by John Borst

I ran into a clear case of “Evangelical Catholicism” this past week. But that should not surprise anyone who follows closely the forces driving the Church from within and now attempting to influence the schools.

I was hesitant about sharing the conversation until I read John L. Allen Jr’s, August 31^st piece in the National Catholic Reporter “The Triumph of Evangelical Catholicism”. Allen places the development of the movement squarely on the shoulders of John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger as Head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).

Allen describes the movement this way: Read more »

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posted by John Borst

TORONTO, Aug. 29 /CNW/

Public, Catholic and French Language school districts across Ontario are joining together to establish common policies, standards and practices for environmental education and to reduce the ecological impact of school system operations.

At its annual meeting in August, the Council of Ontario Directors of Education (CODE), agreed to adopt and promote the Ontario EcoSchools program, which links environmental literacy instruction with real-life conservation strategies to reduce waste, energy consumption, and ecological degradation throughout schools and school communities. Ontario EcoSchools is a certification program created through a collaboration of school boards and other partners to address environmental issues in the education system.

“Classroom learning about the environment is common in most schools, but content varies considerably and students have rarely had the opportunity to participate in practical projects that can measurably reduce environmental impacts,” said Mary Jean Gallagher, Chair of the Council of Ontario Directors of Education (CODE). “To that end the Directors encourage all schools to become certified as EcoSchools,” she added.

The Directors of Education also agreed to review their current business policies and procedures to ensure that environmentally responsible practices are in place throughout their school districts. Best practices in areas of purchasing, transportation, planning and maintenance will be shared and highlighted for the benefit of all school systems.

CODE members also committed to work with the Canada Green Building Council to establish specific environmental and efficiency standards for school construction, according to international LEED (Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design) criteria.

Mrs. Gallagher said Directors of Education agreed to actively seek out partnerships with organizations that can offer experiential learning opportunities for students. “We want to empower students to shape their environment in positive ways through education,” she said.

The Council of Ontario Directors of Education (CODE) is an advisory and consultative organization composed of the chief executive officers of all 72 district school boards in Ontario; Public, Catholic and French Language.

In 2006 – 2007 English Catholic directors of education on the CODE executive were Anna Marie Bitonti, Nipissing-Parry Sound CDSB; Allan Craig, Kenora CDSB; Larry Langan, Huron Perth CDSB; Patricia Manson, Durham CDSB; Roger Lawler, Waterloo CDSB and Michael Schmitt, Algonquin & Lakeshore CDSB.

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posted by John Borst

Grant Gallicho, associate editor at Commonweal Magazine, has a post, dated August 20, 2007 at the dotCommonweal blog on the future of the Catholic High School in America.

In it he brings his readers back to a piece he wrote for the National Catholic Reporter and available at LookSmart on the decision of the Priests of Holy Cross, Indiana Province, to close Notre Dame High School for Boys.

In part it reads:

The collision between high ideals and stark realities is becoming increasingly common across the shifting landscape of Catholic education in the United States, yet rarely is the conflict as vividly displayed as in the story of Notre Dame High School and the Holy Cross Indiana province. This tangled saga illustrates the crunch of the declining number of priests and religious with the continuing dedication of laypeople to Catholic education, while questions of ownership and Catholic identity add intrigue to the outcome.

Of the 1,203 Catholic high schools in the United States, 42 percent are sponsored by religious communities. The dwindling numbers of religious and their increasing financial burdens have forced many congregations–such as the Jesuits and the De La Salle Brothers–to move their schools to a two-tiered governance model. In such a model, a predominantly lay board oversees the daily operations of the school, while some powers are reserved by the sponsoring community, usually involving property and religious identity. “Congregations are realizing that this is a way to continue the mission of their schools,” according to Notre Dame Sr. Mary Frances Taymans, executive director of the Secondary School Department of the National Catholic Educational Association. “Knowing the role they want to sustain over time has to do with mission and charism,” Taymans explained, these congregations understand that “it’s time to turn these institutions over.”

But sometimes a governance transition is out of the question. When a sponsoring community decides to close a school, according to Taymans, “usually the lay board and parents say they want to try to keep it open.” In those cases, “congregations tend to agree to maintain sponsorship, but not financial responsibility for the school,” Taymans said. In the case of Notre Dame High School, however, that was never on the table. When asked how the Indiana province decision compares to national trends in Catholic secondary schools, Taymans said, “It tends to go differently.”

