Ranking and Ruining our Schools

When it comes to the Fraser Institute's Schools Rankings, there is little disagreement between the Alberta Government, the Alberta School Board Association and the Alberta Teachers' Association. Talk to a politician, school board trustee or teacher in Alberta and you are likely to hear why it is wrong to rank and sort schools via standardized test scores. In fact, in 2001, the Alberta Government, Alberta School Boards' Association and the Alberta Teachers' Association released a joint statement that said:

Alberta Learning, the Alberta School Boards Association and the Alberta Teachers' Association do not support comparing schools exclusively on the basis of test scores because this provides an incomplete picture of the education provided in any given school. As groups committed to education, we believe strongly in ensuring that parents and students are provided good and complete information as they make the important decisions about which school to attend—how well students do on achievement tests is just one piece of the puzzle.

Years ago, Alberta's then Education Minister Gene Zwozdesky said that it's, "patently unfair to make comparisons between schools based on scores," and last year, Alberta's then Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk said, "The Provincial Achievement Tests were suppose to inform the province about how well the curriculum is taught, but there are third parties who use the results to rank and sort and blame and shame schools."

If there is so much agreement over why it is wrong to rank and sort schools via standardized test scores, why is the Fraser Institute allowed to continue misusing test scores to mislead the public with their rankings?

It's true, the Fraser Institute is not doing anything illegal, after all, the Provincial Achievement Test scores are public information. But just because something isn't wrong doesn't make it right. 

The Alberta Teachers' Association has been an outspoken critic of standardized tests and has fuelled the argument for more authentic alternatives to public assurance. 

What is the Alberta Government and Alberta School Board Association doing to make sure schools like Braemar are not victimized by school rankings?

Why does the Alberta Government and Alberta School Board Association pursue policies that help third party organizations rank and sort our schools? The silence you hear from the Alberta Government and the Alberta School Board Association is a combination of assent for the rankings and a betrayal to our children.

To paraphrase Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for the misuse of test scores to prevail is for good people to do nothing.

Transformation without change in Alberta

The failure of province wide tripartite talks marks the beginning of the end for Inspiring Education and education transformation in Alberta.

Here's why:

Upon rejecting the Alberta Teachers' Association proposal, Education Minister Jeff Johnson said, "We wanted a province-wide deal, but not at any cost, so we're respecting their decision to go back and start bargaining locally, which is the way contracts have been set for a century in this province." From a distance, Johnson's quip may instill comfort and calm in the public, after all, labour peace (whether real or perceived) is always in the best interest of the government. And yet, no teacher will find solace in Johnson's efforts to minimize the risks of achieving Inspiring Action.

Alberta teachers know that in order for any meaningful reforms to be achieved current unsustainable teaching and learning conditions need to be addressed. This is the central message of the international research team that helped to map out the teaching profession's roadmap for transformation: Great School for All.

Teachers know that in order for school to change, they need to be trusted and supported by government and school boards to make sustainable improvements to how students experience school. Real learning and great teaching requires an education system built on trust rather than bureaucratic managerialism.

Teachers know that the current demands on teacher workload via scripted curricula, standardized testing, technology, class size and extra-curricular activities have teachers frantically distracted in an attempt to survive their work week. Teachers are so busy teaching school the way government and school boards currently mandate that they don't have sustainable time, effort or resources to inspire transformation. Frantic, distracted and overworked teachers are neither inspiring nor inspired to make school a better place for all children.

Teachers know that if we always do what we have always done, then we'll always get what we've always gotten. This is as true for lesson planning as it is for labour negotiations. While Johnson might find comfort in shrugging off the failure of province wide negotiations in favor of local bargaining, teachers know that asking 62 school boards and 62 teacher locals to sit down at 62 different tables will be as effective at achieving transformation as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

To be clear, this isn't about beating up on trustees or teachers. Each of the 62 school jurisdictions will do the best they can to negotiate good enough schools but at the expense of great schools.

