Tag Archives: Teacher

News

New study reveals how school choice benefits the poorest students

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Article in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Jay P. Greene)

Excerpt:

Opponents of school choice are running out of excuses as evidence continues to roll in about the positive impact of charter schools.

Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby recently found that poor urban children who attend a charter school from kindergarten through 8th grade can close the learning gap with affluent suburban kids by 86% in reading and 66% in math. And now Marcus Winters, who follows education for the Manhattan Institute, has released a paper showing that even students who don’t attend a charter school benefit academically when their public school is exposed to charter competition.

Mr. Winters focuses on New York City public school students in grades 3 through 8. “For every one percent of a public school’s students who leave for a charter,” concludes Mr. Winters, “reading proficiency among those who remain increases by about 0.02 standard deviations, a small but not insignificant number, in view of the widely held suspicion that the impact on local public schools . . . would be negative.” It tuns out that traditional public schools respond to competition in a way that benefits their students.

[…]One of the most encouraging findings by Mr. Winters is how charter competition reduces the black-white achievement gap. He found that the worst-performing public school students, who tend to be low-income minorities, have the most to gain from the nearby presence of a charter school. Overall, charter competition improved reading performance but did not affect math skills. By contrast, low-performing students had gains in both areas, and their reading improvement was above average relative to the higher-performing students.

Conservatives love choice and competition, especially in education. We oppose equalizing outcomes regardless of individual liberty and responsibility. Liberals want government to run everything to make sure that everyone gets the same crap level of service. This is what the lazy teacher unions prefer. But conservatives want teachers to be responsive to their customers – the children.

News

Ontario board pushes for all-male school to fix decline in male achievement

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Story from the leftist Globe and Mail. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

Boys left behind by Toronto’s public schools are about to feel a firm force pulling them forward: the strong hand of Chris Spence, the Toronto District School Board’s new education director, who is calling for an all-male school and more “boy-friendly” classrooms to address male underachievement.

Boys’ disengagement at school not only leads to poor grades and unproductive lives, but also can lead to the kind of violence Toronto schools have struggled to control in recent years, Dr. Spence told reporters before presenting a sweeping vision document, his first since becoming director this year, to the board’s planning and priorities committee last night.

“The real objective is to cast a critical eye on how we reach and teach our boys,” said Dr. Spence, whose 2008 book, The Joys of Teaching Boys , makes the case that boys learn differently from girls and have suffered under a “unisex model for child rearing and teaching.”

In Toronto public schools last year, boys were 3.5 times more likely to be suspended. They underperform compared with girls regardless of age, socioeconomic class or ethnicity, and are more likely to need learning support programs.

[…] [Spence] has long advocated for strong role models for boys, to offset what he calls a “fatherless world” for youngsters. A decade ago, he pioneered a mentoring program called Boys 2 Men, which remains popular among Toronto and Hamilton students.

His new vision calls for a significant extension beyond that, to include the boys-only academy that would open for kindergarten to Grade 3 students next September and add a grade with each successive year. It would operate as a “school of choice” for interested families.

[…]Dr. Spence pledged to extend a sampling of a male-focused curriculum across all his schools. Within existing co-ed schools, he wants to set up “demonstration classrooms,” some all-male and others using “boy-friendly” teaching techniques that recognize their different learning style.

He hopes the initiatives will also lure more male teachers to work in elementary schools, where they are underrepresented.

“Boys really thrive in environments that are hands-on; they thrive in environments in which there is structure, but also where they’re empowered” to move about the classroom, he said. Under the traditional unisex approach, “When every bone in a boy’s body is telling him to get up and move around, we’re usually telling him to sit down and be quiet.”

Read the whole thing. Highly recommended. This is what I would love to do in my second career after I retire from computer science – but I refuse to join a teachers union! Especially not one like CUPE, which is notoriously leftist. Like, “Van Jones” leftist.

Commentary

Walter Williams asks how well public schools perform for the money

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Walter Williams explains how much public schools cost and how well they perform.

One of the most left-wing places in the country is Washington, D.C. – which votes 90% Democrat.

How good are schools run by Democrats?

Only 14 percent of Washington’s fourth-graders score at or above proficiency in the reading and math portions of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test. Their national rank of 51 makes them the nation’s worst. Eighth-graders are even further behind with only 12 percent scoring at or above proficiency in reading and 8 percent in math and again the worst performance in the nation. One shouldn’t be surprised by Washington student performance on college admissions tests. They have an average composite SAT score of 925 and ACT score of 19.1, compared to the national average respectively of 1017 and 21.1. In terms of national ranking, their SAT and ACT rankings are identical to their fourth- and eighth-grade rankings — dead last.

And how expensive are schools run by Democrats?

During the 2006-07 academic year, expenditures per pupil averaged $13,848 compared to a national average of $9,389. That made Washington’s per pupil expenditures the third highest in the nation coming in behind New Jersey ($14,998) and New York ($14,747). Washington’s teacher-student ratio is 13.9 compared with the national average of 15.3 students per teacher, ranking 18th in the nation. What about teacher salaries? Washington’s teachers are the highest paid in the nation, having an average annual salary of $61,195 compared with the nation’s average $46,593.

Public schools cost too much and perform too little.