Parental Rights and Education

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]  

Public school is where we sent our children to overcome the limitations of their parents. My wife and I are well-educated, but there are limits to what we know and the values we hold. We wanted our daughters to be exposed to ideas and values different from our own so that they could make their way in the world unencumbered by our limitations.  

We believed that it was our responsibility to ensure our children were led out from the confines of the knowledge we could impart or the experiences we could provide. When I stop to consider it, I think things worked out. They are intellectually independent and, although we share many, if not most values, they came to their value positions on their own. We recognize that the family context and the friendship network in which they were raised were no doubt influential in shaping their values and beliefs, but the beliefs and values they hold were not imposed upon them.  

It is this disposition on my part that makes it disquieting to read about the attempts of school trustees to restrict access to books and ideas in the name of parental rights. A school trustee in British Columbia introduced a motion that “consideration be given to the creation of a policy statement that sets parameters around communications with parents about events scheduled in schools.” The trustee’s rationale was:  

The creation of a new policy statement will ensure that parents are adequately informed about upcoming presentations to be held at District schools. The key components of this consideration should include providing parents with sufficient notice for all school presentations to allow families time to determine whether attending the presentation is in the best interest of their child’s education. This will promote transparency, parental involvement, and a more collaborative educational environment.

 Notwithstanding the ambiguity of the rationale, the motion seems to imply that parents should be able to limit the school presentations to which their children might be exposed.  

Parents are not without certain rights. The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that mandatory religious practices in public schools violate Charter rights to freedom of religion (Zylberberg v. Sudbury Board of Education, 1988). However, when parents in Quebec objected to a mandatory Ethics and Religious Culture course, the Supreme Court of Canada held that merely exposing a child to different religious facts in a public school did not interfere with the parents' ability to transmit their faith (S.L. v. Commission scolaire des Chênes, 2012).  

The parents alleged that the Ethics and Religious Culture course was liable to cause harm in several ways. Among them:            

·     Losing the right to choose an education consistent with one’s own moral and religious principles; interfering with the fundamental freedom of religion, conscience, opinion and expression of children and their parents by forcing children to take a course that does not reflect the religious and philosophical beliefs with which their parents have the right and duty to bring them up.

·     Upsetting children by exposing them at too young an age to convictions and beliefs that differ from the ones favoured by their parents.

In seeking a favorable ruling from the Court, the parents appeared to want to shield their children from ideas that were dissonant or inharmonious with their own. In its decision, the Court observed:

Parents are free to pass their personal beliefs on to their children if they so wish.  However, the early exposure of children to realities that differ from those in their immediate family environment is a fact of life in society.  

I would go further. I would argue that it is incumbent upon parents to ensure that their children are exposed to realities, ideas, values, and beliefs that differ from those of their families. They should count on schools to assist in this. It is in such exposure that children develop the intellectual and moral capacities that adulthood requires.

The Cobra Effect

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]  

Reading school district strategic plans gets me thinking about the cobra effect, the unintended consequences that can result from an action or decision, particularly policy decisions. Two well-known examples come to mind.  

The first example is the prohibition against the production, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States between 1920 and 1933. Prohibition was intended to eliminate consumption of alcohol which was considered immoral and a cause of social instability.  

Prohibition didn’t produce the desired outcome. In fact, it led to the illicit production of alcohol in unsanitary conditions using dangerous methods that led to poisoning and death for some. The U.S. lost revenue from taxation of alcohol and incurred increased costs for law enforcement to counter the illegal production of alcohol by criminal organizations.  

The second is, during British colonial rule in India, the government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra to decrease the cobra population. When the government discovered that some entrepreneurial individuals began to breed cobras to claim bounties, it terminated the bounty program. The entrepreneurial cobra breeders released their now-worthless snakes. The wild cobra population increased rather than decreased.  

A decision that produces the opposite of the intended outcome is sometimes called a "Cobra Effect." I use both examples to make the point that it is important to think carefully about making changes in complex systems and to try to avoid making changes on inadequate evidence.  

Each year schools and school boards make plans based upon what appear to be differences in performance from one year to the next. There are problems associated with strategic planning based on the perception of difference when no true differences have occurred. Chief among the problems is the potential for wasting resources.  

Continuously responding to perceived differences without evidence of true differences can lead to a cycle of planning and re-planning without genuine evidence of progress. Decision-makers who consistently act on perceived differences that aren't substantiated may lose credibility with employees, parents, and the public.  

If the perceived differences aren’t real, then resources (time, money, effort) spent addressing the matter might have been better allocated elsewhere. Moreover, implementing change often engenders resistance among employees. Changes made without evidence of a need for change can produce ‘change fatigue’ where employees become resistant to all changes, even ones that may be properly supported with evidence. Employees can be demotivated if they come to believe that decisions are being made based on inaccurate perceptions or vacuous findings rather than evidence. Worse yet, the employees could go through the motions of implementing changes in which they are little invested leaving the change leader to believe in their own effectiveness.  

The cobra effect can be avoided by carefully considering the evidence upon which one’s plans are made and how those plans might produce unanticipated and unwanted outcomes.  

