Education Technology Visionaries: What Makes Canadian Ed-Tech Evangelist “Super Mario” Tick?*

Mario is the most iconic fictional character in the global video game industry. At the height of his fame in the 1980s, he was the star of the Nintendo Super Mario series of games, capable of ‘powering-up’ to acquire greater abilities and surmount any obstacle in his path.  

            Today, the Canadian education world has, by strange coincidence, its own version of a video game super hero – Dr. Mario Chiasson, a super-charged technology evangelist with a title to match, Director of Research, Innovations and Change Management in New Brunswick’s Francophone South school district, based in Moncton.

            At last week’s virtual Canadian EdTech Summit 2021, sponsored by Toronto-based Mind Share Learning, Chiasson dazzled the audience of educational leaders and ed-techies with his usual high energy presentation. “We are living in COVID times,’ he declared, “and it’s the era of VUCA.” Succeeding in it, he added, means “embracing the three A’s – agility, adjusting, and adapting.”  “Everything is fast and deep and we need to be responsive to shifts in time, space, and technology.” 

            If you missed all that, you are not alone. Chiasson talks fast and speaks in fluent but nearly impenetrable ed-tech jargon. What is VUCA?  It’s short for today’s “volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous” world driven by “the speed of technology” where the educational system is under pressure from a “digital environment” which is “collaborative and malleable” rather than ordered and set in its ways.

            Putting innovation at the centre of education is his mission and that of his latest visionary ed-tech project, Intrappreueur, aimed at transforming schools with digital technology, artificial intelligence, interconnected robotics, and new forms of management. “Shifting the education culture from an Ego-System to an Eco-Community,” is how Chiasson describes it with his usual vivid metaphoric language.  

            While it sounds like a pipe dream, the project is already underway in six pilot high schools in Francophone South. “We’re out to implify rather than implement innovation,” he told me in a recent interview. Some four out of ten students, he claims, are disengaged and to reconnect with them will require “inclusive, personalized learning.” In his vision, “the class will be transformed into the ‘learning lab’ and the school becomes an innovative community learning centre.”

            School leadership is a preoccupation of Chiasson and that may explain why he spends so much of his time ‘managing upwards’ in the K-12 system.  Since the inception of C21 Canada, the high-tech advocacy group of education executives, he has emerged as a darling of Canada’s CEOs and is closely aligned with the leading ed-tech vendors, including Apple Education, CISCO, InkSmith, and Steelcase Education. To no one’s surprise, Mario was honoured as Innovator of the Year in 2020 by the country’s leading ed-tech promoter, Mind Share Learning.

            Chiasson speaks a lot about what students need to thrive in the digital workplace and, more specifically, how to avoid being casualties of technological acceleration and automation. Today’s schools, he believes, need to set aside the old curricula and embrace the ‘recertification’ of students. “The labour force,” he contends, “needs to be recertified” because of workplace dislocations demanding a new set of skills. “Instead of developing workers, we need to develop young entrepreneurs or intrappreneurs.   

            Now entering his fifties, and after teaching for over 25 years, Chiasson has lost none of his zip and vitality. Born and raised near Tracadie-Sheila, N.B., he mastered coding at age 12 while wiling away the hours in the back of his father’s electrical supply store.  He honed his competitive instincts in provincial-level tennis and earned his first degree in Physical Education at Universite de Moncton (2002) before teaching French Immersion and going on to secure a Masters’ degree in School Administration with a specialty in technology (2004).  That Dr. honourific came in 2020 when Chiasson completed his Ed.D. at U de M under the guidance of Faculty of Education ICT professor Viktor Freiman.    

            Like most ed-tech champions, Chiasson strives to be cutting edge and exudes business savvy.  His own consulting firm, My Device, My Space, My Learning Inc., has a website overflowing with the latest high-tech buzz words.  “Personalized learning,” “project based-learning,” and “experiential learning” are among the most popular.  “It’s all about personalized learning,” he told me. “School is part of the journey and it’s important to introduce teachers to digital language, tools and ways of personalizing their teaching.”

            The New Brunswick intrappreneur high school redesign project now being piloted in Francophone South is explicitly designed to disrupt prevailing school culture. With the support of Superintendent Monique Boudreau and a business-education alliance, Chiasson is out to transform high schools with technology-driven ‘21st century learning’ philosophy, constructivist, student-centred pedagogy and the latest digital tools.

            “Digital IT is the new sandbox of innovation,” he says with a flush of exhilaration. Five years ago, his research revealed a “mismatch of leadership” because senior administrators simply could not understand, or see the value of. digital tools.  That is why changing school leadership outlook and attitudes is deemed to be critical. “We call it ‘Operation Leapfrog’,” he told me, because we’re moving from Leadership 2.0 to Leadership 4.0 embracing the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” When it is fully realized, learning spaces will be totally revolutionized. Instead of learning in a six-pack of regular classrooms, high school students may find themselves in large ‘open concept’ spaces looking more like an experimental learning lab with break-out rooms.  

            Chiasson’s futuristic vision pushes at the boundaries with some radical mutations. His Atlantic Institute of Education Summer Institute program July 26 to August 6, 2021, featured a keynote address British high-tech management guru Richard Kelly, the world’s leading proponent of “swarm leadership.”  The core concept was initially conceived by Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health researcher Leonard J. Marcus to explain the massive manhunt following the Boston Marathon bombings. Applying it to educational leadership, Kelly promotes “swarm leadership” inspired by “the ways ants, bees, and termites engage in collective work and decision making.”

            Educational visionaries project a certainty that comes from knowing the answers. Change is the only real constant in the world of the ed-tech evangelist. While leading regional IT initiatives from 2000 to 2004, he saw, first hand, the rise and fall of over-hyped projects such as 1:1 laptops and BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices). “Every two years,” he says now, “there’s a new phase of innovation.”  They didn’t work because “students were not performing” and there was “a gap between the vision and the actual adoption of technology.”

            One of Chiasson’s close allies, Karen Yamada, Chief Learning Officer of C21 Canada and the CEO Academy, cut through the tech-ed bafflegab at last week’s Canadian EdTech Summit. “We were rolling the rock uphill, then COVID-19 hit. It presented us with an opportunity to shake it up,” she said. “People, at all levels, focused on technology for the first time. It breathed new life into moving forward with the OECD Compass for 2030, embracing technology enhanced global competencies.” 

            New Brunswick’s “Super Mario” of digital innovation is an eternal optimist. Like most true believers, Chiasson remains undeterred by old fossils, skeptics, or the wreckage of jettisoned initiatives. “I’m a positivist and aspirational by nature,” he confessed. Confronted by skeptics or nay-sayers, he powers-up and remains steadfast. “I take the time to explain it, so they can understand it better.”  There is, after all, no turning back.

* Adapted from The Telegraph Journal, Brunswick News, November 5, 2021. 

What motivates ed-tech evangelists like New Brunswick’s Dr. Mario Chiasson?  What role does C21 Canada and the C21 CEO Academy play in seeding “21st century learning” in provincial school systems? How much faith should we place in technology as a source of innovative thinking and the route to educational transformation?  To what extent does the ed-tech industry blur the distinctions between private interests and the public good?  Do education technology designers promote innovations based upon forecasts of the “next big thing” or sound educational practice? 

