Discussing Waiting for Superman
Aug. 16th, 2011 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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pvenables: "I have a question for you about a documentary I watched recently. It's called "Waiting for 'Superman'" and (I'm assuming you have seen it but what the hey) it features the plight of the American public school system, the concept of "drop-out factories," and the perception that it is impossible to change anything that's wrong with the system due to smothering influence of the teachers unions.
One thing that particularly shocked me was the fact that American teachers can get tenure. I've never heard of that going on here-- I assume that's only in the US.
Would love to hear your perspective on the film if you've seen it and if you haven't, to hear about your impressions once you have.
The question I had for you was about Canadian (or just Ontario) schools: Do we employ what they call "tracking" for students wherein some teachers funnel students towards success while others might be destined for a lower quality of instruction or attention based on fairly arbitrary assessments? Actually, in thinking about this, I think I can probably say "yes" we do as I saw it in action when I was in school. Perhaps a better question is, how early does this begin? I know you have an objection to... what was the testing called? It was something you've asked that Elizabeth not be included in..."
First, Waiting for Superman is a very biased piece of editorializing passing itself off as a documentary. It was produced by the Gates Foundation, and its purpose is to prove that adding more choice to education (that is, making it more of a free-market model) will improve it. These same people are funding charter schools all over the U.S. and cherry-picking their evidence so that it looks, in the movie, like charter schools out-perform public schools. That's a dramatic over-simplification, to the point of being an outright lie.
The fact is that choice in schooling has not been proven to improve the education of anyone - not even the kids for whom the choice was made, and definitely not for the kids left behind in the public system. The irony here is that the example the movie uses, Finland, is actually an example of the opposite point to the one they made with it. Finland's school system involves practically zero choice. They have high expectations for their students, small class sizes, and plenty of individualized instruction geared to high-level thinking. They also pay their teachers well, recruit their best students to be teachers, and give them a whole lot of freedom in the classroom - no merit pay, nobody coming in to make sure they're teaching exactly the way they should be. And their results are stunning - over a 90% high school graduation rate. They're an excellent example of how a single public system, fully-funded, with high expectations for teachers and students and small class sizes, gives excellent results.
The studies being done in places with a little less bias than the charter-school-pushers in the U.S. are showing that students whose parents choose a charter school for them - or any other school choice, including French Immersion, for example - are likely to do well anywhere they go, not because their school is better but because their parents are engaged enough to investigate options and follow through. Stuck with a single public school (for example, in a remote location with only one school) those parents tend to get involved in the school and make it better. The deciding factor isn't choice - it's parental involvement, combined with socio-economic level and parental, especially maternal, education level.
Which is to say, the American school system is being systematically dismantled on the back of a well-spun lie.
On to the Ontario-specific stuff.
First, while we don't call it tenure, effectively, Ontario teachers have it; once you've been teaching two years in Ontario, the process to get rid of you is long and arduous and almost never happens. This has its upsides and downsides. Upside: teachers don't have to kiss principal or superintendent ass in order to keep their jobs, and they have protection from firing if a parent complains. Downside: it's incredibly hard to get rid of a bad teacher, and entirely possible to coast through the last few years of your job until retirement. I'd like to see more principals take the bull by the horns and get rid of the people who shouldn't be there, because the mechanisms to do so do exist and I'd like young, enthusiastic people to get a shot at full-time jobs. Getting rid of tenure is a bad idea, though. It's there for a lot of good reasons.
The Ministry of Education officially discourages in-school tracking at the elementary level; that is, schools rarely track all the C students into one grade two class and all the A and B students into another. The accepted wisdom is that mixed-ability classes work better, because they allow for a variety of groupings within the class. So, just because the students are all in the same class, it doesn't mean they're all working on the same work. The kids who are struggling with reading will get small-group instruction geared to their reading level, while those who are more adept will focus on different reading strategies on harder texts to improve their comprehension. As students progress, they can move through groups fluidly, because the groups should be changing all the time. The single most important feature of these classrooms is class size: it's very, very difficult to meet student needs in a diverse classroom once those class sizes start creeping up. At the moment, Ontario has a cap of 20 students per class in primary classes, but there is no cap in the junior grades and some junior teachers find themselves teaching thirty or even thirty-five grade fours - kids who, the year before, were in a class half that size. (If ETFO, the elementary teacher's union, is on the ball, this will be an election issue. If not, it will be an issue in contract negotiations next year, and if those negotiations are with a Conservative government, we'll be looking at a strike. But I digress.)
So, officially, no tracking at the class level in elementary. I know it still happens occasionally, especially in very large schools with many classes per grade, and in cases where teachers and principals are trying to make up split-grade classes. I suspect all the grade 4s in this year's 3/4 split will be fairly independent workers who can be set at a task and keep at it on their own, because the grade 3s can then get more of the teacher's attention (and this year, they need it.) But those are decisions that do not affect any future year, just class placement in one specific grade.
This changes in high school. Ontario streams starting in grade nine, into three streams. The top stream is called "academic," and basically is for the kids who are university-bound. The next is called "applied" and is supposed to be for college-bound kids, or kids who will go into a trade. In practice, it's the warehouse stream for kids who are struggling and tuning out. The remaining stream is a spec. ed. stream for those who came from special classes in elementary, I believe.
