up that time, either before school (when an English teacher is paid to be available), after school (when math and writing teachers are available), or on Saturday (when several teachers are available to work with the students). If a student is late to class by 15 minutes, that student owes .25 hours of academic time. If a student misses a day and doesn't bring in a note from a parent or guardian with a good explanation, that student owes 7.5 hours. Students may not play sports unless they are in the process of making up the time. Students who don't make up their time don't get their report cards. 'Come on,' Esparza [the principal] said to one student, urging him to make up the time, 'you're going to want to see this report card.' Esparza is planning to require the same kind of system for excused absences as well as unexcused absences, because the theory is the same: students must put in the time they lose due to absences."