Canada's income inequality

The Globe and Mail: Income inequality affects
every Canadian.

Income inequality is not just a made-in-America problem.

The Globe and Mail ran a piece featuring how income inequality hurts every Canadian's chance of building a better life.

This must-read is a part of The Globe and Mail's Wealth Paradox series which takes a look into how the income gap and inequality is shaping Canada. The question: How income in income inequality affects you? The answers are broken down into four categories: the wage gap, healthcare, education, recreation.

Here are a couple highlights:

WAGE GAP

• Canada's top earners have been getting richer with increasing speed while average incomes remain stagnant.
• In 2002, the average CEO-to-worker pay ration was 84:1. In 2012, its 122:1
• What if more companies ensured that the highest-paid worker never makes more than 10 times the wage of the lowest-paid worker?
• What if more companies engaged in profit-sharing with it's employees?

HEALTH CARE

• Inequality is linked to poorer health outcomes. 
• The income gap is perhaps the most pronounced in mental health care. An estimated 1.2 million young Canadians are affected by mental illness. Only 1 in 4 gets appropriate treatment.
• "What we have today in Canada is a two-tier mental health system in which kids are the victim." Michael Kirby

EDUCATION

• High income areas are primarily home to high-achieving schools while lower income areas have a higher number of lower-scoring schools.
• We need to stop pretending that education can lift people out of poverty on its own.
• Great teachers make great schools, but great teachers can't do it alone - they require the support of an equitable society.
• If we are not careful, we risk misinterpreting standardized test scores, and instead of waging war on poverty and inequity, we end up waging war on teachers and schools.
• Highly-educated and affluent parents can give their kids opportunities their lower-income peers simply don't have. 

RECREATION

• Median incomes haven't budged in 30 years, but leisure activities, the pleasure in life, some of which have become too expensive for the majority of Canadians.
• Parents of current minor hockey players spent an average of $2,898 on hockey-related items during the 2011/2012 season. The parents surveyed earned 15% more than the Canadian average. 

INCOME GAP SOLUTIONS

At the end of the Globe and Mail's piece is a poll that asks Which solution would best reduce the effects of income inequality in Canada? The options include:

Restore Fairness in our Tax System

Enhance Early Childhood Education

Emulate Germany's Approach to Skills Training

Create a New "Social Contract"

Boost Support for the Working Poor

Do Nothing - There's No Major Problem

Check it out here

I can't take the Globe and Mail seriously

I came across this Globe and Mail Editorial titled: Ontario NDP needs lesson on standardized testing, and I found myself as disappointed as I was unsurprised by reading yet another member of the popular press coming to the aid of standardized testing:

Suggesting that Ontario’s province-wide Grade 3 and 6 literacy and math tests are useless, as the New Democratic Party’s education critic Rosario Marchese did this week, is to reveal a party that is not to be taken seriously, at least on education. 

This is the party that, when it governed Ontario under Bob Rae, set up a royal commission that recommended these very tests. The Conservative Party later implemented the testing regime, and the Liberal government has added resources that have helped literacy scores improve markedly. 

But Mr. Marchese cited the hoariest of myths about the tests – that they “produce only a number,” and that teachers simply “teach to the test.” “A political tool, rather than a pedagogical tool.” 

Only a number? Schools learn how they did on each skill or “learning expectation” assessed – drawing inferences, for instance, or developing a topic. They can compare each result with that of the board and province. These numbers spur improvements in teaching practice. Teach to the test? The literacy tests measure higher-order thinking; teaching pupils how to find hidden meanings in a text would be a great accomplishment indeed. 

It is Mr. Marchese who has turned the pedagogical tool his party helped create into a political tool.

Until the Globe and Mail understands the following, I will have a hard time taking them seriously:

• Norm referenced tests were never intended to measure the quality of learning or teaching.
• Virtually all specialists condemn the practice of giving standardized tests to children younger than 8 or 9 years old. Grade 3 students tend to be around 8 years old.
• Standardized-test scores often measure superficial thinking. 
• The time, energy, and money that are being devoted to preparing students for standardized tests have to come from somewhere. There is something inherently disturbing about chasing high scores and calling it learning.
• Campbell's Law is as prevalent as it is ignored: the more any one indicator (such as test scores) are used for decision making, the more that indicator will suffer from corruption, therefore, bastardizing the very processes it was meant to monitor.
• High test scores tend to be an echo chamber for affluence and/or test preparation.
• Using test scores to "spur improvements" is a great way to encourage an education system to know more about raising scores than raising children. By the way, "spur" is a very telling verb to use in reference to what standardized testing actually does to those in the classroom. If the metaphor is to relate a cowboy goading, impelling or urging his horse by impaling it with his metallic spurs, I'm left wondering how this metaphor is ever appropriate when we are talking about people in a learning environment.
• Literacy tests that are multiple choice may be clever but they can never be authentic nor can they effectively measure higher-order thinking.
• Support for testing seems to grow as you move away from the students.

If you read this editorial carefully, you'll see that standardized testing is not being used as a pedagogical tool to further educational purposes -- rather, standardized testing is a political tool used to further nothing more than more politics.

Let me be clear, I'm not writing this to defend the NDP. For the record, I've never voted for the NDP in any election. Ever. But that is beside the point.

What I am proposing is that we need to have a far more sophisticated and mature conversation about education than what standardized testing can ever offer us.

If we truly care about things like teaching children how to find the hidden meaning behind a text, the popular press, politicians and policy-makers need to stop pretending the real meaning of education can be found in a test score.