Today’s public school teachers are on the firing line and find themselves caught on the horns of a dilemma. Since the advent of public schooling, teachers have aspired to be treated with the respect accorded professionals. From 1960 onwards, they have accepted teacher unionism and begun to act like educational workers as well as lower-order professionals. Most Canadians today consider teachers to be reasonably well-paid, favoured with generous pension benefits, and guaranteed tenure for life. Teacher professionals still aspire to excellence, but often do so at their peril.
Teachers in the United States are now being summoned to raise their game. Teacher quality initiatives spearheaded by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have focused attention and resources on the vital importance of improving teaching practice. ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/18/AR2010021802919.html ) Meanwhile, all across the United States, school districts from New York City to Los Angeles are either laying-off teachers or introducing public disclosure of teacher performance rankings based upon “value-added” measures of student test results. (See Andrew Rotherham’s pithy analysis at http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2020867,00.html)
The dam of teacher resistance has now been breached. Since March 2010, a courageous group of New York City teachers known as Educators4Excellence has arisen to challenge the status quo This courageous group has issued an unprecedented call for professionalism, produced a petition opposed to “Last in, First Out” regulations, and come out in favour of tying teacher evaluation to student data. http://www.educators4excellence.org/forms/declaration/
The American movement for teacher excellence sends a chill through the Canadian educational establishment. Teachers in Canada are highly unionized and teacher unions wield tremendous influence over our provincial education systems. Teachers unions in 7 of Canada’s 10 provinces conduct province-wide negotiations to arrive at iron-clad contracts guaranteeing tenure after an initial probationary period (2-3 years) and detailing every aspect of the teacher’s job in schools. Salary scales provide graduated increases for seniority and extra degrees and added certification. Job performance only becomes an issue in rare cases of gross incompetence or misbehaviour.
What’s the root of the problem of sheer complacency? The core interests in Canadian education (i.e. “the blob” of senior superintendents, teacher unions, and trustee organizations) function much like a rather blase “educational “fortress” that remains largely impervious to outside influences. Periodic calls for the introduction teacher merit pay, such as that of B.C. Liberal Kevin Falcon, are met with quiet giggles and dismissed as the insidious inventions of corporate business interests. The Canadian Education Association, based in Toronto, dares not to take a position, contenting itself with “cheerleading” for exemplary school board programs.
American president Barak Obama sends shock waves through Canadian educational circles, and especially those self-styled “liberals” strongly supportive of his presidency. His radical Education Reform agenda came as quite a jolt, all but reducing them to silence. In his January 25 State of the Union Address, he reaffirmed his stance: “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” he declared, and then called upon Americans to “win the race to educate our kids.” Improving teaching is critical to his vision and in South Korea, he noted, teachers are known as “nation builders.”
President Obama’s Education Reform agenda goes far beyond such platitudes. It’s a “Race to the Top” where teacher performance actually counts. “We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for the bad ones. And over the next 10 years, with so many boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want top prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.”
The winds of education reform are now sweeping through the United States, freshly fueled by their abysmal PISA test results. Some 40 American states have now endorsed the “Common Core Standards” and taken an initial step in the direction of restoring academic rigour to the system. A few cities and states are moving quickly to introduce “Performance Counts” legislation aimed at ensuring teacher effectiveness. In the case of Illinois, the reform will tackle teacher tenure guarantees, evaluation standards and practices, and provisions for laying-off teachers. Replacing seniority rules with competence measures and removing ineffective teachers are at the core of these reforms.
Some public voices calling for teacher quality assurance are beginning to be heard here in Canada. In early February 2010, the Toronto Globe and Mail entered the fray with a front page feature assessing the merits of merit pay for teachers. Erin Anderssen’s thought-provoking piece, “Merit Pay: An Upgrade on the Apple,” made a compelling case for more teacher accountability for student performance. For the full story, see http://www.globecampus.ca/in-the-news/article/should-canada-offer-merit-pay-to-teachers/
One Canadian journalist, Gary Mason of The Globe and Mail , has taken up the call to repatriate the Canadian system from teacher unions and has been leading the charge for merit pay. In late January 2011, he claimed that British Columbians were always debating the question of who actually “runs the education system.” He claimed that the BC Teachers’ Federation was on the verge of gutting the province’s Foundation Skills Assessment Grade 4 and 7 student testing program and thereby thwarting the annual Fraser Institute school rankings. Three weeks earlier, he blamed the B.C. teachers’ union for publicly slagging Kevin Falcon’s proposal to explore merit pay. “Serious examination of the issues,” Mason stated, ” got lost amid the overheated, meaningless and ultimately self-serving rhetoric.” Given a fair chance, he contended that ” teacher merit pay could work” in B.C. and in other provinces. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/handled-carefully-merit-pay-for-teachers-might-work/article1859218/
The Canadian public debate over teacher merit pay has, so far, completely missed the point. Teachers as professionals have always claimed to be striving for teaching excellence when it comes to educating kids. In today’s era of public accountability, this is no longer good enough. How can we build better teachers for education in the 21st century? What can be done to ensure that “teacher excellence” actually matters in evaluating and rewarding teachers? And in staffing schools, when it comes to deciding who says and who goes, how can we best guarantee that students come before “job protection” in the schoolhouse?
1) Educators for Excellence teachers in New York City are interested in their own job protection only and are funded from outside. In 5 years not one of those teachers will care. Their own employers look down on them as “shoe shiners”.
2) In the American states where unions are very strong, test scores are the highest. Where they are weak, so called “Right -to-Work” states, scores are the weakest.
3) The education reforms proposed by Bill Gates have nothing to do with quality education. They are an attempt by private interests who want to privatize education and control the introduction of technology.
4) The USA is not being out performed by privatized, charter or voucher nations on PISA or TIMSS, they are being outpaced by highly unionized, totally public democratic systems that simply have a) higher standards and b) a lot less relative poverty, the critical element in education success.
I’d imagine you’d have to allow for all sorts of variables before determining the link between test scores and the unions.
No it is pretty clear. States with VERY strong union movements such as Minnesota and Massachusetts are also the leading states in testing.
The states, almost all of them, who limit union rights such as “Right to Work” states all have terrible scores.
When we look at nations with VERY high OECD scores, almost all of the western nations that are leaders, have powerful teachers unions, certainly Finland, Canada, the rest of Scandenavia, Japan, northern Europe, etc.
It is clear that there is nothing to be gained educationally from restricting teacher union rights. Teachers DO tend to oppose the “reform” movement because they are sophisticated well researched organization who understand that there is ZERO in the reform agenda for kids.
This is what teacher unions believe, like it or not.
Teacher unions believe that the reform movement in education:
1) Exists and is well funded by Gates, Eli Broad, the Waltons, etc for the primary purpose of the the total privatization of education.
2) Right wing interests see teacher unions as the most powerful bulwark of defense of the public education system therefore they seek to destroy education unions.
3) Teachers unions therefore take the position of “not even one inch” in opposition to a movement that they believe is evil.
How did the BCTF destroy the FSA? They simply persuaded the parents to demand that their child not be tested. So many parents agreed that the FSA test results are now considered invalid.
Any parent can keep their child out. The Deans of the three teacher training universities in BC, UBC, SFU and U Vic all condemned the FSA as a counterproductive aspect of education.
Finding new ways to subvert teacher evaluation and public accountability for student results is no solution. Celebrating the impending demise of the one measure that exists is disheartening, especially for those teachers who welcome fair, objective, and meaningful feedback on their performance in the classroom.
Today’s Education Week (January 31, 2011) contains a fine article by Stephen Sawchuk entitled “Wanted: Ways to Assess the Majority of Teachers.” (www.edweek.org)
The feature story also demonstrates that the Americans are already light years ahead of us in coming to grips with the need for thorough, meaningful, teacher evaluation, including “value-added” testing among a range of objective and subjective measures.
Here’s the key section of the story:
“The debate about “value added” measures of teaching may be the most divisive topic in teacher-quality policy today. It has generated sharp-tongued exchanges in public forums, in news stories, and on editorial pages. And it has produced enough policy briefs to fell whole forests.
But for most of the nation’s teachers, who do not teach subjects or grades in which value-added data are available, that debate is also largely irrelevant.
Now, teachers’ unions, content-area experts, and administrators in many states and communities are hard at work examining measures that could be used to weigh teachers’ contributions to learning in subjects ranging from career and technical education to art, music, and history—the subjects, in other words, that are far less frequently tested.
The work, which has taken place quietly, in contrast to the larger value-added conversation, is renewing interest in alternative sources of achievement information.
“A standardized test is very useful to take a snapshot of the inventory of knowledge and skills that a student has, but it’s not as useful to change teacher practice and improve strategies and determine what needs to happen next,” said Laura Goe, a principal investigator for the federally financed National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, who has worked with several states on teacher evaluations.
Such work is also giving way to questions about how to make sure that alternative measures—such as projects, portfolios scored according to guidelines, and classroom-based assessments—are both rich sources of data and provide comparable information about teachers and their impact on student learning.
“I would say this has been a very challenging area because it’s so high-risk in a sense,” said Lawrence T. Waite, the program manager of a teacher-evaluation initiative housed at the New York State United Teachers, or NYSUT. “Using growth is new. Certainly, teachers look at student learning every day, but we’re now doing this to look at teachers’ impact on student learning, which raises the stakes on the use of that assessment instrument.”
Gauging Evaluations
Charged with using multiple measures for evaluating teachers, states and district are mulling over methods for estimating the impact of teachers on student learning.
STUDENT-LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Individual teachers, or sometimes teams, set goals for student growth, subject to certain parameters, with their principals. The goals are approved by principals and audited using agreed-upon assessments.
Used for bonus-pay systems in:
• Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C.
• Austin, Texas
• Denver
Used for professional development by:
• Teach For America (goals set with program directors)
Used for teacher evaluation in:
• Rhode Island
COMMON GROWTH MEASURES
Committees of teachers review a variety of measures of student growth and make recommendations to either the district or state, which approves a list for each subject and grade. Measures have comparability across classrooms and/or districts.
• Albany City, Hempstead, Marlboro, North Syracuse, and Plattsburgh school districts, N.Y.
• Delaware
STANDARDS-BASED TESTS
Pre- and post-course tests aligned to standards are developed in most subjects and grades. Results are comparable across the district.
• Hillsborough County, Fla.
• District of Columbia (planned)
SCHOOLWIDE STUDENT GROWTH
Under this system, teachers in nontested grades and subjects have their student-growth targets based on schoolwide growth on state standardized tests or on another schoolwide index.
• Teacher Advancement Program
• Tennessee (interim recommendation)
SOURCE: Education Week
If the debate seems wonkish and academic, the consequences are anything but. In a wave of legislative action last year, nearly a dozen states took steps to require teacher-evaluation systems to consider evidence of students’ academic growth.
Value-added measures rely on state standardized tests to generate the individual teacher estimates and are typically available only in reading and mathematics in grades 4-8.
One widely cited statistic puts the proportion of those who teach in nontested grades and subjects at about 70 percent, but technical issues can push the figure much higher. Under the District of Columbia’s IMPACT teacher-evaluation system, just 15 percent of teachers have individual value-added data, according to school district officials.
And because legislation in several states, including New York, Rhode Island, and Tennessee, requires evaluations to weigh multiple measures of a teacher’s contribution to student learning, all teachers in those states will need more than just value-added statistics to show that they are effective.” (Reprinted from Education Week)
Comment:
Teachers unions and faculties of education opposing standardized student assessment in B.C. are simply out to protect their own hides. Everyone knows that the FSA was critical to establishing “value-added” testing measures. Organized attempts to “kill” testing do little to restore public confidence in the system. They are, in fact, thinly veiled attempts to thwart the next phase of educational accountability: holding teachers more accountable for student performance and finding more effective ways of both rewarding the “good teachers” and weeding out the “bad ones.”
Holy Cow Dude! What a great response! I did a spell check, and it got an A+ grade. You obviously spent a great deal of time and effort on this project, and have proved you did your homework. I have not seen a report with greater utilization of MS Office in some time. Aside from the fact that it would be inconceivable for a person to personally check all the reference material you presented, unless they were employed by a government grant, you managed to confuse the issue quite admirably.
If you would take another 2 hours or so of your free time to watch “Waiting for Superman”, as no doubt President Obama now has, the same concerns might appear to you as they will to countless others. The issue is, what can be done about the lack of accountability, to students, that teachers have. If A teacher can tell a student, “I get paid if you learn or not.” what hope is there for that student having respect for ANY teacher? If the Unions, who are representing teachers, permit those members, of their own field, to police each other, on BASIC STANDARDS, like actually teaching during class, this would not even be a problem.
Here is a personal story drawn from my own experience. Two years ago, in grade 1, my son’s teacher was replaced with 5 weeks remaining in the year. What led up to this is quite a disturbing story.
Every time my wife and I spoke with the teacher, during the year, she expounded upon his inability to focus on learning, and his disruptive behaviour in class. We were very upset with him as his reading skills and math skills had actually digressed in a short period of time, and he was well below average in every new learning path. We were quite hard on him, taking away T.V. time, video game’s, and computer time. The most impacting punishment was computer time. He already knew how to access the internet at 4, and had a lot of favorite sites like Nickelodeon to go to, and that punishment hurt him the most. He said he would try harder in school. The next report cycle came, and he had done worse. We were very hard on him, and spent many hours a day trying to help him “catch Up” under his teachers guidelines. Time after time, we were told he was only getting worse, and we might want to contemplate trying a chemical solution to this problem. We declined, and were told not to expect any impovement unless we did so.
During a short absence of his teacher due to a death in her family, my wife and I came into contact with other parents in my son’s class, who stated they had the same problem with their children in the same classroom, but with the teacher’s absence, there was a remarkable change in their children, and we had noticed a change in our son as well. Further inquiries were made of the other parents of children in the same class, as they are all friends and in our same location, and it was found that 75% of the parents of students in that same class were also advised by the same teacher that their behavior was disruptive.
After bringing it to the attention of the Principal of the school, who looked into it seriously, it was discovered that the teacher had serious mental problems, and she was retired. It appears that, she was only a short time from retirement, and continued on, with the full knowledge of her co-workers, fellow teachers, and principal, that she was not performing her duties, but, in order for her to collect full benefits upon mandatory retirement, they said nothing.
She was once a well respected teacher, as her dedication to the students was well known, as some of the teachers, in the same school, were once her students many years before Yet things unravelled toward the end of her career. Upon entering her class, her grade 1 students, including my son, would be given a form sheet for math, reading, or writing. She did not give any instructions to them, on how to do it, just to do it. When they asked a question or asked for help, they were told to “Just do the work. If you can’t, Lay your head on your desk quietly and wait till I say otherwise.” My son….being all of 6 years old, was not ready for this university-type education. This situation had gone on for 2 years. She eventually retired 8 month’s early, on full pension.
One third of her students became medicated during her final year in the classroom, based on her advice to parents, and another one third were advised to begin medication by their teachers last year, to correct the problem from the year before, and now I find myself in the position of doing the same to my son, as the damage has not repaired naturally, along with the remaining one third of his grade one class. Today 99% of my son’s former s grade 1 class has learning disabilities, and could have been avoided if there was some kind of peer review, or social conscience in the teachers’ union.
Narc. Snitch. Ponyboy. Squealer. Brown-noser. Tattletale. Jonas. Supergrass. Coward. Those are the names given to criminals. Who testify against their fellow criminals, in order to save themselves from prosecution, for the same crimes they have committed themselves. There are many other names. The name’s they call themselves do not matter. They lie, they cheat, they steal My son’s teachers have lied to me, my wife, and my son, demonstrating by their actions what they value most.
Governments are represented by the people, who scream loudest. As long as government controls the schools, people like me have no say. Big Business also exerts great influence and leaves us with no voice.
Trust is important in life and without it all is lost. If teachers are all treated the same, if they do a good job or not, some will neglect their duties or be irresponsible in their actions.
Having Unions can be a good idea. Fair pay, for fair work. Everyone is equal, man, woman, race, religion. Do the work, get paid. Unions are a bad idea, when you don’t do the work, still get paid, and the Union protects you in their own interests.
The true purpose of a Union, for those who forget, is to ensure that an employee does not suffer, due to unfair discrimination, from an employer, due to, race, age, sex, nor religion, and be paid fairly in accordance of their abilities, and their ability to maintain those qualifications. It should not guarantee that any person unwilling to fulfill those obligations to an organization will be protected, but it does so anyway. Strange as it may seem, we do not hear much about unions in China, but here they are far more active in the workplace.
Every time I go to a restaurant, I am polite to the servers, and tip them well, as I don’t relish the idea that one of them will spit on or drop my steak on the way to my table. I would be much happier knowing my son is not being taught that 2+2=5 because they feel underpaid or they just don’t care, as they will know, I will never know about it till too late anyways. Pay Teachers Better, I say! Make them accountable by all means. Otherwise, it may be my son or yours experiencing signs of resentment.
That’s all I have to say, being (as I am) a lower middle class minion. After working as a printer for 30 years, I simply wanted to go on record with my concerns and observations about teachers and unions.
This just in…”Waiting For Superman is coming out on DVD on February 15th!” Michelle Rhee just inboxed me on this. I’d like to say I know personally, but she responded to my query about the movie on my fb page. I didn’t ask if the date would be different for Canada though. Hopefully, it isn’t.
The entire teaching profession and a critical mass at teacher training institutions and grad studies departments reject standardzed testing since a child’s address is a better predictor of future success.
So-called “value added” measures are no improvement since higher income children not only start higher, they learn more per year under most circumstances.
Individual teachers vary wildly from year to year under VA systems.
Teaching is not a science it is an art. Trying to make it a science sucks the life out of it.
Actually it isn’t “pretty clear” at all.
I suspect you’d also find that states such as Minnesota and Massachussets spend significantly more on education than the so-called “right to work” states. Unless and until we know the numbers sweeping generalization or dubious assertions are counterproductive.
It will be interesting to watch what happens when formerly wealthy states are hit hard by the economic meltdown gripping the U.S. I suspect the gravy train will slow down sigificantly.
Now Malkin would tell you that money makes no difference JohnL so which is it?
I always wanted to have a provincial referrendum on whether money is critical to education or not.
Those that vote that money is very important would get more money. Those that vote that money is not critical would not get any.
We could save millions and also have all the money where it is needed.
As trustee I moved a motion that : “All cutbacks take place in the wards of the trustees that voted for cutbacks and all school closings take place in the wards of those who voted for overall closings.” Oh they eventually got the board lawyer to issue an opinion that such a motion was out of order but I didn’t mind one bit. All the hypocrytes had been identified by then.
Seems that the “Superman” attack on unions and public education has fallen flat.
http://www.educationnews.org/commentaries/106784.html
No doubt the problem would be that not ever party in “education” would feel obliged to abide by the results of a public referendum.
Imagine if the public voted in favour of doing away with teacher strikes or making education an essential service…!? Does a referendum take precedence over a collective agreement, Doug?
Then there’s the issue of what “more money for education even means”.. What level, what parts, etc.
Sorta like wanting more money for “healthcare”; until you define if precisely it can, and would, be abused endlessly and not mean much. Higher pay for doctors? Shorter wait times?
Just a quick question??? Why are all the facts in the article American?
Why are the examples of Value-Added teacher evaluation from the United States? For the reason given in my commentary – teacher union dominance and intransigence here in most, if not all, Canadian provinces. Every time V-A E or Merit Pay are raised, we hear a chorus of opposition from the BCTF and other teacher unions.
It might be deplorable, but it’s also understandable. If you ruled the roost and continued to enjoy secure tenure (job protection) without any meaningful annual or even periodic accountability, you might be inclined to rise to defend those prerogatives. The amazing thing is that Educators4Excellence has broken ranks and spoken out of school. Some may call them “shoe-shiners” but most reasonable people know that unionists are good at ostracizing those who insist on pursuing teaching excellence. Tall poppies, it seems, need to be cut down so they “do not make others look bad.”
Outside of English Canada, there are examples. We do need to look more closely at Quebec, where there are some interesting moves in the direction of Value- added teacher assessment. Having taught there for 8 years, I’m not surprised. Since the 1960s, Quebec has continued with its provincial testing regime and it covers all subjects, including Grade 10 Quebec/Canadian History. In short, that province is well equipped to introduce broader V-A evaluation, incorporating student test scores.