Improve a class average from a C to a B

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]  

For many years I conducted a school-based teacher education program in a school district in British Columbia’s lower mainland. Students in one of the district’s schools were eager to enroll in the classroom of a teacher whom I will call Peggy. Peggy worked hard to make her class an inviting and successful environment for all students. But, on that score, she was no different than any of the other teachers in that school, one in which the parents and students held high expectations.  

Students in Peggy’s classes performed better than the students in the classrooms of her peers. But, before I reveal the not-so-secret sauce that Peggy employed, let me put in context the impact of what Peggy did that the other teachers did not do.  

The performance of students the classes taught by Peggy’s peers averaged about 75% (C) with almost 70% of the students achieving between 55% and 95%.  The remaining students scored better or worse. The class average of students that Peggy taught was ten percentage points higher, a B.  

Teachers eager to find ways to produce a genuine improvement in student performance can do what Peggy consistently did, and it is supported by a vast body of evidence. When I say vast, the evidence comes from 222 research reports with data from approximately 50,000 students.[1]  

I first learned about Peggy’s technique from observing students in the hallway. Most of the school’s students were engaged in the typical pattern of student behaviour and misbehaviour as they moved from on class to another. Peggy’s students were atypical. Most of them passed from their previous class to Peggy’s with their notebooks open.  

I found that the students were preparing for the brief quiz with which each of Peggy’s classes began. As soon as the students crossed the threshold of the classroom, they were expected to complete a brief quiz about the previous day’s lesson. Peggy collected the quizzes (they were paper based at the time) and, then, briefly reviewed the results.  

The effectiveness of Peggy’s practice of regular quizzes was confirmed by the 2021 study refenced below. The findings from that meta-analysis have several implications for teaching practice: ​

1. Class quizzes boost student achievement to a noticeable extent.
2. Quizzes are more effective in enhancing learning compared to other strategies such as restudying, concept mapping, and other elaborative strategies. ​
3. The format of the quiz does not significantly impact the effectiveness of test-enhanced learning. ​ Different test formats, such as fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, short answer, etc., all contribute to enhancing student learning. ​
4. Quizzing reinforces the retention of tested knowledge and enhances the learning of untested knowledge, though the effect size for untested knowledge is slightly smaller.
5. Providing feedback following quizzes like Peggy did significantly increases learning gains because feedback helps students understand their mistakes and learn from them.
6. The number of quiz/test repetitions positively correlates with the effectiveness of test-enhanced learning. ​ The more times class content is quizzed (Peggy did it every day), the larger the learning gains.
7. Test-enhanced learning works across different levels of education, including elementary school, middle school, high school, and post secondary, and it consistently facilitates achievement across different subjects. ​

There is no doubt that the students Peggy taught (and their parents who sought Peggy as teacher of their children) recognized what has been confirmed by the meta-analysis: Incorporating regular quizzes or tests in the classroom is an effective strategy that enhances student learning and academic achievement. ​ 

 

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[1] Yang, Chunliang, et al. "Testing (quizzing) boosts classroom learning: A systematic and meta-analytic review." Psychological bulletin, vol. 147, no. 4, 04/2021, pp. 399-435, , doi:10.1037/bul0000309.

The Ottawa Carleton District School Board thinks “eighty percent of success is showing up.”

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged] 

"Eighty percent of success is showing up," is an often-repeated quip. In February of this year the Ottawa Carleton District School Board received a recommendation from its senior staff to enshrine the sentiment in policy. The recommendation would alter the Board’s Graduation and Commencement Ceremonies and Awards policy to move from holding graduation ceremonies to organizing commencement ceremonies. 

If approved, the FAQs about the proposed change say that the policy would celebrate all students who have concluded their “secondary school journey.”  The proposed format would “ensure the inclusion of all students who are celebrating their achievements when they are eligible to leave high school at the age of eighteen.” This would include students who for a variety of reasons have not fulfilled Ontario’s graduation requirements. 

As I have written in other blogs, good intentions (for example, the desire to “to ensure welcoming, inclusive communities in our schools and system”) can have unintended consequences. A friend’s experience illustrates the point. The friend’s daughter did not complete the requirements for graduation but was encouraged to take part in graduation ceremonies by donning a cap and gown and being recognized as she crossed the stage. 

When her mother suggested that she might return to school to complete the requirements necessary for graduation, she said, “No way, not after everyone saw me walk across the stage. There’s no way I can go back there.” 

The proposed shift, from graduation ceremonies to commencement ceremonies strikes me as a misnomer. Commencement refers to a beginning, typically one in which degrees or diplomas have been awarded. Leaving secondary school without a diploma is not much of a beginning. It sounds more like a ‘send off’ than a commencement. “We wish you well on your journey, even if we didn’t prepare you very well.” 

The quip about success and showing up makes the point that an important step in achieving a goal is making the effort. But just showing up isn’t good enough. Reaching the goal or not reaching the goal has consequences. Except for a very small number of students with cognitive impairments, all students should earn graduation. When they do not, it is a failure of the education system. 

I doubt that students who have failed to achieve graduation feel better (more included) simply because they have celebrated coming to the end of a less than successful experience. Celebrating that failure is not a foundation for commencement.