Place equity at forefront in education debate

This was written by my friend and colleague J-C Couture who is an executive staff officer with the Alberta Teachers' Association. While I wish he did blog and tweet, he does not. I'll let you know if I ever convince him otherwise. This post was originally found here.

by J-C Couture

In recent weeks, there has been much hyperventilating concerning government efforts to fundamentally redesign Alberta's K-12 curriculum based on the five year-old promises of Inspiring Education.

A small but vocal segment of this province has been gathering the tinder for what could become a season of wildfires. Calls for "back to the basics" and a return to more testing are being countered by those who question Alberta's overloaded curriculum while calling for more local flexibility for schools. Adding potential fuel for a firestorm is the exit of Alison Redford as premier, leaving Education Minister Jeff Johnson with an orphaned mandate and an image in some people's eyes as advancing an ambiguous agenda of "21stcentury learning" hatched by an inner circle of advisers.

Whether it is the competitive energy expended over international rankings, the current hand-wringing over memorizing multiplication tables or bemoaning the decline of phonics instruction - Albertans' deeply rooted anxieties over what counts as learning (remember the existential threat from the Japanese in the 1980s?) perpetuate our collective inability to address the systemic barriers to student learning.

According to Joel Westheimer, one of Canada's pre-eminent educational researchers, these interminable curriculum debates obscure larger social problems that stand in the way of a great education. Rather than polarizing debates over content versus competencies or traditional versus progressive education, the greatest impact on student learning is support for students in the early years of development and provision for optimal conditions of learning throughout schooling. Renowned scholar David Berliner and his team take Westheimer's point further. In their recent book, 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America's Public Schools, Berliner concludes the impact of the quality of teaching on student learning contributes 10 per cent of the variation in outcomes. Student background, community characteristics and other variables shape 60 per cent. Further, his team found that no credible researcher disputes the claim that teacher and school programming combined determines more than 30 per cent of student learning outcomes.

This is all not to say teaching, curriculum and what goes on in schools do not make a difference. But Albertans cannot lose sight of the fact with family and community characteristics determining more than 50 per cent of the chances for students to succeed in school, equity ought to be our strategic priority. Unfortunately, the current curriculum flare-ups distract us from the reality that among peer countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Alberta along with the rest of Canada ranks 17th out of 20 in terms of income

inequality, with one in seven children living in poverty in the province.

In a two-year national study involving more than 600 principals from across Canada that we undertook with the Canadian Association of Principals, school leaders report that rather than being able to focus on instructional leadership and supporting their teachers, they are increasingly struggling to mitigate the negative impacts of growing income inequality, the brittleness of families and increasing psychosocial problems of children and youth.

B.C., Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and other far less economically advantaged provinces than Alberta have made huge strides in their education systems by focusing on the systemic barriers to learning. Quebec's comprehensive daycare system is yet one more example of how addressing the readiness to learn can lead to huge gains in learning. While we are materially some of the richest people of the planet, Alberta remains at the bottom of the 25 economically advanced jurisdictions with respect to children's readiness to learn by age six.

Alberta teachers are mindful that literacy and numeracy will always be part of the eternal golden braid of learning. In a recent visit as part of the three-year-old educational partnership, Krista Kiuru, Finland's minister of education and science, remarked that as with her country, Alberta remains among the select few "education superpowers." With our Finnish colleagues and other international partners, Alberta teachers understand that the goal of creating a great school for all students will not be achieved through a preoccupation with finetuning government-mandated curriculum documents, obsessively testing students on the so-called basics or aggressively chasing competitive rankings.

Our schools are constantly renewing and recreating themselves. The 19,000 new students expected to enter next year and the 144 babies born every day in this province deserve more than the current curriculum brush fires - they deserve our sustained commitment to equity. This will ensure a great school for all students and our province's vibrant future.

Jeff Johnson nails it

The math wars have returned and Alberta is at the epi-centre.

Critics are trying to blame Alberta's Inspiring Education and curriculum redesign for Alberta's 2% reduction in our raw score on math over a period of three years.

I am often the first in line to critique Jeff Johnson's handling of Education in Alberta, but I am also prepared to give him credit when credit is due. Jeff Johnson does a masterful job of explaining the nuances of PISA and Alberta's math curriculum.