There are 15 responses to Gallicho’s post. Each by itself adds further understanding to the state of Catholic secondary school education in the United States.

Here are some small samples taken from a number of longer comments:

(JR) One wonders to what extent Catholic schools have simply become private schools.

(AA) As a teacher in three different Catholic high schools for the past 12 years, I can say that there is a real battle going on for the soul of Catholic high schools.

(K) There might be a parallel in the decline of Religious-sponsored high schools with that of minor seminaries.

(AA) I have taught in what some might consider more “elite” Catholic high schools. However, all these schools have a considerably large number of younger faculty who try out teaching for a few years.

(JR) It would be interesting to look at the annual family income of kids who attend Catholic high schools as well as the level of “Catholicity” to get some kind of picture of what’s going on across the board.

(JC) Having taught in a Catholic high school here, and knowing others who did, I can attest that our reason for leaving was not due to any lack of commitment to passing on the tradition. We left because we simply could not afford to teach there. It wasn’t a matter of being unwilling to make a small financial sacrifice; we were unable to pay our monthly bills and support our own children on a Catholic school salary.

(RM) I too have some concern about the diluting of the ‘Catholicity’ and the slow evolution into an ‘elite’, ‘Christian’ school. . . . Most of my sons friends there are not Catholic, but Protestants whose parents are looking for an alternative to the public schools. Since they’re also generally fairly well off, I think the school cannot help but be influenced by the need to cater somewhat to that potential pool by subduing its ‘Catholicity’.

The entire post with links can be found here.

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by John Borst

The September 2007 issue of The Walrus has a very interesting article by novelist Jon Evans (Dark Places) titled “APOCALYPSE SOON: The future of reading”.

Essentially, Evans is not so much talking about the future of reading but the future of the publishing business and the novel in particular.

His contention or apocalypse is that he has seen the future in the form of the Sony Reader. He says “for the first time in my life I could envision myself abandoning paper for digital books. It was a revelation.”

Evans thinks that book publishers are hiding their head in the proverbial sand since the electronic book has been a “dismal failure” achieving only 0.2% of the market. He sees no reason why books will one day not go the way of the music recording industry, the newspaper and magazine industry and the movie industry.

The key to the Sony Reader is that you do not read it on an LCD screen but “electronic paper” and that in turn provides the same eye pleasing “contrast” as ink on paper.

Evans goes on to discuss the issue of “free content”, and why people will pay for something that is free and he uses iTunes as an example or in the case of books, purchasing a book at a book store when the same items is and has been “free” at the local library for the past hundred years.

Juxtaposed with this article is a recent piece in The New York Times about the cost of university text-books which reported that the average amount spent on texts per year is about $1000.00 Canadian. Examples of $200.00 textbooks in the maths and sciences were not hard to find. The author’s thesis is that new ways to price out text books need to be found.

I also remember with little fondness my own high school days when it was typical to carry your binder with six texts layered out three deep in two rows slung on your hip. I ‘m not sure when the backpack became the norm but certainly by 1990 woven-bags for girls and army surplus shoulder-bags were modish for guys, so the mid-nineties is a good estimate.

Imagine students carrying one small e-text reader about the size of a thin trade paperback upon which exists all of the student’s text books.

School boards annually spend hundreds of thousands and for boards like Toronto, millions of dollars on texts. Many are dated by the time they are in print. Many teacher’s would prefer new more up-to-date texts but have to make do with old ones until the old ones are no longer viable. Novels can’t be changed because there is no budget to purchase new ones.

Imagine if instead, a literature teacher got to choose the novels to be used on a yearly basis. Or the mathematics teacher could choose the most up-to-date text with the latest theorems explored. Or the geography teacher could choose a Wikitext that was annually updated with the latest demographic or economic data for a country under study.

Instead of outright purchases school boards would pay an annual licensing fee. In turn publishers would guarantee to update their texts continuously something akin to a professionally produced Wikipedia.

Such texts of course would be searchable, highlightable, and annotatable. The mathematics texts could provide edited text guiding students through each step of an equation. Videos, pictures, text messaging and chat features could no doubt be merged into an iText.

Just imagine if a literature teacher in a Catholic school wished to teach a course on the Catholic novel. With a downloadable bank of the entire works of the likes of Jon Hassler, William Kennedy, Thomas Keneally, Shuskau Endo, Mary Gordon, Brian Moore, Flannery O’Connor and Andre Dubus at his figure tips the flexibility to design a unique course of study would be liberating.

