‘World Class’ Education System in Crisis: Why are the Canadian ‘Systematizers’ Ringing the Alarm Bell?

“Canada’s public schools are the envy of the world.” So claim two of Canada’s leading architects and promoters of the current centralized, bureaucratic and learning-focused Canadian K-12 public education system, Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves. What’s most surprising and indeed shocking to them is that anyone would question that claim, let alone want to tamper with their creation, especially in Ontario, where the school change theorists first tested and implemented their system-wide reforms.

The global pandemic has not only confounded Canadian school leaders and policy-makers, but thrown Hargreaves and Fullan, the principal players in the school improvement industry, for a loop. Systemic change is derailed when the centralized bureaucratic apparatus becomes discombobulated and top-down directives become impossible to implement in properly functioning schools or to download on teachers in a conventional classroom.

That explains why the leading school change theorists rang a giant alarm bell and pushed the proverbial panic button in a most remarkable Toronto Star guest opinion column on September 23, 2020 with the scary headline “How to ruin a world-class education system.”  Adopting a rather paternalistic and condescending  tone, the two former advisors and confidantes to Ontario Liberal governments mocked today’s Ministers of Education and policy-makers for failing to protect the system during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and for giving implicit aid and comfort to those who threaten to undermine the status quo in the form of a free, universal and accessible single platform with few if any alternatives for students, parents, and families.

The two systemic reformers sound as if they are running scared in COVID-19 education times. The metaphoric System , in their view, is threatened by dark, shadowy forces with a foothold in Ontario and Alberta, two wayward provinces with Conservative governments committed to dismantling their legacy. Any and all deviations from that formula are now deemed to be not merely threats but the slippery slope leading to ruination.  Lurking behind local initiatives and innovations is the spectre of something almost as lethal as the virus — creeping “privatization” 

Provincial education authorities, particularly in Ontario and Alberta, are now dangerous enough to be enemies of the “public good” and unwitting tools of the “wealthy” forsaking the many while implicitly doing the bidding of the few.  Such diabolical forces are fomenting a “crisis” in education through a variety of ruinous means. Taken together the unseen enemy forces are plotting to 1) Undermine public education; 2) create private alternatives; 3)misuse technology; 4) impose austerity; and 5) mortgage the future. Unmasking the hidden agenda is presented as a clarion call to “see the light,” rise up, and save public education.

The fundamental problem with the Hargreaves-Fullan analysis is that is largely fictional and, quite possibly delusional. The origin, of course, of the now infamous “Best System” claim is the two McKinsey and Company reports (2007 and 2010) purporting to identify and then analyze the success of twenty of the world’s leading education systems. It also echoes the very wording used by the Ontario education reform architect Fullan in a high profile  2012 Atlantic article assessing the success of his own initiatives.

Most of Ontario’s success, as touted in the 2010 report, is attributed to “continuity of leadership” under successive Dalton McGuinty– Kathleen Wynne Liberal education regimes. It began in 2004 when Fullan teamed up with Ontario Education Minister Gerard Kennedy promising to pump $2.6 -billion more into education over the next four years and to raise math and reading results to 70 per cent meeting provincial standards.

Aside from the 2010 McKinsey & Company report forward, written by Fullan, there is surprisingly little about Ontario initiatives in the actual document, except for one passing reference to Parents Reaching Out grants.  Any true cost-benefit analysis must weigh in the balance the fact that education spending skyrocketed by over 57% from 2003 to 2011 to $22 billion while school enrollment fell by some 6 per cent. Much of that massive infusion poured in to support a series of Poverty Reduction initiatives, enhanced special program supports, and universal full day Kindergarten.

Two years after the triumph of the Doug Ford Conservatives in Ontario, the Ontario Liberal education legacy has lost considerable lustre. A “Back to Basics” education platform helped to bring Ford to power in June of 2018. The lavish education spending of the Liberal years may have helped reduce the equity gap, but it fell short of producing better student results. Staking the claim on rising graduation rates is suspect because, while the graduation rate rose from 68 to 83 per cent, we know that “attainment levels” do not usually reflect higher achievement levels, especially when more objective performance measures, such as student Math scores, stagnated during those years.

The global shock of the COVID-19 pandemic bears most of the responsibility for the current crisis facing public education, in Ontario, Alberta and most other provinces. Three months of emergency home learning was, by most accounts, an unmitigated disaster for student social progress, attendance, and achievement. School reopening in September 2020 posed tremendous challenges, especially in higher population provinces with much more severe virus infection rates. Blaming it all on misguided policy choices or mismanagement of the teacher union front is ill-considered and, at best, a partial explanation of what went wrong.

Substandard pandemic education and complicated or unpredictable school schedules have undermined support for the public system. Some 80,000 students in the Toronto District School Board and tens of thousands more across Ontario have turned the system on end by opting for online learning.  Some 11,000 parents have joined a grassroots parent movement initiating “Learning Pods” for teacher-guided home learning, launched by Greater Toronto Area mother Rachel Marmer in July 2020,  Students and parents may well be harming public education by voting with their feet and aggravating existing inequities.