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Educational Spending: Who’s Minding the Store in the Canadian K-12 System?

Some things in education return, year after year, like clockwork. So the dawn of 2021 produced the latest iteration of the Fraser Institute’s perennial report on “Education Spending in Public Schools in Canada.” Everyone in Canadian K-12 education attuned to public policy, from coast-to-coast, knows what to expect as regular fare from one of our most conservative, cost-conscious think-tanks.

Public spending, so the narrative goes, is invariably excessive, wasteful, and spread around without much focus on meeting targeted needs. Spending more on public education does not produce better student results and, in the case of the Maritimes, spending rises while student enrolments have declined over the past five years. Those regular monitoring reports also come complete with supporting statistics –in the form of data, bar graphs, and tables.

Flipping through Fraser Institute reports, you can almost hear provincial education ministers, superintendents, and educators muttering something to themselves: “Lies, damned lies and statistics.” That’s a rather snide comment about the persuasive power of statistics, and particularly the kind used to mount or defend weak claims and arguments. While often attributed to former British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (1804-1881), the phrase originated much earlier and only came into popular usage from the 1890s onward.

That was the phrase that first popped into my mind when reading the recent Atlantic Canadian spinoff from the Fraser Institute report for 2021. “Spending on public schools in Maritime Canada on the rise, despite largest declines in enrolment nationwide.” So read the Nova Scotia media release produced by Tegan Hill and Alex Whelan. What, one might wonder, is new about that pattern?

A year ago, the Fraser Institute 2020 report on Education Spending was mostly a yawn because it did beat the same old drum. Spending on public schools was up by 9.2 per cent per student from 2012-13 to 2016-17, a five-year period, and student numbers had dipped a little, by from 2 to 3 per cent in the Maritime provinces. Looking closer at the numbers, however, those increases averaged 1.8 per cent a year overall, and, at most 2.4 per cent a year in Nova Scotia. Throughout the period, it might be added, Nova Scotia consistently ranked 7th among the provinces in per-student spending, reported at $13,135 per student in the final year, 2016-17. Student enrolment in N.S., over the final year, actually began to edge upward to 118,566, province-wide.

The most recent Fraser Institute report actually did say something new and that may get lost in the whole debate, waged – for the most part—by ideologues holding fast to fixed positions. Something began to happen in 2017-18 that changed the trajectory of education spending in Nova Scotia and, to a lesser extent, in New Brunswick.

Total spending on Nova Scotia public schools, the 2021 Fraser Institute Report found, increased from 2013-14 to-2017-18 by 19.0 per cent to $1.7 billion, an increase of $279 million. Student enrolment did drop slightly over the five years by 1.7 per cent, but that was not the big story. Instead of ranking 7th among the provinces in education spending per student, it now ranked fourth at $14,726 per student. That’s well above the national average of $13,798 in 2017-18.

More was being spent on Nova Scotia public education and student performance, measured on international, national, and provincial tests, has plateaued or slightly declined, like many other provinces. It’s difficult to be definitive because, since 2015-16, provincial tests have routinely been reformatted, postponed or cancelled altogether, making it difficult to reliably track student results. That’s a recurring pattern and one that renders problematic the usual claims of declining standards.

What’s really new in Nova Scotia is the recent cost drivers for education spending. Two major program initiatives with infrastructure costs, Inclusive Education ($15-million per year since 2017-18), and Pre-Primary Program expansion/completion (2016-17 onward), are factors and produce recurring expenditures, mainly in the form of new education sector jobs. From 2017-18 onward, some 449 new positions have been added in K-12 education.

Few question the wisdom of moving forward with Inclusive Education for learning challenged students and universal Junior Primary for 4-year-olds, and those cost pale in significance when considering the real cost drivers in the extraordinarily high recent Nova Scotia education spending increases, all in the pension, benefits, and contract services domains.

Human resources costs represent the largest share of total education expenses, but under the public sector wage restraints, salaries and wages remained at or below the cost-of-living. Supply and services costs, including contracted work, reached $394 million in 2017-18, representing 22,9 per cent of all expenditures. Together, the employer share of pensions and fringe benefits totaled $324 million, up significantly over the previous five years.

Pension and benefits costs incurred by the K-12 system are running well ahead of all other expenditures, averaging more than 10 per cent increases per year. Carrying a monumental provincial liability, defined benefit education pensions cost $91 million to sustain in 2017-18 (representing 5.9 per cent of all spending) and addressing the problem continually gets deferred by the government and the education unions. Back in 2017-18, employee fringe benefits, including retirement allowances, were 13.5 per cent of all expenditures, double the national average, and up 31 per cent over five years.

Capital spending in K-12 education is hard to track because so much of the procurement and spending is financed over long-term financing arrangements. Some provinces simply report the annual costs paid in principal and interest on long-term contracts, disclosing only the annual carrying costs to the system. In the case of Nova Scotia, the provincial budget for 2020-21 will absorb $265.6 million in costs for capital projects. The deferred financing will cover the cost of renovating 16 schools and for the purchase of 16 Public-Private Partnership schools from developers at the conclusion of 30-year lease agreements.

Conservative business and public policy tanks are prone to “cry wolf” when wading into the regular waves of government spending, particularly in K-12 education. It would be tempting to dismiss the Fraser Institute’s 2021 Education Spending report on similar grounds. That would be a mistake, given the recent surge on Nova Scotia education spending, commencing before we were all hit with the pandemic.

Why are education policy reports from business-oriented think-tanks like the Fraser Institute routinely ignored or brushed aside in Canadian K-12 education? Why does so much education reporting and analysis focus almost exclusively on trumpeting new programs proposed to meet every conceivable need and boasting of dozens of new hires? Do human resource costs in K-12 education escape critical scrutiny? Who’s monitoring and overseeing rising human resource costs, particularly pensions and benefits? Should such dollars be focused more on meeting student needs in the classroom?

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Righting the School System: Will the COVID-19 Education Crisis be the Tipping Point?

The global shock of the COVID-19 pandemic proves, once again, the old adage that “it takes a crisis” and especially so in the world of K-12 education. Surveying the fallout from the school shutdown, the six-month hiatus, and the rocky school-start-up in September, everyone from school leaders to students, educators and parents, is absorbing the lessons, rethinking past assumptions and considering what once seemed like unlikely scenarios.

Pandemic distance learning was mostly an educational disaster. The centralized and overly bureaucratic school system described in my new book, The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools, proved to be vulnerable and ill-equipped to respond to the massive COVID-19 pandemic disruption. Students, parents, and teachers have –in many ways – still not recovered from the disruption and subsequent upheaval.

The three-month long school shutdown exposed what German sociologist Max Weber aptly termed the “Iron Cage” – a bureaucratic structure which traps individuals in an invisible web of order, rationality, conformity, and control. We came to see how dependent students, teachers and families were on provincial and school district directives. Little did we realize that it would devolve into a marathon and that possibly the worst was yet to come.

Since the resumption of school in September, the unsettling impact of the massive distance learning experiment, compounded by fears and anxieties over COVID-19 health risks, have destabilized whole school systems. Tens of thousands of Ontario students and parents, particularly in the Greater Toronto Area, abandoned in-person schooling for hastily assembled online learning programs. Some 11,000 parents, in spired by Toronto parent Rachel Marmer, flirted with creating pandemic “learning pods” and hiring teacher/tutors to serve small groups of four or five students.

