Discussing Waiting for Superman

[velvetpage]

From 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.

Comments

[pvenables.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't suggest that the idea of holding all children to the same achievement standard is the same as teaching them using the same methods. There's no question that different children learn better or worse in certain environments. I've seen my own kids respond entirely differently to different kinds of instruction and discipline.

What I took away from the Charter schools approach (and granted, I'm no expert) is that with reduced student to teacher ratios and more in-class time coupled with targeted learning practices to the student lead to success where otherwise little was seen.

For the autistic child, there's no question they need to be engaged differently than other kids. I could be wrong, but children so diagnosed get addressed in the special education program which, on the face of it, seems like the right thing to do.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

If you teach kids in such a way that all of them achieve the same standard, some of those kids are going to be achieving below their ability level, and that's not fair to those kids. Some kids are going to need a lot of support to meet the standard. Some kids aren't going to need very much. But the kids who don't need much support to meet the standard probably COULD be doing much better than the standard, if they weren't being given a lower degree of support in order to equalize the unequal!

Kids on the autism spectrum sometimes get put in regular classes, even if they're special ed students with IEPs. In those classes, they are usually seriously bullied (i.e. abused) by the other students. When a teacher tells a class, "get yourself in groups and do X," any autistic kids are likely to just stand there and have no idea what they're supposed to be doing. If they do manage to engage with a group, they're extremely unlikely to have any concept of how to have their contributions to the group roughly equal everyone else's, or to be able to effectively manage any other aspect of group work. The kindest thing you can do for an autistic child in a regular class during group work is to just let the child work alone, with lots of teacher support.

[pvenables.livejournal.com]

Here's where I have to stand down. I couldn't possibly comment on how best to integrate autistic children. I think it's going to be a challenge, however, regardless of whether you have one standard of education or multiple streams. Ultimately, you have to account for impairments to education.

Perhaps the issue at hand is where you draw the line on educational impairment. Personally, I don't see any method as being capable of identifying impairment/educational limits between superior and average students. There are ways of identifying learning disabilities or impairments like autism but and clearly identifying those from non-impaired students, but I wouldn't be comfortable saying that certain children simply aren't as smart as other kids so let's not challenge them.

I can only speak anecdotally, of course, I was a solid "C" student all through school and didn't turn "on" until grade 10 at which point I became a high performer and finished high-school a straight "A" student. For me it was motivation and peer influence. That doesn't mean all kids can be turned on like that but if I had been streamed (and they tried to) into general curriculum I'd have never gone to University.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Let me tell a story to illustrate why I don't think you can ever completely do away with streaming:

In seventh grade French, for which the seventh-graders in my split-grade gifted class were integrated with a regular class, I often helped a student (let's call her Teri) with her work.

Teri was very, very intellectually slow. It was obvious even in casual interaction with her. It was even more obvious from her efforts to do schoolwork. She wanted to just copy my answers to our French work. Due to my scruples about cheating, I insisted on walking her through every question, or at least one or two of the questions in each exercise, in the hope that she would be able to actually learn the material. My hope was almost always in vain. I would walk her through the material in the slowest, most step-by-step way I could think of, and she still wouldn't get it.

I specifically remember one exercise where we had to fill in the blank: one question was "Tu ________ la cuisine." ("You ______ the kitchen.") We were supposed to choose between the verbs "manger" (eat) and "ranger" (tidy), and then conjugate the correct verb. I said, more or less, "'Manger' means 'to eat'. 'Ranger' means 'to tidy'. Do you eat a kitchen, or do you tidy a kitchen?" She STILL didn't get it.

That was a representative sample of what attempting to help Teri with French was like. No matter how much support I gave her, she just could not grasp the concepts. I realize my seventh-grade self couldn't teach nearly as well as, say, velvetpage probably can, but I'm not sure anything would have gotten the concepts into Teri's head. She just wasn't very smart, no matter how much support she was given, and she failed French that year in spite of my efforts.

I'm pretty sure Teri was a special ed student with an IEP, but she was integrated with a regular class for the majority of her school hours, even though French was not the only class that went completely over her head. I just...it would have taken a bona fide miracle for Teri to ever be able to learn calculus. The idea is about as plausible as pigs flying. I hope that analogy doesn't come across as likening her to a pig, because she was really a nice kid. She was just very, very slow.

In any case, holding Teri to the same expectations as a strong student or even an average student was, really, rather cruel. She shouldn't have been expected to study a second language at all, and she most certainly shouldn't have been lumped in with gifted kids who found the assigned work mind-numbingly easy. She needed to be streamed out, or at least to be given a curriculum with a different set of expected outcomes, probably ones involving basic literacy and numeracy in English. (She failed math that year too.) She should also probably have been in a setting with a lower student:staff ratio--that's something I totally agree with Erin about--so that somebody trained could walk her through everything in the teeny tiny steps that would have been necessary for her to learn it. That would have meant either a separate special ed class, or an aide with her in the regular class who could help her complete her customized curriculum rather than expecting her to do the same work as the other kids.

