Filling the Educational Vacuum: Where was the Council of Ministers of Education during the Pandemic?

Canada’s K-12 schools are in recovery mode after what is being called a “lost year in education.”  Since the COVID-19 shock in March of 2020, school disruptions and pivots in-and- out of online learning have left our ten provincial systems in a state of disequilibrium with adverse impacts on student learning, achievement and well-being.

Pandemic calamites have given rise to public calls for a more robust federal presence in Canadian K-12 education. Tackling the COVID-19 crisis has shone more light on the fact education is strictly a provincial responsibility under our constitution and Canada is now the only leading member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) without a federal department of education.

Would a new national education coordinating agency make much of a difference? That depends upon your assessment of what’s needed to tackle the contemporary challenges facing our education systems. Serving the 5.5 million students attending our K-12 schools is the primary responsibility, but the education sector also includes early childhood, post-secondary education, and adult workplace training programs.

Creating a federal department of education with a seat in cabinet would, in all likelihood, merely compound the fundamental problem diagnosed in my latest book, The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools (2020). Based upon past experience, it would add a top-tier of administrative oversight which, in turn, generates more layers of centralized, top-down, bureaucracy. While attractive as a fresh source of federal transfer payments, it’s highly unlikely that the augmented resources would ever ‘trickle down’ to the classroom.

The existing national coordinating body, the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC), in existence since 1967, is unequal to the challenge. It has evolved, over the years, into a shell of an organization, little more than an exclusive club presided over by the thirteen provincial and territorial ministers of education. While providing a forum for annual discussions and an external place-holder for Canada, it’s scope of activity is circumscribed by the imperative of “fully respecting provincial jurisdiction.”

CMEC played a constructive role in fostering pan-provincial cooperation and nudging the provinces into large-scale student testing. Sparked by uneven student Mathematics performance on the 1988 International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP -I), CMEC initiated its own Student Achievement Indicators Program (SAIP) in 1989 and it gradually evolved into a full-blown program from 1991 to 1996, then morphed into the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP, 2007-Present)

Under the leadership of Director General Paul Cappon from 1996 to the early 2000s, CMEC raised national standards and guided our engagement in broader international student assessment programs. With tact, diplomacy and determination, Dr. Cappon wooed and then won over the provinces to boarder participation in the global movement for international testing

Preparing Canada’s provinces for international assessments such as the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA), gave CMEC its rationale and sense of purpose. When Canadian 15-year-olds fared well in the first two rounds of PISA, 2000 and 2003, its organizational viability was secure.

As Director General, Cappon challenged provincial ministers and their ministries to up their game in preparing students for regular international and national assessments. With his 2004 departure, CMC was rudderless because it was chaired by the education ministers, serving on two-year rotations. It devolved into a Secretariat, convening meetings, producing short reports of aggregated data, and research briefs amplifying the strengths of K-12 education. Provincial ministers held sway, ensuring that CMEC served the interests and upheld the reputations of the member provinces.

The most recent CMEC reports in the “Measuring Up” series, focusing on OECD PISA 2018, TIMSS 2019, and PCAP 2020, do aggregate student performance data comparing countries and provinces, but they tend to highlight our strengths, minimize the deficits, and generally ‘put a shine on the apple.’

The latest “Assessment Matters” research brief, the 17^th in a series, released in March 2021 is typical of most. The cheeky title “Are You Smarter than a Fourth Grader?” is alluring. It’s actually a thinly-veiled rationale for putting more emphasis on “reading literacy” (i.e., communicating in multiple forms) than on reading fluency and comprehension, two critical indicators of reading effectiveness.

Proponents of a more robust national governmental presence, such as former federal bureaucrat Irvin Studin, have correctly identified the vacuum at the centre of Canada’s educational system. Provincial systems, severely damaged by the pandemic, are proving incapable of responding with agility to radically changed circumstances. Particularly concerning is the rise of the so-called “third bucket” cohort of children either totally disengaged or missing from public schools, regarded as the human casualties of two years of disrupted education.

While Canada’s provincially governed school systems are currently in disarray, creating a fourteenth system is not really the answer, unless the hidden agenda is to use the federal agency as a source of social transfers to reduce educational inequities from province-to-province.

More funding, while welcome, may only change how the educational pie is divided up among governments. We also know, from cross-provincial comparisons of per-student expenditures that pouring more money into K-12 systems does not produce better learning or higher student achievement. If that was the case, Manitoba would be a leading education province and Quebec would cease being the undisputed champion in Mathematics.

Judging from the American experience, establishing a national education department is not a panacea. The U.S. Department of Education, elevated in 1979 to a cabinet level agency by President Jimmy Carter and expanded by subsequent administrations, has introduced new accountabilities, such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top assessment programs, and run up education expenditures with little to show for all those initiatives. Aside from Title 1 federal grants and the Promise Neighborhood initiative aiming to bridge the achievement gap, it’s hard to fund much evidence of a breakthrough in better student outcomes. Expenditures have certainly ballooned, reaching $70-billion in 2019, representing 13 per cent of total education expenditures.