The initial school schedule combining in-person and online classes proved incredibly complex to manage and, in some cases, unsustainable. Hundreds of teachers were reassigned to centrally managed online instruction and school timetables ended up being reorganized several times. Smaller class cohorts have now been collapsed as school districts, starting with the Dufferin-Peel and York Region Catholic boards, readjust again and resort to offering single stream combined courses utilizing live streamed lessons.

Building back the disrupted and damaged School System will involve confronting squarely the fragility and limitations of top-down, bureaucratic K-12 education. Cage-busting leadership will be required to transform our schools into more autonomous social institutions that, first and foremost, serve students, families and communities. It’s also looking, more and more, like schools will need to be far more responsive to the radically altered health conditions and shifting preferences of students and families.

Community-school based reform
Some forty years after the advent of decentralized democratic governance in the form of school-based management, provincial authorities and regional centres remain wedded to system-wide management of virtually every aspect of educational service. What is needed is a complete rethink of school governance and a commitment to clear away the obstacles to building a more agile, responsive, community of self-governing schools that puts student needs first. Without re-engineering education governance from the schools up, this is not going to happen.

Humanizing education
Flipping the system has emerged as a new COVID-19 era imperative, but decentralizing management and control, by itself, has little or no effect on what really matters—teaching and learning in the schools. It is only the first stage of an overall strategy to make our schools more democratic, responsive and accountable to parents, teachers, students and communities.

Students should come first in our schools, and this is best achieved in smaller schools operating on a human, student scale. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, let’s draw upon the lessons learned through the Human Scale Education (HSE) movement, particularly downsizing high schools, giving students a voice, and building genuine partnerships with parents.

Teaching-centred classrooms
Teachers are clamouring for a much larger role in setting priorities and determining what happens in today’s schools. The recent wave of neo-liberal education reform, driven by large-scale testing and accountability, has chipped away at teacher autonomy in the classroom. That has bred what Gert Biesta has termed “learnification” – a new educational language where students are “learners,” teaching is “facilitating learning,” and the classroom is a “learning environment.” Now promulgated by ministries of education and education faculties, the technocratic language threatens to subvert the real point of education—to learn something, to learn it for a reason, and to learn it from someone.

Teachers know what works in the classroom and are attuned to the spread of unproven theories and practices. Challenging education gurus and the school improvement industry will be essential if we are to base teaching on evidence-based practice and what works with students in the classroom.

Engaging parents in family-centric schools
Parent engagement is now part of the standard educational lexicon, but, in practice, it is incredibly hard to find it exhibited, particularly during the COVID-19 disruption.

One of Canada’s leading researchers on parent-school relations, Debbie Pushor, makes a clear distinction between school-managed parent involvement and genuine parent engagement. School superintendents, consultants and many school principals have a lot to unlearn.
What we need is a completely different model: the family-centric approach, embracing a philosophy of “walking alongside” parents and genuinely supporting the active engagement of the families that make up the school community.

Looking ahead—seize the day
Centralization of school administration has had its day. Eliminating or neutering locally elected school boards has moved us further in the direction of centralizing control over provincial systems. Without access to school-level education governance, concerned parents, educators and the public were left with nowhere to turn to address a host of COVID-19 education problems.

Global learning corporations, exemplified by Pearson International and Google, have achieved dominance through the spread of educational technology and licensed learning resources—and are finally attracting critical scrutiny. The pandemic has also laid bare parental concerns about technology-driven “21st-century learning” and student skill deficits in mathematics and literacy.

A new set of priorities are emerging: put students first, deprogram education ministries and school districts, and listen more to parents and teachers in the schools. Design and build smaller schools at the centre of urban neighbourhoods and rural communities. The pandemic shock has made us more aware of the critical need for meaningful public engagement, rebuilding social capital and revitalizing local communities. Rescuing the system may turn out to be essentially about taking back our schools and charting a more constructive path forward.

What’s happened to our centralized, bureaucratic and stable K-12 school system? Will the pandemic shock lead to a complete rethinking of the current structure and clear the way for systemic reform? Where do we start in building education back from the schools up?

*Adapted from The State of The System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020).

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Resilience and Schools: Do Miracle ‘Self-Help’ Cures Improve At-Risk Children’s Lives or Have Negligible Effect?

Today’s world is awash in miracle self-help cures for our lack of “resilience” and it has now welled-up in our schools. Mindfulness, neuroplasticity, trauma-informed cognitive behavioural therapy, psychoanalysis, career coaching, and yoga are all being adopted by well-meaning educators.  Children and teens who are identified as anxious, hyper-active, overweight or downhearted are far too often pathologized as having “mental health issues.” Hordes of gurus and experts are ready with the latest inspirational programs and quick fixes for all their problems.

Pursuing individual social well-being is not the answer, particularly for troubled, at-risk, and struggling children and youth. That is one of the most fundamental lessons conveyed in Michael Ungar’s latest book, Change Your World (2019), a masterful synthesis of 20 years of research in the field of resilience.  It will be an eye-opener to all who were, up until now, unacquainted with his ground-breaking work assessing the effectiveness of at-risk services for children and youth.

The first wave of New Age self-help came through the medium of TED Talks peaking in the late 2000s. Educational gurus mimicking Sir Ken Robinson were full of magic solutions to cure every conceivable ill besetting students, teachers, and school communities. Dr. Ungar has little use for such solutions because they seldom work. “Self-help fixes are like empty calories,” he writes. “The effects are fleeting and often detrimental in the long term. Worse, they promote victim blaming. The notion that your resilience is your problem alone is ideology, not science.”

Ungar is clear about what went wrong. “We have been giving people the wrong message. Resilience is not a DIY endeavour. Self-help fails because the stresses that put our lives in jeopardy in the first place remain in the world around us even after we’ve taken the “cures.” The fact is that people who can find the resources they require for success in their environments are far more likely to succeed than individuals with positive thoughts and the latest power poses.”

Studying resilience around the world through his Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University  produced some profound lessons. Some young people and adults “beat the odds” better than expected, especially those in war-torn societies and disaster zones. The reason has more to do with their social and physical environments than with personal traits such as “grit,” “growth mindset.” or “self-regulation.”  Changing the environments has more of an impact than changing outlooks and mindsets or even offering formal programs.

Services provided by health, social welfare and educational systems, Ungar and his research team discovered, are rarely assessed for their effectiveness in helping children, youth or adults “bounce back” from adversity or escape the bonds of dependence. For a professional social worker, Ungar is not afraid to pose the tough questions. What actually works in nurturing well-being and building resilience? Most importantly, does resilience depend on the services we receive?

Ungar’s Resilience Research Centre focuses on adolescents and young adults who are using multiple services. Many of his subjects are young people needing special educational supports at the same time that they are under the supervision of a child-welfare worker because of exposure to family violence.  Some are youth with severe mental-health problems such as attention-deficit disorder and conduct disorder serving probation orders for drug offenses or violent acts.  Other participants have learning challenges,including anxiety disorders. The balance are homeless because they had run away from abusive parents.

