Archive for: January 2011
Education funding – how distance education could work
Our old friend Ivan Smith, retired teacher and citizen Internet pioneer, takes up the suggestion that distance education could play a big part in reforming Nova Scotia’s unaffordable education system:
- Identify a topic in grade 4 math (or grade 3 or 5) that currently is particularly troublesome for students. (This topic should be something that can be covered properly in not more than three or four class periods.)
- Identify four teachers, two male and two female, who have substantial experience in teaching this topic, and who have had results significantly better than average.
- Arrange for each teacher to teach this topic in front of a class while a camera crew (three cameras? four?) records audio and video. Each teacher covers the same material, preferably with no knowledge of how the others will present it.
- Do the post-production work to finish the four lesson sequences. (Maybe add a few graphics. Make sure that each lesson sequence will display properly on any browser…)
- Release all four simultaneously on the WWW — not restricted in any way, but available 24/7/365 for anyone anywhere to view at any time.
- Await test scores in following years.
How come we never hear ideas like this from school boards or the teachers’ union? Why can’t they get beyond ringing declarations of the sanctity of their budgets? Smith observes:
Of course, this is not a complete proposal; there are lots of details that need to be filled in, but the essential outline is as above. I choose this IT experiment because it is the core test. The other IT experiments are variations on this. If this is successful, the others will work. If this fails, that’s all folks.
However, the results of this experiment are already known. It was performed in the 1960s, as part of the U.S. response to Sputnik in 1957. It wasn’t “IT” then, but the main idea is the same. It was successful then, and it will be even more successful now with much better distribution system.
It can fail only if the project is assigned to someone who is unwilling or unable to understand the possibilities of the new IT world.
Education funding — how to kill reform
Many assume the Dexter Government made a mistake when it asked school boards to consider—and report back on—the consequences of a hypothetical 22 percent cut in their budgets. They say this gave the boards and the NSTU a license to frighten voters, and thus rally support for their comfortable status quo. Contrarian reader (and retired Education Dept. bureaucrat) Wayne Fiander puts the case vividly:
Having served two premiers in this province, I can say with some confidence that a real education “right sizing exercise” is necessary to preserve public education. No government has yet tackled this issue correctly. They start with the end, and the current mess, a 22% cut—and the school boards and teachers union rub their hands together: They know this play for one more year of funding in their sleep.
Party functionaries and government flaks are in high gear trying to undo the perceived damage. Some assume the plan was a crude bait-and-switch strategy: threaten a huge cut and hope for a sigh of relief when you “only” cut 10 or 12 percent.
Maybe. But I’m not convinced there has been that much damage. In most communities, teachers are regarded as having generous terms of employment, and many Nova Scotians will recognize the union/board caterwaul of the last month as self-serving. In this, as in so many areas requiring tough choices by government, the public is more ready to be treated like grownups than politicians, flaks, and media suppose.
A decade of annual five and six percent budget increases in the face of a 30,000-student drop in enrolment is not sustainable. That’s not a hard concept for taxpayers to grasp. Fiander thinks government should have started, not with a prescriptive cut, but with a vision of a changed education system. (I have done some light editing here for clarity.)
Government strategy should have been to lay out the vision of what the education system would look like, and then asked the school boards to respond. Part of the vision should have been to reduce school boards or downsize the Department of Education, as taxpayers can’t afford both. If that vision were laid out first, the sacred cows would not be put up for sacrifice, as parents would know they were not being touched. The sacred cows that would be on the table would be classroom sizes of 15 going to 20 (with correspondingly fewer teachers), closing small schools so students could get better access to other needs, and putting more operations in private hands.
Reader Denis Falvy likewise urges taxpayers to follow the money:
About 80 to 85 percent of the $1.1 billion spent by the Department of Education goes to the line item, “Formula Grants to School Boards.” Using the Halifax District School Board as an example, approximately 75 percent of its $400-million budget goes to school administration, 59 percent of which is spent on the line item, “Salaries – Teachers.”
No doubt cuts can and should be made to the 25 percent of the education budget not allocated to school boards, and no doubt cuts can be made to the 40 percent of the school board budget not allocated to teachers—after all, teaching is what the department should be all about, not 60 or 75 percent about. But a successful long term approach toward education expenses logically has to come from the line item, “Salaries – Teachers.”
