CBE Results in Decline

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by GGG

Yes washing all your clothes in the same Load turns out ok. Modern inks and detergents are far better than when the laundry rules were created. That’s a terrible analogy.

.

You misunderstood the analogy (which is probably my fault). It was supposed to be about the load capacity of your laundry machine, not the colours. You might be able to wash all your colours together but if you overfill it it doesn’t work as well.

[Slava]

If they’re judging these scores by PAT, then we all know what the issue is. The tests don’t matter to the students. My son took one in grade 9 and I’m almost positive he just went AC/DC down the whole thing and called it a day. His mark was abysmal (in case anyone was curious about how that strategy could work for you!). But it’s irrelevant to him. The grade didn’t matter in his overall class marks. Pretty difficult to motivate kids once they realize that.

And things were that way through Covid with the no jeopardy exams also. I can’t be the only parent who saw otherwise good students somehow have final exam marks that were laughably pathetic. Granted these exams were taken under duress in the sense that I thought it was a good idea to get some exam-writing experience under their belt.

[Sliver]

I believe with a front load washer you are supposed to jam stuff in there. Like pack it way fuller than you'd think was sensible.

[puckedoff]

Originally Posted by Point Blank

There’s a lot of non educators here having some very strong opinions about PD days, ...

I don't think the prevailing opinion is that there should be NO PD days, but the amount and timing of them may be a bit out of hand.

My kids school had a PD day the very first week back from Christmas break! The school didn't return until the second week of January, why was the PD day not during the first week rather than holding it until students were back?

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by Point Blank

There’s a lot of non educators here having some very strong opinions about PD days, Beaverbrook, etc. As I said in my previous post, I’m a teacher currently working for an overflowing high school and I feel like I have some points to contribute.

- PD days are professional development days. These days can be moved to the summer if you want, but we don’t get paid in the summer. Education evolves as the science of education is very complex- many learners learn in predictable trajectories but MANY do not and we need ongoing training to support those students. As with any kind of training, it’s as much as each individual teacher wants to put into it. Any PD can be as valuable or not valuable depending on how the teacher decides to receive it. I personally don’t think it’s right to have dated practices for an evolving world and an increasingly diverse classroom. But the loudest voices are often the most disgruntled so you’ll hear more from teachers who decide not to take any valuable talking points from PD. But there are many who do take PD very seriously.

- Beaverbrook was under capacity because it was undergoing renovations and it was unsafe to be near capacity at that time. You’ll see this occur with Diefenbaker in the next few years as they’ll be under renovations as well. Numbers for Beaverbrook is back up and will soon be at capacity as surrounding schools are now full, including EP Scarlett and Henry Wise Wood. I wonder for those who wish to bring this up as to imply that there is space, why they wouldn’t bring up how new schools such as Nelson Mandela and JCS are beyond capacity and North Trail will be full next year after literally opening just this year to grade 10’s and 11’s. Or why Churchill is getting 6x portables installed to meet enrollment growth.

- Funding has indeed increased, but funding PER student has decreased. Especially under the UCP that keep touting how they’re increasing funding- it’s not catching up with increased enrollment growth. Class sizes are slowly in increasing as a result. This is felt most strongly in elementary classes, where numbers went from mid 20’s to 30’s with more IPP’s and EAL’s.

- Class sizes are important to consider but isn’t the only factor in determining achievement. As a high school teacher, students complete work at a much faster rate and marking 100+ tests and lab reports take time. If I even take 3 minutes to mark and write helpful feedback to each student, that’s 300 minutes per test I’m giving feedback for that I’ll be doing outside of the classroom as I teach 3 x 35 students (some teachers have classes of 40+). Keep in mind we also have to do an extracurricular. I coach so that is 90 minutes per day outside the classroom, during game days I’ll sometimes be at school until 9:30pm. Class size does strongly encourage high school teachers to Scantron based tests that provide poor feedback. Ultimately, student achievement isn’t only determined by class sizes as many high school students don’t read my feedback or ask for help when they should, but it is oftentimes the easiest topic to rally around. I personally think other factors such as assignable time, increasing classroom complexity and lack of Ed assistants to address those complexities make a larger impact.