Canada’s federal role in Indigenous education, managed by Indigenous Affairs and Northern Development, under various names does not inspire much confidence in proposals to further extend federal authority into a provincial jurisdiction. The failure of Bill C-33, the First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act, back in 2013-14, served only to demonstrate the potential for jurisdictional turf wars, territorial imperative, and competing visions about the purposes and future of education.

Most of the substantive criticisms of Canadian education tend to centre around the system’s greatest deficiency – the lack of a national, independent education research bureau and clearing house for the best evidence-based research to inform future planning, policy-making and curriculum reform. The former Canadian Council on Learning, headed by Cappon from 2004 to 2012, demonstrated the critical need for that type of national agency. What CCL lacked was the authority to collect and validate student and system performance and the clout to ensure that the provinces were rewarded for collaborating on national school improvement projects, taping into evidence-based research, and actually tackling persistent and unaddressed problems, including early reading inequities, mathematics competencies, student absenteeism, and grade inflation.

The Canadian Council on Learning’s final report, “What is the Future of Learning in Canada,” remains as relevant today as it was upon its release in October of 2011. While Canada possessed undoubted strengths, specifically in early learning and post-secondary education participation, our students have, as Cappon predicted, plateaued or slightly declined on international assessments and there’s still little or no coherence in our approach to “improving the learning futures of Canadians of all ages.” Early literacy and mathematics competencies, high school student achievement levels, post-secondary education integration, and adult workplace training programs require improvement, just as they did ten years ago.

Replacing the Council of Ministers of Education has more resonance in the wake of the pandemic shock and its destabilizing effect on K-12 education. Adding another layer of bureaucratic oversight, however, would only compound our existing problem exemplified in the aggregation of provincial authorities inclined to protect their own interests. Nothing much will change unless and until we have a new generation of provincial leaders focused on busting through the bureaucracy and preparing our students with the fundamental knowledge and skills to tackle future twists and turns affecting the life chances of today’s students.

Where was the Canadian Council of Ministers of Education when we needed a robust, coordinated response to the pandemic? Can CMEC be reformed to make it more transparent, effective and responsive to dramatic changes in K-12 education?  Or should we start over with a more purpose-built pan-Canadian research bureau committed to rapid response evidence-based policy?  

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Education Policy Outlook 2020: What’s Happened over the Past Decade?

“All that glitters is not gold” is a famous proverb plucked from William Shakespeare‘s play The Merchant of Venice that may well apply to recent international appraisals of K-12 education in Canada. Such rosy assessments tend to put a shiny lustre on what is essentially a sound and ‘pretty good’ school system that has lost ground to competing nations over the past decade.

Five years ago, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development(OECD) produced a rather rosy Education Policy Outlook for Canada as part of a series of reports offering comparative analysis of education policies and reforms across the world’s developed countries. Canada’s overall performance, aggregated from widely varied provincial assessment data, looked good, in comparison with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Most significantly, the OECD assessors brushed aside concerns about “plateaued student achievement” on the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) tests and the decline in the proportion of top performing students.

Emerging concerns were most clearly expressed in Dr. Paul Cappon’s final 2010 report for the Canadian Council on Learning. Student scores on the 2009 PISA test had revealed that Canadian 15-year-olds demonstrated relatively strong sets of skills in reading, math and science, but they were already slipping relative to high performing Asian countries and in some cases in absolute terms. “What I’m hoping,” Cappon said at the outset of his final cross-Canada tour, “is that when people realize that Canada is slipping down the international learning curve we’re not going to be able to compete in the future unless we get our act together.”

OECD Education Policy Outlook assessments and Country reports are based upon templates that tend to favour diverse and well-funded school systems like that of Canada. The six identified policy levers in 2015 were: 1) equity and quality of education; 2) preparing students for the future; 3) school improvement; 4) evaluation and assessment; 5) governance; and 6) funding.  Such public policy forecasts, based upon conventional criteria and historic trends, also tend to demonstrate “path dependency” which limits the capacity to capture radical shifts in context or dynamic changes in educational direction.

Fifteen-year-old students in Canada, based upon triennial PISA tests from 2000 to 2018, continue to perform above the OECD average in reading, mathematics and science. Our most economically and socially disadvantaged students, in aggregate, do relatively better than those in competing countries, demonstrating more equity than in most other countries.  A considerably higher proportion of Canadian K-12 students proceed to post-secondary education in universities and colleges. That much has not changed across time.

