Hawaii starts 'Furlough Fridays'

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 4:40 PM - 4 Comments

School’s out for Fridays. Hawaii’s 256 public schools have switched to a four-day school week as part of statewide cost cuts. Hawaii now has the shortest academic calender in the country, with only 163 school days each year. Parents and politicians are protesting against the new “Furlough Fridays” program. “We are about to rob 17 days from our children’s school year,” lamented Democratic representative Neil Abercrombie. “Days they will never get back.”

The policy has left parents scrambling to find adequate supervision for their liberated little ones—and local news agencies fearing the worst. The Honolulu Advertiser predicted that students would “wind up at grandma’s house or . . . simply be unsupervised at Hawaii’s beaches and malls.” But in the face of a projected $1-billion state deficit, schools superintendent Patricia Hamanoto insists there is no choice: “During this difficult economic period the department is utilizing the resources it has.” Continue…

A co-ed school in Saudi Arabia

By Michael Barclay - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Education in Saudi Arabia used to be strictly segregated along gender lines. That’s all changed with the opening last month of the kingdom’s first co-ed university—the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Not only will women be able to study and work alongside men, they won’t be required to wear veils and will be permitted to drive cars—both serious no-nos for all other Saudi women.

It’s a bold move in Saudi Arabia, where the status of women has often been described as akin to apartheid. KAUST exists outside the education ministry—it’s run by Aramco, the state oil company, which invested $10 billion in its construction. The university is part of King Abdullah’s plan to diversify the Saudi economy beyond oil, and to create new opportunities for the large Saudi youth population (more than half of the population is under 25). To do this, KAUST could be considered a trial balloon to expand women’s education. Continue…

Forget an A, here’s $20

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 11:20 AM - 7 Comments

There are a lot of explanations out there for why Canada’s First Nations students are still so far behind. With on-reserve graduation rates hovering around 30 per cent, according to the Assembly of First Nations, Aboriginals are less than half as likely as other Canadians to crown their teenage years with a high school degree. Many say the crux of the problem is chronic underfunding of First Nations schools—rooted in a federal funding formula that dates back to the 1980s. Others admonish lousy on-reserve teaching and poor communication with provincial schools. Still more find blame in dated technology, or ethnically biased curriculum, or cultural attitudes on reserves that undervalue formal education.

But while the ideological debate rages, some First Nations have taken matters into their own hands. Their solution: pay students to go school. Honey Powless, of Ontario’s Six Nations, graduated in 2007 and recalls cashing in every semester at Hagersville Secondary. Her school’s incentive scheme operated on a sliding scale; First Nations students were rewarded different amounts of money, depending on how good their attendance was. “Kids were really looking at that,” she says. “It really helped us through.” The 19-year-old says she usually earned the maximum payment: $150 a semester—money she spent on her cellphone bill. Continue…

Reading, writing, and radicalism?

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

In a country where public education has long been low on the state’s list of priorities, madrasas, or Islamic schools, provide a way for Pakistan’s poorest families to educate, feed and even house their children. Though they have traditionally been open only to males, there has recently been a dramatic rise in the number of all-female religious schools: of the roughly 12,000 madrasas registered with the state, around 1,900 are attended by young women only. The female students, who have limited educational opportunities in Pakistan, are excelling in the schools and writing graduate exams at a higher rate than their male counterparts.

The illiteracy rate for women in Pakistan is nearly 80 per cent, and any opportunity for young girls to learn to read and write is worthwhile. There is concern, however, over what the madrasas’ real lessons are: some believe the schools are exposing students to radical Islamic teachings, and fostering sympathy for militant groups.

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Shocking news: Canada does something important well

By Paul Wells - Friday, April 24, 2009 at 3:14 PM - 52 Comments

From a McKinsey & Company study designed mostly to demonstrate that the U.S. school system is letting the American people, and the American economy, down, let us snatch a few charts that allow us to compare Canada’s education performance against the world’s.

McKinsey’s source is the OECD’s Pisa study, a large international survey of 15-year-olds’ performance on standard math, science and reading tests. Pisa’s handy: you get large samples, lots of buy-in, a time series that results from administering the tests repeatedly, and other good stuff. And here’s what it shows about how Canadian 15-year-olds do compared to their peers in dozens of other countries.

1. Canadian students perform near the top of the world.

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Dumbed down

By Lianne George - Friday, November 7, 2008 at 1:00 AM - 62 Comments

For almost three decades, the Arrowsmith School, a small Toronto private school housed in a converted mansion on the edge of Forest Hill, has been treating kids with learning disabilities. When its founder, Barbara Arrowsmith Young, developed the school’s patented program in the late ’70s, it was with a first-hand knowledge of the frustration and stigma of living with cognitive deficits. Growing up, Young struggled with dyslexia. She had difficulties with problem-solving and visual and auditory memory. Finding connections between things and ideas was a challenge, and telling time was impossible—she couldn’t grasp the relationship between the big hand and the little hand. Traditional learning programs taught her tricks to compensate for her deficits, but they never improved her ability to think. “I walked around in a fog,” she says. But as a young psychology graduate, Young came across the brain maps created by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who studied soldiers who had suffered head wounds. Using these maps, she identified 19 unique learning dysfunctions and the brain regions that control them. Her theory was that a person can transform weak areas of the brain through repetitive and targeted cognitive exercises, and she was right. Today, this notion of brain plasticity—which she intuited three decades ago—is established wisdom in neuroscience.

Over the past decade, the Arrowsmith program has been proven so effective that schools throughout Canada and the U.S. have adopted it. In 2003, a report commissioned by the Toronto Catholic District School Board found that students’ rate of learning on specific tasks like math and reading comprehension increased by 1½ to three times.

These days, though, Young has noticed a new development: increasingly, she’s seeing a great many young people having difficulties with executive function, which involves thinking, problem-solving and task completion. “It looks like an attention deficit disorder,” she says. “The person has a job or a task and they start doing it but they can’t stay oriented to it. They get distracted and they can’t get reoriented. When I started using the programs, I really didn’t see a lot of this. I would say now, 50 per cent of students walking through the door have difficulty in that area.” The second thing she’s noticing is more frequent trouble with non-verbal thinking skills. These kids struggle to read facial expressions and body language—which can make dating and friendships, and indeed, most social situations, tricky. Continue…