Society for Quality Education

Vol. 21, No. 3. September 2012. ISSN-1201-215

FROM THE PRESIDENT

It's back-to-school time, and in Ontario the rhetoric is flying fast and furious as the government and the education unions duke it out. What with all the rhetoric, it's hard to know what's really going on unless you're paying very close attention. Fortunately, we at SQE are paying close attention. SQE's executive director Doretta Wilson is doing a fantastic job of giving journalists the low down.

If you appreciate Doretta's efforts on your children's and grandchildren's behalf, you can show your support by making a donation to the Society for Quality Education. Click here to find out how.

Regards, Malkin

SQE ACTIVITIES

We will be releasing four mini-videos into the social media later this month. Be sure to watch for them.

Our popular blog, School for Thought, now in its third year, is approaching the 3 million hits mark.

Sometime soon, we will be releasing our third remedial program for parents - Stairway to Grammar.

Work begins this fall on a scholarly analysis of why Edmonton students learn more than Calgary students. Could it have something to do with the fact that Edmonton students enjoy significantly more school choice?

Our Sunshine on Schools website is constantly being updated. Here you can find out all kinds of shocking information about Ontario school boards.

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 at [email protected].

Question

My question is about my son who is turning eight in September and will be going into grade 3. He is slightly behind in reading and his writing barely readable. My son can be neat when he tries, but his spelling is very weak. He can read vowel sounds, but cannot write appropriate vowels or consonant blends in words. My son was delayed in his speech development, which I think affected his reading/writing, but his speech is fine now except for /r/ sounds which we're working on. Padmal, Toronto

Answer

I would be able to give you more informed advice if you were to give your son the diagnostic test in Stairway to Reading and report back to me. I'm wondering how much your son's reading ability owes to his ability to memorize words. Aunt Malkin

Padmal's Response

I gave the diagnostic test to my son and I was surprised. He made mistakes on the nonsense words in the third line of Part 1 (meaning he was unable to read wez, quax, and yev). Padmal

Aunt Malkin's Response

It sounds as if your son is an accomplished memorizer. He should start at Lesson 5 of Stairway to Reading, and your emphasis should be on nonsense words. You will have to adapt some of the exercises for this. I would be happy to give you ideas if you would like. And when you get to Lesson 13, let me know and I will make suggestions as to how you can emphasize spelling from there on. While you're at it, you can greatly improve your son's printing if you insist he holds his pencil correctly and forms the letters properly and legibly. Here's a link to an article that explains how to do this.

Regards, Aunt Malkin

MAILBAG

No-Zero Policies

The slight improvements in Ontario test scores might be part of the pattern observed by some teachers in the secondary system where no student is allowed to fail. Many teachers go along with this practice, perhaps following the urging of a former vice-principal of mine to "pass them and get them out of here!" Now we have the "No-Zero" policy spreading across Canadian educational systems. I always administered penalties of 10% each day late for such things as lab reports. Since the days and dates of all tests were written on the chalkboard (often determined by negotiation to avoid clashing with tests in other subjects), the excuses for missing a test were few. However, any student who was absent for a test was allowed to write a substitute test following his or her return. The substitute test was always unlike the original, such that learning the answers from other students was to no avail. One student, who was persistently absent for tests, achieved a mark of 35% on her make-up test, for which I was publicly vilified at a promotion meeting. The teachers of math and biology awarded her 70%, reporting the same pattern of absences. The difference may have been that they administered to her the same tests as had been given to the rest of the class a few days earlier. Cheaters prosper, when principals award pass marks in place of 35%. Peterborough, ON

Reading Eggs

I have been trying out the online program called Reading Eggs. It is about $67.75 a year I think, but I have been paying only $10 per month because it's easier for me that way (and I wanted to know if it would be worth it). Charlotte (my four-year-old) loves it, and I think she is getting a lot out of it. It is fun, and it covers the basics thoroughly so that the children build mastery before moving on. However, when I clicked on a sample lesson that was more advanced, I thought it was pretty repetitive and the sounds were not made precisely. This was a bit disappointing because the lessons we have seen over the past three months have been much more varied and fun. In any case, it has been well worth our $10 per month so far. It will be interesting to see how it moves along. Barrie, ON

Wasting My Money

I live in Toronto, and I'm not Catholic and I work at a low-paying job, and so I have no choice but to send my kids to the local public school. The teachers at my kids' school are constantly complaining about how little money they have to work with, and I'm wondering whether there might be a connection to the news reports about how the Toronto board paid $143 to get a pencil sharpener screwed in, almost $3,000 for fitting a simple electrical outlet, and $19,000 for installing a sign. I don't think it's fair that hard-working people like my husband and me have no option but to patronize a school board that goes through taxpayers' money like water. Against our wills, we're helping to enable the continuation of this abuse! Toronto, ON

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

For more than 20 years, SQE has been campaigning for schools that are more responsive to parents' wishes. Over the years, we have enjoyed isolated successes but, generally speaking, Canadian educators have managed to cling to their failed educational policies.

It will take a very powerful force to galvanize today's educators into accepting the significant changes that are necessary to improve their service. One prospect is school choice - making it possible for more parents to transfer their children out of failing schools, thereby threatening the jobs and security of the educators in the failing schools.