Imagine if instead of a small library of picture books in the corner of a Kindergarten classroom if each child had a large library of picture books on his own iBook or iTome as Jon Evans calls them. Primary teachers could truly customize a whole library of “I can read” books for the exact level through which a child is progressing. Young children could finally, read books in the same manner as do adult readers regardless of income disparities. Education would become even more of an egalitarian activity.

Evans concludes his piece with “the oncoming digital meteor will hit today’s publishing industry hard, and its dinosaurs are going to die.” Evans was talking about the publishers of novels. Text book publishers will not be immune from this revolution. Nor for that matter will the developers of curriculum or programs of study from the Ministry of Education to the department head in a high school or to the teacher in her classroom.

Anyone familiar with the history of education knows that we have swung from liberal progressive teacher-centred eras to the centralizing and standardizing forces of conservative bureaucratic-centred eras. The latter is getting a little long in the tooth. I suspect the dawn of the iText will see at least for a time the return of the next progressive era in education.

© copyright Tomorrow’s Trust, 2007

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posted by John Borst

There is a short piece in the August 4, 2007 issue of The Tablet in which the following is reported:

A Senior Irish bishop has condemned today’s culture of video games, television soap operas, computer chat-rooms and school exam pressures for “stealing away innocent years” of children, writes John Cooney.

The Archbishop of Tuam, Michael Neary, gave the stark warning of the threats to childhood, in a homily.

He said children need to “to discover the need to reflect, to slow down the pace of life, to wonder at the beauty of the earth, and to really appreciate the value of our friends”.

Using first communion as an example Dr Neary claimed children are “all too soon dragged into adolescence before their primary schooldays have ended.”

The peer pressure put on young people as a result of commercial advertising also came under scrutiny from the archbishop.

I found it interesting “school exams” was included in that media list.

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posted by John Borst

There is a major essay on education, once again in Harper’ Magazine, the September 2007 issue. It is by Peter Schrag and is titled “Schoolhouse Crock”. He begins with a list of the incredible number of things America’s school s have been expected to accomplish.

Reading it one begins to realize why the debate has never been quite as intense here in Canada. But Canadian teachers of a certain age will no doubt recognize all the social forces and flip-flopping directions, some just well intentioned fads, others serious politically motivated errors, while major philosophical differences about education continue, then as now, to swirl around the battle ground which has been education for the past 50 years.

He dates this battle from October 4, 1957. That is the day the Russians beat America into space with the launch of Sputnick, the world’s first Earth-orbiting satellite. I was in Grade 12 at the time and can remember standing on my back-porch watching it tumble across the sky. (The orbit was low by today’s standards and in the early evening the sun would reflect off it so it was visible to the naked eye.)

For those too young to have experienced it, think on the scale of how 9/11 has changed the world and especially America and you will have an idea of how traumatic was the event.

The final paragraph refers to Americans but it could be any advanced western style democracy.

Americans are far too hung up on the notion that in some past golden age the schools were better. When was there ever such an age? The people who blame the schools for today’s ills are themselves products of schools that were under attack for similar failings a couple of generations ago. Are the schools good enough? Of course not. But then, they never were. And as long as we expect schools to solve every cultural and eco­nomic challenge the United States faces in an ever-evolving world, as long as we continue to tin­ker with them as if they were training facilities for warriors in cold wars still to come, they never will be. Perhaps it is time we thought of schools as places where our children might simply learn something-not just for our benefit, not just for the nation’s, but for their own.

What teacher would not say “amen” to that conclusion?

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drawn by written by Caryn Swark

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posted by John Borst

Editor’s Note: The following letter by John Stunt, Executive Director, OCSTA, was written in response to an article in the Ottawa Citizen. It is reprinted here with permission.

by John Stunt

Letter writer Susan McBride doesn’t seem to understand the current education funding model when she claims the formula favours Catholic school boards.

All school boards in the province receive identical per-pupil foundation grants that cover the basic costs of education.

All boards are eligible for special-purpose grants based on board-specific needs, not based on the number of pupils. These grants cover such things as special education, transportation, geographic circumstances, school operations and teacher qualifications. Capital grants such as for school renewal and new pupil places are also derived from formulas that are applicable to all boards based on their needs. That Catholic boards in some areas receive more funding is simply a reflection of the model responding to these board-specific needs.

