Category: school reform

Teaching new teachers in 2022

On By paulmcguire2013In Innovation, school reform, Urban Communities Cohort1 Comment

Next week we start the interesting process of looking at our teacher education program. This is the unique time in the year when staff have a chance to suggest changes for the next academic year. This year, after three years of working with new teachers, I have a few ideas on how we might be able to make things more meaningful for people starting out in the profession.

First, Canadian universities need to make a strong commitment to doing their very best to develop innovative teacher education programs. This is such an important role for the academy. We have a collective responsibility to present a program that challenges, trains and inspires people who may be involved in the education of young Canadians for the next 30 years. It should go without saying, but there are powerful competing interests in the academy that work against this notion.

Universities value scholarship and research. In many faculties across the country, teaching excellence is not a requirement they are looking for. For faculty of education programs, there has to be a shift in emphasis. While educational research is an important component, we must also model teaching excellence in all the courses we teach. We only have two years to work with new teachers and there needs to be a new consideration of the balance between the academic and the practical.

I can’t offer a systematic review of what is needed to develop innovative programming, but I would love to see examples of how this is being done well in Canada. Has this been studied? Do we know what the components of an excellent program are? Is this knowledge shared and discussed throughout the academic community?

If this information exists, why are we not reading this material before we meet to discuss changes to the program? I think we are going in unprepared for the task.

Teacher education is grounded in the academic and the practical. There are other areas that have this mix where the academy is developing professionals. Medicine and law come to mind. In all cases where professional training is involved, there is a constant need to assess how effective these programs are at preparing new professionals for the working world. While the Ontario College of Teachers regularly certifies teacher training programs in the province, what role does the OTC play in the years between reviews?

How can we best strike a balance between teaching theory and practice? At the university, the teaching staff is made up of full-time professors – experts in their fields of study, seconded teachers who teach up to three semesters in their subject areas, part-time professors and graduate students and faculty advisors. Faculty advisors act as a liaison between the university and the practicum schools. In non-Covid years, these faculty advisors visit the schools on a regular basis to connect with the associate teacher and the teacher candidate.

The key staff position is the associate teacher. This is the person who volunteers (there is a small stipend) to take on one or more student teachers for the year. They are responsible for overseeing the practice of the student teacher and they assess the success and areas of growth of their students throughout the year.

This is the essential component of training that takes place over the two years of teacher education. Associate teachers are given no time off to do this important work; it is one of the many add-ons that society depends on teachers to assume to keep education moving in the province. Associate teachers have no say in what is taught at the university and do not play any role in the program review process we are going through right now.

There is another group of volunteers that receive even less attention. A small collection of university professors coordinate the in-university practicum programs over the two-year period. They play crucial roles in developing connections and partnerships with schools, associate teachers and administrators and they play an important role in fashioning the student teacher reflective component of the practicum experience.

Because the coordinating role does not count as part of their academic load, these educators take this on as part of their extra duties apart from the research they are expected to do and their academic teaching load.

The two most important roles in teacher education are being conducted by volunteers. I don’t think many people think or write about this, but volunteer associate teachers and university coordinators give their own precious professional time to nurture the next generation of teachers in this province. Both groups have little say in the structure and content of the teacher education program.

Universities, like other large institutions, move very slowly. There is little incentive to make changes that would give volunteers a voice in the development of new teachers. Like many institutions, the paid permanent staff hold almost all the reins of control and power and see little need to change a situation that in their minds, works very well.

Some people – academic advisors, professional staff, full-time professors are doing very well in this current system. They are protected by seniority and tenure, structural program components that guarantee complacency. Academic advisors are kept in their jobs well beyond their best before date. Some advisors have not seen the inside of a classroom in 20 years. Student teachers, associate teachers and volunteer academic staff have no voice in program design even though they represent the essential stakeholders in teacher education.

I don’t know if this has been studied in Canada. There is a problem although it is not in the interest of the academy to do anything about this. Earlier this year we read The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities (Henry et. al., 2017). This is an excellent study of the inequities around race and indigeneity that exist in Canadian universities. While the problems in teacher education are different many of the same elements that block reform are similar. It is a stunning rebuke to the academic system here in Canada.

These are discouraging situations, all the more important to write about them. Solutions do exist, this is not hopeless, but we have to start asking the right people the important questions.

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A Cosmopolitan Classroom and Mixed-Race Identity: Challenges and Proposals for Change

On By paulmcguire2013In Academic Life, Poverty in Schools, school reformLeave a comment

It is a fallacy to believe that any school system is equitable and fair. As state institutions, schools reflect the society in which they exist. The picture Karis Campion and Remi Joseph-Salisbury paint in Bringing Black Mixed-Race Pupils into Focus in British Schooling (2022) shines a harsh light on the challenges mixed-race students face in British schools. While this is a rapidly growing population, there is yet to be an in-depth study of their lives and the effect of schools on those lives (Campion & Joseph-Salisbury, 2022). Their research sets out to chronicle the experiences of mixed-race students as recorded in three separate collections of qualitative interviews from 2013 – 2018 with 71 mixed-race people.

Campion and Joseph-Salisbury (2022) focus on mixed-race students. There is a limited amount of research in relation to this growing population of students across the British schooling systems. As classrooms become more diverse, they call for a more nuanced view of mixed-race students that focuses on their needs and experiences. Mixed-race students are often racialized as Black students. However, as Campion and Joseph-Salisbury stress, their experiences of racism and prejudice differ and remain underexamined.

Their findings are troubling. For them, the British system continues to put Black/White mixed-race and Black students at a considerable disadvantage. Especially by the time Black and mixed-race students reach the secondary school system, they face overt racism and prejudice from three sources – their peers, their teachers, and the curriculum (Campion & Joseph-Salisbury, 2022).

