6 Ways: Transforming High Schools in Ontario

A recent press release by the Ontario Government recognizing the province’s top educators reminded me a of a link I came across last year about the McGuinty government’s plan to increase high school success rates. While the provincial Liberals see this as a good trend, I am worried by the numbers they show for secondary education:

60.5 per cent of Ontario students earned 16 or more credits by the end of their second year of high school in 2005 and are on track to graduate in four years.

While I am, in no way, encouraging students to rush through their education, the fact that only 60% of Ontario students are on track to graduate worries me quite a bit. That’s why I was glad to see the Ministry of Education introduce their six ways to transform high school in this province last year.

Though I’m not an expert in the domain of public education, I thought I might offer some thoughts on each of these six ways, having gone through two separate secondary education systems in this country some years ago.

Student Success Teams
While the concept behind the Student Success Team is good, the implementation will need to be effective, and it doesn’t look like it will be when you see the structures in place. What this strategy does is put an added task on the already heavy task list of the guidance counselors and principals, and ‘Student Success’ teachers will most likely be classroom teachers as well, instead of being dedicated to the Student Success Team.

While the Student Success Team has a mandate to support struggling students and provide them with more options for learning, all other students not identified by the team must request support from the team in order to get more information about these options: not easy to do when there has been little done to increase awareness about the program in actual high schools.

Expanded Co-op Credit
Increasing the emphasis on co-operative education is one of the smartest moves the government can make, and allowing students to have more co-op credits count for graduation is a step in the right direction. Co-op — as it has been proven within the university setting — not only provides students with valuable work experience, but equips them with the contacts and confidence to engage in the job market. The next logical step for the McGuinty government, if they can mobilize enough employers, is to get co-op to be a compulsory part of the high school experience.

Specialist High Skills Major
Not every student wants to study philosophy or chemical engineering in university or college. For years, training for students interested in emerging industries such as hospitality and tourism and manufacturing have been largely ignored in the secondary school system. While this is still in pilot phases, I do hope that the specialist high skills major will help target students in these domains and assist them in discovering possible career outlets in non-traditional academic sectors.

Dual Credit Program
It is clear that a lot of the learning that happens in the classroom — either in high school classes or co-op — carries over into learning that students will pursue in their colleges, apprenticeships, or universities. Recognizing this fact was an important step for the Ontario government, and now allowing students to count this learning as credit equivalents for both secondary school and their further pursuits will encourage the building of behaviors that foster continuous learning past the high school arena.

Lighthouse Projects
To be honest, I don’t know much about alternative education strategies and credit recovery programs in the province, but the general principle behind the Lighthouse Projects — which are supposed to provide students having difficulty acquiring credits with the tools necessary to continue their education — seems to rooted in sound theory.

Grade 8-9 Transition
While the transition between middle school and secondary school has the potential to be difficult, I’m not sure problems in the early years of high school are necessarily tied to the problems of adjusting to a new educational system; instead, at that age, students have to deal with issues outside the classroom that would have a large impact on their performance in their courses. While it is valiant for the government to consecrate more teachers and resources to this transition period, what the Ministry of Education needs to do is liaise with other ministries and organizations in order to mitigate problems caused by social pressures.

Overall, I think this is a good start for the Ministry of Education: it gives students options to customize their education in order to learn the way they feel is best suited for their future goals. Of course, it needs to be implemented effectively to have any impact at all on the success rates of students across the province, but it’s a good start. As my friend Striatic says on Twitter: “I think this is really good stuff. Seems to give students more flexibility in terms of what they want to get out of school. It’s all in the execution though.”

Review: Spider-Man 3

I apologize for the lackluster review but I returned from the midnight screening of Spider-Man 3 at 3am, so I haven’t slept much. Then again, you can say that the weakness of the review I’m about to write is completely indicative of the quality of the latest installment of the Spider-Man franchise. Somebody go buy me a cup of coffee, and while you’re at it, buy Sam Raimi a screenplay.

In an effort to be positive, Spider-Man 3 is a funny movie. I laughed when Tobey Maguire danced in the street, I laughed when the characters would make witty remarks, but sadly, I also laughed when Sam Raimi tried to make his movie melodramatic. Romance and drama trumped action and intensity in the film, making it not only dragging and tiresome, but ultimately laughable.

The Sandman is a fundamentally weak villain, we only see Venom for less than 20 minutes, and even bad Spidey is more annoying than aggressive. Sam Raimi was more interested in making sure Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson and Harry Osborn all love each other rather than giving us what we all lined up to see: a superhero movie. Spider-Man 3 features an ending that is more long-winded and drawn out than that of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, and is more musical-comedy than action-adventure. In essence, a bore. I should have used my time to sleep.

World Press Freedom Day

Today, May 3, is World Press Freedom Day. The day is celebrated every year in order to raise awareness of the importance of freedom of the press and to remind governments of their duty to respect and uphold the right to freedom of expression according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And while I do believe that it is our responsibility — as consumers of the free press and as citizen journalists alike — to uphold the freedom of the press every day of the year, I’m glad that there is a UN-sanctioned day to recognize the struggle that many members of the press have to go through in order to ensure the adequate delivery of information to the masses.

Sadly, I don’t have the time to write a full post on my thoughts about the day because of commitments, but here’s a sampling of a few good articles from around the web, mainly from The Guardian, who are have some great reporting about this day.

