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velvetpageEveryone has been to school, therefore everyone has opinions about it. In fact, many people consider themselves armchair experts in education even if they've never taught a day in their lives, because they did, after all, go through X number of years of school themselves, and they see the kind of education their children are getting, etc,etc.
It seems to me that there are three main groups of people who feel that the education system in Canada isn't working. The first group are the baby boomers. They grew up with huge class sizes and strict, fairly old-fashioned teaching. They were streamed by standardized test fairly early, and movement between streams was very difficult. If you had a cold on the day of the test and your parents didn't have a great opinion of your intelligence, or trusted the teacher more than their own instincts about their child, you could find yourself in the wrong stream, channelled towards a certain type of career by a paternalistic system. They also grew up at a time when kids who were clearly special needs either didn't go to school, or went to special, segregated schools; where non-graduation from high school meant a factory job on an assembly line and a pretty good life; where any deviation from the norm was met with punishment, until children conformed out of fear of the teacher or got themselves kicked out of school because they had none.
This group has a tendency to see our current system as too lax and permissive. Kids aren't taught grammar the way they used to be in their day. How is it possible for a student to get out of grade eight with such horrible handwriting? When they were children, if they didn't do it right, they'd get a strap to the hand and then they'd do it again until they got it. They often forget the people who didn't go on to high school with them because they didn't do well, or who dropped out halfway through for that reason. They forget the kid who was labelled by grade three as the dumbest kid in the class, always mixing up his b's and d's and reversing numbers, and who probably left school for a simple job at the age of twelve, convinced he was stupid. They usually fail to acknowledge that the literacy they were taught involved decoding words and spelling them but paid relatively little attention to understanding them or using them in different contexts.
The second group are gen-x and early gen-yers, the students of the eighties. Education was changing dramatically at that time. It was recognized that the decoding-based literacy teaching was no longer enough, but no one was sure what it should be replaced with. The solution, starting around 1982 and continuing into the early nineties, was Whole Language. The idea was to present language always in meaningful contexts, taking it out of context when the child proved a readiness for that strategy by attempting to use it. Creative spelling was encouraged, though parents looked on it with horror - you mean spelling doesn't COUNT? The fact that, in this case, the parents were right, has been recognized since then. But in the meantime, children who were in school at that time have grown up struggling with never being explicitly taught many elements of good writing that their elders considered indispensable.
The third group, and it often contains members of the previous two groups, are parents whose children are having trouble in school now. I'll get back to this one in a minute.
Now, on to a few realities of today's system.
The rule of thumb for special education is integration. Kids do not fail grades simply because they can't do the work, because that strategy doesn't work. Kids who are held back rarely make significant progress the following year. The earlier they are held back, the better their chances of succeeding later; sometimes all it takes is a little more maturity. But it's rare. Kids with obvious disabilities of all kinds will find themselves in regular classrooms with EA's as often as in specialized classes, dependent entirely on the severity of their disability and the availability of special-class placements. ESL kids who have never been in school before find themselves in age-appropriate classes with the help of an ESL teacher a few times per week, if they're lucky. The result is a breadth of achievement levels that simply did not exist forty years ago. At that time, a normal class would have a span of perhaps two or three grades in terms of ability; that is, some of the grade fours would be up for grade five or six work, most would be at grade four, a few would be at grade three, and anyone lower than that probably failed the previous year and was therefore in a different class. Contrast that with my class, where my reading levels run the gamut from grade one to grade six, and that's actually one of the smallest gaps I've ever had. I've had kids in my grade seven class, receiving little in the way of spec ed help, who were reading at lower than a grade two level. In the same class were kids who were submitting essays to high school English competitions and being considered as finalists.
Next reality: new research is resulting in a revolution in the way we teach. Instructional practices are improving dramatically thanks to research, much of it from Australia and New Zealand, backed up by what's happening in the States. The researchers looked at how good readers read, and broke down what they do into a collection of strategies which are now explicitly taught. In other words, we are teaching children to do consciously what good readers have always learned to do instinctively. It's working. Several of the kids who are functioning at a grade three level in my class right now would have been in danger of complete illiteracy as recently as ten years ago. They're going to make it, thanks to these techniques. Every subject area is gradually being affected by the new instructional strategies. Some of these strategies have been around for donkey's years, and fell by the wayside during the whole language era; others are new. But the fact is, they work much, much better, for the vast majority of students, than anything we've done in the last fifty years.