His initial study of Canadian youth examined the relationship between risk exposure, resilience and behavioural outcomes for almost 500 young people, all of them facing serious challenges. It was later expanded to include more than 7,000 young people around the world. The overall conclusion was that “resilience depends more on what we receive than what we have within us.” Providing supportive environments and needs-based resources, more than individual talent or positive attitude, accounted for the difference between youths who did well and those who slid into drug addiction, truancy and high-risk sexual activity.

School systems do not always fare well in Ungar’s resilience research findings. Education district offices and schools can be resistant to tailoring their programs and services to meet student an d family needs. One common example –  school guidance counsellors who insisted that parents take time off from minimum-wage jobs to attend case conferences because guidance counsellors and psychometricians do not work evenings. The results were predictable:  “the most vulnerable families did not show up because they could not afford the lost time at work. It was their children, doubly disadvantaged by learning difficulties and poverty, who wound up untreated and who eventually dropped out of school.”

“Student well-being” was sanctified in the Ontario school system from 2010 to 2018 and is now being mimicked in other Canadian provincial school systems. Yet Canadian resilience research demonstrates that social, economic and communitarian contexts and supports are far more important to student health, fitness, and financial security than our individual thoughts, feelings or behaviours.  “When it comes to maintaining well-being and finding success,” Ungar claims, “environments matter.”  A positive attitude helps students and adults capitalize on opportunities, but “positive thinking” on its own does not help in surviving childhood abuse, crime-ridden neighbourhoods, or natural disasters.

Why do today’s pop culture gurus, child psychologists, and behavioural therapists put so much faith in miracle cures and self-help strategies?  How and why have educators embraced those approaches?  What can be learned from Michael Ungar’s ground-breaking research? To what extent is what’s surrounding us more important that what’s within us when it comes to developing resilience in school and in life? 

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Education Governance Trends 2018: Is Nova Scotia a National Bellwether Province?

The Canadian education system is largely provincially-driven and stands as among the most decentralized among the member states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Within the small group composed of a dozen provincial/territorial ministers known as the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC), the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia tends to exemplify a “middling province,” almost routinely finishing in the middle-of-the-pack when it comes to national and international student assessment results.

While Nova Scotia education is widely seen as “median Canadian,” it might also be viewed, in some respects, as a bellwether.  It may be hard to imagine Nova Scotia as “the leading sheep of a flock, with a bell on its neck,” but the province may well be where national trends are most visible.  With the abolition of Nova Scotia’s seven English school boards in March 2018, national education observers are taking more interest and wondering if it is an omen of things to come elsewhere. If so, reading the signs of public disaffection may provide a few vitally-important lessons.

A November 2018 Public Opinion survey commissioned by the Nova Scotia Teachers Union revealed that the Stephen McNeil government’s structural education reforms are far from popular with the public. What is clear, based upon an analysis of responses to all of the questions in that the NSTU survey, is that there are educational lessons for governments elsewhere.

Centralizing education in April 2018 through the elimination of the seven English school boards created more problems than it solved. Of those Nova Scotians who think public education is getting worse, over three-quarters (78 per cent) believe it is because the structural reforms have made the system “too centralized” (30 per cent), reduced input from community/local groups (24 per cent), or eliminated regional input from boards (24 per cent).

More than half (52 per cent) of Nova Scotians polled rated the quality of public education as “fair/poor,” very much in line with surveys going back to 1992. Whatever the problems, some 82 per cent of Nova Scotians still hold teachers in relatively high esteem. The most critically important current public concerns identified were, in order: lack of support for special needs students (74 %), violence in classrooms (72 %), poor student achievement (67 %), lack of leaning supports (65 %), and teacher morale (65 %). Fewer than 60 per cited teacher workloads, class sizes, and student bus issues.

Provinces looking at following Nova Scotia in abolishing their elected school boards would be well advised to take a closer look at Nova Scotia and the legacy of that decision. Eliminating the seven English school boards and replacing elected board members with an appointed Provincial Council on Education (PACE) is looking more and more like a serious blow to both public accountability and school-level democratic participation.

With the exception of sweeping aside elected board members, nothing much has changed and it’s actually reaffirmed bureaucratic rule. Regional Superintendents of Education have come out on top and preside over eight school districts without any real school-level accountability. School-based management and governance was squashed, aided and abetted by School Advisory Council Chairs comfortable in their current roles.

Two more provinces, Quebec and Manitoba are reviewing the status of their elected school boards and have signaled that they may be moving to eliminate those democratic structures.

Quebec Education Minister Jean-François Roberge confirmed in December 2018 the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government’s policy commitment to abolish school boards.  He made that statement right after meeting with representatives of the Quebec English School Boards Association (QESBA) and its French counterpart, the Fédération des commissions scolaires du Québec (FCSQ),

“Let’s be clear: the Quebec government will turn school boards into service centres and will abolish school elections,” Roberge said in a Facebook post. “We’re open to comments, but we will not deviate from this plan.”  He also contends the move is necessary.“It is imperative to bring decision-making closer to those who know the students by name,” he said.

Manitoba could well be next. Former PC education minister Ian Wishart announced in 2018 that a provincial governance review would take place and it is to be released in 2019.  The Manitoba School Boards Association (MSBA) strongly opposes amalgamation, claiming that the savings would be minimal and it’s a question of democracy, transparency and accountability.

All is not well with Manitoba’s existing boards. The Winnipeg School Division (WSD) was the subject of a scathing report in 2015 that criticized the irresponsible conduct and performance of trustees. In 2016, the province ordered a third-party audit, after noting that while the school board had made progress in transparency and accountability, an independent review was still required. The WSD continued “under a dark cloud” for a number of years with growing concerns that too much business was being conducted behind closed doors. While the WSD may have improved, news in January 2018 that the Louis Riel School District had suspended a school trustee, without explanation, suggests that transparency and accountability may be just a slogan.

One outspoken Manitoba trustee, Patty Wiebe of Pembina Valley, MSBA Region 2 Director, urged fellow trustees in early December 2018 to send out a consistent message that elected members speak for their communities: “That we are your local elected officials. That we represent your voice when it comes to how your schools are run, and how important that voice is,” she said. “Schools are the hubs of your community, it’s important to have local voice when it comes to governing those buildings and what happens in those buildings.”

The Brian Pallister government in Manitoba has said everything will be examined during the education review, including proposals to eliminate or amalgamate school boards.

School board promoters can, and do, damage to the cause by conveying confused and contradictory messages about the philosophy and purpose of elected boards — and the expected role of elected trustees. One veteran school board consultant, Stephen Hansen of BoardsworkCA, provided a recent example of what has gone sadly wrong in school board governance.

His “New Years Message to School Trustees” espoused the sort of governance philosophy that has rendered elected board members totally ineffectual. Judging from the established ground rules, trustees are expected to behave much like children in grade school: Focus on policy and don’t mess with administrative matters; think corporate interest/regional and keep your distance from local groups; respect the code of board solidarity; express your views in a respectful manner; act as a goodwill ambassador; and come prepared to meetings (i.e., do your homework).

Giving the public a voice and bringing local concerns to bear on board decisions are not even mentioned as core responsibilities. No school reformers need apply because the rules of engagement are a recipe for toadyism. It’s just the kind of thinking that spelled the end of elected trustees in Nova Scotia.