Three significant changes can be identified from the accumulating OECD student assessment and survey data and they deserve far more critical scrutiny:

Downward Trend in Student Performance:  The performance trends for Canadian fifteen-year-olds are consistently downward from 2000 to 2018 in READING,  from 2003 to 2018 in MATHEMATICS, and from 2006 to 2018 in SCIENCE.  While the OECD average scores are also in decline as more countries are included in PISA, the descent is more pronounced among students from Canada. Students in Canada’s top performing provinces of Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec (Mathematics) tend to buoy-up the lagging results produced by students from New Brunswick, Newfoundland/Labrador, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.

Deteriorating Classroom Disciplinary Climate:

The 2015 Education Policy Outlook for Canada flagged one measure, based upon student survey responses, where Canada simply met the OECD standard – the index of classrooms conducive to learning (Figure 5, OECD Canada, 2015).  That largely undiagnosed problem has worsened over the past three years.  Canada ranked 60th out of 77 participating nations and educational districts in the OECD’s 2018 index of disciplinary climate, released on December 4, 2019.  According to a global student survey conducted in the spring of 2018, one in five students, 15 years-of-age, report that learning time is lost to noise, distractions, and disorder, so much so that it detracts from learning in class. A relatively high proportion of Canadian students say the teacher is not listened to and it takes a long time for the class to settle down. In addition, students regularly skip school and report late to class.

High Incidence of Fear of Failure:

Personal anxieties may also run higher among Canadian students when they confront writing standardized tests and experience a fear of failing the test. In Canada, the OECD 2019 Education GPS report states, “15-year-old students have a strong fear of failure”ranking 6th among 77 national student groups participating in the survey.  Fear of failure runs highest among students in Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Macau, Japan, and Germany, but is less pronounced in high performing countries such as Korea. Estonia, and Finland.  Such fears are present to the same degree among students in the United Kingdom, but less so in the United States.  No analysis whatsoever is offered to explain why fears run so comparatively high among teens in Canada.

The initial report on the Canadian Results of the OECD PISA 2018 Study, released by the Council of Ministers of Education (CMEC) in early December 2019, are of little help in evaluating these rather striking trends.  Like previous reports in the CMEC series, the report puts a positive spin on the aggregate results by casting them within a broad, global context, lumping together countries with radically different commitments to education in terms of spending and resources. It is possible to ferret out anomalies and to conduct province-by-province comparisons, but only with time, effort, and attention to detail. That is sufficient to keep it either buried or accessible only to education assessment specialists.

Does the Canadian Education Policy Outlook ventured in 2015 stand up under close analysis. five years on?  What’s missing from the OECD and CMEC assessment reports for Canada over the past decade?  Should the Canadian public be concerned about the downward trend in the demonstration of core skills in reading, mathematics and science?  Is disciplinary climate now a real concern in Canadian classrooms? And why are Canadian students so afraid of failing in our schools when grade promotion and graduation rates are at record levels?

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Education for the Future Rankings: Why is Finland on Top and Who’s Advising the World Economic Forum?

Students and parents in the Pontus school in Lappeenranta, one of the first  Finnish schools to implement the “phenomenon-based” digital curriculum, are now disputing the broad claim made by the World Economic Forum in its 2018 Worldwide Educating for the Future Index. Concerned about the new direction, parents of the children have lodged a number of complaints over the “failure” of the new school and cited student concerns that they didn’t “learn anything” under the new curriculum and pedagogy. For some, the only recourse was to move their children to schools continuing to offer a more explicit teaching of content knowledge and skills.

The Finnish parent resistance is more than a small blip on the global education landscape. It strikes at the heart of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s 2016 plan to introduce “phenomenon’ problem-solving — replacing more traditional subject-based curriculum in mathematics, science, and history with an interdisciplinary model focusing on developing holistic skills for the future workplace. Perhaps more significantly, it blows a hole in the carefully-crafted image of Finland as the world leader in “building tomorrow’s global citizens.”

The basis for Finland’s claim to be a global future education leader now rests almost entirely upon that 2018 global ranking produced by the World Economic Forum, based upon advice gleaned from an ‘expert panel’ engaged by The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited.  While Finland has slipped from 2000 to 2015 on the more widely-recognized Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, that educational jurisdiction remains a favourite of global learning corporations and high technology business interests. A close-up look at who provides the “educational intelligence” to the World Economic Forum demonstrates the fusion of interests that sustains the global reputation of Finland and other Western nations heavily invested in digital technology and learning.

The 2018 World Economic Forum future education index was a rather polished attempt to overturn the prevailing research consensus.  The PISA Worldwide Ranking – based upon average student scores in math, reading and science — place Asian countries, Estonia and Canada all ahead of Finland in student achievement.  The top five performers are Singapore (551.7), Hong Kong (532.7), Japan (528.7), Macau (527.3), and Estonia (524.3). A panel of seventeen experts, selected by The Economist Intelligence Unit, sets out to dispute the concrete student results of an OECD study of 70 countries ranking 15-year-olds on their scholastic performance.

