Tag Archives: Education

| Media, Slow News Day

AP needs more sleep

Apparently forgetting that correlation is not causation, Associated Press promotes a study that says more sleep leads to better performance in schools compared to all-night cram sessions the night before an exam.

It reaches this conclusion based on the fact that people who stay up all night have statistically better grades.

This is an uncontrolled study. Rather than take two randomly-selected students and have one stay up and the other go to bed, it asks people after the fact about their habits. While it shows a link between sleep and grades, it does not show that the lack of sleep while cramming causes a decrease in grades.

The study could be simply explained away by the fact that students who do poorly tend to procrastinate to the last minute and do all-night cramming. There’s no evidence that getting them to bed earlier would improve their grades, because nobody has actually tested for that.

AP (and the Globe) should know better than this. Comments attached to the Globe story pounced on it immediately. Why didn’t a journalist?

| Montreal, TV, Video

Screaming matches are not interviews

A memo to Jean-Luc Mongrain:

Acting like Bill O’Reilly doesn’t make you a better interviewer. When you invite a leader of the student protest movement on your show and yell at him like a madman, it doesn’t make people agree with your position more. In fact, people already agree with your position that protesters provoke police and that the tuition hikes are modest and don’t necessitate this kind of response.

So why are you yelling like a baby who thinks nobody is listening to him? You invited the guy on your show to speak his mind. At least let him speak.

Mongrain Clenche Porte Parole Etudiant 50 Dollar
Uploaded by mediawatchqc

UPDATE (Nov. 19): Mongrain’s contract expires next spring, and he doesn’t seem worried about his future.

UPDATE (Nov. 20): via Patrick Lagacé comes this example of classic Mongrain:

| In the news

More cries of “police brutality”

As predictable as the sun’s rotation around the Earth, the militant student group ASSÉ, which is on “strike” this week against the unfreezing of tuition (despite the fact that most of its members are CEGEP students who don’t pay tuition), started a fight with riot police during one of their protests and is crying “police brutality”.

It’s not that I think there aren’t any rotten eggs in the police department, or that their tactics aren’t a bit heavy-handed when it comes to protesters (fully-armored riot cops don’t exactly have to fear for their lives against kids), but at some point the boy has to stop crying “wolf”. Especially when the protesters are the ones starting the fights.

| Montreal

The tuition debate is over

As if to deliberately underscore how chaotic and disorganized the student activist movement is, two separate, competing protests are being organized over the next two weeks concerning tuition and accessibility of higher education.

The first, by the CEGEP-heavy, highly militant unlimited-strike-at-the-tip-of-a-hat ASSÉ, is this Thursday afternoon. (The event’s tagline is telling: “Parce que la lutte continue, tabarnak !!!”)

The second, by the bigger-budget, more organized PR-savvy FEUQ, is the following Thursday.

The reason behind the two protests is nothing more complicated than the two groups engaging in a pissing contest with each other. Rather than put aside their differences and come together, student groups prefer to fight and sue each other.

But even if this wasn’t the case, the protest is pointless for one simple reason: They’ve already lost the battle.

In the last provincial election, Liberal leader Jean Charest made it abundantly clear he intended to unfreeze tuition and raise it by a small amount. ADQ leader Mario Dumont even wanted to go further. Those two parties took over 2/3 of the seats in the National Assembly.

The public, meanwhile, made it very clear that keeping Quebec’s tuition the lowest in Canada is not their top priority. Even some students think our tuition is too low, and would prefer to see more student money go into the education system.

These protests (and the laughable “unlimited general strike”, which hurts no one but the few students participating in it) are organized on the assumption that the public supports them. But it doesn’t. And tying up downtown traffic so that some hippies can yell how $200 a course is too much to pay for university education isn’t going to help their cause at all. It will just piss people off and make them think that these students have far too much free time on their hands that they could be spending earning money to lessen their tuition load.

The tuition debate is over as far as the government is concerned. If you’re going to try to revolutionize the way Quebec finances post-secondary education, you have to convince the voters to think like you. That means a big, honest education campaign, not a protest.

And don’t hold your breath expecting attitudes to change overnight.

| Uncategorized

School boards: What will we do with them now?

Now that school board elections are over, with absolutely atrocious voter turnout, the inevitable we-have-to-do-something leadership-by-hindsight begins.

Some of the options being considered:

Abolish school boards entirely: This is the ADQ’s solution to the problem, and the excuse for reason why they want to force a real election. Administration of schools would fall to municipalities, the provincial government, and the schools themselves, removing a layer of bureaucracy. Unfortunately, as municipal mergers should have shown us, it’s not that easy. The bureaucracy created by the change might be as large or even larger than the bureaucracy it’s replacing.

Give school boards more power: For those (like me) who complain there aren’t any issues to be decided here (things like school taxes and curricula are set by the Quebec government), this might make elections more interesting. But it would also make the boards inconsistent, and that could lead to problems down the road.

Tie school board elections to municipal elections: I can’t see how this isn’t a good idea. Let’s reduce the amount of times we need to go out, update a voters’ list and wait in line to cast our ballots.

Here’s one I’d like to suggest adding to the list: Have school board commissioners appointed by municipalities instead of elected by the populace directly. This may sound anti-democratic at first, but the system it’s replacing isn’t perfect either. This solution would keep the bureaucracy as is, but the decisions about how local schools would be run would be left in part to the municipal governments they’re in. (Municipal politics aren’t high on voter turnout either, but it’s better than school board elections — and most people can name their mayor at least.)

