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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Kudos to the District School Board of Niagara
GUEST BLOG BY JO-ANNE GROSS, FOUNDER, REMEDIATION PLUS SYSTEMS
In 2009, I presented Remediation Plus to the special education department of the District School Board of Niagara. Psychologists, superintendents, speech pathologists, and special education teaching coordinators were present. They call this a "wrap-around team".
Since that day, we have trained nine teachers in a pilot program, and then expanded the program to 110 schools and trained a Remediation Plus Reading Specialist for identified students in each of the schools. The speech pathologist became a Remediation Plus Master teacher who trains and coaches all the staff.
Two years ago, we began a discussion with the superintendent of curriculum for the early years. The idea was to bring in early reading intervention for grade 1 kids at risk. so that we would encounter fewer remedial students later on. Because some of the schools in this school board are in very poor neighbourhoods, there were quite a few children in this category. We now have 20 primary classrooms with Remediation Plus-trained teachers doing multisensory explicit Orton Gillingham and phonological awareness training as a core program. Each classroom has 20-25 students with either a parent assistant or a teaching assistant.
A look at the board's EQAO scores over five years attests to their commitment to improved literacy. The board has been willing to commit money and training to improve the outcomes for their students, and it has paid off. Sometimes, we forget that there is hope. Many many great people work in school boards, and some of them can be agents of change for generations of children to come.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Neuroplasticity)
Once you start, you won't be able to stop viewing this clip in which Toronto's Barbara Arrowsmith-Young tells how she overcame her own severe learning disabilities, and by extension how everyone can overcame his or her own learning difficulties. According to Barbara Arrowsmith-Young, there are no unteachable children, just untaught children.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Dam Busters Needed
In yesterday's discussion about seniority hiring, Doug explained that seniority hiring provisions are necessary to prevent nepotism (as in principals hiring family and friends). Some cynical persons might reflect that all unions like seniority provisions, for reasons of their own, and that if it quacks like a duck, etc. The same cynical persons might wonder why, if nepotism is the problem, the powers that be didn't simply make a rule against hiring friends and relatives. However, be that as it may, seniority hiring provisions are only a small part of a very large picture.
The larger picture is that of an entrenched bureaucratic structure that has evolved and grown and consolidated itself over many decades, such that this structure is now practically written in stone. The structure includes seniority hiring, yes, but also general acceptance of out-of-field teaching assignments, disgracefully-inadequate teaching pre-service and in-service training, wretched textbooks and faddish teaching materials, a pay and promotion system that ignores merit, disgraceful testing and reporting, trustees who are laughing stocks, a shoddy curriculum, bad teachers who can't be fired, special education that sucks, and the list goes on and on.
These unfortunate features of public education are very well entrenched. Competition is the only force I know of that has the ability to dislodge them. If public schools had to offer better service lest they lose students (and the associated funding) to competitors, then suddenly it would become possible to fix many of the above problems.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Whacking the Mole of Seniority-Based Hiring
The Ontario government is getting flack for its convoluted seniority-hiring regulations, and even the Premier is now admitting there are problems. more Trouble is, she appears to be thinking in terms of looking for ways to tweak the regulations (translation - make them even more convoluted).
The Conservatives, bless their hearts, are holding out for rules that let principals choose their staff. To most of the world, this looks like a sensible proposal, one that makes it possible for school leaders build a team with a common vision. Dollars to doughnuts, however, the Conservatives' proposal will get short shrift, and we will end up with even more Byzantine regulations that will force educators to find new work-arounds and in the end will change nothing.
The comments to the Globe and Mail article are worth reading. The high level of cynicism about the Ontario education system is quite alarming, and this is G&M readers!
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Time to look at the elephants in the room
I'm quoted in today's Globe and Mail saying that it's important that students get a good grounding in literacy and math in the early grades (here). My comments are borne out by another article in the same paper about the head-scratching going on in Ontario education circles over declining math scores and the tendency of students who did poorly on the grade 3 and 6 math tests to do poorly on the grade 9 math tests (go figure).
So far the favourite candidates for students' math problems seem to be poorly-trained teachers (necessitating a second year of teacher training) and teachers with low expectations of their students. So far, I have not seen any discussion of the involvement of the curriculum, the teaching methods, the use of calculators, and the textbooks - although you would think these would be obvious possibilities.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
You Have to Laugh or Else You’ll Cry
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
One size doesn’t fit all parents
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute surveyed American parents and found that nearly all of them wanted "schools with a solid core curriculum in reading and math, an emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, and the development in students of good study habits, strong critical thinking skills, and excellent verbal and written communication skills". But some parents also wanted "specializations and emphases that are only possible in a system of school choice". The study divided parents into six groups, the largest being the "Pragmatists" (36%), followed by "Jeffersonians", "test-score hawks", "multiculturalists", "expressionists", and "strivers".
