State of the Education Beat: Where Have the Intrepid Reporters Gone?

The recognized dean of Canadian education reporters, Louise Brown of The Toronto Star, has just stepped down and will leave a gigantic hole in the field.  Why that is so is worthy of a commentary on the state of the Education Beat in Canada as well as the United States.

For over thirty years, Louise not only “covered” education and family life, but produced numerous in-depth pieces demonstrating her formidable enterprise reporting skills and commitment to media accuracy. In her recent August 6, 2016 farewell piece, she identified the abandonment of Ontario Grade 13 as “the biggest mistake” of the past 30 years. It demonstrated, once again, the critical importance of “institutional memory” in education reporting.

Reading Louise’s retrospective piece prompted me to start investigating the state of Education Beat journalism and to look for research on recent trends over the past decade.  A May 2016 report, State of the Education Beat 2016, produced by the Education Writers Association, revealed how different the situation is on the other side of the continental line.

Based upon a survey of 400  American “education journalists,” the average reporter is a woman, 36 years old with 11 years experience and almost four of five (79 %) of the respondents are “very or fairly satisfied with their jobs.”  Optimism oozed from the report and the EWA made a bold declaration: “Education journalism is a field with a future.”

The EWA was, of course, attempting to dispel the myth abroad in the land of journalism that covering education is a “beginner beat” where novice reporters are broken-in and mark time waiting for more prestigious assignments to materialize at the newspaper or local television station.  Surveying local education reporters over the past forty years, most have looked (to me) either totally bored covering school board meetings or so completely out-to-sea as to be easy prey for board communications officers. 

Digging more deeply into the EWA 2016 report, a different, more familiar pattern begins to emerge. Most education journalists (60 per cent) work for newspapers, reporting in print and online. Very few are employed in television (4 %) and today’s education journalists are surprisingly critical of the token, superficial coverage provided on local television. The fastest growing segment, education-focused news outlets, like Ed Surge, Education Next or Chalkbeat, employ 22 per cent of American reporters, a field largely absent in Canada.

When it comes to nagging professional challenges, there is remarkable convergence across the border. Based upon my ongoing conversations with beat reporters, over forty years, the critical issues remain remarkably consistent: 1) being spread far too thin covering K-12 and PSE education or periodically reassigned to general reporting duties; 2) shortage of expertise, particularly among senior editors and regular reporters; 3) the spread of data analytics, skewing coverage to “click bait” topics or reactive reporting.

Two-thirds of American education reporters report having little or no difficulty getting in-person access to schools and campuses. The vast majority of them ( 88 per cent) still report getting their information primarily from school system insiders, via teachers (89%), news releases (89%), local education leaders (82%), or education departments (80%). Most “story leads” (70 %) are “planted” by school district communications officers, and only 41% are generated by academic research and 37% by education think tanks. Only 20 per cent of U.S. reporters admit that they find themselves covering topics they “don’t really understand.”

One-third of American education journalists find it difficult to penetrate the school or university system. Getting in-person access to schools or campuses is difficult for them and almost one-out-of four (23 %) of reporters find educational leaders either “uncooperative or hostile” toward them, effectively denying access. It would be interesting to know why this happens and whether, as one might assume, it is retribution for writing critical pieces on education.

Education reporting in Canada, based upon my experience, is in considerably worse shape. Few of our beat reporters make a career of covering education and those that do achieve legendary status. Over the past thirty years, only a handful have either registered as major players or stayed long enough to make a real impact. The Toronto Star’s Louise Brown belongs in that company, but so does Janet Steffenhagen of the Vancouver Sun, who, for fifteen years broke many stories in British Columbia education, most notably the crisis that tore apart the former BC College of Teachers. Promising education reporters such as Hugo Rodrigues of the Sun News chain and Frances Willick of The Chronicle Herald are more typical — making their mark and then moving on in journalism.

Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, has employed an Education Reporter for years, but none better than Jennifer Lewington in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  She is also, to my knowledge, the only one ever to write a book about the state of education. Her 1993 book, co-authored with Graham Orpwood, Overdue Assignment, still offers the most thorough, insightful analysis of the “fortress-like,” self-absorbed school system.  It’s safe to say that educational leaders who dared to take her calls had done their homework.

One Canadian education news outlet that does exert influence inside the school system is the Canadian Education Association. Official education news has found a reliable outlet in the CEA, particularly through the pages of the CEA magazine, Education Canada, and, more recently, the CEA Blog. Provincial education ministries and faculty of education professors find Education Canada most useful in trumpeting new initiatives or disseminating research supporting those initiatives.  Under the guidance of Max Cooke, the CEA Blog has become more interactive, publishing many thoughtful pieces by former teacher Stephen Hurley, the curator of  VoiceED Canada, a truly unique open-ended online venture in a field too often characterized by echo chamber conversations.

Education commentators tend to fill the void in Canadian public education. Of all Canadian daily columnists, Margaret Wente, is — by far – the most influential and the most feared, judging by the rather foolish attempts of a University of Toronto OISE “Facts in Education” truth squad to discredit her opinions.  Manitoba social studies teacher Michael Zwaagstra, a tireless newspaper column writer, and Edmonton Journal online writer-editor, David Staples, regularly bang the drum for higher standards, improved math instruction, and proper teaching of reading.

Over the past month, two feisty and incredibly determined Canadian education reformers, Malkin Dare and Doretta Wilson, have taken a step back from the education battleground.  For over thirty years, “Aunt Malkin” of Waterloo, Ontario, the founder of the Society for Quality Education, churned out hundreds and hundreds of short research summaries and columns championing not only phonics and systematic reading instruction, but school choice and charter schools. As Executive Administrator of SQE, Doretta was the public face of the movement, appearing regularly on Ontario radio and television shows.

Education reform tends to get short-shrift in the Canadian popular press but not so in the United States. A May 2016 American Enterprise Institute (AEI) paper, How the Press Covers Charter Schools, reveals just how vibrant the public discourse is in American newspapers, magazines, and the electronic media. Based upon 2015 coverage in seven major news outlets, Rick Hess and his AEI team found a relatively balanced division of opinion, perhaps reflecting that country’s deeper right-left divisions.

One fascinating finding was the influence of gatekeepers such as Valerie Strauss, Editor of The Answer Sheet, a widely-read  regular feature in The Washington Post.  Of 36 Washington Post stories coded and analyzed, some 17 were from The Answer Sheet and, of those, nine were critical or “negative” on charter schools, eight were neutral, and none judged supportive or “positive” toward the reform.  Her presence, AEI noted, skewed Post coverage against school reform.

Carrying the torch for so-called “progressive education” in Strauss’s fashion would not even raise an eyebrow in Canadian educational circles. That’s why no one even asks why Toronto’s perennial education commentator Annie Kidder, founder of education funding lobby group People for Education, is quoted in a surprising number of  news stories generated by Toronto news media outlets. News biases are invisible in the mainstream Canadian educational echo chamber.

What’s happened to the education beat in Canada and the United States?  Why do so many education reporters simply recycle school district media releases or content themselves reacting to official policy pronouncements? Is there cause for the optimism reflected in the 2016 EWA report on the state of the field?  Who is going to fill the void in Canada left by the departures of veteran reporters like Louise Brown, Janet Steffenhagen, and Jennifer Lewington?

 

 

 

 

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Demolishing Education Myths: How Deep is Student Learning without Content Knowledge?

Few books on the state of Education have created as much of a stir as Daisy Christodoulou’s 2014 treatise, Seven Myths About Education. When It first appeared in July of 2013 as a short, persuasive e-book, British and American educators hailed it as a potential “game-changer” from a British schoolteacher willing to present the accumulating research evidence that challenges the prevailing “progressive education” orthodoxy.

Since its re-publication in March of 2014, the book has dominated educational discourse everywhere but here in Canada and much of the United States. In the wake of the May 2, 2015 ResearchED New York conference, that’s likely to change. Daisy Christopoulou’s workshop presentation found a new North American audience, including a few Canadians like John Mighton, Robert Craigen, and me.

