Noisy and Disrupted Classrooms: What Does PISA 2018 Reveal About Student Behaviour?

Canadian classrooms may well have an undiagnosed problem with students’ time-on-task. According to a global student survey conducted in the spring of 2018, one in five students, 15 years-of-age, report that learning time is lost to noise, distractions, and disorder, so much so that it detracts from learning in class. It’s also a problem that has worsened since the previous survey three years ago.

Canada ranked 60th out of 77 participating nations and educational districts in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s 2018 index of disciplinary climate, released on December 4, 2019.  The index is based on an international survey of 600,000 15-year-old students’ views about the state of student discipline in their classes. A relatively high proportion of Canadian students say the teacher is not listened to and it takes a long time for the class to settle down. In addition, students regularly skip school and report late to class.

While most mainstream media and education commentators focus on the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 test student achievement rankings in reading, mathematics and science, critically important survey data on the lived experience of students tends to get overlooked. Most Canadian educators are so totally wedded to current positive progressive discipline principles that there’s a blind spot when it comes to connecting deteriorating class climate with the stalling of student achievement.

Noise and disruptions are relatively common in Canadian language of instruction classes, and well above the average among the 77 jurisdictions completing the survey.  This is significant because students who report being unable to work well because of such distractions in most or every class scored 25 points lower in reading on the 2018 PISA test.

For most countries, classroom discipline improved between 2009 and 2018, the OECD report said.  Comparing student behaviour in 2015 in science classes with 2018 behaviour in English classes, student discipline has deteriorated with more students reporting that the teacher has to wait a long time for students to settle down, that students cannot work well, and don’t start learning until long after the beginning of the lesson.

Students are best behaved in school systems focused more on providing orderly, purposeful teaching, such as Korea, Japan and China, and other authoritarian countries. Classroom unruliness is far worse than in Canada in Argentina, Brazil, France, Greece, Spain, the Philippines, Belgium and Australia.  Concerns run so high in Australia that it’s been publicly described as an “entrenched behaviour crisis.”

A total of 38.9 per cent of Canadian students reported there was noise or disorder in most or all of their classes, compared with 31.5 per cent across the OECD participating states. That’s far higher than in Korea (7.9 per cent), Japan (9.7 per cent), and top European performer, Estonia (23.6 per cent). It’s also more prevalent than in the United Kingdom ( 33.7 per cent) and the United States (28.2 per cent).

Student bullying among Canadian 15-year-olds is also reportedly higher than in the United States school system. One out of five students (19.2 per cent) report “being hit or pushed around by other students.” Only 2 per cent of Korean students report being bullied, and some school systems’ classrooms are downright dangerous places. In the Philippines, for example, three out of five students (60.2 per cent) claim to have been roughed-up during the course of a year.

Skipping school and arriving late to class are more common in Canada than in either the U.K. or the U.S. In the two weeks prior to the PISA test, some 23 per cent of Canadian students skipped between from 1 to 5 or more school days. One out of three skipped some classes and over half (52.3 per cent) arrived late for school from 1 to 5 or more times.

Speading ‘nasty rumours’ is an unpleasant aspect of student life. One out of four Canadian students (27.5 per cent) report being on the receiving end of such psycho-harassment by other students, similar to the situation in  U.S, schools.  It’s far more prevalent in both U.K. and Australia schools and relatively rare in Korea, where only 9.6 per cent report being the victim of personally damaging rumours.

Connecting changes in school disciplinary climate with students’ academic achievement challenges is long overdue in Canadian K-12 education. Struggling students in noisy and regularly disrupted classes, according to the OECD, do pay a price in terms of their scores in reading and presumably in other core subject areas.

School-wide Positive Behaviour Intervention Systems (SW-PBIS) have eclipsed other approaches to student behaviour management in Canada and in many of the countries where students report poor disciplinary climate.  It’s exemplified in schools with regular noise, distractions, and disorder where students skip school and regularly miss classes.

Whether you favour SW-PBIS programs or not, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s a breakdown in effective classroom management. Far more attention has to be paid to responding to “behavourial violations” (where positive praise does not work) with planned and systematic strategies, including “brief, concise” correctives,  ‘planned ignoring,’ and the appropriate use of explicit reprimands.

Why do we focus so much on PISA student achievement rankings and tend to ignore the contextual analysis explaining the contributing factors?  Should we pay more attention to the OECD PISA survey data on student experiences?  How big a factor is “disciplinary climate” in creating optimum conditions for student learning and achievement?  Is it time to look at alternatives to school-wide positive behaviour supports and associated programs? 