Mixed-race students face prejudice from all sides. In some cases, Black/White mixed-race students are wrongly associated with a wider racial population that includes Asians and Pakistanis. This leads to incidents of name-calling that wound and further alienate mixed-race students. In other instances, they are set apart from Black students who have difficulty understanding they have a White and a Black parent leading them to be labelled in derogatory terms like ‘zebra’ (Campion & Joseph-Salisbury, 2022, p. 75).

The prejudice these students face also comes from their teachers who have little or no training or understanding on how to work with mixed-race or Black students. Comments like “in this country, we dot our i’s” are a particularly hurtful example of the racism exhibited by teachers (Campion & Joseph-Salisbury, 2022, p. 79).

The prejudice of their peers and teachers is degrading and demoralizing for these students, and such racism also extends to the curriculum. For me, this seems the worst – here racism is embedded and sustained by the state through the curriculum that all students are subjected to. The curriculum continues to celebrate a White “British” mindset that has little to do with mixed-race and Black students.

Consequently, Black and mixed-race students are invisible in the curriculum. They are not included in what is called “fundamental British values” (Campion & Joseph-Salisbury, 2022, p. 80). In an earlier article, Joseph-Salisbury (2017) focuses on the unique impact of the history curriculum in Black Mixed-race Male Experiences of the UK Secondary School Curriculum. The teaching of the standardized history curriculum, for him, brushes out any mention of mixed-race or Black people apart from the abolishment of slavery in 19th century England.

The combined effect of systemic racism in the curriculum, teacher indifference and ignorance combined with peer antipathy results in lower grades and higher levels of suspension and expulsion for Black and mixed-race students (Campion & Joseph-Salisbury, 2022). Lower teacher expectations and overall dissatisfaction with the curriculum paints a very glum picture of school life for these students. 

This research introduces the problems faced by mixed-race students. Campion and Joseph-Salisbury (2022) outline that there are differences in the experiences of Black and mixed-race students and more research needs to be done to get a complete picture of their lived experiences. Mixed-race students face prejudice from both White and Black students. Students also talk about the inability of their peers to fathom interracial relationships (Campion & Joseph-Salisbury, 2022). This reminds us of the ongoing systemic barriers; there is little written here that suggests an overall solution. Consequently, more qualitative research is needed.

As mentioned earlier, Joseph-Salisbury writes about the impact of a Eurocentric history curriculum, especially on Black and mixed-race students. In the British curriculum – (there is no differentiation offered here; Scottish? Welsh? English?) these students simply do not exist. What does this do to the student whose story is not told? How can they possibly combat the sense of inferiority that comes from not being in the picture? 

Joseph-Salisbury offers some ideas on curriculum modification by featuring mixed-race role models like Malcolm X and Bob Marley. However, I am not convinced that these insertions go beyond token offerings in a curriculum that ultimately supports White hegemony.

Moving away from the study of mixed-race role models, Joseph-Salisbury proposes a different solution. He refers to Black Saturday Schools as a way to supplement what students are missing in the regular curriculum (Joseph-Salisbury, 2017). This is one solution to the White hegemonic curriculum that all his interview subjects agree does not serve Black and mixed-race students. Consider, Jake, one of his participants:

As long as Black schools would take into account the needs of mixed kids, then yeah, I think that’s the future for us. Mainstream isn’t working. While responses and proposed interventions were varied among participants, the underlying dissatisfaction with the current curriculum was unanimous. (Joseph-Salisbury, 2017 p. 458)

Black Saturday Schools are part of the 50-year-old Black Supplementary School Movement in Great Britain.  This is one response to the racist nature of the regular British school system. In some ways, these schools sound similar to the language schools run by both English public-school boards here in Ottawa. Language schools in areas like Somerset West cater to Chinese and Vietnamese students offering instruction unavailable in local community schools. While the British schools have less support than their Canadian counterparts, there is real interest in studying this movement to better understand how these schools could be a solution to a problem that is plaguing British schools (Andrews, 2016). Black Supplementary Schools do offer the possibility of building resilience in Black and mixed-race youth. This additional training can support students in their efforts to succeed in a public schooling system that was and is designed for White communities only (2017).  Joseph-Salisbury & Andrews continue that Black Supplementary Schools must find ways to recognize Black mixed-race students within the curriculum.

When Black British children faced endemic racism, Saturday school was a necessity.

While the Black Saturday Schools offer an avenue for reform in Great Britain, Dunn, Spaulding, & Love, (2021) suggest that in the United States the time for reform is over, that the White, Eurocentric school system must be destroyed and worked over to better reflect the lives of Black Students. For example, they state:

Educational reform has never been enough; thus, now is the time for abolition. It’s imperative that we tear down the corrosive, racist and inhumane practices and policies to rebuild our educational system to value the multiplicity of our students and diverse communities. (p. 215)

Bettina Love, the founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network in the United States, has written extensively on the need for a new type of teaching for Black, Brown, and Indigenous students. She advocates for a new pedagogy that teaches these students to thrive, not just survive (Wall, 2021).  Love and others are using the disruptions caused by Covid to propose a new system of education for racialized students. First, a critical consciousness needs to be developed so that students can recognize the racist nature of the current school system. Second, schools need to move away from indoctrination towards a system of critical analysis that empowers students. Finally, racist policies, practices and educators need to be called out and sidelined (Love et al, 2021). While this might seem much more radical than the Supplementary School Movement, the goals are similar. In both cases, there is a call for new institutions and new spaces that supplant White supremacist institutions that are incapable of providing an equitable education to racialized students.  Both decry the inability of their school systems to develop an inclusive, non-racist curriculum.

