Implementing Inclusive Education: What Lessons Can Be Learned from New Brunswick?*

Implementing true inclusive education is one of the most formidable challenges facing Canadian provincial school systems.  Scanning the Inclusion and Special Education policy landscape from province to province, New Brunswick stands out as an outlier. The so-called “New Brunswick Model” adopted in 2006 and formally confirmed in 2012-13 focuses almost exclusively on integrating all students into regular or mainstream classes.

Education Minister Dominic Cardy’s recent announcement of a New Brunswick inclusion policy review was welcomed by concerned parents and teachers. Defenders of the existing inclusion model under Policy 322 reacted with dismay and trepidation, and for good reason.  Public consultations have revealed, once again, that the total inclusion classroom is not working for every student nor for far too many regular teachers.  While former Education Minister Jody Carr and his entourage are travelling the world promoting that model, it is on decidedly shaky ground at home.

Everyone today supports inclusive education and there can be no turning back.  Societal changes, human rights advocacy, and the growing complexity of classrooms in terms of capabilities, language, race, ethnicity and gender have combined to forge a broader commitment to truly inclusive education.

What looked progressive fourteen years ago when Wayne MacKay proposed the current N.B. inclusion model has now been superseded by newer, more flexible and more responsive approaches better suited to meeting the full range of student needs. We are also now more attuned to significant differences on the question of how to achieve meaningful, properly-resourced inclusion for all students across the full spectrum of abilities.

A lot is at stake in the latest review of inclusive education policy. That is because the so-called ‘New Brunswick Model’ is a provincial export product and is being considered for implementation in Ireland. An October 2019 report from the Irish National Council on Special Education (NCSE), heavily influenced by Carr’s policy advocacy, tilted in the direction of adopting a ‘total inclusion model’ and it has inspired a fierce debate in Ireland.

The proposed policy reform has put New Brunswick education under the microscope. No other Canadian province has chosen to follow the N.B. inclusion path, and this has been duly noted by vocal critics of the whole scheme in the widely-read Irish Times newspaper.

Much has been made of UN Special Rapporteur Catalina Devandas-Aguilar’s commendation of New Brunswick for its compliance with international human rights declarations. That was, it must be noted, one of the only positive mentions in her report which critiqued almost every other province for their ‘uneven application’ of policies across all public services, including heath, education, housing and transit.

Many educators and researchers in Ireland are puzzled as to why the N.B. model emerged as a preferred option when it is at odds with inclusive policy elsewhere. Most provinces, including neighbouring Nova Scotia, offer ‘inclusive education’ with options ranging from integration into regular classrooms to special ‘resource’ classes to specialized programs in alternative school settings.

Defenders of the N.B. model were rocked a year ago by a series of Toronto Globe and Mail investigative stories focusing on whether “inclusive classrooms” were working for most if not all students. The deeply moving story of Grayson Kahn, a 7-year-old Ontario boy with autism excluded from his school for assaulting an Education Assistant, captured nation-wide attention. It also departed from the usual script – extolling the virtues of inclusion – and, instead, raised serious questions about the difficulties of accommodating children with complex needs in regular classrooms.

Teachers in Canada, including many in New Brunswick, are reporting a dramatic rise in violent incidents disrupting their classrooms, and rising tensions with families who feel their regular stream children are at risk. For the past five years, periodic concerns have been voiced by the New Brunswick Teachers Association (NBTA) over threats to the safety of teachers and education assistants.

Some educators in the Globe and Mail series addressed the so-called ‘elephant in the classroom,’ daring to wonder if inclusion has gone too far for students with very complex needs.  Inclusiveness will not work, they claimed, without “a thoughtful rethinking of how we teach children with diverse needs and how we structure the school day.”

School districts in Canada are beginning to acknowledge the need for “time out rooms” to allow students experiencing meltdowns space and time to recover. Families with children who have intellectual and developmental disabilities are increasingly being asked to pick up kids early, start the school day later or simply keep them home for the entire day.

Complicating matters is the fact that apart from a few advocacy or parent group surveys, most Canadian school districts, including those in New Brunswick, didn’t formally track these exclusions or shortened days until recently mandated to do so.

The N.B. inclusion system is full of holes, judging from concerns raised by parents and teachers during Minister Cardy’s current round of consultations.  Co-founder of Riverbend Community School in Moncton, Rebecca Halliday, was one of those speaking up for changes. She has fought an uphill battle for five years to establish a school for severely learning challenged students. Her struggles mirror those of hundreds of parents and families effectively ‘excluded’ by the total inclusion classroom policy and practice.