Last reality: most schools do not currently have access to optimal resources for the full implementation of these strategies. Research shows that a well-trained teacher-librarian in each school full-time can raise achievement levels significantly even when no other changes are made, yet in Ontario, funding for full-time TL's starts with schools that have at least 800 students - which is less than 10% of our elementary schools. Class sizes in primary are falling, but there has been no increase in the actual number of classroom teachers, which means that there are more primary classes but fewer junior and intermediate classes. The result is that if you get to grade six without basic skills, you'll find yourself lost in a room with thirty-odd kids and one stressed-out teacher. Getting funding for books, getting access to training for your teachers, etc, depends almost entirely on how poorly your school does on tests. If your school does all right, good luck getting the training to improve. If your school does poorly, you'll roll in the dough for a few years until the scores come up - and then you'll be left out in the cold again, abandoned, as all the programs that were put in place die for lack of the cash to sustain them.
So, how does this affect our three groups of detractors? The baby boomers don't see that the situation has changed to require more resources to do what they perceive as the same job - though the reality of the job is actually quite different. The people who grew up with whole language know only that the school system failed them, and are often too quick to spot the failure of the system in their own children. They don't see why their child's teacher should get so much vacation and be paid so well (???) to turn out mediocre results, and if they were right about the results, they'd have a point. And none of the three groups are truly up-to-date on the dramatic improvements that are happening. Political funding arguments that villianize teachers are far too common, and people buy into them because they don't see that this is not about greedy teachers always wanting more; it's about teachers who are frustrated, knowing exactly what needs to be done, and constantly being denied the resources needed to do it to the best of their ability.
I have more confidence in our public education system right now, for my own children, than I had when I started teaching or than my parents had as their children grew up in a whole-language environment. I will fight for the resources needed for my children to excel, but I know they're there to be fought for and that they work. Speaking from inside - our teachers and our education system need to be adequately supported to allow for optimal achievement by all our kids. As a socialist and a parent, there is no greater priority.
It seems to me that there are three main groups of people who feel that the education system in Canada isn't working. The first group are the baby boomers. They grew up with huge class sizes and strict, fairly old-fashioned teaching. They were streamed by standardized test fairly early, and movement between streams was very difficult. If you had a cold on the day of the test and your parents didn't have a great opinion of your intelligence, or trusted the teacher more than their own instincts about their child, you could find yourself in the wrong stream, channelled towards a certain type of career by a paternalistic system. They also grew up at a time when kids who were clearly special needs either didn't go to school, or went to special, segregated schools; where non-graduation from high school meant a factory job on an assembly line and a pretty good life; where any deviation from the norm was met with punishment, until children conformed out of fear of the teacher or got themselves kicked out of school because they had none.
This group has a tendency to see our current system as too lax and permissive. Kids aren't taught grammar the way they used to be in their day. How is it possible for a student to get out of grade eight with such horrible handwriting? When they were children, if they didn't do it right, they'd get a strap to the hand and then they'd do it again until they got it. They often forget the people who didn't go on to high school with them because they didn't do well, or who dropped out halfway through for that reason. They forget the kid who was labelled by grade three as the dumbest kid in the class, always mixing up his b's and d's and reversing numbers, and who probably left school for a simple job at the age of twelve, convinced he was stupid. They usually fail to acknowledge that the literacy they were taught involved decoding words and spelling them but paid relatively little attention to understanding them or using them in different contexts.
The second group are gen-x and early gen-yers, the students of the eighties. Education was changing dramatically at that time. It was recognized that the decoding-based literacy teaching was no longer enough, but no one was sure what it should be replaced with. The solution, starting around 1982 and continuing into the early nineties, was Whole Language. The idea was to present language always in meaningful contexts, taking it out of context when the child proved a readiness for that strategy by attempting to use it. Creative spelling was encouraged, though parents looked on it with horror - you mean spelling doesn't COUNT? The fact that, in this case, the parents were right, has been recognized since then. But in the meantime, children who were in school at that time have grown up struggling with never being explicitly taught many elements of good writing that their elders considered indispensable.
The third group, and it often contains members of the previous two groups, are parents whose children are having trouble in school now. I'll get back to this one in a minute.