When Daisy Christodoulou started teaching in September 2007 in a South East London secondary school she was immediately struck by how little her students actually knew.. In one class of 15 and 16-year-olds, she discovered children who “were barely literate and numerate” grappling with books written for eight and nine-year-olds. “Many of the pupils I taught could not place London, their home city, on a map of Britain. Plenty thought Africa was a country,” she says.

Widely regarded as “Britain’s brightest student” before entering teaching, Daisy set out to find out why students’ content knowledge had slipped so dramatically in state schools. Her research only confirmed that her experiences weren’t atypical. She stumbled upon Susan Jacoby’s 2008 book, The Age of American Unreason, which reached similar conclusions about the appalling level of students’ understanding about the core principles and foundations of the American democratic system.

Little in her British teacher’s college training prepared her for this discovery and, only when she began to look wider afield, did she discover the research and writings of two American authorities, E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Daniel T. Willingham. “It was a great relief to read Hirsch and Willingham,” she now recalls, “and to realize that the intuitions I’d had about the importance of knowledge were backed up by solid evidence. But it was also extremely frustrating, because I just couldn’t believe that all this vitally important evidence about how pupils learn hadn’t been taught to me when I was training to be a teacher.”

Then Daisy Christodoulou began to connect all the dots. “Much of what teachers are taught about education is wrong… I was not just shocked, I was angry. I felt as though I had been misled.”  She then added: “I had been working furiously for 3 years, teaching hundreds of lessons, and much information that would have made my life a whole lot easier and would have helped my pupils immeasurably had just never been introduced to me. Worse, ideas that had absolutely no evidence backing them up had been presented to me as unquestionable axioms.”

Awakened to that realization, Christodoulou proceeded to identify what she terms “Seven Myths About Education”:

1. Facts prevent understanding
2. Teacher-led instruction is passive
3. The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
4. You can always just look it up
5. We should teach transferable skills
6. Projects and activities are the best way to learn
7. Teaching knowledge is indoctrination

Her book not only identifies, but documents, why these beliefs fly in the face of social-science research and the latest discoveries in cognitive psychology.

Much of the book exposes the ideological bias that informs far too much of what passes for educational discourse. “Too often, people think that teaching knowledge is somehow right wing and elitist,” Christodoulou wrote in the AFT magazine, American Educator.  “But this isn’t the case. The kind of powerful knowledge that’s in the Core Knowledge^† curriculum in the United States doesn’t “belong” to any class or culture. The great breakthroughs of civilization were made by a whole range of people from different classes and cultures, and if they belong to anyone, they belong to humanity. Teaching these insights to children isn’t elitist—not teaching them is!”

Christodoulou is particularly critical of British and American school systems for educating students who “lack knowledge of important fundamentals.”  The education establishment, according to her, downplays the importance of knowledge. “There is general academic underachievement despite a multiplicity of reform efforts and relatively generous funding. Attention is paid to school structures over classroom practice.”

The British teacher-turned-author is difficult to label and discredit because of the soundness of her thinking and her impeccable research. Nor is she inclined to defend standardized student testing. ” The high-stakes, test-based accountability systems in both countries,” she says,” have, by and large, failed….when I advocate teaching knowledge, people assume I’m advocating high-stakes tests. That isn’t at all the case. In fact, I’d argue that a lot of the damaging test preparation we see in both systems is the result of the misconception that skills can be developed in the abstract.”

Christodoulou’s Seven Myths about Education is already one of the most talked-about books in British education over the past 20 years. A London Sunday Times book reviewer got it right in August 2013 when he commented that she had unleashed “a heat-seeking missile” at “the heart of the educational establishment” and her recent researchED Conference presentations have only enhanced her credibility among regular classroom teachers.

The book demonstrates the persuasive power of sound ideas and research-based approaches to education. “More and more teachers are realising the gap between the theory they are taught and their practical experience,” Christodoulou commented in The Spectator. “More and more books are being published which explain the insights of cognitive science and the implications they have for classroom teachers. Instead of the warmed-through fads of the past century, I think the next few years will see evidence-based reforms that lead to genuine educational improvements.”