Conducting a provincial review opens the door, once again, to providing support for the most severely challenged students and need relief for their exhausted parents. What Halliday’s school struggle amply demonstrates is that it will not happen in New Brunswick without the introduction of a tuition support program being extended to students and families without the means to pay the tuition themselves.

Such a program exists in Nova Scotia where, since September 2004, provincial education authorities have offered a Tuition Support Program (TSP). It not only plugged the service gap, but broadened public access to intensive support programs designed for students with acute learning difficulties. Under the TSP, a small number of private, independent Special Education schools  (DSEPS) (Grade 3–12) not only exist, but fill the gap by providing a vitally important lifeline in the continuum of student support services.

Inclusion is an ideal to which most advanced education countries, provinces and states aspire.  One of the best and most influential international statements, the Salamanca Statement on Principles and Practice in Special Needs Education (UNESCO 1994), continues to inform much of the current policy on inclusive education. Children should be learning together in schools – but not necessarily in one particular setting.

With the exception of New Brunswick, provincial ministries of education take their cue from the Salamanca Statement and are working toward inclusive education by removing barriers and improving student supports across a range of program service options, including intensive support for children with the most complex needs. Today, inclusive education is the overriding philosophy and the real challenge is to ensure that students, parents, and service providers find the ‘right fit’ for every child or teen.

Winning a September 2016 Zero Project prize and recent praise from a UN agency, it turns out, is a dubious honour for New Brunswick because it involves expending so much time and energy defending a regular class setting for everyone, when some fare far better in smaller classes with more intensive resource support and others thrive with more individualized attention.

Instead of merely complying with a UN philosophical declaration, Minister Cardy and the Department would be better advised to study carefully the findings of Nova Scotia’s 2018 Inclusive Education Commission and its prescription. Following that extensive and comprehensive review, Nova Scotia is now fully engaged in building a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS), much better aligned with best practice and evidence-informed research.

• An earlier version of this post appeared in the Telegraph-Journal, March 5, 2020.

Tackling inclusion stirs up passions and raises sensitive issues, but it’s time to address the key policy questions: Will the New Brunswick Model ever work, given the complex challenges in today’s classrooms?  What are the real and unintended consequences of mandatory inclusion in the absence of other viable, attractive or effective alternatives?  Is the properly-resourced all-inclusive classroom model feasible or sustainable?  If the N>B. model is optimal, why are school districts everywhere tilting more in the direction of implementing MTSS and attempting to support everyone across the full continuum of needs? 

 

Read Full Post »

Inclusion Confusion: What’s Happening to Nova Scotia’s Inclusive Education Plan?

A year ago, a Nova Scotia Inclusive Education Commission headed by Dr. Sarah Shea of the IWK Children’s Hospital broke new ground in proposing a robust $70-million, 5-year plan to re-engineer inclusive education. The new model known as Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) attracted immediate and widespread support from classroom teachers, parents of learning-challenged students, and advocacy groups, including Autism Nova Scotia.

Today there are clear signs that the implementation of Nova Scotia Inclusive Education reform is going off-the-rails and the whole venture in danger of being turned to different purposes. Three critical implementation pieces have been dropped and the whole project is now under completely new management.

Education Minister Zach Churchill and his recently appointed Deputy Minister Catherine Montreuil have already abandoned three first stage recommendations: establishing an independent Institute for Inclusive Education (NSEII), appointing an Executive Director to spearhead the initiative; and commencing independent Canadian research into evidence-based MTSS practices.

Much of what is going inside Nova Scotia’s Education Department is now carried out behind closed doors and completely outside public view. Piecing together the puzzle requires the investigative skills of a Detective William Murdoch. Sleuthing in and around the Department does provide a few clues.

A January 2019 Provincial Advisory Council on Education (PACE) agenda featured a peculiar item under the heading “Inclusive Education Policy.” Assembled members of the appointed body, chaired by former HRSB chair, Gin Yee, were assembled to engage in an ‘interactive exercise’ focusing on “Dr. Gordon Porter’s work.” The published meeting minutes made no reference whatsoever to that discussion.

