pobod

Sure sounds like Jay is working very hard to discredit Finland because they do every single thing the opposite of what he wants but get the world’s best results.

Could it be the 5% child poverty rate and even that is not concentrated.?

Could it be zero standardized testing until the very end of school?

Could it be the very short days with project oriented curriculum?

Could it be the demand for 1 or even 2 masters degrees from its teachers?

Could it be that there are zero charters and voucher schools?

Until we know, I believe we should do ALL OF THE ABOVE.

Canada actually has a far better post secondary rate than Finland mainly because Finland has that northern European orientation to high paid skilled trades like Germany.

Doug falls into the same trap, concerning the post secondary rate of Europe. Post-secondary is free, but an European student must qualified to meet the criteria that is set by the post-secondary institutes. The criteria is set by the grades and scores of exit exams at the high school level.

For Finland, they stand at 27 % of students will be selected for admittance to the universities. In Ontario, and the rest of Canada - the criteria is much lower for admittance to post-secondary. Ontario has the highest percentage of students entering university and it stands at the 35 % mark. However, like Finland and other European countries, approximately 50 % of students do not qualified for admittance at any post-secondary because the students do not meet the criteria to qualified for admittance for various reasons. The secondary reason are the seating caps imposed upon post-secondary studies and trades. 

One has to look at the big picture and as in the article, “Once we have valid descriptions of the distinctive operational differences between good and not-so-good schools, controlling for differences in student background and out-of-school factors that are beyond district control, the social science of district reform can move to planned and carefully evaluated interventions.  That is our playbook. That is where we need to be.  I don’t think the path goes through Union City.”

Another analogy that could be shown - The green thumb gardener success of growing tomato plants….......and the not so green thumb gardener of dying tomato plants. Many variables are at play, which one is the nutrients of the soil, bacteria count and the number of earthworms.

Isn’t it always a combination of variables, that can only be arrived at by looking at the big picture???  The successes, the failures and the mediocrity is the only route to arrived at solutions of interventions for the education of children.

In the comment section - “You know Greg, there may be something to that. He was incredibly flexible, very strong, smart, kind, an all around good person. It must be because he could throw a javelin!”

Would we teach all the students to throw a javelin?  Yet, in many cases the education system does just that, arriving at solutions that problem solving skills will increase when children learned to solved using 20 different methods that are not the standard algorithms.

Or the classic example of children will learned to read well in an enriched literacy environment, therefore there is no need of intensive reading interventions. Just the very act of holding the book will transform the poor reader into a good reader. After all, the best and the brightest grade 1 students are very successful in holding their books, reading the content and are motivated to pick up another book. What is rarely discussed in the education circles are all the variables at play between the successful and not so successful students. The whole picture leads to true path of solid achievement for all students, and not just the best and the brightest.

pobod

here is a good article that explains 100% of everything.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/17/public-educations-biggest-problem-keeps-getting-worse/

There is not much to celebrate; only 84% of our high-school students are reading at a minimal functional-literacy level.  http://www.eqao.com/pdf_e/13/Secondary_Highlights_2013_en.pdf

‘Monopoly’ and ‘excellence’ are not words that go together.  Doug echos the self-serving blather of a monopoly school system, staunchly defending the monopoly at the expense of the excellence.  Educators have their lips firmly attached to the public teat, and nothing else matters.

It just adds insult that all shortcomings are blamed on the parents and the kids themselves.

As for Doug’s link -  the reason for low achievement is low-income. Of course it is all based on one and just one measure - the number of school students receiving free or reduced school lunches. If one took a look at the charts, measuring poverty based on the number of students qualified to received free or reduced school lunches is a very poor indicator. Why not turn this around for Finland where all students received free lunches at the Finland schools. Such we assume that there is no low-income people in Finland??  Crazy eh when it comes to the educators who are using low-income as their favourite tool, to blame low achievement unto the backs of the students. In NA, the public education system have taken it one step further, to make education policy based on the social-income status of students. Ergo, as one travels down the income ladder, students received less and less education services that allows access to to the educational opportunities of the public education system. No point in striving in school, if the kid is a poor reader and still counting on his fingers in high school.

Taking a look at Canada - First Nations Children Poverty Rate Around 50 Per Cent
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/06/18/first-nations-children-50-percent-poverty_n_3462808.html

And there is a beauty of a lawsuit making its climb all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. The education system figures in prominently as one of the bad guys. The powers to be in the public education system will fight tooth and nail, as they did in the Moore case just to prevent access to the education opportunities - the public education system is only willing to provide minimum basic education, and everything else, the students and their families are on their own.

“Numbers from Statistics Canada show B.C. has tied with Manitoba for the child poverty highest rate in the country. This is the ninth year in the last decade that B.C. has achieved first place in poorest families. - See more at: http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/2013/07/05/BC-ties-Manitoba-for-highest-child-poverty/#sthash.CERYm5Wj.dpuf

Now the reasons makes far more sense - First Call places the blame for the rising poverty levels on a perfect storm of a high cost of living combined with inadequate wages in the province. Regardless of B.C.‘s economic performance over the years, the advocacy organization says government has failed to adequately address the government’s child poverty problem.”

In Canada, since no government at any level really has an universal program in free or reduced school meals, and that is if the schools have a cafeteria - something that is not a regular feature of most K to 8 schools of the older kind - how does the educrats measured student poverty?? They don’t, because none of them are serious about interventions to reduced the poverty factor. Ergo, the one variable focus is used to mapped out a planned based on ideology and NOT on needs.

