Society for Quality Education

Vol. 21. June 2012. ISSN-1201-215

FROM THE PRESIDENT

All politics is local, and this is especially true for those of us who live in the Waterloo riding recently vacated by Elizabeth Witmer. If the Liberals can win our bye-election, they will regain their majority status. With labour strife around the corner, due to the expiration of teachers' contracts this summer, and spending cutbacks on the way, due to the province's huge deficit, education is poised to take centre stage. A Liberal majority is potentially a game-changer.

SQE will be front and centre in the fierce education debates soon to come. We're already in the news several times a week, giving your side of the story for a change, and we expect our media requests to at least double in the near future. Be sure to look for Doretta on the radio, on television, and in the newspapers. If you like what she has to say, you can show your support by making a donation to the Society for Quality Education. Click here to find out how.

Regards, Malkin

ASK AUNT MALKIN

A veteran of the school wars herself, with the scars to prove it, Malkin Dare has had lots of experience dealing with education problems. If you want some been-there-done-that advice, give Malkin a call at 519-884-3166 or e-mail her.

Question

I have a five-year-old daughter whom I would like to teach to read. Lately, I have been seeing ads on TV for a reading program called LeapFrog that looks like a fun and effective way to teach kids to read. Do you recommend LeapFrog? Elizabeth, Parry Sound

Answer

Judging by what I see on the LeapFrog website, this reading program might work okay for many beginning readers, but it doesn't look sufficiently well-organized or systematic for the approximately 40% of children who find reading difficult. There is also the issue of expense. LeapFrog sells a bewildering array of books and gadgets, and at $10-$20 per item, the bill would quickly mount up. On the other hand, one of our board members reports that the DVD's are good for teaching young kids the simple letter/sound correspondences.

To be honest, I wasn't too surprised by what I found on the LeapFrog site. There are now hundreds of entrepreneurs who have have rushed in to exploit the educational void in Canada. Their programs and services look very appealing, but most of them betray a profound misunderstanding of the way children learn. It's a jungle out there!

In fact, there is rarely a need to spend hundreds of dollars teaching and remediating kids, as a number of educational good Samaritans have made available several very effective but low-cost programs, as summarized on our schoolproofing microsite. Some of the online programs, for example Starfall, are excellent - and completely free of charge!

Regards, Aunt Malkin

Birdies for Stairway to Reading

If you enjoy golf and want to help the Society for Quality Education keep our free online resource, Stairway to Reading, available, you ought to pledge Birdies for SQE.

Charity begins on the golf course at the Manulife Financial LPGA Classic (June 20-24, 2012) on the Grey Silo Golf Course near Waterloo, Ontario. You have an opportunity to make the Society for Quality Education a big winner by participating in the Birdies for Charity program .

It is expected that approximately 800 birdies will be made by the LPGA Tour players during the 2012 tournament. Every birdie made by an LPGA player means more support for struggling young readers. Simply make a pledge of $0.02 or more per birdie or make a flat pledge of $15 or more and your tax-deductible (in Canada) pledges will ensure that we can keep providing our online learning resources free of charge so that struggling children can keep reading!

We will receive every single penny of the donations generated on our behalf! Additionally, you have a chance to win great prizes when you pitch in to help us!

To make it even more exciting, the Manulife Financial LPGA Classic is giving you the chance to “Guess the Birdies” that will be made during the tournament by the LPGA Tour Players! The donors who guess the correct amount of birdies are entered into a drawing to win a TaylorMade RBZ Driver! In addition, SQE is offering a limited number of free "any-day" tickets as a prizes for our top pledgers!

Help struggling readers become a big winners by pledging online HERE! The deadline is coming fast - so don't delay!

You don't have to love golf to know how much Stairway to Reading can make a difference for student success. Thanks in advance for your support!

MAILBAG

A Bouquet for Publicly-Funded Schools

My husband and I have been used to a lackluster school system ever since our eldest started kindergarten, but now for the first time we are tempted to stand up and cheer for an excellent publicly-funded program. Click here for information about a high school robotics program that is being offered at our 16-year-old son's Catholic Board school. My son and his teammates have been building/programming a robot this year, and they attended the exhitiion/conference in Toronto in March. It was intense! They spent several hours several days a week for months, and they even had mentors - a couple of successful high-tech firms sent in reps to assist and inspire. I have to say First Robotics is an excellent program (the three R's, though, he had to learn at home). Ottawa, ON

A Brickbat for SQE

Ontario teachers work very hard and diligently in the face of shortages, lack of respect from people such as SQE, and mean-spirited attacks randomly issued. Everyone is such an expert on the subject of education. At a time when there should be more funding put into education, you and your kind are screaming for cuts. Shame on you. Look at the outdated texts in schools, the shortages of computers, the paucity of technological equipment, the poorly-stocked school libraries, the state of school buildings, the inadequate playgrounds, the number of hungry children, and so forth. The education system in Ontario in no way reflects a province which is dedicated to nurturing its children and their learning. Stop teacher bashing and start focusing on what we can do to help children become learners. Calling your organization a society "for quality education" is a farce. There is no quality in a position dedicated to clawing away what is already threadbare. Hamilton, ON

