Surveying educational trends in Canadian K-12 education is always a challenge when Canada’s ten provincial school systems rarely move together in the same direction. International comparisons in education, including those sanctioned by the the OECD’s Education Office, can be downright misleading, especially when “Ontario” stands in for “Canada.” Few operating within the Queen’s Park orbit would likely notice that difference.
Drawing up a National Report Card is such a challenge that we have the field all to ourselves. Changes in provincial governments and the appointment of new education ministers can result in seismic changes, and governments seeking re-election tend to front-load spending and campaign for more “investments” in public education. It is possible, however, to identify a few emerging issues and to point to some hopeful signs.
Dominant Issues:
Sea Change in BC Education
The BC New Democratic Party under newly-elected premier John Horgan moved forward with what was labelled by the BCTF and the provincial media as an “education correction.” “We don’t want chaos and confrontation, ” Horgan assured teacher union leaders, and he vowed to lead a government “showing respect in tangible ways” from the leadership level down to the schools. New Education Minister Rob Fleming arrived bearing $177-million more in education funding. In 2017, Fleming announced the hiring of 3,500 new teachers, made a commitment to fully honour the 2016 Supreme Court ruling on class sizes, and set aside another $40-million to ease enrollment pressures.
School Closures and Local Governance
Canada’s smallest province, Prince Edward Island, was rocked by a school closure crisis in early 2017 when the Wade MacLauchlan Liberal Government attempted to close small schools, rezone school districts, and reorganize the entire K-12 school system. After sacking the regional school boards from 2012 to 2014, the new PEI Schools Branch governance model, fronted by Deputy Minister Susan Willis, aroused a storm of rural resistance and utterly failed its first real governance test. In early April, MacLauchlan abandoned the whole plan, overruling his own Deputy Education Minister, and long-serving Education Minister Doug Currie retired before year’s end. That’s why the Charlottetown Guardian’s editorial board chose the closure of Island schools as Prince Edward Island’s 2017 News Story of the Year.
Treaty Education Controversy
Saskatchewan Education Minister Bronwyn Eyre got hammered for perhaps unwittingly wading into “treaty education” by daring to question the version of history being taught to her own Grade 8-level son. She voiced concern that her son was being taught, as fact, that “European settlers were colonialists, pillagers of the land… who didn’t respect Mother Earth” and objected to such “indigenous” interpretations being “infused” in classroom teachings. The embattled Minister survived calls for her resignation, offered abject apologies, and learned to keep such views to herself in the future.
Defense of Gay Straight Alliances
Alberta Education Minister David Eggen proceeded full steam ahead with his ambitious progressive reform agenda. passing four bills, visiting 100 schools, and meeting with two dozen school boards. In his year-end- interview with The Edmonton Journal, he claimed that the revised GSA legislation stood out as a major accomplishment. Weathering opposition from conservative-minded Albertans, he succeeded in upholding the commitment to GSAs and claimed that the new version protected kids from being “outed” who belonged to such school organizations. Defenders of GSAs like Edmonton trustee Michael Janz won re-election while facing vocal local opposition.
Ontario Student Assessment Review
Ontario Education Minister Mitzie Hunter finally launched the long-awaited Student Assessment Review, foreshadowed by the People for Education Measuring What Matters advocacy and guided by OISE professor Carol Campbell. Facing a public backlash over the latest declining Math scores, Premier Kathleen Wynne sought to not only to change the channel, but to initiate a “student assessment review” targeting the messenger, the EQAO, and attempting to chip away at its hard-won credibility, built up over the past twenty years. Where improving literacy and numeracy fits in the emerging Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) student assessment plan is far from clear at year’s end.
Student Mental Health Issues
With the news full of stories warning of a “mental health crisis,” teachers in the K-12 system are feeling anxious and more conscious than ever of their role in the front lines of education. One of Canada’s leading teen mental health experts, Dr. Stan Kutcher, has emerged as a voice of reason in the wake of school suicides and angst-ridden parents. What Dr. Kutcher’s Mental Health talks and research offered was something of a tranquilizer because he not only rejects the “crisis” narrative, but urges classroom practitioners to develop “mental health literacy” so they can “talk smart” with students and their parents.