That realization is what fuels the latest rising phoenix – the British teacher-led ResearchED movement.

What explains the dominance of certain persistent “mythologies” in the world of contemporary education?  How accurate was Daisy Christodoulou’s “heat-seeking missile”? Is there a danger in restoring “content knowledge,” that pedagocial approaches other than teacher-guided instruction will be similarly discarded or devalued? What can be done to transform teaching into the art and science of combining style with substance in today’s classrooms?

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The Education Policy Kingdom: Will the ResearchED Movement Make a Difference?

A British grassroots, teacher-led movement, known as researchED, is emerging as a new player in the rather closely-knit, education school-centred, internally-referenced world of education policy research.  It originated, almost by accident in 2013, when Tom Bennett (no relation) with assistance from  Helene O’Shea, came up with the idea of holding a conference exploring school-level and system-wide research into “what works in education.” What a revolutionary idea!

On the first Saturday after school opened in September 2013, over 500 British educators, policy wonks, and researchers came to Dulwich College simply to “talk, listen and learn.” With the support of former UK policy advisor Sam Freedman and The Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre, the incipient movement took-off and spread across Britain. The movement founder, Tom Bennett, who ran Soho night clubs before entering teaching, became its passionate emissary and pied piper, sponsoring follow-up events in York and Birmingham. When both were sell-outs, researchED began to develop even more expanding throughout 2014 , far beyond the wildest dreams of its pioneers.

Tom Bennett and ResearchEd have tapped into the creativity, energy and ideas of regular teachers and “ideas people’ from outside the normal cloistered world of academe and the “fad-prone” educational bureaucracy. While accepting the critical value of “educational experience,” Tom and his supporters see “huge areas” that are “amenable to scientific investigation” utilizing insights from other subject disciplines, not just psychology. “It’s time teachers started insisting upon evidence,” Tom declares, “before being expected to accept every claim and magic bullet sent their way. It’s time for a quiet revolution.”

The ResearchEd movement has not only expanded, but amassed considerable brainpower — mostly from outside the established OECD Education circles.  Surveying the ResarchEd contributors, now numbering well over 60 individuals, it’s a very eclectic, diverse group of thinkers ranging from Founder and Chief Executive of the Teacher Development Trust David Weston and Times Education Supplement editor Ann Mroz to Science Education specialist Mary Whitehouse and well-known Head Teacher Tom Sherrington.

The UK’s Teacher Conference success story of 2014 comes to the USA in early May of 2015.  The first North American ResearchEd conference will be on Saturday May 2, 2015 at the Riverside School in the Bronx area of New York City. One look at the line-up of speakers and you can see that it will be a ground-breaking day for teachers, academics, and anyone interested in finding out what the latest research really says about how to improve classrooms and schools. Some of America’s and the UK’s most prominent thought leaders, academics and educators will be there, very few of whom were invited to the recent ISTP2015 Conference in Banff, Alberta, dominated by education ministers, union leaders, and hand-picked ‘friendlies.’

One example of ResearchED’s iconoclastic spirit appeared in the April Issue of its online magazine.  “Only one in ten education reforms,” Gemma Ware of The Conversation reported, is ever “analyzed for their impact.” Based upon an OECD study covering 34 member countries from 2008 to 2013, that was worth reporting. So was OECD education director Andreas Schleicher’s comment that the education world needs a “more systematic and evidence-based approach to reforms.” Most significantly, Finnish education guru Pasi Sahlberg is quoted as conceding that education authorities have little appetite for spending more studying “failure.”

In today’s education world, ResearchED is a breath of fresh air with a commitment to bringing the UnConference to the neglected field of education policy research. Inspired partly by the progressive EdCamp movement. it may pose a threat to the ‘usual suspects’ like education experts Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves, and Pasi Sahlberg who tend to identify trends, feed-off one another,  and tap into the educational treasure chest of  OECD Education and state education authorities. Not to mention plowing those resources into the very traditional pedantic, OISE-centred graduate student KMb (Knowledge Mobilization) research movement.  What’s appealing about Tom Bennett’s grassroots insurgency is it’s cheekiness and willingness to tilt at the windmills propelling the modern education state.

