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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
V is for victory over the system
I'm reading this great book, Campus Confidential, and I will be formally reviewing it one of these days. Today, however, I want to show you part of a section on Ontario's victory lap phenomenon.
"This may seem hard to believe, but it's true: a quarter of students who qualify to graduate from high school don't graduate. Instead they come back to school and take some of their courses over again - not because they have to, but because they want to. This costs them nothing and is a ridiculous waste of public funds that distorts the university admissions proccess.
"The standard scenario is simple. Mary and John both get 78% in Grade 12 math. Both want to be accountants. Mary's parents encourage her to graduate. She does so and applies to her top three universities. She is turned down by all of them and either goes to a lower-ranked school or shifts into a less competitive program. John and his parents want into the top school. So he registers in Grade 12 again, takes a couple of courses, including math 12, and gets his grade up to 85%. He applies to university a year later, and armed with two or three higher grades, he is accepted.
"Both students have the same abilities in math. But John, having spent thousands of dollars of public funds, gets a higher grade on the second pass (easy to do, since it's the same material) and so gets into the premium university program. Since most universities accept the higher of the grades, he has played the system well, even though he has the same potential as Mary.
"It's not just the public system that offers the victory lap. There are many private high schools, some entirely credible and offering top-quality education, others little more than grade-selling education mills. Students sign up for the extra courses in these private institutes, secure the higher grade though some combination of hard work, excellent tutelage, or teacher complicity and apply to university with better scores."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Part of Finnish school success: abolishing “teacher colleges”?
Although I seldom agree with him politically, I find Rick Salutin’s takes on many issues to be worth reading because they are well thought out and moderately stated. I was sorry to see him leave the Globe and Mail’s op ed page where he was the token “leftie” columnist.
He has now resurfaced at the Toronto Star (quelle surprise!) in a big way with two articles, one on the importance of teachers and another arguing against school choice.
The one about teachers contains a lot of references to education in Finland. Buried in the middle of the article is the following nugget (caps added by me for emphasis):
The training [for Finnish teachers] averages from five to seven-and-a-half years — and is comparable to other professional degrees. All teachers must have a master’s degree, and do a thesis. THERE ARE NO SEPARATE TEACHERS’ COLLEGES OR CERTIFICATION PROGRAMS. The university degree is the licence to teach.
If Mr. Salutin is arguing for the abolition of our faculties of education, or at least the teacher training portions of their mandates, he, probably inadvertently, has identified the one action that would have the most positive impact on the future quality of education in Canada.
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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Small and religious schools are the way to go
The Fraser Institute has published school rankings for Ontario elementary schools. The rankings take into consideration the students' backgrounds, rating schools on the basis of how much value they add to their students' learning. Only schools that administered the provincial grade 3 and grade 6 tests are included in the tables, meaning that few private schools are ranked (they can't afford to pay the approximately $50 per student fee).
I looked at the 22 top-ranked schools (p. 208) to see if there were any common themes, and indeed there were! Almost every school had fewer than 400 students, and most had considerably less than that. Of the 22, 4 were private religious schools and 6 were publicly-funded Catholic schools. Only 12 (just over half) were public schools, but even some of them had extenuating circumstances - for example, French immersion or gifted programs that drew students from afar or the school that is 99.99% Chinese. Considering that two-thirds of Ontario schools are public schools, the public schools are definitely under-represented in the top ranks.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Debunking destreaming
A new study from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation finds that Massachusetts schools that track (stream) their grade 8 students get better math results. The executive summary can be found here and the full report here (registration required).
Some of our readers may remember Ontario's ill-fated experiment with destreaming grade 9 in the early 90's. The policy was ideologically driven by ivory-tower theorists in the ministry of education, and their plan was to destream grade 10 in a few years once the destreaming of grade 9 had proved to be a roaring success. Well, the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglay, and the destreaming of grade 9 was universally acknowledged to be a disaster. There were tales of grade 9 math students crying in the back of the class, for example. It was awful. One Toronto high school was the darling of the ideologues because it destreamed all of its grades. I spoke to a teacher at that school a few years later, asking him how destreaming was going. "Oh", he said. "We're not doing that any more. It didn't work."