Keep in mind that the Alberta Government holds all the cards: They command and control curriculum and assessment. They have a monopoly on legislation and they have all the money.

If Inspiring Education and educational transformation couldn't be negotiated in a discussion when government was at the table, it is tremendously naive to think that anything meaningful will be accomplished without them.

Expiring Education in Alberta

The Alberta Government has rejected the Alberta Teachers' Associations' (ATA) final proposal to reach a province wide deal between the government and Alberta teachers which means that the ATA's offer to freeze salary grid increases for two years and limit increases to one per cent and three per cent for the following two years is now off the table.

ATA president Henderson said, "We worked really hard to address the fiscal and stability concerns of government, and the government came back not offering any real, measurable improvements to teacher conditions and practice, and it was just something we couldn't take to teachers." Henderson also said, "So we believe that the minister and the premier have missed an enormous opportunity to improve classroom conditions for children, to contain their costs and to guarantee labour peace for the next four years."

Through out the province wide Tripartite talks, I've seen action and proposals from the Alberta Government via Education Minister Jeff Johnson, and I've seen action and proposals from the Alberta Teachers' Association via president Carol Henderson.

But what about the Alberta School Boards' Association (ASBA)?

Stephen Murgatroyd wrote an excellent blog titled The Missing in Action Premier Redford, and I think the same could be said of the Alberta School Boards' Association. While I'm one of the strongest supporters of public education and locally elected school boards, I'm disappointed by how little the ASBA seems to have contributed to these province wide negotiations. I have yet to see or hear a proposal from the ASBA from province wide negotiations. What have they tabled during these negotiations and how did they propose to address teachers' conditions of practice?

ASBA president Jacquie Hansen commented on the ATA proposal that was rejected by the government, "We’re not necessarily going to throw the terms of that agreement out. It’s certainly an excellent document to work from and it will just have to be hammered out locally now, rather than provincially.” Such a comment is at best naive. Local bargaining will now begin from scratch as none of the pieces (including the proposed salary concession) carry forward to local bargaining.

Hansen's comment leads me to believe that the ASBA has little understanding about what they helped convince the government to reject. If the ASBA and the government think that teachers locally will agree to 0%, 0%, 1% and 3% pay increases over the next four years and no measurable improvements to teacher conditions and practice they are dreaming.

We all want Inspiring Education to become a reality in Alberta.

We all want to make learning more personal and individualized for students, but this requires us to move beyond our content-bloated, top-down mandated, scripted curricula and standardized testing. Truthfully, there are bold teachers and courageous schools who have already made moves to try and make Inspiring Education a reality, but these pockets of progressiveness are fuelled by the blood, sweat and tears of teachers which are ultimately unsustainable due to the lack of systemic support from government and school boards.

Teacher's working conditions are students' learning environments. As long as teachers remain on the farside of education reform by being the last to hear, the last to know and the last to speak, and the Alberta Government maintains their 19th century Command and Control politics, Inspiring Education will remain nothing more than an initiative.

What's worse, if the government tries to push "any pace, any place, any time" down the throats of teachers without teacher input on how such transformation will drastically alter teacher workload, Inspiring Education will very quickly become Expiring Education.

Reporting Real Learning

If 70% of tax payers in Alberta do not have children in school, will they take the time to look beyond the limited and superficial information that a standardized test score can provide?

Likely not.

I don't really blame them for this; after all, we all have only so much time and effort to expend, and if a tax payer doesn't even have a child in school, they've got better things to do than study the quality of their neighbourhood school.

Be assured this is less of an indictment of the public and more of a wake up call for educators, school boards and governments to do a better job of exhibiting and sharing real student learning.

In Alberta, the Alberta Teachers' Association, Alberta School Boards' Association and Alberta Education need to collaborate in a far more effective and efficient way to replace standardized testing with something far more authentic.

Ultimately, real accountability really means that the public can access the information they need to know about their schools. In other words, accountability is really about transparency; and yet accountability begins and ends with standardized test scores which are anything but transparent.

