POSTED ON BEHALF OF DOUG

We are given an endless number of Miracle schools by the reform movement. When you tke a close eye you soon see the problems.

1) Control over admissions

The article admits the school has control over admissions. This is critical. Most ‘miracle schools’ use it to keep out any trouble making or hard to serve students and then say “look at us we do a better job”

2) Longer school day

KIPP and many others use a longer school day. Well public schools can simply make a longer school day but what happens. More marginal students can’t take it so they don’t apply or drift away. Teachers say bloody H E double hockey sticks if you think we will work 3 extra hours without charging you $150. At KIPP it leads to staff turn over at a high rate. Not scalable

3) The article admits the school is NOT scalable.

4) Schools started by dynamic individuals or are reliant on that energy and leadership but it cannot be replicated. There are only a few to go around. It is like a hockey coach saying “watch Sydney Crosby - now do that.”

So what do we learn from ‘miracle schools’ ?

a) they need specialized support to begin and flourish, they can’t do it under the same ‘take all student’ policy as public schools.
b) longer hours is the main typical reform. There are serious scalable problems with longer hours

Conclusion:

Schools like this are of marginal utility at best and are not a model for the reformation of the system.

Often wonder why, the public education systems are very opposed to having schools where all students achieved? Why the public education system are opposed for all students have a solid foundation in the basics, and instead allow a hefty majority of students having gaps in basic knowledge and basic foundation skills? 

Could it be, the public education stakeholders would loose their authority over the students and parents that charter schools, other alternative schools, and vouchers brings to the table. The public education stakeholders are not against the reforms, when they are still the ones in charge, lording over the students and parents. Oops, can’t have extended extracurricular activities, because its not in the contracts. So sorry, little Suzie and Johnnie, you just have to make do with cut and paste programs of the art classes in the regular school day of 9 to 3. Don’t you know, it would create undue financial hardship for the public education system to provide the specialized support and resources?

On the Greenwich Free School site - what an impressive school building when the renovations are finished. Scroll down to the bottom, and check out the before picture. Its what Sarah Jones, one of the co-founders was dealing with back in 2012.
http://www.greenwichfreeschool.co.uk/location.php

Meet the Co-Founder of Greenwich Free School
http://www.spearswms.com/education/31825/meet-the-cofounder-of-greenwich-free-school.thtml

Now after one and all, has finished reviewing the Greenwich Free School web site, time to move unto the reasons why England’s charter school version are so popular with parents and others.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/jan/04/free-schools

I will just copy and paste the first two comments that states the only reason. “So, the key factor in all of these issues is not privatisation, but removing schools from the control of local authorities. Most of these schools are undoubtedly local, and responsive to their parents. But local authorities made a convenient power base for activists, and it is the removal of this power base that has caused almost all of the controversy over free schools. It is, though, good to see co-operation between the LA and at least one of these schools, and it may well be that the existence of an alternative obliges some LAs to shape up.”

The second one - “Exactly - the activists (especially the Lefties) hate anything they can’t control.

Free schools are an excellent way forward: let a thousand flowers bloom. In a way this is very much in the spirit and philosophy of John Stuart Mill and Gove will likely go down as one of the outstanding reforming education secretaries.”

The third comment is priceless, and displays the attitudes and belief systems of the public education stakeholders, of how they really are against the children, and their best interests. On a side note, I had no idea, that in my advocacy for my child, I was seeking control over the public education stakeholders that would reduced their authority towards my child. Here I thought, I was freeing my child from the constraints and restrictions that prevented my child from learning.

Lastly a chat forum - called the Mums Net. The topic of discussion is the Greenwich Free School.
http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/secondary/a1583324-Greenwich-Free-School

Apparently, the parents are over the moon. Check out this comment - “As a parent I have to say I welcome the strict policies they have in place and I absolutely love the fact that the classes are no bigger than 25 and only 4 classes per year. Also (and this is not to be underestimated) there is NO HOMEWORK! They have a very long day but when they leave school they know their day is done and can come home and do whatever they want (which makes family life much easier as there are no arguments!). And therefore weekends are also free for family time.”

Meanwhile in the public schools, its back to anything that goes providing its in the best interests of the educators and lots of busy work that is sent home for homework, by educators who did not have the time to teach it. Apparently, in the public education system, its all scalable but not the Greenwich Free School, and its counterparts.