Hardened, unresponsive, insular and unaccountable school boards tend to self-destruct.  That was the case in Nova Scotia and may well be what is happening in provinces such as Manitoba and Quebec. If Quebec and Manitoba go the way of Nova Scotia, seven of the ten provinces (including New Brunswick, Newfoundland/Labrador, and Prince Edward Island) will have eliminated elected regional school boards and adopted far more centralized educational administrative systems.

Simply brushing aside local democratic control of the schools is definitely not the answer if we wish to retain a semblance of public accountability in the education sector. Provinces eliminating elected regional boards without replacing them with locally-responsive, school-based governance alternatives can expect the same kind of backlash witnessed throughout 2018 in Nova Scotia. That’s in no one’s interest.

Will Nova Scotia turn out to be a national bellwether for educational  centralization? What lessons can be learned from the elimination of elected boards in Nova Scotia? Looking ahead in 2019, has public resistance to elected boards, as presently constituted, stiffened in the mold? Why are provincial and regional school authorities so resistant to alternatives such as school-based governance? 

 

 

 

 

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Promoting Student Well Being: Is the Mass Application of Mindfulness Harmful to Schoolchildren?

Mindfulness has enjoyed a tremendous boom in the past decade and has recently begun to spring up in Canadian school systems. Two provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, are hotbeds for promoting “student well being” through broad application of ‘mindfulness training’ and its step-child ‘self-regulation ‘ beginning in the earliest grades. Under the former Liberal Government of Kathleen Wynne, the heavily promoted “Student Well Being Strategy’ attempted to integrate ‘mindfulness’ through what is known as the MINDUP curriculum.  The recent change in government presents a rare opportunity to critically examine the whole initiative, its assumptions, research base, and actual impact upon schoolchildren.

“Student Well Being” has acquired something of an exalted status in Ontario schools ever since the appearance of a fascinating November 2016 policy paper,’ entitled “Well Being in Our Schools, Strength in Our Society.’ The whole concept of  Student Well Being was rationalized using a popular narrative promoted by its leading Ontario advocates, Dr. Jean Clinton, a McMaster University clinical psychiatrist, and Dr Stuart Shanker, a York University psychologist who doubles as the CEO of the MEHRIT Centre, a Peterborough-based organization holding a patent on the term “Self-Reg” and marketing “self-regulation’ in schools.  While labelled an “engagement paper,” the educators and the public were invited to “provide your insights and considerations on how best to promote and support student well-being throughout Ontario’s education system.”

Promoting “Student Well Being” sounds like the educational equivalent of motherhood, so it has, to date, attracted little close scrutiny. That may explain why the whole provincial strategy sailed through the normal process of review and was immediately embraced by educators, particularly in elementary schools. Few Ontario educators, it seemed, were troubled by the initiative and parents were, as usual with curriculum initiatives, presented with a fait accompli.

Growing concerns among leading researchers in the United States, the U.K., and the Netherlands about the widespread adoption of positive psychology, the implementation of the Goldie Hawn Foundation’s MINDUP program, and the mindfulness and happiness movement. failed to register.  Judging from Ontario Ministry of Education and school board conferences held in 2016-17 and 2017-18, the provincial school system was totally enamoured with an approach that promised salvation and relief from stress, anxiety, depression, bullying, and today’s frenetic school life.

What could possibly be wrong with making Student Well Being a system-wide priority? It sounded harmless enough until you bore down into what it actually entails and begin to examine the promotional videos and classroom resources generated by the initiative. An early warning was issued by British Columbia teacher Tina Olesen  in November of 2012 on the Scientific American Blog. Her concerns about the potentially harmful effects of Hawn’s MINDUP program were prophetic. Early studies in British Columbia (K.A. Schonert-Reichel 2008 and 2010) extolling the virtues of MINDUP curriculum have now come in for heavy criticism, challenging the validity of the findings.

Mindfulness and meditation recently took a big hit in “Mind the Hype,” a January 2018 peer-reviewed article in Perspectives on Psychological Science. An interdisciplinary team of scholars, led by N.T. Van Dam, found that the benefits of “mindfulness and meditation” have been over-hyped and that the research evidence to support its widespread use is mostly shoddy. They are very critical of the “misinformation and propagation of poor research methodology” that pervade much of the evidence behind the benefits of mindfulness. They focus in particular on the problem of defining the word mindfulness and on how the effects of the practice are studied.

“Mindfulness has become an extremely influential practice for a sizable subset of the general public, constituting part of Google’s business practices, available as a standard psychotherapy via the National Health Service in the United Kingdom and, most recently, part of standard education for approximately 6,000 school children in London,” the authors wrote. They also pinpointed a number of flaws in the supporting research, including  using various definitions for mindfulness, not comparing results to a control group of people who did not meditate and not using good measurements for mindfulness.

“I’ll admit to have drank the Kool-Aid a bit myself. I’m a practicing meditator, and I have been for over 20 years,” David Vago told Newsweek. A research director at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University, he is one of the study’s authors. “A lot of the data that’s out there is still premature,” he said. Educators are not the only ones overstating the benefits of mindfulness.  “You go into Whole Foods today, and there will be three magazines with some beautiful blonde meditating on the cover,” Vago said. “And they’re labeled ‘Mindfulness, the New Science and Benefits’ in some shape or form.”

Mindfulness has spawned a completely new “mental health and happiness” industry. Mindfulness and meditation are a popular practice that brings in around $1 billion US annually, according to Fortune. The booming industry includes apps, classes and medical treatments.  That’s what concerns Canadian mental health researchers such as Dr. Stan Kutcher, the Sun Life Chair of Teen Mental Health, at Dalhousie University. “Being happy all the time without feeling any stress,” he reminds teachers, is not normal.  Contrary to the claims of Mindfulness promoters, Kutcher points out that  “Anxiety Disorder is not the same as being stressed before an exam.  Handling such normal stress is, in fact, essential to being in good mental health.”

Where’s the research to support mass application of Student Well Being training based upon mindfulness?  Two leading University of Wisconsin  researchers , Richard J. Davidson and Alfred W. Kaszniak, addressed the problem squarely in their October 2015 American Psychologist research review.  Mindfulness meditation and mindfulness-based interventions, they found, lack a proper research base. “There are still very few methodologically rigorous studies, ” they concluded,  that demonstrate the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions in either the treatment of specific diseases or in the promotion of well-being.”

Studying the effectiveness of Canadian social and emotional learning (SEL) school programs is still in its infancy. One of the first such studies, conducted by Dr. John LeBlanc of Dalhousie Medical School and a team of researchers, systematically assessed over a dozen school-based SEL programs, including both “evidence-based” and “non-evidence based” programs. Five evidence-based programs (PATHS, Second Step, Caring School Community, Roots of Empathy, The Fourth R), and 6 non-evidence-based programs (DARE, Lion’s Quests: Skills for Adolescence, Options to Anger, Room 14: A Social Language Program, Stop Now and Plan (SNAP), Tribes) were identified.