This is true for a variety of interesting reasons. One example I often use is that if you want to know if a child can throw a ball, you don't give them a multiple choice test, you watch them throw a ball. And yet this is precisely the mistake we make with standardized testing.

We say we want kids to be happy, creative, responsible, ethical, honest, respectful, autonomous, and resilient, but then we give them standardized tests that are incapable of assessing any of these things. And yet how many people see standardized test scores as prima facie evidence that our schools are good or bad?

The best feedback parents can receive about their child's learning is for them to see their child's learning.

Back in the old days, show-and-tell, science fairs and barn dances were exhibitions of learning. Communities came together to observe and listen to students while they performed their learning - and if things went really well, parents and community members might have actually interacted with the students.

No one needed to translate the results - everyone could see with their own eyes that learning was or was not taking place. However, when we use something as artificially simple as testsandgrades to report something as complex as student learning, is there any surprise that many of us mistake testsandgrades and real learning as the same thing?

When we are offered the choice between the inconvenience of spending the time and effort required for observing the messiness of real learning with the arbitrarily convenient tidy testsandgrades, I fear we will be seduced by the spurious precision of the numbers.

This is precisely why educators have a professional obligation not to provide the public with such reductionist data.Truly no good can come from it.

Alberta Education Survey on Curriculum

I completed Alberta Education's online survey for Albertans to provide input on rethinking curriculum.

Here are my responses:

1. Curriculum evolves in response to emerging student and societal needs.

• I agreed and commented: Curriculum and course outlines that are created without student input is like a bride planning her wedding, honeymoon and life without a husband.

2. Curriculum enables student-centered learning.

• I agreed and commented: Too often curriculum is done *to* kids when it should be done *with* them. 

3. Curriculum enables broad exploration and deep understanding

• I agreed and commented: Coverage is the enemy of understanding.

4. Curriculum enables the development of competencies for living, learning, and working.

• I agreed and commented: Anything worth learning is worth doing so in a context and for a purpose.

5. Curriculum enables ways of learning - acknowledging that students have diverse needs and preferences for learning.

• I agreed and commented: We do not need standardization to have high standards -- and those standards need to be as vague as possible.

6. Curriculum enables ways of knowing - recognizing that one's knowing is influenced by personal identity, experience and culture.

• I agreed and commented: This is only possible if we have both differentiated instruction and differentiated assessment.

7. Curriculum enables learning through flexible timing and pacing in a variety of learning environments.

• I agreed and commented: This is only possible when both class sizes and curriculum outcomes small.

8. Please add up to three ideas that you consider important to guide future curriculum development. Provide rationale for your ideas.

• Curriculum should involve project based learning that is done in a context and for a purpose, collaboratively with students.

• When children have trouble learning this should be seen not as a problem *with* the child, but a problem *for* the curriculum to solve.

• Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information.

Educational Transformation in Alberta via Collaboration

On September 22, I had the pleasure of representing Red Deer Public Local #60 teachers at Alberta's Fall Education Transformation meetings. This meeting hosted three parties who play an intricate part of public education in Alberta: Alberta Teacher's Association, Alberta School Boards Association and Alberta Education.

I spent the day at Barnett House in Edmonton, the home of the Alberta Teachers' Association, sitting with my school district's superintendent, two school board trustees, two members from Alberta Education and two other teacher representatives from my local.

The day was spent discussing these three focus areas:

 FOCUS AREA #1: SHARED UNDERSTANDING/SHARED OPPORTUNITY
OUTCOME: SUPPORT FOR THE IDEA OF TRANSFORMATION AS A SHARED PROCESS

• What's the most important characteristic of education transformation for you?
• If transformation is about moving from one reality to another, what does this entail (e.g., is this about learning outcomes being different, is it about the classroom, is it about how education is governed?)
• Discuss the relationship enhancements that articulate a new way of working together -- what do we have to change about how we relate to one another?

FOCUS AREA #2: MOVING FORWARD TOGETHER: WHO DOES WHAT?