The Economist Intelligence Unit index runs completely counter to the PISA rankings and attempts to counter the well-founded claim that student mastery of content-knowledge and fundamental skills is the best predictor of future student success in university, college and the workplace. Upon close examination, the World Economic Forum index seeks to supplant the established competencies and to substitute a mostly subjective assessment of “the effectiveness of education systems in preparing students for the demands of work and life in a rapidly changing landscape”( p. 1). It focuses on the 15 to 24 year-old-age band in some 50 countries around the world. Setting aside how students are actually performing, we are provided with a ranking based almost exclusively on compliance with so-called “21st century learning” competencies – leadership, creativity, entrepreneurship, communication, global awareness, and civic education skills.

The poster child nation for the World Economic Forum rankings is Finland, now ranked 8th on its PISA scores, because it has now embraced, full-on, the “21st century learning” ideology and invests heavily in technology-driven digital education. The balance of the Top 5 World Economic Forum nations, Switzerland, New Zealand, Sweden, and Canada, rank 15th, 16th, 26th, and 5th on the basis of their students’ PISA scores. Most problematic of all, the future education ranking downgrades the current global education leaders, Singapore (7th), Japan (12th), and Hong Kong (15th).  Mastery of academic competencies is, based upon the assessment criteria, not relevant when you are ranking countries on the basis of their support for technology-driven, digital education.

Who produced the World Economic Forum rankings?  The actual report was written by Economist Intelligence Unit contract writer Denis McCauley, a veteran London-based global technology consultant, known for co-authoring, a Ricoh-sponsored white paper, Agent of Change, alerting business leaders to the urgent necessity of embracing Artificial Intelligence and technological change.  Scanning the seventeen-member expert panel, it’s dominated by the usual suspects, global technology researchers and digital education proponents. One of the more notable advisors was Chief Education Evangelist for Google, Jaime Casap, the American technology promoter who spearheaded Google’s Apps for Education growth strategy aimed at teachers and powered by online communities known as Google Educator Groups, and “leadership symposiums” sponsored by the global tech giant.

Most of The Economist Intelligence Unit advisors see Finland as the ‘lighthouse nation’ for the coming technological change in K-12 education. Heavily influenced by former Finnish education ambassador, Pasi Sahlberg, they are enamoured with the Finnish model of phenomenon-based learning and its promise to implant “21st century skills” through structural changes in curriculum organization and delivery in schools.  It’s not surprising that it was actually Sahlberg who first tweeted about the Pontus school uprising, likely to alert Finnish education officials to the potential for broader resistance.

Launched in 2016 with a flurry of favourable ed-tech friendly research, the Finnish curriculum reform tapped into the rather obscure academic field of phenomenology.  The new curriculum adopted a phenomenon-based approach embracing curriculum integration with a theoretical grounding in constructivism. All of this was purportedly designed to develop student skills for the changing 21st century workplace. The ultimate goal was also spelled out by Canadian education professor Louis Volante and his associates in a World Economic Forum-sponsored April 2019 commentary extolling “broader measures” of assessing success in education. Peeling away the sugary coating, “phenomenon learning” was just another formulation of student-centred, project-based, 21st century skills education.

The daily reality for students like grade 6 student Aino Pilronen of Pontus School was quite different. “The beginning of the day was chaotic,” she reported, as students milled around developing study plans or hung-out in the so-called “market square.” “It was hard for me that the teacher did not teach at first, but instead we should have been able to learn things by ourselves.” Her brutally honest assessment: ” I didn’t learn anything.”

The Economist Intelligence Unit not only ignored such concerns voiced by students and parents, but brushed aside evidence that it would not work for the full range of students. A Helsinki University researcher, Aino Saarinen, attributed the decline in Finland’s PISA education standing to the increasing use of digital learning materials. Investing 50 million Euros since 2016 in training teachers to use digital devices and laptops, she claimed was not paying-off because “the more that digital tools were used in lessons, the worse learning outcomes were” in math, science, and reading. The most adversely affected were struggling and learning-challenged students, the very ones supposedly better served under the new curriculum.

What can we learn from taking a more critical, independent look at the actual state of Finnish education?  If Finnish education is in decline and 21st century learning reform encountering parental dissent, how can it be the top ranked “future education” system?  Who is providing the educational intelligence to the World Economic Forum?  Is it wise to accept a global ranking that discounts or dismisses quantitative evidence on trends in comparative student academic achievement? 

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Homework and Mathematics Achievement: What Works Best for Students?

The Homework Debate never seems to go away.  Popular books and articles inspired initially by American education writer Alfie Kohn and his Canadian disciples continue to beat the drum for easing the homework burden on students or eliminating homework altogether before the secondary school level. That “No Homework” movement made significant inroads in the United States and Canada during the 2000’s. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), responsible for the Program of International Assessment (PISA) test, confirmed that the amount of time students in North America spend on doing homework had declined, as of the 2014 assessment year.