Additional Resources for Parents

I would like to recommend two websites for parents who are teaching their children to read and do math. The first is the Bricks & Mortar program, which is excellent for teaching phonics. This site also offers fraction stories and multiplication worksheets. The other website is Precision Reading, an excellent and very reasonably-priced program for developing readers. Students very much enjoy this program, because they can graph their results and see their progress, with the result that they are motivated to practise more. I have used both of these programs very successfully with students of all ages and types. I have also set up short parent workshops for summer reading practice. Ottawa, ON

Online Schools

We have tried several online schools in our family. The two that were Ontario online schools were bad to very bad. We had nothing but trouble with both the instruction itself and with the administration of the programs. They seemed like fly-by-night operators but, when I complained to the Ministry, I learned that they were duly registered and considered to be up to snuff. On the other hand, we used several online schools out of the US which were far better. It happens that they are all run on the Classical Christian model - the Regina Coeli Academy and the Veritas Press Academy. The teaching at Regina Coeli changed my son from the standards he had grown to expect in the Ontario school system to real academic standards. Veritas Press Academy taught all of our children in some subjects: they offer Saxon Math and Shirley English, as well as a little-known course for 10-12-year-olds on memory skills (blows my mind how good it is). These online schools use real live (and dedicated) teachers, as opposed to simply posting badly-explained textual content on the school, as the Ontario online schools do. London, ON

Extreme Frustration

There was a letter to the editor in the last newsletter from a Toronto community college instructor who was exasperated by being asked to cope with an emotionally-volatile student. I am assuming that the student is on the autism spectrum, and I'm sure the student would have preferred not to have been born with autism - and the instructor not to have such individuals in his or her class. These wishes do not help anyone in the here and now, though. Do we deny an education to the autistic individual? Do we deny professional satisfaction to the instructor? Hard call. Perhaps this autistic student will be one of those high-functioning autistics who goes on to win a Nobel Prize. Perhaps if this instructor finds continued satisfaction on the job, he or she will go on to positively influence a generation of students. If the situation is not somehow resolved, however, everyone risks losing out. Caledon, ON

Reading Rescue

I am involved in a literacy program in Bluewater. I work with Linda Soehner who developed a program called Reading Rescue Ontario. This is an amazing program, which I have been implementing in my school for the past five years with lots of success. As the vice principal of my school, I do assessments, train new volunteers, and organize the program. It yields fantastic results and is volunteer-friendly. I would love to show others how we implement the program with struggling readers, and I hereby pledge time for inservice and training for anyone who is interested. Markdale, ON

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

The other day, I was driving to a bridge tournament with a new acquaintance - a fellow who had emigrated from Romania when he was in his early twenties. Out of the blue, having no knowledge of my interest in education reform, he said, "You know, there were a lot of things wrong with Communism, but some things were better in Romania than in Canada - for example, the schools." It turned out that my new friend and his Romanian wife had been gobsmacked by how little his children were expected to achieve in their public schools, and they found the schools' service so poor that they felt compelled to tighten their belts so they could afford private schools for their kids.

It so happens that SQE has a couple of other Romanian immigrants among its supporters. Both are outraged at how low the education standards are in Canadian schools. According to them, by the time children reach grade 8, Canadian kids are on average at least three grades behind Romanian children.

Quoting from one of the other Romanians: "In talking with other Romanian immigrants, we discovered the magnitude of Canada's education disaster. All of them are deeply involved in their children's education - reteaching the lessons, assigning homework, providing feedback. When we went back to Romania, we learned that Canada's calamity is old news there. There are articles in Romanian papers all the time, with people describing the catastrophe taking place in Canadian schools. Some Romanians read these reports and actually change their minds about moving to Canada!

This fellow laughs when he hears Canadian educators complaining that they don't have enough money. As with the Olympics, where Romanian students excel despite a training budget that is a tenth of Canada's, the Romanian education system manages to educate all of its students to a very high standard - despite a budget that is far less than the amount spent on education in Canada.

Few Canadians realize how poor their schools are because this is all they have ever known. To Canadians, low standards are normal. But other countries - China, India, Eastern Europe, Asia, even some South American countries - are graduating millions of highly-trained workers. In a world that is increasingly globalized, these workers are competing in a very real sense with Canadian workers. Guess who's going to win?

I'll end with another quote from one of our Romanian friends: "We love Canada and we want to stay. We don't want to have to send our kids back to Romania to get a decent education (as many immigrants do). We don't want to watch Canada slip into third-world status. My family, and many others in the Romanian community, are prepared to do anything we can to help the education system improve. Please - listen to our voices before it's too late."

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

You know what we think, pretty much, so now it's your turn to tell us what you think. This month's poll question asks what you think of your local schools and invites you to explain why. We're really interested in your comments. To participate, click here and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

BOOKS OF INTEREST

A Chance to Make History: What works and what doesn't in providing an excellent education for all. Wendy Kopp.