- Administration and management is easily a target for many people as saying it’s “bloated” but I’d like to know whether people making these claims actually know what the budget is for management level employees. As with PD days, how teachers decide to access support from admin and downtown specialists is important. I’ve personally seen specialists help with the following: advocating for additional staffing in highly complex EES classrooms (students with very exceptional learning and medical needs), looking over created assessments and providing guidance on curriculum alignment, teaching teachers how to run specific learning strategies such as literature circles. They no doubt get ragged on a lot from teachers and the public as being unnecessary. But having personally accessed their expertise and being a willing participant in improving my practices, I’ve found them to be very helpful. Not all teachers access these willingly as teaching is a very personal practice and they feel infringed upon when receiving outside recommendations on their practice. The article talking about specialists being many years removed from the classroom is just completely false, and specialists and strategists have 3 year term limits before they must return to the classroom. Finally, admin in our school is literally swamped with kicking vaping kids out of the bathroom daily, finding who was selling machetes in the parking lot, chasing after a teen with a balaclava on wielding a baseball bat, scrambling for milk to treat a student who got maced, shutting down an entire hallway that got maced (yes these have all have happened…in one year), and answering over 100 emails per day from parents about why their kid isn’t getting 100% in a class. Those are all things I’m grateful that someone ELSE is doing instead of me.

So Beaverbrook is scheduled to get back to its former glory ?

I think it was 3000iwh students when I graduated in ‘89

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by opendoor

If that was the case, then wouldn't there be a discrepancy between jurisdictions with longer school closures and those with shorter or no closures? Because the most recent OECD data shows no real distinction in resilience of performance based on school closure length. In anything, there's actually a slight negative correlation, where the jurisdictions with a higher percentage of students experiencing 3+ month closures were actually more likely to have resilient performance in math and reading compared to pre-pandemic than jurisdictions with shorter closures.

And that doesn't even get into the fact that educational performance declines in most countries long predate the pandemic.

Links?

Learning declines do predate Covid, so there are likely other factors at work. But there’s a wealth of evidence that disruption from schools closure and remote learning during the pandemic have had substantial long-term impacts on learning.

On average, students globally are eight months behind where they would have been absent the pandemic, but the impact varies widely, with countries falling into three archetypes:

High-performing systems, with relatively high levels of pre-COVID-19 performance, where students may be about one to five months behind due to the pandemic (for example, North America and Europe, where students are, on average, four months behind).

Low-income prepandemic-challenged systems, with very low levels of pre-COVID-19 learning, where students may be about three to eight months behind due to the pandemic (for example, sub-Saharan Africa, where students are on average six months behind).

Pandemic-affected middle-income systems, with moderate levels of pre-COVID-19 learning, where students may be nine to 15 months behind (for example, Latin America and South Asia, where students are, on average, 12 months behind).

The pandemic also increased inequalities within systems. For example, it widened gaps between majority Black and majority White schools in the United States and increased preexisting urban-rural divides in Ethiopia.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/...earning-crisis

To what extent has the learning progress of school-aged children slowed down during the COVID-19 pandemic? A growing number of studies address this question, but findings vary depending on context. Here we conduct a pre-registered systematic review, quality appraisal and meta-analysis of 42 studies across 15 countries to assess the magnitude of learning deficits during the pandemic. We find a substantial overall learning deficit (Cohen’s d = −0.14, 95% confidence interval −0.17 to −0.10), which arose early in the pandemic and persists over time. Learning deficits are particularly large among children from low socio-economic backgrounds.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01506-4

What’s your theory about the reasons for declining outcomes? Do you think Covid had an impact at all?

[edslunch]

How are the new curriculums doing from a teacher and parent perspective?

[Fuzz]

I'd suspect kids being far more connected with devices and apps purposefully designed to foster addiction has a pretty large impact. This has gotten much worse over the past 5 years, so if it is a cause, it may be hard to tease out the size of effect from covid closures. Together, they were probably a big issue.

[The Fisher Account]

Originally Posted by Locke

What?

Because Class sizes havent changed in 20 years?

"My daughter teaches a class that was the same size as mine in the 90's, therefore all classes are the same."

Locke should be banned from any thread involving Teachers.

[Geraldsh]

I met a kindergarten teacher last week who looked tired. She started the year with a class of 34 and 2 education assistants. Last month one assistant took mat leave and the other had a sudden long term medical issue. There are no replacements available so she is alone with the 34, several of which are special needs. Majority of her days is just zippers and shoes.

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by Sliver

I believe with a front load washer you are supposed to jam stuff in there. Like pack it way fuller than you'd think was sensible.