 

A critical question needs to be asked: Has the “No Homework” movement and the apparent push-back against homework had an adverse effect on student achievement? That’s difficult to answer because, despite the critical importance of the issue and the long history of homework research, few North American researchers have been inclined to study the role that homework plays in enhancing student achievement, even in mathematics.

One little-known researcher, Lake B. Yeworiew, an Ethiopian scholar, based at the University of Calgary, but recently-arrived in Canada, saw the hole in the research and recently tackled the whole question. His focus was on assessing the relationship between homework and Grade 8 Mathematics student achievement, comparing Canadian students with the top performing students in the world. While attending the AERA 2019 Congress (April 5-9) in Toronto, I got a sneak peak at his findings.  While his research study attracted little attention, it will be of considerable interest to all of those committed to maintaining and improving student performance standards.

His University of Calgary study, co-authored with Man-Wai Chu and Yue Xu, laid out the essential facts: The average performance of Canadian students in Mathematics (PISA) has declined since 2006 (OECD, 2007, 2010, 2014, 2016)  Students from three top performing Asian countries, Singapore, Macau-China and Japan, continue to outperform our 15-year-old students by a significant margin.  Furthermore, OECD reports that students in Asian countries (Singapore, Japan, Macao- China and Hong Kong-China) spend more time doing homework and score much higher. It is estimated that they score 17 points or more per extra hour of homework.

Recent North American research seems more alert to the need to study the relationship between homework and academic achievement, particularly in mathematics. A literature review, conducted by Yeworiew, Chu and Xu, demonstrates that, while the findings cut in both directions, the weight of research favours homework. In fact, the Canadian Council of Ministers’ of Education (CMEC 2014) has come down in favour of homework. Based upon Canadian national test surveys (PCAP), CMEC confirms that math achievement of students who do not do homework is significantly lower than those doing regular homework.

Yeworiew and his research team provide further confirmation of this 2014 CMEC assessment. Utilizing the 2015 TIMSS study in Canada, involving 8,757 students and 276 schools in four provinces (Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and Newfoundland/Labrador), the authors demonstrate the clear value of regular homework in modest amounts.

The research findings are effectively presented in a series of graphs mapping the study results, reprinted here directly from their AERA 2019 Toronto presentation:

 

 

The relationship between homework and achievement is becoming less of a mystery. Based upon the performance of Grade 8 students in the 2015 TIMSS study, short but frequent homework assignments contribute to improved student learning and achievement in mathematics. Frequent homework assignments, up to four times a week, have a positive effect on math achievement, but less sop when it is of longer duration. No discernable differences were detected for girls in relation to boys at the Grade 8 level in Canada.

Why do Canadian researchers produce so few studies like the University of Calgary project attempting to assess the impact of homework on achievement?  To what extent is it because Canadian homework studies tend to focus on psycho-social aspects such as the impact of homework on student attitudes and the opinions of parents?

Are we asking the right questions? “How much is enough?” is surely a sounder line of inquiry than “How do you feel when overburdened with homework? ” What is really accomplished by asking ‘Does homework ad to your anxieties?” Should we be more conscious of the inherent biases in such research questions? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Student Achievement and Teachers’ Cognitive Skills: Does What Teachers Know Matter for Student Success?

Student achievement varies a great deal across the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Good teachers can have a significant impact upon their students’ learning and achievement and there is now research to support that contention.  What makes some teachers more effective than others is less clear.  It remains one question that cries out for further in-depth study.

A comprehensive research study reported in the latest issue of Education Next (Vol. 19, Spring 2019) tackles that fundamental question on an international comparative scale. Three American researchers, Eric A Hanushek, Marc Piopiunik, and Simon Wiederhold, not only demonstrate that teachers’ cognitive skills vary widely among developed nations, but that such differences matter greatly for student performance in school.

Developing, recruiting and training a teacher force with higher cognitive skills (Hanushek, Piopiunik, Wiederhold 2019) can be critical in improving student learning. “An increase of one standard deviation in teacher cognitive skills,” they claim, “is associated with an increase of 10 to 15 per cent of a standard deviation in student performance.” Comparing reading and math scores in 31 OECD countries, teachers in Finland come out with the highest cognitive skills. One quarter of the gaps in average student performance across countries would be closed if each of them were to raise the level of teachers’ cognitive skills to that of Finland.

What’s most fascinating about this study is the large role Canadian teachers play in the comparative data analysis for teacher cognitive skills.  Of the 6,402 teacher test-takers in 31 countries, the largest group, 834 (13 per cent), were from Canada. Based upon data gleaned from the OECD Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), we now know where Canadian teachers rank in terms of their numeracy and literacy skills (See Figure 1). We also have a clearer indication of how Canadians with Bachelor’s degrees and Master’s or Doctoral degrees rate in terms of their core cognitive skills.