Jim Nunn is in the Smoke Room
In 1995, when Jim Nunn left the host chair at what was then called First Edition and moved to Toronto to take over co-hosting duties on the CBC Show Marketplace, some of his chums produced a tribute music video called, “Jim Nunn is in the Smoke Room.” There are a few CBC in-jokes, but the piece, starring Jonathan Torrens, Mike Clattenburg, Keith Bradley, and Brian Heighton, never fails to crack me up.
Other credits: Producer/Director: Cynthia Kent; Editor: Keith Bradley; Shooters: Steve Lawrence & Doug Carmichael. H/T: Sharlene Woods.
What really happens when you legalize drugs?
Faced with the conspicuous failure of the war on drugs, the Harper Government proposes to escalate it, as if doing more of something that failed is likely to succeed. Portugal took a different approach. On July 1(!), 2001, that country decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs, a move many feared would accelerate social decay. The British Journal of Criminology has published a study of what actually happened:
This paper examines the case of Portugal, a nation that decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs on 1 July 2001. Drawing upon independent evaluations and interviews conducted with 13 key stakeholders in 2007 and 2009, it critically analyses the criminal justice and health impacts against trends from neighbouring Spain and Italy. It concludes that contrary to predictions, the Portuguese decriminalization did not lead to major increases in drug use. Indeed, evidence indicates reductions in problematic use, drug-related harms, and criminal justice overcrowding. The article discusses these developments in the context of drug law debates and criminological discussions on late modern governance.
Education Funding – how does size matter?
Readers have responded quickly to my challenge for new ideas to deal with the real crisis in provincial education funding, and the dominant theme so far is school size. Stephen Moore wants to eliminate small schools:
My suggestion, though it will likely be unpopular, is to close smaller schools. There are many schools with extremely small classes sizes (and some instances of miltiple grades in one room). I agree that small classes can be beneficial and that small schools are a resource for rural communities; however, these are communities with declining enrollments and an aging demographic. School boards, afraid of a violent backlash from voters, decided to keep these small schools open even though keeping them open requires tremendous amounts of capital per school. This was a poor decision and, based on demographic trends, one that merely delayed the eventual necessity of closing these schools. If these schools were closed when the the boards had their chance, the cuts of 22 per cent would have been easier and far less painful. Communities and politicians looked at this issue and decided to pick buildings over teachers. They should have seen this coming.
But George Gore wants more small schools:
One-room schoolhouses, with a student-teacher ratio of 20:1. They can be highly energy-efficient and can operate off-grid. They would have minimal transportation costs. They could be built by the volunteer labour of the communities they serve. And if you think that the quality of education might suffer, consider this: the tiny schoolhouse on East Ironbound produced the highest ratio of PhD candidates in Nova Scotia.
Wayne Fiander, who worked for two ministers of education, notes that, “When I left government in 2009, according to the education deputy minister of the day, there were over 3 million square feet of vacant space in the form of schools throughout Nova Scotia.”
Denis Falvy thinks the key is to favor centripetal over centrifugal forces:
Given the experience we now have of distance education and the technical resources available to us in this day and age, surely we can have the bulk of education done in one ‘school’ in the province made available to all schools. Why should 100 teachers attempt to teach for example math, a subject most of them are poor at and hate, when a handful of capable and motivated educators could produce and present the material much more usefully, answer questions much more constructively, and motivate students toward the subject, instead of imbuing the student with a sense of failure in the subject.
Children and teens cannot be controlled long distance however. And students needing special help will continue to need more hands on time from teachers more imminent in their lives. So there would have to be some form of supervision and local help. The best way might be to promote the formation of small groups of students locally in communities, everything from at-home schooling to souped-up day-care groups, to small groups in community multi-purpose facilities. The site for the consumption of education can be flexible, as opposed to the current model of school construction. That would leave the very gifted and the very challenged to be dealt with, but it would provide the majority of education much more efficiently. Indeed, there is no reason why this could not be done on a national level.
This is obviously a long term strategy, but it can be phased in by immediately changing the focus of the current system toward a centripetal attitude toward teaching and a centrifugal attitude toward learning, all facilitated by distance education.