As long as the school boards insist on micro-managing the teachers there’s no point in evaluating teachers.
The boards are simply looking for somebody to blame for their own failures.
If and when teachers regain the authority over their classrooms we can have a look at teacher evaluations.
As it is now, they are being held accountable for something over which they have no authority.
The entire premise of Merit Pay’s virtues presented here greatly simplifies the fact that schooling involves people, not ideologies.
As a public educator for over 35 years, too often I have read these interventions, all in the name of saving education. Too bad it is based on ignoring evidence and realities. (http://thurly.net/0s2d)
Also, the mention of Value Added is not, repeat, not Merit Pay. Please take a look at Quebec, where the unions + Anglophone School Boards + Government have agreed to a Value Added component in the collective agreement, starting in 2011.
At the Canadian Education Association, we strongly encourage all stakeholders in education to reflect on how we can continue to improve educational systems. It does not include the old Roman expression, “The whipping will stop when the morale improves.”
Three cheers for the CEA.
“As long as the school boards insist on micro-managing the teachers there’s no point in evaluating teachers.”
Might be, but considered this – the majority of board staff in key positions are educators to begin with, who are more than likely toll the union line and goals, evaluations of teachers will be a resounding no. I have observed that board staff, are focus only to work with the unions and the ministries of education, and where students best interests are secondary to the needs of all three arms. Teachers’ colleges is the fourth arm, that provides the training that is well suited to look after the needs of the three other arms, without upsetting the balance of power, influence, and structure of the system. As in the boards, the ministries and teachers’ colleges the key positions are staff with degrees in education, with the majority holding administration degrees. The last thing that the the four arms want, is to give authority to the teacher in the classroom and the school, because accountability to the students, parents and the wider community would become the new norm. Yikes, it might mean working on the behalf of the best interests of children, and no longer working to advance their own personal interests and goals. Can’t have that when the staff of the boards, ministries and teachers’ colleges are pulling in $100,000 plus plus, it would mean accountability at these levels as well.
I have never forgotten a conversation with a educrat who was pulling in $200,000 telling me the dangers of teaching my child the basics at home, without using the same methods that the school and the board uses in their schools. It was a conversation to accept mediocrity,
and not at all about reaching a child’s full potential.
Doug the link you provided on Waiting for Superman, written by this guy, Ron Issac, trashed the film. Not surprisingly, here is his info, “Ron Isaac is a retired public school English teacher and staunch unionist. ”
Now , why would a staunch unionist oppose a film that gave the teacher’s union a good smackdown and asked that we provide a proper education for all students?
Look I agree that parents are significant partners in education but they are never going to be the hegemonic element. By the time parents learn the elementary ropes their kids are in HS. By the time they learn the HS ropes their kids have graduated. The bureaucracy, the unions, the OISEs, the ministry are powerfully funded, permanent, rooted institutions that need to be dealt with.
Parents groups like People for Education, who know how to ESTABLISH themselves, finance themselves and work WITH the other powers for reform will have influence. Those that try to position “parents” as oppositional when in fact, the vast majority of parents are very satisfied with the system, will have a very hard row to hoe.
“Parents groups like People for Education, who know how to ESTABLISH themselves, finance themselves and work WITH the other powers for reform will have influence. Those that try to position “parents” as oppositional when in fact, the vast majority of parents are very satisfied with the system, will have a very hard row to hoe.”
P4E is an organization that depends heavily on government grants, and the admiration of the ministry and the teachers’ unions. It would not exist if it depended on the donations by the citizens. It exists as is, as long as they do not directly or hinder the goals of the unions, and education ministries.
As for parents, only unionists will say that parents are satisfied when the education system has ensure that parents have no effective voice in the education system when it comes to the education of their children.
In fact, the greatest funding for People4Education comes from the Laidlaw Foundation. I don’t think there is any union money in P4E, except maybe a little from the Canadian Auto Workers Union.
The fact that Waiting for Superman is full of holes and is a piece of propoganda and as such snubbed by the oscars, is becoming clear to the American population. The film lauds charters and trashes unions yet:
Students have higher scores in strong union states
Charters do no better than regular PS as everyone including Chester Finn is beginning to acknowledge.
The breakout by Neil Reynolds in the Globe the other day proved my point.
American whites and Asians do as well or better that Canadians and European kids.
Blacks and hispanic kids do very badly draging the USA way down. Reynonds racist assumption “these groups don’t seem to care about education” is his problem.
The USA has one of the worst child poverty rates in the OECD. Blacks and Hispanics are a major part of this povety, poor kis do badly in school, therefore the USA does badly.
The issue is child poverty, not teachers, not unions, not boards, not ministrys, not curriculum and not pedagogy.
There is one and only one way for the USA to join the league of nations with decent education systems, eliminate child poverty.
“The amazing thing is that Educators4Excellence has broken ranks and spoken out of school. Some may call them “shoe-shiners” but most reasonable people know that unionists are good at ostracizing those who insist on pursuing teaching excellence.”
There aim is:
“Our Mission
Educators 4 Excellence (E4E) is an organization of education professionals who seek to provide an independent voice for educators in the debate surrounding education reform. E4E’s mission is to unite the education community around a shared set of goals, principles, beliefs, and actions, which place student achievement first.
Our Vision
E4E envisions an education system in which all stakeholders are driven to improve student achievement by putting students’ needs first.”
What I have observed, there is major cracks developing between the individual teachers and the other arms of education including unions. In Canada, it is starting but in a different way that it is not obvious to the naked eye. The teachers are starting to speak out on a whole host of issues, criticizing the system by showing the outcomes of bad policies and the negative impact it is having on teachers and the children. Questioning low-income comes to mind, when curriculum and teaching methods are standard across the province. To many teachers they see this first hand, where students who are average learners, within a year are now top achievers. The credit goes to the tutors or home instruction being done across Canada, working on the foundations that are crucial to do advance work. Than they go to a low-income school, using the same curriculum and teaching methods, and even when the low-income students are provided with free lunches, and other assortment of programs that ease their lives, it is still a great struggle to increase over-all achievement. And yet in that low-income room, there is a few students achieving beyond expectations, and this too can be credited to outside tutors and home instruction on the foundational skills in language and numeracy.
The teachers start to asked questions and begin to explore it, only to find out that it is the structure of the education system that makes teaching very difficult where no one cares about putting the student first.
In Canada, it is a matter of time and not if when there will be divisions in the teachers’ unions. And the days of unionists’ propaganda will be over with. Along with fudging on facts, figures, and shifting numbers around to protect the various interests of the education system. The focus will be on the best interests of each and every child, and their education.
Canada shouldn’t be so smug:
http://www.societyforqualityeducation.org/index.php/blog/read/the-amazing-education-gap-disappearing-trick/
Neil Reynolds comes to racist conclusions in his article that blacks and hispanics have a culture that is not interested in education.
I have been saying forever that American white and Asian students score at the Canadian-European level. One can hardly say as Reynolds wants to say “blacks and hispanics don’t count”.
Blacks and hispanic do not have low scores because they are black and hispanic. They have low scores because they are mainly poor but white, American Aboriginals who are poor also score very badly. The USA has never made a serious attempt to educate them, leaving them with substandard urban and rural poor schools with the least trained and sometimes untrained, teachers.
Black, hispanic, poor white, Native American whatever, they have low scores because they are poor and the poor universally have low scores.
Finland child poverty rate = 4%, USA = 20%. That is the critical difference.
Doug Little is not accurate about People for Education. That organization would never have gotten as far as it has with out the “help” of the teacher unions. At one time they were considered the Trojan Horse of the system – pretending to advocate for parents but always towing the party line.
They now hold no influence with the Ontario government and are as hamstrung a bunch of parents as most of us are, except that they’re very well paid thanks to grants from left-leaning foundations.
Remember the good old days Doug when the teacher unions would help Annie out with promotion and invite her to speak at functions, cooly suggest to union members to attend then pass a hat around to collect cash? There are lots of us in Ontario who remember and live to tell folks something other than spin
Doug, you have a strange take on Neil Reynolds’ recent column. Slagging him a a “racist” is preposterous and let’s hope that slur doesn’t end up in The Little Education Report.
You seem to be beating the same old drum heard in teacher union councils and repeated in media commentaries. I heard Mary Lou Donnelly on CBC Radio late last month and it’s clear that she has no clue whatsoever about PISA results and how to interpret them. All she did was parrot the usual line that Canadian students perform well compared to their poor American counterparts.
Let’s set the record straight:
Writing in the Jan. 31, 2011 edition of The Globe and Mail, Neil simply drilled down into the PISA results and came up with some sobering conclusions. Our Canadian 15 year olds might not be such “hot shots” after all. Indeed, Reynolds supports the findings of Robert Samuelson that Canada is ethnically homogenious (85% white) and when white Canadians are compared with white Americans the advantage disappears.
Here are the key passages from the column:
“The National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the U.S. Department of Education, possesses a congressional mandate “to collect, analyze and report full and complete statistics on the condition of education in the U.S.” In its report of the PISA survey, NCES notes the demographic implications of the U.S. score in straightforward terms: White students and Asian students outscored the OECD average as well as the U.S. average. Black students and Hispanic students underscored the OECD average as well as the U.S. average.
NCES calculated the racial/ethnic difference another way – comparing the difference in scores between mostly black schools (with a high percentage of students who qualified for free lunches) and mostly white schools (with a low percentage of students who qualified for free lunches). The scoring gap ranged from 444 at the free-lunch schools (80 points lower than Canada’s score) to 553 at the schools without free lunches (31 points higher than Canada’s score).
Writing on these issues the other day in The Washington Post, economics columnist Robert Samuelson cited Canada – “a country that is almost 85 per cent white” – as an example of the statistical significance of homogeneous populations. “The most pessimistic view of the [PISA] study is that, on average, American schools do as good a job as schools in other wealthy nations” – when educating similar students. On this basis, it’s probable that most U.S. students are doing slightly better than most Canadian students.
Canadians reluctant to analyze the PISA results for demographic enlightenment should keep one other fact in mind: In Canada, most aboriginal youths who live on reserves never really finish high school, and many of them never really start.” (Reprinted from The Globe and Mail)
Comment:
The achievement advantage may well be illusory when one compares various segments of the Canadian and U.S. student populations. If that is the case, then the Canadian Council on Learning had better refine its methodology. Why? Because the Canadian Education Association, the Canadian Teachers Federation and school boards everywhere are simply parroting their summary reports and over-estimating the achievement of the majority of our students.
Digging deeper is exactly what union mouthpieces fear the most — whether it’s focused on international standards or, horror of all horrors, on ensuring teacher quality.
Well Doug, I am sure calling our aboriginals white, will be view as an insult to them at the very least. It implies that aboriginals share the same cultural values as the white population. This is not the case, nor is it within the sub-groups of the white population. Leave it to you to declare any conclusions drawn from looking at the PISA results through the window of demographics are racist. Canada would do well, if they did look through the lens of demographics where cultural factors come into play. One might come to conclusions that the PISA test is greatly flaw, including the provincial standard testing for countries that do not have a homogeneous population that more or less share the same cultural values, with no measurable differences.
And yes it is being discuss, even ones who are against standard testing that PISA represents.
“In the first place, we should question the good sense of comparing a diverse, 300-million-person nation like the United States with tiny homogeneous city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore. In addition to size, other factors complicate the issues. In Hong Kong, schools concentrate on English, Chinese, and mathematics. Proposals to introduce “liberal studies,” which looks like critical thinking to me, have stirred great controversy. In Singapore, schools serve a relatively small proportion of low-income students because many low-paying jobs are done by thousands of Malaysians who enter the country each day and return home in the evening or by “guest workers,” mostly from Indonesia and the Philippines, who cannot bring their spouses or families.
Those who cite PISA results to criticize the U.S. education system also ignore a number of characteristics that keep PISA from being useful for comparing the quality of schools in different nations. One problem is the fact that PISA is administered only to 15-year-olds. Because different nations start formal schooling at different ages and have different policies about students repeating a grade, such a limited snapshot can hardly tell us much about a nation’s overall success in educating students.
Another problem is the design of the test items. As PISA officials write, “The assessment focuses on young people’s ability to use their knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges, rather than merely on the extent to which they have mastered a specific school curriculum” (OECD, 2005, p. 12). Because the test purportedly measures students’ ability to incorporate information that they might not have learned in school, PISA’s design would seem to bias it toward affluent students whose homes and families have more resources.”
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/nov09/vol67/num03/The-Big-Tests@-What-Ends-Do-They-Serve%C2%A2.aspx
The author continues on speaking on the same lines. “Both politicians and the media have relentlessly linked scores on national and international assessments to economic health. Release of the PISA results in 2004, for instance, led to headlines like “Economic Time Bomb” (Kronholz, 2004) and “Math + Test = Trouble for the U.S. Economy” (Chaddock, 2004).
This notion is easily refuted by the example of Japan, which led the world in test scores and economic growth in the 1980s but saw its economy sink into the Pacific in the 1990s. Throughout this period, Japanese students continued to ace tests, but Japan’s economy sputtered into the new century and slipped back into recession in 2007.
It is doubtful that the ability of 4th and 8th graders to bubble in answer sheets has any connection to the economy. In fact, although educators might not want to recognize it, the current economic calamity should drive home the reality that the economic forces at play in the world dwarf the effects of education. Iceland scores high on international assessments, but in the global crisis of 2008–2009 it became an economic basket case with a national debt equal to 850 percent of its gross domestic product.
Education, by itself, does not produce jobs. There are regions of India, for example, where thousands of applicants show up for a single job requiring moderate education. The people who noticed this phenomenon worry that overeducation in the absence of job production could destabilize India (Jeffrey, Jeffery, & Jeffery, 2008). Similar worries no doubt afflict the government of China, where 33 percent of 2008 college graduates are still looking for jobs (Johnson, 2009).”
Your objection to looking at the PISA results through demographics is rather telling, because it does put the theory of SEC factors down a few notches, and where the test becomes the focus. I often wonder who are the authors of the standard testing in the different provinces and how their cultural values impact the various demographic groups. I sometimes wonder because the questions seem to be asking for values, rather than the knowledge.
Read it carefully Paul, “…but Black American students scored 466 and hispanic students 466. These scores reflect (among many other intractible causes) [added on the web not in the original print version] a widespread and lamentable indifference to formal education in the two most significant American subcultures.
This is a profoundly racist thing to say Paul and the letters to the editor have already shown this.
I have always said that if you take Blacks and Hispanics out, Americans do well. The point is that you cannot take them out. America has opressed these minorities for centuries and the chickens are coming home to roost.
If Canada said, “we would beat Finland if both countries took out their poor people” everyone would die laughing. Finland hardly has any poor people due to its advanced socialist poverty elimination programs which is, of course, one of the most important reasons why they do well in education.
Guess what, the situation of American Black and Hispanic students will not be solved by teacher bashing or charters or vouchers or Mayoral control or phonics or direct instruction or merit pay or any of the other failed and failing nostrums of the right.
Poor people do badly in school. This will be fixed by raising them out of poverty. This means, housing programs, transportation programs, ECE childcare programs, dental programs, optical programs, tutorial programs, welfare reform, ….
Does education have a role in poverty reduction? Of course but you must target massive resources in a laser like way on the poor in the way that has been done in Regent Park.
It requires ELP and radical class size reduction, support professionals, hand picked principals, and so forth.
Is the whole thing expensive? Sure it is but ignorance is more expensive.
I love the fact that conservatives love standardized tests until standardized tests prove that liberals and socialists are corect about education and conservatives are wrong. All of a sudden there is something wrong with the test.
Pardon me while I die laughing, call 911.
Don’t worry Paul. Despite Doug’s suggestions to the contrary the Reynold’s piece and the Globe for publishing it is the best public service announcement the Globe could have published.
The truth hurts and it means that more and more people will be educated as to how the self-interested spin the message…and try to fool people.
Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t the TDSB keep achievement levels according to race these days?
I consider that the Globe piece proves me right because it is exactly what I have been saying for year, minus the racist conclusions.
White America (Asian as well) I have been saying forever does as well as Canada and Europe. The USA does very badly because it writes off its poor people, and thus some racial minorities who are oppressed, in a way that no other democratic nation does. The UK is close so they also do badly.
The only difference between Reynolds and me is he is a racist who says blacks and hispanics are lazy and don’t really want an education and I say blacks and hispanics are oppressed (held down on purpose).
Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t the TDSB keep achievement levels according to race these days?
Yes, it tracks achievement by race and cutural/ethnic/linguistic groups ( as self-reported AFAIK).
It also monitors achievement by income level. The data are not so cut-and-dried as Doug would have us believe. Some white subgroups do very poorly. Some black subgroups do much better than some Asian and white subgroups. A number of schools with mostly low-income students do better than a number of higher-income schools. And so on.
There are only a handful of “rich” schools (Whitney, Rosedale, etc.) and they score well but a number of schools in the next quintile by achievement are lower-income than a number of schools in the quintile after that, so it’s far from a perfect match between SES and achievement.
I’m not sure how public those data are. The discussions about race and achievement tend to generate more heat than light.
Race and achievement should be look at, as well as the sub-groups within each race. Looking at just income seems to be tunnel-vision that turns into the main focus where only income manners. Yet completely ignoring the cultural values of people. In Newfoundland, the student population is mainly homogeneous, with a very low count of other races. It is not low-income that plays a major role, but the great urban and rural considerations. What the homogeneous population share is the cultural values, and is a nice fit for the immigrants who do locate here. I am sure if 10,000 Newfoundland students decided to locate to Toronto, it would probably impact the numbers in different ways and most of them in a negative way because of culture and value differences. Their language is unique and certainly not commonly found in other provinces. When I moved to NL, I certainly felt as though I moved to another country, and not another part of Canada.
Of course there are subgroups such as the Portuguese who are white but do badly. History has a legacy and most Portuguese in Toronto, as example came from the Azores Islands and Madeira not the mainland. Public education ended at grade 4 because it was a poor fishing farming community. That is why they are in Toronto in the first place. All of this notwithstanding, this can be improved, especially on an intergenerational basis.
Nevertheless income is a far greater predictor of success or lack of success than any other factor in education.
It goes back as far as the Coleman report in the USA where Coleman felt that 80% of school success was determined outside of the school by other factors, primarily SES.
Naturally, those of us in education are working on that 20% section and doing the best we can to improve results in that slice but without major changes to poor people’s lives by those working on the 80% piece, those of us in education will only ever make marginal improvements.
Child poverty rate Finland 4%, USA 20% says it all to me.
Where do you get your information? Those broad sweeping generalizations need to be challenged.
Let’s start with the Azores: “The Azores and Madeira Islands have constitutionally mandated autonomous status. A regional autonomy statute promulgated in 1980 established the Government of the Autonomous Region of the Azores; the Government of the Autonomous Region of Madeira operates under a provisional autonomy statute in effect since 1976. Continental Portugal is divided into 18 districts, each headed by a governor appointed by the Minister of Internal Administration.”
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3208.htm
And yes they do have schools.
“Education has always been a social and political priority with state and private education expenditure two per cent higher than EU15/25 averages. In total representing 5.6 per cent of GDP, Portugal spends significantly more on primary and secondary level but less on tertiary level education, with 28 per cent spent at this level in Portugal against a European average of 36 per cent (all figures from Eurostat 2006). Yet the completion rate, those passing versus the total registered, for students in the final year of secondary school stood at 50.6 per cent in 2004/05 academic year. This is perhaps indicative of the challenge facing the national education system.
Furthermore, while free education is a constitutional right and compulsory through to the age of 15, its actual provision has been mixed. Private schools, including international schools and important French, Spanish and German state establishments, are attended by approximately one in five students across the primary and secondary systems and make up the overwhelming majority of the best ranked and most prestigious schools. As such, they play a crucial role in the major metropolitan areas and tend to be first choice options for professional, middle/upper class households.”
http://www.britishcouncil.org/eumd-information-background-portugal.htm
Who is next on your hit list, Doug? As with the last two links it tells a different story. To understand culture, one really needs to know the history. Culture values are very important to know when formulating policy and in education policy. I can see why my Portuguese friends wailed about the schools back in the 1980s, because now that I can look back – it was all about disrespecting their culture. Back than I thought it was miscommunication, but now I think it was all about disrespect for their cultural values.
