SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Unleashing teachers’ potential

Click here for an interesting article about incentivizing employees. There is no mention of the education sector in the article, but the principles are easily extended to schools. 

At present, teachers get paid more if they take additional courses,  stay on the job for a long time, or get out of the classroom by becoming a principal, consultant, or union official. How much their students learn is irrelevant in most jurisdictions. It would take some careful thought, but if we can put a man on the moon we can surely devise ways to reward teachers (and principals) for better academic achievement.

Of course, those devising the pay scheme would have to care about student achievement, and at present I'm not sure any of them do....   H/T JE

L’Etat C’est Moi

A controversy is raging in Quebec because the new education minister sends his children to private school. more  

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with this. After all, Quebec's private schools are partially subsidized by the government - giving them status as part of the government's network of education options. And in any case, parents would be remiss if they let political considerations interfere with their decision-making when it comes to their children's well-being. For example, no one insists that the children of tobacco executives smoke.

But I do see something very wrong with politicians that on the one hand restrict their citizens' choices when it comes to their children's language of instruction or religious instruction but on the other hand send their own children to English-speaking and/or religious schools. Lots and lots of politicians do this - for example, Lucien Bouchard and Jacques Parizeau. 

Does anyone know whether the private school that the new Quebec minister of education sends his kids to is English-speaking or religious?  H/T TB

Be careful what you ask for….

The Ontario Government has introduced a new scheme whereby students from low-income families will not have to pay any tuition fees for their post-secondary education.  more

This six-year-old School for Thought posting suggests that this is a bad idea and the students will pay for the government's mistake.

Sunday at the Movies (Breaking Bad Habits)

This is not about education per se, but it definitely is educational................

There, I’ve said it!

As we watch the Donald Trump madness in the US, I - like most normal people - have been wondering what his appeal is. This article offers a plausible answer - people are tired of political correctness. 

"Liberal elites may try to conceal some of these “truths: Mexican immigrants are wrecking the country; Muslim immigrants are potential terrorists. But conservative elites conceal others: Trade deals destroy American jobs; big donations affect government policy."

The linked-to article then riffs on the politically-correct notion that most high school graduates should be encouraged to try post-secondary education. Of course, the hard truth is that less than half - perhaps as few as a third - of high school graduates are adequately prepared for higher education. The same goes for Canada, of course, and this is reflected in the high drop-out rates (in some Canadian schools, nearly half of freshman fail to graduate). 

At the risk of being politically incorrect and inviting comparisons to Donald Trump, I declare that I believe post-secondary education should be reserved for those who are adequately prepared for it - and its inevitable corollary, students should be required to write common external examinations at the end of grade 12 and post-secondary institutions should be allowed to use student results in making admission decisions. 

Tall poppy syndrome

TK writes in from Regina, SK about the local school board's decision to phase out its International Baccalaureate IB) high school program. more

Education leaders are justifying their decision by saying that the IB is too expensive and they will substitute the much-less-expensive and equally-good Advanced Placement (AP) program. Against this, TK says the AP program has been mandated to have identical programming at all eight public high schools and thus it is expected to be much watered down.

Education leaders' second justification is that only eight students had pre-registered for next year's IB program. They fail to mention, however, that this was the direct result of their arbitrary relocation of the program from the two high schools where it was thriving to a downtown high school that has mostly lower-achieving students who are less interested in the IB.

As far as I'm concerned, it's déjà vu all over again. I can't count the number of times I've witnessed the death of a popular high-achieving program or school because it made the other schools look bad.

Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it

This poster was sent in by CD. It appeared in the latest edition of Professionally Speaking, the magazine of the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT). 

When I first became aware of the problems with education back in 1988, I have to say most of these "2016" trends were already in full swing. Project-based learning? Collaborative Learning? Self-Directed Learning" Play-Based Learning? Experiential Learning? They were all being used whole hog and they were all seriously failing their students. And of course this is still true almost 20 years later.

This obliviousness to history is typical of education leaders. How in the world can they still be breathlessly suggesting their excitement over failed fads that are at least 20 years old? 

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine a poster in the OCT magazine that pants over trends towards systematic phonics, teacher-led instruction, drill and kill, and very structured classrooms. It's just not going to happen because it doesn't get educators' juices flowing.

The fact that it would get parents' juices flowing is irrelevant.

King Canute and the Baltimore School Board

Click here for a story from Baltimore that illustrates what seems to me upside-down thinking regarding conventional publicly-funded schools and charter publicly-funded schools. The story concerns a Montessori charter school in a "struggling but gentrifying" neighbourhood that is so good that it is attracting students from wealthier neighbourhoods. By law, the school has to decide admissions by lottery, meaning that something like 90% of its students come from outside the area. 

The school's founder wants to be able to accept more local students - she's already asked the city for permission twice - but the Baltimore school board doesn't like this idea because it is worried that the nearby conventional publicly-funded school will lose students and have to close its doors. And, as it happens, the Baltmore school board is in the business of trying to protect its conventional schools from its charter schools - it gives the charters less money, arguing that giving the charters more money will result in under-funding for the conventional schools.

I expect that if the Baltimore school board was instead the Baltimore whale-bone corset company, it would be pulling out all the stops in an effort to force its citizens to continue to wear corsets. But times change, disruption and competition happen, and the smart thing is to accept the new wave and try to stay on top of it. The Baltimore school board should be embracing charter schools, helping them in every way possible, while at the same time leveraging their competition to galvanize its conventional schools into improving their service.

Smorgasbord

My reader tips file overflows. 

ADHD Does Not Exist - guaranteed to make you think   (see also Why French Kids Don't Have ADHD)  H/T DW

A Pilot Program to Pretest and Post-test Ontario Post-Secondary Students  H/T DW

Schoolwork, Advocacy Place Strain on Student Activists - suggesting that schools' well-meant efforts to radicalize their students may backfire on the students  (see also Ontario's $1.35 million new program to build environmentally-responsible citizens)   H/T JD

The Learning Styles Myth Debunked on the Back of a Napkin - adding modalities benefits some students without hurting any   H/T JG

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world   H/T TB

Na, na, na, I can’t hear you

Although I usually find myself in agreement with Margaret Wente, Saturday's column constitutes an exception. In it, Margaret refers to a recent UK study that suggests that both intelligence as well as "non-cognitive components of school success include traits such as self-efficacy and motivation, curiosity, emotional intelligence, conscientiousness, well-being and prosocial behaviour" are substantially heritable, and together they essentially determine school success. The UK study, it is important to stipulate, examined students who had attended publicly-funded schools that are dominated by the currently-fashionable child-centred methods.

I disagree with Margaret because she appears to be assuming that the students' schools were doing everything possible to help their students succeed but failed because they ran up against an impenetrable genetic barrier. For my part, I believe that there is much schools can do to mitigate genetics - things like systematic phonics, direct and sequential instruction, practice, high expectations, structure, and so forth - but for some reasons educators are choosing not to use these measures. I believe that the methods used by most modern schools essentially make no difference to their students' lives - raising the question of why we even bother with school if it is so ineffectual. As Andrew Nikiforuk says in the title of one of his books, "If learning is so natural, why am I going to school?"

Until such time as schools bring in 'unnatural' approaches, I think the jury is still out on the question of whether or not schools can make a difference. It may be that more traditional approaches will help all students equally and do nothing to mitigate the achievement gap - but I don't think so. I think traditional approaches will disproportionately help disadvantaged children, and I would love to find out!