JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The recent record of teachers’ high absenteeism, including many 3-day weekends, demonstrates serious irresponsibility.

The generous terms of their employment – high salaries, big pensions, generous benefits, 6-hour days, and 8-month years – aren’t enough for them.

And when a teacher is absent for no good reason, the public is required to pay two salaries each day.

During labor negotiations we always hear the teachers’ special-interest plea about kids’ education needs, but teachers behaving this way really care about kids, don’t they? Or for that matter, care about anyone else?

Of course, the real problem is, and always has been, that teachers pretty much answer to no one once they are hired into a school.

And the problem is made worse by the fact that the entire system – from principals and superintendents to directors – is run by teachers, actually teachers who’ve left the class room and don’t want to teach any more.

And what is the genuine competence of the average teacher with his or her general BA and a few months at an academically-meaningless teachers’ college? Not much.

If the public doesn’t demand more for public education, we’ll never get it. Remember – setting aside former-Premier McGuinty’s years of empty rhetoric – Ontario in no way stands out in the world of education.

And now we have another premier, a former teacher as it happens, who will give and give and demand nothing in return – a formula for labor peace and political advantage but having nothing to do with genuine education.

We need an entirely new way of hiring and training teachers if we are to have reform.

Any motivated university graduate with an academic major or at least two minors or any motivated middle-aged professional should be able to spend two years in the class room as a substitute under supervision.

Eliminate the academically-meaningless teachers’ colleges.

And forget the overblown and inaccurate notion of teaching as a profession.

It is not, it is an avocation, an art, a skill, and sadly not enough of our current teachers, despite the formal qualification of teachers’ college, possess it.

And you must have something you know thoroughly – music, math, English – in order to teach effectively, which is not the case for so many general BAs. Indeed teachers’ colleges promote the fatuous notion of teachers as some kind of vaguely-defined facilitators who needn’t be expert in the subjects they teach.

Making teachers’ college a 2-year proposition – as our McGuintyesque Premier Wynne has done – is a guaranteed waste of resources and no route to improving education.

And we badly need real management of our schools – people who understand the effective management of human and physical resources – not the money-wasting system of boards and principles we have now.
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From a reader:
“Those who can, TEACH. Those who can’t, CRITICIZE. (I’m neither a teacher nor a critic of teachers.)”

You’ve got the quote wrong, and your error is revealing.

Shaw said:

“Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”

A criticism of teachers from a wry, inveterate critic.

A world without serious critics would be an impoverished one indeed.

Some of the greats included Shaw, Voltaire, Johnson, Orwell, and Swift.

People like this writer want the same tired band to march in the same tired parade, playing the same tired tunes.

So, according to this writer, we don’t want critics, but hacks like the last director of TDSB are okay? He managed to weasel through a system which has no effective protections and no competent management. Indeed that fact is the most important lesson that should have been learned by those shameful events.

The “managers” at TDSB clearly never checked into his background. I am aware that he was a failure in Hamilton and, most importantly, a very big and wasteful spender, but none of Toronto’s “experts” were aware of the facts nor did they recognize serial plagiarism when they saw it.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Bullying in Canada is nothing more than a soapbox topic.

The soapbox gets pulled from the closet every now and then, as when Amanda Todd was so brutalized, to stand on for a cheap speech.

The fact is that complicit bystanders generally are teachers and school officials.

They are the ones in authority, and it is owing to nothing less than a cowardly shirking of duty that bullying happens in our schools.

You cannot blame the children when their local adult example is an example of indifference or cowardice.

It really is a very simple matter: are we to have civil society in our schools so that we have some hope that the generations passing through grow up as more responsible citizens?

You cannot teach civility or human decency when this goes on, as it does regularly.

Slogans and programs are pointless expenses are not much more than a cover-your-behind effort and an utter waste of time and money when a poor example is shown by those with the authority.

I know the difference that is made by a responsible adult from my own childhood experience, and I have never failed to intervene when there is genuine bullying or violence involved.

Also, we should not forget that there are more than a few teachers who are themselves bullies.