Teachers from Canada fare reasonably well, in the top third, in the comparative analysis of cognitive skills. In literacy, teachers in Canada perform above average, with a median score of 308 points out of 500 compared to the sample-wide average of 295 points.  If there’s a problem, it’s in terms of numeracy skills, where they perform slightly above the teacher-wide sample with a median score of 293, compared to the average of 292 points. Adult Canadians with Bachelor’s degrees actually outperform teachers in numeracy skills by 7 points. Teachers in Finland and Japan, for example, perform better than Canadians with Master’s or Doctoral degrees.

Since the September 2010 appearance of  the McKInsey & Company study “Closing the talent gap,,” American policy-makers have considered teachers’ own academic performance as “a key predictor” of higher student achievement, based upon teacher recruitment practices in countries that perform well on international tests. High scoring countries like Singapore, Finland and Korea, for example, recruit their teacher force from the top third of their academic cohorts in university.

Securing sound data on the actual quality of recent Canadian teacher education cohorts is challenging because of the paucity of reported information. One claim that Canadian teachers come from the “top one third of high school graduates” put forward in a 2010 McKinsey & Company OECD study looks highly suspect.

A September 2008 review of Initial Teacher Education Programs  (Gambhir, Evans, Broad, Gaskell 2008), reported that admission cut-offs ranged from 65 per cent to over 90 per cent, depending upon the faculty of education. Most of the Canadian universities with Faculty of Education programs, to cite another fact, still have grade cut-off averages for acceptance in the Arts and Science that hover between 70 per cent and 75 per cent. With the exception of OISE, Western, Queen’s and UBC, teacher candidates are not drawn from the top third of their academic cohort, particularly in mathematics and sciences.

Differences in teachers’ cognitive skills within a country also seem to have a bearing upon student performance. Plotting student performance difference between math and reading ( at the country level) against the difference in teacher cognitive skills between numeracy and literacy yields some intriguing results (Figure 2). An increase of teacher cognitive skills of one standard deviation is estimated to improve student achievement by 11 per cent of standard deviation. The data for Canada shows a teacher test-score difference between numeracy and literacy of -12 points

The brand new American study (Hanushek, Piopiunik, Wiederhold 2019) also demonstrates that paying teachers better is a possible factor in attracting and retaining teachers with higher cognitive skills. In terms of wage premiums, teachers’ earnings in higher performing countries are generally higher, as borne out by Ireland, Germany and Korea, where teachers earn 30 to 45 per cent more than comparable college graduates in other jobs.

Teachers in Canada earn 17 per cent more than their comparators, while those in the USA and Sweden earn 22 per cent less. Increasing teacher pay has potential value in the United States where salaries discourage the ‘best and brightest’ from entering teaching. There is a caveat, noted by Hanushek and his research team:  Changes in policy must ensure that “higher salaries go to more effective teachers.”

Do smarter teachers make for smarter students? How sound is the evidence that teachers who know more are actually better teachers? Why do we put so much stock in improving student learning in literacy/reading and mathematics?  What potential flaws can you spot in this type of research? 

 

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Future-Proof Learning: What if… 21st Century Skills Don’t Exist?

Equipping the rising generation of students with what are termed “21^st century skills” is all the rage. Since the fall of 2010, British Columbia’s Ministry of Education, like many other education authorities, has been virtually obsessed with advancing a B.C. Education Plan championing the latest iteration of a global education transformation movement – technology-based personalized learning.

 

The whole concept of 21^st century skills, promoted by the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), rests upon widely-circulated global theories about our fast changing, technology-driven, unpredictable future. Leading proponents of the new dogma contend that it is now essential to ensure that our youth are “equipped with the right type of skills to successfully navigate through an ever-changing, technology-rich work environment’ and ready to “continuously maintain their skills, upskill and/or reskill throughout their working lives.”

Much of the 21st century learning mantra went unchallenged and escaped critical scrutiny until quite recently. Today many of the education researchers challenging the 21^st century learning orthodoxy are charter members of researchED, a British grassroots teacher research organization, founded by teacher Tom Bennett five years ago.

A growing number of outstanding education researchers, including Daniel T. Willingham, Dylan Wiliam, and Paul A. Kirschner, have been drawn to researchED because of its commitment to scrutinize prevailing theories, expose education myths, and encourage more evidence-informed curriculum policy and teaching practice. That is precisely why I took the lead in bringing researchED to Canada in November 2017.

British Columbia teachers have given the futuristic B.C. Education Plan a cool reception and are, by every indication, ripe for teacher-led research and curriculum changes that pass the evidence-based litmus test.