Inclusive Education Implosion
Popular theories supporting inclusion for all in the regular classroom are now coming under much closer scrutiny — and being challenged everywhere by evidence-based models offering a wider “continuum of services.” The Interim Report of Nova Scotia’s Inclusive Education Commission, headed by IWK physician Sarah Shea, released in June 2017, signaled that the province was looking at expanding its programs to meet the complex needs of a wider range of learning-challenged children and teens. In New Brunswick, the New Brunswick Teachers Association (NBTA) and education staff have drawn the line after a rash of well-publicized cases where regular teachers are forced to wear protective Kevlar clothing in class or to seek medical treatment for black-eyes and teeth marks as victims of classroom violence.
Hopeful Signs
The Rise of VoicED Canada
The most positive development was the remarkable growth and expansion, in 2017, of voicED Canada, a 24/7 education radio network hosted by Ontario educator Stephen Hurley. Generating radio broadcasts on such a scale was mammoth undertaking but Hurley managed to ‘pull it off’ by enlisting the support and participation of teachers and educators in a growing network extending from Ontario to every part of Canada. It’s truly inspiring to hear teachers sharing their pet innovations and speaking up on larger educational issues. Under Hurley, voiceED radio has become a vehicle open to everyone right across the spectrum.
Arrival of researchED Canada
The international teacher research phenomenon, researchED, founded by Tom Bennett in September 2013, finally arrived in Canada on November 10-11, 2017, at Trinity College, University of Toronto. After twenty-four conferences on four continents, the researchED Toronto program featured 29 speakers from Britain and Canada, including luminaries such as Tom Bennett, Trivium 21C author Martin Robinson, and British Council Schools Director Susan Douglas. Among the stimulating and diverse session speakers were Self-Regulation advocate Dr. Stuart Shanker, mathematics teacher Mathew Oldridge, Manitoba teacher-researcher Michael Zwaagstra, and Dalhousie psychiatrist Dr. Stan Kutcher.
It was great to learn that Harvey Bischof and the OSSTF will be offering a second researchED Canada conference on April 14, 2018 in Peel School District, just west of Toronto. Something exiting is stirring among research-savvy Canadian classroom teachers and cutting-edge education researchers!
What were the dominant trends in Canadian K-12 education in 2017? Does this summary cover the most notable developments? If not, what’s missing? Is the arrival of researchED merely an aberration or the beginning of an awakening among class practitioners and grassroots education reformers?
Happy New Year!
The least hopeful is the obvious desire to eradicate transparency re the Ontario EQAO debacle that showed the math program was flawed,didn`t work,failed kids;the reading scores are in decline.
Rather than seek to improve their delivery of math and literacy ed,school boards barked that the tests were wrong and had to go.
The most hopeful is Research Ed.
Canada has no Ministry of Education,every province does their own thing.This gives us a venue-finally-for digging deep and sharing with educators concerns about what people are selling and using as far as curriculum and helping to bring the “real research”to the top.
Busted!I feel reinvigorated.
Pick Your Poison For 2018
I think we’ll be hearing much more about and from Jordan B Peterson in the coming months. He’s just thrown down the gauntlet to students to resist radical politicization. He is challenging the Social Justice Curriculum that the ETFO has successfully been implanting into Ontario schools. This goes back to the alert we were given by Paul in his column of March 11 — https://educhatter.wordpress.com/2017/03/11/social-justice-education-is-sje-a-broadening-or-narrowing-classroom-pedagogy/
I’ve just commented as below to that comment to build on Paul’s insights at that time:
(BTW, “pick your poison” is Peterson’s challenge and you will come across this in his video or see a reference in my comment):
It’s Finally Come To Pass
Paul W Bennett scopes the education field regularly and carefully, and then provides an analysis with questions added. His question, after a careful layout of the issues relating to social justice education, is perceptive — What is driving the movement to introduce Social Justice Education into elementary schools in Ontario and elsewhere?
Well, it seems it is not gradual evolution or a groundswell of public opinion that is pushing the agenda “in Ontario and elsewhere”. Rather, according to Jordan B Peterson “a small, noisy, domineering, victimhood-claiming, coterie of radically left-wing thinkers have commandeered the controls and are steering the ship where they want it to go, screaming bloody murder if anyone dares to question, or worse, oppose …” He refers to the yet another twist to the noxious concept of “producer capture” of the education industry — this time by the elementary teacher union for ideological reasons versus the usual self interest of the education establishment.
