SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Will wonders never cease?

We can now add an eighth wonder to the list - today The Globe and Mail endorsed the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party in the coming election. You can read it here.

Make your vote an informed vote

There's a provincial election in Ontario in six days. People for Education have an excellent summary of the various parties' platforms here.   PFE's summary is exceptional (wish we'd done it!).

In addition to PFE's summation, we add the following information from the Ontario Libertarian Party.

• Favours giving principals the power to choose their teachers, believing that schools should be competitive and free from unnecessary oversight by distant bureaucracy.
• Does not favour a centrally-planned curriculum, as it stifles innovation and caters to the lowest common denominator. Competitive Charter schools could develop their own curriculum, making it as rigorous as parents require. Ultimately parents should have the final say in what their children are taught. All children learn at different speeds, and competitive schools will advertise their particular curriculum that will ALWAYS exceed so-called mandatory requirements.
• Favours a policy whereby school funding follows the child (school vouchers).
• Favours the use of commercial standardized test and publication of results. 
• Favours entry standards set by secondary schools.and college/university entrance exams as a signal to schools about what is required for post secondary entry.
• Favours alternative routes to teacher certification.

A very conflicted trustee

GUEST BLOG BY LOU D'AMORE, TEACHER

I recently wrote to my school trustee to ask him about his views re OECTA choosing to march in the gay parade. I was surprised to watch him wiggle and squirm as he tried his best to avoid answering my simple question.

A bigger issue has come out of this. My trustee claims that he did not vote on the issue because he had to claim a conflict of interest - his declared conflict was the fact that he has a relative who is a teacher. He claims that he can't vote on issues that might affect the welfare of teachers.

Is this nonsense true ?????? How can a trustee possibly do their job if it is ?

I wrote the Chairman of the board and got this limp answer:  It is up each trustee and staff member at the TCDSB to state whether they believe they are in a conflict of interest on any matter based on our stated policy.  As they are held individual accountable, they are also individually responsible.  

Really ?????? I knew our politicians were wimps but..............

I have no intention of dropping this here. Any suggestions re next steps to take ?

Also wondering how to use Freedom of Information. I would like to know how each trustee voted on this issue.

Thanks for any help

There’s a new sheriff in town

Internet comments are the new wild west, and we have tried to bring law and order to the comments to this blog several times in the past. Now we're going to try again.

Starting now, Doretta and I will turn back any comments that:

• don't add new information to the discussion;
• don't clearly make their point in the first 50 words;
• are too long; and or
• repeat something the commenter has stated in previous posts.

The purpose of these new rules is to provide a welcoming environment for new commenters. 

PS  You can read my latest Huffington Post article here.

Scaremongering 101

Today, Margaret Wente is writing about the political campaigns being waged by the unions of Ontario policemen, firefighters, and teachers. These unions are naturally worried about Tim Hudak's promise to cut 100,000 public-sector jobs because their unions will lose members and funding, but of course they are not positioning their opposition in terms of the threat to their own well-being but rather spinning it as a threat to the people they serve. For example, the police say that job cuts will endanger public safety.

Our beat being education, let's take a look at what the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association (OECTA) is telling its members in a letter mailed to all of its active and retired teachers. Although OECTA has entitled its campaign "Speak for Children", it spells out the consequences as:

• teachers with little seniority laid off
• occasional teachers waiting in vain for work
• student-teacher ratios increased in all grades, including kindergarten
• special education teachers hoping for an education assistant, a vanishing breed
• all teachers prepping for and administering more standardized tests, including a Grade 8 EQAO test in science
• teachers and students returning to rote learning and the 'basics'

That last bullet (teachers and students returning to rote learning and the 'basics") is a funny one - because the Ontario PC's haven't mentioned teaching methods at all in their campaign. This appears to be an extra boogeyman thrown in to round out all the other scary stuff and seal the deal against the Ontario PC's. Is OECTA reading its teachers' views correctly? Are teachers really so opposed to rote learning and the basics that this is the nail in the Ontario PC's coffin? 

You read it here first

There is a real-life education experiment going on right now in New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina changed all the rules. As of May 28, every single public school in New Orleans is a charter school. There is no longer a school board. There are no longer any neighbourhood public schools. more

So it will be very interesting to see how well this new model works. So far, the evidence is positive, with the graduation rate up 23 percentage points and the pass rate for math and reading up 34 percentage points. If it turns out that the all-charter school model is superior, it suggests that school boards are an expensive anachronism and other jurisdictions ought to think about abolishing them too.   H/T AS

Sunday at the Movies (Teacher Evaluations)

In New Mexico, a new system of teacher evaluations has been introduced, but it is unpopular with teachers who have reacted by burning their evaluations because they weren't glowing enough (get it?). 

Competition makes people competitive

In the US in general and California in particular, the school districts are smaller than in Ontario, meaning that there are way more of them and that it is generally feasible for parents to drive their kids to a school in two or three different districts. This article explains how the Riverside Unified School Distict declared itself a District of Choice, meaning that parents in other school districts could send their kids to a Riverside school without any red tape. As a result of this and some other school choice options (like a science and technology middle school and a virtual school starting at grade 3), the district has attracted almost 1000 new students and reversed its trend of declining enrolment. Roughly 30 other California school districts have followed the Riverside Unified School District in declaring themselves Districts of Choice, and of course none of their neighbours likes the "poaching" of their own students. In fact, one school district, Rowland Unified School District, took Walnut Valley Unified to court - and won!  But generally speaking, the poached districts pretty much have to suck it up and start competing.

Of course in Ontario, the school boards are too big for this scenario. However, in Ontario we have contiguous public and Catholic school boards, along with the interesting anomaly that non-Catholic parents can send their kids to Catholic high schools but not to Catholic elementary schools. So I formed the hypothesis that there would be a wider achievement gap between the province's elementary Catholic and public schools compared to the achievement gap between the secondary Catholic and public schools - due to the greater degree of competition between public and Catholic school boards at the high school level. I compared last year's average grade 3 math EQAO scores of all the public schools with the average grade 3 math EQAO scores of all the Catholic schools and found a difference of 3.96 percentage points. I then compared last year's average grade 9 math EQAO scores of advanced students between public and Catholic school boards, and found a difference of 1.27 percentage points - bearing out my hypothesis.

In both comparisons, btw, the Catholic school boards were superior, with approximately 66% of Catholic students passing the grade math 3 test compared to approximately 62% of public students, and approxiately 82.5% of Catholic advanced students passing the grade 9 math test compared to approximately 81% of public advanced students.

Odds and Ends

My reader tips have been piling up - so today a bit of a hodgepodge.

Education and Skills for Life - an OECD report that emphasizes the critical importance of giving young students a good foundation  H/T EF

Homeschool Domination - some impressive facts about homeschooling  H/T TB

Ontario Math Petition - as an apparent result of public pressure, the NDP and Liberal parties have added math reform to their platforms, 2000 more signatures requested  H/T TM

My latest Huffington Post article

Ontario 2014-2015 Student Grants  H/T TB

Moo

There are a lot of sacred cows in education, and beautifully-decorated classrooms are a good example. This one has been around for a long time - when I went to teachers' college in the sixties, we were actually taught how to decorate our classroom, with special attention to bulletin boards, although there was no mention of how to, say, teach kids to read. And once I was teaching, when visitors came to our classrooms they tended to take our measure on the basis of our decorations. Sometimes you would even be allowed to use your professional development day to work on your bulletin boards. In other words, classroom decorating was really really important.

Now comes a study that suggests that students would learn more if their classrooms were barren. It turns out that decorations are distracting. Go figure.  H/T TB