Single sex schools no better than co-ed

From io9

Science has just published an article stating that claims of the benefit of single sex schooling lack any empirical evidence. The authors go so far as to call these claims pseudoscience.
The researchers argue that there's no evidence of academic advantage to single sex schools, and that such claims are "deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence."
This research looked at single- and mixed-sex school in the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. While students at single sex schools do tend to perform better, this is just as easily explained by other reasons — most notably, these schools tend to be more academically rigorous, and the students who attend them are strong learners already. The researchers also note that many single-sex schools will swiftly transfer out poorly-performing students, thus artificially boosting graduation and college acceptance rates.

See the full article for details.

The Finnish Education system

Great article at Salon, titled "How Finland became an education leader"

Some key quotes:

in the 1970s [Finland] completely transforming the preparation and selection of future teachers. That was a very important fundamental reform because it enabled them to have a much higher level of professionalism among teachers. Every teacher got a masters degree, and every teacher got the very same high quality level of preparation.

So what has happened since is that teaching has become the most highly esteemed profession. Not the highest paid, but the most highly esteemed. Only one out of every 10 people who apply to become teachers will ultimately make it to the classroom. The consequence has been that Finland's performance on international assessments, called PISA, have consistently outranked every other western country, and really there are only a handful of eastern countries that are educating with the same results.

[...]

There is no domestic testing except a very quiet auditing program to test demographic samples of kids; not for accountability, not for public consumption, and not for comparison across schools. The fascinating thing is that because they have created such a high level of professionalism, they can trust their teachers. Their motto is "Trust Through Professionalism." The difference between the highest performing school in Finland and the lowest performing school in Finland is less than four percent, and that's without any testing at all.

[...]

what's different in Finland is that there has been a bipartisan consensus over 30 years about the importance of education and the importance of high-quality teaching as the real solution. It's been a partnership between businesses, policy makers and educators, and that's what we need in [America] but don't have.

[...]

they've defined professionalism as working more collaboratively. They give their teachers time in the school day and in the school week to work with each other, to continuously improve their curriculum and their lessons. We have a 19th century level of professionalism here, or worse, it's medieval. A teacher works alone all day, everyday, and isolation is the enemy of improvement and innovation, which is something the Finns figured out a long time ago. Get the teachers out of their isolated circumstances and give them time to work together.

Fascism and Divergent Thinking at Schools

Two links that seem unrelated are infact not.

First there is a great RSA Animate version of a talk on Changing Education Paradigms by Sir Ken Robinson



At about the 4 minute this he states a belief that ADHD is a "fictitious epidemic" and that children who are living in the most intensively stimulating period on earth are being regularly medicated and penalised for being distracted from boring stuff at school. They are being given drugs to get them focussed and settle down. We are getting them through school by anaesthetising them. We should be waking them up. And Sir Robinson notes that much of this drive for conformity is correlated with standardised testing and the way schools are modeled on the industrialisation and the production line mentality.

I could not agree more - and I speak as someone who could have probably benefited from these drugs at school - but just to help me fit in rather than to become a more creative student and be fully alive. It would have contained by ability to think divergently.

The second post is from http://www.ronjoneswriter.com/wave.html, which details a class 'exercise' from 1967 in Palo Alto, where a teacher named Ron Jones, tried to 'simulate what happened in Germany by having his students "basically follow instructions" for a day.'

The results were scary and worth reading. Towards the end, the author quotes Jones

"Fascism is always a possibility because it's so simple and people are frustrated. They lose their jobs, their dignity, their sense of worth, and someone comes along and says, "I've got the answer."

School systems prepare the ground, Jones says by using only standardized tests for success and failing to recognize alternative paths of learning, as well as a wider variety of individual achievements.

Educational institutions weed out troublemakers and those who are difficult to teach, he contends, rewarding placid students who want to succeed at any cost and will accept authority.

"That's the sad thing. Teachers can trigger it by telling students they're special, they're part of a community, that they can do special things. All they have to give is their loyalty," Jones concludes. "It happens every day in school, only the paraphernalia isn't there. Kids aren't learning to ask questions. You create a population where freedom's just a spelling word."

Can you see the connection now?

iBooks in Schools

The way of the future http://www.macworld.com/article/157013/2011/01/ipadintheschool.html?lsrc=rss_main