An excellent panel discussion on Abolitionist Teaching including Bettina Love

Kendi (2019) supports this desire for something different and more equitable in his research about Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the United States. For Kendi (2019) HBCUs reflect the reality in America where Black Americans “live in majority-Black neighborhoods, work in majority-Black sites of employment, organize in majority-Black associations” (p. 171). The establishment of new systems that empower racialized students recognizes that there is no real mainstream world or school system. There are instead multiple real worlds and perspectives that need to be respected.

Campion and Joseph-Salisbury have revealed a world that is unjust and inequitable. They offer important research into the lives of mixed-race students and how they sometimes intersect with the world of Black children. The story is nuanced and complex. While this book chapter presents a problem with vague solutions, it builds on research that calls out the negative impact of curriculum that marginalizes these students.


While Joseph-Salisbury and others propose the Supplementary Schools to enhance White schools that are resistant to change, others like Love and Kendi advocate instead for spaces apart from the White Eurocentric school culture. It is a powerful argument and a logical extension to Joseph-Salisbury and Campion’s reform-minded proposals. The world of the mixed-race student differs in important ways from that of Black students; the nature of racism and prejudice is unique and no study of the multiracial cosmopolitan classroom is complete without careful study of the challenges that make up the daily lives of this rapidly growing ethnic group.

A final word from Remi Joseph-Salisbury speaking about racial microaggressions in higher education

References

Andrews. (2016). The problem of political blackness: lessons from the Black Supplementary School Movement. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(11), 2060–2078. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1131314

Campion, K. and Joseph-Salisbury, R. (2021). Bringing Black Mixed-Race Pupils into Focus in British Schooling In Schecter, S. & James, C. (Eds.),

Critical Approaches Toward a Cosmopolitan Education (p. 69-85). Routledge.

Dunn, Chisholm, A., Spaulding, E., & Love, B. L. (2021). A Radical Doctrine: Abolitionist Education in Hard Times. Educational Studies (Ames), 57(3), 211–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2021.1892684

Joseph-Salisbury, R. (2017). Black Mixed-race Male Experiences of the UK Secondary School Curriculum. The Journal of Negro Education, 86(4), 449–462. https://doi.org/10.7709/jnegroeducation.86.4.0449

Joseph-Salisbury, & Andrews, K. (2017). Locating black mixed-raced males in the black supplementary school movement. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 20(6), 752–765. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2016.1248838

Kendi. (2019). How to be an Antiracist (First edition.). One World.

Love, & Muhammad, G. E. (2020). What do we have to lose: toward disruption, agitation, and abolition in Black education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 33(7), 695–697. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2020.1753257

Wall. (2021). Review of Love’s We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. The Professional Educator, 45(1), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.47038/tpe.45.01.02

 

Building a Better Way: Teaching from a Social Justice Framework

On By paulmcguire2013In Hope, Life in the Times of COVID - 19, Online teaching and learning, school reform, Speaking Truth to Power, teaching as resisting, Urban Communities CohortLeave a comment
taken from article Ontario Teachers Can Now Face Consequences For Racism November 2020

 

This is my second year teaching at the University of Ottawa. We work with students both in the first and second year program. In a year that is fraught with troubles due to the pandemic, there are, I think, some great opportunities to really focus on what we are teaching our students in the Faculty of Education.

Here we work in cohorts and we are the Urban Communities Cohort (UCC). There are fewer distractions this year as everything we do is online. I really believe that what we are focusing on this year is truly essential to the formation of new educators here in Ontario.

This is an essential pause at the beginning of a career, a chance to reflect and ponder before actually diving in.

In both years, we are focusing our work on anti-racism, diversity, and inclusion. In the first year program, we are studying Is Everyone Really Equal by Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo. In second year we continue to work on How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi.

Along with this, we have had a series of excellent panel discussions from leading urban educators here in Ottawa. The panels and the books are challenging our thinking about what it means to teach in an urban school.

This year we are doing something very special, something that we were not able to do last year. It is a bit like starting our own school of urban education. By starting with Sensoy & DiAngelo and Kendi and the panel of education leaders, we are truly grounding our students in a social justice framework – something that I have not seen before.


People like to talk about social justice, but it is not very often that it is practiced in our schools. The discussions with local leaders really brought this home – as urban educators, we need to ground our teaching in social justice first, everything flows from this. It is one thing to say that social justice is important to your teaching, it is a very different thing to make this the basis of your practice.

And what will this look like in your school? What will this look like in your classroom? How will you be challenged if you put social justice first?

Teaching from a social justice perspective means that you need to challenge societal norms and practices that are invested in protecting the status quo. A school board by its very nature is designed to protect itself from any radical change. In many ways seeing the world from a social justice perspective calls into question the very existence of large institutions like our school boards. How well do our schools cater to Indigenous students or students from different ethnic minorities?

Through the work in this program, we have been introduced to the works of Dr. Bettina A. Love and the Abolitionists in the United States. Her work is compelling and we focused one of our online discussions on what she teaches and how it can apply in the Canadian context. Dr. Love and others advocate for a system of education that breaks down barriers for children and where social justice is the guiding principle.

The education survival complex mirrors the prison industrial complex. Both industries are making money off these narratives about Black and Brown children—that we’re defiant, violent, thugs—and it’s just not true. This is about racism and how it plays out on Black and Brown bodies. The complex doesn’t want to remove any barriers, it’s just going to try to measure how well you can jump over them. 