A 2017 BCTF survey of teachers gave the B.C. Education Plan mixed reviews and has already raised serious concerns about the province’s latest iteration of a “21^st century skills” curriculum. Teachers’ concerns over “personalized learning” and “competency-based assessment” focus on the “multiple challenges of implementation” without adequate resource support and technology, but much of the strongest criticism was motivated by “confusion” over its purposes, concern over the lack of supporting research, and fears that it would lead to “a less rigorous academic curriculum.”

Such criticisms are well-founded and consistent with new academic research widely discussed in researchED circles and now finding its way into peer-reviewed education research journals. Professor Paul A. Kirschner and his Open University of the Netherlands team are in the forefront in the movement to interrogate the claims and construct an alternative approach to preparing our children for future success.

Research-informed educators are now asking whether the so-called 21^st century skills actually exist. If these skills do exist, to what extent are they new or just repackaged from previous generations of attempted reform.  Why, they ask, have the number of identified skills ballooned from four in 2009 (Partnership for 21^st Century Skills) to 16 in 2016 (World Economic Forum).

What students need – and most teachers actually want – is what Kirschner has termed “future-proof education.” Based upon recent cognitive science research, he and others are urging teachers to take action themselves to ensure that evidence-informed practice wins the day.

The best way forward may well be deceptively simple: set aside the “21^st century skills” paradigm in favour of “the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to continue to learn in a stable and enduring way in a rapidly changing world.”

Kirschner and his research team propose a new “future-proof” basis for preparing students for success and fulfillment: 

1. Cognitive and metacognitive skills are critical. Five of the identified GCM clusters emphasize such skills and suggest emphasizing a progression from concrete cognitive skills to more generic personality competencies.
2. Authentic learning situations should be a high priority and the driving force for teaching, training, and learning. Such tasks help learners to integrate knowledge, skills, and attitudes, stimulate them to develop coordinate skills, and facilitate transfer of what is learned to new problem situations.
3. Redesigning schools and professionalizing teachers in 21st century learning strategies are not likely to make much of a difference. Shift the focus to cognitive and metacognitive skills, linking learning with authentic, real-life situations and matching teaching methods with educational contexts and goals.

Rushing head-long into 21st century skills makes little sense to Kirschner and fellow researchers because the most effective and durable initiatives are those that are planned and staged over a longer span of as much as 15 years. He proposes a three-stage approach: 1) laying the building blocks (i.e., concrete cognitive knowledge and skills);  2) develop higher-order thinking and working skills; and 3) tackle Bigger Problems that require metacognitive competencies and skills. Much of the underlying research is neatly summarized in David Didau’s 2017 Taxonomy demonstrating the connection between long term memory and working memory in teaching and learning.

All of this is just a small taste of my upcoming researchED Vancouver 2019 presentation on the B.C. Education Plan.  It will not only analyze the B.C. version of 21st Century Learning, but attempt to point the province’s education system in the right direction.

Where did the “21^st century skills” movement actually originate?  Where’s the evidence-based research to support 21st century skills projects such as the B’C. Education Plan? How much of the Plan is driven by the imperatives of technology-based personalized learning and its purveyors? Can you successfully prepare students for careers and jobs that don’t exist? Would we be better advised to abandon “21st century skills” in favour of “future-proof learning”? 

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Stealth Assessment: What do Facebook Data Mining, OECD Testing, and ‘Well-Being’ Assessment have in Common?

Millions of Facebook users were profiled by Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge and that public disclosure has heightened everyone’s awareness of not only the trend to “personality profiling,’ but the potential for massive invasion of privacy. These controversial actions have exposed the scope of Big Data and the wider aspirations of the data analytics industry to probe into the “hidden depths of people.” It has also, as U.K. expert Ben Williamson has reminded us, tipped us off about the growing trend toward personality measurement in K-12 and post-secondary education.

Williamson’s 2017 book, Big Data in Education, sounded the alert that the collection and analysis of more personal information from schoolchildren will be a defining feature of education in coming years. And just as the Facebook debacle raises public concerns about the use of personal data, a new international test of ten and 15-year-olds is to be introduced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – a powerful influence on national education policies at a global scale.  Almost without being detected, it is also emerging as a key component of the current Ontario Student “Well-Being” Assessment, initially piloted from 2014 to 2016 by Ontario People for Education as the core objective of its Measuring What Matters project.

Most data collected about students since the 1990s has came from conventional international, national and provincial examinations of knowledge and cognitive skills. Preparing students for success in the 21st century workplace has been a major driver of most initiatives in testing and accountability.  International test results such as OECD’s Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) have also become surrogate measures of the future economic potential of nations, feeding a global education race among national education systems.