The reverse could as easily be true in other parts of the province where the public school boards may have greater needs.

As required by law, a legislative review committee was established in 2003 with representation from the government and the four trustees associations to review the funding formula. The committee analyzed the funding model on a grant-by-grant basis and concluded that indeed the funding model did appear to operate in a “fair and non-discriminatory manner” as between English public and English Catholic school boards.

Although all partners to the legislative review agreed that the current funding model was fair, equitable and structurally sound, there continues to be a consensus in the education sector that the model is inadequately funded and does not reflect the current cost of education.

The recent funding enhancements announced by the government are an attempt to respond to these concerns and are certainly welcomed by most school boards.

John Stunt,
Toronto
Executive Director,
Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association

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posted by John Borst

Back on May 18, 2007, Tomorrow’s Trust informed its readers of free full access to America Magazine, one of the United States “top Catholic publications.”

Originally scheduled to run for June and July, it was extended until the end of August. The message below is an offer to continue receiving the full site and a pdf of the magazine on-line at the super-bargain rate of $12.00 U.S.

All good things must come to an end, right?

Not necessarily.

America magazine’s online “Open House” will conclude at the end of August, but you can stay on as a Web-only subscriber for next to nothing.

For just $12, you can continue to access all of the articles published in America, plus great online content like podcasts, video meditations and blogs.

$12! That’s 50 percent off the normal online subscription rate of $24. And 75 percent off our print rate.

As an online subscriber, you can download a PDF-replica of every issue, so you can print it out and read it just like a print subscriber. (That’s 41 issues per year!) You’ll also have full access to our online archives, which include seven years of America articles.

Too good to be true? Nope. Just our present to you, as we continue to celebrate the launch of our new Web site.

So please, stay with us. To subscribe, visit your member home page or register here.

Sincerely,

Lisa Pope
Business Manager
America Magazine

P.S. Remember, our online open house will be ending on August 31. So subscribe now to America, the print and online magazine for thinking Catholics and those who want to know what Catholics think.

In a follow-up e-mail exchange with On-line editor, Tim Reidy, it was confirmed that the offer is for all first time subscribers and will remain open to such persons beyond the date of August 31, 2007 “for the time being”.

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posted by John Borst

The following list is courtesy of Eric Shaker at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

1.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/
20070814/toys_networking_070814/20070814/

High tech toys incorporating social networking

BarbieGirls.com; $75 per doll; PC users only.

Barbie is introducing their first toy to embrace MP3 players and social networking. Technology expert Kris Abel shows us how toys and high tech gadgets are coming together like never before.

Be-Bratz.com; $50 per Doll; PC computers only

Be Bratz dolls are no different from what girls are already familiar with from the Bratz line, expect that included within the package is a computer mouse, a mouse pad, and a special USB memory drive that unlocks access to a new social networking community at www.be-bratz.com.

SwypeOut.com; $20

Designed to target boys, SwypeOut is an online racing community that is tied to a series of collectable cards and a bar code scanner.

WebKinz.com (recommended)$20

WebKinz have been around since 2005 and as such have one of the most developed online worlds on the internet.

2.

http://www.adweek.com/aw/national/
article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003628072

Consumers Split on Ad Limits

NEW YORK Consumers are divided about whether self-policing by food companies advertising to kids is a good thing, per a new survey.

3. http://www.thestar.com/living/article/246278

Giving teens credit

Meet Danny, a typical teen. Except when he first flashes across the TV screen, he’s kneeling in a playpen. A caption introduces him as “Recovering Momma’s Boy.” Seconds later, Danny is in a highchair, protesting, “I’m not a baby, mom!”

4. http://www.springwise.com/weekly/2007-08-22.htm#freehand

Free notepaper for students

Advertisers competing for the much desired attention of the college-aged set now have another opportunity to get their ads in the hands of students and hold their interest for up to 90 minutes.

5. http://www.springwise.com/weekly/2007-08-22.htm#kaching

Financial literacy for kids

We’ve featured efforts by two banks Postbank and Umpqua to stimulate children to start their own businesses, but financial institutions aren’t the only ones interested in making children financially savvy.

6. http://www.mediaincanada.com/articles/mic/20070822/td.html

TD launches Money Lounge on Facebook

TD Canada Trust is tapping into the Canadian student demo on Facebook through its newly launched TD Money Lounge Facebook group. The bank is betting students spending hours in online social space will jump on the chance to talk about money and share budgeting strategies.

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