At least that belief is consistent….

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Geraldsh

I met a kindergarten teacher last week who looked tired. She started the year with a class of 34 and 2 education assistants. Last month one assistant took mat leave and the other had a sudden long term medical issue. There are no replacements available so she is alone with the 34, several of which are special needs. Majority of her days is just zippers and shoes.

At that age it's basically babysitting 34 kids. That's a big no thank you from me. I max out at 2.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan

You misunderstood the analogy (which is probably my fault). It was supposed to be about the load capacity of your laundry machine, not the colours. You might be able to wash all your colours together but if you overfill it it doesn’t work as well.

Again modern washing machines like to be packed densely. (I’m kinda being a dick here but hopefully it’s in good fun)

Now if you had used dishwasher I could back you.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

I'd suspect kids being far more connected with devices and apps purposefully designed to foster addiction has a pretty large impact. This has gotten much worse over the past 5 years, so if it is a cause, it may be hard to tease out the size of effect from covid closures. Together, they were probably a big issue.

I think the way phones are handled in schools is terrible. Outright ban in classrooms should be the policy.

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

As a parent of a special needs kid, my perspective may also be skewed the other way. I know that in a CBE classroom giving my kid the attention he needs is a bit of a zero-sum game; someone else is getting less one-on-one time. And there have been many times where it’s clear the teachers just don’t have the energy to meet him where he’s at and deal with it, so they just… leave him to his own devices. The ones who go above and beyond for him are the ones I’ll remember: they did more than their job to make sure one kid gets the help he needs, and I know they aren’t just doing it for one kid but for as many as they possibly can. And you can’t convince me that this isn’t hard work; it’s brutal. And it’s way harder if you have over 30 other students to also think about. It’s really common sense in my view: one on one teaching time is critical for many kids, and in large classes those kids will get less of it. Outcomes will suffer.

Sometimes it really is as simple as resources. Our children are the future of our society and it makes sense to invest in them. They aren’t drones who thrive on sameness and factory-style teaching in a system where the main lesson they can learn is to sit down and shut up and to get used to it because life sucks. That is how we get a generation of mediocre adults with no critical thinking skills.

That’s not to say that I put much stock in test scores per se. But by any measure, achieving good learning outcomes is going to be way harder with fewer teachers and more students.

[Ashartus]

Originally Posted by edslunch

How are the new curriculums doing from a teacher and parent perspective?

My wife (a teacher) says there is some good stuff (the curriculum was badly in need of updating), some stuff that doesn't make sense, and some that is at the wrong grade. One of the challenges is the lack of teaching resources for the new curriculum. For one of the units she's doing with a grade 3 class, the only available resource is a grade 8 textbook. A short-term issue is that because it isn't being updated one grade at a time the students often don't have the background they need (e.g. a grade 3 unit might build on a grade 2 unit, but the grade 3 students took the old curriculum in grade 2).

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by GGG

Again modern washing machines like to be packed densely. (I’m kinda being a dick here but hopefully it’s in good fun)

Now if you had used dishwasher I could back you.

Yeah, I guess it’ll teach me to try to come up with analogies first thing in the morning…

[Mr.Coffee]

Originally Posted by opendoor

If that was the case, then wouldn't there be a discrepancy between jurisdictions with longer school closures and those with shorter or no closures? Because the most recent OECD data shows no real distinction in resilience of performance based on school closure length. In anything, there's actually a slight negative correlation, where the jurisdictions with a higher percentage of students experiencing 3+ month closures were actually more likely to have resilient performance in math and reading compared to pre-pandemic than jurisdictions with shorter closures.

And that doesn't even get into the fact that educational performance declines in most countries long predate the pandemic.

What do you think explains educational performance declines?

I wonder if smart phones are part of the story.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by GGG

I think the way phones are handled in schools is terrible. Outright ban in classrooms should be the policy.

Aren’t they already banned in classrooms?

I do think phones and technology are part of the problem. But it goes beyond distracting students in class. Screen time is now so high that it has crowded out almost all other activities, including reading. Or really anything requiring sustained attention. I’d guess the ability to concentrate on reading long-form text or doing math problems for 30 solid minutes has been badly eroded over the last decade.

[you&me]

Originally Posted by Sliver

I believe with a front load washer you are supposed to jam stuff in there. Like pack it way fuller than you'd think was sensible.

Must... resist... strong urge... to... make joke... about... his wife