Azores and Madeira Islands are in the top 10 places in the world to visit, as is Newfoundland and Labrador. Below is a link informing Doug, the wonderful aspects of both islands including the Channel Islands. I wonder what Doug thinks of people living on the Channel Islands? Just wondering because Newfoundland’s culture is a unique blend of cultures where many of the surnames and places, one can determined very quickly where their first ancestors came from, or the place name. And Portuguese is one of them.
“There is something about island life that captivates our imagination. These small worlds unto themselves, isolated by expanses of ocean, developed for centuries free from influence. They were, of course, eventually discovered, colonized and took on some sense of the country that suddenly laid claim to them. But deep underneath, these places maintained their traditional ways as well, in tune
with the nature surrounding their small world of green in a blue sea. We’ll explore both of these aspects — the natural and cultural — on our new expedition, An Island Odyssey: Azores, Madeira & Channel Isles. And we’ll do it at the absolutely best time of year. In Madeira and England we’ll
wander through some of the most exquisite gardens in the world at the height of their springtime bloom.”
Click to access images%5CBrochures%5Cazores-madeira-canary-channel-isles-2011.pdf
Better recheck the stats on low income. Welland has 14 %, and Windsor a little higher. Twenty percent seems too high, but I would like to see the supportive evidence. One can improve the odds in education by not disrespecting people’s cultural values. It goes a long way where the interested parties can arrived at a mutual understanding. Pity, it seems that the front line teachers know this, but heads of unions, and the decision makers of the boards/ministries do not have a clue. A good place to start for boards, tell their staff to stopped calling parents bad parents, even though the words were never spoken. Try being a single parent, either gender and race. Even the ones making a good income, have the same problems when dealing with problems that need to be taken care of in the upper levels of the education system.
As for your favourite country – Finland: You should look at this report on “Child Poverty in Finland” to set the record straight.
The purpose of Child Welfare system in Finland is to secure the best interest of the child and to act as a last resort safety net. Children from the largest population group defined as poor in Finland, 132 200 (2003) children are living in poverty. Every 8th child of a total of 1 103 698 in (21% of the whole population in 2005) in 591 528 families is considered poor. Child poverty rate in Finland is 12,3% (2005). ”
http://www.lapsitieto.fi/palve/kortti.phtml?type=c&id=164
Child poverty is a fact of life in Finland and the situation is worse the recent economic crisis in the world. It’s only been made worse by cuts in the social services. Finns may be reasonably well-educated but there are not enough jobs to go around.
TDSBW is absolutely right there are outliers and Dr. David Johnson, and economist at Laurier U., has done quite a bit of research (both in Ontario and BC) to back up the kind of data collected at TDSB.
Click to access commentary_258.pdf
“For example, it is reasonable to conclude that the
Herbert Spencer school, where 90 percent of all students over three years met or
exceeded expectations, is a better school than Champlain Heights where, with a
similar mix of students, only 70 percent of all students attained the same standard. A
reasonable question to ask — one that should be the objective of future research — is
what is happening at the Spencer school that allows its students to do better, and what
does or does not happen at the Champlain school to explain its poorer relative
performance?”
Exceptions prove principles.
I love it when people say SES is not the price common denominator with school success and then they look at board like TDSB or any big board for that matter and say “Look over here I found a school that is tenth from the bottom by SES but 12th from the bottom on test scores.” This proves SES is not a factor.
Yes outliers ARE interesting but they are also not long lasting. They shift from year to year.
Everybody in Toronto knows that schools full of Asians do a bit better that their SES would predict but they also know that those schools are full of students with very demanding parents with very high expecttions, often only temporarily at a lower income while they re-establish themselves in Canada.
I took 120 Toronto high schools to the Toronto Star with there SES averages and their grade 10 test results. The Star was slack-jawed to see that 119/120 schools fell directly onto their SES position and Jarvis Collegiate, the outlier is easily explained by local conditions. It still was only 8 spots out of 120 from its SES predicted spot.
There is an overwhelmingly powerful relationship between SES and educational success. People who deny it, only make themselves look very foolish.
It is a good thing, in other areas that outliers are look upon with great interest, and yet Doug would have us believe that outliers are not long lasting. There is many examples of outliers in this world, and the last thing they are, are of short duration. One thing they have in common, whether in a business, or a school or a person – the trait of finding effective strategies that works for them, and the problems that they are dealing with. Thinking outside of the box, to solve a problem that is impacting them.
There is lots of examples of schools who are doing very well, even though they are faced with SEC factors that are impacting their school in a negative way. Where I lived, there is one such school who is number one in achievement, and every few years there is at least one student that will walk away with a fully paid scholarship for university. The school is in a rural outport, high unemployment, student population below 200, economic growth is slow, and a mixed of low-income to middle-class incomes. The school is a K to 12 school, and is a fairly new school compared to the other schools on the peninsula. Otherwise, all other schools on the Peninsula can be compared more or less. The difference is some teachers are reading specialists, who paid their own training to help the children. All children become good readers, including the cognitive-delayed children depending on their abilities. The school actually has a high number of LD students, and everyone becomes a good reader and writer. The other major difference, is sending children home with extra exercises to work on weaknesses in reading and writing. Not all children received it, but the exercises are short in duration, with the parent overseeing it.
I feel that the difference is the teachers, and how this set of teachers worked around the SEC factors to limit their impact on students. I often find that SEC factors are used as the excuse for failure, rather than finding solutions that would limit their impact. Doug and others like him, only offer solutions that will change the SEC factors and never solutions that would change the school organization in seeking effective strategies within.
I learned that lesson with my youngest, where it became apparent to me rather early, that I must change in order to help my child, and not my child. Fooling around with external variables such as rewards, designer clothes, and other such variables were not working nor did they motivate her. Once I change, providing her with the help for her learning weaknesses, everything change for the better.
You FEEL that the differences is the teachers. Well I guess we should go with your FEELINGS over 40 years of social science research.
Teachers are an important element within the 20% (according to Coleman) that is controlled by the school itself.
OK so we are talking about the 20% of the situation controlled by the school itself. How do you get good teachers into classes more often?
Do you think you get it by teacher bashing and union bashing? Do you think you get it by cutting teacher wages and benefits? Do you think you get it with merit pay?
The profession overwhelmingly rejects merit pay. Are you going to force it on them anyway? Do you really expect that FORCING teachers to accept a pay plan that they themselves have rejected will work?
Experts in teaching Nancy, people who have dedicated their lives at high academic levels will tell you that none of this will work.
In a nutshell, no system is perfect but Finland is the best and has the best results. They have very high standards to enter teacher training institutions, like A averages and at least Masters degrees more to come later.
This is what works and has been proven to work. In Korea teachers are treated with respect and called “nation builders” as Obama indicated.
I can tell you this, attempts to force teachers to be paid and inspected in ways they professionally reject is putting the square peg in the round hole.
I just will not work.
Which is why “feelings” were considered the main criteria for good teaching by teachers?
This OISE report
[ http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/oise/UserFiles/File/OISE%20News/2011%20News/OTQT-Induction_Report_FINAL_4.pdf ]
contains the following findings:
“TEs (teacher educators) describe good teaching as not being about the acquisition of knowledge.”
and
“Like SAs (school administrators), TEs privilege charismatic subject discourse (Moore 2004) in their conceptions of good
teachers, emphasizing personal characteristics and dispositions rather than learned skills or
knowledge, and over transformative and liberatory pedagogies. Both SAs and TEs talk about
good teaching as charismatic, and predominant characteristics they identify are “caring” and
“loving.”
A thoughtful piece from Rick Hess and friends which is a propos of Paul’s queries at the top of this thread:
http://educationnext.org/pyrrhic-victories/
And, on another topic, some interesting reflections on Finland from Kevin Carey. Read his 2008 post first on his observations from visiting Finland here:
http://www.quickanded.com/2008/12/lessons-from-finland.html
then his current one:
http://www.quickanded.com/2011/01/the-final-word-is-always-finland.html
You can’t pull that stuff here Mr. Little. Your grammar and spelling aside you speak for no one but yourself.
I respect the feelings and sentiments of those open and honest about the failings of old union mantra when there’s so much more out there for consideration.
The kneejerk reaction and accusation of teacher-bashing aren’t appropriate here because no such thing is happening.
It’s called discussion and just because it’s not going your way please don’t resort to insulting others here.
It’s not fair to those posting in good faith and looking for something new in the life of a grossly aging system.
Rick Hess in Education Next article cited by TDSBW talked about marketing of reform ideas. So here goes–
Measuring Up: A Conference on School Accountability will be a forum to discuss many of the topics we are discussing. It will feature the Canadian premiere of The Cartel and many interesting panelists. So keep the of April 26th free. More details will follow from SQE.
Seems to me that Rick Hess keeps saying that reforms are being oversold and overpromised. The system has the ability to inhale a few, reject others and wait out this little reform blip that will gradually decline and at that point the system can dump any reforms that have not proven worthwhile, like most of them.
BTW teachers take the position that saying teachers have ANY responsibility for low results in poor areas or some nations constitutes “teacher bashing” which is what they call it internally.
Teachers feel blameless in this situation. More people graduate and go on to advanced degrees than ever before in Canada, or 15 year olds are higher achieves than any nation on the Earth except Finland (better teacher training and certification) and Korea (many longer hours and support for teachers).
Finland also has 4% child poverty and still barely beats us. International experts consider Canada and Ontario one of the really bright lights but all we hear from the far right is teacher bashing.
Seems Rick Hess is saying, nothing we stand for has had any significant effect but don’t dazzle us with the facts. Our mind is made up.
http://educationnext.org/pyrrhic-victories/
In the first place, Finland teachers are well-versed on reading and writing. In fact, reading instruction there is no skipped steps and the first step is teaching the sounds. Children also start off later than most countries, where 7 year old children are in a grade 1 classroom in Finland and are more apt to be ready for reading instruction, compare to a typical Canadian classroom.
Furthermore, the ministry of education is looking to change the reading programs, to one of more direct systematic instruction due to the great success in Labrador schools, and the success of some schools on the island. There is also pilot programs being put in place to study the effects. Fifty-two percent of the population have low literacy skills, and this has been steady for the pass twenty years. Something is feeding the 52 % percentage, to keep it steady while the population declines, and the only explanation is the reading instruction. It cannot be SEC factors, since everyone including the low income have all the electronic gadgets, computers, cheap Internet access, plus since there is very few distractions such as what a city has to offer, activities are spent outdoors with the ATVs, hunting, skidooing, since there is no MacDonalds and other things. There is a lot more family time, especially with meals and extended family. So there is a few pluses that blunts the SEC factors. I should also add, under $30,000 there is a drug program, dental coverage, and other programs such as a heat rebate for all residents. The major complaint from the kids, there is nothing to do. One problem that exists as it does in the cities, is a drug problem. One of the things to combat it, is most communities have youth centres, that the main funding comes from the government, property tax revenue, donations and fundraising.
Newfoundland is small when it comes to the population, as a result people in all kinds of different fields talk to each other either professionally or on a social basis. This has a influenced on direction in education, and one thing that is being discussed is the reading problem. And where MUN professors are vocal on this issue every chance they get.
As for teachers they are well respected in the rural communities, as well as holding council positions and offer themselves in other volunteer activities. Just because a group of professionals are respected, it does not mean that people should hold them up as demi-gods to be worship. Respect is a two-way street, and not a one-way street as Doug would like it to be. Criticism is part of life and in work. I bet the teachers in my area would welcome some type of merit pay, providing they get the autonomy. Until the upper levels let go of their power and work to the best interests of the children, the teachers have a tough job paying homage to the upper levels, before the needs of the children.
Wow I was in Finland and then I was in NL without knowing I took a flight.
You can try to wiggle out of it all you want Nancy but the world has asked Finland how they do so well and they have answered. “We invest in the best teachers.” This is the reason.
The experts, the OECD, etc say the difference between Finland and any other advanced nation is the way the recruit and train teachers.
Of course outside of schools, their advanced social programs that have almost totally eliminated poverty and everyone one knows that it is poor children who do badly so when there are almost no poor children, there is almost nobody to do badly.
Nancy, at the time of the Salizar and Catano Fascist governments of Portugal, public education ended at grade 4 in the Azores. Their data is far different from the mainland. This was the immigrating generation. There is an educational legacy to fix here.
Huge numbers of Portuguese immigrants in Toronto cannot just not read English, they cannot read Portuguese. The adult ESL/Literacy programs are huge to try to address this problem.
Nancy,
The low literacy levels in some part of NL are a subset of low literacy levels in resource extraction communities across Canada. Frontier College recognized this many years ago.
It has almost nothing to do with instruction in the schools.
This pattern will be mirrored across the world, People in international education note. Education and literacy levels rise to the level required to make the local economy function. Only a few are educated beyond this level.
Perhaps we should find an education system of countries more in sync with the geographic, demographic, cultural and ethnic makeup of Canada and/or the U.S. than Finland…? The entire population of Finland would fit in the GTA. then there’s the issue iof immigration levels, ethnic diversity, et al. Where do we see all the differences accounted for?
The issue of apples-to-apples comparisons has been raised already.
Perhaps the international experts at the OECD and leading educational intellectuals that say Finland is exactly what we should look at are the ones we should listen to.
BTW your criteria would throw out Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore so I guess Canada is back to #3 in the world behind Finland (4% child poverty) and Korea, (much longer school day).
Wow, we look great.
BTW John, we are all well aware of why the right wing does not like Finland. The world’s best system proves that child poverty is the real issue, testing is not required and choosing the highest educated teachers is the same as choosing the best teachers. As a result, it proves without a shadow of a doubt that conservative educational dogma is wrong about everything every day.
And yet…
You still failed to answer the issue of how two very different nations, on all sorts of levels, can be compared to each other., on education or much else, without adjusting for the differences.
There’s no need to respond if you’re unclear of the issue being discussed.
Here is a link that puts child poverty in context. What is often omitted when Finland is discussed, is the overall poverty and low-income percentages. Four percent sounds wonderful, until one looks at what is impacting the numbers. Countries like Canada and United States, has to find their own way to decrease the over-all poverty rate, based on their own unique characteristics and economic trends. And the biggest problem in Canada, is the great rural-urban divide, and access. Some provinces do a better job than other provinces, but it is difficult when raw resources are removed from rural areas, and the value-added jobs for processing benefits the urban areas. The is just one area that can have a great impact on the economies of rural areas, which in turn impacts policies and where cost consideration comes into play. The social programs and other government programs are cut back by centralizing the operations, which in turn accessibility depends on location in the rural areas.
http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/society/child-poverty.aspx#models
As John has stated, it is difficult if not impossible to compare Canada to small states like Finland, without taking in a whole host of variables. The closest country is United States, but even here in the education file there is immense differences, and yet there is similar stats when it comes to looking at it through the lens of race. Canada looks better, until it is brought down to the provincial and board levels. Not a pretty picture in some boards………….
Here’s an illustration of poverty and education for ya…
http://www.thechronicleherald.ca/NovaScotiaBurning/7580246.html
Read it and weep.
So far, the Teachers’ Unions have gotten off lightly in our discussion. While I agree that child poverty makes teaching a formidable challenge in many elementary schools and leads to teenage deviance, I think that such a focus tends to distract us from something well within our control — teacher quality and improving the quality of instruction.
Yesterday, Nova Scotia’s Teacher Union president Alexis Allen provided yet another example of the lengths to which teacher unionists will go to whitewash the public education system. In a rapidly shrinking school system, she continues to insist that “cuts” would be a disaster leading to “an educational recession.”
Here is the column:
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Letters/1225668.html
Reading the piece, it is abundantly clear that “rightsizing” the system is being resisted simply to protect teachers’ jobs. You will also be stunned to see mediocre PISA results presented in such glowing terms. Since when is finishing “in the middle of the pack” a triumph? Perhaps when you are expecting to finish in the bottom four provinces and can take pride in edging out New Brunswick!
With 127,000 students, over 9,700 teachers, and a PTR of 13.6, there is plenty to hide and that may explain the firewall defence strategy.
John, there are no two nations on the Earth that are the same. Comparing us #3 with the Americans #19 is frought with problems.
The point is John that it is out of your hands and mine. The international experts, far higher up the food chain than you and I, have said that this is the nation that all especially western nations should follow because they do the best job and get the very best results.
Of course their very low poverty rate (a political decision not an economic one) and their very high demands for teacher education plus their total lack of any need for testing makes them the world model.
To reiterate John, it is not up to you. It is up to the OECD, Linda Darling-Hammond and others at that level to decide. You (and I) will have no influence on that.
Finland IS the world model.
Paul, if money is not a critical factor and more money does not improve education, why do conservative boards and conservative provinces howl like the dickens when their education budgets are cut.
Here is one for you. Why does Alberta pay the highest teacher wages in Canada, much higher that “union dominated” BC?
Why do unions oppose reform?
They oppose it because they have examined it VERY carefully and found that:
-there is no evidence of improved learning
-it is totally woven with teacher bashing to the point that the 2 cannot be separated
-it is backwards looking when we need to look forward
In short, they find reform proposals, ill informed, poorly researched, amateurish, myth oriented, anti-intellectual, nonsense.
They are being cobbled together in order to destroy public education for certain ends. 1) so profit oriented private interests can carpet bag the public money, 2) to attempt to fund religious education by some, 3) to counteract the progressive orientation of public education towards environmentalism, science as opposed to religion, equality, and generally speaking its oientation towards the greater public good rather that the private motivations of greed.
Overwhelmed with things I want to write. Poverty is so devastating, and it’s thought of as a lack of money, but in the case of the boys in the link from the CH, they were victims of a lack of intelligent adults in their lives,of a lack of attention, of a lack of love.
Then,concerning the Teachers Unions, the things they boast of in your link Paul, they didn’t come up with on their own.Some are the result of the Nunn commission recommendations. I mean, someone had to die for those programs to be put in place. Pretty sad.
I am still trying to compose my “positive letter” to the NSTU. My head hurts.
Paul, it seems like a disease that are within our public institutions such as education to promote only the positive, while ignoring the negatives. It seems to be a problem in NL, as well as other provinces.
NL, 1.3 billion dollar budget with a student population of 69,665 to 5530 teachers, and a teacher-student ratio of 12-1.
Click to access FASTFT10.pdf
All done within a system, that celebrates mediocrity that hands out the resources in a piece-meal fashion, never questioning if the current programs is the correct fit. One just has to look at the current reading programs for the primary grades, to see this. If it was correct, 95 to 97 % of the children would be above grade level by the end of grade 3. But than again, if it was done correct in the first place, they there would be no need of increasing the education budget besides the increase costs associated with new technology and inflation factors, as enrollment declines. But than that would mean less teachers, and there would be no need for a big bureaucracy whose function is to provide the band-aids in the upper grades. My child came home today, telling me a story. It is a sad state of affairs when high school teachers have to teach the basics of note-taking, a skill that should have been taught in grade school, instead of focusing on the course content.
As Doug notes, cobbled together in defending his stance for more money. Rather amusing, when unionists share in the blame for creating the system of mediocrity based on a social agenda that only serves their interests, and the children’s interests are much further down the list. And where to find it, one just has to look at the stories where the education system has failed them.
That would be if it was a mediocre system. The world experts who look at all the top systems say it is one of the world’s finest systems. People die in the world’s finest hospitals.
You had problems with the system Nancy. Most people don’t have problems with it.
Nobody says it is perfect. It is simply among a handfull of the very best.
One just has to look at the current reading programs for the primary grades, to see this. If it was correct, 95 to 97 % of the children would be above grade level by the end of grade 3
This has never happened (and is a statistical impossibility).
The question of how to improve reading instruction for all students, given full inclusion classrooms and extremely wide ranges of development and prior learning, is a discussion worth having — but I haven’t seen anyone (reformers included) taking it on. The programs that have proved successful in the past were not for full inclusion settings, and depend on homogeneous grouping, very small classes, a “Joplin Plan” for school organization, an abundance of paraprofessionals, a great deal of extra funding, supplementary one-to-one instruction, or several or all of the above.
Rick Hess has the right idea. We have to re-think the entire way schooling is organized and delivered.
