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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
As usual, the footsoldiers feel the pain, while the officers go unscathed
According to this Toronto Star story, the Toronto District School Board is facing an $85 million dollar deficit. As a result, board staff are recommending that 803 positions be cut - 430 educational assistants, 200 high school teachers, 134 school secretaries, and 39 vice-principals. Does anyone other than me find it strange that not one consultant or board administrator is on the list?
Here's an idea! Toronto might take a look at Edmonton which moved the responsibility for administrative services down to the schools and let them decide what they needed. Here's an article from our archives that explains how it works.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
It all adds up to the wrong answer
We have previously mentioned the math problems arising from the new programs that emphasize understanding over skill. Here's a recent article in the Toronto Sun on this topic (quoting Doretta), and there has been a lot of other coverage, including a cover story in Maclean's Magazine.
An alert reader in Oakville sent us this link. You have to hand it to the Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board - they are listening! In response to parental frustration with their new math programs, the board is offering SuccessMaker: an adaptive online math program for parents - so they can learn the new math programs themselves and then support their own children. The course will take a minimum of eight weeks, 20 minutes four times a day.
An alternative, of course, would be to offer math programs that are effective and accessible to parents, but that would probably break Ontario laws. At a minimum, the use of such programs would handicap its students on the provincial tests. H/T HH
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Keep your eye on Louisiana
Unrelated to today's blog, but of interest nevertheless - School for Thought has just gone over the 2,000,000 hits mark. Thanks for reading.
Today's video is an impassioned plea from the governor of Louisiana last week to a legislative committee considering three landmark education reform bills. It's worth watching, because it reminds us (if we had forgotten) how high the stakes are. The bills in question are progressing rapidly through the Louisiana legislature, and it looks as if they will all be successful. More here, including information about the inevitable teacher union opposition. YouTube link
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Sunday at the Movies (A remarkable teacher)
If you click here, you'll access a heart-warming antidote to Friday's video. H/T LDA
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Friday at the Movies (Boorish Behaviour)
This video speaks to the departure from our blog of John Myers. The video gets a bit repetitive and tedious in the middle, and the language is very offensive, but please keep watching. There is a point to the video, and its point directly relates to some of the commenters to our blog. You know who you are.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
It’s comedy, true enough, but it’s not divine
A human rights organization that advises the UN on racism and discrimination is recommending that Dante's Divine Comedy be removed from school curricula on the grounds that it is racist, homophobic, anti-Islamist, and anti-Semitic. No doubt, The Merchant of Venice and The Bible are not far behind.
Of course, this is business as usual in the politically-correct world. My question is: why on earth would anyone think he needs to ban the Divine Comedy from schools? I mean, this assumes that it's actually on the curriculum of some high schools. Really? I'm not sure how one would go about checking it out, especially in Ontario which doesn't mention any works of literature in its curriculum, but I've never heard of any high school students who are studying the book. My sense is that we long ago passed the point of exposing high school students to the canon, instead preferring politically-correct stuff like the following (taken from the Ontario Grade 11 and 12 English curriculum). H/T CT
- Learning resources that reflect the broad range of students’ interests, backgrounds, cultures, and experiences are an important aspect of an inclusive English program. In such a program, learning materials involve protagonists of both sexes from a wide variety of backgrounds. Teachers routinely use materials that reflect the diversity of Canadian and world cultures, including those of contemporary First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples, and make them available to students. Short stories, novels, magazine and newspaper articles, television programs, and films provide opportunities for students to explore issues relating to their self-identity. In inclusive programs, students are made aware of the historical, cultural, and political contexts for both the traditional and non-traditional gender and social roles represented in the materials they are studying. Stories, novels, informational texts, and media works relating to the immigrant experience provide rich thematic material for study, as well as the opportunity for students new to Canada to share their knowledge and experiences with others. In addition, in the context of the English program, both students and teachers should become aware of aspects of intercultural communication – for example, by exploring how different cultures interpret the use of eye contact and body language in conversation and during presentations.
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Why run pilot studies if nobody understands what they’re telling us?