This issue is the elephant in the room of Ontario education: there's a gap the size of the Grand Canyon down the middle of grade eight and grade nine, and kids are falling in on a regular basis. It's extremely difficult to get out of one stream once you're in it, partly because you won't know the things you need to know to do the work in the next stream up, and partly because the guidance counsellors and teachers tend to take placement in a stream as a statement of ability and counsel parents and kids to maintain that established order. The high school teachers are not getting the literacy training that the elementary teachers are getting, nor the emphasis on constructivist methods, so the kids who are doing all right with support in grade eight come to grade nine to discover that absolutely everything they thought they knew about school has changed, and nobody can tell them how. The lessons are set up differently, the work expected of them is different, the level of teacher interaction or help is different, the process of improving work is different, and most of their teachers act like they should know all this because it's always been this way. We're in desperate need of high school reform to match the elementary reform we've already had under the McGuinty government. (He hasn't been perfect, but as political regimes go, he's been the best we've had since Bill Davis was education minister.)
The other big issue is standardized testing. In Ontario it's called EQAO - Education Quality and Accountability Office - and it happens in grades three, six, nine, and a literacy test in grade ten. You're right, I'm not letting Elizabeth write it. It won't tell me anything I don't know about her already or can't find out from less intrusive means, and the testing is used to hurt schools and teachers by pitting them against each other. I'll vote for any party that promises to reduce or eliminate EQAO, especially the grade three testing. This is the only spot in which the accusation of tracking fits in Ontario elementary schools: grade three EQAO results are predictive of high school graduation rates more than 90% of the time. That is, a student who does poorly (a level one or two) on EQAO in grade three has less than a 30% chance of graduating high school, while a student who does well (level three or four) has close to an 80% chance of graduating. And yet, most of the deficits in education at the grade 3 level could be remediated. There's no good reason why a kid who is reading at a grade two level in grade three can't succeed over time; she's off to a slow start but that's not statistically indicative that she can't do it, only that she needs more time. By pigeonholing them with EQAO, we're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. They don't succeed because they know they didn't and therefore believe they can't.
To sum up, I'll say that the situation in Ontario is dramatically better than the American situation overall, though of course there are pockets in both countries where the norm doesn't hold. Ontario is near the top on the measures of school systems in North America, and holds its own against European counterparts, coming in the top ten. We've got a good public system that has improved dramatically in the last ten years. The trick now is to keep from voting in the people who want to take it down the American path.
pvenables: "I have a question for you about a documentary I watched recently. It's called "Waiting for 'Superman'" and (I'm assuming you have seen it but what the hey) it features the plight of the American public school system, the concept of "drop-out factories," and the perception that it is impossible to change anything that's wrong with the system due to smothering influence of the teachers unions.One thing that particularly shocked me was the fact that American teachers can get tenure. I've never heard of that going on here-- I assume that's only in the US.
Would love to hear your perspective on the film if you've seen it and if you haven't, to hear about your impressions once you have.
The question I had for you was about Canadian (or just Ontario) schools: Do we employ what they call "tracking" for students wherein some teachers funnel students towards success while others might be destined for a lower quality of instruction or attention based on fairly arbitrary assessments? Actually, in thinking about this, I think I can probably say "yes" we do as I saw it in action when I was in school. Perhaps a better question is, how early does this begin? I know you have an objection to... what was the testing called? It was something you've asked that Elizabeth not be included in..."
First, Waiting for Superman is a very biased piece of editorializing passing itself off as a documentary. It was produced by the Gates Foundation, and its purpose is to prove that adding more choice to education (that is, making it more of a free-market model) will improve it. These same people are funding charter schools all over the U.S. and cherry-picking their evidence so that it looks, in the movie, like charter schools out-perform public schools. That's a dramatic over-simplification, to the point of being an outright lie.
The fact is that choice in schooling has not been proven to improve the education of anyone - not even the kids for whom the choice was made, and definitely not for the kids left behind in the public system. The irony here is that the example the movie uses, Finland, is actually an example of the opposite point to the one they made with it. Finland's school system involves practically zero choice. They have high expectations for their students, small class sizes, and plenty of individualized instruction geared to high-level thinking. They also pay their teachers well, recruit their best students to be teachers, and give them a whole lot of freedom in the classroom - no merit pay, nobody coming in to make sure they're teaching exactly the way they should be. And their results are stunning - over a 90% high school graduation rate. They're an excellent example of how a single public system, fully-funded, with high expectations for teachers and students and small class sizes, gives excellent results.
The studies being done in places with a little less bias than the charter-school-pushers in the U.S. are showing that students whose parents choose a charter school for them - or any other school choice, including French Immersion, for example - are likely to do well anywhere they go, not because their school is better but because their parents are engaged enough to investigate options and follow through. Stuck with a single public school (for example, in a remote location with only one school) those parents tend to get involved in the school and make it better. The deciding factor isn't choice - it's parental involvement, combined with socio-economic level and parental, especially maternal, education level.
