Business Model Promotes Failure

I cringe at some of the decisions being made by politicians concerning public education.  The educational morass the United States find themselves in has not seeped north of the border yet to any dangerous degree, but our provincial politicians, strapped as they are for cash and worried about the next election are being tempted by the glowing promises and fear tactics so popular south of the border. 

In the last ten or so years, the cry down south has been to let private enterprise and the free market rescue their woefully underachieving urban school systems.  Extremely low scores on standardized tests have motivated the Gateses and Waltons and other vastly wealthy tycoons to cough up billions and billions of dollars to fund projects that reflect their vision of school systems being run, not by educators, but business school graduates.  They have poured money into school systems in New York, Chicago, San Diego, New Orleans and many other urban areas on the condition that the school systems do things their way, the corporate way.  If you wonder why teachers in British Columbia are concerned about the use of standardized test scores, you need look no further than these districts where the ultimate solution forged by the corporate vision has resulted in hundreds of teachers and principals being fired and schools closed because they did not raise their scores enough to suit the imposed business success model.

All of this activity is spurred on by the infamous No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation of 2002 with which the U.S. government mandated that every child must meet minimum standards in reading and mathematics by 2014. Since many schools started with only 25 or 30 per cent of their students meeting the set standards, the teachers in those schools knew the goal of 100% per cent mastery was going to be difficult to achieve.  Actually, any experienced teacher would have told you the goal was going to be impossible to achieve. That’s because teachers know only too well that the effects of poverty, poor family life, and weak English language skills are obstacles that are incredibly difficult to overcome.  Business tycoons don’t believe that of course.  They believe in what works for them, the carrot and the stick:  the carrot of cash and the stick of job loss.  Mandated by legislation, schools that meet improvement targets get big grants, schools that don’t get closed and the teachers get fired, to be replaced by new, charter schools run by private enterprise. Despite the fact that some schools spend as much as 60% of classroom time preparing for the two standardized tests, success has been minimal. A handful of charter schools, populated by students whose parents are motivated enough to apply for admission and then transport them every day to the school’s location, report increases in test scores.  Of course, the percentage of non-native English speakers and special needs students is smaller than in the urban public school population. Meanwhile all other subjects are deemed to be of little significance as teachers scramble to instruct their students in multiple choice test taking strategies.

We are lucky in British Columbia to have a school system that has a reasonably broad, varied and stimulating curriculum, and that has not yet succumbed to the U.S. view that public education is no different than a corporate enterprise.  Or that no knowledge of education is required to run schools.  We are heading that way however.  Principals are more and more being chosen for managerial skills than teaching skills or experience and have been for some time.  School boards spend almost all their time dealing with matters related to finances: trimming budgets, allocating resources, closing schools, or implementing programs that make up for a lack of parental guidance: anti-bullying

programs, drug and alcohol awareness programs, race/religion/sexual orientation understanding programs.  The only time they spend on matters related to academic achievement, the area that used to be thought of as the main purpose of public schools, is time spent considering the graphs and charts provided by superintendants showing  the progress or lack thereof of student achievement on standardized tests, often carefully disguised at the high school level in the blended marks that combine low test scores with elevated classroom scores.

Still, as long as school boards allow professional teachers to teach a well-rounded curriculum and politicians resist the temptation to dangle carrots and wield sticks, BC public schools should continue to be relatively successful.

Fads and Whims Dominate Educational Reform

Public education, we are told, is failing. Those making this claim often say high school graduates are untrained and unprepared for work, or without the skills and knowledge needed for academic university courses. The system, we are told by pundits, columnists, futurists and a wide variety of educational gurus, is failing to keep up with the social and technological changes of the twenty-first century. The public school system must embrace change to remain relevant, they say.