The advent of Big Data is gradually transforming the nature of student assessment. While the initial phase was focused on stimulating competitive instincts and striving for excellence, more recent initiatives are seeking to “broaden the focus of student assessment” to include what is termed “social and emotional learning (SEL).” Much of the motivation is to secure some economic advantage, but that is now being more broadly defined to help mould students committed to more than individual competitiveness.  With the capacity to collect more “intimate” data about social and emotional skills to measure personality, education policymakers are devising curriculum and assessment programmes to improve personality scores. Despite the Cambridge Analytica controversy, personality data is well on the way to being used in education to achieve a variety of competing political objectives.

The ‘Big Five’ of Personality Profiling

The science of the psychographic profiling employed by Cambridge Analytica is hotly contested. It is, however, based on psychological methods that have a long history for measuring and categorizing people by personality. At its core is a psychological model called the “five factor model” of personality – or the “Big Five.” These include “openness”, “conscientiousness”, “extroversion”, “agreeableness” and “neuroticism” (OCEAN). Personality theorists believe these categories are suitable for classifying the full range of human personalities. Psychologists have invented instruments such as the so-called ‘Big Five Inventory’  to capture OCEAN data for personality modelling.

Advent of Stealth Assessment

The upcoming 2018 OECD PISA test will include, for the first time, a battery of questions aimed at assessing “global competencies” with a distinct SEL orientation. In 2019, the OECD plans to launch its international Study of Social and Emotional Learning  Designed as a computer-based self-completion questionnaire, at its core the test is a modified version of the Big Five Inventory. The OECD version maps exactly onto the five factor personality categories with “emotional stability” substituted in place of “neuroticism.” When implemented, the social and emotional skills test will assess students against each of the Big Five categories.

The OECD Education Skills experts, working in collaboration with Pearson International, firmly believe that social and emotional skills are important predictors of educational progress and future workplace performance. Large-scale personality data is clearly seen by the OECD to be predictive of a country’s potential social and economic progress. Although both the OECD and the Ontario Student Well-Being advocates both claim that it is strictly a test of social and emotional skills, Williamson claims such projects employ the same family of methods used in the Cambridge Analytica personality quiz. Upon closer examination, the same psychological assumptions and personality assessment methods underpin most of the latest education ventures.

The OECD is already a powerful influence on the moulding of national education policies. Its PISA testing has reshaped school curricula, assessments and whole systems in the global education race.  It is increasingly likely that its emphasis on personality testing will, once again, reshape education policy and school practices. Just as PISA has influenced a global market in products to support the core skills of literacy, numeracy and science tested by the assessment, the same is now occurring around SEL and personality development.  Canada’s provincial and territorial ministers of education, working under the auspices of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) have not only endorsed the OECD’s  proposed “global competencies,” but proposed a variation of their own to guide assessment policy.

The Ontario Student Assessment initiative, announced September 6, 2017, deserves closer scrutiny through the lens of datafication and personality profiling. It’s overarching goal bears repeating: “Update provincial assessment and reporting practices, including EQAO, to make sure they are culturally relevant, measure a wider range of learning, and better reflect student well-being and equity.”  Founder of People for Education Annie Kidder hailed the plan for “embedding” the “transferable skills” and positioning Ontario to take “a leading role in the global movement toward broader goals for education and broader measures of success in our schools.”

Critics of large-scale student assessments are quick to identify the underlying influence of “globalization” and the oft-stated goal  of preparing students for the highly competitive “21st century workplace.”  It can be harder to spot currents moving in the opposite direction and heavily influenced by what Kathryn Ecclestone and Denis Hayes aptly termed the “therapeutic education ethos.” Ten years ago, they flagged the rise of  a “therapeutic education” movement exemplified by classroom activities and programs, often branded as promoting ‘mindfulness,’ which pave the way for “coaching appropriate emotions” and transform education into a disguised form of “social engineering” aimed at producing “emotionally literate citizens” who are notably “happy” and experience “emotional well-being.”

Preparing students to be highly competitive human beings or to be creative and cooperative individuals is risking re-framing public education in terms of personality modification, driven by ideological motivations, rather than the pursuit of meaningful knowledge and understanding. It treats children as ‘guinea pigs’ engaged in either market competition preparation or social engineering, and may well stand in the way of classroom teachers pursuing their own evidence-based, knowledge-centred curriculum aims.

Appropriating and misusing personality data by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica led to a significant world-wide public backlash. In education, however, tests and technologies to measure student personality, according to Williamson, are passing unchallenged. It is equally controversial to capture and mine students’ personality data with the goal of shaping students to “fit into” the evolving global marketplace.  Stealth assessment has arrived and being forewarned is forearmed.

Why is education embracing data mining and personality profiling for schoolchildren? What are the connections between Facebook data mining and recent social-and-emotional learning assessment initiatives?  Should students and parents be advised, in advance, when student data is being minded and mapped against personality types?  Why have Canadian assessment projects like the Ontario Measuring What Matters- Student Well-Being initiative escaped close scrutiny?  Should we be more vigilant in tracking and monitoring the use and abuse of Big Data in education? 

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