TDSB I would be very nervous about a Joplin Plan even if restricted to reading. ANY forms of streaming/tracking has terrible effects on those who see themselves as being in the lower (read dumb) group. They are very demoralized and give up.
It’d make for an interesting world if citizens can’t discuss or have views on issues “that are out of their hands”.
No doubt some “experts” would point out the considerable differences between Finland and Canada and the issues involved in imposing a common system on both.
As to the value of one teacher having more degrees than the person next door I suspect we’d need to know what additional responsibilities that person has taken on before we can determine the value. If they’re both doing the same job it’d be pretty dubious.
As to what or who qualifies as an “expert” I suspect there’s considerable cherrypicking involved. For every “expert”, such as Linda Darling-Hammond, making one claim there’s an “expert” claiming the opposite.
I would suspect most experts would look at 2 cold northern nations, European tradition, formerly resource extraction, shifting to high tech, close and influenced by a super power but struggling to stay independent, even fought one war for it, similar rural urban split,
Finland and Canada are more similar than any 2 nations on Earth.
I would suspect not, since Finland and Canada does not share the same historical past. Last time I check, Canada has not been invaded by another country, unless one counts the battles before 1867 between France, England and United States. Nor does Canada have a next door neighbour that is a knock-off of the former USSR , and all its communist glory. If you are referring the War of 1812, simply put – the Americans lost before the first battle, by underestimating the strengths of the settlers, the British and the natives. Even to this day, underestimating Canadians and their resolved can be very foolish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Finland
Are you saying that Canada no longer depends on resource extraction? It seems to me the economic engine is the resources, and without them the Canadian cities would not exist as they are today full of hope for a better future. So unlike Finland, which is resource poor…………..
“Finland and Canada are more similar than any 2 nations on Earth” – Doug
That’d be news to quite a lot of folks, however I suspect this line of discussion should be put to bed at this point.
Back to the topic at issue?
You started the Finland doesn’t count stuff, where the leaders of the OECD “capitalism’s trans-Atlantic think tank” say Finland IS the model.
The thread is why do unions oppose reform?
Because reform as it is defined in the USA has no research basis to support it, no proven track record, no achievements to speak of. Even the Rick Hess types caution the reform movement not to look foolish by out promising what they cannot deliver.
The teachers unions look at the total failure of reform in the USA and the incredible success in Finland and say, lets look at the later, there is nothing in the former.
Charters? no better than PSs
Vouchers? Nobody wants them, can’t win a vote
testing? Check out NCLB total failure
teacher testing? no working model that adds anything
KIPP? long hours, kick out difficult kids
kill teacher unions? teacher unions associated with higher scores
phonics and DI? American white middle class doing well without it.
teacher training? Finland does it better
stop ECE? more is better proven winner
religious schools? NL Que etc going the other way
Gee I cannot, for the life of me figure out why teachers’ unions would oppose reform?
What is interesting in one of Doug’s comments – “phonics and DI? American white middle class doing well without it.
teacher training? Finland does it better”
I never thought of a teaching methodology or practice based on race. If a method is effective , it should work for all children, and not a particular race. This got me thinking, is the education system, including the union practicing some sort of race agenda, promoting the white culture over other races or is it the opposite, the white student population receiving less effective methods, so the rest of the other non-whites can catch up?
Apparently there is a lot of literature very much like the question I posed above. Here is one article, that touch on everything concerning it. Rather interesting, in the face of Doug’s comments.
“Closing Thoughts
What makes teacher expectations and the resultant discrimination so difficult to eradicate is that personal beliefs are deep-seated, part of our individual and cultural experiences, and therefore difficult to change from the outside. They are also often hidden. Even if they believe it to be true, few people are willing to admit that they consider white students to be smarter than African-American students or wealthy students to be more capable than poor students. And one would suspect that even fewer educators are willing to admit that they treat underserved students any differently in the classroom than they do the rest of their students.
However, taking the first step of acknowledging the role teacher expectations play in opening or closing doors to student postsecondary opportunities and then creating a schoolwide and system-wide dialogue about this issue in and of itself begins to open those doors.”
http://www.prel.org/products/pn_/cultural-belief.htm
You are wildly off track once again Nancy.
First, reformers’ “support” resides with a mostly uninformed, unengaged public–one that isn’t especially sold on their ideas and that, in any event, is often outmatched by well-organized, well-funded, and motivated special interests. And second, and more unfortunately, many reformers are eagerly overreaching the evidence and touting simplistic, slipshod proposals that are likely to end in spectacular failures. In short, some forces of reform are busy marching into the sea and turning notable victories into Pyrrhic ones. To quote that wizened observer of politics and policy, Pogo: We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.
And this is Rick Hess… and you wonder why teachers’ unions might stand in the way of reform?
There is zero credible research supporting most reform ideas but some people just have their fingers in their ears blocking out counter evidence because it is not congruent with pre-existing views.
“Committee Transcripts: Standing Committee on Public Accounts – March 31, 2010 – 2009 Annual Report, Auditor General: Ministry of Education ”
Just below the half-way point of the transcript:
”
Mr. Peter Shurman: Thank you, Chair.
I’d like to go to a different area. A couple of months ago we did a pre-budget tour around the province. We get presentations, as you well know, from an awful lot of interest groups, both public and private. I just keep a running narrative on everything that I hear, and something struck me, so I consulted it. What I noticed was a bullet point under one of the teachers’ federations that says, “Don’t cut our members. Cut EQAO and numeracy/literacy for cost savings.” Then there’s a little editorial comment—I won’t read it into the record—that I put in there.
Having said that, I’m interested in whether the office seeks to address what is apparent antipathy, or at least some push and shove, between some of the teachers’ federations toward the EQAO mandate. Is that something that you observe, and, if so, how are you addressing it? You’ve talked in some pretty glowing terms here over the last little while—and, let me hasten to add, I think quite well and very professionally—about the great relationships you have with teachers. By the way, I don’t question that either, but I suspect they are more one to one than in an umbrella way with groups. Can we hear some comments on that?”
The Response: “Ms. Marguerite Jackson: Actually, I would say to you we have great relationships with the teachers’ federations as well. We just happen to have a different point of view.
Mr. Peter Shurman: Have you thought about running for office?
Ms. Marguerite Jackson: I met with Sam Hammond earlier this year, in January, prior to the bulletin that you’re speaking about. He advised me that he had a motion that had been passed at his general assembly that was going to result in a magazine that was going to speak about assessment from the perspective that his members had given him. I shared with him the kind of information I’ve shared with you in terms of what teachers say to us. We always invite them to any of our symposia where we’re doing training sessions about data. We also have them sit on an advisory council that meets at least twice a year to look at all of our processes and to advise us on what they see as acceptable or not.”
Click to access 31-MAR-2010_P002.pdf
Rather interesting the cozy relationship between the EQAO and the teachers’ union. Informing one another before hand, before they publicly air their stances. No wonder the union heads get away with the things that they state, when no other part of the education arms voiced much opposition, even if goes against their own goals.
” “Don’t cut our members. Cut EQAO and numeracy/literacy for cost savings.”
It is obvious where the union stands, but more to the point the whole transcript is a lesson when uncomfortable questions arises, addressed it in general terms, and than switch the topic. No wonder why improvement in reading, numeracy and writing is moving at a snail’s pace, when politics come first to serve the education arms before the best interests of the children, and to society.
Nancy,
Only a racist would say, “white children or Asian children are smarter that black children,” there is no evidence for that, however their environments are often very different.
Black and hispanic Americans (and often Canadians) are poorer than the white population although there are actually more poor white than poor black people in raw numbers in the USA.
The lives of the poor, particularly in the USA, less in Canada, are characterized by poor nutrition good food is expensive, low birth weight, constant moving and school changes, often chaotic unstable neighbourhoods, poor health care, bad dental and optical care, FAS, drugs, single family struggles, latch key environments, etc I think you see the picture. Our advanced medicare in Canada mitigates some but not all of this which is one MAJOR reason we do better.
In the USA, poor schools often get less than half the funding of richer schools. They are often violent so that only the very most dedicated + those who will not be hired elsewhere form the staff. Good teachers move on to more affluent schools with fear of burn out if they don’t.
Waiting for Superman was instructive. Their view of low expectations, motivated by Geoffrey Canada, was the placement of vocational high schools in poor neighbourhoods. It also meant the tracking(streaming to us) of poor black students into vocational tracks in multi-track schools. G. Canada wants university bound hs only in poor neighbourhoods.
This is what low expectations really looks like and I have fought it all my life.
Doug,
Completely ignoring the point of the article – the deep seated personal beliefs of those who work within the education system, and how it impacts the children. As you have stated in dozens of posts in various blog, your revulsion for those who hold religious beliefs. If one cannot be honest about their personal beliefs, how can one honestly say, it has no impact on the education system?
Further more is it not racist when you state, ““phonics and DI? American white middle class doing well without it.” ? If one follows your line of thinking, the article is simply stating that some educators hold views that certain races are superior to others, that is a personal belief and based on experience. But to state instruction methods of phonics and DI as the white middle class is doing well without it, is it not derived from your deep-seated belief that whole language instruction and other progressive methods are best for all children, regardless of individual learning differences?
Finally, a belief that is probably held by a few educators, but voicing it would be suicide to their careers, and what you have stated in numerous posts, that SE children are children that are hard to teach. It is a justification by those who hold these beliefs, that SE children do not merit the same type of education as other children, since there is lower expectations for the SE children.
Out of the personal beliefs of those who work within the education system, is where the low expectations are formed, and than the handy excuses of the SEC factors are used as the reasons because they are more politically acceptable, than opening up the can of worms of acknowledging the role of teachers’ expectations play in our public education system.
Low expectations is found throughout the education system, and not confined to the SEC factors. But you rather not see it that it the individuals expectations and beliefs, that has potency to impact the collective groups and their collective goals.
One example is character education. In the NP today,
“She found that board’s character education program used a narrow definition of what it meant to be Canadian, one that promoted universal values at the expense of diversity. It defined being Canadian as holding “a perspective that transcends boundaries of race, ethnicity and culture, socioeconomic background, ability, faith, gender, sexual orientation and age.”
“This claim silences dissenting voices and delegitimizes different perspectives as it defines and essentializes what it means to be Canadian,” Ms. Winton wrote. “It also constructs diversity as something that must be transcended – something to get past – rather than something to be valued for itself.”
Read more: http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/02/05/plastic-bag-blacklash-sparks-deeper-debate-on-social-values/#ixzz1D6pglemQ
Even here, the powers to be within the education system, have lower expectations of children and their morals, or the lack of morals. “The battle for the hearts and minds of children has long been waged in schools, but has been making a resurgence in Canada in the form of “character education” programs, which insist that schools play a central role in shaping children’s morality, beyond the role of religion and parents.”
Let me put this in a nutshell for you Nancy.
Progressives say the issue is poverty.
Conservatives say the issue is instruction.
Conservatives are wrong.
Progressives say the issue is poverty.
Conservatives say the issue is instruction
Both are correct. Poverty, especially extreme poverty, seriously undermines academic learning and opportunity. Instruction is a key variable and critical to student achievement.
“Progressives” do not maintain that instruction does not matter. They disagree among themselves (as do “conservatives”) as to what instruction is best, for whom, at what time, in what measure, with what curricular emphases, and so on.
One self-identified “progressive” here may posit that instruction is irrelevant, but this is a definite minority viewpoint.
Rick Hess (I’m back to him again) points out that the so-called “progressives” and “reformers” actually agree on more than they disagree on. They accept as givens a number of factors about the way we “do” public education, and thus these do not even arise for discussion.
Therein lies the problem.
There was some intended humor in there TDSB. I guess it failed.
😦
Here is a link, where three educators voiced their viewpoints. The first one is written from a parent’s view, and his journey. The second is the rebuttal to the first, and the third is DI in action at a low-income school.
“Yet in the nearly thirty years since the education establishment has stubbornly insisted that the progressive model is the only way to go, and meanwhile they seem mystified at why they have not made much progress
in narrowing the achievement gap. This is true not only here but also abroad. Bonnie Grossen, an education researcher from the University of Oregon, wrote:
“Extensive case studies in England indicated that progressive education was in reality radically conservative; children became more firmly entrenched in the social class they inherited from their parents.”
It’s easy to see why this is so. If schools routinely rely upon parents to teach their kids the basics as Riverdale does, children from less educated families will
tend to fall behind. Riverdale can get away with it and not appear to fail, since the affluent families will generally make up for what the school refuses to do. But how
about the inner city where the demographic is much different.”
Click to access progressive_education.pdf
It falls in nicely with what TDSB has stated, and after reading the PDF file, it is apparently at least in my eyes that personal beliefs and experiences are playing an active role, that are seen differently depending on where one is standing.
progressive vs traditional has very little to do with it.
It is the level of child poverty that will tell you all you need to know predicting success or not.
I would take traditional education + the elimination of poverty over
progressive education + poverty any day.
That is because the school and all of the people in it control less than 20% of the outcome. (Coleman and many others).
This is no excuse to give up. That 20% can be very important to many many students.
The irony Doug, as a union man and the unions have never taken action to gain more autonomy within the school walls. I read several recent articles done in the past few years, that teachers may very well have 50 % of the control but the union heads don’t want them to have it, because it is bargaining power when it comes to contracts.
Teachers themselves asked the union to take the position that they did not want the power to suspend or otherwise exercise significant discipline such as that.
Teachers believe that this is a principal’s decision.
Teacher tenure is one of the primary obstacles to implementing meaningful teacher quality initiatives in the United States as well as Canada. It comes down to human nature. With guaranteed tenure and salary, where’s the incentive to seek improvement or to pursue excellence?
Teacher tenure is currently a red hot issue in the United States, especially after President Obama’s State of the Union Address. Most of the action, however, is occurring in the American states rather than Washington. It is definitely a polarizing public issue, but Andrew Rotherham’s recent TIME Magazine column (January 27, 2011) is one of the best on the subject.
Here is the link:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2044529,00.html
Eduwonk (aka Andy Rotherham) hits the nail right on the head:
“most teachers are not incompetent or dangerous and that, as a group, they have been unfairly maligned in recent coverage of the tenure issue. But with more than 3.2 million teachers in the U.S., even a small percentage of lousy ones adds up to a lot of students’ being shortchanged — or worse. Today there are simply too few teaching licenses being revoked, unless you somehow believe that there are far fewer incompetent teachers than there are incompetent lawyers or doctors who are being removed from their professions. The reality is that because it is far easier to encourage teachers to move to another school or district instead of trying to formally remove them from yours, sometimes people who are not only not good at teaching but actually dangerous to children bounce from one school to the next.
That phenomenon highlights a second problem with current practices. Whatever process is in place will be meaningless absent a culture that values excellence and differentiates among teaching performances. A 2009 report by the New Teacher Project looked at teacher evaluation across the country and found that less than 1% of teachers were rated unsatisfactory. Given the dismal performance of many schools, such ratings defy common sense. I mention this study because too often the blame is placed on teachers’ unions for protecting bad teachers. But ineffective administrators are a big part of the problem too.” (TIME Magazine)
How can we break the logjam?
Andy rejects the current American proposals on the table because they “treat all teachers alike.”
His proposal is far better:
“Why not look to empower teachers and administrators by giving them the ability to negotiate more flexible contracts? Let districts act more like professional sports franchises so they can protect and incentivize the talent they most want to hold on to. Contracts could offer more than monetary incentives. Excellent teachers could be protected from layoffs, for example, or given enhanced professional development experiences. Most of us are not professional athletes, but you see the same approach in a variety of workplaces all the time.” (TIME Magazine)
Giving administrators and teachers the freedom to decide what’s best for each school boar, school district, or school would certainly open up new possibilities. What’s encouraging is that it is been publicly debated in the United States, while it remains another “taboo” here in Canada.
Provinces with declining enrollments are facing critical human resources decisions in the years ahead. There will be teacher layoffs in most provinces. Will they take the path of least resistance and let the “last hired” be the “first fired”? Will teacher union protection shield ineffective teachers and Canadian union leaders stand idly by while younger professionals are dropped or consigned to morale destroying years on those lengthening sub-teacher lists?
It pains me to think of the lost hope and waste of talent that will result from the union enforced “seniority rules” and the malign neglect of quality assurance in the teaching profession.
What more could possibly be said about teacher tenure? Plenty… and I guess it’s up to me to advance that discussion:
The New York City school system is in complete disarray and always in the news. Most of what is happening provides lessons in HOW NOT TO reform a school system. Having said that, trust those New Yorkers to take direct action to fight terrorism, clear the roads of snow, and jettison educational roadblocks!
The latest example is the New York City initiative to revamp FILO (Last in, First out) seniority rules in advance of anticipated teacher layoffs.
A NY Assembly Democrat, Jonathan Bing, is leading the charge and in the New York Post (Feb 3, 2011), he did not mince any words:
“The problem for our city’s schools is worse than just potential budget cuts. State law — under a provision commonly known as “Last in, first out” or LIFO — mandates that schoolwide or systemwide teacher layoffs occur solely on the basis of seniority, with no regard for teacher quality. Under this law, the most recently hired teachers are laid off regardless of merit.
Who bears the consequences of this mandate? Our children.
We must end LIFO now, before any layoffs are necessary.
There are two reasons in particular why LIFO is unfair and poor educational and fiscal policy.
First, a teacher’s quality can’t be considered in any way before he or she is fired in a mass layoff. Under LIFO, a highly competent junior teacher who has received stellar performance evaluations must be terminated before a more senior teacher who has been deemed “unsatisfactory” after undergoing a rigorous hearing process.
That same junior teacher who excels at her craft must also be fired before more senior teachers who are in the Absent Teacher Reserve, a pool of more than 1,000 teachers without permanent jobs. State law dictates that the city spend $110 million a year to indefinitely pay the salaries of these ATR pool teachers who aren’t teaching — money that could otherwise be used to fund afterschool programs or school libraries.
Second, LIFO institutionalizes a bias against neighborhoods with chronic teacher shortages — because that is where recently hired teachers are most likely to be employed. These communities fall within two categories: low-income, underserved neighborhoods in which the student-achievement gap is at its greatest, and rapidly growing neighborhoods in which an increase of families with children demand the hiring of more teachers. Under LIFO, schools in both kinds of neighborhoods stand to lose a highly disproportionate amount of teachers.
Under LIFO, District 7 in the South Bronx could lose nearly a third of its teachers as other districts in the city lose only 5 percent. This is why a California court recently declared LIFO as it applied to Los Angeles schools to be racially discriminatory and unconstitutional on the ground that it violates each child’s right to equal educational opportunity.
Similarly, School District 2 on Manhattan’s East Side (which I represent) has seen much population growth over the last few years that has led to greater public-school enrollment and the hiring of more teachers. Under the current system, District 2 could lose up to 20 percent of its teachers — nearly four times as many as some other parts of the city.
Our children are the city’s most precious resource. They deserve to be taught in the public schools by the best teachers possible, whether a recent Teach for America graduate or a long-tenured senior instructor. Layoffs should be conducted based on merit and quality, not by putting all our teachers on a list based on seniority and indiscriminately firing every teacher the city has hired in the last three or five years.
Changing this policy won’t be easy, but when it comes to doing best for our kids, it’s worth the fight.” ( Opinion Column, New York Post)
Comment:
Such straight talk is rare in Canada where teacher unionism silences public discussion of such vitally important educational matters. It is also fair to say that our educational leaders are complicit because they too accept the unwritten union code. Some are tortured by the consequences of LIFO, but are actually afraid to challenge its dominance in the public education sector.
The Americans are in a difficult spot. Due to fiscal problems, (and some ideological ones) many feel that there will need to be massive layoffs.
The contracts are almost always LIFO (last in first out). Boo hoo, management across the nation signed these contracts decades and decades ago and people went into teaching with this reasonable expectation.
There is no such thing as teacher tenure in either country, there is LIFO and there is due process in firing and discipline. Do people think we should do away with due process? I don’t think so. I can tell you that every single year there are many teachers fired right across Ontario and the blue pages of the OCT magazine makes this clear.
There were just as many before the OCT was created. When I sat on the Toronto board, about 10 teachers were fired each year.
One of the absolute classics is the perfectly good teacher that developes depression, anxiety or other mental illnesses half way through a career.
Many are high functioning and others are beter with time off. This is a very difficult situation for management, the union, the teacher and the kids. The problem is, at exactly what point does “stress” become debilitating mental illness that effects the students?
Four year teacher? Easy answer, council out and create soft landing LTD, late career teacher? Easy, soft duties till early retirement. The problem is the 40 year old teacher.
Very high priced talent on all sides wrestle with this every year.
Seniority is the most sacred of all union beliefs. They simply will not tolerate fooling around with it.
Every year less experienced French teachers are retained over more experienced English teachers because seniority is subject based.
All teachers are excellent until management proves they are not.
Who says young is good old is bad. That is ageist if I ever heard it.
The attack on the entire teaching profession, which is what this is a part of, is simply scape goating teachers because America is not prepared to do what all other advanced nations do.
Medicare for all, public housing, compensatory education, poverty elimination etc.
To paraphrase Father Neimoller:
First they came for the teachers..but I was not a teacher….
Rather bizarre to treat teachers having the same skills and abilities no matter who they are, based on seniority, as if they skills are no better than the guys on an assembly line.
All teachers are excellent, until management proves otherwise, is a convenient saying among the unions, since very few teachers are fired in the first place, unless they have committed a crime and have been convicted of it. As for teachers who are sick, or suffering from stress-related illnesses they are simply put on long-term disability. Teachers either in United States or Canada, have excellent benefits and where there get discounts in a variety of areas, from car insurance to travel discounts to cosmetic surgery that makes their lives a bit easier, and enhances their health and economic stress. Teachers received good pensions, and often have part-time jobs as clerks and other lower paying jobs or being rehired to teach as a sub. And Doug would like to see teachers have easy soft jobs until retirement? How much of a cushion a teacher should have, could be up to debate since they already have an easier lives than most people, because no one in the high-price help seem concern about the product – the student. The short-term outcomes yes, but not the long-term outcomes.
As one goes up the ladder, if the primary grades does not do a good job, it is left to the elementary grades to do it and whatever is left over, is up to the high school teachers to fixed the problems, dealing with many students at various levels in reading, writing and numeracy. Why the high school teachers never complain about teaching things that should have been taught a long time ago, is beyond me. It does create a tremendous amount of stress for teachers at the high school level when students are at various levels in the 3 Rs, and yet there is no pressure to change things in the earlier grades so students are more even with the 3 Rs. It will be more cost effective, than giving teachers soft jobs until retirement, but than Doug’s thinking has always been about jobs, and not about the students.
Here is a thought: “Are there any plausible or proven benefits to unions in education, except from the perspective of those who are members of them? Are there ways in which students would be worse off if they were taught by a non-unionized workforce, or one with a more limited right to strike? If so, can those benefits be said to adequately compensate for the harms that seem convincingly documented? If it is indeed the case that unions in the educational sector harm society at large – while benefiting their membership – it seems especially regrettable. Not only would it represent a situation in which a minority is exploiting its power over the population at large, but they would be doing so within an institution that is meant to be one of society’s great levelers. Those who lack access to decent educational options cannot plausibly be expected to thrive subsequently in many important areas of life, such as employment and informed and effective participation in public life.”
http://www.sindark.com/2011/01/18/unions-and-education/
Seems like it was OK for 70 years that LIFO was in place and now it is “bizarre”.
Every one of those teachers has a file a foot thick saying they are fine. They have been inspected and observed for decades. Now you want to conduct a witch hunt.
No, we will be dealing with every one of these on a case by case basis. Every one will have due process.
Your principals an supers will soon report to you that there are not enough hours in a day to conduct this.
Michelle Rhee tried this in DC and is now on the outside looking in.
Nancy, all of the jurisdictions where teachers are unionized in the USA seriously outperform those areas where unions are restricted.
Conservative Premier George Drew gave teachers the closed shop in Ontario.
Teachers in Finland? Highly unionized. They seem to be doing OK right?
Alberta teachers, highly unionized, highest pay in Canada from the Conservative gov’t of Alberta. You think Alberta kids are suffering?
Right to strike in Ontario granted by Ontario PC gov’t Robarts/Davis.
BTW Nancy, in Ontario before 1975 teachers did not have the right to strike.
The union simply went around and collected a letter of resignation from evey teacher, effective in June unless certain demands were met, like 20% raises etc since there had been few raises for a long period of time.
The government lawyers tried in vain to find a way to stop teachers from resigning on mass. Their own lawyers told them, “that would be called slave labour.”
The right to strike was established, by conservatives, to “regularize” the teacher labour market.
Everyone in the labour field knows “when you make strikes illegal, you get illegal strikes”.
Probably best not to feel sorry for Michelle Rhee.
It appears she’s now got a far bigger plan in mind. It’ll be interesting to watch.
And yet everyone within the education system ignores the long-term outcomes of the quality of education received during the 12 years. No one seems to care, when universities has remedial courses for the 3 Rs and in some cases remedial 101 in the sciences. No one seems to care, when colleges have year long course outlines for what is essentially adult school dress up, to take care of the 3 Rs, or prep school to prepare students who are lacking in some skills, for university. No one seems to care how many students while in the public education system, are receiving private tutor lessons for the 3 Rs.
And yet the union heads, along with the teachers never take issue with the curriculum and all the other bone-headed programs that come from above, unless it impacts their contracts or hours work. And least of all, how much talent is never discovered among our students, or nurture to realized their full potential. One can understand why the likes of Einstein or Thomas Edison in their particular eras were not welcomed at school, but in today’s world with all the knowledge that has been gained on learning, the chances are very good they would be sitting in a special education class, or being suspended for their learning. As a union, one would think that they would point out the weaknesses of the curriculum, the bureaucracy above and how it impacts the students. Yes teachers need to be protected, but the students need to be protected as well. My youngest went through 5 different curriculum changes in math, and no one was looking out for their future outcomes in math.
Teachers can only do so much, and yet it is the only life line for students, because quite frankly no one on the boards gives a toss, nor at the ministry of education. Their only concern is the data, cold hard numbers and any bad outcomes can be conveniently blamed on a number of reasons, including unions. And yet after 12 years of education, we have students taking remedial courses????
I still maintained that unions need to take back their autonomy and stopped trading it for more benefits. I could have used a few teachers with full autonomy to take my youngest and bring her up to speed, by not using whole language. As most teachers discovered that whole language is just not working for 60 % of the class, and creates more work to bring them up to speed. And yet, what can teachers do, when the powers to be including the teachers’ colleges are filled with people intent on a course that makes all start to protect and serve their own interests. There is no reason why students are left hanging in the wind, paying the price for the lack of accountability at the board and the ministries.
All education data in Canada is always better than the year before.
Nobody is concerned Nancy because every single year you go backwards in history, things were worse.
None of wht you say concerns me in the least. We have one of the world’s handful of outstanding education systems.
Nancy, the OSSTF provincial office has an entire dept “Education Services” other federations do as well, that is in constant contact, debate, negotiation, professional dialogue with the province on curriculum and pedagogy. They serve on an endless number of committees.
We tell them over and over:
-get rid of testing
-curriculum is too complex
-tone down the credit light stuff
-get rid of Fullan and the Fullanites
This only scratches the surface.
I am always amazed at your ability to opine on major subjects with so little background on how it actually works.
How will we decide who stays and who goes in an environment of mass layoffs?
Well, we start by keeping all teachers. We use the twin crisis of fiscal problems and declining enrolement to simply keep making classes smaller and expand into ECE without ADDING to the total # of teachers.
If the total # of teachers STILL must decline, we simply use attrition to handle that.
Simple wasn’t it?
Of course students improve from one year to the next in terms of knowledge, and weaknesses improve as well, but if it was never taught in the first place, or touch briefly the weaknesses are still their in senior high school. It is rather weird that some in my child’s grade 10 academic class, still does not have automatic recall for the times table up to 12, or some still count on their fingers. No wonder the teachers have to resort to calculators, for such simple calculations. It not big numbers one is talking about. Than one can talk about fractions, a key piece that would make the world of algebra a whole easier to understand. The fundamentals of math have not change in the last 100 years or so, nor has the structure of the english language has change.
It becomes progressively harder for teachers to address at the high school level, where many of the things being done are not effective to eliminate the problems. And it is not the teachers, but the many consultants running around suggesting this or that. No one really cares if the method was effective.
Here is just one of the many articles from university professors; ” Professor James Côté and co-author, Anton Allahar, in their recent book Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis (see a review in this issue), blame a general student disengagement with learning as source of the problem. However, most of the students I see are not so much disengaged as poorly trained for university expectations. Students’ ability to do analysis and synthesis seems to have been replaced by rote memorization and regurgitation in both the sciences and the humanities. This is a complaint that I hear from instructors in senior high-school classes through to professors in the humanities. Trent philosophy professor, Bernie Hodgson, tells me that his students want “philosophy paint-by-numbers” – a memorized, fill-in-the-blanks approach to passing tests and writing assignments — and this is exactly what I and many of my colleagues are seeing in science and mathematics disciplines. While we still get some students with excellent analytical ability, there has been a serious decline on average. In mathematics and physics, it means that students do not really understand what they are doing even when they have covered the material in high school. This problem is reflected in the learning approach of most students, which has changed along with their test performance. All term, students were asking me when I was going to teach them what they need to know for the exam, as though physics has only a fixed number of facts or kinds of problems that need to be memorized and fed back to the instructor.”
http://www.universityaffairs.ca/has-ontario-taught-its-high-school-students-not-to-think.aspx
And their realms and realms of material on the government sites, of interested parties questioning the state of the student’s basic skills that are necessary for the next level.
As for union reps serving on the committees, who are they representing – the teachers or the students? It is obvious there is going to be a conflict of interest and where students are left flapping in the wind, because the union rep decided to become a yes person to the ministry, and in return, a favourable decision on another matter down the road. Doug, you keep repeating the union does a lot of things, without the supporting evidence. Even the little things such as the excessive used of calculators, because the students just do not have the automatic recall that they should have by at least grade 6. Apparently that is all politics too, as well as ideological. But than again, unions may be pushing to add two more years to any post-secondary institution, because than high school teachers would be hired, because most professors would not be incline to do that type of work. Would it be there, students actually would learn how to do analysis and synthesis? Something that was drilled in my head through the high school years, and where I actually could produced a A-graded essay, when I put my mind to it.
As far as opining, there is a lot of opining going on at all levels of the public education system, and not a whole lot of common sense. It is rather hard for teachers, students or parents to hang their hat on, when the interested parties are intent to keep their political influence and power, by trading favours with each other.
James Cote is a crank.
Not one student improving Nancy, the educational data of the nation is constantly improving. Every year there are more university and college grads as a % of their cohort, more high school grads, all positive signs keep going up, illiteracy etc keeps going down, as we march confidently into the future as one of the world’s leading education nations.
Go Canada. Go public education.
The teachers on government committees represent “the collected wisdom of the profession”.
What do doctors represent on health committees, lawyers on law committees?
OSSTF reps represent all that the profession has learned since Socrates.
This wisdom resides within the federations. The government knows the unions represent education wisdom.
Well if that is the collective wisdom, there sure have a funny way of providing programs that does not fit the needs of the students. Or another way to look at it, they care only for the short term goals and never the long term goals of the students. Or the collective wisdom of ignoring the advancements that have been made in learning disabilities, and instead dumbed down the curriculum, rather than the hard work in addressing the learning weaknesses. Or the funny way of ignoring the stats at some schools, where achievement is rather high but there is a very high percentage of students attending private tutors afterschool for the basics. Than have the nerve to celebrate and give each pats on their backs that they are succeeding, until the next article in the newspaper from other interested parties condemning their collective wisdom.
Isn’t it about 23 % of the grade 12 student graduates actually go to university and finishes up with a degree? And the rest that do go either have college or some form or part of post-secondary education. I am not sure about that, but the last time I read anything on it, students were taking a longer time to get a degree, and some as long as 6 years for a BA. And at the very least, the numbers are not being track closely to arrive at solid numbers.
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=8a112484-aea5-4e8a-be69-c8986a34837d&k=95908
Here is the last one I read.
http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2010/09/27/students-who-dropout-over-grades/
Read the comments, especially the last one – “How about better preparing students for University in high school?”
Sorta like the assembly folks at a GM plant represent “automotive wisdom” 🙂
Maybe the better route would be to seek out folks who don’t have such a vested interest, on a very personal level, in how things are done. Do we ask a bus driver at the TTC how to manage the TTC? A bank teller to determine the direction the bank should take? A private on military startegy for the army?
Let’s not overdo the “I’m a teacher so I’m an expert on education” thing too much.
Show that statement to any teacher, they would call it teacher bashing and incredibly insulting.
Only teachers understand education.
We’ve covered this already; you represent your view of things and nothing else so claiming to know what “any teacher” thinks or finds “insulting” doesn’t fly. I suspect most teachers who fall back on the tired old “teacher bashing” routine should be ignored in any event.
As for the rest… why even bother.
Good night
Thanks John L. you’re correct.
Doug seems to be very good at lording judgments and telling folks here who’s right and who’s not.
Why the unions balk at teacher excellence initiatives?
Because it would mean actually proving once and for all what pretty much the world knows already – that no two teachers are alike and can guarantee quality of education to students.
It’s one of the worst kept secrets of the teacher unions.
It also knocks the wind out of the “all for one” union mantra.
There are 2 kinds of teachers in the “competency” sweepstakes. There is the competent 99% and there is the incompetent 1%. Neither management, labour or government want further categories beyond what is mutually negotiated. It is the role of management to discipline and/or dismiss those where they can document incompetency and offer due process.
Many are disciplined and or dismissed every year. There are “Dr Charles Murray” types in every single profession.
The British conducted a “merit pay” experiment in a few schools. The Head Masters (principals) soon asked the government to stop. They could not get anything else done and had to stay late at night to do their paper work. Everybody broke into factions and began fighting, all teachers not awarded merit pay all appealed and reapplied at every opportunity until they were granted it.
“Many are disciplined and or dismissed every year”
And yet, “As a result, there is a high turnover of beginning teachers who leave the profession within the first few years of teaching. Studies from the US suggest that about one-third of beginning teachers leave the profession within the first three years and almost half may leave within the first five years.91 Across Canada, a study done for the Canadian Teachers’ Federation showed that, in 2000, about six in ten of the 1995 graduates from elementary and secondary teacher education degree programs were employed as full-time elementary and secondary teachers five years after graduation. Almost one quarter of the 1995 graduates never went into teaching at all.92
While specific results for Alberta are not known, they likely are similar. This is a tremendous loss to the individuals involved, the teaching profession, and the education system.”
http://education.alberta.ca/department/ipr/commission/report/reality/excellent/teachprep.aspx
Apparently Doug, and these stats are being cited in other countries, that 1/3 of new teachers leave within 3 years, and almost half of the new graduates leave within 5 years.
Are you not lumping the few that do received discipline or the fired ones, from the teachers that leave voluntarily?
Nobody knows those stats better than the federations. The studies that have been done asking teachers why they left basically say this:
The job is far harder than they thought
The pay is not that good
There is FAR too much accountability and too little autonomy
Everything about the high early attrition rate supports the federations case.
No I am not lumping them in Nancy. Look in the blue pages of the OCT magazine “Professionally Speaking” and they were also fired at the same rate before. Technically the college does not fire. It lifts the liscence. Boards cannot employ teachers without a liscence so they must fire the teachers.
I mentioned my time as a trustee in Toronto. An average of 10 teachers were fired every single year. We did not make announcements in the paper so they were allowed to characterize it as quitting, retirement, whatever.
Doug, you are splitting hairs calling teachers who were asked not to come back, as being fired. At the end they chose to leave the professions, and as a result stopped paying their fees to the teachers’ colleges. Big difference for the newer employees at any place. All will get their lay-off notice, and often is the case the management will decide to eliminate the dead wood when it is time to go back to work, to the newest employees, by never calling them back. You are still ignoring 50 % of the graduates who hold teachers’ certificates quit the profession for various reasons. And the main one is, that they cannot find a job as a teacher, or steady employment and move on to a different profession. How much talent is wasted in the public education system, for other companies that will benefit of their skills? There is far fewer teachers being fired, because of discipline by the Teachers College than the reality you have stated.
No I am not. There is laid off and their is fired. I am saying that there are many many teachers FIRED every year. You have trouble believing that because there is a myth that it is impossible to fire a teacher. It is not impossible, it happens every day of the week.
Nobody sends you an email every time someone is fired. It happens very quietly in a discreet manner.
Dismissal is not layoff, layoff people have recall rights. Nobody is confusing the 2 except perhaps you.
The people who quit Nancy already had a job and were past their probationary period. You are totally confused because you equate having a certificate with having a job.
Huge numbers QUIT, resign because the job is very demanding, the pay is too low and there is too much accountability in other words not enough professional autonomy.
Every bit of evidence you site proves my case not yours.
“Ontario’s Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities, John Milloy, announced this week that Ontario will cut 1,000 spaces from its teacher training programs in an attempt to correct an oversupply of unemployed B.Ed graduates.”
The above is in the Globe Campus, and check out the comments. New teachers cannot find steady work, plus numerous other problems – and the general feeling seems to me from reading all the comments, certain special interests would like to keep the status-quo. In the comment section, no one complained about the pay scale. And on a side note, a teacher cannot be hired unless they have a teacher’s certificate. Dismissal, in the next link takes on different meanings depending on the context.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dismissal
And the next link, explain the differences between lay-offs and dismissal, plus other terms. It makes the difference between collecting IE and not collecting IE. Good to know, when the feds are always redefining IE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_of_employment
It would be an interesting debate Nancy if you could keep your facts straight or had a better grasp of what you are actually talking about. Your posts are full of inaccurate information, conjecture and myths oft repeated.
it would be an even better debate if folks could stick to the topic and refrain from passing judgment on individual points of view – I don’t know who this Doug thinks he’s fooling but if we’re looking for schools in Canada to move backwards he’s definitely our man. If we’re looking for a new, more inspirational model with a dwindling “blob” and fewer excuses, my money’s on Paul and the majority of posters here.
Has anyone considered that there’s a deliberate plan in place by some teachers to keep students under-performing? I mean what would we do with all of those educated students if we had them?
Is the whole resistance to excellence more about what’s good for teachers and their job security than it is about actually educating children?
On the contrary, I cannot find anything, anywhere in Canada, that states what you have stated. The closest I can come, is the number of teachers losing their certification, and I might add is a very small, small percentage. If anything, is one article after another article on the over supply of newly minted teachers, not enough specialized teachers, and so on. And what I have found is one fact that is consistent and that is 50 % of new teachers leave the profession for various reasons, by the end of 5 years, and this is confirmed by OECD. Another point, in Canada it is very hard to confirmed, because the powers to be do not want to collect the data, for obvious reasons, as one American author has stated. They leave, because most cannot find steady work. But it is rather hard, when boards are not collecting the information, nor are the teachers’ colleges and when they do, they used words such as dismissal, which to most people means one has been fired. However, if this was the case – the numbers be a lot higher than the small amount such as the ones that you have stated, that about 10 teachers are fired from the Toronto Board.
If it was indeed myths, should you not take on OECD, your favourite global organization that you love to quote from, and set them straight? Since they are responsible for conducting the original study for the countries, including Canada and United States.
Has anyone considered that there’s a deliberate plan in place by some teachers to keep students under-performing? I mean what would we do with all of those educated students if we had them?
Is the whole resistance to excellence more about what’s good for teachers and their job security than it is about actually educating children?
Rampant paranoia.
No the whole resistance is based on the fact that the “reform” agenda is chaotic, built on sand, has little or no research base, flies in the face of other key pieces of research, and has nothing whatsoever to do with excellence.
Ask Rick Hess. Overpromised, premature, “marching into the sea”.
People do not want to be accused of teacher bashing and then come out with outlandish pronouncements that low achievement is a plot by teachers to keep us undereducated.
That is a slander on every working teacher.
There is no need for a new model since we live in the midst of what many consider to be the greatest education system the world has ever seen here in Onraio and Canada.
The only 2 nations ahead of us are Finland and Korea (South Korea). One has 4% child poverty and the other has many more hours in the day. The case is clear that on the basis of the weight being lifted by the system itself, within the hours it works, there simply is NO better system.
Does it need tweeks and improvements? Sure, they all do but it is by far the best.