The changes that are advocated always include the introduction of more technology and alterations that make the system more student-centered and less teacher centered. One of the areas in which educational reform is based on fallacious argument is in the use of terminology. Student centered for example, is considered a positive attribute of the system no matter how it is used. Advocates for reform push for student-centered courses and student-centered classrooms. They want to abandon traditional courses of study for those that appeal to students. They propose polling students and parents for ideas that interest them and that they feel will be useful. Within the courses themselves they propose that students determine the direction of study by choosing assignments, content and even methods of evaluation that they find appealing. These advocates propose that public schools abandon the model of teacher as  instructor  in favour of teacher as facilitator. At the same time, they say that less emphasis must be placed on facts (now often referred to derisively as factoids), and more time on competencies.

Socrates would weep.  Not because he was strongly opposed to educational change – he thought that teaching everyone to write down their thoughts would weaken their ability to think clearly and destroy the oratorical skills democracies require – but because the logic behind the contemporary educational change movement is so weak.

Indeed, for the last thirty years the changes that have occurred in public education, as well as those that are contemplated today, have been based on what Socrates or any 19^th century English public (private) school boy would have recognized as logical fallacies.

One of the most common has been the fallacy classically referred to as  post hoc, ergo propter hoc: “after that, therefore because of that.”  That fallacy has led to the policy of keeping students in school at any cost. The reason given for that policy is statistical and always the same: students who graduate from high school make more money than those who drop out; therefore, keeping students in school until they graduate will cause them to make more money.  Of course, the reason that students who graduate make more money in the work place than those who drop out may be that they are more motivated to succeed and have greater knowledge and skills. However the Ministry and school boards have not concerned themselves with that possibility because those reasons for success cannot be easily measured and turned into statistics.  Instead, school boards and high schools have been required simply to keep students in school, at all costs. In order to make students want to stay in school, those responsible for school policy have attempted to eliminate everything that students might feel is negative; student “success” has become a priority. In the last 25 years, graduation requirements have been eased, alternate academic courses developed (Communications 11 and 12, four levels of Math), and many non-academic courses created provincially and locally that not only are appealing in content, but in which evaluation of student performance is designed to ensure success. The Ministry has helped by not allowing failing marks to be recorded on a student’s record and has eased the requirements for adult equivalent graduation.  As a result, a student unable or unwilling to pass enough courses for graduation can simply wait until their nineteenth birthday when they will receive the same diploma, but based on fewer course credits.

Recently, the Department of Education in Nevada has begun to implement the concept that merit pay should be meted out to teachers based on the level of involvement the parents of their students take in their children’s education. They acknowledge that merit pay based on student performance has not really worked, but since statistics show that student performance is directly related to the level of parental involvement, making teachers responsible for involving parents not only makes sense, but is a necessary extension of a teacher’s responsibility.

Education Funding Woes

No news is not good news when it comes from the Ministry of Education these days. Anticipated funding shortfalls have every school district including Boundary, struggling to come up with ways not only to maintain the programs that exist, but to fund new ones that the Ministry has decreed must be implemented. Last Thursday, while visiting Grand Forks, Minister of Education Macdiarmid indicated that districts would not find out until March 15 what the funding news would be, yet districts are expected to have their budgets in place before that date.

Careful management and funding programs that gave School District 51 extra dollars over the last few years have meant that the blow to this district will not result in the large numbers of lay-offs and school program cuts that other districts will be facing, but the impact will be felt in every school nonetheless.

Macdiarmid repeats the refrain that we have heard over and over again, that the government values education and health care above all else, yet the Liberals continue to reduce the amount of money that inflation and the changing needs of the population require. At the same time, the education ministry stands behind the Foundation Skills Assessment that costs millions of dollars and has almost no value. Student test scores in small districts like ours go up and down from year to year depending on the abilities of the students as they move through the system. There is no pattern of steady improvement; there never will be. The scores will always vary from year to year. The students who are identified in the tests as Not Meeting Expectations come as no surprise to their teachers, who had already identified their needs on a far more specific basis than the FSA could ever determine.

When asked if the government would be providing additional funds to help those poorly achieving students meet expectations, Macdiarmid stated that there were already resources in palce: teachers, parents and the students themselves and perhaps if parents read to them fifteen minutes a day, that might be the help they needed.

The government’s commitment to education appears to be contained in her statements; if parents and teachers want the system to improve, do it yourself.