There were when I was a child, and the experience of a friend brought the fact powerfully back to me recently, a case of a horrible teacher going beyond bullying to vicious verbal abuse and the baring of teeth against a woman worker for a Board, in front of others, including a school superintendent, who did nothing.

And what powers do the higher authorities have in these matters?

Virtually none because they have abdicated to the teachers’ union and to bullying parents.

So, it is time, politicians and senior school officials and editorialists, to put up or shut up. It is very tiresome to keep hearing about a problem that is completely avoided other than buying some t-shirts or other slogan-laden promotional premiums.

Either take some genuine action or quit talking about the problem you deliberately avoid even as you speak of it.

And what do I think are the chances of that?

About the same as were the chances for zero-tolerance of violence in the schools. The policy, a sound one, was swept under the rug quickly with the firsts objections from affected parents.
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“Public shaming – reduces the big, strong men who threaten little girls anonymously or from behind automatic weapons to the wee, limp men they are.”

Again, an example of the soapbox pulled out, but the statement helps no one because it is utterly non-operational.

Someone has to lead and direct the effort.

Just saying “public shaming” is a bit like saying bullies should be told their behavior is unacceptable.

Yes, but who does the telling?

This issue has always been about leadership in the defense of human values.
____________________________________________

I see good old Margaret Wente is at it again with her predictably titled squib, “The best protection against bullying isn’t legislation.”

Of course no one is permitted to comment now on the dishonest words of the Globe’s only demonstrated plagiarist.

But it is fitting she too should chime in on bullying.

She’s been a verbal bully for years, often attacking what she doesn’t even understand.

And does anyone remember her filthy words about Palestinian mothers not loving their children a few years back?

The words of a genuine bully, surely.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Most teachers have never lived in the real world spending their entire lives from age 5 to retirement in a classroom. They are the most pampered whining class of people in our society.”

Well said, indeed.

A pointed truth.

It is time for an Ontario Premier to show enough courage to take the teachers’ union on.

The courage to take a strike would re-establish the proper relationship of government and government employees.

A strike would not only be extremely helpful in this way, it would not last very long.

When the teachers realized that their next vacation in the South of France or Cancun, Mexico, was imperiled, or payments on the two fully-equipped SUVs wouldn’t be met, the strike would end.

We have no better example of a huge ship without anyone at the helm than Ontario’s public schools.

McGuinty has done nothing but throw money at teachers to buy votes, giving them, last time round, a generous multi-year increase when most of society, the people who pay the wages, was being sent into an economic tailspin.

The arrogance of teacher-spokespeople is simply breathtaking. Here is a job in which the bulk of practitioners have a general BA – often with not-stellar academic performance – plus a pretty meaningless certificate from an anti-intellectual teachers’ college.

The truth is that – except for specialists in science, math, and languages – most teachers could be replaced almost instantly by people without the certificates, and if we included retired experts and highly-motivated people only, we would see a startling improvement in our kids’ schools.

In economics we would say that the next best opportunity for the bulk of them is as clerks and salespeople at wages a fraction of what they receive and with no gold-plated pension and no working effectively 8 months a year.

We need a sense of reality here, as society is facing great waves of turmoil and insecurity from the world economic situation.

And the harsh truth is Ontario schools on average are not terribly competitive in the world.

McGuinty’s past giveaways have achieved not much beyond enriching and indulging the teachers.

All the tests by which we supposedly measure improvements are poorly conceived and in the control of teachers to tweak and adjust and mark.

They are not objective, and they are completely unsatisfactory measures of performance.

The very measure of the teachers’ poor attitudes is precisely this almost insignificant sacrifice McGuinty is asking. It does barely begins to change the many things needing change, yet they whine and reject like the worst students in their classes.
______________________________________

“Wow, continue to be astounded by the depth of teacher hatred in the general population.

“To be fair, teachers are very well compensated for their work, not sure they are over compensated, though.

“Summers off? Well, maybe they should be in PD training or refresher courses for 4 or 5 weeks in July or August.