Does the ResearchED movement have the potential to challenge popular ‘fads and fetishes’ that constantly wash over public education?  Can regular teachers be engaged in assisting to develop research-based, workable solutions to the system’s chronic problems? Will Tom Bennett’s little ‘quiet revolution’ move beyond simply stirring the pot? Will the North American education establishment even notice the little disturbance in the Bronx?

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Immigrant Student Success: Why Do Canadian Asian Students Outperform Others?

Amy Chua, the infamous Asian American “Tiger Mother,” is back with a provocative new book, The Triple Package, that started generating monsoon-high waves even before its publication. Teaming up with her spouse, fellow Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld, Chua tackles what is considered a taboo subject – why certain “cultural groups” in the United States are “astonishingly successful” and perform particularly well in school.

Studying the more materialistic measures of success — income, occupational, status and test scores — Chua and Rubenfeld  claim that top performers come disproportionately from certain cultural groups, most notably Chinese Americans and Mormons.  While the controversial book focuses on American immigrant student success, it might well apply here in Canada where Asian Canadian students are now academically soaring in the major cities of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal.

The central thesis of Chua and Rubenfeld’s The Triple Package is not only plausible, but defensible, and that’s what’s driving the legion of critics crazy. According to the authors, three traits breed success: a superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control.  Only when this “Triple Package” comes together does it “generate drive, grit, and systematic disproportionate group success.”  Lost in the largely hostile initial reviews in The New York Post, The Guardian, and Salon.com is any reference to Chua’s rather forthright analysis of the downsides of “The Triple Package” –the burden of carrying a family’s high expectations, and the deep insecurities instilled in children that may exact a psychological price later in life.

Since the early 2000s, Canadian educational leaders and researchers have begun to conduct demographic studies that yielded some unexpected and perhaps unwanted results.  Driven by the Educational Equity research agenda, they have focused almost exclusively on the deficits, studying under-performing student groups and attempting to close what is known as the “learning gap.”

In the case of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Canada’s largest public school system,  the first comprehensive “demographic snapshot” released in June of 2008 was presented as a wake-up call demonstrating how “the system was failing to help students overcome roadblocks of culture, poverty and family background.”  Then Director of Education Gerry Connelly was quoted in The Toronto Star issuing a fateful pledge: “I am bringing an action plan to address the underachievement of marginalized students that will specify targets and actions to break the cycle over the next five years (2008-2013).”  Those five years are now up, and the latest TDSB Demographic Profile for 2011-12 seems to accept the dictates of “socio-economic gravity” when it comes to school success.

Leading researchers like Dr. Bruce Garnett, Research Director in BC District 36 (Surrey),  produces fine immigrant student studies, but is not entirely helpful in explaining why students from some “cultural groups” are far outperforming others.  After just completing his PhD at UBC in 2008, he seemed to rule out the potential of looking at “the minefield” of demographics and student excellence. “This isn’t some kind of horse race, ” he told The Toronto Star, and “we do this kind of research in the interest of equity because we know know kids from different countries can come to school with different degrees of preparedness, depending upon the dominant values of the culture.” He then hastened to add that it was “dangerous to use this kind of data to make genetic assumptions.”

Mounting evidence is accumulating that Garnett cannot afford, any longer, to avoid turning over that stone. The latest TDSB Environmental Scan for 2010-11 and particularly the Census Portraits for demographic groups has rendered such blinkered approaches almost untenable. Toronto school board research specialist, Maria Yau, and OISE Graduate student Sangeetha Navaratnam, have blown a hole in earlier research assumptions. The most recent Census Portrait of Toronto’s East Asian Students actually confirms the “Triple Package” thesis, and so do the findings of the South Asian demographic analysis.