Another prospect, one that is tantalizingly just over the horizon, is online learning. In a way, this is actually another version of school choice, in that it makes it possible for more parents to take their children out of their failed schools. If technology delivers on even a fraction of its promise, the world of education will soon be rocked by tectonic changes similar to what has already happened to many other services - such as media, banking, book sales, entertainment, transportation, music, and communications.

Here's a prediction by politician economist Terry Moe, involving the emergence of "hybrid” schools: "many of them charters, some run by districts - in which kids still 'go to school' at a physical place, interact face-to-face with teachers and other students, and continue to participate in art, music, and sports but take roughly 80 percent of their academic classes online. Their teachers no longer have the job of teaching a standardized curriculum to classrooms of thirty kids; instead they have a much more differentiated profession—some teaching online, some overseeing large numbers of kids in computer labs, some tutoring kids one-on-one, some dealing mainly with parents, some in charge of software development, and on and on. The traditional sameness of teaching thus will give way to a much more productive division of labor."

These changes are still coming slowly at present, perhaps in part because they are being fought by the various vested interests, but the force of technological change is unstoppable. King Canute found out he couldn't hold back the tide, and the education establishment is about to learn the same lesson.

BOOKS OF INTEREST

Clear Teaching: With Direct Instruction, Siegfried Engelmann discovered a better way of teaching. Shepard Barbash.

This booklet tells the story of Direct Instruction (DI) - one of the most successful educational approaches ever created. The program works and has been demonstrated to work over and over and over again in many different locations and for many different subjects. DI has proven that poor and disabled students can learn at acceptable rates. Yet the educational establishment treats DI like a pariah! The excerpt (pp 2-3) gives some information about the program - and some explanation of why it is hated by status quo educators.

DI is old-school. It uses teaching practices that were scorned by Progressive Era reformers but widely used until education was swept up in the cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies. These include teacher-led exercises, skill grouping, choral responding, and repetition. DI also provides a carefully designed and tested script, not just a content outline or lesson plan from which the teacher endeavors to create an effective lesson.

Essentially, DI teaches academic lessons the same way great trainers and coaches teach the fundamentals in sports. It identifies key skills, teaches them first, and then adds to that foundation. It builds mastery through practice and intervenes early to prevent bad habits. Unlike virtually any other approach to instruction, it is built on the premise that the program is responsible for the results. If the student has not learned, the program has not taught.

While these features are what make DI so extraordinarily effective, they are profoundly at odds with the beliefs about good teaching that have come to dominate education. DI is rejected not because it doesn't work - it does - but because it challenges the validity of those beliefs.

For decades and especially since the sixties, teachers have been taught to be 'a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage.' This ideal regards DI and similar approaches as the antithesis of good teaching. Thus, education professors and theorists denigrate DI's teacher-led practice as 'drill and kill', its high expectations as 'developmentally inappropriate', and its emphasis on building a solid foundation of skills as 'rote-learning'.

The Same Thing Over and Over: How school reformers get stuck in yesterday's ideas. Frederick M. Hess.

This book points out that many of the features of our current way of delivering public education - one-teacher-one-classroom, age-defined grades, nine-month calendar, etc. - were innovative and exciting - in the nineteenth century. However, a structure created for families who lived on farms and in villages and just wanted their kids to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic can hardly be expected to work well more than 100 years later. As the author points out, the average life span of a Fortune 500 company, from conception to dissolution, is only 50 years. It's time to break the mould and start developing mechanisms that will equip 21st-century children for the information age. The excerpt (pp 213-214) looks at a modern day school that has broken out of the strait-jacket of our "confused, anachronistic, and barnacled mess".

One eye-opening example of how this might all work is provided by the fascinating School of One experiment in New York City. The School of One, created by the New York City Department of Education in partnership with for-profit provider Wireless Generation, starts from the presumption that new technologies mean we no longer have to teach classes of twenty-five students the same thing at the same time. Rather, it should be possible to customize what a student learns each day based on what she has already mastered and needs to learn, to do so with an eye toward the ways in which that student learns best, and to do so in a way that maximizes the efficient use of school resources. The School of One manages this feat (currently, just for middle school math) by collecting data on which learning objectives students have mastered and how they like to learn, and then assigning them each day to appropriate lessons.

On a given day, depending on the content in question, a student might learn in a large group, from a tutor, in a small group, using a computer simulation, or any number of other ways. A student's mastery of each learning objective is gauged using an assessment, and students aren't sent on to the next objective until they've learned the present one. Rather than one teacher having to shepherd twenty-five students through the curriculum from start to finish, teachers can now swap lessons and focus on those they teach best - while advanced students can move more rapidly and lagging students can get extra instruction. The result allows students to move at their own pace, teachers to concentrate on teaching to their strengths, teacher aides to provide targeted support, students to spend more time learning in the manner they like best, and makes it harder for kids to get lost in the shuffle. Am I suggesting that the School of One is 'the answer" or the wave of the future? Of course not. But it does provide a powerful example of how unbundling can give us leave to start using tools and talent in smarter ways.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

Measure your brain age in two minutes here. If your final score is younger than your actual age, then you are getting enough brain exercise, but if you score higher than your age, then you need to exercise your brain more - perhaps by learning another language or taking up bridge.