Abolitionist Teaching in Action: Q&A with Bettina L. Love ASCD December 2019

We watched a long interview with Dr. Love and other Abolitionists educators and I have included an excerpt below. The original is 90 minutes long and is really worth watching. Even this short segment is liberating and talks about how the impossible became possible at the beginning of the pandemic.

It is a bit crazy to think about now. We had computers, but kids couldn’t bring them home. We had testing, then EQAO stopped. Teachers became the center of everything. We need compassion over compliance!! Why did it take a pandemic to see what really is possible?

These ideas are new and liberating to me. How appropriate for new educators to be exposed to these ideas at the beginning of their career. Education should be about liberation, educators need to lead and not comply with what the conventional practices of the school board dictate. New teachers really need to question who our schools are really for. They need to critique the public school system and look for ways to change that system when it does not serve their students.


By giving our students this framework, they will be able to question more and push the limits of a system that really needs to be pushed. Teaching from a social justice framework is the opposite of supporting the status quo. This is certainly what our schools and our students need right now.

Some of these ideas are making it into our own school systems. Just last week, the Peel Board announced changes to entry requirements for Black and Indigenous students into specialized programs:

Faced with continuing criticism of its failures to address issues of equity and systemic anti-Black racism in its schools, Peel’s interim education director told trustees on Tuesday evening that giving access to groups that are underrepresented in programs, such as arts and technology, strings music and the International Baccalaureate, is a “necessary action.”

“They have a right to be there. If our random selection process was working well and we were encouraging students from these identities to apply, we wouldn’t need this step,” Colleen Russell-Rawlins said in an interview earlier on Tuesday.

Peel board changing specialty program criteria to increase access for Black, Indigenous students

Maybe this is why the abolitionist approach is so interesting – the only way to actually provide BIPOC students with a safe and caring environment is to create new structures that do not rely on a school model designed for Industrial Age Great Britain. The Peel approach is a good one and one that should resonate with our students.

At a time where the education of our children is so important when we need to question how we serve all of our students, these questions and discussions are essential to the development of the next generation of teachers. As they learn to challenge the way things have been done in the past I am confident we will build a better way forward.

Living in the age of incivility Part 3 – The Iron Cage that is the school system

On By paulmcguire2013In governance and public education, incivility, leadership, Life in the Times of COVID - 19, school reform, Speaking Truth to Power1 Comment

The modern school system has, for all intents and purposes, come more and more to resemble and function much like what German sociologist Max Weber called the “Iron Cage” – a bureaucratic structure that traps individuals in a world driven by technological efficiency, rational calculation and control.

Paul W Bennett Globe and Mail, October 2, 2020

I worried most about this third article in my series Living in the age of incivility. I worried about this because I was going to take things personal, talk about a situation that occurred while I was a principal in the Ottawa Catholic School system five years ago.

In a tweet I never put out I wrote this:

In 2015, I was unjustly suspended by a school board I had worked for for 27 years. A disgruntled employee brought a whole host of false accusations against me. I have never written about this. In a time of such incivility, is it now time to expose the injustice of what happened?

Yes, it is time, but how do I make this a useful article? It would be very easy to become the victim in my own story or for the reader to think – maybe these accusations were not false, maybe he got what was coming for him.

If you keep the story as personal, if you hold on to the anger, the message gets lost, the story is blurred, people turn away.

Even a few years ago, I couldn’t write this story. I was too caught up in anger and shame. I have avoided any occasions that involve the OCSB for years now, including, to my shame, the retirement of a good friend, and my own board retirement party. But enough with that now.

What has given me the context for this third article is an opinion piece by Paul W. Bennett in today’s Globe and Mail. He is writing a summary of some of his ideas in his new book – The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools. I don’t have the book yet, but I will be reading this soon.

In his article, he starts out by writing how the pandemic has really exposed the inadequacies of our public school system, a system that has maintained the same structure for well over 100 years.

Beyond this crisis however, the pandemic has exposed a more fundamental problem. It has lost its connection with students, families and the wider community.

Our public schools, initially established as the vanguard of universal, accessible, free education, have lost their way and become largely unresponsive to the public they still claim to serve. Those voicing concerns about early reading, mathematics scores or school closings find the system resistant to change and regularly hit brick walls and glass ceilings, particularly when trying to access the points of decision-making.

What they are very good at is shutting down innovation and smothering dissent.

Now, I enter the personal, but I do it briefly, because I am not the story here.

In 2015, I was the principal of a small urban school in the Ottawa Catholic School Board. We had a great school with wonderful children, mostly new to Canada. Our school had served immigrant communities for decades and this meant going beyond the prescriptive norms to give them the opportunity to thrive in a brand new world.

At the time, we had one employee who worked closely with me who used their position to create tension and strife amongst the staff. I was unaware of this situation until the staff member began to poll staff about their attendance in a board-wide PD day. This is something you just don’t do in a school – the principal can do this, but I would never take a step like this – I trusted the people I worked with.

I did call the employee out on this behaviour, but I did not know at the time it was just one in a series of ‘aggressions’ the staff member had taken out on the rest of the staff.

While generally we could have moved on from this incident we didn’t. The employee went directly to the head of HR for the board, brought in their union representative and left the school when I asked why they were escalating the issue.

This was a time of high tension in the school board. The employee’s union was on work to rule and incidents like this were happening in other schools as well.

Still, nothing really to worry about here. In the ensuing weeks, without my knowledge, the employee with their union rep held a series of meetings with the superintendent of HR and others and in those meetings a long history of my supposed infractions were laid out out. It must have taken hours and hours to come up with this list.

It was fanciful, but it was damming. When the list was complete and the meetings were over, I was called in to hear the whole story. I brought our association rep, a fellow principal. As principals in Ontario, we don’t have a union which means we are exposed and unprotected. Most principals have no idea how precarious their position is.