Nancy listen carefully. The people who are leaving in droves before 5 years are up are teachers with full time secure jobs that they are resigning from, not people who could not find a job or a secure job.
They have been studied. The conclusions are that they were overworked and lacked professional autonomy. Your evidence proves my case not your case.
http://www.massteacher.org/teaching/newmembers/pd/pd_why_leave.aspx
This is one and only one of the dozens of articles and studies that come to the same conclusions.
The job is very hard, too hard for many, underpaid, underappreciated, hectored, pestered, and harrassed to death.
Yes, the article that was supplied is the usual reasons from a union’s standpoint. However, there is a flaw in this kind of reasoning, and where the boards and teachers’ colleges object to rather harshly. Unions are actually stating that teachers’ colleges are not fully preparing the the future teachers to the rigors of the classroom, nor is the board supplying the proper types of resources, to ease their way into the classroom. Another point that is raise, parents are used as another reason, because they preferred more experienced teachers. However, new teachers are bound to be accepted as much as experienced teachers, because new teachers bring in a fresh perspective, and are often willing to sit down with parents trying to understand their viewpoint, without dismissing them out of hand.
How does the reasons given hold up, when unions are always boasting including yourself, all teachers are equal in training quality, since teachers must have a certificate. granted by the teachers’ college. Or all certified teachers have number one quality to the non-certified teachers?
I am afraid the reasons given by unions have been picked clean by the other education arms, who are defending their position to protect their own interests, as unions are in the same sense. There is only one reason that would be agreed upon by all arms of the education system, and that teachers leave the profession because it is not for them, or did not meet their expectations.
As for the data, that can be easily done by the payroll departments of the boards and in part the teachers’ colleges payroll department, that keeps track of teachers leaving the profession long before retirement, because they stopped paying their yearly fees. In both cases, there is a huge paper trail of data, that can be pulled together by the clerks who work in the accounting departments. Even unions have their own data streams, of union fees.
But if it was done, the gravy train of fees might end , and people might have second thoughts of entering the field, and avail of other fields that might want their talents. Or could it be, that no one wants to open the can of worms and have it exposed to the public? As one writer stated, there would be a price to pay, if medical doctors were leaving the profession at a 50 % rate within 5 years, or another profession like accountants. One newly minted teacher. a Canadian has finally given up and has enrolled in college, in a totally different field. Like she stated, her brother enrolled in college, landed a job in his field, before he graduated and within three years is making $60,000 dollars. Plus he does not have the heavy loans to be paying back.
Nancy, you are speculating as usual, picking things out of the air to suit your own bias’. This question has been very strongly studied in many countries and they reached the same conclusions as above.
Young, employed, secure teachers are leaving in droves because:
* The job is too hard
* The pay-benefits are too low
* The accountability is too onerous
* There is too little professional autonomy
Every study finds the same thing. You are confusing this with young trained teachers who cannot find jobs. Both things are true at the same time due to a radical decline in enrolement.
I have been trying to tell people a few things. Declining enrolement allows us to cut class sizes, add ECE all without adding teachers, (ie costs).
If federations don’t like the loss of fees in Ontario, they need to ask permission to merge since their unions are statutory. First their should be an OSSTF-ETFO merger followed up by an OECTA merger with the new entity, with an eventual merger with AEFO.
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/25_02/25_02_miner.shtml
Very predictable knee jerk response from Doug folks.
His response to an individual who doesn’t buy the union mantra is the reason for the balk by unions to move towards reformed excellence.
Paul – I’m pretty sure you’ve had your answer to your question answered in Doug’s responses alone.
“Rampant Paranoia” – not at all.
“teacher-bashing” – not one bit.
it’s the usual response when the getting to the truth is closer than we think.
“A slander on any working teacher” – I give that a 4/10 Doug and it’s not a slander on working teachers. It’s as solid an explanation as any other.
Good teachers need to be recognized for something more than tenure. Good teachers know that.
Perhaps the key is to offer teachers more choice in their jobs and in how they are represented. Seems to me that the USA is moving well in that direction.
Nancy – you’re making your case well. Good to see.
Has anyone considered that there’s a deliberate plan in place by some teachers to keep students under-performing? I mean what would we do with all of those educated students if we had them?
Is the whole resistance to excellence more about what’s good for teachers and their job security than it is about actually educating children?
I mean really Cate, that is paranoia. I am waiting for the other reformers to jump in and say Cate is right, the teachers are running a vast conspiracy to keep the kids uneducated. It involves 3,000,000 teachers in Canada and the USA but it is a secret.
The teachers are represented by a law passed in the mid 1940’s by the Conservative government in Ontario that all teachers must be in the following unions, OSSTF,FWTAO,OPSMTF, OECTA and AEFO. It was amended to allow FWTAO and OPSMTF to merge in the 1970s.
It is called a statutory union.
In BC Premier Vander Zalm, made membership in BCTF totally optional. Within 3 months BCTF has signed up 90% of the provinces teachers into the new optional union. Within 6 months it was 98% where it remains today.
The federations are very popular with their membership.
“As educational historian Diane Ravitch notes, the corporate-based reform agenda undermines community and democracy and is subject “to the whim of entrepreneurs and financiers.” The obsession with schools as a business, she notes, “threatens to destroy public education.”
In the Rethinking Schools article, rather ironic to blame billionaires for under-minding community and democracy in United States, when the very structure has moved over the years to limit community and political power of people by having the people served the needs of the structure, rather than having the structure serving the needs of the people. It can be applied in Canada as well, where one of the final outcomes, low voter turnout for young adults.
Click to access youth_e.pdf
The roots of our young adults not likely to vote, the education system plays a large role telling them throughout their school years what is democracy, but they see little evidence of democratic principles working within the structure.
Bill Gates in the Macleans article, offers a different viewpoint that should be considered, even though he was mainly talking about the American system, it can be applied in Canada as well.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/09/21/bill-gates-in-conversation/
“And the difference isn’t just in math and reading scores. You look at the behaviours of these kids, the collaborations of these kids, the dreams of these kids, the willingness to vote—any measure you like. You like sculptures, honestly, the KIPP kids are better at sculpture. It’s a huge difference.”
I too have notice the difference over the years, some schools do a much better job in looking after the needs of the students, by not only lecturing students, but also providing the means to actively participate. Schools that have band/choir, sports/teams, drama, newsletters written by students – and where they are allow to freely express themselves are all things that promote democratic principles. Yet, there is forces within the system that are intent to control what goes on inside the walls of our schools, based on their own best interests and not on the best interests of our children.
“I didn’t have Wikipedia to look something up when I was confused. If you’re a motivated student, it’s way better to be learning now than at any time in the past. You want to have an Internet connection and you want to have adults who, when you get confused, can straighten you out and can tell you what learning might connect to your curiosity, your job opportunities, those kinds of things. I envy those kids in KIPP. I’d never want to use the capacity because KIPP goes to inner-city kids but if my kids had to go to a KIPP school, it wouldn’t be that different from the great private schools they are going to now.”
In Canada, “Eight in ten Canadians have Internet access at home, according to a new study by Ipsos Reid. Canadians older than 55 are less connected than their younger compatriots but are catching up fast. Mobile connection is the next big wave, Ipsos Reid predicts.”
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/281131#ixzz1DN6wOQP0
And here too, the Internet is used mainly for information gathering, and not as a learning tool where individual students can work on their academic weaknesses at home, school and elsewhere. One just has to look at distance education and what is offered for the K to 12 system, to see that breath and variety of programs for all learners and their needs is lacking. The structure of the education system, does not like the Internet, and other tech devices taking away the system’s control over how and what children learn. If one child needs lessons on basic grammar, and another in summary writing – it has to follow the curriculum. Yet, on the web there is free and subscription sites that follows direct instruction methods, lots of practice and so forth, but once again, they are frown upon by some within the education system. As I have observed there is schools across Canada that offers their students this kind of help at school and home, and it is schools that also have great programs in arts and music that go beyond math and language arts, are students that are actively learning the principles of democracy and community.
Bill Gates was asked this question, ” So is the problem the education departments and administrators, or is it teachers’ unions, or the teachers themselves?”
His response: “We don’t celebrate the good ones and study what they do, we don’t figure out how to transfer their knowledge. That fact tends to get blamed on the unions, but everyone’s been involved—the parents, the school boards, the governors, the different levels of government. You can say you need to lengthen the school day, you can say you need to reduce the amount of money that goes into the pension side. There are problems with the common curriculum thing. There are some ways that technology can help. But I put the evaluation system way ahead of all those other things we should also do, and our foundation is funding pilot programs in that area.”
I agree with Gates, and I would add that parents are viewed within the system as being part of the problem, but never part of the solution. Never part of the solution, because they are seen as a variable that needs to be control to prevent the under-minding of the latest programs coming from the educrats.
I can attest to it, when I decided to subscribed to Time4Learning, from K to 8. An American site, where my youngest grades at school were improving, in conjunction with spending 1 hour daily at home, learning key knowledge and basic facts in math, language arts, and science. It help her greatly to connect the lessons at the school to what was being taught at the site, and she was learning. But foolish me, thought sites such as Time4Learning would be a great addition for the school, to help the students, especially the SE children. Boy, was I wrong about that one, and the educrats lectured me on the evils of such sites. However my child’s classmates were thrilled about the site, and every chance they had, pleaded with my child to put in her password, so they could go on because it was fun. And imagine that, they were learning!
The reform movement in the USA is a faux grassroots movement.
It receives massive funding from the Bill Gates, the Eli Broad foundation, the Walton Family Trust, and a series of hedge fund managers the like of whom nearly brought us asunder very recently.
Without this funding, it would be a cashew coalition of fringe players.
The above back the movement for one simple reason. They hope to cash in handsomely from the privatization of public education.
Gates would be happy if an intermediate step caused the USA to continue to overproduce engineers and scientists in order to drive down wages.
If the reform movement was indeed a faux grassroots movement, it is rather odd for it to have such a long life, and well into the future. As for Gates, and billionaires like him, they do not throw their money around, because they can. Gates in particular started the new game plan a long time ago, with providing health care in third world countries. He apparently got the established gameplayers upset with his plans, but did not back off. The Gates Foundation want to do change things for the better, giving people a helping hand, without them being dependent on those who have much more. There is a vast number of communities across Canada, that have computers in their libraries and schools because of the Gates Foundation, and without the Gates Foundation, would still be using castoffs of the government’s kindness, or none at all. I remember reading a story about him, long before he decided to get heavily involved in public education that the way things are being done in a lot of areas, is doing the same things, and expecting a different result. Public education may be an perfect example of doing things, expecting people to fall in line singing in the same hymn book. It is the structure that needs to be change, not the people.
Here is one example in today’s NP, where cultural becomes the prime vehicle to accommodate students. I see a lot of it going on, especially when ESL students received more grammar, spelling, and other essentials of the English language, than the Canadian students who have the garden variety everyday language weaknesses. The policy of cultural is being taken too far, when immigrants are demanding this – “A dozen Muslim families who recently arrived in Canada have told Winnipeg’s Louis Riel School Division that they want their children excused from compulsory elementary school music and coed physical education programs for religious and cultural reasons.
“This is one of our realities in Manitoba now, as a result of immigration,” said superintendent Terry Borys. “We were faced with some families who were really adamant about this. Music was not part of the cultural reality.”
Read more: http://life.nationalpost.com/2011/02/05/muslim-families-in-winnipeg-want-children-excused-from-certain-classes/#ixzz1DPDWu2tX
And the sad part, the school board will move mountains to accommodate them. But for the SE children, who are the Canadians, the public education system has a real problem accommodating their needs, since many of their needs are based on educational needs and not the star that is called culture. Perhaps, parents of SE children should start demanding things because it is part of our cultural reality. Parents could create a whole culture based on some real world science and call it our religion.
The above NP article, is another reason why the grassroots is growing, when we have educrats looking at people through their culture, and than decide their educational needs basing it on SEC factors. People are people, and as Barbara Kay has stated in reference to the low-income school: ” Only social theorists living in ivory towers and labouring under the Marxist delusion that poverty and lack of success are causally linked to capitalism and a conspiracy to keep them ignorant and enchained could come up with such a stupid idea. What low-income children need most in their lives is ambition, inspiration and encouragement. They need parents who push them to achieve, not bureaucrats who absolve parents from their jobs and make their children wards of the state. This scheme is more than stupid. It is a slap in the face to all people who came up by their own bootstraps, or who worked their fingers to the bone to ensure that if they themselves couldn’t have a higher education and a secure future, at least their children would. It wasn’t the state’s public schools that made successful Canadians who started out in poverty: It was self-respect, civic pride and a profound sense of responsibility toward their children. They did it for themselves. Now we have a school board essentially waving off the qualities of character and parental sacrifices that pulled children out of impoverishment and gave them the tools to enrich themselves.”
Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/02/08/barbara-kay-niagaras-school-board-of-dunces-needs-an-education-in-life/#ixzz1DPFuxEyX
We need more Bill Gates in the public education system, just to prevent all the bone-headed ideas that come from our educrats.
Here are some wise words from the late Adrian Rogers on socialism.
“Professor is a Genius
An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before,
but had once failed an entire class.
——————————————–
That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.
The professor then said, “OK,
we will have an experiment in this class.
All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.
After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B.
The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.
As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.
The second test average was a D!
No one was happy.
When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.
The scores never increased as bickering,
blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.
All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.
Could not be any simpler than that.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Rogers
His words are being quoted, to describe what socialism ideology can do to human beings. Perhaps this is why achievement rates limped from one year to the next, and at the same time dumbing down the work . The unions here in Canada, should really understand that people should not be treated as equals, when in reality we are not. Nor should they be fooling around with the SEC factors, by taking away the core basics that are essential in a democracy. But they do, to ensure socialism ideology lives on, with about half expecting something from the government, and the other half that has given up along time ago.
It makes me think of another nutty plan from the educrats, where the K to 6 kids will no longer be graded with letters. I wonder how many kids will just stopped trying, because there is no reward for hard work?
It is the “socialists” like Peter Kormos for the NDP that said the “poor school” is a stupid paternalistic idea. They want nothing to do with it but nancy, don’t let the facts get in the way of a story you like.
That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.
What next Nancy, the Little Ren Hen?
Not a bad idea, a primer on the evils of socialist values that devalues the worth of people. It could be called The Little Red Hen on the Evils of socialism. Actually, there has been many writers of note that has covered this topic, including Marx himself. He noted himself many of the flaws that would cropped up, if some country decided to try out his theory of socialism. You should try some reading on Marx, and how his writings are so very similar to the structure of the public education system, where socialist values are interwoven throughout the entire system.
At the end of Barbara Kay’s article, “I know a young woman who teaches school in a low-income area of Ontario – no point in being more specific than that – and she told me about the difficulties of dealing with low ambitions and low discipline. I asked her what she tells the parents when they come for their parent-teacher interviews. She laughed. She said none of the parents of her kids ever show up for them. There’s your problem. A special school won’t help children whose parents won’t help them.”
Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/02/08/barbara-kay-niagaras-school-board-of-dunces-needs-an-education-in-life/#ixzz1DPu7EeR9
Good luck on the low-income school, since it will be a constant reminder for the kids and their parents and probably told often that they will see themselves as low-income, and not a person. Kormos is against it, like most politicians across all party lines. Another nutty idea from the educrats who believe in socialist justice and values. As Barbara Kay states, “It’s about the culture, not the income.”
How many X have I said “It is not socialists who want the poor school.” It is not a socialist value and did not come from socialists. If fact, socialists believe in the maximum class integration possible.
That is why they are concerned about French immersion, gifted, IB, and other such progrms since they polarize the class situation.
Queen of Reform moves money from poor schools to give it to rich schools.
Boy that reform stuff looks great. Why would teachers not want to support that?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/06/AR2011020603122.html?sid=ST2011020700596
“How can we build better teachers for education in the 21st century? What can be done to ensure that “teacher excellence” actually matters in evaluating and rewarding teachers? And in staffing schools, when it comes to deciding who says and who goes, how can we best guarantee that students come before “job protection” in the schoolhouse?”
The questions Paul asked have yet to be answered.
Folks are tuning out of education in a big way. Even on discussion forums. The provocations don’t help…they actually serve to derail the discussion……it’s a case of history repeating itself on this education blog like all of the others.
“how can we best guarantee that students come before “job protection” in the schoolhouse?”
we can’t unless
a) union membership asks for choice in representation
b) break the union grip on our schools
c) make an end run around the unions by educating individual classroom teachers and parents as to what their choices are and how to get them.
“We” can’t build better teachers. “THEY” can by standing up to the blob and axis of excuses.
With education not even in the running of issues as the Ontario election ramps up – priorities from an aging population lay elsewhere. THAT will be the union’s undoing because today’s boomers are going to want to start seeing return for their investments and their tax dollars spent on health care, jobs and keeping costs (and taxes) down.
How can we build better teachers for education in the 21st century? What can be done to ensure that “teacher excellence” actually matters in evaluating and rewarding teachers? And in staffing schools, when it comes to deciding who says and who goes, how can we best guarantee that students come before “job protection” in the schoolhouse?”
The questions Paul asked have yet to be answered.
Q) What can be done to ensure that teacher excellence actually matters in evaluating and rewarding teachers?
Teachers are heavily inspected as probationary teachers and also during their careers. The profession of teachers, not just teacher unions, overwhelmingly rejects cash rewards based on inspections or on testing. There is near unanimous feeling on this. Finland has the keys to excellence and they are initial education and ongoing professional devlopment.
If you want to pay cash for something, pay for extra curricular, pay for extra degrees, pay for coverage of absent teachers, and pay more for ositions of responsibility.
Q) When it comes to deciding who stays and who goes, the decision must be made to keep everybody and decline by attrition only. The seniority system is the most sacred of all union beliefs. They will fight changes to it with their entire arsenal. Be prepared for the existential fight to the death on this question. This will mean massive strikes work to rule campaigns etc. Back to the Future Mike Harris style.
Management has the right and obligation to inspect and approve teachers on an individual basis. The fact that they must follow due process means they cannot get themselves up off their duffs to do enough classroom visits. This is hardly the fault of the union.
Dozens and dozens of teachers are fired and in the case of probationary teachers, not offered permanent contracts, every single year.
One way the Harris government destroyed any element of incentive in the teaching system was when it decided to slash the amount available to department heads in high schools. Harris cut the funding in half.
OSSTF argued with the boards that the number of Positions of Responsibility (PORs) ought to remain the same and the $4000 allowance should be cut to $2000.
The boards said no and cut the number of positions by combining departments. This was combined with the loss of a free period for dept work in recent years.
Naturally, many teachers decided that it was not worth it to compete for PORs any more because they were not worth the agro.
It seems the same philosophy now wants to find ways to reward excellent teachers.
They had one. They broke it.
I think Cate answered it much more directly.
I never found union bashing in the Dale Carnegie course.
Yes unions will use all of their influence to block “reform” as it is understood in the USA these days.
The reason is that it is bad for public education, the most important institution in our society and one of the most popular.
Public unions – one of my favourite lines taken from the numerous articles of unions, and their heads –
“When the fiscal update came down, Canadian Labour Congress president Ken Georgetti had the nerve to put on a baffled expression and ask: “How does taking away public employees’ right to strike stimulate the economy?” The answer, which any poor bastard trying to get a lift to work in Ottawa could have given him, is that the private sector has to cover the salaries of the public sector by creating wealth in an environment of risks and changing price signals. But increasingly, tax-funded workers act as if they’re doing the general public a favour by allowing us to pay for their lifestyles.
Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/12/17/national-post-editorial-board-canada-s-public-service-can-t-be-fired-can-t-be-satisfied.aspx#ixzz1DVJ2Icvr
Yes Doug, it is applies to teachers’ unions as well. Soon, it will be the public sector unions turn, and they might be hard press to find someone in the public, having any sympathy for those who get paid by the public purse.
” A new study finds that student achievement is significantly higher in countries that make use of teacher performance pay than in countries that do not use it. Students in countries with performance-related pay score 25 percent of a standard deviation higher on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests in math; 24 percent higher in reading; and 15 percent higher in science. Since one-quarter of a standard deviation is roughly a year’s worth of learning, the study’s author suggests that “by the age of 15, students taught under a policy regime that includes a performance pay plan will learn an additional year of math and reading and over a half a year more in science.”