Seven months after Nova Scotia embraced the plan to build a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), the surfacing of Dr. Porter was downright strange on two counts. Canada’s leading champion of all-inclusive classrooms, New Brunswicker Porter, is well-known for advocating an approach at odds with the government’s stated policy. Not only that, but in October 2018, Education Minister Churchill had named Porter as the lead consultant responsible for overseeing implementation.

If there was any doubt as to where Dr. Porter stands on inclusion, that vanished on February 15, 2018 when he published a very revealing commentary in his house organ publication, the Inclusive Education Canada newsletter.

When a Toronto Globe and Mail feature story on an autistic Ontario boy, Grayson Kahn,  pointed out that his ‘inclusive classroom’ had failed him, Porter took great exception to the piece because it called into question the appropriateness of the all-inclusive model for everyone. “Classrooms, inclusive or not, do not fail students,” he wrote. “The responsibility for success or failure lies with officials of the Education Ministries and the leaders of the school districts who set the policies, allocate resources and are responsible to ensure accountability to both parents and taxpayers.”

After thirty years of fighting to rid the system of alternative settings and specialized support programs, he was not about to change, even when confronted with the current challenges of class composition posed by the dramatically rising numbers of students with complex needs and sometimes unmanageable behavioural disorders in today’s classrooms.

Porter and his Inclusive Education Canada allies, well entrenched in New Brunswick, continue put all their faith in the all-inclusive classroom. Most, if not all, of their public advocacy seeks to demonstrate how every child can thrive in a regular classroom. The whole idea of providing alternative placements, ranging from one-on-one intensive support to specialized programs is an anathema to Porter and his allies.  Instead of addressing the need for viable, properly-resourced multi-tiered levels of support, they promote provincial policy aligned with the international Zero Project, aimed at enforcing inclusion for all, including those, like Grayson, with complex needs and severe learning difficulties.

Defenders of the New Brunswick model, shaped and built by Porter, remain blind to the realities of today’s complex classrooms. Sending children regularly to “time-out rooms” or home as “exclusions” for days-on-end come to be accepted as expedients to keep, intact, the semblance of inclusive classrooms.

Further detective work reveals that Porter is not without an ally on the PACE.  The sole education faculty appointee on that essentially faceless appointed body is Professor Chris Gilham of St. Francis-Xavier University, trained at the University of Alberta and closely aligned with Porter’s thinking.

Gilham’s research and teaching are steeped in the Inclusive Education Canada philosophy. He’s a public advocate of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an educational framework designed initially for Special Needs children that aims to increase “access to learning for all students” by removing all school-level barriers, physical, cognitive, intellectual and organizational.

Classifying and coding Special Education students, Gilham and co-author John Williamson claimed in a 2017 academic article, is part of the “bounty system” which provides funding on the basis of designated, documented exceptionalities. It is clear, from his writings, that he’s opposed to the “bifurcation of students” into a “value-laden, deficit-oriented, gross categories” aligned with their particular learning needs.

Inclusion of all students is now virtually universally accepted, but the Nova Scotia Inclusion Commission, to its credit, recognized that it does not necessarily mean inclusion in one particular setting, but rather in the one best suited to the child along a continuum of services from regular classroom to specialized support programs. The Students First report pointed Nova Scotia in that direction and challenged us to build an entirely new model significantly different than that to be found in New Brunswick.

Reaching every student and building a pyramid of tiered supports were the Nova Scotia plan’s overarching goals, not endlessly seeking ways to integrate students into one universal, one-size-fits-all classroom and concealing the actual numbers of students on alternative or part-time schedules. It’s time to urge Minister Churchill and his Department find their bearings and return to the True North of MTSS as charted by Dr. Shea and the Inclusive Education Commission.

What is happening to the implementation of the new Nova Scotia model for inclusive education? Do the decisions to drop three first-stage implementation recommendations signal a change in direction? Why did Nova Scotia’s government hire Dr. Gordon Porter to review implementation?  Will Dr. Porter’s upcoming review report confirm the change in direction? 

 

 

Read Full Post »

Inclusive Education: Are Inclusive Classrooms Failing Kids –and, If So, Where Do We Go from Here?

A feature story in the Weekend Globe and Mail on January 6, 2019 has successfully opened the door to far more meaningful public discussion of inclusive education, from province to province, right across Canada. National Education reporter Caroline Alphonso did so by posing the right question and re-framing the whole conversation. “Are inclusive classrooms failing students?” is just the kind of question that breaks new ground by inviting responses from a much wider range of perspectives.