A meeting that I thought would be a 15-minute conclusion to a strange affair turned into a two-hour grilling that only ended when I had had enough. I told them this was ridiculous and I left.

There is a nine-page summary of the meeting written by my representative. Even now I can’t read it and my hands actually shake as I pull it up again on the computer. I also produced a 22-page document in my defence. I really don’t know if anyone actually looked at it.

As a principal, you get accused of all sorts of stuff. This is part of the job, but you do expect your supervisors to support you and believe in you.

Mine did not. A few weeks after this meeting I was suspended pending an investigation.

I don’t know if an investigation ever took place. Three weeks later on the last day of school before Christmas, I was reinstated with a hastily written disciplinary letter added to my file.

There was no explanation about what their findings were or if they had actually conducted an investigation. To this day I don’t know the results, but apart from the letter, there were no consequences. The employee was relocated and later it turned out that this person had done similar things at another school, but in the earlier case the principal was told to keep quiet. There has never been an explanation or an apology.

This is my story of the Iron Cage. A school board totally out of touch with their staff more than likely doing its utmost to stay clear of a strong union in a time of labour strife. A school board that placed little value on a loyal employee.

There is no question in my mind that the system of centralized power and incompetent managers needs to be reworked. The pandemic has exposed all of this, but I experienced this gross misuse of authority and power over five years ago.

In his article, Paul Bennett calls for a humanizing of the education system. We need to turn away from big schools that dehumanize relationships between educators, children and parents. We also need a system that has some real oversight so that power can no longer be abused by those who want to sanction others who do not follow the script.

One board official once told me I deserved what I got because my views on education were unconventional. With attitudes like this how can we not want to rework our system? How can someone think it is OK to say things like that?

My situation remains unresolved because I never received an explanation and certainly not an apology. I am retired now – writing this while working at a school would certainly lead to grave consequences.

Now I want a better system. Not for me, but for all those who work in schools, for all children and families and their communities. These old institutions need to go and we need to start considering alternatives. As paul Bennett writes:

A new set of priorities is coming to the fore: put students first, democratize school governance, deprogram education ministries and school districts, and listen more to parents and teachers. Design and build smaller schools at the centre of urban neighbourhoods and rural communities. It’s not a matter of turning back the clock, but rather one of regaining control over our schools, rebuilding social capital, and revitalizing local communities.

This is what we really need to do. Humanize education, give power back to parents and communities, get rid of the bureaucracies that do everything in their power to protect what they have.

Education should be about people, it is not about power and institutions. When abuse of power happens so easily with no consequence for the abusers it is time to rework the system.

Covid Journal # 7 – Returning to school is risky

On By paulmcguire2013In Innovation, Life in the Times of COVID - 19, school reform1 Comment

These graphs put out by science teacher and biostatistician, Ryan Imgrund are something I am going to watch closely over the next month.

‘On August 2, in Ottawa there is a 4.8% chance you’ll encounter an individual who can transmit COVID-19 in a group of 27.’

This is actually a statement put out on Ryan Imgrund’s Twitter feed. You can fill in the blanks for your region if you would like. How’s it going for you?

What this means should startle everyone. There is a significant risk of COVID-19 spreading in classrooms this fall. There is no hard cap for kindergarten classes or grades 4-8. Kindergarten classes can still be as high as 29 students, classes in grades 1-3 are capped at 23 (90% of classes must have 20 or fewer students).

From Ontario Families for Public Education

The only meaningful caps that exist right now are in grades 9 – 12 where students will attend in groups of 15.

Not to sound overly critical, but I am not sure how this is going to work.

Today, Sunday, August 2 – Australia declares a state of disaster in Victoria and imposes curfew in Melbourne  

Great Britain and Spain are beginning lockdowns again in various regions.

In the New York Times – After a brief reprieve, coronavirus charges back in US

Again the New York Times – A school reopened. It had to quarantine students within hours.

I am going to stop at four, but I could add many more stories. My point here is to state the obvious, this virus is not under control. Reopening is fraught with danger and in many cases leads to more outbreaks.

The great thing about daily statistics is that we can track the daily spread of the virus against significant changes in behaviour.

While we all should be concerned as Minister Lecce is for the emotional well-being of students, is sending them back into a very risky environment the best way to do this?

Should we not be trying to reimagine what school could look like if we were not so tied to an industrial era school model? We could be asking – what was so good about how we did things in the past? What could we do better? Why are we so tied to tradition at the risk of our student’s and teacher’s health?

Schools support the economy, there is no question about that. When kids are in school people can go back to work. If we truly were concerned about the well-being of staff and students we would be looking closely at the statistics and we would be using this time to reimagine school.

Are the people in charge of our school systems motivated to do this? People in senior positions traditionally want to protect the status quo. It is in their self-interest to do this. There is nothing amazing in this – all large corporations act in the same manner.

But what should we be doing?

  • Should any grouping of students be above 15?

  • Could we be using facilities like community and health centers to spread out our teachers and students?

  • Could we develop more robust video conferencing tools to make the online experience more meaningful (is there life after Zoom??)

  • Is five days a week, 6 hours a day really meaningful? Can we develop a community-based model for education that makes parents active partners?

 

We do ask these questions in countless blog posts and podcasts, but are these questions ever taken seriously? If not now, when? How tied are we really to an old model that really doesn’t work well for many kids?

I really want to see what happens in the next 30 days. Will there be meaningful debate about what education in Ontario will look like this year? Do we realize that we are in this for the long haul? There is no returning to school until there is a vaccine.