Ergo, its apparent and so obvious that the public education stakeholders idea of reforms are the ones that do not threatened the legal authority of the public education system and its stakeholders. Its why, the children with reading difficulties are sentenced to poor achievement because turning the poor readers into good readers, it cannot be scaled and threatens the authority and autonomy of the local public school and education stakeholders. Note - according to the Gospel of Doug and the collective - the public education stakeholders.

A good and welcome read.  Thanks.  our schools need more and longer days, and we need the basics taught and lots of discipline.  Poor kids in our public school system!

Dismantle This Mass Education Experiment

*** “ . . . A general state education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another and the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government . . . If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them.” John Stuart Mill on Liberty, 1859

Over 150 years ago John Stuart Mill predicted the consequence of government education — that it would be dominated by who ever was in power.  Today, that power is wielded, not by the elected government, but by the public education industry.  That establishment consists of layers of providers — teacher training institutions, bureaucracies in schools and Ministries, and the teacher unions.

Public education, as most public services, depends on THREE pillars for its existence — policy, producers, and patrons.  The producers, unfortunately, manipulate the politicians and policy people regarding legislation, regulation and funding.  The patrons (parents, students, taxpayers) are not as manipulated but “used” symbolically because they really hold no clout. 

In economics this is called “producer capture”. But, educators claim: “We’re in it for the children.”

The best comeback is made by Professor Richard Elmore: 

*** “I blanch visibly when I hear educators say, ‘We’re in it for the kids.’ This phrase is a monument to self-deception, and, if I could, I would eradicate it from the professional discourse of educators. Public schools, and the institutions that surround them, surely rank among the most self-interested institutions in American society.” http://hepg.org/hel/article/434

Elmore edited the book “I Used to Think… And Now I Think… 20 Leading Educators Reflect on the Work of School Reform (2011).

Presently the words of one of those 20 are now circulating, causing dismay amongst public education circles increasingly coming under the spotlight — from media, from legislators, from patrons and even from their own midst (think Daisy Christodoulou who says she was “misled” by her teacher training). 

So, what’s the second big mantra?  Isn’t it something like this:  Public education is for equity, social cohesion, social justice, or some other guilt-laying bromide!

Larry Cuban, one of those 20, has just republished his views on his blog, inviting fresh comments.  He had said:  “I used to think that public schools were vehicles for reforming society. And now I think that while good teachers and schools can promote positive intellectual, behavioral, and social changes in individual children and youth, schools are (and have been) ineffectual in altering social inequalities.”

It is really sad to read some of the current comments from educators on Larry’s two posts
https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/how-my-thinking-about-school-reform-has-changed-over-the-decades-part-1/#comments

https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/i-used-to-think-and-now-i-think-part-2/

I, however, am dismayed, because neither Elmore nor Cuban sees parent and consumer voices being part of the solution. 

Another activist in the “equity” cause is Ben Levin from OISE.  He definitely does NOT see school-based decision making with parents involved as a promising approach.  He is actively proposing that New Zealand — which has enjoyed over 20 years of devolution — again become more centralized, more top-down governance.  See his article in Phi Delta Kappan on Decentralization http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/11/01/kappan_levin.html

I think the NZ model and the current UK “free schools” approach are definitely the models we should be looking at instead of trying to rejig the mass education models the industry loves to capture.

POSTED ON BEHALF OF DOUG

I also believe students need many more hours even years of school. That is why I support ADK, ADJK and ECE down to age 2 + free post secondary.

If anybody thinks you can extend the school day without paying teachers more at the same rate you are more naive than I thought.

Without the thick mantle of stultifying bureaucratic inertia promoted by the endless internal power struggles of unions vs them, who knows how many schools might be those rare exceptional schools which Mr. Dee so quickly and glibly dismisses as irrelevant.  It it the enormous idealistic energy and creativity which is endlessly sacrificed to “the required order” to survive the system that ultimately is at the root of the rot.  Unfortunately, there is no co-relation between mandated financial security and teaching performance as is the case in most realms of human endeavour. Beyond a point, the formalized quest becomes more of a stifling, form of creative strangulation rather than a source of enlightenment.

Its the other thing that really irks me about the public K to 12 stakeholders. The idea, that having all day care from the age of 2, wrapped around services and early childhood services and do a good job. I bet there be telling a lot of parents if you want something more, go look elsewhere.