If the public education system was serious about it - milk and other food, would be offered at much reduced, deeply discounted prices. In my day going to school in the 1960s, a 1/2 pint of milk was free up to grade 5, and from grade 6, we had to pay 10 cents for the 1/2 pint of milk, and 15 cents for the pint sized milk. I was absolutely shocked when my oldest child was attending grade school starting in 1979,  what had a sticker price and that was all foods and worse yet, charging full retail price and even higher prices as the market would bear. As the decades have gone pass, the operations of school cafeterias and canteens have gone into profit mode.

Then the public education officials and stakeholders have the gall to blame the parents and children for low achievement and the failings of the public school.

As shown in this article - there is multiple factors affecting poverty, and in the same way there is multiple factors affecting school achievement and student achievement.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/04/15/map-how-35-countries-compare-on-child-poverty-the-u-s-is-ranked-34th/

I am inclined to agree that the fault lies with the government policies, services and our social institutes who will pass the social costs and burden to the citizens on the failings of poor government policies and services designed to keep the public sector happy and fat.

It is time to look at the whole picture, but if that was done the public sector would no longer be happy and fat!

pobod

Tom your analysis is far too shallow. No sophisticated observer blame the poor for being poor. Progressives do not blame parents, teachers, students, principals, the blame biz leaders and politicians for poverty. Poverty is not natural, it is created. It can be 5% like Finland or over 20% like the USA. Those are policy decisions. Walmart and Republicans create poverty in the USA.

Poor children do badly in school period that is a fact. Poor children also do very badly in charters and vouchers. Also a fact.

The only serious way for the poor to do we’ll in,school is to mitigate their poverty.

No the education class of the poverty theorists never do come out in black and white language - blaming the people. They used a subtle but very effective sophistry that induces people of low-income to accept their circumstances.  The poverty theorists always do blame the poor for the failures of the schools…...a few thoughts and damning indictments from educators and other experts.

“Students, teachers, and administrators cannot use poverty as an excuse. We have to see through it and teach students how to maneuver around their obstacles. Our optimism becomes their hope.” - See more at: http://www.joannejacobs.com/2013/06/teacher-we-can-help-low-income-students/#sthash.2EoVMVId.dpuf

The Poverty Myth - “Parrett says that low-income students can find themselves pigeonholed. “You’ll hear terms like ‘those kids’ or ‘poverty kids’ from teachers, staff, administrators. That’s how they often get labeled,” says Parrett, co-author of an upcoming book, Poverty and Underachievement: How High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools Lead Their Students to Success. http://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-41-spring-2012/feature/poverty-myth

“The power to change education—for better of worse—is and always has been in the hands of teachers. It is past time for educators to examine the critical role their power plays in the system that is education. It is past time for teachers to assess the soundness of the foundation on which that power rests. It is past time for teachers to exercise that power mindfully and with wisdom and compassion. They owe their students nothing less.”
http://www.teachersmind.com/TeachingInMind.html

Teaching Tolerance web site - http://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-41-spring-2012/feature/poverty-myth

Low Expectations for Low-Income Students
http://whiterosereader.org/2013/06/10/low-expectations-for-low-income-students/

Teachers’ Expectations and Sense of Responsibility
for Student Learning: The Importance of Race,
Class, and Organizational Habitus
http://www.distributedleadership.org/DLS/Publications_files/Diamond Rando,lph, Spillane.  Teachers’ expectations and sense of responsibility for student learning- The importance of race, class, and organizational habitus.pdf

If anything the structure and design of the public education system has built-in mechanisms that allows the education establishment to employed the more subtle forms of soft bigotry and discrimination based on the beliefs and biases of the education class.

Not how Doug uses the global and national data streams to support the low achievement of low-income student…............but assumes that teachers have no differences. In the third link - ” The assumption that every teacher will use this information in the same way and with the same results ignores a critical factor—differences in individual teacher thinking. While theorists address “individual differences” among students, teachers are assumed to be a constant in the educational equation rather than what is arguably the most important variable.”

Something to think about, because as my youngest steadily progress up the achievement chart - the disbelief of the local teachers, the principal and the school board were clearly shown on their faces. Yet they chose to believe the myth that LD children cannot learn and achieved academically. Doug has done the same thing, by looking for evidence that would support the poverty angle - that low-income students cannot learn and achieved academically. What happens in the schools - instead we have teachers that are more willing to erect the barriers of cultural biases and beliefs of the education class in order to ensure the continuity of their poverty theories, and other pedagogical theories that more or less state, the brain is fixed and students cannot achieved unless the external SES variables are fixed.

If one wants to understand, one would have to read the political philosophers and their take on the professional class, which would include the education establishment. For students on the ground, it is no joke, how damaging it is to the psyche of the students, when they are constantly being told by the educators that you are poor or you don’t have the brains for school in 1001 different ways.
The LD children are at the bottom with the low-income students placing second to last. There is some heart rendering stories by parents on the web - they happen to carry the curse of being low-income and having a LD child. Stories on what the public education class will do - fight tooth and nail to prevent students from accessing the educational opportunities that is offer at the schools. The educators really do believe in their heart, that children of lower income and learning differences cannot achieved. The biases run deep in the public education establishment and their refusal to acknowledged the biases, is evidence of their deep biases guiding the education of children.

Poor educational systems perpetuate poverty. 
Regardless of all the rhetoric about how we can’t possibly understand cause and effect, in other words, why some educational systems fail while others succeed, there are bottom lines:  direct instruction and mastery of basics will enable a child to do well in any subject.  No one ever discusses curricula and teaching methods when looking at a school’s performance:  they discuss whether or not to test!  We taxpayers are so caught up in all this edubabble that we can’t see the forest for the trees.  Teaching methods, and curricula are the number one way to determine how well students will do.