Consistent with common sense, homogeneous groups are easier to teach and the kids learn more. This is one reason why child-centred learning should be de-emphasized, as it results in much less homogeneity.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Time to try something else
This column from today's Toronto Sun points out that Ontario's Liberal government has increased its spending on education from about $14 billion in 2003 when it took office to about $20 billion this year. These numbers exclude spending on capital programs, which roughly doubled over the same period - from $670 million to $1.3 billion. (For more detailed information, click here. The funding for the whole province is on page 5, and the funding for individual boards follows. It's worth noting, although the Toronto Sun column did not, that enrollment shrank over the same period, from about 2 million students to about 1.8 million students.) So the spending increases are even greater than they appear.
The Toronto Sun column makes the point that despite the increase in spending, Ontario students are doing only very slightly better on the provincial tests. Another thing that the column doesn't mention is the provincial tests are based on the provincial curriculum and, because the curriculum has been dumbed down over the same period, the tests have become easier. As well, test conditions have been relaxed, with students being allowed more accommodations and time to write the tests. It's no wonder there has been a slight improvement in test results. Of course, it's impossible to be sure, but I will go out on a limb here and guess that Ontario students are actually learning less than they did in 2003.
So let's sum it up. More money = fewer students and less learning. Something is fishy here. We are going to try to get to the bottom of this apparent paradox at our symposium on accountability on April 26 in Toronto. Please come out to our symposium and help us find the way forward.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The high cost of non-transparency
On Thursday, People for Education released a report documenting the fees that Ontario high schools are charging their students for a wide variety of things, including course fees and charges for extra-curricular activities and optional programming. On Friday, the Ministry of Education released guidelines on school fees. This is a remarkably speedy response from the education bureaucracy! However, that's not what I want to focus on.
First, a personal tale. Back in the 1990's, one of my children attended a public school that was rolling in money. In addition to extorting money from the parents for the usual stuff like school photos, pop machines, mandatory $1.00 dances (in school time), fund-raisers, yearbook fees - it seemed as if there was a new request at least once a week - the school also bussed the kids to Toronto twice a year to see a musical (at approximately $75 a pop), plus there was an annual ski trip to Quebec (at approximately $350 a pop) for the approximately 200 grade 8 students. I'm guessing that the school took in between $150,000 and $200,000 from these money-making activities every year. That's a lot of money.
It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that the school should have been accountable for this money. Along with a member of the school council, I asked to see a record of income and expenses, but the principal refused to provide this information. My friend and I did not pursue it, because of course we were powerless, but I believe that the principal was in the wrong. Even if no one was stealing from the school's money pot, and of course I have no indication that anyone was, the principal should have prvoided a scrupulous accounting of the fund-raised money in order to ensure that no one was exposed to temptation. With huge amounts of unaccountable money sloshing around in some 4,800 schools in Ontario, the chances are very high that someone somewhere has his or her hand in the cookie jar.
So, for what it's worth, that's my take on the People for Education report. Yes, certainly make fund-raising fair - but go further: require every school to publish financial statements scrupulously documenting how much money was received and what it was spent on.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Two contests for the price of one!
1. When was a video of John Snobelen explaining the need to "invent a crisis" in education made public?
2. Which political party actively promotes a "single school system" that would eliminate the Catholic system?
3. Name the three reporters/columnists who cover provincial politics for the Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun and The Globe and Mail.
4. How many teachers marched to Queen's Park in January 1996 to protest cuts to education by the Harris government?
5. What year was Bill 160 (regarding the ability of Catholic schools to raise taxes separately) debated?
If you can answer all five questions correctly, you might win an iPad. For more information, click here.
If you can guess which political party the contest sponsor favours, enter your guess in a comment to this posting. You might win an autographed copy of my book How to get the right education for your child. And if you can guess who the sponsor of the iPad contest is without peeking, you might win a free ticket to SQE's Accountability seminar on April 26.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
School Vouchers: A win-win solution
These graphs summarize the findings of a recent survey of the effect of school vouchers in several US jurisdictions - both how they impact the participating students and how they impact the students in the schools they left behind.
Clearly, everyone is better off when some students can receive school vouchers.
In the author's words, "The benefits provided by existing voucher programs are sometimes large, but are usually more modest in size. This is not surprising, since the programs themselves are modest - curtailed by strict limits on the students they can serve, the resources they can provide, and the freedom to innovate. Only a universal voucher program could deliver the kind of dramatic improvement our public schools so desperately need."