My youngest child she was a very busy child between the ages of 2 to 4. This was a typical day 5 days a week.  Nursery school (I called it prep school) for the morning. Arrived back at the home at 11:30, ate lunch at 12:30 after short nap. At 1:00 - one of the two speech therapy session per week, 50 minutes each session. From there, down to the YMCA for another type of an upscale version of a play group and the emphasis is on arts and crafts. It finished up at 3:00, and a trip back to the lobby to either go to Little Tots Gymnastics or swimming lessons while parents sat down and chatted, watching through a window. Back home around 4:30.

All were committed to encouraged my child to communicate verbally, and they worked cooperatively with the speech pathologist. From time to time the speech pathologist would dropped in to observed my child. My youngest child may not have done a lot of talking back then, but she certainly was learning and was well-prepared for entry in JK. By first grade, she could no longer do simple addition and subtraction, nor print her name neatly, and great struggles in reading.

Kindergarten was not the problem, but no matter how accomplished and advanced a child with developmental dyslexia is doing, the instructional practices and education policies, it can make or break a child. Today, in 2013 my child would have been identified as dyslexic at the age of 2 in Ontario by the health professionals, and one additional activity would have been added, lessons on phonemic sounds and words. Rather odd, that in 2013, the public education system maintains that young children cannot be identified as having dyslexia, but are quite willing to test for dyslexia when the children are 10 years old and by then are far behind other children academically.

Does anyone think that the public education system are capable of providing the services and quality pre-schooling & activities that my child had, without it being watered down and one-size-fits-all approaches? 

Does anyone think that the public education pedagogy and education policies, are the type, that maintains the academic and social skills of previous years of the students, and increases the academic and social skills to the next level?

In my opinion, no. Then again, I am just a parent who apparently was asking too much from the public education system, for remediation in the essentials - reading, writing and numeracy. It has become way too easy for the Public K to 12 to labeled children according to their learning difficulties and SES variables without ever testing the children as for the reasons of the difficulties.

On a side note, a couple of weeks ago I read a study about the graduation rates and entry rates to post-secondary. The study was commissioned by the European Union Commission. Of interested, in the European countries who all have free post-secondary, entry into post-secondary are well below 40 % with the exception of Germany, who have surpassed the 40 % mark. In Canada, its at the 50% mark, but even here, entry in university is only 35% up from 27% 10 years ago. The discussions have been centered around the mismatching of skills of the youth to the job market. Whether its free post-secondary or not, it doesn’t see to make a difference to improved the outcomes for employers seeking new graduates with the right set of skills. The discussions have now moved to peering at the K to 12 education system and what role they have played. It should be interesting when the next round of studies come out from the leading international organizations.

Why? Perhaps the public education system and its stakeholders should not have all the authority and autonomy on what will be and what will not be a basic education. Perhaps the recommendations will be for more free schools, charters and vouchers where parents have escaped the yoke of the authoritative powers of the public education system.

I am just saying, because if I had the freedom to choose, my child today, would have fair to good reading, writing and numeracy levels, despite her dyslexia problems. Bonus, I would not have gone through 12 years of hell, fighting a public education system who thinks in the 19th century matrix of knowledge and ideology.

I agree with Frank,that`s why we must start by mandating expertise in emergent literacy in teacher preparedness.At the moment,the professors`s beliefs are disseminated to his willing students.Research is ignored by most of these profs and their personal ideologies,flawed as they may be,are annually and circuitously seeded,sadly,these professors have not been in for of a struggling child for years…

Teacher education needs to refer to human physiology and psychology and Reading…the key to education has to become a large part of the education degree.Right now teachers tell me it`s only 30 hours and they only discuss “different theories”,never,what do I do when the kids don`t learn or what do I do to get optimal results in my classroom.

If we did it right,only 5 % would struggle,a huge difference to what TDSB now has for example..a 50 or 55 % failure rate by grade 3…

Oh yes,I forgot,poor kids in that board so naturally they fail!Brilliant isn`t it?

I wanted to add that looking at TDSB just as an example,there are 133 out of 451schools that have EQAO scores under 60 percent,out of those many are at 30 and 40 percent.

I just wonder why that never makes it into the newspapers.