I will be working with teacher candidates in first and second year so I will certainly have lots of opportunities to see how we protect our students and staff. I will continue to look at the stats – we are very fortunate to have this daily reminder about what we are heading into.

Will we invest in real change or will we just hope for the best?

Why e-learning during a pandemic can’t work

On By paulmcguire2013In 1:1, Digital Transformation, parent engagement, school reform3 Comments

These are challenging days. Teachers are scrambling now to find ways to teach their students using some form of e-learning. While families with multiple devices and parents at home will be able to do this, in many cases e-learning can’t work. We haven’t done the human capacity building that is necessary for this to take place.

We should have been doing this, but we haven’t done the necessary capacity building.

At my last school, we worked for over a year to build capacity with our students and teachers. We had a Chromebook for every student from grades 3-6 and they were obliged to take them home every night. We trained the kids on how to use Google tools. That was the capacity building that would need to be in place right now to make an e-learning system take place.

Students need to be taught that the computers are for daily learning and the expectation needs to be there that they will use the machines – that takes time, that is a paradigm shift.

And before you say but… this was a very poor school. With the help of our school board, we made sure the computers were always available – after school, on the weekend and if there had been enough time, for the summers as well.

We are woefully underprepared for this current situation.  We have squandered an opportunity to set up good e-learning relationships.  It would take a long time to get this set up, I am not sure why we are trying to do this now.

You can only build this capacity while you are still in school. We should have been working on this years ago, but there was no real support for this. Even a flipped classroom takes in-person time to set up.

I talked to one of my students this year who tried to set up a flipped learning system in his high school classroom. He did assign work for students to do at night that could be taken up the next day. The project failed because students didn’t see the assigned work as something they had to do.

We talked about this and realized that such a system would only work with some careful in-class learning. As in our school, a good e-learning relationship can only be set up if there is a prolonged in-person training period prior to enacting the system.

We needed a year to set up our system. Unfortunately, as soon as I left the school, the new principal stopped buying the computers our students needed and the system fell apart. There was no system-wide support for this kind of a relationship so the experiment ended.

I write this post with a certain amount of frustration. It seems that we never think of the important human relationships that we need to structure first before we plunge headlong into technical solutions to learning. Yes, we have the technology, but no we have not developed the important human linkages necessary to make this work.

It is not really the technology that is slowing us down here, we just haven’t done the necessary human face-to-face work. Yes, we could easily get the Chromebooks to the kids who need them. We could set up mobile hubs in neighbourhoods that do not have internet access. But we have not done the necessary work with our students, especially at the elementary level to make all this work.

These are extraordinary times. Our students and our families are really on their own now. Maybe we will learn from this. Maybe we will construct the necessary human linkages to make real, meaningful digital learning work in the future.

I hope people are thinking about this. Technology rarely solves important human problems.

Naming and Shaming

On By paulmcguire2013In school reform, Speaking Truth to Power, Teacher Political Voice, teaching as resisting1 Comment

It is tiresome to write about people who misrepresent the truth.

It is tiresome, but it is worse if we don’t write anything. It is so easy to become desensitized to misrepresentation and outright lying by our public officials. We see it all the time now and we are used to it.

Right now I am a bit housebound. I have an inner ear condition that produces dizziness and instability. The one thing I can do is watch the on-going impeachment saga in the United States. That and read Twitter.

This is really something terrible to watch. House Republican leaders are actually saying what Donald Trump does in his attempts to bribe the leader of Ukraine is OK because, well, he didn’t go through with it. He got caught, so no bribe happened.

I find this incredible. These are publically elected officials who are blatantly ignoring the facts to push their own party line. While this might work in a grade 9 classroom debate, we should be better than that when it comes to public office.

This type of misrepresentation of the facts has seeped into Ontario politics. Steven Lecce, the Minister of Education in the Province of Ontario, duly elected by his constituents is doing exactly the same thing. He is appealing for public support because he knows a significant portion of the public will believe him or will at least not allow facts get in the way of a good story.

Last week he put out the tweet above ‘naming and shaming’ the OSSTF for standing up to his misinformation campaign.

It is his government that wants to stack Ontario classes with more students at the high school level. It is his government who wants to save education dollars by requiring Ontario students to take on-line courses following the shining example of that leader in education – Alabama.

Interesting, the original plan was for four online courses. Steven Lecce is showing his flexibility by reducing the number to two – twice as many as Alabama and other states. Beyond this, he only wants to increase class size now to 25:1.

Let’s be very clear about what is going on here. Both initiatives have absolutely nothing to do with improving the quality of education in the province. They have everything to do with siphoning money out of the system. That is the fact and it is something Stephen Lecce will never talk about.

This morning there was a good conversation on Twitter about raising the level of discourse on education issues here in Ontario. It’s a good point.

But, I have to say, how are we to discuss matters of education reform when our system is dominated by politicians who struggle with the truth? Yes, public bargaining is not a refined tool for developing education policy, but when we are dealing with people who are insincere and dishonest, we have to realize that a strong, coherent defence is essential. When someone is trying to shame you you need to stand up to the bully.

I remember being at an education conference soon after the Harris Government was replaced by the Liberals. It was a great conference, new ideas and positive, innovative initiatives were being discussed. I asked a consultant what it was like to have these discussions during the conservative years. She replied that everyone just kept their heads down.

What a way to bring about change!

When your minister knowingly doesn’t tell the truth. When he tries to use old-style bully techniques, when he apes the tactics of Republicans south of the border we have to realize that we are playing by a different set of rules.

Facts matter, education matters. If we don’t want to keep our heads down we must call out those who want to hurt our system. We shouldn’t have to do this, but here we are. There is no shame in this.