It's 6 minutes long. Check it out.



Check out this petition that is in support of Alberta's math curriculum that focuses on understanding. 

Making change in Alberta schools

Education in Alberta is changing.

The Alberta Government and the Alberta Teachers' Association (ATA) are spearheading change with Inspiring Action on Education and A Great School for All: Transforming Education in Alberta. 

I see Alberta a little like this: 

At the top is The Government and the ATA trying to lead change by lifting the system into the 21st Century.

At the bottom are individual teachers, students, parents, administrators and trustees who are innovators and early adopters of change. These people do the heavy lifting because they are the ones actually doing the everyday work of school while simultaneously making change.

In the middle is everyone else who makes up the system. This includes teachers, students, parents, administrators and trustees who are busy everyday making Alberta's education system work. This group is made up of the early majority, late majority and late mass.

Geoffrey Moore defined the gap between Early Adopters and the Early Majority as "The Chasm". In my picture above, the chasm can be found between the heavy lifters at the bottom and the rest of the system.

Making change in Alberta schools requires Inspring Education to cross the chasm to what Malcolm Gladwell defined as "The Tipping Point", where a majority of schools start to adopt ideas and change their practices. Inspiring Education has not yet crossed the chasm. 

Innovators and early adopters know that navigating across the chasm brings both crisis and opportunity. While the Government and ATA lift from the safety of above, it's the innovators and early adopters in the schools (at the bottom) that risk getting squished by the weight of the system. 

On one side of the chasm, innovators and early adopters are driven by research that others don't know about so that they can do things differently and better. 

On the other side of the chasm, the early majority, late majority and late mass are driven by social proof which is to say that they want what many others have and are talking about. The status quo, regardless of quality, lives comfortably on this side of the chasm.

Teachers who are interested in crossing the chasm will always find more support in schools and school districts that are also interested in crossing the chasm.

Teachers who are interested in crossing the chasm but find themselves working in schools and school districts that are not as interested in crossing the chasm will likely not find the support they need and risk being labelled as outcasts, rebels, troublemakers and crazy.

What responsibility does the Alberta Government and the Alberta Teachers' Association have in supporting innovative teachers who work in schools and school districts that are not innovative?

Jeff Johnson is confusing innovation with privatization

On Alberta Prime Time, Alberta's Education Minister Jeff Johnson was asked to respond to the Parkland Institutes recent research on for-profit Cyber Charter Schools in K-12 education:

"One of the reasons Alberta has one of the best education systems in the world is that there is a choice of different types of schools and programs in which students can enroll... I'm open to options that create excellent learning opportunities for our kids."

As a parent, teacher and Albertan, I object to Johnson's response in four ways:

1. This is not a thoughtful response at all -- this is a shrug. This is indifference towards privatizing public education. Albertans should be immensely proud of our world-class public education system -- simultaneously, Albertans should be appalled when our elected officials consider for-profit, private schools as a way of improving our education system. I've written a post here about why Cyber Charter schools are such a bad idea. It's one thing to suggest that students should be encouraged to become entrepreneurial but it is quite another to unleash entrepreneurs to profit off of children and public education. To be clear, this is not about pedagogy -- it's about privatizing public education which is ultimately wrong.

2. I am in my fourth year of teaching in a children's inpatient psychiatric assessment unit in a hospital. I work with children that present with a variety of different mental health problems -- while some do well in school, many do not. I fear that too many of these children may be seen as candidates for cyber school. Too many of the children I work with already isolate themselves and cyber schools double-down on an already failed strategy.

3. While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that choice via privatization undermines education equity and excellence, this is precisely what the research has been showing us. The assault on public education is not just an agenda pursued by Americans; Alberta would be wise to see American education reform and privatization as a cautionary tale and a model for how not to improve our schools. Johnson's use of school choice reflects a neo-liberal agenda that confuses public education as a private interest -- when in reality it is a public good. For a brilliant take down of the hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to our public schools, check out Diane Ravitch's latest book Reign of Error where she has an entire chapter on the folly of cyber schools.

