Subscribe to our Blog
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
What’s On the Menu?
Dear Aunt Malkin, You're always going on about school choice, but what exactly is it? Signed, Virginia
Dear Virginia.
It might be easier to think about school choice by first thinking about restaurant choice. At present, most people can choose among dozens of different types of restaurants - ethnic, vegetarian, home-cooking, deli, fast-food, and on and on. Nor are people forced to confine their selection to a particular geographic area or price range. The market is wide open, limited only by demand (and, of course, by government regulations and inspections regarding things like health and safety).
School choice is similar to restaurant choice. In this scenario, parents can choose their children's schools from a wide array of differientated schools - year-round schools, all-boys schools, small neighbourhood schools, Montessori schools, International Baccalaureate schools, sports schools, special-needs schools, traditional schools, distance schools - the options are limited only by their ability to attract a viable number of students (and, of course, by appropriate government regulations). Unlike restaurant choice, however, school choice is at least partially subsidized by the government (like health care in Canada), meaning that parents who choose private schools or home schools receive vouchers or tax credits to offset their expenses.
If your child is thriving at the local one-size-fits-all school, that's great. But if you think your kid would be better off at a school that specializes in teaching kids with learning disabilities or where the teachers don't go on strike, then you would be able to choose that option.
The bottom line is that school choice makes it easier for parents to send their kids to the school that best matches their circumstances.
Signed, Aunt Malkin
PS School choice also means that teachers can choose a school that best matches their strengths and interests.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The show always goes on
Although the public school teachers in most of Ontario have withdrawn from participation in extra-curricular activities, the parents and students at Linwood Public School have gone ahead with the annual Christmas play anyway. It almost sounds as if the result is going to be even more beneficial for the students and the community than other years.
Teacher union strategists might want to bear in mind that their protests are going to start some parents noticing that they can manage without their members' services - with a resulting loss of market share. No one is indispensable.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The Big Easy
A new report from the Brookings Institution ranks 107 US school districts (the 100 largest metro areas and seven others of interest) in terms of how much education choice and competition they provide. The Education Choice and Competition Index. The report is not of much interest to Ontario parents, except insofar as it shows how far behind the province is in terms of school choice.
Ontario parents would really have a hard time wrapping their minds around what it would be like to educate their kids in New Orleans (the district at the top of the Brookings list). There are 70 schools in the district, all of them different from one another (including 12 traditional schools), and the district goes out of its way to help parents learn about all of their options and choose the one that would be best for them. Imagine!
If you like this posting (or any other of our postings for that matter), you can tell others about it on Twitter or Facebook by clicking on "Comments" and then the appropriate icon.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Vocabulary declines, with unspeakable results
There was an article by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. last week in the Wall Street Journal on the importance of teaching kids vocabulary and general knowledge. I was struck by the following paragraph.
"Vocabulary-building is a slow process that requires students to have enough familiarity with the context to understand unfamiliar words. Substance, not skill, develops vocabulary and reading ability—there are no shortcuts. The slow, compounding nature of vocabulary growth means that successful reform must lie in systematic knowledge-building. That is the approach used in South Korea, Finland, Japan, Canada and other nations that score highly in international studies and succeed best in narrowing the verbal gap between rich and poor students."
While I agree with everything Dr. Hirsch says about vocab and general knowledge, I was surprised to see Canada cited as being one of the countries that embed systematic knowledge-building. Is this true, does anyone know? H/T Chas
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (The zero hero)
I couldn't figure out how to embed this news clip - so just click on this link. to watch a short interview with Edmonton's zero hero. His situation is an object lesson in why so few teachers dare to speak out against bad education policies. H/T LDA
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Cassandra and me
I see that Educhatter is trying to get at the roots of bullying in his latest blog. While I agree with him that police state measures are not the solution, I disagree that the cause of the rapid increase in the incidence and severity of bullying is a rise in the number of dysfunctional families. (Is this what you are in fact postulating, Educhatter?)
I feel like Cassandra - fated never to be listened to - but for years I have been suggesting that the main reason for the modern bullying epidemic is the emphasis on fostering kids' self-esteem, and nobody has taken the slightest notice. more I would be grateful if someone would at least dump all over my hypothesis.
Very often the solution to a problem lies in understanding the problem in the first place - think of malaria, for example - and I am suggesting that the solution to bullying just might be found in reducing the emphasis on self esteem and increasing the emphasis on self-control and self-discipline.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
United we fall?
Thiks video expains right-to-work legislation in light of Michigan's becoming the 24th US right-to-work state - yet another nail in the labour unions' coffin. In Canada, the House of Commons has passed legislation that will force the unions to disclose spending information (it still has to pass in the Senate - plus the inevitable court challenges in due course). There appears to be no doubt that unions' influence is waning, at least in North America, and the unions are not going quietly!