There was an interesting article in The New York Times the other day that illustrates two of my favourite themes. The article is about a pilot study in New York that compared, among other things, the reading comprehension of primary students in Balanced Literacy classrooms and students in Core Knowledge classrooms. The students in the Core Knowledge classrooms performed significantly better.
The author of the article then concludes that the Core Knowledge approach is better than the Balanced Literacy approach when it comes to teaching reading comprehension - primarily because kids learn better if they read non-fiction books as opposed to fiction. Of course, as faithful readers are no doubt thinking, this is total rubbish. Core Knowledge is not at all a method of teaching reading; it is a general philosophy that all students deserve equal access to the common knowledge base that holds their societies together.
So how were the children in the New York Core Knowledge schools taught to read, you ask? It turns out that the Core Knowledge students in this pilot were taught using systematic phonics-based instruction in decoding skills (more on the Core Knowledge reading approach here). So in fact, the New York pilot was comparing systematic phonics with Balanced Literacy, and systematic phonics won.
Theme #1: Systematic phonics is superior to Balanced Literacy.
Theme #2: Most reporters writing about education know almost nothing about their topic, and this fact is partly responsible for the education debacle.
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Luckily, a lack of math proficiency is no bar to becoming a teacher
The cover story in this week's Maclean's Magazine deals with the fallout from the new new math. Although designed to foster deep understanding, the new approach turns out to foster deep frustration instead. Far from deeply understanding math, most students aren't even learning basic arithmetic. As the article makes clear, many parents (even math professors and engineers) sometimes get bogged down when trying to help their kids with homework. Many parents are turning to paid tutors (according to the article, more than 30% of Canadian parents supplement their children's education). The result is a two-tiered education system, whereby the children of affluent, savvy parents manage to survive their public schools - but the less fortunate children flounder.
The article leaves us with a depressing thought, quoting math professor Anna Stokke: "If they [students] don’t know their math facts, she says, they won’t be able to do fractions, which means they won’t be able to handle algebra, which means calculus is out, which means they can’t be engineers, doctors, pharmacists, economists, programmers, or any discipline that requires math, including skilled tradeswork. But one thing they can become? Teachers." H/T RC
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The Middle-School Cliff
In Ontario, it has become quite common for school boards to segregate their grade 7 and 8 students in a separate school called a middle school. But when a Harvard professor decided to investigate the effectiveness of middle schools, his findings cast serious doubt on the wisdom of this practice.
Basically, the researchers found that "moving to a middle school causes a substantial drop in student test scores (relative to that of students in who remain in K-8 schools) the first year in which the transition takes place." As well, they found that "the relative achievement of middle-school students continues to decline in the subsequent years they spend in such schools", nor was there any evidence that these losses were ever recouped in high school. In fact, there was evidence that a higher percentage of middle-school students went on to drop out of school.
The researchers suggest two main (possibly inter-related) explanations: a) school transitions lower student achievement; and b) the overall climate for student learning is worse in middle schools. Here is a more nuanced discussion of the study's findings.
We find little evidence that the negative effects of attending a middle school are attributable to differences in resources, cohort sizes, or educational practices. We do, however, find suggestive evidence that the overall climate for student learning is worse in middle schools than in schools that serve students from elementary school through the 8th grade. This suggests a final potential interpretation of our results that is directly related to the choice of grade configuration: students may benefit from being among the oldest students in a school setting that includes very young students, perhaps because they have greater opportunity to take on leadership roles. This interpretation could account for both the gains in relative achievement made by students in K-5 and K-6 schools prior to entering middle schools and the superior performance of K-8 students relative to their peers in middle schools....
Taken as a whole, our results suggest that school transitions lower student achievement but that attending middle schools in particular has adverse consequences for American students. Especially when considered along with those of other recent studies, our findings clearly support ongoing efforts in urban school districts to convert stand-alone elementary and middle schools into schools with K-8 configurations.
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Sunday the Movies (The Agenda - Austerity and Ontario’s Teachers)
In case you missed it, here's The Agenda episode that I participated in as a panelist. You might recognize an old "friend" as one of the other guests. Notice he sits to my left!