Now, on to a few realities of today's system.
The rule of thumb for special education is integration. Kids do not fail grades simply because they can't do the work, because that strategy doesn't work. Kids who are held back rarely make significant progress the following year. The earlier they are held back, the better their chances of succeeding later; sometimes all it takes is a little more maturity. But it's rare. Kids with obvious disabilities of all kinds will find themselves in regular classrooms with EA's as often as in specialized classes, dependent entirely on the severity of their disability and the availability of special-class placements. ESL kids who have never been in school before find themselves in age-appropriate classes with the help of an ESL teacher a few times per week, if they're lucky. The result is a breadth of achievement levels that simply did not exist forty years ago. At that time, a normal class would have a span of perhaps two or three grades in terms of ability; that is, some of the grade fours would be up for grade five or six work, most would be at grade four, a few would be at grade three, and anyone lower than that probably failed the previous year and was therefore in a different class. Contrast that with my class, where my reading levels run the gamut from grade one to grade six, and that's actually one of the smallest gaps I've ever had. I've had kids in my grade seven class, receiving little in the way of spec ed help, who were reading at lower than a grade two level. In the same class were kids who were submitting essays to high school English competitions and being considered as finalists.
Next reality: new research is resulting in a revolution in the way we teach. Instructional practices are improving dramatically thanks to research, much of it from Australia and New Zealand, backed up by what's happening in the States. The researchers looked at how good readers read, and broke down what they do into a collection of strategies which are now explicitly taught. In other words, we are teaching children to do consciously what good readers have always learned to do instinctively. It's working. Several of the kids who are functioning at a grade three level in my class right now would have been in danger of complete illiteracy as recently as ten years ago. They're going to make it, thanks to these techniques. Every subject area is gradually being affected by the new instructional strategies. Some of these strategies have been around for donkey's years, and fell by the wayside during the whole language era; others are new. But the fact is, they work much, much better, for the vast majority of students, than anything we've done in the last fifty years.
Last reality: most schools do not currently have access to optimal resources for the full implementation of these strategies. Research shows that a well-trained teacher-librarian in each school full-time can raise achievement levels significantly even when no other changes are made, yet in Ontario, funding for full-time TL's starts with schools that have at least 800 students - which is less than 10% of our elementary schools. Class sizes in primary are falling, but there has been no increase in the actual number of classroom teachers, which means that there are more primary classes but fewer junior and intermediate classes. The result is that if you get to grade six without basic skills, you'll find yourself lost in a room with thirty-odd kids and one stressed-out teacher. Getting funding for books, getting access to training for your teachers, etc, depends almost entirely on how poorly your school does on tests. If your school does all right, good luck getting the training to improve. If your school does poorly, you'll roll in the dough for a few years until the scores come up - and then you'll be left out in the cold again, abandoned, as all the programs that were put in place die for lack of the cash to sustain them.
So, how does this affect our three groups of detractors? The baby boomers don't see that the situation has changed to require more resources to do what they perceive as the same job - though the reality of the job is actually quite different. The people who grew up with whole language know only that the school system failed them, and are often too quick to spot the failure of the system in their own children. They don't see why their child's teacher should get so much vacation and be paid so well (???) to turn out mediocre results, and if they were right about the results, they'd have a point. And none of the three groups are truly up-to-date on the dramatic improvements that are happening. Political funding arguments that villianize teachers are far too common, and people buy into them because they don't see that this is not about greedy teachers always wanting more; it's about teachers who are frustrated, knowing exactly what needs to be done, and constantly being denied the resources needed to do it to the best of their ability.
I have more confidence in our public education system right now, for my own children, than I had when I started teaching or than my parents had as their children grew up in a whole-language environment. I will fight for the resources needed for my children to excel, but I know they're there to be fought for and that they work. Speaking from inside - our teachers and our education system need to be adequately supported to allow for optimal achievement by all our kids. As a socialist and a parent, there is no greater priority.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-11 04:38 pm (UTC)Thank you for saying all this. As a parent of a school-aged child, former teacher, and former student, I agree with all of it. And it's just as true here in the States.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-11 06:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-13 03:01 am (UTC)I am grateful to have a Canadian Teacher on my flist. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-13 11:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-13 04:28 pm (UTC)