A systematic literature search was conducted for all evidence-based programs, and each program underwent qualitative analysis using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) approach. Implementation recommendations were then developed for all 13 programs. PATHS and Second Step received the strongest recommendations for school-based implementation, due to high quality empirical evaluations of the positive outcomes of these programs. Caring School Community, Roots of Empathy, and The Fourth R showed promise and received provisional recommendations for implementation. Those five programs were recommended for use in Nova Scotia public schools. Eight other noteworthy programs were discussed. but deemed to require empirical evaluation before evidence-based recommendations can be made. Based upon the evidence gathered in subsequent Dalhousie Medical School studies, MINDUP would also fall into that category – not yet suitable for school implementation. The research study or toolkit for educators underlined the critical need for proper program evaluation to ensure that such SEL programs are “cost effective and yield maximal benefits for students’ behaviour.”

Why did the Ontario Ministry of Education adopt Social Well-Being in January 2017 as a system-wide priority?  Where is the evidence to support the implementation of a mindfulness-based initiative in schools across Ontario? Were Ontario parents ever properly consulted on this provincial curriculum initiative?  Given the recent research findings, is it time to halt the Student Well Being Strategy and to seriously look at the wisdom of proceeding on the current set of assumptions? 

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School Choice in Canada: What’s Causing the Latest Ruckus?

One of Canada’s provincial premiers, Brad Wall of Saskatchewan, has waded into the Catholic Separate School question and brought the issue of school choice, once again, to the fore.  In Late April 2017, he announced that, in direct response to a recent Court of the Queen’s Bench decision in the controversial Theodore Catholic School case, the province would be invoking the Charter “notwithstanding” clause to support the right of non-Catholics to attend the province’s Catholic schools.

A tiny local dispute, as is often the case, erupted into a  full-blown debate over the right of parents to choose the best school for their children.  It was sparked by the decision of 42 multi-denominational parents in the village of Theodore, fifteen years ago, to resist a public school closure and instead create a Catholic School Division and open their own publicly-funded Catholic school.

Premier Wall staked out his ground in defense of the right of parents to school choice encompassing public, separate and faith-based schools. It was a courageous decision given the complexity of the issue and the passions aroused by the Catholic question in public education.

Sorting out such a thorny educational-constitutional issue should not be left to the lawyers because it has far-reaching implications for parental school choice far beyond Saskatchewan.  That is why The National Post invited me to take a much closer look at the whole controversy.

The court decision to end funding for non-Catholics to attend such schools had great potential for massive disruption. Some 10,000 students and their parents province-wide were left in limbo facing the prospect of being forced out of their Catholic schools.

The Saskatchewan Catholic schools dispute is, for better or worse, a critical “test case” that may well determine the fate of the Catholic school option in Saskatchewan and perhaps elsewhere. It’s also about far more than the funding of Catholic schools in that province. School choice in Saskatchewan, as in Alberta and Ontario, rests, in many ways, on having parallel public and separate school systems, both in English and in French. Such options, freely accessible to everyone, provide more choice than is commonly recognized.

In spite of what look from the outside like uniform bureaucratic structures and curricula, such denominational and language options do allow for variations, particularly in core philosophy, academic focus, and student discipline.  One out of five Saskatchewan students (21.1 percent), 22.9 per cent of Alberta students, and 30.3 per cent of Ontario students were enrolled in fully-funded, principally Roman Catholic schools, in 2009-10, the most recent data.

Separate religiously oriented schools within the public education system not only offer choice but a measure of competition. Students and parents can opt for schools with provincially-approved religious instruction as an alternative to the predominantly secular, non-denominational public schools.

Saskatchewan is not the only province where the religious walls have recently come down. In many Catholic school districts across the three provinces, the relaxing of strict religious expectations and admittance of non-Catholics (or students of different faiths) has effectively expanded the range of choice, since such schools are no longer available exclusively to more religiously oriented families.

Alberta is hailed as Canada’s undisputed leader in the provision of a wide range of school choices. A February 2014 Fraser Institute report only bolstered that claim by demonstrating that Alberta offered six different publicly-funded options: regular public, francophone public, separate Catholic, separate francophone, separate Protestant, and charter schools.  The report’s principal author Jason Clemens noted that “Alberta goes out of its way purposefully, strategically, to provide parents with choice not only within the public system but outside the public system.”

Next to Alberta and Ontario, Saskatchewan offers the most school options: regular public, public francophone, separate Catholic, and separate Protestant schools. The continued vitality of one of those options is imperiled by that Theodore school court decision.

School choice should not be simply taken for granted. The vast majority of Atlantic Canadians living in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island have only one real choice. Over 95% of all K-12 students in these three provinces are offered only one brand of school, the standard English Public School model. In New Brunswick, some 28% of all students attend Francophone schools, but their curriculum and program are, with a few exceptions, a French mirror image of the Anglophone version.

Atlantic Canada is, putting it bluntly, a “take it or leave it” public system where only more affluent families have an alternative, the odd private independent school and homeschooling, enrolling from 1 per cent to 3 per cent of the total student population. About 2,600 First Nations students in Nova Scotia (2.1%) do attend very small Mi’kmaw Education Authority (MK) schools in 13 different native communities. Fewer than 250 Nova Scotia students receive tax support to attend special schools for kids with severe learning disabilities.

Public fears about charter schools in Alberta are fueled by defenders of the existing educational order— and appear to be not only irrational but unfounded. Under that province’s  1993 Charter School law, the numbers of publicly-funded charters are limited (to 15) and enrollments are capped, Introducing charter schools in the mid-1990s hardly proved destabilizing because the flow was restricted and only 1% of the student population were able choose them.

Giving parents and students more school choices and more variety in terms of alternative programs would not be ‘the end of the world.’  Students and parents in Canada’s largest urban school systems like Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver, already have many school choice options and have “open school boundaries” allowing students to attend schools of their own choice.  School district “boundary reviews” provoke an intense public outcry for good reason – the school board is dictating where your children are going to attend school.

School choice is gradually emerging as a fundamental human right for students and families. Choosing the best school for your child should not be so difficult or next-to-impossible without significant financial means. School systems benefit from being more open and responsive to a wider range of student needs and aspirations. Safeguards do need to be built-in to prevent a mass exodus and to provide some recourse in the case of under-performing schools.

Putting a stop to the removal of non-Catholics who have chosen to exercise their option of choosing an alternative to the ‘one-size-fits-all’ system is not only defensible, it’s advisable, especially in Saskatchewan. One can only hope that it derails any movement to further restrict parental choice in education.

What’s causing all the ruckus over the Saskatchewan separate school question?  Who gains when provinces move to “one big English language system” for all? How fundamental is the right to parental choice in Saskatchewan as well as Alberta and Ontario?  Should non-Catholics continue to have free, unimpeded access to Catholic separate schools?  Wherein lies the danger of broadening the range of choice in our provincial school systems? 

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Aftermath of a Teachers’ Strike: Who Will Step Up to Tackle the ‘Wicked Problem’?

A hard lesson in public education is being learned in one of the most unlikely places, the Canadian East Coast province of Nova Scotia, better known by license plates emblazoned with the motto “Canada’s Ocean Playground.”  The earth has shaken. That province has just survived its first protracted teacher dispute and the first teachers’ strike in the 122-year history of the Nova Scotia Teachers Union.

Here’s the backstory and a few questions raised by the bitter, divisive teacher dispute — where there are no clear winners and the provincial school system with 400 schools, 118,000 students, and 9,300 teachers shows few signs of recovery.