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School Water Fountains: How Serious is the Lead Risk in our School and Day Care Drinking Water?*

“DO NOT USE” signs plastered all over school drinking fountains have a way of getting the chilling message across. For the past thirty years, those signs have appeared, periodically, on fountains in thousands of Canadian K-12 schools. Most of us walk by, unaware – until recently — of a simmering public health crisis.

What was a largely dormant issue has come back with a vengeance.  The November 4, 2019 release of the findings of the massive year-long Canadian investigation, spearheaded by the Institute for Investigative Journalism, has raised new concerns over exposure to lead in home tap water and school/daycare drinking water supplies.

The “Tainted Water” series of news reports were alarming because many in education had assumed it was behind us. The benchmarks changed in March of 2019 when federal health authorities reduced the acceptable levels of lead from 10 parts per billion (ppb) to 5 ppb. Out of 12,000 tests conducted since 2004, in 11 different Canadian cities, one-third – 33 per cent—exceed the new health. safety standard. The latest investigation, based upon some 260 water tests conducted in 32 cities and towns and validated in accredited labs showed that 39 per cent of samples, or two out of five, exceeded the 5 ppb guideline for healthy water.

The current health alarm is serious, but needs to be considered in proper North American context.  Three to four million American children were found to have toxic levels of lead in their blood back in the 1980s. Levels of contamination were far higher in those days. The U.S. EPA reported that thirty-three of the 47 states testing drinking water had levels exceeding the then acceptable standard of 20 ppb.  Back then, most people, including young children, were exposed to multiple environmental sources, including paint on old housing walls, drinking water, ambient air, dust, soil, and food, particularly canned goods.

The 1988 U.S. Lead Contamination Control Act imposed strict new regulations on American schools requiring them to clean up their act by testing drinking water, abandoning lead-lined water coolers, and remedying any contamination found in taps and water intake pipes. It faced stiff legal challenges and a great deal of non-compliance and was eventually struck down in 1996 by a federal appeals court.

The first real school drinking water scare did produce a ripple effect and reactive responses which reverberated in school districts, from province-to-province, across Canada. What survived was a 1991 EPA established standard that required periodic tests for lead and copper levels in public water systems virtually excluding schools and day cares drawing water from their own wells. While the limit was reduced to 15 ppb, it applied to municipal water feeds rather than internal sources of contamination. In the case of schools, most of the lead still originates in lead pipes, water-cooler linings, and in led metal fountains and taps.

Medical science has advanced significantly over the past three decades, but implementation of health regulations lags, especially when it comes to testing for lead contaminants in schools and daycares. Coast-to-coast, the Canadian investigators identified a patchwork of lead regulations, weak oversight, laxity in conducting tests, and the relative absence of regular testing of homes, schools or daycares drawing water from wells.

When Health Canada cut the acceptable level of lead levels in half, it sent provincial and school district authorities scrambling, particularly outside the major metropolitan centres,  The new regulation came with warnings that, even at concentrations as low as 5 ppb, high levels of exposure can damage the prefrontal cortex, cause prenatal growth abnormalities, and contribute to anti-social behaviour and child behavioural problems. It has also been identified as a risk factor for hypertension, chronic kidney disease and tremors in adults.

Thousands of Canadian children in schools and daycares are at risk of ingesting lead in drinking water and most were totally unaware of that until the release of the latest journalistic expose. Provincial authorities, with the possible exception of Ontario and British Columbia, are playing catch-up, compared to a number of American states more proactive in testing and public disclosure.

The EPA promotes its “3Ts” approach – Training, Testing and Taking Action, complete with home and school water quality testing kits.  Since August 2016, New York State has required all school districts and boards to “test all potable water outlets for lead contamination, to remediate contamination where found, and to notify parents of children and the public of the results.”

The 2016 public health crisis in Flint, Michigan, intimately connected with the toxicity of water did not seem to register up here in Canada. Periodic warnings were issued to no avail by provincial public servants, according to newly-released government documents obtained through formal freedom-of-information requests.

Cleaning-up school drinking water standards is back as a top education priority. Whether it will last in a system best by competing immediate demands for reduced class sizes, more resource supports, and improved working conditions remains to be seen. Deferred maintenance has a way of coming back to bite school systems.

*An earlier version of this commentary was published in The Chronicle Herald, November 16, 2019 

Why is lead still in school and daycare drinking water, thirty years after the initial revelations?  Was the 2019 lead in the water scare the result of Health Canada’s decision to dramatically reduce the acceptable standards? How effectively did school and day care authorities respond?  Without a nation-wide investigative report, how much would we have known about the extent of the problem? 

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