“Pensions? Yes, but they do contribute about 10% of their pay to their pension, or, looking at it another way, they pay half their pension contributions. Their pensions are not paid by the government, but through the pension board, which invests their money. Done a pretty good job of investing so far, it looks like.

“Teachers’ unions? The Charter guarantees freedom of association. it is right under the Charter to form a federation and have that body negotiate on their behalf. It’s all legal.

“So, it’s a good job, if you like doing it.

“Don’t know anybody in it for the money, though.”

Hatred of teachers?

That is simply wrong.

Rather, it is hatred of abuse and arrogance and hypocrisy and the fact that teachers do not clearly perceive those demonstrated qualities are major parts of the problem.

To assume that it is hatred of teachers reveals the same warped perspective that generates this entire issue.

Refresher courses in what?

The courses now offered by their administration for advancing them on the pay-scale are appalling in their content. They run from childish to anti-intellectual with surprisingly little hard new information and demand for learning, and the reason for that is simple: they would be flunking hundreds of teachers regularly otherwise and still sending them back to their jobs – an impossible bind.

They pay half their pensions? That’s not an accurate way to measure it, but even if it were, what a deal, double your money, guaranteed. Try getting that deal anywhere.

Teachers’ unions are indeed the exercise of a right, but all rights can be abused and have limits, even freedom of speech.

The key point you ignore is that the teachers’ union, rather than genuinely trying to improve education and conditions, consistently works to extract more money by the threat over all parents’ heads of striking. And while they work to fleece the public, they use weasel words which fool absolutely no one but themselves. They also consistently defend the indefensible, poor and even ignorant teachers.

That last line of yours is very telling.

You either do not know anything about the people with whom you work or your head is in cloudcuckooland.

It is easy to spot teachers whose only drive is their own career and pay advancement. Loads of them.

And when your next best employment is a store clerk – true, I’m sorry, for many of them – the money counts hugely.

They, and you, only pretend it doesn’t.
______________________________________

“Think about teachers the next time your child is in a play at school, taking part in a Christmas concert, going on a special field trip, being part of a sports team, being a member of a school band or participating in a talent night. I am not looking for accolades but the harsh words and misleading comments are hurtful. I think you should all homeschool your children since we as teachers are all so stupid and wouldn’t be able to get a job in the real world.”

Sorry, but that is a perfect example of the special pleading that make so many despair at teachers’ lack of understanding on these issues.

If you do those things, it is only what parents expect in return for your handsome remuneration.

You don’t seem aware at all that anyone who takes pride in their work anywhere does equivalent things.

It actually is a bit stunning that you don’t realize that your preconceptions and special pleadings are strong evidence of the cloudcuckooland that so many teachers reside in.

The hard truth is many, many teachers never do more than they absolutely have to. I’ve seen them, and I’ve heard their smirky remarks.

They are ready to go home at 3 PM, and they do. You can see them by the score doing so.

You say you are not looking for accolades, but the drift of your comment is precisely to seek accolades, not just for yourself but all teachers.

But all teachers do not deserve accolades any more than all auto mechanics or all cooks. Many just barely function in their jobs, others are getting away with murder, and the public is well aware of those things, yet we have to read the special pleadings and the whining about the least change in work conditions.

If you had any exposure to the lower middle-management world of private industry, you’d know that overtime and evening or weekend work are completely the norm.

Expected by management, but earning no special remuneration or, often, no special praise.

And the salary and benefits of an Ontario elementary teacher, one up in the pay scale, are quite comparable to that hardworking class in private industry (In excess of $80,000 per year plus immensely rich benefits).

And people in private industry start with two weeks of vacation, maybe building up to 3 or 4 after some years.

And if they regularly took another 20 or so days off as sick days (sick days whose cost is literally double given the need for substitutes) – as many Ontario teachers do – their careers would likely come to an end.

They won’t get your pension either.

Your last thought is both ridiculous and offensive.

People should teach their own kids just because they have criticisms of how things are in the schools and how teachers present themselves in public?