My own feeling is that there are opportunities to consolidate rural schools with dwindling populations. Sydney’s beloved Holy Angels High is a perfect example. Common sense demands that it be consolidated with Sydney Academy. But busing has probably reached its limit in rural Nova Scotia, where some students spend a crazy 2-1/2 hours a day riding buses. So maybe Moore and Gore are both right, and Falvey provides the key that could unite their views. Maybe a community like Pleasant Bay could be inspired to produce some great education with a heavy local, volunteer component, while drawing on distance education to fill any gaps.
Falvey and Fiander have several other ideas. More to come when time permits. (Contrarian does have a day job!) Here’s another question: if Contrarian readers can come up with a discussion of this calibre in a couple of hours, why can’t teachers, administrators, school boards, and union officials produce anything but sterile demands that their respective oxen not be gored?
Doing security better
Contrarian has produced dozens of posts about the stupidity of airport security as practiced by the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority and the Department of Homeland Security. How about some sensible security ideas? Pilot and author Lane Wallace, guest-blogging for James Fallows, has a few ideas. She begins by noting that airports aren’t the only places vulnerable to attacks like the one that killed 34 people in Moscow Monday:
Russian President Dimitri A. Medvedev has said that airport officials at Domodedovo must be held accountable for failing to prevent the attacks. I feel for those officials. Because the ugly truth of the matter is unless we want to prohibit more than five people from gathering in any given place, targets will exist for people willing to sacrifice their lives to hurt others. And it is impossible to police or screen public gathering places well enough to keep any attempted attack from succeeding…
The bombing at Domodedovo happened to take place in a public area at an airport, so much of the alarm and reaction is (rightly or wrongly) going to focus on airport security. But really, the same bomb could have been detonated, and done just as much damage, raising the same issues of security and access, in any crowded, public area. Think, for a moment, how many people are in Grand Central Station at rush hour. It more than rivals any airport reception area. Or in Times Square on any given evening. Or in Macy’s, the morning after Thanksgiving. Or at Rockefeller Center when the Christmas tree is lit. The list goes on and on. The point is, finding a place where a suicide bomb explosion will kill 30 or 50 people is just not that tough to do. And there is simply no way to eliminate that risk.
So what to do about it? Wallace offers three sensible suggestions after the jump: Read more »
Can we talk about education funding, or only fear-monger?
Speaking on CBC Cape Breton last week, former Conservative Education Minister Jane Purves offered a rare, even-handed take on Nova Scotia’s education funding debate:
The government is genuinely looking for savings in education. I think it has been very good at promoting the truth that the syste has cost way more over the last 10 years but there are far fewer students. However, I’m wondering if in retrospect it was wise to floaat this 22 percent because they should have known what was going to happen: And what’s going to happen is that every board is going to come up with every sacred cow they can find to burn, sory for mixing metya[hors, and the government is beginning to face a tsumani of criticsm from parents, teacers, other unionized employees, and generally althought the public may be somewhat sympathetic about the need fors curs, the public doesn’t like a huge amount of noise coming when a government is trying to just do its job.
The full interview, with host Steve Sutherland, rewards close listening:
The rote response of school boards and the teacher’s union has been what we might call a confidence-draining exercise. Are we really entrusting our children’s education to a group of professionals unwilling or unable to contemplate new ideas for coping with an untenable financial situation?
The school system has been losing almost three percent of its enrollment per year for ten years, while education budgets have increased two to three points faster than inflation. Anyone can see that’s not sustainable. Surely boards, administrators, and union lobbyists can do better than to insist any change to the status quo will bring ruin to the system. Where do they expect the money to come? Health care? Highways? Increasing our already onerous debt?
Can’t we hear some new, creative ideas for how a Nova Scotia school system with fewer students might operate—on less money?
I have a few I’ll be posting in the days ahead, and I invite suggestions from readers. Surely on a topic this important, Nova Scotia can do better than obdurate resistance to change of any kind.
Snap your fingers, Bill — cont.
My parking ban post and Bruce Wark’s rebuttal has sent readers to their keyboards. The ban enrages North End Halifax homeowner Cliff White:
The rage is prolonged by the following sequence of events. Eventually it snows either during the day or during the night. If it’s during the day and it’s a modest amount the street may get plowed during the same day, with cars parked on both sides of the street. If we are lucky the plow might return in the next few days and do the street again, and if very lucky this will happen at night and some improvement will take place. If the snowfall is large or happens at night as it did the with first snowfall this year, then my neighbours and I wake up to find that in fact the street hasn’t been plowed during the night. Just as infuriating, when the street is eventually cleared, it is not done back to the curb. So as the winter progresses, the street gets increasingly narrow–to the point where parking is eventually restricted to one side of a very narrow street. In a neighbourhood that contains both Statacona and The North End Seniors Centre the rage becomes palpable as the season progresses.