Kids are different. They can't all learn the same stuff, and we need to respect that by giving each kid a high level of support in completing a curriculum that is suited to their ability, whether their ability level is high, low, or in between.

[pvenables.livejournal.com]

I can't argue that a child with a demonstrable learning disability will be ever be able to learn all subjects. I will also go so far as to say that the standard curriculum does not necessarily need to have calculus in it to prepare students for the next stage of education. Really, it's not about the content, it's about the principle that children shouldn't have their future determined by an early test score that limits their options later in life. Nor should they be given the freedom to take the path of least resistance-- I think we owe it to them to challenge the lot of them more than we were as kids. Challenge... but engage them in more effective ways too. There isn't a one-size-fits-all teaching methodology.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

To discuss this issue properly, there are a few things you would need to know about Teri. For example, and this is an incomplete list:
* Did she have a central auditory processing disorder that made her unable to process information in the way you were giving it to her, but able to process it better some other way? What did her IEP say about her best modes of learning and how would she have done in French if her IEP were being properly implemented?
* What was her previous experience of French? Did it involve trauma that made her believe she couldn't learn French, or that playing dumber than she was would result in a reward you couldn't see? (For example, was she hoping that if she failed the class, she'd be exempt from French?)
* What was her home life like? Did she get enough to eat and enough sleep? Was she being abused?

Those are off the top of my head. There are potentially many more reasons why Teri may not have been able to learn French at that time, in that way, with you as her primary instructor, that do not indicate she could never possibly under any circumstances master the material to any meaningful level.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Those are really interesting points, not all of which I'd considered. I don't understand how anyone could not understand the explanation I described giving, but that's one of the reasons I'm not a teacher :P.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

If she had a central auditory processing deficit, expecting her to learn primarily through oral explanation is like expecting an ADHD person to be able to manage their paperwork if they're just taught the right routines for organizing it in binders.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

I probably have a central auditory processing deficit, and while I would have understood that explanation, I'm a lot more likely to understand more complex material when it's presented in writing than when it's spoken. So what you're arguing here does make sense to me when I allow for individual differences in the ability to understand logic as well.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

If you teach kids in such a way that all of them achieve the same standard, some of those kids are going to be achieving below their ability level, and that's not fair to those kids

Let me get this straight, and see if you're saying what I think you're saying.

I'm saying we need to up our expectations and our support so that every student can meet a higher standard than most of them do now - let's say we'll expect every kid to meet the standards in academic-level grade nine and ten courses, just as an example.

You're saying that that means some of them will be achieving below their ability level, and that's not fair.

But my premise begins with the idea that the achievement of the academic stream would be the new minimum standard. So what you're saying is that expecting the same standard of everyone that we now expect of the highest stream is unfair because it doesn't sufficiently challenge the highest stream. So this improvement, that would see the kids currently lost in the middle cease to be lost in the middle and given the same opportunity as the kids getting the best we can offer, is still not good enough because the kids currently getting our best still deserve more. Do you not see how classist that is? In effect, you're completely denying the possibility that educational equality is something we can or should strive for.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

I think whether I'm saying what you think I'm saying depends on what you mean by educational equality.

I think every kid should have the opportunity to learn the most challenging material they can handle. I absolutely accept that kids should have the opportunity to move between streams if they turn out to be able to handle more challenging material than their teachers originally thought. Every kid who has the basic intellectual ability to handle university prep material should be able to study that material, and if you're correct that most kids do have that ability (and I'm willing to believe that), most kids should have that opportunity. So I believe in educational equality if what you mean by that is that everybody should get the opportunity to develop their academic potential to its fullest.

What I'm not convinced of is the idea that if you give every kid the same opportunities and level of support, most of them will achieve around the same level. I'm certain there are real differences in ability among kids (which I know you accept in the case of LD/non-neurotypicality), and I would be surprised if there aren't real differences in ability among basically neurotypical/non-LD kids. If that's the case, making them all achieve at the same level (e.g. that of the academic/university prep stream in Ontario high schools right now) would require more support and challenge for some students than for others. That would mean that students who couldn't do any better than the current university prep standard would be supported and challenged enough to achieve to the best of their abilities, where students who could do better would only be supported enough to get them to the current university prep standard. I think every student should be supported enough to get them to achieve to the best of their ability. So if by educational equality you mean every neurotypical/non-LD student achieving at the same level, I'm kind of skeptical of that because I don't think it would happen even if there was equality of opportunity--I think it would require better opportunities for the less able students.

I hope that doesn't make me horribly classist.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I'm more interested in equality of outcome than I am in equality of opportunity.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

I'm interested first in every student getting a level of education that is sufficient to allow them to function well in society, and secondly in equality of opportunity. I don't think everybody needs to end up at the same level of education. There's a certain minimum that is necessary to perform the tasks associated with modern Western adulthood and to engage with politics and society in an informed manner, which I'm guessing would be roughly equivalent to a high school diploma at the university prep level. Beyond that, I think some people will have the ability to become and interest in becoming better educated than others, and I'm okay with that, as long as everybody who wants a thorough education and is able to learn the required material can get it.