It’s a childish and petulant statement.

And, sorry, but just plain ignorant.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Reading is like oxygen…”

Not really, and by making that exaggerated claim the Globe places itself on the side of all the phony politicians and teachers and school administrators who day in and day out make false and even ridiculous claims about reading and literacy.

The Globe editorial writer would perhaps be surprised at the number of parents who do, or even cannot, read. After all, it wasn’t just yesterday we began graduating people who are functionally illiterate.

And preaching to such parents is both foolish and effectively just another way of shirking the responsibilities of our teachers and schools to do the job parents do not.

Even more surprising would be the number of elementary school teachers who do not read, and haven’t the least interest in it.

We have too many teachers – and this is especially important in the primary grades – who report to work each day with much the same attitude as the proverbial post office worker: I want my pay, my days off, and my pension, and “I’m outta here.”

Such people should never have been hired for so important a job, yet I guarantee we have platoons of them today in our schools.

Typically at times when in the past we experience teacher shortages, any warm body that walks through the day was hired. Trouble is, once hired, they remain in place for a lifetime of inadequate and unsupervised (we have absolutely no systematic check on teachers’ work ability and habits today) lethargy.

And all up the line we have teachers who wanted to get out of the classroom as principals, superintendents, directors, and “professors” at teachers’ colleges. There’s no escaping their influence.

It would be an interesting assignment for a Globe reporter to interview a number of school officials and teachers on their reading. I think the results would be eye-opening. Does anyone really believe that the ex-football player heading up Toronto schools is a serious reader?

And it’s the same for the politicians setting the poor rules. Ontario’s “literacy” test is a bad joke. I say that having first-hand experience with Asian students attending Ontario schools. It is a foolishly conceived test, set and marked by teachers. Those who “fail” it just take a bird course the next term to be deemed as having passed.

Now with politicians handing out the raises and benefits, what do you think is the motivation of those marking this test every year?

If we want to see help in reading for all students – as in any other subject you care to name, as well as the use of computers – we will demand of our rather handsomely rewarded teachers that they do the job for which they were hired.

We will put some of the best teachers in the early grades. It was Roger Ascham, Elizabeth the Great’s tutor, who argued for the ablest teachers at an early age. We frequently do the opposite, I’m afraid.

We will test the kids with a genuinely objective, machine-readable test periodically, one not set by teachers and ex-teachers seeking extra income.

So, please, dear Globe, do not spout meaningless figures of speech unless you are prepared to support the fundamental changes required. Nothing’s easier and more useless than mouthing platitudes while the big ugly machine chugs on. Reform is what we need.
____________________________________________________

“There are certainly a lot of drivel books out there.”

Yes, indeed.

And the education establishment has brought some of the worst of it into the schools.

I refer to the dull books stuffed into “literacy closets,” bought from publishers trying to make a quick buck on parents’ concerns and the education establishment’s mouthings about literacy.

At the same time that considerable resources have been wasted on these over-priced and uninteresting books, we have let libraries in schools decline into a shameful state.

A school library should have the best of children’s literature on the shelves and a friendly person in charge to introduce them to the books and teach them about using our great public libraries.

On the whole, we simply do not do this.

So-called “teacher-librarians” – a recent historical creation which is neither fish nor fowl – preside over the pathetically supplied and poorly maintained libraries on a part-time basis, and many of them show no interest in library content or children’s reading skills and interests, nor are they themselves lovers of books often.

They are there to fill in the holes in the principle’s schedule for teachers briefly away for some temporary reason – a ghastly anti-educational concept altogether.

We need lovers of books in the libraries, people dedicated to promoting the use and value of libraries. Library technicians, selected for their skills with books and children, would provide a superior human resource.

Just go see the lovely people working at many branches of our public libraries. No one comes away feeling they are there to fill holes.

Young children need a loving and informed introduction to books, especially the large numbers of them with no hope of receiving that at home.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GARY MASON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Handled carefully, merit pay for teachers might work.”

A profoundly silly statement, Gary Mason.

First, when did school boards or public schools ever handle anything carefully?