Just a thought.

| Montreal

School board election results

I don’t blame you if you slept through it, but yesterday was school board election day across the province. Turnout in English boards (which have a much smaller electorate because you have to specifically request to be added to it) was low, about 10-30%. Turnout for the French boards was comically bad, in the low single digits.

That probably had something to do with the fact that there were no issues in this election, nobody knew anything about the candidates, and school boards are powerless to make any meaningful changes about how our kids are educated anyway.

Still, for those who care (the immediate families of the candidates come to mind), here’s a quick breakdown of what happened.

English Montreal School Board

EMSB results (PDF)

  • Spiridigliozzi: Wards 8, 11, 15, 21, 22, 23 (plus 16, 17, 18 and 20 by acclamation)
  • Barbieri: Wards 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 14
  • Mancini: Wards 1, 4, 7, 10, 19
  • Independents: None

The EMSB election, as Henry Aubin explained it, was a battle between chairman Dominic Spiridigliozzi (whose team had a slim majority on the board) and Rocco Barbieri and Angela Mancini, who work together and whose candidates did not compete against each other for seats. Despite having four candidates elected through acclamation (including Spiridigliozzi himself), the team managed to win only 10 of the 23 board seats, with the rest going to Barbieri and Mancini’s teams. This will represent a major shift in the way this board is governed.

Spiridigliozzi lost 3 incumbents: vice-chair Elizabeth Fokoefs (NDG Ward 3), Daniel Andrelli (St. Henri/Point St. Charles/Westmount Ward 6) and George Vogas (Plateau/Park Ex Ward 13)

Two of the races were extremely close (close enough that judicial recounts have been ordered): Rocco Barbieri won by a margin of only seven votes: 319-312. Julien Feldman (also on Barbieri’s team) defeated incumbent George Vogas in Ward 13 by only six votes: 319-313, with 52 votes going to independent Adam Beach. (A second independent, Ilias Hondronicolas, dropped out.)

As for Bryce Durafourt, who I had high hopes for, he received only 49 votes against Barbieri’s Liz Leaman (454) and Spiridigliozzi’s Mario Pasteris (200).

Lester B. Pearson School Board

Official results

Not as fun to analyze as the other board because there weren’t any declared teams and there were only seven races. Two incumbents, Howard Solomon (who’s been there 14 years) and Don Rae (a one-time incumbent whose website is filled with stock photos of smiling kids), lost their seats.

Commission scolaire de Montréal

List of winners (PDF)

Wow. You can’t go wrong with a 100% victory, but that’s exactly what the MEMO group did here, picking up 13 acclamations and winning all eight contested elections against independents. Even Dominique Cousineau, whose campaign apparently consisted of pointing out that her opponent was named Mostafa, won her board seat. I can’t find a list of the vote totals (though with a turnout of less than 4%, maybe they’re embarrassed to show them).

Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys

List of winners (PDF, apparently scanned from an old fax machine)

With 20 of 21 seats contested, this board’s election was the most active. Diane Lamarche-Venne was the big winner, picking up 14 seats of the 19 her candidates ran in (including herself and one candidate who was elected through acclamation). Jocelyne Bénard-Rochon, who ran 17 candidates, only saw three victories, and lost her own seat to a Lamarche-Venne candidate.

Surprisingly, four independent candidates, three of whom ran against at least one of the parties, also picked up seats: Guylain Desnoyers, Jean-Guy D’Amour, Sonia Gagné-Lalonde and Sarita Benchimol (the latter ran in Cote-St.-Hamp-West, which didn’t see any party candidates).

The turnout was also abysmal here, at just over 3%.

| Business, Montreal, My articles

TWIM: Kids, money

Bryce Durafourt

This week, I talked with Bryce Durafourt (above), who’s running in the school board elections for the English Montreal School Board in TMR/Saint-Laurent. He’s 20, a McGill microbiology student, curler, and ran for city councillor the 2005 municipal election in Saint-Laurent, only to come dead-last as the only independent candidate.

So I asked him: What’s up with that?

Also this week (though not online) is an explainer about the status of the Canadian dollar, which is constantly hitting new highs compared to the U.S. dollar. It also mentions the situation in Zimbabwe, home of the least-valued currency in the world and one of the worst examples of hyperinflation since the 1940s.

| Media

Media don’t take quizzes seriously

First CBC’s Test the Nation had a small problem with its algebra, then a Cyberpresse quiz was riddled with grammatical errors. Now comes news that a TVA spelling quiz had errors of its own.

The blog post points out that the test was developed by a French teacher and that this teacher made the errors. It also gives some complete B.S. about how the media is thorough in its research, which it clearly isn’t.

Having a professional create the test was a good move for TVA. But not having the test verified by another professional was where they failed. It’s relying on a single source to verify that something is accurate. This is one of the first things they tell you in journalism school not to do.

But TVA wasn’t concerned too much with accuracy, because they didn’t take it seriously. Just like the other tests given in the media, it was nothing more than a gimmick to fill air time and possibly generate ratings. Infotainment that had nothing to do with quality journalism.

Until the media start taking these kinds of tests seriously and having them properly verified, the public can put about as much faith in them as they have in the spelling accuracy on this blog: not mcuh.

| Montreal

OMG they’ll outsource our students too!

Apparently realizing that there are no real issues in this school board election, Commission scolaire de Montréal candidate Michel Bédard has decided to invent a scandal. Bédard is running as an independent against incumbent Paul Trottier of the establishment party MEMO in Division 15, which is the area around the Gay Village in southeast downtown.

Bédard is complaining that the school board had Canada Post print some of its election material, and they did so in Toronto. Apparently this blatant outsourcing is taking jobs away from Montrealers willing to print flyers.

Yeah.

Scandal.