I apologize for being off topic here.

To confirmed Joanne’s information -  one OISE professor whose research has numerously been cited over the years, and yet has not made much of an impact on reading instruction and increasing the number of students that are accomplished readers.

“Dr. Willows is interested in normal reading and writing processes as well as in the causes of difficulties and disabilities. Her practical work is focused on literacy education in classroom instruction and on reading/writing assessment and intervention for children and adolescents with learning disabilities. Her research involves multidimensional longitudinal studies of the impact of various factors in pre-service and in-service teacher education in the area of literacy. A particular focus of her work at the present time is on knowledge mobilization, putting literacy research into practice through an evidence-informed website and examining uses of these internet resources as a tool for professional development.”
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/aphd/Faculty_Profiles/1545/Dale_Willows.html

“DALE WILLOWS, one of Canada’s leading experts in the area of language and literacy education, is a full professor and program chair of Child Study and Education, a two-year M.A. teacher preparation program at The Institute of Child Study, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. She is an internationally recognized
scholar who has made numerous presentations to groups of educators around the world, and her work has been published in books and articles. She was the only non-U.S. member of The National Reading Panel. She also served as a member of Ontario’s Expert Panel on Early Reading.”
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/balancedliteracydiet/UserFiles/File/Education_Canada_Article_November_2008.pdf

The above link is entitled - REDUCING LITERACY FAILURE THROUGH TEACHER DEVELOPMENT: IMPLEMENTING A BALANCED AND FLEXIBLE LITERACY DIET.

There is hope yet, but it appears that Dale Willows is a lone voice in the OISE and the Ontario Education system for what is really needed to transformed education. Its apparent the public education gurus and the stakeholders are not listening to Willows, or even give her room at the podium.

Its too bad, because the public education stakeholders are fueling the charter schools, other education alternatives and vouchers when they refuse to honour the research and to the point they ignored one of their own, who has stated that around 95 % of children can acquired average and above skills in the 3 Rs.

Continuing OT:  the office in which I worked was near to a downtown school.  Every year this school’s eqao scores were around 10%.  During the nicer weather, every single day I’d see the teachers take the children to the park.  No books, nor pencil cases—just teachers and kids.  The teachers and principal sure didn’t appear to be the least bit interested in improving test scores.  Were the teachers too lazy to bother and would rather just babysit?

Back in my day, having classes outdoors was the norm. We would all sit under the old towering chestnut, maple and popular trees, to escaped the heat of the classroom. If we did walked off the school property, there was a purpose. Such as catching tadpoles from the local creek and pond, or to dig up some clay for the art class, or to skate on the pond, while the homeowner made hot chocolate using fresh cow’s milk and the Baker brand chocolate. Some good,,,,,,, All of it is against the rules…....too dangerous.

By the way Bev, I believed its called Nature Literacy. Somehow getting close and communicated to nature, will somehow motivate children to improve on their reading. Meanwhile, back in my day, we took the tadpoles in the assorted bottles and canning jars back to the classroom to learned about tadpoles in real time and their stages on their way to becoming frogs. Lasted about a week, and then we marched back to the pond to released the tadpoles, so they could grow into frogs. Then we learned another part of the pond ecosystem.

Bev,with the poverty excuse,it means just babysit them.
There is no pressure on schools that score that low to do better.
As much as EQAO identifies the schools that fail to educate students,the system has no accountability tied to it.

Nature literacy?  Well the eqao scores were repeatedly around 10%, so obviously these kids needed systematic phonics and proper instruction in math.  I find it appalling that the superintendents didn’t get after the staff to work harder with the kids.  From what I saw, I gathered that educrats goals are not to teach kids.

Continuing OT:  in the bldg where I worked, there were some working poor whose children attended the downtown school.  During the Harris era, when the teachers went on strike, the parents were afraid to collect the $$ that Premier Harris said belonged to them for babysitting expenses.  The parents who did come in to get the $$ got a hard time from the principal.  I told the parents that I’d go with them to collect the $$ that was rightfully theirs.  I’m sorry to say that my opinion that principal was nothing but a warm body collecting a payck and getting the summers off.  He didn’t seem to give a damn about the welfare of his charges.  He should have been fired years ago, but his superiors were no better.  Ontario’s expensive educational system is a rotten, and it needs to be got rid of.