The initial story focused on Grayson Kahn, a 7-year-old- boy with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and the incredible struggles of his mother Lisa Kahn and father Dave to get their son’s needs addressed at John McCrae P.S. in Guelph, Ontario. Diagnosed with ASD in the summer of 2017, Grayson was “excluded” from attending school because of that school’s inability to meet his complex needs.  The story hit a nerve because it highlighted the plight of hundreds children like Grayson either on reduced timetables or excluded in schools across the country.

Most readers were shocked to learn that in the Ontario school system, among the most inclusive and resource-rich anywhere, children like Grayson were being marginalized and poorly served in their public schools. Upon closer scrutiny, they learned that the system-wide philosophy, for decades, has been one that welcomed students with special needs into the regular classroom. It came as news to many that, faced with behavioural problems and regularly disrupted classrooms, principals had resorted to sending children home for part of the week or months on end.

Schools across Canada, since the 1990s, have fully embraced an enlightened model of inclusive education and attempted to implement it right across the board. One of Canada’s province’s, New Brunswick, has gone so far as to adopt the “Zero Project” philosophy in an attempt to integrate every student, irrespective of the severity of their disabilities, into regular classrooms. Leading education provinces, such as Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta, support inclusive education, but recognize the need for a variety of additional support programs and services.

The Globe and Mail feature reopened the fierce debate among competing factions, all of whom are committed to improving inclusive education. Many are asking whether we now have a system of inclusive education in theory but not necessarily in practice. It is becoming more widely recognized that the current model was never designed to accommodate and serve the incredible range of student needs present in today’s classrooms. The rise in the prevalence of children diagnosed with ASD alone is enough to overwhelm teachers attempting to manage their classes, with or without Education Assistants. Many Special Education experts now acknowledge that inclusion is not working and it’s not just a matter of the shortage of EAs or the lack of resources.

The Inclusive Education Debate tends to be polarized around three distinct policy positions, each exemplified in opinion pieces generated in response to the initial Globe and Mail story:

1) Students with Severe Learning Challenges and Complex Needs should not be excluded from regular public schools, especially for prolonged periods, and its a school district’s responsibility to either accommodate those children in regular classes or find viable options (Laura Kirby-McIntosh and Ontario Autism Coalition)

2) Inclusive Education is not working because of inconsistencies in implementation and the rationing of resources in the form of resource supports such as psychological services, para-professionals, and/or education assistants. Hiring more support personnel is the answer to realizing the potential of inclusion ( Gordon Porter and Inclusive Education Canada)

3) Inclusive Classrooms are highly desirable, but can never accommodate the range of needs, especially those with severe learning disabilities and complex needs. For a small proportion of children with complex needs (3 to 5 per cent) school districts need to support or provide the option of  alternative school programs and/or “congregated schools.” (Phil Richmond, Hayley Avruskin and the Congregated School Parent Network)

A growing consensus is forming that the conventional inclusion model, exemplified by the ‘one-size-fits-all’ classroom, has passed the breaking point. In the case of Grayson Kahn and hundreds of children like him, it’s not working now and it’s highly unlikely that simply pouring more resources into that classroom will resolve the problem. What’s surprising, however, is the reluctance of the competing factions to look at more flexible alternative delivery models.

No one, so far, has really gone beyond restating their positions and few, if any, have referenced the findings and recommendations of the Nova Scotia Inclusive Education Commission, published in the March 2018 report, Students First. Produced by Dr, Sarah Shea, Adela Njie, and Monica Williams, it represents a concrete attempt to break the policy gridlock. It differs from most policy initiatives, particularly those promoted by Inclusive Education Canada, in laying the groundwork for a re-invented model which is far more flexible and built around a “multi-tiered continuum of programs, services and settings.” 

Six months ago, Nova Scotia adopted this new Inclusive Education model that embraced inclusive education as a core philosophy, while implementing a re-engineered model based upon a “multi-tiered system of supports.”  All Nova Scotia students would be welcomed in a Tier 1 inclusive classroom and school environment, but students identified with severe learning challenges or complex needs would be provided with greatly enhanced supports through Tier 2 (Small Group), and then Tier 3 (Intensive – Individual or Alternative Program) options.

Educating the Grayson’s in today’s classrooms will require a more realistic, evidence-based, and effective approach to implementing inclusive education. It is time we confronted and tackled the “elephant in the inclusive classroom” and considered a more flexible and responsive way forward.