You can read more about it and take a short quiz to see what group you belong to here.
The point is: parents want different things from their children's schools and so there need to be differentiated schools for parents to choose among.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
A Clear Conflict of Interest
We have previously posted blogs about the enormous unfunded teacher pension liabilities that loom over school boards (and governments), but so far it's kind of like the weather - everybody complains about it but nobody does anything about it.
Education Next has an interesting explanation of why nothing is being done about unfunded teacher pension liabilities. Unfortunately, the fall issue isn't online yet, so all I can do is quote a few relevant sections of the article, which is entitled "the School Administrator Payoff from Teacher Pensions". It is important to understand that most teacher pensions are "defined benefit" pensions, which "provide retirees with a guaranteed lifetime benefit, the annual value of which is typically based on number of years of service and average salary during the final years of their careers.... DB plans remain the norm in the public education sector....This is a clear area where the public and private sectors are on opposite trajectories."
"There are a variety of reasons DB pension plans have persisted in public education. The most obvious factor is strong teacher support. Unquestionably, teachers unions have vigorously advocated for generous DB retirement benefit plans.
"A largely overlooked factor is that educational administrators, the 'stewards' of the system, are enrolled in the same plans as teachers. This is typically not the case in large private-sector firms, where senior managers have their own retirement benefit plans....The rule structure in educator pension plans, combined with the career-cycle timing of teachers' promotions into administrative positions, results in senior management in K-12 education enjoying the largest net benefits from these plans....
"In the area of teacher pension reform, it is important to recognize that school administrators reap the largest net benefits from the current system, which has rising costs and clear inefficiencies. Given the powerful incentives that are in place, there is no reason to expect school administrators or their organizations to support reforms that would provide a more modern and mobile retirement system for your educators, like those found in nearly all other professional employment settings. On the issue of pensions, labor and management are on the same side of the bargaining table."
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Free Educational Video Sites)
This is choose-your-own day, and you ought to be able to find something to your liking via this website. Perhaps our readers can tell us about a goodie they found? For my part, I nominate the video here (through learner.org), which deals with gypsy moths and exponential growth.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Empowering Students
GUEST BLOG BY TOM BEREND, SQE DIRECTOR
Somewhere in Ontario, a school board that doesn't yet want to be named is taking baby steps towards adopting Empower Reading. Huge kudos to Pamela Cairncross, an awesome, relentless parent who has been pushing hard on this for years.
Empower Reading is based on the research of Dr Maureen Lovett and her team of researchers at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. It is a comprehensive toolbox of research-based strategies and training materials focusing on accurate word recognition using phonological skills, synthetic phonics, and morphology. Empower stands in sharp contrast to whole-language programs such as Reading Recovery that encourage guessing at words from context.
Five years ago, Pamela realized that her son was struggling with reading in grade 1. Her son's school told her not to worry and provided him with the usual accommodations, but it was clear that his teachers were not trained on reading disabilities and he would not get any actual help in learning to read. Pamela started looking around.
Through the International Dyslexia Association Ontario Branch (ONBIDA), Pamela learned about systematic approaches to reading instruction. She worked on phonics with her son at home, and helped him master reading. And then she attended a presentation by Maureen Lovett at Queen's University in early 2012, and heard about Empower Reading. It was a relevation.
Empower was like her home program, but for a whole classroom including training for the teachers. She contacted the principal of the local high school, and urged her to offer the program. This is not an appeal that school principals are typically receptive to, but Pamela was relentless. She and her husband even offered to help pay for it. The principal investigated the program, and courageously took the plunge to put in a pilot program for grades 9-12. It was a huge success, and so it is being rolled into grades 7-8 starting next week
But Pamela wasn't finished yet. Next she went after the school board. Pamela met with trustees, bombarded everyone she could find with information and testimonials, made presentations, and wrote letters. The board had already been talking to Sick Kids. Pamela, with the support of the principal, increased the pressure and momentum.
And so now this school board is making plans to start rolling out Empower Reading this year, perhaps eventually going board-wide. It is a major undertaking, a huge investment in the students, and so clearly the right thing to do. We'd love to applaud them publicly, but they are still working through the details and asked us not to.
Perhaps the trustees would have done this eventually anyhow. However, we like to think that a determined and single-minded parent can move mountains.