The TDSB research findings for the East Asian and South Asian students, now representing some 40% of the TDSB student population, are impossible to ignore.  Taken together, they are now the majority group in the system, larger than the “White” population (31%), and clearly driving recent improvements academic achievement and graduation rates.  What explains their recent success?  The three East Asian sub-groups from China, Hong Kong, and Korea, according to Yau, share several “commonalities” (i.e., traits): they achieve well academically, spend far more time per week on homework and studying (14-15 hours, almost double that of”white” students); and have parents more likely to expect them to go to university.

Asian Canadian students in the TDSB are also setting the academic pace, even though they are not drawn from the most economically-favoured, high income communities. Their academic achievement levels of East Asian students are truly outstanding, especially when so many start as “E.S.L” students.  Between 85% and 89% of East Asian students achieve Levels 3 and 4 on the provincial  Grade 6 Math test, some 25 to 30 points higher than the TDSB average., and a higher percentage at Grade 10 (84% to 69%) are on track to earn a high school graduation diploma. South Asian students, originally from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Guyana, and Bangladesh, are also performing well, all (except the Guyanese) with Grade 6 Math scores 2% to 15% above the board average.

Asian Canadian students in the TDSB are beating the socio-economic odds and performing very well in school. While it is true that more East Asian parents, except those from Hong Kong, have university degrees, parents from China are actually most likely to be in the two lowest income groups  (i.e., with annual household incomes of less than $30,000 or between $30,000 and $49,000 per year).  South Asian students tend to come from larger families and their parents , except for the Guyanese, are also mostly university educated. Once again, South Asian students have parents mostly in the lowest two income groups, earning under $50,000 per year.

American immigrant student research is proving to be closer to the mark than comparable work conducted by Canadian researchers.  While Bruce Garnett and OISE researcher Jim Cummins focus on race and language as a disability affecting E.S.L. students, American scholars Grace Kao (University of Pennsylvania) and the late John Ogbu (UC Berkeley) saw great strengths in recently arrived immigrant students. Since 1995, Dr. Kao’s  “model minorities” thesis has gained wide currency. She has made a compelling case that Chinese and Korean Americans are imbued with a strong sense of cultural values attaching great importance to achieving economic success through schooling and higher education.

Nigerian American Ogbu added credence to the “model minority” explanation by documenting the radically differing academic achievement levels achieved by children of “voluntary” immigrants compared to those from refugee or involuntary minority communities.   In short, students from voluntary immigrant groups like the Chinese, Koreans, and East Asians, have higher hopes for school success and apply more effort than the so-called “colonized” and “conquered” immigrants such as Aftrican-American or First Nations children.

The ground-breaking American studies of Kao and Ogbu, buttressed by recent TDSB demographic research, strongly suggest that Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld’s controversial book The Triple Package should not be dismissed as completely off-base and might help to shed more light in the dark corner of North American education.

Why are Canadian Asian students performing so well in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal public schools?  Do East Asian and South Asian students exhibit what Amy Chua terms “The Triple Package” of a superiority complex, insecurity, and impulse control?  If not, then what else explains their “academic trajectories” and pace-setting achievement levels?  And perhaps most significantly, where would Canadian schools (particularly in Toronto and Vancouver) rank in international student assessments without the presence of these high performing students?

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Facts in Education: Who Guards the Canadian “Facts” — and for What Purpose?

Bright red pencils and bold X’s used to be the preferred tools of correction in the North American classroom. Those methods came  naturally to educators with a bred-in-the-bone urge to correct others.  Today the red pencils and self-esteem destroying X’s are gone, but the underlying instincts to correct others remain. That may explain why a Toronto-based group known as Facts in Education (FiE), spearheaded by Dr. Ben Levin, has arisen to defend the education system by identifying and “outing” errors of fact and unsubstantiated opinion in the popular media.  Upset with the media, the group, claiming to be “a non-partisan panel of experts,” has set out to combat and correct the “excessively negative, sensationalistic, or just plain wrong coverage of education” in Canada.