From World Press Freedom Day:

Alarming numbers of journalists continue to die in the course of their work. Some are killed reporting wars but most - around 70% - are murdered because of what they have written or the questions they have been asking. In the vast majority of these cases, their killers are never brought to justice.

From Safety of Journalists:

In times of violent conflict, the dangers journalists are exposed to are more imminent than in ordinary times. Independent, precise and professional information is particularly vital under these circumstances.

From The Need to Know:

Politicians run governments and seek to exercise power in the name of the people. Journalists serve those people directly day by day, for they are their readers and viewers. They do not, if they’re wise, want power for themselves. They do, though, have a direct hand in the workings of democracy.

From Dying to Tell:

The Hollywood image of the intrepid foreign reporter is that of James Woods in the thick of a civil war in the film, Salvador, or Jennifer Connolly unearthing the truth in Blood Diamond. War correspondents do sometimes get caught in crossfire or executed by despots for being “spies”, but a little-known journalism statistic is that few of the correspondents who die are killed on the battlefield: seven out of 10 are murdered after being deliberately targeted for what they have written or aired. They are hunted down and shot by professional hit men, beaten to death by hired thugs, or simply “disappeared”.

From The Price of Press Freedom:

With reporters being killed or held hostage by groups in conflict, with governments jailing, threatening and censoring journalists and cyber dissidents for promoting democracy or political debate, and with drug traffickers, corrupt local politicians and other criminals getting rid of reporters investigating their whereabouts, members of the media are literally risking their lives just to get the story. Every year it seems there are more and more dangers to be overcome. And more and more journalists are paying the ultimate price — losing their lives — simply to protect our right to know.

From The Blogging Relationship:

Today, everyone has a voice through the plethora of internet forums, social communities and blogs that have sprung up on the internet over the last few years. There are no barriers to access beyond an internet connection, and blogs can be set up by anyone, anywhere in the world in a few minutes and at no cost.

From Heroes or Martyrs?:

It is not only that bloggers are widening the quantity of information available in a region where political gossip is often more trusted than official statements. They are also deepening the quality and breadth of debate with the abandon that only the rush of ego-driven publishing (and anonymity) can provide.

I’ll try and update this list as the day goes on, but if you find anything else insightful on the topic, drop me an email and let me know.

Judging a Paper by its Cover

A recent post on Torontoist about the The Art of Dose, where they feature a interview with former Editor-In-Chief of Dose Pema Hegan. For those of you who have been tracking my various blogs for a long time, you know how enamored I was of Dose’s design — not only their covers, but their page layouts and their graphics — and how sad I was that the print version of the newspaper had to be discontinued. I have tried to continue visiting the Dose website, but the effect is completely different: I didn’t pick up Dose everyday for the content, but for the fantastic aesthetic presence it had, a sensibility that isn’t adequately conveyed on the website.

Speaking about cover design to Torontoist editor Marc Lostracco, Hegan said:

We believed the cover was our single biggest opportunity to introduce new readers to Dose. It needed to reach out to people walking past the box, and that is hard to do with a busy front page full of stories. We thought the best approach was to focus on a single issue/idea and find a smart and visually interesting way to communicate it.

Hegan gets it right: while more and more newspapers are trying to crowd more and more stories onto their front pages, Dose realized that people’s attention spans don’t have the time to digest all that text. Instead, people want a front page that speaks to them, that speaks to the issues that are on their mind, and that appeals to their visual tastes.

Of course, great cover design needs to be backed up by great content, and that may have been the cause of Dose’s demise. One newspaper I have been following quite regularly (other than The Guardian, The Toronto Star, and The New York Times, of course) has been the The Independent out in the UK. Ever since they ran that absolutely stunning infographic about a Middle East ceasefire last year, I’ve been completely enthralled by the way they present cutting news and pressing information on their front pages. Unlike Dose, however, The Independent has done a great job of marrying fantastic design with insightful content inside the newspaper. While it may not have the journalistic cachet as a paper like The Guardian, for example, The Independent still stands out as a premier newspaper available in the United Kingdom because of the issues it addresses, but mainly because of of the way it stands out in the newsstands by its design.

I’ve written about cover design before on this weblog, but most of my insight on the topic has been limited to the crafting of book covers. While I will admit that good cover design might be a bit more important for books which don’t have serial subscribers in order to buoy their sales, it is undeniable that periodicals need to embrace the importance of front page design in a world where people don’t have time to examine before they make the decision to purchase. Malcolm Gladwell said it in Blink, and he was absolutely correct: the decision to pick up that newspaper or that magazine is made in your first glance. And while it is clear that some publishers realize this and put the necessary resources into styling their covers, I have yet to see any kind of periodical achieve the kind of brilliance that George Lois created for Esquire in the 1960s.

I put a quick message up on Twitter yesterday asking for suggestions of other newspapers that have great cover design, and here’s a quick list of a few that were recommended to me: Chicago Sun-Times, Hamilton Spectator, Houston Chronicle, Publico Lisboa and Rocky Mountain News. I haven’t been following all those papers regularly, so I can’t vouch for their quality, but if you’re interested in seeing what kinds of newspapers my Twitter friends like to read, check out their websites or search for them at the Newseum.

And of course, you can’t forget the excellent sites Newsdesigner and Best Front Design. They say everything I’ve said here with examples, every day.