Ludger Woessmann, a professor of economics at the University of Munich, conducted the study for Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. A research article presenting the study’s findings will appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Education Next and is currently available on the web at http://www.educationnext.org.”
http://educationnext.org/countries-with-merit-pay-score-highest-on-international-tests/
Apparently, tenure keeps salaries down. It makes sense to me.
“Tenure brings other troubles, too. Because it is nested within a set of HR practices and protections that include seniority-based job placements and reductions in force, tenure contributes to principals’ inability to determine who teaches in their schools and superintendents’ inability to let the least qualified or least needed (or most expensive) teachers go during a time of cutbacks. Because tenure—job security in general—is a valuable employment benefit that substitutes in part for salary, it tends to hold down teacher pay, which in turn affects who does and doesn’t seek to enter this line of work and who does and doesn’t stay there. Because tenure pretty much guarantees one a job regardless of performance, it reduces teachers’ incentive to see that their pupils really learn—and their incentive to cooperate in sundry reforms that might be good for their schools and their students.”
http://educationnext.org/nobody-deserves-tenure/
You think the public sector does not create wealth? You need an economic literacy cource Nancy.
You think the level of education in society does not have a profound effect on the economy? Ask Blackberry who built their plant behind U of W.
You think the fact that we have public highways, subways, airports, harbours, regulators, food inspectors, a public health care system, etc does not have a profound effect on the economy?
Chrysler CEO Lee Iaccoca said he put his plants in Ontario because the state covered medicare. In the USA he had to provide it to the UAW.
Funny how the business community in Atlantic Canada DEMAND that Ottawa spend money to create public sector jobs in Atlantic Canada because it raises the standard of living and circulates money that allows business to flourish.
The level of regulation of our banks and financial houses in Canada saved us from the financial meltdown.
I guess you see the police force, the firefighters, the EMS workers, the Canadian Forces, the nurses are all parasites to you. They are all public sector workers.
Paul – I do believe you have before your blog participants and lurkers some guy – Doug – who by his declarations of being true to his union and in his ability to recite the union line is by demonstration a very good example of what’s holding teachers back from building better teachers, and happier ones.
Scanning the responses to my post, this much is clear: our Doug is a teacher union man through-and-through and a fellow who has made his career preserving and protecting public education. To many of us, he is a constant reminder that unionism is well entrenched in the system. If Doug didn’t exist, we would probably have to invent him as some kind of teacher union straw-man.
Educhatter’s Blog is ragged, messy, and full of contradictions. It exists because the system forecloses on wide-open discussion of critical issues. I sense that even Doug Little knows that. If I have one hope it is that instead of filibustering the discussion, he would provide us with fewer, more substantive comments. Let me cite one example: His recent post of the analysis piece on “Waiting for Superman.” I read the attached article and some of the points raised had merit. I only wish that Doug had presented the full critique instead of going on to bombard us with five more “quickies” full of glittering generalities.
Teachers are very happy with their unions which has been surveyed many times by outside agencies.
All the teachers unions I am aware of, constantly survey their members asking what re we doing right, what would you want to see improve etc.
Teachers are overwhelmingly happy with their unions which leads to solidarity and mutual trust between the leaders and the members.
Frankly, I believe Paul is correct. He knows my history as an active parent, as a trustee, as an OSSTF official in Toronto, as a lecturer at York U on the Politics of Education in Ontario, as a Founder of Our Schools Ourselves Magazine, as NOW Magazine’s education reporter, and as a blogger today.
I have exerienced the federation at all levels. You need to know what you are up against. OSSTF are known inside the federations as the Spartans of the movement, smaller than ETFO and OECTA but much tougher and single minded. OSSTF alone has a $70,000,000 reserve fund primarily to support possible strikes but also, if necessary, to support issue campaigns and elections. OSSTF alone gives the Liberals and the NDP $100 000 each per year + much more during elections. The other feds give similar proportions.
OSSTF has an “Education Services Dept” of 4 people all very well paid who lobby specifically on curriculum testing and ministry policy every day. They also have a PoliticalAction and Communications dept of 5 (not counting support staff) who work full time on internal “information” and in lobby and election preparation.
I was the person who triaged the electoral ridings and made proposals to the executive based on which ridings to place massive support behind the Liberal or the NDP with the prime directive of “keep the Tories out and keep the NDP alive”. The fed hire highly professional public relations firms to poll the Ontario population every 3 months and prepare professional issue and political campaigns.
They also contribute at least $100 000 to the “Working Families Coalition” … Not this time Ernie… not this time.
OECTA and ETFO are even bigger and contribute more to these causes.
It would be good for the reform movement to calibrate their relationship with the federations and their priorities in light of these factors.
Clearly, the federations do not always win or we would not have standardized testing in many provinces but be aware that they are working 24/7/365 to weaken and eventually abolish them.
From time to time we get PC governments in Ontario but the feds work to persuade the PCs to return to their Bill Davis routes where OSSTF actually supported some PC candidates. The return of a Hudak Harris style agenda just means a long painful trip to the dentist for education with strikes lockouts work-to-rule campaigns.
The one thing I like about Paul is that he does not impute motive. He fully understands that those active in education from the 180 degree opposite pole are also highly motivated to do the very best for the kids.
My focus has been on poor and working class students to date since the rest are doing fine.
The latest SQE post – a mother who is determined to end tenure in the state of Florida.
Background: “Alex’s mother, Melissa Barton, filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court Southern District of Florida in 2009, about a year after her son was voted out of his Morningside Elementary School kindergarten class by his peers at the encouragement of his teacher, Wendy Portillo. Portillo was given a one-year unpaid suspension as a result. She has since served the suspension and returned to teaching in St. Lucie County.
Barton’s lawsuit names the St. Lucie School District, Portillo and the teachers’ union as defendants.
Each defendant denies each material allegation and denies committing any wrongdoing, the settlement documents state. The document states the settlement was reached to avoid further costs.
Barton could not comment on the settlement but did talk about her next step. She wants to end teacher tenure in the state of Florida.
“What good is it to advocate for your child if there is no punishment for the teacher?” says Barton. “I absolutely will go after tenure this year and my intent is to see the elimination of tenure by the end of 2011.”
http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/region_st_lucie_county/boy-voted-out-of-class-settlement-
“As Barton explains it, the danger of tenure is purely economics. If a teacher is going to remain on a payroll regardless of their being fired, it would be fiscally irresponsible to fire a tenured teacher for any infraction that is less than actionable. And how does one judge what is actionable and what isn’t? The alleged abuse of a death girl? An ill-advised disciplinary measure for an autistic boy? The only reliable method is to wait until an incident takes place and becomes public. “And by then it’s too late,” says Barton. The school board will rush to save face, the union will rush to defend its own, and the hands of individual principals and superintendents are tied.”
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/juice/2010/12/wendy_portillo_alex_barton_autism_settlement.php
Another reason to get rid of tenure. As for Canada, how many teachers have been discipline for debasing, shaming, humiliation, bullied and other forms of discrimination, just to teach a special-needs child a lesson. None that I know of, but I do know a lot of parents that have sought out psychological help for their children who have some sort of special-needs, to address self-esteem issues that actually impacts learning at school, and were cause by someone within the education system.
First of Nancy, you go with your “feelings” and not the facts. You really need to check the “Blue pages” of the OCT publication “Professionally Speaking” which lists the teachers disciplined for these infractions every issue. There is also a great deal of discipline handed out that nobody sees, every single day. I know because it was my job to assist the teacher.
Except for major infractions of a sexual or violent nature, discipline is progressive, meaning it must move up from verbal warnings to letters in the personell file to being sent home without pay for short periods, then longer period and eventually termination if the problem continues.
It is the business of the family, the student, the teacher, the school management and the union. It is not your business until it reaches a very high level.
Do not expect to be copied on each infraction, many of which turn out to be false in the end.
Doug, “The one thing I like about Paul is that he does not impute motive. He fully understands that those active in education from the 180 degree opposite pole are also highly motivated to do the very best for the kids. ”
I would question it, especially when all parts of the education arms are acting in their best interests first, and children come secondary. Can you honestly state, that the upper levels of public education, gives a toss about what is happening at the bottom rungs of public education, unless it impacts their programs in a negative light, From bully policies, to providing education to special-needs children, and everything in between, blame is issued on everything that the education arms have no control in the first place, except within the education system, the policies.
Your last post simply tells a reader that the upper levels is all about it being political first, and power. The education of children are between the politics and power, without regard what is best for children. What is news to me is this comment, “From time to time we get PC governments in Ontario but the feds work to persuade the PCs to return to their Bill Davis routes where OSSTF actually supported some PC candidates.” The feds work to persuade the PCs to return to their Bill Davis routes??? Kind of hard to see with the current federal government that is in power, when they are more likely to be against all the social engineering that is occurring. But you could be right, since the majority of them send their children to private schools, and not the local public school. You could be right, where the national organizations such as principals and teachers, may work extra hard in areas of tax credits and deductions for children with extra educational needs, by convincing the feds of narrowing the criteria to a very small select group of children, who are in need of private tutors, software and other educational material that the school does not provide. I can see why the upper levels would work hard to do this, because my child and many other children who have identified disability or disorder, the feds would never find out the amount of money is being spent by parents for tutors and other home help for their children.
As you have outlined, it is about politics and power, and even at the federal level, the national education organizations have to present an image that everyone is doing well, and all are being provided an excellent education. And in your case, except for low-income and working class students.
“There is no national governing body for education in Canada, although the government has been known to use economic incentives to target and promote various educational initiatives. Two examples would be the thrust towards science and technology in the 1960s, and towards official bilingualism through the establishment of French Second Language and French Immersion programs in the 1970s (Tompkins, 1986). In response to fears that the national government was attempting to increase its influence over education, the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) was established by the provinces in the late 160s. This body has no legislated authority and can only take action when there is unanimity among its members (Levin & Young, 1998, p. 52). As a result, CMEC has had little direct impact on the educational landscape in Canada. The whole gamut of educational policy, as it refers to both public and private schools, remains an area of provincial jurisdiction.”
http://www.umanitoba.ca/publications/cjeap/articles/goddard.html
The above link, is just one example of the literature from a federal viewpoint on education. As I can see it, the national education bodies, are in Ottawa to promote and lobby for their best interests, rather than the education of children.
You and many others have a very funny notion of tenure which seems to seep over from universities. Teachers in Ontario and most of N. America have a right to nothing more than “due process” . There are seps and hoops that management must use or start over if they miss a step. By the time of many complaints, teachers have a thick file full of positive reports or at least many years of teaching with no negative reports.
This tends to make complains look like outliers.
Let me tell you a story about what happens every day in schools. A student came to my door determined to fight with a member of my class. I blocked the door and told the student they were not welcome. They tried to bolt past me to start a fight right in the classroom (grade 10). The student was wearing a backpack with a loop handle. I foolishly it turns out, grabbed the handle to restrain the student and prevent the fight. The student kept moving forward and because I had the backpack, he fell on the floor. By this time, several other teachers arrived and the student went willingly to the office.
I was called to the office later that day because the student said “Mr Little threw me on the floor.” I needed the federation to defend me.
This happens 1000 X a day right across Canada. Students lie to defend their actions. If you actually believe your son/daughter in these situations before you ask the teacher what happened, you are just setting yourself up to look foolish later when the truth comes out.
Paul – you’re absolutely correct.
I might also add that parents need to stop being easy marks for the unions and carrying their agenda forward. As long as parents keep being used in this way, individual teachers will never find their voices.
Parents need to stop shilling for the folks that would rather be mired in mediocrity and excuses than look toward some measure of accountability through their teaching excellence.
Once parents stop doing the union’s bidding and start thinking for themselves as to the quality and standards they expect the choice to move toward something beyond what the unions are providing now will grow much quicker in Canada.
Michelle Rhee, the Queen of Mean in formerly of Washington DC wanted to fire a number of teachers. Here is what happens when you are incompetent and bull headed at the same time. Now the board must pay back the teachers who did not teach. Brilliant.
BTW I was in Washington when the firings came out. The instant reaction was “she is firing all the black teachers to make room for her white Teach for America friends.”
http://www.educationnews.org/ednews_today/107440.html
Doug, I am not talking about the actions of students whose intent is violence, to bully, or to cause trouble for the rest of the school. In that area alone, much of the literature, news have been on the violence towards teachers. Not much is directed at the everyday events of bullying, name calling, humiliation, debasing, shaming that is directed at students, by the adults within the education system. In most cases, it is being done on the best of intentions for the students. How is forcing a student to count to 100 in front of the class, knowing in advance the student was incapable of doing the act of counting to 100? Than to allow the other children to snickered, laugh and make comments to compare their ability to that child, is teaching a lesson other than humiliation and debasing?
And the real shame is, most parents do not find out until years later! Making it almost impossible to undo the damage to their psyche. It is also too late to have it addressed at higher levels, so action can be taken. Children within the public education are not entitled to due process, nor are the parents within the education system. That privilege belongs to the people who work within the system, to protect them, from all outsiders, including the children. At least in the United States there is laws backing up the children and parents, but in Canada, there is no such protection within the education system to come to the defense of bad teaching that are apparently done in the best of intentions.
You speak of OCT doing their bit part rooting out bad teachers. For the most part, other than a teacher being fired for a criminal conviction, they received a slap on the wrist. For every case that has been investigated, there is hundreds of cases that are directed at children that will never be seen as worthy to be heard above the school level. Otherwise, the OCT would be hearing over 100 cases every month across Ontario or any other province, on the very teaching practices that are apparently good for children. The same type of practices, if a parent was caught doing, at the very least they would have children services’ on their back for at least 6 months, and at the worst, the police knocking on their door.
Black Conrad – “I was given a table and a chair at the back of the Vocational Training pavilion, where, for a few weeks, my reading of newspapers and other material was sporadically interrupted by improbable scholars wending their downcast way toward me on a forced march: I was the last resort before they were effectively declared inaccessible to higher education.
I hadn’t liked teachers when I was at school, except for a few that I remember with gratitude, and as I generally prepared myself for examinations, was never much convinced of their importance beyond elementary education. The last thing I wanted was more intimate contact with them.”
Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/11/14/conrad-black-the-transformative-effect-of-teaching-my-fellow-inmates.aspx#ixzz1DZym9Bhb
Black’s viewpoint on our public education system in both countries, is not at all flattering, It is an indictment on what the public education system has not done. And the elimination of tenure is a step where the focus would be on the education of our children, the whole child and not what is the best interests of the teachers, or what they think is the best approach without having due consideration of the negative outcomes that appear years later, in the manifestation of behaviour and activities that took root in the public education system.
“But many are victims of legal and social injustice, inadequately provided for by the public assistance system, and over-prosecuted and vengefully sentenced. The greater competitiveness of the world makes the failures of American education, social services and justice unaffordable, as well as repulsive.
In tens of millions of undervalued human lives, as in the consumption of energy and the addiction to consumer debt, the United States pays a heavy price for an ethos afflicted by wantonness, waste and official human indifference. In other advanced countries, the custodial system is dedicated to the sort of work that has almost accidentally flourished here.”
Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/11/14/conrad-black-the-transformative-effect-of-teaching-my-fellow-inmates.aspx#ixzz1Da0P6ln5
I thought little Conrad went to Upper Canada College before he was kicked out for cheating. I don’t know whether his life as a duplicitious capitalist, stealing pension funds or his criminal activity, is an endictment of private education or his own character flaws.
If Conrad is the poster boy for private schools, public schools are pretty safe.
So did Avi Lewis [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Lewis ].
Bob Rae, Pierre Trudeau, Gerard Kennedy, Michael Ignatieff.
All private school educated but pushing public education.
While we’re talking hypocrites, how is it that it’s ok for Doug Little here to fall on his union sword in public while privately he’s dipping into the private school scene. Isn’t that what Mrs. Crux uncovered?
How many more hypocrites in the union ranks Doug?
“The court also rejected arguments by Dydell that the superintendent was not protected by the Coverdell Act because he failed to comply with its language that his actions conform to federal, state, and local laws in furtherance of maintaining order and control in schools. Dydell said the superintendent failed to comply with a district policy requiring any portion of a special education student’s individualized education plan that mentioned potentially violent behavior be shared with teachers.
The court said while the student who slashed Dydell was in special education and had an IEP, the Coverdell Act didn’t impose a duty on the superintendent to make sure that the student’s IEP detail his potential for violence (which it apparently didn’t).”
This is about a recent U.S. court ruling: ”
A federal statute meant to give teachers and school administrators protection from legal liability over their efforts to maintain safe and orderly schools has been upheld against a constitutional challenge.
The Missouri Supreme Court, ruling in a lawsuit in which a student who had been slashed by another student sought to hold a school superintendent liable, held that the federal law was a valid exercise of Congress’ powers under the spending clause in Article I of the Constitution.”
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/school_law/2011/02/court_upholds_federal_teacher-.html
Another reason for not having tenure concerning teachers. Without tenure, there is an increase chance of safety that is more in tune with the children, rather than protecting the back side of teachers.
Teacher immunity legally allowed, to prevent parents or students from suing the school. One commenter stated: “This is just great…does it also mean schools in which a child has been bullied to the point of suicide aren’t liable if they didn’t take steps — real steps — to stop bullying?
I understand there may be tough circumstances, but if we cannot depend on our schools to keep our kids safe and secure while they are there, why should we send them there in the first place?
I’m not so much worried about the particulars of this case as the precedence it may set in others.
Anyone else concerned?”
Is it about time to have careful consideration that children’s safety come first, before making up rules and policies that protect legal liability of teachers and schools, and not at all about the safety of children.
Black was kicked out at the age of 14, for selling the exams. If he had not sold the exams, he probably would not have been kicked out. Cheating, copping exam copies, claiming work that is not of your own is as much as a problem as it was back in 1959. Does this mean, Doug if one uncovers boners committed by you as a youth, that one should disregard any points that you have made? No in my book, but in your book just being a parent with no educational background, they are discounted for not knowing the system. And here is my point, Black pointed out, “In tens of millions of undervalued human lives, as in the consumption of energy and the addiction to consumer debt, the United States pays a heavy price for an ethos afflicted by wantonness, waste and official human indifference.”
Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/11/14/conrad-black-the-transformative-effect-of-teaching-my-fellow-inmates.aspx#ixzz1Dar12BJn
He was pointing out the indifference of our public institutes, and how it undervalues human beings and the aftermath. Having tenure based on seniority, creates a system that devalues children and their education, by ensuring that teachers’ best interests are looked after first and foremost, over the educational needs of children. Children become the political fodder to be used by the unions to ensure the union’s power and influence is balance against the other education arms and their interests.
One of negative outcomes that has come to light, is dealing with the noise on how low-income, low education levels must be fixed within and outside of the education system. Describing people of low-income, low education as not as capable, and so forth that is part of the messages people are receiving. It creates the current dynamics in a case in NL, where the social services have removed two children from their parents, based on IQ tests of the parents, and not on any abuse or neglect of the parents. Some have pointed out, the discourse among the people in the higher levels of government departments is distorting the picture of the problems that low income and low education has on society, and to the point where people with good intentions think that to break the cycle of low-income or low education is to take drastic measures such as the removal of children based on IQ measurements. This set of parents have grade 12 diplomas, and yet there has not been one peep from the education officials how two parents that received a grade 12 diploma, having a IQ that puts them at a level where they would have great difficulties in taking care of their daily needs, to where they would need 24 hour care. The lawyer that has been retained by the parents has described it as such, that it boils down to IQs measurements. And to hear the government officials defending children’s services’ and their actions, is really a display of the ‘nanny state’ on steroids.
Not only indifference from our government institutions, but as well as going into overdrive to defend and protect the current biases and prejudices that government employees may hold against their citizens, based on ideology learned at the feet of the post-secondary institutes.
I would love it is conservatives made Conrad the poster boy. Nobody can stand the old lying, crooked plutocrat.
As long a you remain the poster boy for every province and state to assume a stance in favour of school choice for parents Doug, we have nothing to worry about.
I’m encouraged that the future of Canada’s students doesn’t lie with teacher unions talking points.
It’s somewhere else entirely.
I would very much like to hear from our friends in the USA, as we did in the beginning of this blog.