Why are inclusive classrooms failing so may children?  If our public school classrooms cannot accommodate all children, don’t school authorities have a responsibility to develop alternative support programs and services?  Should school districts be sending challenging students home and leaving families to fend for themselves? Why has the new Nova Scotia model attracted so little attention outside that province? 

 

 

Read Full Post »

The Illusion of Inclusion: Why Did the New Brunswick Model Implode?

Melissa Jones teared up in late November 2017 talking to the Fredericton Daily Gleaner about the plight of her son, Grade 4 student Brayden Jones. Leafing through a box full  of school warning letters and suspension notices for his school behaviour, she was upset and frustrated with her local school’s latest policy of limiting her son to three hours a week for “soft-re-entry” to the regular school classroom.  The past four years have been hellish for the family because, as a result of Brayden’s behaviour outbursts, he had been on a reduced schedule and out of school altogether from November 2016 to October 2017. “He’s not getting any education,” Ms. Jones said. “They’re setting him up for failure.”

A nine-year old boy with autism, Alex Piper of Quispamsis, NB, was suspended from his elementary school in November 2017 for  a series of violent outbursts and the school district’s solution was to restrict the student to 30 minutes of class time per day. His father, Jeremy Piper, a 40-year-old RCMP officer, protested the decision to “kick-out” his son without providing any incident reports and for only allowing his son back for what amounted to three 10-minute classes between 8:45 and 9:15 am each day. “They consider this an education, I guess, ” he told CBC News New Brunswick. 

Saint John parent Heather Adams says the New Brunswick education system also failed her autistic son, Brian,who graduated from high school in 2015 with kindergarten-level reading and Grade 2 math skills. “He would come home from school saying, ‘I feel so stupid, I don’t want to go’,” she recalled.  “And I don’t think anybody should have to go to school and feel stupid, and that’s how he felt.” While she maintains that inclusive education can work for some students,”it failed Brian.”

Heartbreaking stories like these are now surfacing regularly in the Atlantic Canadian province of New Brunswick. Over the past year, a steady stream of distraught parents of students with severe learning challenges have spoken-out with personal stories of how the current model of inclusion has failed their children. A year ago, the President of the NBTA, Guy Arsenault, broke his silence and expressed alarm over the physical threats faced by teachers forced to wear “kevlar” vests to protect themselves.

All of this is happening in a provincial school system recognized in February 2016 by the global Zero Project human rights organization for championing the inclusion of all students in regular classrooms.  It is becoming clearer that the New Brunswick model is broken and badly needs to be re-engineered to better serve those with severe challenges and complex needs.

 

A year ago, NBTA president Arsenault painted quite a picture of today’s high school English class.  Out of 28 registered students, 12 have identified special education needs, 10-11 cannot write and require oral exams, five are chronically absent, three have ADHD or ADD, two have mental health issues, two speak little English, and only two read at the expected grade level.  That is why, he insisted, “class composition” is now the biggest concern of teachers.

Class composition and inclusion have also been linked to declining student achievement levels.  In October 2016, Education Minister Brian Kenny and Arsenault agreed that it was a factor in the latest abysmal Anglophone Education test results. Only 20 per cent of Grade 6 students met provincial standards in mathematics and 26 per cent in science. In reading assessment, only 54 per cent scored successful standing.

All of this evidence merely confirms the findings of my recent research comparing New Brunswick’s inclusive system with other provinces across Canada. It’s all there in my two researchED presentations in Washington, DC (October 2016) and Toronto (November 2017).

Since June 2012, when NB Education Minister Jody Carr reaffirmed the province’s unshakable commitment to “inclusion for all,” things have gotten far worse. Spending $62-million to shore up the existing model from 2013-2016 has made no appreciable difference. Between 2 % and 4% of all students, numbering 1,900 to 3,800 students are struggling with severe learning challenges and limited to 3 hours a week of supports. Perhaps as many as 1,200 of New Brunswick’s Anglophone students have Autism Spectrum Disorder and require significantly more specialized support far exceeding the three hours per week.

In March 2016, Arsenault shocked many with the revelation that New Brunswick teachers were facing “unacceptable” levels of violence in both their “frequency and severity.” “Some teachers, ” he told CBC News, “have to wear Kevlar because of the biting that is going on with students and some of the kicking and punching…” Then he added: “We feel that students are entitled and have a right to be in classrooms but it should not be at the detriment of others.”