4. Being open-minded is one thing but Johnson's response is growing old and tired. Every time someone asks him about a potential idea in education, regardless of its quality, he fires back with this hollow political boilerplate. Inspiring Education is a wonderful initiative that Johnson's predecessor Dave Hancock had the foresight and wisdom to start. However, Inspiring Education is not a blank cheque for the Alberta Government to do whatever they want.  Phil McRae from the Alberta Teachers' Association may have said it best on Alberta Prime Time, "What Albertans should be concerned about when I hear [Jeff Johnson's statement] is that when the minister speaks about innovation, he is actually speaking about privatization. These corporations exist essentially to extract a profit."

Inspiring Education was never about privatizing public education, so it's time for the Alberta Education and Jeff Johnson to stop confusing innovation with privatization.

Editorial: Doing it with us or doing it to us?

This was written by Jonathan Teghtmeyer who is with the Alberta Teachers` Association. Jonathan tweets here. This post first appeared on the Alberta Teachers` Association website. I also wrote about Alberta's new Task Force on Teacher Excellence here.

by Jonathan Teghtmeyer

If Education Minister Jeff Johnson is serious about educational change, he could learn something from past experience—Johnson served as cochair of the Inspiring Education committee.

In 2009, then education minister Dave Hancock embarked on an ambitious project to listen to Albertans about their hopes, dreams and aspirations for public education in the 21st century. The project generated rich conversations about the goals and purposes of public education to create a vision for education, which is articulated in the Inspiring Education Steering Committee Report.

Many of us were at the table during the regional consultations—we completed the online survey and participated in open discussion boards on a variety of topics. The engagement process took time, but it was meaningful and authentic. When I read the steering committee’s report, I heard my voice in it and I heard the voices of others, some of whom I don’t necessarily agree with but the voices were there. In fact, if there’s one criticism, it’s that the report is so broadly worded that everyone can find ways to support competing ideas on where to take education.

However, it’s precisely because of careful and purposeful engagement that the process and the resulting document enjoy so much support. Minister Hancock (now Alberta’s minister of human services) is a coalition builder; he ensured that a variety of people and organizations would commit to the process and champion it. To that end, one of the first groups to guide the process was the Inspiring Education Working Committee. This group of 29 diverse people represented 13 ministries within the government and 12 education stakeholder organizations. The diversity of voices included government officials, ranging from a deputy minister to a crown prosecutor. Stakeholders, sometimes with competing interests, were brought to the table, including private schools, school boards, superintendents and teachers. These people found a way to work together on a project they all believed in.

I suspect that at the time, Minister Hancock realized that educational change could only happen if the people most responsible for implementing changes were actively engaged in the process.

The Inspiring Education Working Committee defined the processes and provided input into the tools needed, and committee members reported to their representative groups on the success of the initiative.

The open-arms invitations, collaborative spirit and clear window into process that stood as hallmarks of Inspiring Education stand in stark contrast to the approach adopted by the Task Force for Teaching Excellence.

First, information about the task force isn’t readily available. What is available is housed on the servers of a private contractor that does marketing and branding work. Second, stakeholders weren’t invited to participate in developing the project and were told about it just days before it was publicly launched. Third, information about dates and times for regional consultations were released less than a week before the first public meeting occurred. Last, the survey tools and focus group questions were developed without any input from stakeholders.

It’s puzzling why the Task Force for Teaching Excellence would exclude the voice, input and buy-in of teachers. It’s unconscionable that ATA President Ramsankar was excluded from speaking at the launch of the task force, yet the president of the Alberta School Councils’ Association was invited to bring greetings. Puzzling indeed—after all, this isn’t the Task Force for School Council Excellence.

The absence of clear and readily available information raises many questions, the first of which is, “Is the Task Force for Teaching Excellence about bringing about change with teachers or bringing in changes toteachers?”

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.

Jeff Johnson and Teacher Workload in Alberta

Alberta's Education Minister Jeff Johnson knows that he has to address Alberta teachers' workload, however, he opposes placing hard caps on work hours.

As an Albertan and a teacher, I agree that teacher workload is something that we can no longer ignore. And like Johnson, I also oppose hard caps on hours.

Teaching is a profession and professionals do not have punch cards. Professionals must be given the authority and support to do their jobs and then they must be trusted to act on that authority. Only then can professionals be held accountable.