Trolls Creep Into the Education Debate in Ontario

On By paulmcguire2013In school reform, Speaking Truth to Power, Teacher Political Voice, teaching as resisting2 Comments

What does one expect a retired principal to say??? You just want leech our system dry and fail our student to line your colleagues (sic) pockets.

Taken from a direct tweet to me – Sunday, March 24

We are entering into a zone in Ontario where debate and protest are again necessary to protect public education here in Ontario.

Unfortunately, when you begin to advocate for a public institution, you do invite the trolls out there to take shots at you. It is incredible how quickly the debate on social media can go south when we start talking about education. I certainly will not be focussing on the negative, but it truly is a shame when people think it is OK to attack teachers for standing up for their students and parents.

Every 15 years or so democracy seems to take a misstep. We elect someone whose interest in public institutions is suspect. Why do we do things like this? Why do we get tired of supporting vital public institutions?

Democracies sometimes head down the wrong road and when this happens the consequences can be very destructive.

In Ontario, the current government of Doug Ford is taking the beginning steps in dismantling many of the gains our education system has made in the past 15 or 20 years. For the most part, we have made these gains because the people in power believed in strong public institutions. Of course, they made lots of mistakes and they could have done more, but I don’t think you can argue that they didn’t believe in a strong public education system.

The current government is having trouble figuring this one out.

When I protest, I’m not standing up for my rights. I’m standing up for my students because my working conditions are their learning conditions & they deserve better than crowded classes, fewer high school options & forced e-learning.

Taken from Twitter – March 25

It is great to see educators fighting back – there are lots of comments like the one above on Twitter right now. Maybe we can drown out the trolls!

There is an important interview you should all listen to. In it, the current Minister of Education, Lisa Thompson struggles to explain why increasing average class sizes to 28 in high school is a good thing.

//www.cbc.ca/i/caffeine/syndicate/?mediaId=1461676099953In a follow-up article, Lisa Thompson is quoted saying that her government is committed to standing by Ontario’s teachers.

I would argue it’s a little more like standing on the necks of teachers, but that’s just me.

This is an important moment for education in Ontario. Increasing class size does only one thing – it reduces the number of teachers you need to employ, nothing else. Anyone who has spent time scheduling high school classes knows that and I have done lots of that.

You have to expect the trolls will ooze to the surface during these debates. Lots of people have real or imagined gripes against an educator and social media gives them a voice.

trying to ‘school’ teachers will not work for Doug Ford

What is great about the current debate is that lots of educators are also taking to social media to write in support of the current system. This is really important. I don’t know if it will make any difference, but politicians should learn that they can no longer make decisions in a personal vacuum. Their decisions will be debated and in some cases protested against in the public forum. Doug Ford warning teachers not to protest his education cuts is a hollow threat.

It is good to reflect on the Twitter comment to me. The troll writes,  “You just want leech our system dry and fail our student to line your colleagues (sic) pockets.”

The day before Doug Ford was quoted saying this, “I love the front-line teachers and we may not see eye to eye with the head of the unions because all they want to do is collect their union dues and start pocketing (them) into their pockets,”

There seems to be a similarity here. This is what happens when our political leaders drag down the debate and make things personal. It gives permission to the trolls out there to do the same thing.

Educators in Ontario should not allow this to happen.

 

Power Corrupts Absolutely, Even in Education

On By paulmcguire2013In Fads in Education, governance and public education, school reform, Speaking Truth to Power, The Class Struggle PodcastLeave a comment

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

Lord Acton,  in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887

I started off my day today reading about the testimony of Jody Wilson Raybould to the Justice Committee and John Ibbitson’s response in the Globe and Mail        “Trudeau has lost the moral mandate to govern“. It was quite the day yesterday. Not only did we have the stunning testimony of the former Justice Minister, the House Oversight Committee in the United States grilled Michael Cohen, the former Trump fixer, for over nine hours. I watched lots of this testimony, it was incredible. While I didn’t see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s questioning, I saw a clip of her quizzing Cohen later in the day. If you haven’t seen it you should take a look here

If you contrast this with the performance of her Republican colleagues, you can get a good example of power corrupting absolutely. Like their Liberal Party cousins here in Canada, they are displaying blind loyalty to a leader and a party that has lost the right to govern due to their abuse of power.

I think we need more oversight committees and more politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jodi Wilson Raybould. Speaking truth to power is a very rare commodity these days.

There are more examples of the corrupting influence of power closer to home. Our premier Doug Ford has been in the news twice this week. First, it was reported that lobbyists, companies and industry groups are feeling pressure to attend a $1,250-a-person fundraiser in order to maintain access to Ford’s government “Doug Ford defends fundraising dinner amid cash-for-access criticisms“.

Then there is the $50,000 bill for Doug Ford’s new van with leather-covered swivel chairs. Very nice, but is this something he really needs to be premier of the province? This is yet another interesting article to read – all published this week! Here it is “Doug Ford’s van customization has $50K price tag, documents show”.

Power corrupts absolutely. Is there an educational context? I think there is. As a society, we are just not interested in making the investments necessary to ensure a safe system that is flexible enough to cater to all children. There is no reason at all that in a wealthy society like our own we can’t create a system that caters to the needs of all children. The fact that we have daily incidents of violence, especially in our elementary schools is an indication that we are not willing to make the hard choices that would allow for a more humane system.

Instead, we get the shoddy of implementation of cure-all philosophies like self-regulation. We get well-meaning educators who claim that if we just trained really hard, there would be no violence in our schools because everyone would be ‘regulated’ somehow. While this is an interesting idea, school boards will never be able to make this happen. Their implementation has been way too ham-handed.