New Brunswick Autism activist Harold Doherty, father of Connor Doherty, a 21-year-old with severe autism, intellectual disability and epilepsy, has been fighting for a fuller continuum of support services for more than a decade.  Year after year, he sees evidence gathering that the NB model is contributing to the problem.  It’s simply wrong, he contends, to think that one program could ever meet the needs of every student.  “It’s a huge mistake,” he says, to ignore students being failed by the system.  He’s also convinced that the province has to abandon it’s model based upon well-intentioned theory in favour of evidence-based program responses based upon “what works for each child.”

With the New Brunswick model imploding, a rough consensus is emerging that will bring that province more into line with the Canadian leaders in inclusive education, Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario. The neighbouring province of Nova Scotia already offers more program options, including a Tuition Support Program (TSP) providing improved access to specialized program schools.    “For inclusion to work, ” Arsenault’s NBTA successor George Daley recently stated, ” the system must fit the student instead of trying to make the student fit the system.” Five years after my June 2012 AIMS report, Building a Bigger Tent, the key message seems to be sinking-in up in New Brunswick.

Why has the New Brunswick model imploded over the past five years? What’s standing in the way of inclusive education reform in New Brunswick? What can that province learn from other Canadian provinces about what works for the full range of special needs students? What can be done to promote evidence-based policy in New Brunswick and elsewhere in Canada? 

 

 

Read Full Post »

Inclusion and Class Composition: What’s the Real Impact on Teaching in the Classroom?

Striving for the “full inclusion” of all students in the regular classroom may be a worthy goal, but it makes teaching far more challenging and cannot satisfactorily meet the needs of all children.   A few Canadian provincial school systems, following the lead of New Brunswick, have elevated “inclusive education” to an exalted status. For many children and teens with severe learning disabilities or complex needs, it is not the most enabling learning environment. It’s also rendering today’s diverse classes, at certain times, nearly impossible for regular teachers to teach.

Teacher surveys identify class management as a fundamental problem and “class composition” as the biggest obstacle to professional satisfaction.  Building upon Canadian school research, it’s clear that special needs policy, designed by theorists, is not working and needs rethinking to achieve a better educational environment for teachers and students alike. That was the theme of my recent researchED presentation, October 29, 2016, in Washington, DC. 

Class size is a well-diagnosed and much studied question with much of the research driven by teacher unions. Back in September 2013, Gordon Thomas of the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA), used a class of 37 students as an example of the challenges facing stressed-out high school teachers. In his worst case scenario, out of the 37 students, four had learning disabilities, five were in transition from other provinces, one exhibited serious behavioural issues, three were repeating the course, seven were functioning below grade level, and one was chronically absent because of a dysfunctional home life.

In such overcrowded classes, Thomas asked, how can we expect teachers to provide constructive and rewarding learning experiences, let alone introduce innovative practices? Coping in such diverse classrooms goes far beyond class size and raises the hidden issue of “class composition.”

Most Special Education researchers concur that “smaller classes have the greatest positive impact on students with the greatest educational needs.” (OISE-UT/CEA, 2010). It is now clear that both class size and diversity matter.

Today teachers try to adapt their teaching to address the individual needs of the learners in their regular classrooms. As the classroom becomes larger and more diverse, this task becomes increasingly onerous. All of this has obvious implications for inclusive education. The success of “Inclusion” is, in large measure, determined by the extent to which teachers have the necessary supports and services to be able to effectively integrate students with special educational needs into their classrooms and schools.

Class size reductions from K to 3 and possibly beyond can produce student achievement gains (Canadian Council on Learning 2005), provided that the total context is conducive to such improvement. Three critical factors have been identified:

1.Complementary policies and practice supporting higher student achievement (i.e., raised expectations, positive discipline, regular assessment, teacher PD);

2. Contradictory policies and practice that undermines the potential benefit of class size reductions (i.e., full inclusion, social promotion, student competencies gap, language challenges);

3. Rising class sizes at higher grade levels – from grades 7 to 12 (i.e., removal of class size caps, integration of learning disabilities and ELL students).

Class sizes have actually dropped in all Canadian provinces except British Columbia over the past 15 years. At the macro-economic level from 2001-o2 to 2010-11, student enrollment has dropped 6.5%, the number of educators rose 7.5%, the student-teacher ratio declined by 12.9%, and spending per pupil rose by 61.4%. Class size reductions and caps from K to Grade 3 or Grade 6 may explain the overall smaller class sizes.