If you can cite a significant instance, you will earn a footnote in history.

Our school boards are run by teachers who no longer want to be teachers.

And who are our teachers?

Generally, they start teaching right out of teachers’ college, young people with no experience of the world, aware of none of the complexities of dealing in the real world of business.

At the grade school level, they are mostly not well educated, being generalists having taken a lot of easy-to-pass courses, specialists in nothing, and then they spend a year in that most anti-intellectual, anti-academic, and anti-real world of institutions, the teachers’ college.

The atmosphere in public schools and in school boards is one somewhere between a monastery and the post office.

Just read the language of the education establishment, and you will read, not so much the jargon that goes with any profession, but a lot of puffed-up language saying almost nothing and high-sounding euphemisms for avoiding problems or making hard decisions.

Further, there is an almost suffocating sense of cloistered society in our school bureaucracies, of “ins” and “outs” and favoritism and “hush, you musn’t say that.” It is not an atmosphere conducive to fair and open evaluation of anything.

This includes a kind of prevailing bureaucratic dishonesty. For example, the subject of bullying is talked about endlessly and expensive materials are purchased for presentations. Yet the real solution to bullying is never, never touched: that is, every teacher’s taking responsibility for the acts which occur before his or her eyes.

Another example of this institutionalized dishonesty is the effort to deal with genuine problems by inventing some new temporary nostrum rather than dealing directly with a problem which requires sleeves rolled up and hard effort. The examples are countless.

There is the fraud of Afro-centric or other forms of segregated schools as a solution to poor academic performance. Essentially, if these succeed – as measured by grades – it will be because of reduced demands and high marks for projects which are of little value to a good education, all conducted in the “safe” atmosphere of a place with no genuine scrutiny.

There is the fraud of social promotion: a way to make no extra effort for difficult students and a way to kiss your problem good-bye at the end of term.

Ontario has report cards that are almost a joke from a Monty Python skit. Pre-written, bureaucratic phrases are pasted into each kid’s report from a list. Their actual performance is not even properly graded.

Ontario has literacy tests – created and graded by teachers themselves – rather than grappling with teaching kids to read in the first place. As they exist in Ontario, and I have both read them and experienced a foreign student’s exposure to them, they are a complete fraud, accomplishing nothing.

Literacy closets – things filled with costly special-purpose, forgettable, throwaway books created just to the purpose – rather than attending to libraries and seeing that there is good literature kids will enjoy and learn from and teachers who help introduce them to it.

The teacher-librarian – a bizarre creation which is neither a qualified librarian nor a teacher with expertise in anything, but a body sitting around to fill in holes for various teachers away for one reason or another, spending their remaining hours supposedly taking care of the library. One good look at the state of these libraries will tell you how effective they are at their job.

Now, on top of all this, add the teachers’ union, defender of dead-wood, hero organization of the non-performer.

Finally, add a school system under direct political control, whose politicians are concerned only with getting re-elected and avoiding any serious conflict, no matter what their rhetoric.

So this is an environment in which conscientious, impartial evaluations of performance can occur? Only in your dreams.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Merit pay for teachers is a totally unworkable idea, and it is that for many reasons.

If you genuinely embrace the concept of merit pay – that is, better-than-average pay for excellent performance – you must, for logical and economic consistency, also embrace less-than-average pay for under-performing teachers.

Only in that way is there a genuine incentive for improved performance at all levels, and only in that way is there a genuine appraisal of performance at all levels.

Yet that part of the merit-pay idea is never discussed: we hear only about extra pay for superior performance. In effect, such a one-sided system would be bribery for favored teachers.

Extra pay for supposedly superior teachers is guaranteed under current arrangements to be nothing but a giveaway of billions to no genuine effect.

And try selling the idea of full-range merit pay to the teachers’ union, the same organization which works day and night protecting the jobs of incompetent teachers almost the way the Catholic Church has protected its abusive priests.

And which of our generally spineless politicians would show the courage and tenacity for a fight with that monopoly organization? Imagine Dalton McGuinty standing up the teachers, a man who has done nothing but shovel money at them to keep his political peace?