A number of years ago they did remove the parking ban for one winter, but in a way that I remain convinced was designed to fail. They let everyone park where they liked, and required them to more their vehicles when snow fell during the night. Ever since then, whenever the topic comes up, the city spokesperson says, well, we tried that and it didn’t work.
Actually, it would be very simple to have a working winter parking policy. First, no overnight parking on major thoroughfares. Second, on other streets, allow parking on alternate sides of the street on alternate nights. That way, when the plow actually came by during night, two thirds of the street could be plowed in the first pass. Forth, tow cars that are parked in the way to a nearby clean street and ticket them. Lastly, clean the damn streets back to the curb.
For the last couple of years, I’ve spent a good part of the winter in Quebec City, where they have an average of twelve feet of snow during the winter. They also have on-street parking. They do an initial plow down the middle of the street. They have lights on posts every few blocks, and when these lights flash orange, everyone knows the plows are coming in a few hours. When they flash red, you better be off the street: a task-force comes by with snowblowers and trucks and they clean the street completely–yes, amazingly, right back to the curb. But I suppose I’m dreaming that Halifax could ever have some similar system.
Just a little aside, when as a young man Howard Epstein first ran unsuccessfully for city council one of the planks in his platform was the removal of the winter parking ban.
In response to my suggestion of a parking ban limited to nights when snow clearing occurs, Bruce Wark asked where people are supposed to move their cars on those nights if they haven’t made accommodations. His implication: If they can make alternative arrangements on snow nights, why not do so throughout the winter? Charlene Boyce explains why:
I live in a flat that has behind it three parking spots — one for each flat. Beside us is a mirror image building with the same parking situation out back, so it’s a 6-spot parking lot. None of these spaces is mine, since my roommate had her car first. I’ve arranged for winter parking at a friend’s place, but it’s a 20 minute walk away — a 20 minute walk in whatever weather we’re getting. Inconvenient and unpleasant, but at least he’s not charging me. If the parking ban was as it used to be: move in bad weather–I’d suggest my car and the other overflow car in our buildings could easily be driven into the driveway, blocking in the other cars, sure, but off the street for the temporary duration of the storm. It would require cooperation among neighbors perhaps… but it’s a reasonable solution.
To Mr. Wark’s point, there are some people who live in places with no driveway at all, it’s true, and those people may have to make an agreement with their nearest driveway or parking lot owner, but it’s possible.
Possible, but not something you’d want to do every night for four months, just because the traffic tzar can’t be bothered to make distinctions between nights when it snows and nights when it doesn’t.
I have the same situation when I’m in Halifax. There is no space for me, but I can cram my car into the driveway at considerable inconvenience to other residents of the two adjacent buildings.
Suzanne MacNeil wonders why the ban is enforced in some places, but not others:
My partner and many of my friends live in the North End (just north of North Street) where enforcement is heavy. Notably, this is also a neighborhood where very few houses have driveways, characteristic of historic housing stock. It seems unfair to be fining the folks who don’t have anywhere else to put their vehicles.
Perhaps I am answering my initial question here. It would, after all, be silly to focus on areas where folks have driveways or other parking areas for their vehicles.
Milestone
Web fixer and community participation guru Mike Targett points out that Contrarian is about a week away from a quarter-million page views.
Air Canada kneecaps Sydney
This is a tired tune, but indulge me for a few bars. A few weeks ago, a Halifax physician went on Air Canada’s website to book two round-trip flights: one to Sydney, Nova Scotia, 306 kilometers away; another to San Diego, 4,724 away (via Toronto).
Air Canada charged $827 for the Sydney flight; $548 for SanDiego. That works out to $2.63/km for the Sydney flights vs. 11¢/km. for SanDiego.
Years ago, some Sydney friends attended a wedding in St. John’s, NF. Another wedding guest came from Cairo, Egypt. Guess who paid the lower fare?
Try doing business with that handicap. Or as my 10th grade math teacher would have said, “Capitalism fails again.”