The complete study can be accessed here.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Entitled disengagement
The latest addition to our lending library is Lowering Higher Education: The rise of corporate universities and the fall of liberal education. The authors are professors at the University of Western Ontario. Basically, they are chronicling the modern trend towards the de-emphasis of liberal arts and science education in universities in favour of credentialism and job training. They examine the corporatization of universities within the context of a range of contenious issues in higher education, from lowered standards and inflated grades to the overall decline of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences instruction. The excerpt (pp. 91-93) outlines the scope of the problem, and then zeroes in on the very new phenomenon of students who feel entitled but who are disengaged from the learning process.
"In broad strokes, this crisis is unfolding as follows: Government policies promoting mass access to universities have addressed the supply side of labour, rather than the demand side of creating more jobs. Consequently, there is an oversupply of university graduates in relation to the demand for them. In conjunction with a decline in funding, universities have attempted to survive by embracing corporate management principles, and these measures, in turn, have helped to create the credentialist approach to universities on the part of both students who are seeking job opportunities and courses of study that are hungry for recruits. In the past two decades, universities have seen an influx of students whose primary purpose for being there is to receive a credential, and they have a less than keen interest in the courses they must take to get that credential. In turn, classrooms have been affected by a culture of disengagement as more students assume the mindset of entitled disengagement: they have paid for their credential and assume that the product will be delivered to their satisfaction. As this culture has taken hold, professors who are sensitive to these changes have reacted in a number of adverse ways that do not bode well for the future of the profession."
.....
"Many students have a rough time when they attend university. There is ample empirical evidence of increasing stress levels (especially for female students, who now predominate by a ratio approaching 60/40). There is also widespread alientation. The alienation discussed above in chapter 2 is manifested in numerous ways, from a detachment from the (daily process of learning, to a disdain for the product of learning (the outcomes). The detachment from learning shows up in the disengagement statistics, but can be experienced as an inability to 'be in the moment' and experience university-level learning as an intrinsically gratifying experience that produces a sense of fulfilment. And, alientation can be stressful: being forced to enter or remain in alienating situations can simply compound that stress.
"The disdain that many students develop for the product of learning is discernible in the mindset of entitled disengagement."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Mrs. Enigma
From time to time, I give a plug for my free book, How to get the right education for your child. So today, I decided to reproduce a few paragraphs from my book. This excerpt is taken from the chapter entitled "Exhausting the System" (pp. 20-22) and concerns what parents should do when they finally realize that their child is in serious trouble academically.
"Looking back, you realize that Jack's primary teachers were all worshipping at the altar of child-centred learning. Whenever you would summon up your courage and ask about Jack's reading problem, these teachers would assure you that Jack was developing appropriately. Further, they would warn you not to communicate your foolish worries to Jack, lest you damage his self-esteem. As a result of their well-intentioned claptrap, Jack has lost three years. There's nothing you can do about that now. But perhaps his new grade 4 teacher is more open-minded? Will she provide Jack with the kind of teaching he so desperately needs? How to find out?
"Before deciding how to approach Mrs. Enigma, put yourself in her shoes for a moment. Every day, Jack's teacher stands in front of a class of 25 nine-year-olds, many of them with special needs. Mrs. Enigma has nine students with severe reading problems. Three of them have behaviour problems. One student has been very upset by her parents' recent divorce, and two don't speak English very well. One, severely-disabled and with his own teaching assistant, often shouts uncontrollably, drowning out the teacher's words.
"To add to her difficulties, Mrs. Enigma has never had special training on how to cope with challenges like these, and so she is just doing the best she can. Furthermore, she was away the day they mentioned phonics at her faculty of education - so she doesn't have a clue how to teach kids to read.
"Because Mrs. Enigma is teaching grade 4 for the first time this year, she has had to develop her entire course of study, finding or making the necessary teaching materials. (Despite spending almost $10,000 per student, her school board can't seem to afford textbooks. In any case, whole class sets of texts are against board policy.) Being the busy mother of two preschoolers, Mrs. Enigma hasn't a lot of spare time. She does find a few minutes now and then, however, to scan the newspaper headlines. She knows how much criticism the schools have been getting lately. Furthermore, you are not the only parent who has been in asking for special treatment for her child.
"Still want to visit her?"