And what is average performance? The way our public education is organized, it would be impossible to establish because teachers, once they are hired permanently, are never assessed. There are no meaningful measurements or standards.

You cannot use only student performance because some teachers are assigned to schools where families are successful and expect performance, providing encouragement and resources, while some teachers are assigned to schools where families are broken or unsuccessful, sometimes barely feeding their children and having no high expectations.

You cannot use the official curriculum as a standard against which to measure because it is pretty much a poor pile of generalities and frantic efforts to appear comprehensive rather than a specific set of measurable requirements.

Further, there is no qualified, experienced body of people to do the assessing. Once Ontario did have such people, but the concept of regular assessment died decades ago.

Moreover, our entire public education system is essentially run by teachers – perhaps its greatest source of weakness. Principals are generally just teachers who wanted out of the classroom. Superintendents and directors are just teachers again who’ve piled up lots of puff education courses – and truly there are few other kind at our colleges of education where academic standards are low.

There is no perspective in any of these officials beyond a kind of generalized public-school teacher perspective, and that gets us nowhere.

One assumes that the whole idea of merit pay is to increase the effectiveness of our schools. The only way to do that is to compete with world standards of performance, and we don’t do that with our present system. It will take far more than merit pay.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The shameful thing truly is that a study is needed to tell us this obvious truth.

The money and time spent on the study itself are reflections of the poor state of our public education.

Math, perhaps more so than any other subject, builds the next row of bricks on that previously laid.

I tutored kids in math, and I learned a good deal about the state of math education in Ontario.

It is terrible.

There is a ridiculously complex curriculum written in education jargon that many a math major would not understand.

The subject areas jump around far too much, proving in effect a large series of short stories rather than a novel with a good plot.

And the teachers use this stupid curriculum, their fear of not covering it all, to avoid doing what really needs doing.

I encountered a number of children in grade five who did not know their times tables, a topic that was part of grade two or three when I was young.

Those not knowing them – because the teachers do not take the considerable effort required to effectively teach them – are of course still passed.

So we end up with the most absurd situations – deliberately created – of children being introduced to things like elementary probability, which is work with fractions, when they do not know the times tables or division facts needed to work with fractions. Or try division problems with double-digit divisors without knowing the times tables.

Any reasonably bright person observing such nonsense knows we are in trouble and knows the education establishment in Ontario has failed our kids.

Good work, Dalton, handing them gobs of money and getting nothing in return but ease in your election.
_______________________

“…teach kids math using real life examples when young, cutting up pizza, dividing oranges, slicing cake…”

A totally inadequate and trivial notion, useful at the baby level, something already done by good teachers.

When it comes to multiplying or adding fractions, this notion is completely useless. Or try using wedges to teach double-digit division. Basic algebra? Solid geometry?

Not all math operations can be given easy-see demonstrations, yet they must be learned for the power of what they do.

But they can be taught by patient, methodical teachers, teachers who themselves understand what it is they are doing – something far too often not the case in our elementary schools.

Fundamental ideas like place value and what moving a decimal point left or right does must be absorbed thoroughly.

The real problem is the average poor quality of grade-school teachers and their often lack of any special knowledge. We have gym teachers teaching math sometimes or “teacher-librarians” expert at nothing handling various classes.

And, of course, going beneath that layer of the problem, we come to the fundamental one: a teachers’ union which often defends and effectively promotes incompetence.

Those people form the talent pool out of which virtually all the education officials up to the minister come from. The blind leading the blind.

We’ll only improve things by efforts like changing the way teachers are trained and taking recognized experts from outside of the public education establishment – as university professors recognized for their skill and expertise – to write curricula. All performance testing should also be handled this way.
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“I think the best way to improve education is to abolish faculties of education, thereby eliminating the affectations and pretensions that go with the limp masters and doctorates in the “discipline”. Most of what passes for higher education here is not worthy of the name, and, merely debases the coinage, as evidenced by the shoddy research that only occasionally appears before the public.”