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The verdict is in
Realizing the importance of education, for many years now North American politicians have been trying to reform their public education systems. Mostly, their reforms have involved such things as more spending, more testing, and higher standards. Since all of these measures had been tried in the past, the new initiatives acquired a catchy nickname that encapsulates their persistent futility: "More of the Same - Harder" (MOTS-H). MOTS-H reforms are almost always failures, and it was no surprise that this turned out to be true for more education spending, more testing, and higher standards. In Ontario, student achievement has actually been stagnant (as measured by the PISA tests) or declining (as measured by TIMSS) over the last ten years or so. Anecdotal evidence, in the form of complaints from employers and the need for remedial courses in post-secondary institutions, points to the same conclusion.
As realization dawned that the MOTS-H reforms were not working, American education reformers began to turn their eyes to market-oriented approaches. A wide variety of market-oriented reforms in other sectors had swept the globe in the period after Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and it was thought that competition among schools and wide-open parental choice would galvanize educators into improving their service. Unfortunately, however, powerful education lobbies, such as the teachers' unions, faculties of education, and various bureaucrats, took violent exception to school choice - because the proposed changes would reduce their power and importance. As a result of their opposition, to date in most jurisdictions only very limited school choice programs have seen the light of day.
Many of the new school choice programs have been the subject of careful research designed to find out whether student achievement has improved. In most cases, there appears to have been a slight improvement, but the findings are controversial. Certainly, there has been nothing like the spectacular improvement anticipated by school choice proponents. These modest results have both discouraged school choice proponents and provided fuel for the enemies of school choice.
The one exception is Florida, where Governor Jeb Bush managed to introduce wide-spread, large-scale school choice. And lo and behold, the latest TIMMS/PIRLS round of international comparisons of student achievement reveals that Florida has rocketed to being close to best in world - despite being a state with a large proportion of poor Hispanic immigrants.
Other US states are not far behind Florida (Louisiana, Indiana) in terms of school choice measures, and you can look for spectacular improvement in these states on the TIMSS/PIRLS 2014.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Most Likely to Succeed
In the chapter "Most Likely to Succeed" in What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how hard it is for interviewers to tell which candidates would make good employees. Because of the difficulty of predicting performance on the job, the financial-advice sector throws the net very wide - hiring, for example, one candidate for every 20 interviewees. After that, the successful candidates are run through a four-month "training camp", with only about half surviving that. And then the real sorting begins! Mr. Gladwell then extends the principle to teacher candidates (pp. 333-334).
"Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree - and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander's training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you'd probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can't be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eight-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half's material in one year, we're going to have to pay them a lot - both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.
"Is this solution to teaching's quarterback problem politically possible? Taxpayers might well balk at the costs of trying out four teachers to find one good one. Teachers' unions have been resistant to even the slightest move away from the current tenure arrangement. But all the reformers want is for the teaching profession to copy what firms like North Star have been doing for years. Deutschlander interviews a thousand people to find ten advisers. He spends large amounts of money to figure out who has the particular mixture of abilities to do the job. 'Between hard and soft costs,' he says, 'most firms sink between a hundred thousand dollars and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on someone in their first three or four years,' and in most cases, of course, that investment comes to naught. But if you are willing to make that kind of investment and show that kind of patience, you wind up with a truly high-performing financial adviser. 'We have a hundred and twenty-five full-time advisers,' Deutschlander says. 'Last year, we had seventy-one of them qualify for the Million Dollar Round Table' -- the industry's association of its most successful practiitioners. 'We're seventy-one out of a hundred and twenty-five in that elite group.'
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection fo those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Hot off the press
This is just a quick posting to alert you to the release (at 10 am) of the latest round of international testing - the PIRLS 2011 and the TIMSS 2011. More time will be needed for meaningful analysis, but quick first impressions suggest that the Asian tigers are still way in the lead, Florida has shot to near the top, Finland's performance is very respectable but not stunning, Ontario seems to be holding its own in the middle of the pack of its peers, and Alberta is slipping a bit.
A QUICK FOOTNOTE: Now that I've had a bit more time to look at the reports, I see that Ontario's results have weakened in four categories - Grade 8 Math, Grade 4 Science, Grade 8 Science, and Literacy. In the first three categories, the performance decline is significant. The EQAO reports that overall the performance of Ontario students improved significantly between 1995 and 2003 (the Mike Harris years), and then worsened significantly between 2003 and 2011 (the Dalton McGuinty years). It begins to look as if, despite enormous increases in funding, Ontario students have actually learned less in the years since Mr. McGuinty took office.