Please see Peterson’s call to arms published on video for the new year’s school season — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0EuQe6BOWo&feature=youtu.be
From the blurb accompanying the video, we glean the intent of Peterson: Students should speak out — “This sounds like indoctrination to me, rather than education, so I’m leaving” and walk out of the classroom if any of these topics are intruded into the regular classwork: diversity, inclusivity, equity, white privilege, systemic racism, gender. Yes, Peterson admits that mistakes will be made, some discussions may be reasonable, but on the whole he sees the scale of the effort as “essentially ideological and propagandistic”. He calls for “active resistance” saying “if effective action is not taken now to counteract the politicization of the public school curriculum, the need for such action will merely increase, and it will take much more to forestall the process later. Pick your poison.” His video is keyed to parents and students in elementary to high school.
The video argument is LONG, so have coffee or tea at hand, but it is sequentially built by Peterson in such a way that it becomes self-evident that the drive for these moves is guided and organized and not a spontaneous natural development of social change. That something needs to be done. What it does mean is that parents, in particular, must try and become aware of this creeping politicization danger and support their children if this issue comes up in their schools. The kids are sitting ducks in this element and what seems to be happening is very undemocratic!
I can’t keep up with the name-calling or stereotyping, let alone the false assumptions. The valid points made, and there ARE valid points, are buried and thus insufficiently addressed. Among the casualties are
– civic competence
– social responsibility
– civility / good manners
– elements of truth and goodness
tant pis (too bad)
Paul, I am curious about your comment about Ontario standing in for Canada in PISA results. Are you saying that Queen’s Park doesn’t know that Canada’s scores are different from Ontario’s (and that Canada benefits from the scores of Quebec and B.C.) or that they don’t particularly care if they confuse Ontario and Canada’s scores?
Teresa has a point. I am positive people in Ontario ed know the difference. Imagine the differences between education assessment in NY state and Washington states with Alabama and Texas.
One theme linking some of the above but not explicitly noted is how we work with the increasing diversities in our schools, of which indigenous students and the diversity in the area of sexual orientation are just 2 examples.
Curious about diversity.These Ss would really be helped by solid curric and stong remedial help. De streaming gr 9 is far too late to catch up on all the missed years.
Re diversity as mom of Mayan Indian daughter who is gay and African American ( now Canadian) daughter should I expect my daughter to see contemporary Mayan society reflected in her school life. Or taken to nth degree should I expect that the school work with my gay, Mayan, adopted daughter who has associated mental health issues. Really a solid math and language curriculum would have done wonders.How far will people take this bc handling all this diversity can become a very expensive and divisive issue.
Thankfully my children are no longer in school.
Teresa, quite the family if you are describing it accurately. I am making that assumption. If your description is not accurate, we have a problem!
The audience for looking at issues related to diversity include those who are considered “regular Canadians”: however that is defined. Given the societal fractures worldwide dealing with “diversity” may be more fundamental than ever. In the old days when achievement levels and standards were much lower, students who did not “fit” just dropped out. We can not afford that now.
Regular Canadians. Mmmmh so my black daughter would be included, background wise, but not so much my Mayan daughter. Is that what you mean? Yes, it is all true and that is the simple part of the story. Also, I am the white one, but grew up in England until aged 12, so my daughters are more Canadian than I am.
I guess my point is that even among regular Canadians, whatever that means, the diversity is endless. I am just curious how this will play out in practice and how this diversity will be handled. I suspect that groups will multiply and multiply all with valid reasons and needs.
I am curious too. Unfortunately, the evidence is that “Canadian” is too often considered of people who look like you and me. We are diverse and while we generally see that more clearly than in other countries we are far from perfect.
Like you, I see that there is a difference between pandering to superficial issues and avoiding deeper but harder ones like treating all people with respect. There is extensive literature on strategies and even approaches to content that are effective. Like you, I am disappointed on how rare such work is applied.
Yes, I agree with you Tunya. The video is well worth watching and as Jordan Peterson says diversity can be brought down to the individual level as I was trying to show with my gay, adopted Mayan Indian daughter. As their mom, I would not be thrilled if my children bought into this stuff. They cope with life as the rest of us do. But I do predict we will see an outpouring of groups, excluded people, victims; the list is endless.