I don't really feel that everybody needs to end up at the same education level, especially since there are many different jobs that require a wide variety of education levels and abilities to do. Not everybody needs, would want, or would benefit from a PhD. However, people who can and want to do the work should be able to get PhDs, regardless of their parents' education level or engagement with their education.

Furthermore, to get a PhD, a strong student may need just as much support as a weaker student needs to complete a university-prep high school diploma. I feel that the strong student should get that support, rather than being left to languish at a lower level despite the desire and ability to go further. If very strong students need more advanced material to keep them engaged with school and encourage them to continue their education, they should get that advanced material even if it would not be appropriate for every student. Very bright people can often contribute more to society if they receive an advanced education (e.g. the PhD, and sufficiently advanced material at earlier grade levels to keep them engaged with school), because said education opens doors to highly responsible jobs that serve society in important ways. I don't think anyone, including bright people, should be denied the opportunity to achieve at their maximum potential.

[ruggerdavey.livejournal.com]

I don't really feel that everybody needs to end up at the same education level, especially since there are many different jobs that require a wide variety of education levels and abilities to do.

But who gets to decide who gets what education level? Kids are nowhere near capable of making a good decision about which track they should be in, and it's so easy to make the mistake of basing tracking off of prior knowledge rather than actual ability (which is much harder to ascertain).

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

I'd say kids, parents, and teachers should decide collaboratively, and there should be opportunities for kids to move between tracks.

[ruggerdavey.livejournal.com]

But if you've got a kid who is already behind and decides to join the lower track and then changes their mind, they're already even further behind. I think it just sets us up to continue the cycle of poverty because the poorer kids tend to have less of an educational base when they first come to school, and so it's easier for us all to assume they'd be better in a lower track, and so they don't get a high level of education, and so they get a lower-paying job, and since they don't have higher-track knowledge, their kids enter with less background knowledge too, so they decide the best fit is the lower track, etc etc. It perpetuates the educational divide which tends to fall along class lines, and thus families get stuck.

[ruggerdavey.livejournal.com]

That would mean that students who couldn't do any better than the current university prep standard would be supported and challenged enough to achieve to the best of their abilities, where students who could do better would only be supported enough to get them to the current university prep standard.

I disagree. I don't think that anyone is saying that raising expectations to a set level for all means you won't help kids who can do beyond. Just as you'll need to support some kids more to reach that expectation, you need to support kids who can go farther.

Everyone deserves the chance to get an education that will allow them to attend university if they decide to do so some day, and giving that to all doesn't mean that bright kids (like I was) will necessarily be left to languish. And even though I was an advanced kid myself (and thus sometimes bored), I don't think tracking is a good idea. Kids can do so much more than we might expect of them, especially if we've been tracking them; it's just a matter of instructing them in a way that they'll learn well.

Plus, some kids (the "bright/advanced ones" particularly) come in with much more prior knowledge than other kids, so they pick things up so much quicker because they have a frame of reference. We do the kids without that prior knowledge a real detriment when we assume that just because they don't pick things up as quickly as the others that they can't learn it at all. We have to be cognizant of the fact that some kids are always playing catch-up and then give the support to do so.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Which means that kids should be able to switch into higher streams if they make up the gaps caused by a lack of prior knowledge. It doesn't mean that the kids with and without prior knowledge should be given the same curriculum, which would assume either the presence or the absence of prior knowledge and thus disadvantage one of the two groups.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

The piece you're missing is the high level of support. You're right that raising standards without also raising the level of support dramatically is a recipe for failure, but that's no reason to write off the kids who don't currently have the knowledge and skills they need. If they need remediation to make up for past gaps in their education, they should get it, while still being expected to learn new concepts as far as they can. As the lower grades improve their net so fewer kids fall through it, the remediation at the higher grades becomes less of an issue.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

That's fair enough. I'm still not convinced most kids will be at the same level if they all get high support, though.

[ruggerdavey.livejournal.com]

But how are they meant to make up that higher knowledge if they're in a track that assumes they don't have it and don't need it? This is what velvetpage was talking about when she said those lower kids are left to languish - they aren't given the opportunities to gain that higher knowledge because the track they're in doesn't require it and thus doesn't teach them it. Whereas if we have at least the same base high standards for all (and no one's saying don't let kids go beyond that), then they'll get that higher knowledge and can use it as they wish.

I think this is one benefit of my district. We've got the same high standards for all kids, but they do fit advanced program kids under the umbrella of "exceptional child education" (term used instead of special ed) - because of that, the higher level kids DO get what they need, while the mid-range kids still get the support they need to reach the standards. We actually have a form that we have to fill out - not as extensive as an IEP for special ed kids, but it's meant to show that we are making accommodations for the gifted kids. This way, everyone gets what they needs, and you don't have kids left behind because we've tracked them into some lower set of standards.