The Facts in Education initiative is the creation of Ben Levin and actually run by two of his graduate students at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.  His panel of experts, now numbering 21 educators, reads like a Who’s Who of the Toronto-based Canadian education establishment. Most of the members are education administrators, faculty of education professors, and former school superintendents rather than academics and, with the exception of Dr. Charles Ungerleider of UBC, all are in the Toronto-OISE orbit.  Recognized scholars with a more independent bent like Kieran Egan,  Paul Axelrod, David R. Johnson, Dennis Mulcahy, and Jamie Metsala are conspicuous by their absence from that list of ‘gatekeepers.’

The Levin Group claims to be guarding the “facts” of Canadian education and functions much like a “truth squad” pouncing upon offending news reports and even objectionable opinion columns. A recent paper delivered to the American Educational Research Association (April 26-May 1, 2013) in San Francisco is almost laughable. In it Levin and two of his proteges describe how they interrogate troublesome columns by The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente and even feature articles in the Walrus Magazine.  What upsets them most is “poor framing, sensationalized or misguided opinion” known in the outside world as freedom of opinion and expression.

Ben Levin’s feature essay, entitled “Getting to Better Schools” Literary Review of Canada (June 2013), provides deeper insights into their outlook and peculiar “reformist” mindset.  The Canadian education system, according to Levin, is definitely not in crisis and that is presented an incontestable fact.  Indeed, “proper framing” demonstrates that Canadian education should be viewed through an Ontario lens and educational reform is the Ontario Dalton McGuinty reform program writ large.

Dr. Levin makes a heroic effort to dispel any public perception that the education system is in crisis.  A recent Ipsos Reid poll, released 6 September 2012, would tend to suggest otherwise.  An overwhelming majority of Canadians (86%) now express concern about public elementary school children’s performance in reading, writing, and mathematics. Furthermore, contrary to Levin and his allies, three-quarters of those surveyed (75%) agreed that “standardized testing” was “a good way” to measure and compare students’ performance against other provinces and countries.

To be fair, Levin accepts the fact that the system is not perfect, but then proceeds to identify supposed weaknesses like program supports for the poor, minorities, aboriginal people, and students with disabilities, which are actually our current strengths, compared to most other developed OECD nations. What he is really proposing is tinkering with the status quo rather than any reform agenda addressing broader public concerns.

Leading Canadian educators like Levin find it difficult to confront the system that they themselves have helped to shape and tend to have a few blind spots. More objective analysts seeking to assess the state of Canadian K-12 education would draw upon the independent research of the Canadian Council of Learning and, more importantly, from the findings of its Final Report. It might have been helpful, for example, to reference Dr. Paul Cappon’s October 2010 assessment that “Canada is slipping down the international learning curve” and that “we are not going to compete in the future unless we get our act together.”  While Levin lauds the Canadian system for “the consistent quality of our schools,” he seems to brush aside Cappon’s key finding that “we have very little information nationally about how we are doing.”

Scraping below the surface, what education reforms does Levin actually support?  More spending on public education, raising graduation rates, poverty reduction measures, investing in arts education, expanded co-op and workplace education, and presumably less emphasis on public accountability testing programs. And, of course, “mobilizing knowledge” to advance that cause.  In other words, maintenance of the Canadian education status quo.  That’s also a reasonable facsimile of the aspirational McGuinty Education Agenda from 2003 until 2011.

While purportedly addressing the perils and pitfalls of education reform, Levin seems remarkably resistant to the more popular panaceas — parental choice, standardized testing, teacher quality-evaluation reform, and alternative charter school programs. In a nutshell, he seems to be gently and diplomatically rejecting the main tenets of the current North American education reform movement. It all sounded so reasonable that his hidden message almost escaped my notice.

What is the real purpose of the Toronto-based group known as Facts in Education?  Why are the “facts” in Canadian K-12 education so closely guarded? Do we really need an educational “truth squad” to police the popular media and disseminate the conventional wisdom of the current educational establishment?  Most importantly, what are up and coming policy researchers being taught at OISE and possibly other faculties of education?

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