SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

It’s Just a Matter of Time

So a few weeks ago there was an article in The Globe and Mail about how disruptive technology is changing the food world. It's worth reading because it will open your eyes to how apps can turn an industry upside down seemingly overnight. And not only are these apps transforming the restaurant business, but also of course Amazon and its ilk are getting into the grocery business in a big way. more

It's just a matter of time until technology disrupts the education industry. Click here for an interview with Bill Gates who is on it, having already invested more than $240 million in what he calls "personalized learning". And click here for my Huffington Post article on this topic. Public schools are going to lose their monopoly if they don't pull up their socks - and maybe even if they do.

Thursday at the Movies (More Mole Whacking)

It's really hard/impossible to micromanage huge school boards, and this CTV clip looks at one of thousands of demonstrations of this truth - managing class sizes. The Ontario Minister of Education is huffing and puffing and maybe she will whack the odd mole, but of course for every mole she whacks another 10 pop out of position. Realistically, the only way this thing can work is to give schools money and autonomy and then hold them responsible for results.

Let Parents be Parents

Click here for a National Post column by SQE director Marni Soupcoff that pretty much says it all on the topic of parents who get in trouble with Child and Family Services for letting their kids play in their fenced-in backyard with their mother watching from the window. 

Marni is quite moderate in her comments, just saying she thinks it's okay for kids to play unsupervised. I would go further. I think it's really important for kids to develop independence and the ability to entertain themselves, and that there is such a thing as too much supervision and organization in the lives of today's kids.

Perhaps parents who enroll their kids in a million organized activities should draw the attention fo Child and Family Services instead. (I'm just kidding, of course - I think that Child and Family Services should reserve their scrutiny for the small number of parents who truly are neglectful or abusive.)

Out of the Mouths of Babes

H/T CT 

Mislabelled?

The autism label is quite amorphous. While it always includes difficulties with social interactions and communication and repetitive behaviours, there is a wide variety of manifestations, with "autistic" children behaving very differently one from the other. And therapies that work for some children are ineffective for other children. 

Recognizing that it's not terribly helpful to class all chilren with social difficulties together, a senior clinician scientist at Toronto's Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital named Dr. Evdokia Anagnostou has stepped back and is looking into the possibility that developing new diagnostic criteria might be more helpful. She asks "What if by grouping all ... patients under an autism of ADHD or OCD label, they were missing critical clues about the roots of their symptons? What if they needed to rethink their diagnostic categories?"

Something like 1 in every 63 children is now being diagnosed with autism. more

Sunday at the Movies (Gamification)

Here's a whole new approach to making test prep fun.  H/T TB

Yes, Minister

Politicians come and politicians go, but the staff at their ministries stay and stay, and these staffers generally have their own agenda which they're not inclined to abandon just because some flash-in-the-pan politician is appointed minister for a short time. So the Ontario Ministry of Education is no exception - in fact possibly a poster child for resistance (remember John Snobelen and creating a crisis). This Globe and Mail report mentions three of the latest manifestations of out-of-control ministry staffers - a directive to the province's private schools to use the public-school template for report cards, regulations that would have put 12-month-old babies in toddler rooms, and a shut down of the admission process to the province's demonstration schools. 

Minister Liz Sandals is having a bad month - in addition to having to back down on all three of these issues, she also had to apologize to the teachers' unions for suggesting that teachers were taking more sick days because they're no longer bankable (as if).  H/T TB

Big Unions

You know that the Ontario teachers' unions have too much power when the Toronto Star says that seniority is a lousy way to hire teachers.  And a recent judicial ruling favourable to the unions is going to cost taxpayers a lot of money and increase the unions' power even more. 

A Lesson in Humility

A lot of people have touching faith in the ability of  governments to solve problems and provide competent services. But in my observation, governments tend not to be very good at running programs, in that they quickly become bureaucratic and rigid and start serving the interests of their own staffers. Obviously, we need governments to provide some programs, like for example defence and policing, but I think that generally speaking we should be striving to reduce the extent of government meddling in our lives.

In this vein, I found this column of considerable interest. It concerns a money-is-no-object spending spree in Kansas City, MO schools in the eighties and nineties. Despite the lavish spending and massive effort on the part of all kinds of governmental agencies, things definitely got no better for the students and arguably got worse in terms of racial segregation.

As time passed, a more decentralized approach gradually emerged, including charter schools (41% of Kansas City, MO students now attend a charter school), and things are gradually improving. As the linked-to column concludes, "The lesson from Kansas City for the rest of the nation is one of humility. We often don't know what we don't know and are overconfident that our one great idea is the silver bullet that can turn things around if done by every teacher or every school. We think that we can impose our views and shape the behaviors of people by administrative diktat, even when the people we're working with deeply disagree with us about the proper course of action. The world doesn't work that way, and we must pursue a path that respects that."

Wednesday at the Movies (A Double Standard)

Apparently - not surprising when you think about it - Arabic refugee boys are bullying Canadian kids at a Halifax elementary school. More surprising, the school and the school board and even the media are unwilling to do anything about the problem. I guess this is what happens when political correctness meets unfairness.