Rather than place working hour caps, Johnson has said that he would rather identify and remove unnecessary initiatives imposed on teachers by the province and school boards.

In principle, I can agree with the sentiment of Johnson's suggestions. For too long, Alberta teachers:

• have been treated as mere pawns in top-down mandated, flavour-of-the-month initiatives that come from distant school board or provincial authorities.

• have found themselves on the farside of education reform.

• are rarely asked to speak on their own account.

• are the end-point of education reform - the last to hear, the last to know, the last to speak.

• have experienced school board and provincial initiatives as things done to them rather than with them. 

• have been encouraged to take on new responsibilities without balancing their workload by removing other responsibilities.

If Jeff Johnson wants to address teacher workload, I suggest he start by empowering the teaching profession by:

• end heavy handed, top-down mandates from distant school board authorities and government.

• provide schools and teachers with sustainable funding to address class sizes.

• provide teachers with more time to collaborate and learn together.

• reduce the paper work teachers are required to produce such as Individual Program Plans.

• eliminate grade 3, 6 and 9 provincial achievement tests.

• rethink the scripted nature of the curriculum so that teachers can use it as a guide rather than a command and control rule book.

• rethink school board mandates such as district level standardized instruction and assessment policies such as online grading and reporting.

• work with teachers to make Inspiring Education a reality.

School has looked, tasted, smelled and felt like school for too long. In order for things to improve, things have to change.

It is unsustainable to expect Alberta teachers to take better care of other people's children than their own. 

Technology is only one of the many disruptive forces that are pushing on public education, and Alberta teachers are so busy teaching students that they don't have enough time to learn how to be better teachers. Unless something is done about teacher workload, Alberta's future failures will be paved by our refusal to innovate and improve on our past success.

David King on Alberta's Education Act Part I

This was written by David King who is a former Alberta Minister of Education. This is 1 of 2 posts on Alberta's new Education Act. This post first appeared on King's blog here.

by David King

In 2008 the then Minister of Education initiated a province-wide conversation about the future of K – 12 education in Alberta. The department contributed to the conversation by providing a structure – Inspiring Education – and Albertans contributed by providing content.

Although many of the participants felt that the government’s management of the Inspiring Education process was biased in favour of self-interest, and that this bias was reflected in the wrap-up, nevertheless the conversation was valuable.

From it came ‘standards’ by which to draft new legislation. These standards were never codified and agreed to in a formal way, but it would probably be fair to characterize public consensus around the following points.

1. The new Act should be clear about the foundational principles. (As the Minister of the day said, the new Act should be principle-based.)
2. The legislation should oblige the government to uphold foundational principles, without discretion to abdicate responsibility. The government itself claimed that its primary responsibility was to “assure” needful outcomes. (The legislation should hold the government’s feet to the fire, as much as the government sometimes holds others’ feet to the fire.)
3. The new Act should represent a commitment to the future (with all the attendant risk and uncertainty), rather than to the past. (Albertans want to be first into the future, rather than last out of the past.)
4. The role of the provincial government, as reflected in the new Act, should be to declare the goal and set the direction (by looking at the stars), and the role of the school operators should be to cover the ground and achieve the objectives that move us toward the goal(s).
5. The new Act should provide a legislative framework for oversight for all types of educational delivery, with as much operational freedom as is useful for good government, sufficient boundaries to be clear about public purposes and goals, and openness to as yet unimagined types of educational delivery.

Assuming agreement about the ‘standards’, the next important focal point should be on principles. What principles should be clearly expressed in the new Act? Again, based on the Inspiring Education conversations, the following suggest themselves.