Absolutely, spot on.

The best example of this I can think of is the new Director of Toronto Public Schools, a football player with a meaningless doctorate in education. Every time he opens his mouth, it is either to reveal how little he knows or to do a photo-op.

Hire people who know math to teach math, and just so every other fundamental subject.

We have a huge reservoir of talent out there in our retired professors, scientists, technicians of every kind, government specialists, astute businessmen.

Hire them on at least a part time basis with no need for vacuous degrees in education. Throw in local artists and musicians to enrich the schools.

Get rid of the deadwood, people who know nothing and have no enthusiasm.

We could improve our schools dramatically in a couple of years.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

It is indeed a stupid idea.

The fact is that it has already been tried in other places. It simply does not work.

In Chicago, most of the poorly performing schools in black neighborhoods were years ago renamed into various academies.

Sometimes one academy changes into another academy when the poor performance catches up with them.

Toronto’s new Director of education, Chris Spence, spent his last several years in Hamilton as Director. The sum total of his real achievements is zero.

Everywhere the man ever went, a retinue of cameras followed him to produce shots like the one you have leading this story.

When the cameras were turned off, so was the Director, typically rushing out to the next place.

Football players with education degrees just won’t do it. Indeed, it is time to get genuine management and analytical ability heading our schools. Education degrees are just academic fluff.

You’ll only get the best ideas in education from the best people, something our public schools fail to understand.

And that goes for the quality of teachers too. There are far too many who should never have been given a classroom. Get some people with real skills in computers and science and music in the classrooms, even if they do not have education degrees.

A name change, a photo op, and some rah-rah change nothing.

_______________________

The grand thing about schemes like Chris Spence’s is that by the time everyone discovers what a waste of time and money it has all been, he’ll be off somewhere on a gold-plated pension.

Truly, a professional mediocre bureaucrat’s dream, and it’s the kind of thing that keeps getting repeated over and over again in public education, which I am sad to say sometimes resembles a giant Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme rather than a serious institution.

A new fad every decade at least. All of them flops. New silly lingo. New pretensions. New nonsense.

Meanwhile, absolutely nothing real is done about the quality of kids’ education.

Truly nothing.

And nothing will until the management of education is taken out of the hands of teachers and ex-teachers with fluff education degrees and fluff ideas.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Yes, this study result strikes me as quite valid, but I’m afraid it has little to do with our schools.

It’s a bit like saying those with intelligence and some mix of initiative will succeed.

My observations of children who like to read suggest little of it comes from the class room.

Of course, a good class room can further the love and skill further, but the truth is that a good many of our elementary teachers are themselves non-readers (you only have to listen to their conversations) or indeed people who have no idea about how to teach children to read.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A CBC RADIO ONE PROGRAM ON THE CURRENTYour guest, Leonard Sax, only proved how little genuine scholarship and hard thinking often go into discussions of education.

First he told us of research showing the differences in brain development between boys and girls at a young age – actually pretty fatuous research since the difference is a practical reality that any person of moderate observational powers, having passed through public education at any time over the last century or so, took for granted.

When your interviewer remarked that such research would seem to say that segregated classes might then be necessary in general, we got a cotton-mouth response typical of the education establishment, “No, I wouldn’t go that far in making a generalization.”

Of course, the sad truth is much of what passes for scholarship in education is extremely feeble stuff.

I remember when I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto reading announcements of PhD theses at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. There was always some genuinely comical stuff, virtual parodies of serious scholarship, Monty Python does educational research. Many professors then at U of T actually objected to the University’s granting degrees for OISE because of its poor standards of scholarship.

And I’m afraid this is a general condition. Even at a world-class institution like Harvard, a prominent member of the education faculty expounds a notion of multiple intelligences, a notion having absolutely no science to it. Many public schools in the U.S. actually have posters in classrooms proclaiming the notion of multiple intelligences as though it were education’s equivalent to Maxwell’s Laws on Electromagnetism.

