Turning a school around

                                                            

Here is an interesting thread on Twitter on turning schools around by a Former school leader, Director - author, radio presenter and SEN parent who has more than 3,600 followers on Twitter. 

Most educators are good at going around the mulberry bush repeating the same thing again and again expecting different results.

graham Chatterley @grahamchatterl2 29.1.24

If you are bragging about turning a school around, but your exclusion figures are sky high and you are sending parents elsewhere, you haven’t turned anything around, you’ve taken a massive shortcut. If you cherry pick your students of course results go up.

Of course, that is a truism. Here are some of the responses and my comments. I have highlighted my comments in blue. My comments are not part of the thread but my comments now. I will tag the participants of this thread on Twitter to see if any of them will comment.

Barry @bazhsw8183 Jan 29

Son's high school has a new head, been here less than 12 months.  Bragged to KIDS in assembly, she'd expelled 8 times as many kids as the last one.  Becoming an academy next month.  One can see the uninspired leadership and throw of kids on the scrap heap in real-time.

graham chatterley

Can only hope the new government puts a stop to it. You would think 2 million children not attending school would be something to prompt change.

My Response:

Change should have happened in the past few decades when the percentage of kids who could not read proficiently had been maintained at around 30%. Did anyone on this thread do anything to reduce that percentage?

Jimmy Rotheram @MusicEdu4all

The same goes for getting good results by cutting the arts, PE, triple science etc. Putting the narrow data of school performance measures ahead of children's developmental needs.

My comment:

Did cutting the arts, PE etc. improve the school results? As I have said several times in my blog most of these people including so-called educators continually bark up the wrong tree. Once a kid has shut down/disengaged from learning to read it is almost impossible to get them to decode. I have explained this with corroborative evidence in my book Shut Down Kids. Link

Kids who are predisposed to shutting down, disengage from learning to read when things are confusing. They go to school full of self-esteem and lose it in the first year because teachers teach them wrongly. Thank Goodness the majority of kids figure out how to decode.  

Joe Nutt @joenutt_author

Untrue. Every single, successful school in the world, has pupils who buy into what classrooms and lessons are designed for. If you take over a school where some children don’t, you have no option but to remove them, for the benefit of all who do; ‘For the many’ if you prefer.

 

My response:

Should we not find out why some/many kids don’t buy into “what classrooms and lessons are designed for”. Why not find out the kids who are unable to decode and segregate them into separate classes where they can be taught to decode or brought to grade level?

As I have mentioned in my blog it is the British who are the main culprit for the kids around the world being unable to decode. They provide television programmes such as Baby TV which teaches the wrong sounds represented by letters. When questioned the so-called educators on Twitter say that it is an entertainment programme and not an educational programme. How stupid can people get to think that kids can differentiate between entertainment programmes and educational ones? Don’t these Twitters know what Thorndike said more than 100 years ago about the importance of initial learning?Read the importance of early/ initial input on my post HERE.

 

Serena Joy @realdoll03 Jan 30

Like children are going around ‘I’m not buying into this’. It’s laughable. They can’t and many schools will not meet needs, it’s school failure, not school success. The schools that can help are the heroes in my eyes.

My response:

I proposed a hypothesis on why Singapore is consistently number 1 in the PISA exams while the US and the UK are not even in the top ten. I have also asked how is it possible for Singapore to reduce the ‘dyslexic’ percentage from ‘10 to 20%’ around the world to ‘3.5% to 10%’. Did any of these guys care to even read the hypothesis and give their opinions? No! This is the same when in 2010 I proposed the hypothesis that phonological awareness deficit was not the cause of dyslexia. Not a single person questioned me. Fortunately, that theory was debunked in 2017 after more than 5 years of my disagreements.

Nick Riden @NickRiden50575

So if I go into a failing business, remove the people that are having a detrimental effect on results, promote the people that are doing well and foster an atmosphere of success, that is wrong?

graham chatterley

Businesses are very different from schools, they are there to serve the children and the community. Not make profits for bosses. It’s a stupid comparison.