Which is to say, the American school system is being systematically dismantled on the back of a well-spun lie.
On to the Ontario-specific stuff.
First, while we don't call it tenure, effectively, Ontario teachers have it; once you've been teaching two years in Ontario, the process to get rid of you is long and arduous and almost never happens. This has its upsides and downsides. Upside: teachers don't have to kiss principal or superintendent ass in order to keep their jobs, and they have protection from firing if a parent complains. Downside: it's incredibly hard to get rid of a bad teacher, and entirely possible to coast through the last few years of your job until retirement. I'd like to see more principals take the bull by the horns and get rid of the people who shouldn't be there, because the mechanisms to do so do exist and I'd like young, enthusiastic people to get a shot at full-time jobs. Getting rid of tenure is a bad idea, though. It's there for a lot of good reasons.
The Ministry of Education officially discourages in-school tracking at the elementary level; that is, schools rarely track all the C students into one grade two class and all the A and B students into another. The accepted wisdom is that mixed-ability classes work better, because they allow for a variety of groupings within the class. So, just because the students are all in the same class, it doesn't mean they're all working on the same work. The kids who are struggling with reading will get small-group instruction geared to their reading level, while those who are more adept will focus on different reading strategies on harder texts to improve their comprehension. As students progress, they can move through groups fluidly, because the groups should be changing all the time. The single most important feature of these classrooms is class size: it's very, very difficult to meet student needs in a diverse classroom once those class sizes start creeping up. At the moment, Ontario has a cap of 20 students per class in primary classes, but there is no cap in the junior grades and some junior teachers find themselves teaching thirty or even thirty-five grade fours - kids who, the year before, were in a class half that size. (If ETFO, the elementary teacher's union, is on the ball, this will be an election issue. If not, it will be an issue in contract negotiations next year, and if those negotiations are with a Conservative government, we'll be looking at a strike. But I digress.)
So, officially, no tracking at the class level in elementary. I know it still happens occasionally, especially in very large schools with many classes per grade, and in cases where teachers and principals are trying to make up split-grade classes. I suspect all the grade 4s in this year's 3/4 split will be fairly independent workers who can be set at a task and keep at it on their own, because the grade 3s can then get more of the teacher's attention (and this year, they need it.) But those are decisions that do not affect any future year, just class placement in one specific grade.
This changes in high school. Ontario streams starting in grade nine, into three streams. The top stream is called "academic," and basically is for the kids who are university-bound. The next is called "applied" and is supposed to be for college-bound kids, or kids who will go into a trade. In practice, it's the warehouse stream for kids who are struggling and tuning out. The remaining stream is a spec. ed. stream for those who came from special classes in elementary, I believe.
This issue is the elephant in the room of Ontario education: there's a gap the size of the Grand Canyon down the middle of grade eight and grade nine, and kids are falling in on a regular basis. It's extremely difficult to get out of one stream once you're in it, partly because you won't know the things you need to know to do the work in the next stream up, and partly because the guidance counsellors and teachers tend to take placement in a stream as a statement of ability and counsel parents and kids to maintain that established order. The high school teachers are not getting the literacy training that the elementary teachers are getting, nor the emphasis on constructivist methods, so the kids who are doing all right with support in grade eight come to grade nine to discover that absolutely everything they thought they knew about school has changed, and nobody can tell them how. The lessons are set up differently, the work expected of them is different, the level of teacher interaction or help is different, the process of improving work is different, and most of their teachers act like they should know all this because it's always been this way. We're in desperate need of high school reform to match the elementary reform we've already had under the McGuinty government. (He hasn't been perfect, but as political regimes go, he's been the best we've had since Bill Davis was education minister.)
The other big issue is standardized testing. In Ontario it's called EQAO - Education Quality and Accountability Office - and it happens in grades three, six, nine, and a literacy test in grade ten. You're right, I'm not letting Elizabeth write it. It won't tell me anything I don't know about her already or can't find out from less intrusive means, and the testing is used to hurt schools and teachers by pitting them against each other. I'll vote for any party that promises to reduce or eliminate EQAO, especially the grade three testing. This is the only spot in which the accusation of tracking fits in Ontario elementary schools: grade three EQAO results are predictive of high school graduation rates more than 90% of the time. That is, a student who does poorly (a level one or two) on EQAO in grade three has less than a 30% chance of graduating high school, while a student who does well (level three or four) has close to an 80% chance of graduating. And yet, most of the deficits in education at the grade 3 level could be remediated. There's no good reason why a kid who is reading at a grade two level in grade three can't succeed over time; she's off to a slow start but that's not statistically indicative that she can't do it, only that she needs more time. By pigeonholing them with EQAO, we're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. They don't succeed because they know they didn't and therefore believe they can't.
To sum up, I'll say that the situation in Ontario is dramatically better than the American situation overall, though of course there are pockets in both countries where the norm doesn't hold. Ontario is near the top on the measures of school systems in North America, and holds its own against European counterparts, coming in the top ten. We've got a good public system that has improved dramatically in the last ten years. The trick now is to keep from voting in the people who want to take it down the American path.