1. The new Act should explicitly acknowledge and commit to the principle that public education is the preferred institution for education, recognizing that public school education is unique for three reasons: 1) it is inclusive without pre-conditions of any kind and it is inclusive of all who are students and of all adults as part of the community that governs it; 2) it is a deliberate model of a civil democratic community, so the government of public school education is democratic and public school education exists to promote an understanding of, and commitment to, democracy; and, 3) local democracy and local community are the ground from which springs every other community and democratic understanding. Public school jurisdictions should be given meaningful natural person powers.
2. The new Act should explicitly acknowledge and commit to the principle that the public interest in assuring education for every child is not only for the benefit of the child: education serves the public purpose of creating and sustaining our society, and the provincial government controls education for the purpose of assuring that children are exposed to ideas and practices of good citizenship in a civil democratic society;
3. The new Act should explicitly acknowledge that public school boards are a local general purpose government, dealing on a daily basis with the mandate of more than a dozen provincial government departments, and their range of freedom should reflect this.
4. The new Education Act should embody democracy, including the following ideas:

• all participants are worthy of trust;
• inclusion, respect, and diversity, without pre-conditions of any kind;
• the people who will be most effected by decisions are the people who should have most responsibility for making and implementing the decisions, and public school jurisdictions should have the capacity to accept mandates from local electors and accomplish locally determined mandates;
• open, transparent government, at all levels; and,
• elected representatives are accountable to their electorate, not to other elected representatives.
• all participants(for example, students as well as teachers) are producers of education, not merely consumers of it.

The Education Bill introduced to the Alberta Legislative Assembly today (February 14th) should be tested against these standards and principles.

Probably the first thing that strikes a reader of the Bill is that it is very similar to the current School Act. It relies upon concepts and organizational structures that are more than 100 years old. Most notably, it relies upon well-used words and phrases because they have been tested in the courts (often more than 60 years ago), and their meaning is well known to anyone who wants to continue living and working in the historic paradigm. The government’s stated reason for rejecting new ideas and new language is that newness represents risk for the government, since the ideas and words have not been tested in the courts. In its organization and language the Bill represents an explicit rejection of new ways of thinking, new models, new language.

The second thing that might strike a reader is that there is no declaration of aspirations or principles within the body of the Act. Some of the “Whereas” clauses allude to aspirations and principles, but “Whereas” clauses are advisory only; they are not decisive. The Whereas clauses may make all of us feel good, but they are not in any way binding. There is no description, in the body of the Act, of the intended outcomes that the provincial government or local school operators are accountable for assuring. Consequently, the entire Act is procedural: it focuses on means, without regard for ends. The Minister and the department can direct or sanction any school operator at any time, for any reason, because, in the absence of ends statements in the Act the Minister and department can enforce whatever end they choose, and their choice can change from day to day. On the other hand, in the absence of clearly stated expectations in the Act, the Minister and the department can decline to assure anything. For example, the general public may believe that every child is entitled to access a public education that is non-denominational in flavour, and the Minister may agree that such access is fundamentally important for every child, while at the same time declining to act in a timely fashion to assure it. Or, the Minister may say that safe and healthy schools are essential to good education, while the government defers school renovations.

The Act treats all delivery systems as being essentially equal. There is only a procedural definition of public school education, or of any other form of education. There is nothing suggesting that public school education is the preferred means of education, and no statement that public school education is important to the attainment of public policy. There is nothing to make clear that a necessary work of education is to create and sustain a civil democratic society. There is no statement that the government of education is to be democratic.

More, in an upcoming post.

Vouchers, direct instruction and standardized testing

"Standardized exams serve mostly to make dreadful froms of teaching appear successful."

-Alfie Kohn

Edmonton Journal blogger David Staples wrote a post titled "Redford will be dealing a blow to elementary students if the government axes provincial achievement tests."

Staples laments Alberta's newly elected Premier Alison Redford's campaign promise to do away with grade 3 and 6 provincial achievement tests. He is also critical that Redford's education minister Thomas Lukaszuk is currently reviewing how provincial achievement tests are conducted.

Before any changes are made, David Staples implores Redford to consult with all kinds of experts on testing, including Mark Holmes, professor emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

I had never heard of Mark Holmes so I googled him and found that he is an honorary patron with The Society for Quality Education (SQE). Here's what I learned.

Essentially, SQE believes the root of the problem in public schools is child-centered learning. They believe that progressive education that encourages children to play an active role in constructing an understanding from the inside out while interacting with others is nothing more than a fad.

Holmes and SQE are critical of the idea that learning should be customized to meet the individual needs and interests of each student. They are unimpressed that child-centered learning is designed to be fun, engaging and hands-on.

They go on to make the sweeping generalization that girls tend to respond well to child-centered learning, but low-income students and boys suffer.

