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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Drunk on Power?
I'm surprised Nancy hasn't commented on this story from Newfoundland, whereby trustees in the province's biggest school district are under fire for lavish spending on food and wine. Of course, the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on fancy dinners are just a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of the school board bureaucracy.
The more fundamental question is - does the school board do anything individual schools couldn't do for themselves if all that money was carved up and distributed to the board's 119 schools instead? It would mean about $65,000 extra for each school, according to the board's financial statements. I wonder what would happen if the schools were given this choice.... H/T TA
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
Perhaps you didn't realize that SQE is a force to be reckoned with! This Huffington Post blog (tenth paragraph) lists the most important components of a Canadian conservative infrastructure that holds politicians accountable to right-wing causes. We're not exactly sure why championing the rights of low-income families to get decent schooling for their kids qualifies us as right-wing, but whatever. It's nice to be powerful.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Good Riddance?
Homeschooling continues to surge, as per this article. Note the first comment, which ends "good ridance (sic) see ya" by our very own Doug/Dean/Joe, followed by great outrage on the part of many many commenters. Doug/Dean/Joe tries to defend himself near the bottom, but only digs himeself in deeper.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Deaf to Parents’ and Students’ Concerns
This article in the Windsor Star nicely sums up the deafness of education leaders to parents' and students' (read the comments) concerns. Over and over, the users of the education system are complaining that the basics are not being taught properly, and over and over education leaders pooh-pooh their comments (managing to patronize them in the process).
For a glimpse of the way out of this impasse, I suggest you imagine how such a dialogue might go with the principal of a private school.
PARENT: My son isn't learning how to do long division.
PRINCIPAL: Oh, silly you, that's old-fashioned. Everybody uses calculators these days. It's much more important to have higher-order thinking skills.
PARENT: I'd like my money back, please.
PRINCIPAL: Oh, say, would you like me to transfer your son into Mr. Crackerjack's class? He makes sure all his students know how to do long division.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
School Vouchers - A Good Investment
You know how the proponents of expensive initiatives like all-day kindergarten and small class sizes are always going on about these things being an investment that pays off much later in terms of reduced prison and welfare costs? Well, it seems that a much less expensive initiative - school vouchers - have the same effect. The Washington, DC school voucher program yields a benefit of about $2.62 for every dollar spent on the vouchers.
So I guess the proponents of all-day kindergarten and small class sizes will drop their opposition to school vouchers now. Yes?
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Plug for SQE)
Michael Coren interviews Bob Bowden about the Toronto teacher who had gay porn in his classroom for seven months, concluding that parents' only recourse is to be able to remove their children from such situations and giving SQE a plug in the process. link
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Mom just wants to keep her babies safe
Tomorrow is Mother's Day and, according to a new US poll, a much-appreciated gift for your mom would be more school choice. As we've frequently mentioned in this blog, the school choice tsunami continues to build in the US and, as more and more people hear about it and benefit from school choice, popular support continues to grow. This is what happened in Sweden when school choice was introduced there just over 20 years ago: now it would be political suicide to discontinue the Swedish voucher program.
Perhaps that's why status quo educators fight school choice so hard - they know once people get it, they will never let it go.
Anyway, happy mother's day.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The decline and fall of the Alberta education system
Although Alberta has long dominated the other provinces when it came to comparisons of student achievement, its dominance has started to slip, such that Ontario actually outscored Alberta in some categories on the latest round of TIMSS/PIRLS. Now, Alberta seems set to slip even further, given that the government is getting rid of its grade 3 (now) and grade 6 and 9 prorgrams (soon). Click here to read the teacher union's jubilation. This is sure to give ideas to the teachers' unions in the other provinces with testing.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Homeschooling - what’s the problem?
Educhatter has an interesting column this week on homeschooling, and this is the most interesting paragraph - to me, anyway.
The most restrictive province may well be Nova Scotia, especially after a November 2012 Auditor General’s report proposing tighter regulation and more rigorous supervision. While only 850 out of 134,000 school age children are registered for homeschooling, AG Jacques Lapointe reported a “lack of adequate systems” to ensure a minimum of supervision, including proper registration records. Out of 120 files reviewed, he found 102 did not specify what a child was expected to learn and five had no information on the study program. It was a major embarrassment for the Education Department and may precipitate a backlash against homeschoolers.
I've never really understood why the authorities think they have to supervise homeschoolers. I mean, what are they worried about? Do they, for example, think that homeschoolers are so lazy that they can't be bothered sending their kids to school (having kids home is obviously more bother). Or maybe they think homeschoolers hate their kids so much that they want them to grow up ignorant? Or is it that they think homeschoolers can't possibly teach as well as public school teachers (despite the homeschoolers' very small class sizes)?
Seriously, I'd be grateful if one of our readers could put his or her finger on the putative problem.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Kids do well if they can
Lost at School: Why our kids with behavioral challenges are falling through the cracks and how we can help them, by Ross W. Greene, has as its premise that kids do well if they can.
Many (most?) educators think that the reason kids don't do well is that they don't want to or can't be bothered. But the author thinks that the kids who screw up are lacking important thinking skills - skills that can and should be taught.
Here's a short passage (pp. 23-24) from the book profiling Andrew, a black-and-white thinker who, unfortunately for him, lives in a gray world.
"These kids love details (black-and-white) but aren't so adept at handling ambiguity (gray) and often miss the 'big picture" (gray). They love predictabiliity (it's black-and-white) but don't do so well when things are unpredictable (gray). They love certainty (black-and-white) and routines (black-and-white) but don't handle uncertainty (gray) or changes in plan (gray) very well.
"TEACHER: Class, we're not going out for recess today at ten-fifteen because we have an assembly.
"ANDREW: What do you mean we're not going out for recess at ten-fifteen? We always go out for recess at ten-fifteen! I'm going out at ten-fifteen.
"Tough way to go through life. No one would choose to be that way....
"Can black-and-white thinkers be helped to think more flexibly? To move from an original way of thiking and adapt to circumstances or perspectives they may not have taken into account? Most definitely . . . so long as adults recognize that it's hard to teach kids to be more flexible by being inflexible themselves."