After 16 months of negotiations, three rejected teacher contracts, a 6-week work-to-rule, and a one day province-wide strike, Nova Scotia’s Stephen McNeil Liberal government finally brought the teachers’ dispute to an end. Under Bill 75, the province’s 9,300 unionized teachers were legislated back to work on February 22, almost a week ago.

With Nova Scotia Teachers Union supporters in the streets, the province’s reputed ‘Education Premier’ made a rare and startling admission: “decades” of education policy errors – including his own – had contributed to a full-blown education crisis.  Limiting teacher salary increases to 3% over 4 years was a key factor, but somehow did not factor in his thinking.

Reversing the former NDP Government’s education cuts helped catapult the Liberals into office in October 2013, and it was not supposed to work out this way.

Since 2013, McNeil’s government had invested almost $59-million in P-12 education to restore the depleted “learning supports” model. Reducing Grade 4 to 6 class sizes, hiring 59 math mentors, reactivating 114 Reading Recovery teachers, and adding more math and literacy supports simply band-aided the system’s endemic, festering problems.

Now the Premier was conceding that his own rather scattered “classroom investments” had “missed the mark.” Yet, amidst the education chaos, it appeared to be happening again.

Frustrated and angry teachers, emboldened by a few thousand placard-carrying NSTU protesters, came before the N.S. Law Amendments Committee not only seeking to block the back-to-work legislation.

They were also demanding immediate cures for a whole raft of legitimate complaints: a broken inclusion model, ‘no fail’ social promotion, chronic absenteeism, ‘do-over’ student assessment, increasing violence in the classroom, bulging high school class sizes, time-consuming data collection, and managerial excesses eroding teacher autonomy.

Concerned Nova Scotia parents and teachers are both demanding immediate correctives without really addressing the structural sources of what American social planner Horst Rittel  once termed a ‘wicked problem.’

A wicked problem is one that defies quick fixes and proves difficult or impossible to solve for a variety of reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the range of people and opinions involved, the prohibitive costs of resolution, or the complications presented by its interconnected nature.

Today’s school system is the product of a steady, repetitive stream of ‘progressive’ curriculum initiatives, overlaid since the mid-1990s with managerial reforms such as student achievement testing and school quality accreditation.

The P-12 public school system, like most in Canada, is now completely riddled with contradictions.  Curriculum innovations are almost constantly at odds with new system demands for managerial efficiency, student testing, and public accountability.

Curriculum and pedagogy or favoured teaching practices tend to support student-centred learning and incredibly labour-intensive practices, such as differentiated learning, authentic assessment, and ‘coding’ special needs students with ‘adaptations’ and individual program plans.

School authorities, ensconced in the Education Department and regional boards, now impose many external mandates, almost always delivered “top-down” on principals as well as classroom teachers. Vociferous complaints about “data collection” are code for the groundswell of school-level resistance to the system-wide imposition of technological initiatives (Power School and TIENET) or time-consuming provincial tests.

Inclusion is a ‘wicked problem’ of the highest order.  While the vast majority of parents and teachers claim that “the current model is not working,” they persist in believing that investing more in the regular classroom will make things better for special needs students, including those with severe learning challenges and complex needs.

Class composition not necessarily class size was the biggest concern of Canadian teachers in the Canadian Teachers Federation 2012 national survey, but it took a teacher contract upheaval to get Nova Scotia teachers finally talking out of school. Most are clamouring for more “learning supports” rather than holding out for a more permanent fix – a total re-engineering of Nova Scotia special education services.

After sixteen months of negotiations and three recommended agreements, the Bill 75 settlement will likely survive a court challenge. That was NSTU lawyer Ron Pink’s preliminary assessment. Unlike the Nova Scotia context, much of the British Columbia Teachers Federation decision turned on the B.C. government’s aversion to bargaining and arbitrary removal of class size and composition limits.

Establishing provincial commissions or committees to address inclusion and classroom conditions cuts little ice with frontline teachers, accustomed as they are to conflicted mandates and pointless paper exercises. Hashing out “working conditions” with or without an arbitrator is met with understandable skepticism.

Switching premiers every four years has not worked, so far. Education ministers come and go, but the so-called “iron cage” of education, protected by layers of bureaucracy and regulation remains essentially unchanged.

Looking for a better path forward?  Be bold enough to: Go to the root of the “wicked problem” and do not settle, once again, for watering the tree and rearranging the branches. Get on with undoing the failing program initiatives and rebuilding the system from the schools-up for the sake of today’s students.

What are the hard lessons to be learned from the Nova Scotia teacher dispute? How well are students served when Work-to-Rule ends, only to be replaced by Work-to-Contact?  Will other education authorities study the conflict in order to avert similar consequences?  Who will be the first to stand up and tackle the “wicked problem” of internal contradiction and self-defeating policy initiatives? 

 

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School-College-Workplace Transitions: What Can Be Learned from Bridge Building Science?

Bridge building can provide a rather unconventional source of educational reform insights. All bridges built over water –and constructed with the expert advice of a construction engineer — need “a foundation which is rested on the bed.”  Solid foundations, therefore, are critical to successful bridge-building projects.

School, college and workplace are far too often islands separated by hard to traverse expanses of water. Building bridges for high school leavers involves far more than simply clearing a path and creating easier off-ramps. It should involve paying far more attention to the cardinal principle of bridge building science — sound foundations matter.

A recent Nova Scotia Transition Task Force report, From School to Success: Clearing the Path, released June 21, 2016, looks well-intended, but appears to have missed the most critical piece — shoring-up the foundations on both sides of the bridge.  With youth unemployment hovering above the Canadian national average, the task force focused mostly on repairing the bridges, providing more program supports, and better career counselling.  It even proposed that high school graduates take a “gap year” on their own, presumably to acquire the requisite job-ready skills and work ethic.

How well prepared students were for success in college and the workplace was not really addressed in the Task Force report. When pressed to explain what employers were looking for, the notable silence was filled by one Task Force member. Andrea Marsman of the Nova Scotia Black Educators Association. “There are issues around deadlines and attendance and work ethic,” she told CBC Nova Scotia News. “They were saying that over the past several years they’ve seen a decline of respect for those particular principles of work ethic.”

Boring into the report, the problem with the educational foundation of the K-12 level pillar comes into sharper relief.  While high school graduation rates soar above 85%, only four in 10 university students complete their degree within four years. Thirty per cent never complete their university studies at all. At the community college level, 32 per cent don’t come back after their first year of study.

Raising graduation rates has been the priority in Nova Scotia , Ontario, and elsewhere for the past decade or so.  School promotion policies and “no fail” student assessment practices have significantly raised retention levels.  In spite of this, about five per cent of Nova Scotia students drop out in grade 11, unable to collect a graduation diploma. Those who do leave before graduation, it is clear, are totally unprepared for the daily discipline/grind and rigors of the workplace.

The Nova Scotia Task Force report simply accepts the current status quo — trying to help high school dropouts to graduate. While it is true that dropouts are twice as likely to be unemployed, and college dropouts are have 3 % higher unemployment rates, the report does not really confront the the quality and preparedness of students leaving the system.  Instead, the Task Force recommended making it easier to graduate and funding more school-to-workplace bridge programs.