The school choice movement WITHIN public schools is very much alive and even supported by federations on a case by case basis.
The school choice movement OUTSIDE of public schools is the enemy of not just teachers’ unions but administration at all levels, the trustees nd school board associations, the ministry of education, the teacher training institutions, 2 of 3 political parties and most important of all, it is not supported by active parents or public opinion as seen in OISE surveys.
It had a big coming out party with John Tory and got smashed. I very much doubt if Tim Hudak would revive a loser policy such as public support, in any form, to private schools.
The privatization movement in Canadian schools is going nowhere.
Choice is failing to deliver the goods all over the USA and the high tide of school reform will very soon go out.
Bob Rae, Pierre Trudeau, Gerard Kennedy, Michael Ignatieff.
All private school educated but pushing public education.
While we’re talking hypocrites, how is it that it’s ok for Doug Little here to fall on his union sword in public while privately he’s dipping into the private school scene. Isn’t that what Mrs. Crux uncovered?
How many more hypocrites in the union ranks Doug?
Nobody ‘discovered” anything. I remain an advocate of the public system as the bulwark of democracy, equality, personal liberty and economic advancement for Canada or any country that embraces public education.
The British have maintained a private system for their elite which maintains their rigid class system which is the enemy of a meritocracy.
There simply is no more important institution in society than the public education system. It is at the root of everything that is good about Canada.
Bob Rae….. private school educated but pushing public education.
Bob Rae attended public schools until Grade 10 or 11. We went to the same public school in Washington, D.C. — Horace Mann, in the area around American University. However he went to Gordon Junior High and I was in the Alice Deal Junior High area.
I *think* I remember him as the “Bobby” who was one of the “big kids” who wore a special safety belt and was a “patrol” at an intersection near the school to help little kids cross the street. I did approach him at a public event once and it tuned out we had some of the same teachers at Horace Mann.
I stand corrected. His kids however attended private school. He was able to make that choice as a parent and did.
He’s still wearing his safety belt DC Native:-)
I read his biography. The one he wrote after being Premier of Ontario. He sure felt very differently about the push of the unions at the end of his term than he did at the beginning. Actually, he likely arrived at the same conclusion every Premier comes to about the teacher unions.
The Rae kids attended Brown Public School when he was Premier. Did they go to private high school?
I think Brown was an “open plan” school at that time (I know it was originally). That would be enough to put anyone off.
Some kids were just not lucky enough to have the kind of enlightened parents that understood the quality of public schools and forced their poor offspring to endure private schools. I feel sorry for them but as long as these private schools are legal, some people are going to use them.
An American parent who knows what she is talking about. NCLB test and punish system a total failure.
http://www.educationnews.org/commentaries/107431.html
Canadian parents know what they’re talking about too, Mr. Little.
That American Ms. Young who agrees with you likely merits a pass from you. If she had disagreed, you’d tag her teacher-basher.
There is simply no will on the part of the education establishment in Canada to move to doing what’s necessary to guarantee excellence in educators.
It would be great to hear from any of our American friends on the subject of teacher education. Can you identify any examples of education faculties in the USA that are actually turning a corner and requiring something more than adherence to the status quo? Also, do any American teachers have experience with T.U.R.N. who could speak about it?
The Americans are in a totally different situation than Canada, which is why there is no desire in Canada for reform. #2 vs # 24 if you will.
The USA has never really had a good system but they go through cycles of blame when they have no desire to fix their one single problem, the education of their poor class, which every other nation priorizes.
This would mean either massive new funding or a shift from the middle class to the poor neither of which they can contemplate.
Testing was the answer until the people said “we have had years of NCLB test and punish and it did not work?”
Charter became the next answer but it has become lear that the do no better than public schools.
Teachers are the latest whipping boys and girls but it has become clear that places like Finland have the answer here, not merit pay or union bashing.
Seems that the Americans must work their way through every single conservative myth about education before they finally realize that there is nothing there and that none of the highly successful and emerging successful nations follow these these myths.
Canada has nothing zip zero to learn from the Americans who have a terrible system and who seem determined to usher in right wing reforms that only make it worse.
Yes even bad systems can get worse. Testing, charters, vouchers, Mayoral control, teacher and union bashing, closing “bad” schools, are all losing strategies that lead to a dead end with wasted decades and no progres.
Progress can ONLY be made when people realize that there is only ONE problem. The poor kids are not learning enough and what they do learn is not fast enough. There are no other problems, period. Most nations realize it and try to mitigate it. The USA does not so they look very bad in international tests.
Half of the solution is internal to schools who must slash class sizes in poor schools and increase resources and pay teachers a hefty premium to attract the best.
The other half is external and involves the abolition of child poverty. Finland 4% USA 20%
Alexander Russo has a trenchant analysis in his post:
http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2011/02/reform-it-could-get-worse.html
Heading into tonight’s Save Our Schools / Parents Across America shindig here in NYC I am finally realizing that one of the main things that divides the reformy types from career educators is the thought that reform could make things worse rather than better. This possibility might
seem hard to believe for reformers, many of whom can’t imagine things being any worse. But for those with a longer perspective (historical, personal, professional) the possibility of things going from bad to worse is real; they’ve seen good but wrong-headed ideas take root before, sucking energy away and wasting a lot of time, and they know that there’s no guarantee that the current status is a baseline below which nothing worse can happen. It’s simply where we are now. I’ve been writing about the reform/education divide for four or five years now and it’s only now that I’m finally getting this. I’m sure many others figured it out long ago
Now, he is addressing a U.S. audience where “going from bad to worse” is an imminent possibility. But Canadians should also be wary. The law of unintended consequences has a way of biting changemakers in the butt.
My observation of the Canadian “reform” scene is that often the discussion does not show any deep understanding of (or awareness of) relevant scientific research, successful initiatives, or even (surprisingly) current practice in many aspects of public education. We need to be wise as serpents and much better informed than our adversaries.
Robert Pondiscio, over at Core Knowledge, has a thoughtful piece reflecting on Russo’s comments:
http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2011/02/10/it-could-always-be-worse/
His concluding point just about sums up the key issue IMO:
Personally, I’ve always applied the “The Tiffany Test” (after a favorite former student of mine) to all reform ideas: Will this make it more likely or less likely that Tiffany will get the kind of complete, rich, and robust education that will enable her to reach her full potential academically? It’s surprising how rarely the answer is in the affirmative
For a nice break from the broken record syndrome School For Thought is offering a terrific post today about how the lack of standards in secondary schools have contributed to the dumbing down of our universities.
Finland does have bonuses for their teachers.
“. For example, in Finland, according to the national labor agreement for teachers, local authorities and education providers have an opportunity to encourage individual teachers in their work by personal cash bonuses on the basis of professional proficiency and performance at work.”
http://educationnext.org/merit-pay-international/
“A new study finds that student achievement is significantly higher in countries that make use of teacher performance pay than in countries that do not use it. Students in countries with performance-related pay score 25 percent of a standard deviation higher on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests in math; 24 percent higher in reading; and 15 percent higher in science. Since one-quarter of a standard deviation is roughly a year’s worth of learning, the study’s author suggests that “by the age of 15, students taught under a policy regime that includes a performance pay plan will learn an additional year of math and reading and over a half a year more in science.”
http://educationnext.org/countries-with-merit-pay-score-highest-on-international-tests/
Funny thing about the low-income school for the Niagara District – The low-income has been dropped, and what is being kept is students whose parents have grade 12 or below. It will be confirmed on Feb.22,
“Board spokeswoman Kim Yielding later confirmed the board has reconsidered its lowincome criteria for students at the new school. Instead, she said all students who need supports to overcome barriers that may prevent them from attaining post-secondary education will be considered.”
And the whole idea might be scrapped at the end. “While the board contemplates its next steps, a notice of motion was submitted by trustee Jonathan Fast Tuesday evening that could lead to the board backing away from the plan entirely.
“Recently the CRTC, after receiving many complaints to Internet billing, reversed their decision,” said Fast.
“I am making a motion to rescind, in writing, the approval of the DSBN Academy.”
Vote and discussion on that motion is expected to take place at the board’s next meeting Feb. 22.”
http://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2969727
The trustees are taking a beating on this one, where even the low-income students and parents are voicing their objections to it. Latest name for the school, the welfare school. Although Doug, teachers have not been left alone and are taking their fair share of knocks by the low-income crowd. Two small examples of many.
1. “A child that is segregated and sent to be with like-minded students will start to believe that they are not smart enough, not good enough, and will never aspire to anything. It will take an extraordinary teacher to show these children that they can do WHATEVER THEY PUT THEIR MINDS TO. How many teachers will choose this school over one that is creative, empowering, open to learning and will push their students.”
http://2bempowered.com/a-step-backwards-segregating-our-children-by-income/
Low expectations when teachers, trustees, unions look at people through SEC factors. In Canada, one can tell a low-income school real fast – by just looking at the buildings and can be confirmed when one steps into the school. Why bother to fix a window at a school, where it is fully expected by the powers to be that they are not worth the effort.
2.”Connor Bitter is acutely aware that his high school is stigmatized.
It can feel like a disadvantage when prospective employers see Stamford Collegiate Institute on his resume, the 15-year-old said. He can sense it in the reaction people give a student from one of the poorer high schools in one of the poorer parts of Niagara Falls.
And so when the District School Board of Niagara announced late last month that it will open DSBN Academy, a public school just for students whose parents don’t have a university or college education and are defined as low-income, the gifted Grade 10 student envisioned an even greater stigma.
“Already, as a low-income student at a school that is classified by most of the other schools as a low-income school, it makes me feel restricted,” he said of the prospect of attending the Academy.”
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/School+hard+knocks/4240505/story.html#ixzz1DlwbFWSG
And this young parent said it best: “Samantha Battersby, a 23-year-old waitress in St. Catharines, bristles at the idea, fearing her three-year-old daughter Abbey may not enter school on a level playing field with kids from higher-earning families.
“The Public Education Act was based under the principle that [the government] is going to educate every child, even the poor kid,” she said. “It’s very unsettling to see that the DSBN is so quick to put a label on my child before she even enters the classroom just because she’s in a low income bracket.”
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/School+hard+knocks/4240505/story.html#ixzz1DlxYuc51
So Doug, your solution of increase funding for only low-income kids will just create more inequities within the system. The funding part will be a nightmare to sort out, but in particular the costs will increase according to the ratio of low-income students to other income levels. The increase in staff and support will certainly leave very little in the areas of an education for these children, when there is behavioural problems, parents not adapting to the new school norm, the lack of volunteers because both parents are working, and how does one overcome increase funding in one area, without taking away funding in other areas? Just like special education, funding cuts are made here first and rest assure that increase funding over and above even special education children will be met with the same outcry of a low-income school in the Niagara District board.
As noted in the NP article, “While they’ve celebrated some successes, these schools have had their fair share of troubles. Last fall, Thando Hyman-Aman, principal of the Africentric school, was put on leave as officials pursued a parent complaint against her (she has since returned to work). The TDSB’s First Nations school has battled a reputation for low marks and behaviour problems. Its poor academic performance was criticized in a 2008 school board report.”
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/School+hard+knocks/4240505/story.html#ixzz1Dm2shRvp
How about addressing the educational needs of all children, and a good step in the right direction is to get rid of progressive practices that prevents children from receiving an education, that has a firm foundation of the 3 Rs? Another step would be for unions to get out of the political campaigning, and start working towards changing to a novel concept of following that each and every child has a right to an education, and not to be so quick labelling children poor, low-income, black, white, middle-class, and the many labels that are put on children that actually creates a low-expectations environment in the first place.
“
James Cote is seen a a crank by the rest of the education academy.
Mike, nobody is stopping “others” from commenting but as TBSB says, who is highly sympathetic to many aspects of reform, the movement is profoundly misinformed about how the system actually works. It exists largely of myths a people’s impressions of the system when they were in it. There is a total lack of understanding of the data we do have.
It is riddled with contradictions mainly on the centralization-decentralization axis.
My favourite is the demand that the EQAO scores of private schools not be made public because people would stampeed from one to another on little differences.
A “school choice” within the public system would still be weighed down by the same collective agreements, seniority lists, salary rates, unions, etc as any other school.
Why wouldn’t the unions support the concept; it makes them look good without costing them anything.
Yes,TDSBNW, the Rae kids went to UTS.
There is a nice tack in the “reform” movement that all moves towards choice are good moves. The reality is that almost all moves to add choice ‘within’ the public systems make choice ‘outside’ the public systems les likely not more likely.
As TDSBNW has tried to point out to you, the overwhelming number of Alternative schools within the TDSB are significantly to the left of the rest of the system, Deweyist in your terms. Check the ‘Afro-centric’ schools here and especially in the USA and you will see all the posters of Malcolm X and Nelson Mandella that I’m sure you just love.
John L at least speaks the truth that the search for alternatives outside the PS is a search for a non-union, anti-union environment. The vast majority of charters in the USA now are not grass roots affairs but corporate sponcered privatization efforts aimed at making a few people a lot of money and shifting the value system inside schools to the right.
From time to time, some honest reformers actually admit it.
Interesting distortions on charter successes. As Education Next keeps pointing out, reformers are “overselling” reforms and constantly being caught out with nose stretchers.
Reform: Another Questionable Urban Prep “Success” Story
The event was transmitted live online and the Mayor was in attendance along with a throng of media. There were repeated assertions that what was being done was unique nationally. The occasion? The announcement that – for the second year in a row — all of the senior class at Chicago’s Urban Prep had been accepted to a four year university. But the school’s graduation rate isn’t really 100 percent. Roughly 40 kids of the starting class of 2011 didn’t make it through at, an issue raised on my blog and in the WSJ (here) last year. Some transferred to other schools, perhaps even to good ones. But others likely didn’t. There’s no mention in the latest Tribune story about the dropout rate, and so far at least no one from the school has responded to my queries. No doubt, there are good things going on at the school, and congratulations to the kids, their families, and the school. But why exactly does Urban Prep have to make such a big deal of such an obviously questionable number when it has so many other accomplishments to tout? Image via Tribune.
Doug, if you are going to quote another blogger (especially a well-known one like Alexander Russo) you should credit your source. Surely you taught your history students to do that. If you need some further guidance on the proper referencing of quotations, I would be pleased to go into more detail.
It would certainly make for clearer communication.
Alexander Russo’s comment that you, ahem, “borrowed ” is to be found here:
http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2011/02/citys-renaissance-2010-schools-earn-a-mixed-grade-wbez.html
The Wisconsin Public Employees Uprising has re-ignited the American debate over “teacher quality” and Education Sector’s The Quick & the Ed, has ,once again, brought a key article to our attention.
You will not find anything close to this perceptive analysis in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Richard Lee Colvin simply peels away deeper into the onion with this column:
“Wisconsin’s Teachers Union Faces New Political Reality
by Richard Lee Colvin on February 14, 2011
in Teacher Quality
The former longtime president of the teachers union in Toledo, Ohio, a progressive leader named Dal Lawrence, considers Wisconsin’s statewide union to be among the most “retrograde” in the country. “In Wisconsin, they think they invented labor-management relations in the 1920s and they don’t want to hear about anything new since then,” Lawrence told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last fall. Last week, however, the union’s leaders showed that they are very much aware of just how much has changed not only since the 1920s but from even as recently as last year. Saying “we believe good teachers should be rewarded”, the union made a sharp turnaround from its previous position and proposed that teachers be paid more when they earn promotions, just as assistant professors get a raise when they become associate or full professors. The union also proposed a new teacher evaluation system, which would consider student achievement as well as other factors, and speed up the dismissal of teachers who are perennially ineffective.
This was a big concession for the union. It no doubt is the result of an internal struggle within its membership. But the details of the union’s plans don’t really matter because they are highly unlikely to be adopted. Gov. Scott Walker, who came into office last fall as part of a Republican sweep that saw the party also take over the majority in both houses of the Wisconsin legislature and defeat longtime Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, will soon make public his own plan for boosting teacher effectiveness. But it’s almost certain to be far more radical than what WEAC has proposed. He already has proposed legislation that would strip public employee unions of the right to bargain for improved pensions or health benefits and require workers to pay a bigger share of the cost of those benefits, as is usually the case in the private sector.
Of course, the union in Wisconsin is not alone in recognizing the political headwind it faces. The National Education Assn. last fall formed a commission to study the union’s role in promoting teacher effectiveness. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, speaks a lot about why it is important for her union to take more responsibility for the profession and for student achievement. But nowhere has the union’s repositioning been as sharp as in Wisconsin.
State Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon), the new chairman of the Senate Education Committee, told the Journal Sentinel that the union’s shift was a “huge move.”
“I think they know this is happening across the country, and we’re going to do it in Wisconsin, and so they decided, ‘We can sit on the sidelines or we can play ball,’ and I’m glad they’re interested in playing ball,” said Olsen, a former school board president who is considered to be knowledgeable and relatively moderate politically.
WEAC acknowledged as much. “The time for change is now. This is a pivotal time in education.”
Comment:
The American mainstream media seem fixated on the struggle over the collective bargaining rights in the public sector. Looking deeper, the ground appears to be shifting within the American Teachers Federation. It’s encouraging to see Wisconsin teacher union leaders willing to “get into the game” and to begin contemplating the upside of merit – based salary rewards systems. We clearly need more of this “off-grid” thinking in public education.
I suppose the AFT is an example of Darwinism in action–evolve for your own survival!
🙂
One father of an aspiring Nova Scotia teacher, Ron Wray of Lower Sackville, NS, speaks for a silent majority concerned about the LIFO system and the tendency of school boards to retain retirees, closing off opportunities for newcomers.
His Letter to the Editor, VOICE OF THE PEOPLE, The Chronicle Herald, March 6, 2011, read as follows:
Give new teachers a chance
Re: “Retirees a resource” (Feb. 23 letter). As the father of a young aspiring teacher in this province, I find it totally absurd that we would hire retired teachers as substitutes.
Retired teachers are certainly not a bargain for the schools where they teach. Retired sustitute teachers draw their taxpayer-funded pension while being paid (again by the taxpayer) for subbing. Talk about double-dipping.
Teaching positions are few and far between. The competition process for these few positions is tough, considering the number of applicants. You can’t expect a young teacher to survive financially as a substitue teacher, hoping each day for a call.
My daughter, accompanied by her child, had to travel to northern Manitoba in order to obtain employment for a six-month contract. It’s no wonder we can’t keep our young teachers (or young workers, for that matter) in Nova Scotia.
At present, with the proposed cutbacks in the education system, teaching positions will become even fewer. For heaven’s sake, enjoy your retirement and let the next generation of teachers get on with their chosen profession.
Ron Wray, Lower Sackville”
Comment:
Well stated and worth heeding in the years ahead.
I just happened to be looking for information on education reform, especially results of Finland’s reforms and came upon this site. I have found it very interesting, entertaining, and informative about Canadian attitudes toward educational reform. I’ll have to let my teaching partner, a Canadian from Vancouver, know she needn’t think about returning to Canada, because your citizens are just as down on teachers as U.S. citizens. I’ve been teaching since the 70’s and have no plans to quit. I’m good at what I do and love it!
Some of your writers would be surprised to find that I am very conservative, as are many of my fellow teachers. I am not afraid of losing tenure, but I do believe that any worker in any job should not be able to be terminated without just cause! My husband was a principal for many years and terminated a number of teachers over the years with very little trouble because he kept very good documentation. Many administrators are much less careful or determined to do the right thing.
I am not afraid of charter schools or any other innovations they want to try. Some may work, but many won’t. I still remember the disaster called “the open classroom” of the 70’s. Some type of merit pay will be more difficult to institute fairly, but let the powers that be try!
None of you has mentioned that Finland pays completely for the college training of its teachers. I don’t know about Canada, but U.S. teachers often start their careers with $100,000 in student loans, the cost of a small house. Why would anyone today want to start in the hole for a job that won’t ever average more than half that amount in a year? And in the U.S. they want to take away the health benefits as well! In ten years or less there will be a dramatic shortage of teachers, but by then I’ll be retired or dead.
The unions are against merit pay because quite simply it spells their death–it is counter to notions of equality and unity. And teachers support unions because they need them in order to do their jobs free of harrassment and exploitation. Corporate reformers want merit pay because it will break the unions and allow teachers to be exploited for far greater profit.