In the Spring of 2011, the Canadian Teacher’s Federation (CTF) conducted a national teacher survey on the theme of The Teacher Voice on Teaching and Learning to seek input from across Canada on teacher concerns. The CTF survey provided a snapshot of what class size and composition looked like across the country. The survey secured responses from  nearly 3,800 teachers representing 9,894 classes in English and French schools.  The sample teacher pool was drawn from 12 participating CTF member organizations.

Class Size Analysis: Average class size was 21.3 students, ranging from 22.1 students for grades 4-8 to 19 students for junior kindergarten or kindergarten (JK-K). English schools (including French Immersion) had an average class size of nearly 22 students, while French as a first language schools had a slightly smaller average class size of just over 19 students.

Class Size by Grade Level: Over a third of the classes for all grade levels combined contained 25 students or more (8.3% contained 30 students or more). For grades 4-8, nearly 39% of classes contained 25 students or more (6.5% contained 30 or more); for grades 9 and over, 40.3% of classes contained 25 students or more (13.5% – over 1 in 7 classrooms – contained 30 or more students); for grades 1-3, just over 14% of classes contained 25 students or more; for JK-K, nearly 12% of classes contained 25 students or more.

Average Number of Special Needs Students: Students with identified exceptionalities (i.e., designated behavioural problems or mental or physical disabilities, as well as other special needs students including gifted students); and English Language Learners and French Language Learners (defined as students whose first language differs from the school’s primary language of instruction, and requiring supports).  The average number of students with identified exceptionalities per class was 3.5, ranging from 3.8 students for grades 4-8 to 1.9 students for junior kindergarten/kindergarten.

Class Composition – Grade 4 and Over: Students with identified exceptionalities accounted for 16.3% of total students in the surveyed classrooms, ranging from respective shares of 17.1% for grades 4-8 to 10% of students for junior kindergarten and kindergarten. Of classes surveyed, over 81% have at least one student with formally identified exceptionalities, and 27.7% contain 5 or more students with identified exceptionalities. In grades 4 and over, not only were class sizes generally larger but almost 1 in 3 (30.6%) classes contained 5 or more students with identified exceptionalities.

Students with Language Learning Challenges: The average number of English Language Learners and French Language Learners (ELL/FLL students) per class was 2.6. The prevalence was higher the lower the grade, ranging from 4.7 students for junior kindergarten/kindergarten to 1.7 students for grades 9 and over. ELL/FLL students accounted for an average 12.2% of total students in the classroom, ranging from respective shares of 24.7% for junior kindergarten / kindergarten to 8.2% for grades 9 and over.

The CTF survey looked at students “identified” as Special Needs, but did not include students who were undiagnosed or those with other glaring needs such as students from low-income families (with poverty-related issues of hunger, illness, instability), students with mental health problems, or immigrant and refugee students.

My researchED 2016 Washington  presentation also delved into two Class Composition case studies – Inclusive Education in New Brunswick, 2006 to 2016, and Class Size and Composition in British Columbia, 2012 to 2016. In the case of New Brunswick, a province recently honoured by Zero Project for its “legally-binding policy of inclusion” in Feburary 2016, Guy Arsenault and the NBTA are now demanding a full Special Education review to secure “positive learning environments” and come to the aid of teachers forced to “don Kelvar clothing in the classrooms.”  Out west, in British Columbia, a five-week 2015 BCTF teachers’ strike has produced only meagre gains in containing class sizes, while more and more classes have four or more and seven or more Special Needs students.

The real life classroom is not only far more diverse, it’s increasing challenging to manage let alone teach anything substantive. Class Size based upon Student-Teacher Ratios has long been accepted and used in staffing schools, but its utility is now being questioned by front line teachers. Student diversity, driven by “Inclusion” and the growing numbers of severely learning-challenged and disadvantaged kids is the new normal. The rise of “Coddled Kids” and “Helicopter Parents” has compounded the challenges. Tackling Class Composition is emerging as the top priority in teacher-led school reform.

Why is class composition emerging as the biggest problem facing front line teachers?  Why do we continue to focus so much on simply reducing class sizes? What’s standing in the way of us tackling the ‘elephant in the room’ — class composition in today’s schools? 

Read Full Post »