Of course, for years, education faculties quoted the University of Chicago’s Bruno Bettelheim as though he were an authority – that is, until we discovered the famous child psychologist was a fraud and an abuser of children.

There are endless examples of this sort of thing in education, all tending to point to the fundamental truth that teaching is neither a profession, in the sense that there is a basic body of knowledge and standards, nor a science. It is a skill, and the way to hone a skill is to get on with it, not to talk about it.

Ontario’s public education establishment has done nothing but flip-flop decade after decade, going from one half-considered notion to another.

First, tests were important, then they were not so important. First, plenty of homework was vital, then it was not so vital. First, there was zero tolerance for violence, then not really. First, report cards were important means of summing progress, then they were reduced to bland phrases from a computer. First, failure was an important tool, then everyone passed. First, teachers were authority figures, then they were mere facilitators. One could actually write an embarrassingly long list of such complete nonsense.

Any other institution which behaved in such a wildly erratic manner would become the butt of jokes and would fail utterly.

The only difference for our schools is that no one is allowed to say they are failing, but they are, because Canadians are not genuinely competitive in international comparisons, and, in a globilized world, there really is only a world standard for our children’s future opportunities.

One suspects that all this meaningless arm-flapping represents an ongoing effort by “professional educators” to avoid true responsibilities and the hard realities of education, regularly announcing a new notion as a solution, much like still another new elixir from yet another quick-money quack rolling his travelling road show into town.

Fill the classrooms with competent teachers – there are many, but there are also many incompetents protected by their union.

Give them a reasonable curriculum – the current one in Ontario is also right out of Monty Python – and the resources they require, especially libraries and computers.

Then give them the authority they need – authority against the many politically-correct principals and, importantly, against whining, overly-interfering parents.

Stream kids according to their proven abilities, kids having no talent for academics only clog the classrooms and themselves miss alternate forms of education – e.g., shop – that might excite them and give them something of value for their futures.

Open teaching up to all talented and interested people – retired professionals, artists, musicians, businessmen, and others wishing to teach full or part-time – without the need for that most discreditable of all academic documents, a degree from an education faculty which is a guarantees of no hard knowledge or skill or even affection for teaching kids.

Those and a small number of other measures would increase the effectiveness of our schools immensely. As trite as it sounds, we really do need to emphasize basics.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ANNE KOTHAWALA IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Government pretty much is incapable of correcting the serious problems of our public schools.

Only a dedicated, tough, and highly intelligent premier – an Obama type – could make anything real happen, and I sure do not see any prospect of such a politician coming to power.

The right wing tried reform and utterly failed: Mike Harris and the boys made a series of totally ineffectual changes, including that bad joke we call the literacy test, something McGuinty has kept only because it is a useful political tool manufacturing statistics that seem to show progress.

McGuinty has done nothing but literally throw money at the teachers’ union to buy peace for his government while we pay the bills. He has asked and received nothing in return, and he is too weak a character to demand anything real.

The teachers’ union is responsible for the extremely high cost of running our schools, costs which mean there are few resources for improved facilities and expanded services.

Just one tiny example of many I could cite: substitute teachers in Ontario are paid the same rates as regular teachers, a totally excessive and unnecessary cost. Further our teachers in many places are entitled to nearly a month of sick days – this on a 9-month work year – and it is a common attitude to routinely take them, leaving taxpayers paying two salaries for one poorly-taught classroom.

Even McGuinty’s weak minister has commented on the huge costs of sick days in Ontario.

The only way to improve public schools is to make teachers accountable. Accountability is a basic principle we accept in almost all our institutions except public education.

We have some wonderful, dedicated teachers, but we have a great many poor, unmotivated, even unintelligent ones, and the entire structure of administration in education, from vice-principals to superintendents, pretty well comes from these ranks.

Most have never had serious management experience, and most have no concept of accountability. That is why we have a mess.

The kindergarten/day care proposal is a sound one – the first meaningful thing McGuinty has come up with for education, but it won’t happen. The teachers’ union is already attacking it, and if it gets its way, the program will be costly and ineffectual.