It's important to note that the only evidence they use to claim any of this are standardized test scores.

So what is their solution? Holmes and SQE want public education to get back to the basics with more emphasis on reading, writing and numeracy with a strong focus on direct instruction and lecturing, including phonics, drills, and rote learning.

The way forward, they suggest, is by taking money from the provincial public schools' budget and provide parents with school vouchers. The idea being that funding would follow the student to whichever school the families choose, which would force schools to place a portion of their already scarce resources towards competing against each other to attract students.

It's been said before that the real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure ideology and mother nature hasn't misled us into thinking something that you don't actually know. I'm all for changing and improving education, but is there any evidence that endorses a 'back to basics' learning environment with school vouchers?

In the U.S., Milwaukee's voucher program was launched in 1998 and now serves 20,000 low income students and remains the longest-running program in the United States. In Milwaukee, the voucher program claimed to have two goals: the first was to provide a better education for poor children and the second was to create a competitive market among public schools, forcing all schools to improve. The theory being a rising tide would lift all boats.

Milwaukee has had vouchers for years, so it might be interesting to see whether they have fulfilled their mandate. American education historian Diane Ravitch writes, "Milwaukee's 21-year experiment has demonstrated that competition did not cause all boats to rise." Even if standardized test scores told us all we needed to know about these schools (and they don't), students in Milwaukee public schools continue to get higher scores than students in voucher schools. Vouchers fail even when held to their own unimaginative and narrow criteria (standardized test scores).

Pedro Noguera is a Professor of Education at New York University where his research focuses on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions in the urban environment. Noguera explains that there are problems with using vouchers as a means to improve schools for poor children. He writes:

The problem with using vouchers as a means to expand access to quality schools for poor children is that it is based on the premise that parents are the one's who do the choosing. The truth of the matter is that schools are the ones who choose and not parents. 

When a low-income parent shows up at a private school, especially an elite school with few poor children of color, there is no guarantee that their child will be chosen for admission - even if the parent has a voucher. This is particularly true if the child has learning disabilities, behavior problems or doesn't speak English very well. As we've seen with many charter schools, such children are often under-served because they are harder to serve and possession of a voucher won't change that. Many private schools maintain quality through selective admissions and vouchers won't change that either. 

Moreover, choice assumes that a parent has access to information on the choices available and transportation. Neither of these can be assumed. Many parents choose a school based on how close it is to their home or work, rather than the school's reputation. Many are unwilling to send their children to schools in neighborhoods far from their homes, particularly if transportation is not provided.

The irony here is that organizations like the SQE, political parties like the Wild Rose Alliance and other American Education Deformers, continue to prop up vouchers in the face of mounting evidence against their use.

Vouchers and choice tend to benefit those who have already "won the lottery" and often alienates and marginalizes those who can least afford it. Competition and the free market is for the strong. Public education is for all. See the problem?
So if vouchers haven't proven to help poor children learn better, will a 'back to basics' movement help them?

I've heard a lot of people complain about school. I've worked with unhappy parents and angry students who have shared with me how they have been wounded by school. I've listened to politicians and policy-makers describe why schools need to improve. In fact, I spend a good chunk of my time on my blog writing about how school should look a little less like school.

I even participated in Alberta Education's Inspiring Action that engages Albertans in a dialogue about transforming our education system, but I have never, and I mean never, heard anyone ever suggest that what school needs is more lectures, more direct instruction, more worksheets, more textbook drills and more rote learning.

When I hear someone say that we need to get back to basics, my immediate response is "when did we leave?" In his book The Schools Our Children Deserve, Alfie Kohn writes:

Proponents of traditional education often complain that the model they favor is on the wane. They're apt to describe themselves as a brave minority under siege, fighting an uphill battle for old-fashioned methods that have been driven out of the schools by an educational establishment united in its desire for radical change.

Such claims are understandable as a political strategy; it's always rhetorically advantageous to position yourself as outside the establishment and to describe whatever you oppose as "fashionable." To those of us who spend time in real schools, though, claims about the dominance of progressive teaching represent an inversion of the truth so audacious as to be downright comical. As we slip into a new century, traditional education is alive and well - as I see it - damaging a whole new generation of students. If this isn't always obvious, it may be because we rarely think about how many aspects of education could be different but aren't. What we take for granted as being necessary features of the school experiences are actually reflections of one kind of schooling - the traditional kind. 