Wendy Kopp is the founder of Teach For America, an organization that seeks to eliminate educational inequality by recruiting recent university graduates and professionals to teach in low-income classrooms for two years. With their energy and dedication, these teachers are proving over and over again that disadvantaged kids can succeed in school. Thirty years ago, the prevailing assumption in educational circles was that socio-economic circumstances determined educational outcomes. Twenty years ago, this belief was starting to be challenged by a few examples of teachers and schools that were changing the trajectories of their low-income students. Today, there are too many schools like this to count. Knowing that low-income children can succeed in school and fired up by their sense of injustice, Teach For America alumni are now pushing the frontiers of educational reform. The excerpt (pp 73-74) tells a little bit about one school like this.

"As I was working on this book, I had the opportunity to visit one of the Mastery schools in Philadelphia. The Mastery Network is one of the forces behind the recent proliferation of schools that are attaining transformational results in that city. I visited the Shoemaker campus - a school that in 2006 had been a failing institution, with 16 percent of seventh graders proficient in math and 20 percent in reading. The Mastery Network, a charter management group that specializes in 'turning around' failed schools, came in and took over the campus. The school was repainted and small structural changes were made in the building's design, but, more important, Mastery brought to the campus the same lessons we are learning from all the most successful schools across the country.

One of Mastery's students - a young woman from the neighborhood around the school who had been a student on the campus before Mastery took over - gave me a tour. 'We used to come to school to have fun and hang out, ' she said, describing the campus before the Mastery Network's founder, Scott Gordon, and his team took over. 'Kids would come to school and get searched, and there were lots of fights. Now it is completely different - there are roles and responsibilities for us, there's more discipline, and the ways teachers teach - they really care if we get it.'...

On every measure, Mastery's students are dramatically outperforming student averages across the district. After Mastery assumed management of its schools, without a change in the student population, test scores increased an average of 52 percentage points per subject in every grade, while violence dropped 80 percent and student retention increased dramatically. Mastery schools have actually closed the achievement gap in eighth grade math, and two campuses have closed the achievement gap in reading. In 2009, 100 percent of the graduating class was accepted to college. Mastery students have received over $2 million in scholarships.

Teachers Matter: Rethinking how public schools identify, reward, and retain great educators. Marcus A. Winters.

This book starts with the well-accepted premise that teachers are important and that teacher quality varies enormously. Fortunately, according to the author, the revolution in the ability of statisticians to use empirical research to measure teacher effectiveness means we are now in a position to identify good and bad teachers and use the data to prevent potentially-bad teachers from entering the classroom or remove them before they become entrenched. The same data make it possible to identify excellent teachers, paying them more and placing them in lead teacher positions that allow other teachers to be mentored. The excerpt (pp 1-3) discusses the enormous significance of recent advances in the availability of quantitative data measuring student performance.

In his 2003 book, Moneyball, Michael Lewis explained how in recent years the Oakland A's managed to post one of the highest winning percentages of any team in Major League Baseball despite consistently having one of its smallest payrolls. The A's trick, it turns out, was a data-driven assessment for identifying players who would contribute to a team's success. Instead of relying on the traditional subjective analysis of baseball lifers and the usual array of official statistics, the team's general manager, Billy Beane, hired a group of numbers geeks to develop statistical models that could better predict a player's ability to produce runs in the future. Beane's insight, which was already percolating among baseball outsiders, was that a team with better information about player quality has an advantage on the field. Data analysis didn't ensure you'd win the World Series, but, all else being equal, it gave you a better opportunity to do so.

In hindsight, it's surprising that the smart people working in baseball before Beane came along thought that scouting reports correctly identified the best players. Scouts' evaluations were often based on little more than viewing a few of a player's at bats. Nonetheless, for little more reason than clinging to tradition, clubs simply did not bother to improve upon these clearly incomplete measures of a player's worth for many decades. Failure to distinguish correctly between the most and least effective players cost teams tens of millions of dollars each year as they overpaid for mediocre talent.

As in baseball, many features of the current system for employing public school teachers seem reasonable on the surface. For example, it seems self-evident that experienced teachers and teachers who have earned advanced degrees would be more effective than their junior colleagues.... There are limits to how well subjective observation can answer questions like the above. Our eyes are not able to see everything that makes one teacher more effective than others. Objective analyses with quantifiable results are far better at producing answers to those questions - and many others.

We are in the midst of an empirical revolution in education policy. The new widespread availability of quantitative data measuring student performance has allowed us to answer a variety of questions that we couldn't begin to answer before. The role quantitative analysis plays in explaining our world has increased at a rapid pace in the past several decades. The power of modern computers increases our ability to store and analyze information, and several fields in the social sciences have moved in the direction of quantitative analysis in order to better describe our world. Though there is already an established history of quantitative research in many fields, its use in understanding relationships within schools is not yet twenty years old.

This influx of empirical research in education policy provides us with truly game-changing information about the effectiveness of the policies that govern the current school system. It turns out that our eyes have been lying to us: many assumptions that we have taken for granted about our public schools and public school teachers have been false.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

Readers may have heard of TED (Technology, Education, Design), and their videos are terrific. Now TED has started TED-ED, an amazing series of educational videos on a variety of topics, with back-up resources for educators - including the ability to customize the lessons.