The senior administrators who have played out this cure-all are happy with this self-regulation movement. They want violence in the schools to be the educator’s problem. Advocating for a whole-scale change to the education system to put all children first is not part of their game plan. It doesn’t have to be. Like all those in positions of absolute power, there is no real incentive to solve, or even look into the problems of school violence.

Education commentators are no better. Because they are linked to the current ideas on self-regulation they seem to be unable to think outside the education box. The response seems to be that this is the best we can do or that this is ‘part of the solution’. What if we put the child, every child, including the autistic child first? Why are we instead contemplating a system that stops intensive treatment at a very early age then putting everything on the backs of the school system? We are inviting more violence. Is self-regulation really going to be our best tool, or are we just blurring the issue and blunting the debate about what is really needed.

parent protests against the proposed changes to funding of autism programming in Ontario

One school board – Halton District has reversed this trend by speaking some truth to power. This week (again – a big week!) they published a letter to Education Minister Lisa Thompson and Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod. In the letter, the school board indicated that a lack of communication about government funding has made it challenging to ensure that these students have the resources they need.

Without the current government funding, many of these families will be unable to continue therapy at current levels. For example, some students may drop from 25+ hours of therapy per week to two hours per week under the new program. Presumably, students will spend some, if not all, of the rest of this time within publicly funded schools…

Halton school board ‘gravely concerned’ about Ontario autism program changes

I would be surprised to hear that many other school boards are planning to write similar letters and I am sure none of the Catholic boards will do so.

Power corrupts at all levels. When it comes to senior management in school boards, there is little connection to the classroom and to the current debate on violence in the classroom. While protesting against a cut in funding for treatment programs for autistic children is a necessary step, senior officials need to question why we have the problem of rising violence in our schools. The symptom is the violence, the problem is that we are doing an inadequate job at serving our most needy children.

If they cannot address the problem they should get out of the way and let others try. That will never happen. They have the power and authority and power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Self-Regulation and Evangelism in Education

On By paulmcguire2013In Fads in Education, school reform, Social emotional learning, The Class Struggle Podcast5 Comments

Why and how did Canadian elementary schools become so enthralled with “mindfulness” and “self-regulation”?  What critical education issues were either obscured or ignored in pursuit of pseudo-scientific cures for today’s classroom challenges? What will be the legacy of turning the younger grades into therapeutic classroom environments? What does all of this portend for Canadian K-12 education in 2017 and beyond?

Dr. Stan Kutcher

Many years ago I travelled to the Dominican Republic with some of my students. This was easily a transformative experience for me. I witnessed true poverty and injustice in the streets of Dominican towns and especially in the hovels of the sugar cane plantations called bateys.

a batey in the Dominican Republic. Modern-day slavery

Everything is wrong about how people, especially Haitians, are treated in the Dominican Republic, but there is one thing that really stuck out during my visits. One constant presence on the bateys were the evangelical churches.

I bring this up here for a post on the self-regulation movement because there is a link I want to explore. The evangelicals were very popular on the bateys because their ministers did not call into question the injustice of their situation on the plantations. Their reward was elsewhere – not in protesting against the grinding poverty they suffered so we could all have cheap sugar.

Here is the link. Self-regulation never calls into question a system that lends inadequate support to educators in their struggle to teach in a peaceful environment. Rather, self-regulation or mindfulness calls on the educator to transform their inner self and the inner selves of their students to create a peaceful environment in the classroom.

There is no need to advocate for change because the change is within us.

In the past few days, I have received a fair amount of push back for posting about the self-regulation movement. Fair enough, the conversation is a healthy one. We are gearing up for an episode of the Class Struggle podcast on this topic, but we aren’t ready yet. More conversation is needed.

What I find interesting is the push back. People are writing about how self-regulation has transformed their lives and has saved their careers. People write stories about how they were able to transform a situation with a hug while other staff looked on.

Statements like this make me uncomfortable. They have a certain whiff of evangelism. You just need to see the light and your classroom will be at peace. Nothing else is necessary.

My former school board loves self-regulation. Why wouldn’t they? By putting it back on educators to transform their students there would no longer be a need to spend more on educational assistants. There would be no need to lobby the government to change the way we approach the education of our children.

It’s a simple solution.

At one point, our local ‘self-regulation consultant’ came to see me to complain about a new teacher in our school. During her observations, she did not see any ‘evidence of self-regulation in the classroom.’ I think she expected me to march right in and get that fixed. To be honest, I really didn’t know what she wanted or expected. I did know that we weren’t following the new orthodoxy and that this needed to change.

Nothing changed and the consultant moved on to spread more of the good news.

Self-Regulation is based on Mindfulness and Mindfulness is heavily influenced by Buddhism. I think Mindfulness is really great and I have practised it for many years. It is intensely personal and takes years of practice to get good at it. From a Buddhist perspective, you never really get good at this, your whole life is spent working on getting better.

Paul Bennett has written a series of articles (Teaching ‘Stressed-Out’ Kids: Why is the Self-Regulation Movement Spreading?) on self-regulation. They are worth reading. I won’t summarize his writing here, but he makes some very good points about the nature of the self-regulation movement and the approach it is taking in our schools.

I got into this most recent debate not because I wanted to write about self-regulation. I wanted to highlight the important CBC piece on the Sunday edition about violence in schools. This became a bit of a rant about self-regulation when it was suggested that the solution to violence in schools is self-regulation.

I have to push back against this idea. No one idea will save our education system. An idea based on developing a stronger sense of self puts an undue burden on the educator. There is a strong current of evangelism in the current self-regulation movement that blurs our vision when it comes to what is truly needed in our schools.

Violence is tearing at the heart of our education system, we need to keep a clear focus on the problem and avoid distraction.