The Transition Task Force recommendations completely flew in the face of the most recent evidence on employer satisfaction with Nova Scotia student graduates.  In the Nova Scotia Education Review survey, released in October 2014, only 38% of the 2,309 community members surveyed felt that students were “well prepared” for college or university, and fewer still, some 18%, felt they were well prepared for the workforce (p. 35).  Only one of three of the community respondents found students “well prepared” to move onto the next grade, so that is hardly an earthshaking revelation (p. 31).

The answers to the critical questions of preparedness and what today’s workplace demands may not be squarely addressed in the Nova Scotia report, but they are in a pertinent American study, produced in January 2014 by Bentley University researchers.  Just as in Nova Scotia and other provinces, the business sector concerns that today’s college graduates aren’t properly prepared are not going away.  What is changing is the willingness of U.S. colleges and universities to grapple with and address the core issue – improving the core competencies, skills, and work ethic of graduates.

The PreparedU Millennial Preparedness Survey questioned 3,000 respondents across nine audiences and examined skills, traits, use of technology, workplace attitudes and expectations, along with opinions of executives about millennials and vice versa, and much more. It directly addressed the preparedness problem and found a surprising consensus around the source of the problem – a lack of focus on developing strong character, determination, resilience and work ethic. It also found students’ self-perceptions, fostered in schools, to be out of line with those of employers.  Most alarming of all, businesses surveyed found graduates unprepared or unemployable, but seemingly confident in their own abilities.

Thirty-five percent of surveyed U.S. business leaders reported recent graduates they have hired would get a “C” or lower for preparation, if graded. However, they didn’t believe the fault rested entirely with students. Many businesses claimed that “soft skills” were highly valued, but their hiring decisions demonstrated otherwise, showing a clear preference for those with “hard skills,” such as technology training or apprenticeship certificates.

Just over half of business decision-makers and 43 percent of corporate recruiters surveyed said the business community itself deserves a “C” or lower on how well they are preparing recent grads for their first jobs. They also acknowledged that many businesses are not training new hires like they used to, leaving career colleges and private companies to fill the gaps.

School-college-workplace bridges will not be built in a day, nor will they be repaired by tinkering with, or extending, existing programs. Education department reports, like the June 2016 Nova Scotia Task Force study, tend to avoid going to the root of the preparedness problem. Looking at the membership of the Transitions Task Force, it is easy to see why.  Of the seventeen appointed members, the vast majority have a stake in the current system, only two were from business or industry and only one was a teacher in the K-12 school system.

What can school authorities wrestling with school-college-workplace transitions learn from bridge building science?  Why is the preparedness problem so difficult to tackle?  How can you assess the preparedness of high school and college graduates without systematically surveying job seekers or prospective employers? 

 

 

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Child Mental Health and the Schools: Wherein Lies the “Crisis”?

The public cries of “crisis” are in the air, especially when it comes to child/teen mental health in the schools. Britain’s government-appointed Mental Health Champion, Natasha Devon, rang the latest alarm bell in The Telegram (April 29, 2016) claiming that the “child mental health crisis is spinning out of control.” In issuing her “Mental Health Manifesto” for Britain’s schoolchildren, Devon frequently cites a scary figure to buttress her public claims — the statistic that “rates of depression and anxiety among teenagers have increased by 70 per cent in the past 25 years.”

Not everyone accepts her public pronouncements at face value — and a few are looking more deeply into the nature, definition, and prevalence of the so-called “child public health crisis.” Devon’s further claim that it constitutes an “epidemic” has sparked even more skepticism. Is this the proverbial twenty-first century equivalent of “crying wolf” or just a manifestation of our contemporary tendency to ‘pathologize’ social-psychological trends?

One of Canada’s leading teen mental health experts, Dr. Stan Kutcher, devotes his life to educating teachers, students and families about mental health disorders, but he is very skeptical about overblown claims. When asked about the purported “crisis” at St. Francis Xavier University a few weeks ago, he startled a local newspaper reporter with this statement: “there is no mental health crisis for crying out loud.”

Dr. Kutcher was not minimizing  the severity of the problem, but rather questioning the veracity of some of the recent public claims. “We have the same proportion of mental illness in our society now that we had 40, 50, 60 years ago,” he explained. “There is no epidemic of illness, there is better recognition of illness, which is good but what we’re seeing now is an epidemic of ‘I think I have a mental disorder when I’m just really feeling unhappy,’ and that is a direct reflection of poor mental health literacy.”

Like many health professionals, Dr. Kutcher sees the popular media as contributing to the public misunderstanding about the nature and prevalence of mental disorders. He’s critical of those who exaggerate the “crisis” and equally concerned about others too quick to dismiss
it as a ‘teenage fad.’“Now the depression happens in adolescents and depression is a serious disease and if you have depression you need the proper treatment for depression, but feeling unhappy, that’s not depression,” he said.“So I think a lot of people have become confused with all the talk about mental health and mental illness without the literacy to understand what they’re talking about.”

Stress and distress is not all bad, according to Kutcher. “People do have daily distress, that is normal, ubiquitous, necessary and good for you,” he said.“And all of us are going to have a mental health problem like the loss of a loved one, moving to a new city, losing your job – those are substantive challenges in our lives and we need extra help for that. But those two things aren’t mental illnesses and they don’t need to be medicalized, they don’t need medications, they don’t need specialized psychotherapy, they don’t need access to the mental health care system.They can be dealt with, the first one, mental distress, by yourself with your friends. The second one with special support, sometimes counselors, sometimes your clergy, whoever.”

As the Sun Life Chair of Teen Mental Health at Dalhousie University Medical School, Kutcher’s assessment carries considerable weight and he makes the critical distinctions that the popular media tend to completely miss: “Mental illnesses are different; they need specialized treatment like a treatment for any illness. But one of the challenges we have is that socially we’re tending to confuse mental distress and mental health problems with mental illness. So, because I feel unhappy today I feel like I should have therapy, because I take umbrage at what you said to me I have an anxiety disorder, that’s not true at all.”

Dr. Kutcher seems to dispute the whole approach taken by Britain’s Mental Health czarina and ‘body health’ counsellor, Natasha Devon. While Devon and her Self-Esteem Team (SET) target standardized tests and exams as “stress-inducers,” Kutcher and other specialists, including Dr. Michael Ungar, see value in competitive activities in developing “resilience” in teens.  Dr. Kutcher puts it this way: “We have to be very careful to differentiate the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in real life which we have to learn to deal with and overcome, and for which we don’t need treatment, and those things which actually require treatment.”

Mental health disorders are serious and providing more accessible, effective and sustainable services should be a top public policy priority, inside and outside of schools. “Teenage angst,” as Ella Whelan recently pointed out, “is not a serious mental health issue.” It is important to carefully consider all public claims for their veracity and to be skeptical of mental health charities seeking to “normalize mental illness.” We must also recognize that “not all of the kids are all right.” Nor are mental health services accessible or available when and where they are needed in and around the schools. Therein lies the real problem.

What ‘s driving the public call to address the “child mental health crisis” in schools? Are school authorities and educators equipped to make the critical distinction between normal ‘mental health stresses’ and serious disorders requiring treatment?  Is there a danger that those ringing the alarm bells are ‘pathologizing’ teenage anxieties and stress?  Is it possible to identify and support those in serious personal crisis while recognizing that competition and stress develops ‘resilience’ and is part of healthy preparation for life? 

 

 

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