JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Chris Spence has always been pretty much an empty public relations machine.

His record in his previous job showed no worthy academic achievement.

He actually established a reputation for running around the city, with a photographer constantly in tow, doing photo-ops with big grins and arms around groups of boys.

Those were his only grins because he also had a reputation of avoiding eye contact with staff, displaying a contact-avoidance type of personality.

There was also talk about his quiet spending of rather large amounts for projects which appeared of little educational value.

So it was surprising at first when Toronto hired him.

But then the Toronto Board has a national reputation for being dysfunctional, so, on second thought, the appointment seemed somehow fitting.

Of course, he was appointed as a symbol for black children failing in the school system, but symbols do not change serious situations like that.

Hard work and intelligence and management skills are what is called for, but the School Board deals only in appearances and slogans and politics, never in the roll-up-your-sleeves kind of work for change of any kind.

Now we have the clearest possible case of plagiarism screaming at us.

The plagiarism is especially embarrassing because it was so completely avoidable.

I’m confident there are staff at the Board who can write, or at least research and sketch out, speeches and pop essays, a common practice in all large organizations.

But Mr. Spence insisted on doing things himself for a forum almost guaranteed to reveal his plagiarism.

What can you say?

And a campaign against plagiarism, rightly, has become a major one in our schools.

I cannot see how the TDSB, if it has any integrity remaining, can fail to ask for his resignation.

After all, if being a football-player director is about symbolism for some students, what are we to say of a public-plagiarist director as a symbol for all students?

And, as I write this, I hear on CBC Radio that researchers now scouring his past writings have said there are indications of other plagiarism.

In the end, the most important lesson in this is how totally inept our school boards are in having charge of children’s education. They are a force only for mediocrity and should be abolished.

[Note: Chris Spence resigned later the same day.]

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Portables are not an answer, especially for young children in kindergarten.

What is well known in public education circles is that Toronto has long held on to an inordinate number of tiny, poor-quality neighborhood schools.

What a well-functioning Board would do is to build a series of larger, well-equipped schools and close all of the tiny ones.

The underlying economies have changed hugely from 80 years ago, but Toronto’s pathetic Board doesn’t seem to understand.

For the most part today, when you want hardware, you go to a big box store loaded with everything you can imagine, not a narrow little place that likely won’t have what you need half the time.

And the economic forces are no different for schools.

An old neighborhood school of maybe 200 students can only offer a mediocre education today, the costs per capita being too great to be able to offer a rich program.

In a larger school, serving a larger area, you can have music, art, a library, and some specialist teachers in subjects like math.

Right now, TDSB is offering an utterly inferior education to many young people, one not competitive with world standards, owing just to this economy of scale factor, not to mention poor standards and unprepared teachers.

If there were any management at TDSB, I wouldn’t have to point this obvious fact out.

But there isn’t any: just a not-especially-bright ex-football player, a bunch of timid ex-teacher superintendents, and a political Board whose only aim is getting re-elected and making no waves.

Our kids are being robbed in the elementary grades especially when all the foundations are laid for future success.

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.
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“…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

Sorry, but this is a hopeless, go-nowhere idea.

First, Chris Spence, who is a very pleasant man but a truly ineffectual executive, displayed his obsession with boys’ performance – there’s no other word for it than an obsession – for all his years in Hamilton, where his genuine academic achievements were almost non-existent.

Second, every failed school in Chicago – where I grew up and attended a variety of terrible and excellent schools depending on the neighborhood we lived in – was long ago renamed an “academy.” It’s a meaningless gesture, and the schools that were failing are still failing.

Third, this amounts to a back-door approach to the even more meaningless afro-centric school idea. To a great extent, the boys with which this is a concern – that is those dropping out in large numbers – are black Canadians. Something more than a form of segregation is required.

The real problems of these boys could be handled in the existing system, were the School Board to show any genuine thinking or imagination.

Serious research shows that putting failing boys on a treadmill for a vigorous effort in the morning yields maybe three hours of much improved docility and learning. Hyper-active black American boys who could not read actually were able to learn to read doing this.

Something along these lines is one of the real solutions to the problems of failing boys.

Another approach to the same problem would be a soccer league that would see boys spending a little time every morning in a demanding practice.

These approaches must of course also be combined with efficient teaching, using only teachers who have some insight into these problems. A good many of our existing teachers simply would not qualify.