OUTCOME: SHARED COMMITMENT TO PRIORITY ITEMS / ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• If we are to collaborate on transformation, what's most important to work together on?
• How do we define our respective roles and responsibilities in taking on these topics?
• How do we hold one another accountable for our mutual success?

FOCUS AREA #3: NEXT STEPS

OUTCOME: SUPPORT FOR MOVING FORWARD TOGETHER

• What are some ways Alberta Teachers' Association, Alberta School Board Association and Alberta Education can start taking action for transformation?
• Is a plan required to guide the process? If so, what types of plans/planning are needed and who should lead their development?
• How, when and at what levels (local/provincial) do we involve other stakeholders in the process?

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I walked away from this event thoroughly impressed with the level of commitment each of the three organizations (teachers, school boards and government) showed for rethinking how we can work together. There was no finger pointing or blaming. 

Not once did we discuss test scores. 

Not once.

I can only imagine the legacy of hard feelings and grudges that have developed in Alberta between teachers, school boards and government, however, in spite of any potential desire to accuse, blame and criticize each other, there seemed to be a real commitment in the room to move forward together.

So what's next?

On November 4 & 5, The Alberta Teachers' Association and Alberta Education are hosting a Combined Professional Development Area Conference and Invitational Curriculum Symposium. This is remarkably cool because the government and the teachers together will collaborate on rethinking curriculum in Alberta schools. Essentially this event will provide the teachers and government an opportunity to work together to rethink curriculum with a focus on our partnership with Finland.

Perhaps the only hesitation I have with this opportunity is to ask what role the Alberta School Board Association will play in this rethinking curriculum process? Seeing as how they aren't invited.

Alberta Education's flip-flop on class size

On August 29th I saw this tweet from Kathy Telfer who is Alberta Education's Communications Director:

17 days ago I followed the link to the Calgary Herald article
that hosted this quote from Sharon Friesen,
but when I try to click the link now , I get a an error message. I wonder why?

You'll notice that the top, right hand corner of the picture above says 17 days ago. This is important because when I clicked on the URL in Kathy's Tweet 17 days ago I was directed to the quote Telfer featured in her tweet. The article was from the Calgary Herald and was titled "Parents fear affects of growing class sizes". The quote that the voice box of Alberta Education Kathy Telfer featured was from Sharon Friesen, an associate professor of education at the University of Calgary. But when I click on this link today, 17 days later, the link is broken. I wonder why...

To say the least, I was disappointed that the voice of Alberta Education was supporting a stance that might strongly suggest that class size doesn't matter. So I replied to Kathy Telfer one day after her original Tweet:

I think my point is pretty clear. I admit that small class sizes is not some magic bullet or panacea that will miraculously fix public education, but based on a plethora of research, clearly smaller class sizes are at the very least necessary, if not sufficient, in achieving increased student learning.

As if I couldn't be disappointed enough in Kathy Telfer or Alberta Education, here was her response:

This was all made that much more interesting when on September 13, Gordon Thomas of the Alberta Teachers' Association wrote a rebuttal to the Calgary Herald's piece on class size titled "A Sizeable Issue: Class Size Matters" where Thomas pointed out:

Although parents, teachers and trustees are concerned larger classes will adversely affect their children’s education, Sharon Friesen, vice-dean of the faculty of education at the University of Calgary, disagrees. The Calgary Herald quotes her as saying: “We’ve spent a lot of money reducing the number of children per classroom, so one of the questions we need to ask is why is the impact so small on reducing class size?”

(....)

Incidentally, Friesen is a board member of the Calgary Science Charter School, where classes are capped at no more than 25 students per teacher throughout the school.

I find it grossly ironic that Sharon Friesen would discount the importance of class size on one hand while maintaining a leadership role in a charter school that limits class sizes to the rather reasonable number of 25.

This reminds me of the old adage -- class size doesn't matter... for other people's children.

So almost two weeks after this whole mess started, I really have only one question for Kathy Telfer and Alberta Education:

I'll let you know if I get a response but if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath.