TAPC

As in so many other fields, Liberal policy regarding public education is determined not by solid research but by misguided political correctness. Cases in point:

Class Size

Everyone “knows” that reducing the size of classes will improve student achievement. It goes without saying that with more individual attention, a student’s marks must improve. Only thing is that it isn’t true. In the late 1950’s there was a great effort to demonstrate this linkage but study after study, at various grade levels, showed “no significant difference” (which is a statistician’s way of saying that the whole idea is a crock.)

Recently, the McGuinty Liberals in Ontario set a limit on class size. It mandated that no class in Ontario’s public schools should exceed 20 pupils. Immediately, split classes showed up all over the province. Before, if you had 35 kids in a grade, they studied together. After the legislation was passed, if you had two classes of 30 studying under two teachers at two grade levels, you now had to split them into two classes of 20 (one for each grade level) and a split class of 10 at one grade level and 10 at the other. The next teacher you meet, ask her how much is achieved in a split grade and how easy it is to teach.

The expense, of course, was half as much again. In the first instance, you needed only two teachers to teach 60 students. After the law was passed you needed three. Cost of option 2 is one and a half times that of option 1.

Once again, however, union appeasement won out, not only over common sense, but also over empirical research. Continue Reading »

Students once identified with Schulz’s patient, hard-working also-ran. But today, everyone expects recognition–even if they failCollege and university professors across the country had some fun this past week forwarding to one another a National Post news item regarding the era of entitled students. Ellen Greenberger, a research professor of psychology and social behaviour at the University of California-Irvine published a study examining students’ sense of entitlement; entitlement to good grades and recognition regardless of quality of work or performance. In essence, the study reports that students feel they deserve a decent grade so long as they show up to most classes and at least try. This revelation hardly comes as news to those of us teaching at the post-secondary level.

For well over a decade, students have become increasingly demanding and adamant they should get a pass merely for being on the class list. Educators have become service providers, and students are now consumers in an academic world that is far removed from yesteryear. Continue Reading »