Consider: Just as we did, our kids spend most of their time in school with children their own age. Most of high school instruction is still divided into 45-50 minute periods. Students still have very little to say about what they will do and how they will learn. Good behaviour or meritorious academic performance, as determined unilaterally by adults, is still rewarded; deviations are still punished. Grades are still handed out; awards assemblies are still held. Students are still "tracked," particularly in the older grades, so that some take honors and advanced placement courses while others get "basic" this and "remedial" that. Kids may be permitted to learn in groups periodically, but at the end of the day eyes must still be kept on one's own paper. Even from a purely physical standpoint, schools today look much as they did decades ago.

While it's true that traditional education can be found in rich and poor communities, the truth is that poor children are often subjected to poor teaching more often than their affluent peers.

In his article The Pedagogy of Poverty Versus Good Teaching, Martin Haberman writes about a typical form of teaching that has become accepted as basic. Children living in poverty are often provided a wealth of ritualistic routines that have teachers lecture, test and punish non-compliance while the students play a passive, seated role of regurgitating factual information. In this environment, Haberman explains, students can 'succeed' without ever becoming engaged or thoughtful.

Like Haberman, author Jonathan Kozol adds: "The children of the suburbs learn to think and to interrogate reality," while inner-city kids "are trained for non-reflective acquiescence." Paulo Freire's book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed further outlines the oppressive nature of an education that is simply done to us by someone else.

Debra Stipek, dean of School Education at Stanford University puts it this way: "Drill-and-skill is not how middle class children got their edge, so why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn't help middle class kids in the first place?"

In his article Poor Teaching for Poor Children... in the name of Reform, Alfie Kohn outlines a stinging indictment of the sit-and-get, spew-and-forget characteristics of a traditional education. Kohn writes:

The pedagogy of poverty is not what’s best for the poor. There’s plenty of precedent. A three-year study (published by the U.S. Department of Education) of 140 elementary classrooms with high concentrations of poor children found that students whose teachers emphasized “meaning and understanding” were far more successful than those who received basic-skills instruction. The researchers concluded by decisively rejecting “schooling for the children of poverty . . . [that] emphasizes basic skills, sequential curricula, and tight control of instruction by the teacher.

Learning is not like instant mashed potatoes; kids have not been through an industrial process of cooking, mashing and dehydrating to yield packaged convenience learning that can be reconstituted in the classroom in seconds by simply adding direct instruction and testing.
To suggest that school for any student, regardless of their socio-economic status, needs to be less actively child-centered and more passive not only ignores 60 years of research, but it also borders somewhere between ridiculous and asinine.

As for standardized tests, they tell us as much about learning as reality television tells us about reality. Very little of what matters most in schools can be reduced to a number, and as long as we continue to stifle the education debate by limiting ourselves to the narrow measurements of standardized tests, cancerous and destructive forms of education reform will continue to look appealing. As one educational researcher put it, "Measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning."

A rule of thumb I use: A person's understanding for standardized testing rapidly diminishes with their demands to test younger and younger children. Virtually all specialists condemn the practice of giving standardized tests to children younger than 8 or 9 years old.

Anyone who suggests that 5 year olds should be tested as soon as they enter school, followed by annual testing clearly hasn't paid attention to the cancerous effects of 10 years of No Child Left Behind's testing policies in the United States. Nor have they been paying attention to China's recent desire to liberate their nation from standardized testing's reign of terror. Like those who favor vouchers and direct instruction, pro-standardized testers are unfazed by research or real life -- for them, ideology trumps reason.

It's interesting that support for standardized testing intensifies the further you get from the students. There's a reason for this -- standardized test scores provide people who have absolutely no desire to spend time with children the opportunity to judge and control what goes on inside of schools without ever stepping foot in schools.

It makes little sense to pursue reform strategies such as vouchers, direct instruction and standardized testing which are absent in countries with the most successful education systems. As an Albertan who is both a parent and an educator, I would rather Premier Redford and Minister Lukaszuk spend their time with more informed and inspring people than those who are willing to advance their ideology and play politics with education at our children's peril.

It's time to hold tests and grades accountable

My assessment simplified post received the following comment:

I think we have to be really careful to assess based on criteria and not just what looks "cool" in the classroom. If as teachers we are not willing to teach and assess curriculum, then we shouldn't be teaching in the public system. Furthermore, we need to have a realistic idea of what grade-level achievement looks like and be willing to accurately report it to parents when the time comes. I agree that traditional grades can hurt a student's ability to learn, but at the end of the day, teachers need to be accountable to parents, and ultimately the students, by reporting accurately. Worse than giving a grade is giving one that isn't based on fact.

This is a classic cookie-cutter response that I regularly receive when discussing the abolishment of grading and testing, and I would like to respond with a few points.

Testing and grading have not existed forever; they are modern day technologies that educators and education systems adopted relatively recently. With every technology there are sources of error. Remember that in order to reduce something as messy as learning to a number requires some underlying algorithms which are fallible. Your doctor will tell you that your cholesterol test has 20% error associated with it. Political polls like to believe they are gaining valuable insight into who will win the next election, but they advertise their error rate. In other words, many professionals attempt to make inferences based on samples from an entire domain. But do teachers or the education system acknowledge the error associated with grading and testing? Every time teachers, administrators and policy makers sell these grades as an act of precision, they are engaging in assessment malpractice.


There are only two ways you can test people. You can ask them to supply a response/performance or you ask them to pick an answer. The latter includes things like multiple choice exams which only came about around 1910. The former has been around forever. To claim the latter as a requirement for teaching in public education seems ignorant.

Any accountability system that shrugs at the harms done to student learning in the name of reporting must be held to account. Anyone who believes our mania for reducing everything to numbers is reporting real learning accurately has lost the plot. Grading and testing as a means of holding schools accountable is not like the weather - it's not just this thing we have to get used to; rather it is a morally objectionable and intellectually indefensible political movement that must be opposed.

"Worse than giving a grade is giving one that isn't based on fact" is a very powerful comment, but if Linda McNeil from Rice University is correct in saying that measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning than the traditional methods for counting grades may be based on "facts" or criteria that simply don't matter all that much. If you talk to parents and ask them what they want for their children from a good education, they don't say "well, I want them to understand standard deviation and coordinating conjunctions, and they better help their school score well on their accountability pillars." I'm not sure how we can properly grade and test creativity, perseverance, initiative, intrinsic motivation, democratic citizenry, social justice, patience, thoughtfulness and diligence, but I do know our curriculums, programs of studies and state standards tend to ignore all these "cool" things. Some might speculate that giving a grade not based on 'fact' is worse than giving any grade, while others will say that there is a big difference between valuing what you can measure and measuring what you value.

The perceived need for grades is an argument built on the need for ranking and sorting children which have nothing to do with learning, and it's time to hold such an argument accountable.

Alberta's Inspring Education

On June 2, Alberta Education released their Inspiring Education Steering Committee Report. This has been a long awaited document, as many teachers have waited in the balance to hear where the government plans to direct education.

Of course, the entire report was directed by Albertans, as they were asked to contribute their thoughts and feelings on the future of Alberta education. The democratic nature of Inspiring Education can be found in its subtitle - A dialogue with Albertans.

Through the Inspiring Education dialogue, Albertans articulated a vision for a 21st Century education:

• Engaged Thinker
• Ethical Citizen
• Entrepreneurial Spirit

To achieve these three essential outcomes for an educated Albertan of the 21st Century, transformational change with a bias for action and a tolerance for risk will be demanded from all stake-holders.

To achieve this, we need a shift in policy:

For this shift in policy, we need the following shift in governance policy:

So what does this all mean? Well, you need to read the report below, but here are a few points the minister made during the June 2 press conference:

• School Act will be written to be adaptable, less prescriptive and more of a framework
• learner-oriented as opposed to system-oriented
• Classrooms will focus less on content and more on competencies (less curriculum outcomes to distract students and teacher from real learning that is relevant to the learner)
• Assessment will shift from standardization of assessment to a focus on standards of assessment.