Public education reformers like Hargreaves and Fullan look and sound to be on the defensive, fighting to maintain hegemony over school reform in COVID-19 times. Close observers of the two school change theorists, going back over four decades, will note that the current “education crisis” has brought the “old team” back together again.

Progressive educators clamouring for a new vision for future education exemplifying “Maslow before Bloom“ got a real surprise with the reappearance of “Hargreaves over Fullan.”  “Transforming education for public good, not for private profit that rewards the wealthy few” are more the words of a staunch British Labourite than the utterance of the global head of Fullan Enterprises Inc. hitherto closely aligned with  Pearson International PLC and Microsoft Corporation. It took a crisis, real or imagined, to produce the latest reunion.

What has actually caused the current education crisis?  Was the upheaval simply the result of a cataclysmic pandemic that turned the K-12 public  system upside down?  How much of the disaster is attributable to provincial policy missteps and troubled education labour relations?  Are today’s fearful and anxious parents to blame for choosing alternative options, including online learning and home learning pods?  With parents looking for something different, shouldn’t the system be broadening its range of school options? 

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Ontario Mathematics Correction: Will the New Math Curriculum reaffirm the Fundamentals?

Ontario’s Mathematics program for Kindergarten to Grade 12 has just undergone a significant revision in the wake of the continuing decline in student performance in recent years. On June 24, 2020, Education Minister Stephen Lecce unveiled the new mathematics curriculum for elementary school students with a promised emphasis on the development of basic concepts and fundamental skills. In a seemingly contradictory move, the Minister also announced that the government was cancelling next year’s EQAO testing in Grades 3 and 6 to give students and teachers a chance to get used to the new curriculum.

While the Doug Ford Government was elected in June 2018 on a “Back to the Basics” education pledge, the new mathematics curriculum falls considerably short of that commitment. While the phrase “back to the basics” adorned the media release, the actual public message to parents and the public put more emphasis on providing children with practical skills. Financial literacy will be taught at every grade level and all students will learn coding or computer programming skills, starting in Grade 1 in Ontario schools. A more detailed analysis of the actual math curriculum changes reveals a few modest steps toward reaffirming fundamental computation skills, but all cast within a framework emphasizing the teaching of “social-emotional learning skills.” 

The prevailing “Discovery Math” philosophy enshrined in the 2005 Ontario curriculum may no longer be officially sanctioned, but it remains entrenched in current teaching practice. Simply issuing provincial curriculum mandates will not change that unless teachers themselves take ownership of the curriculum changes. Cutting the number of learning outcomes for Grades 1 to 8 down to 465 “expectations” of learning, some 150 fewer than back in 2005, will be welcomed, especially if it leads to greater mastery of fewer outcomes in the early grades.

The parents’ guide to the new math curriculum, released with the policy document, undercuts the “back to basics” commitment and tilts in a different direction. The most significant revamp is not the reintroduction of times tables, teaching fractions earlier on, or emphasizing the mastery of standard algorithms. It is the introduction of a completely new “strand” with the descriptor “social-emotional learning skills.” That new piece is supposedly designed to help students “develop confidence, cope with challenges, and think critically.” It also embodies the ‘discovery learning‘ approach of encouraging students to “use strategies” and “be resourceful” in “working through challenging problems.”

Ontario’s most influential mathematics curriculum consultants, bracing for the worst, were quick to seize upon the unexpected gift.  Assistant professor of math education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), Mary Reid, widely known for supporting the 2005 curriculum philosophy, identified the “social-emotional learning” component as “critically important” because it would “help kids tremendously.” That reaction was to be expected because Reid’s research focuses on “math anxiety” and building student confidence through social-emotional learning skills development.

Long-time advocates for higher math standards such as Math teacher Barry Garelick and Ottawa parent Clive Packer saw the recommended approach echoing the prevailing ‘discovery math’ ideology.  Expecting to see a clear statement endorsing mastering the fundamentals and building confidence through enhanced competencies, they encountered documents guiding teachers, once again, toward “making math engaging, fun and interesting for kids.” The whole notion that today’s math teachers utilizing traditional methods stress “rote memorization” and teach kids to “follow procedure without understanding why” is completely bogus. Such caricatures essentially foreclose on serious discussion about what works in the math classroom.

How does the new Ontario math curriculum compare with the former 2005 curriculum?  Identifying a few key components allows us to spot the similarities and differences:

Structure and Content:

• New curriculum: “clear connections show how math skills build from year to year,” consistent for English-language and french-language learners.
• Former 2005 curriculum: Difficult to make connections from year-to-year, and inconsistencies in expectations for English-speaking and French-speaking learners.

Multiplication and division:

• Grade 3, new curriculum: “recall and demonstrate multiplication facts of 2, 5, and 10, and related division facts.” In graduated steps, students learn multiplication facts, starting with 0 X 0 to 12 X 12 to “enhance problem solving and mental math.”
• Grade 3, 2005 curriculum: “multiply to 7 x 7 and divide to 49 ÷ 7, using a variety of mental strategies (e.g., doubles, doubles plus another set, skip counting) No explicit requirement to teach multiplication tables.

Fractions:

• Grade 1, new curriculum: “introduced to the idea of fractions, through the context of sharing things equally.”
• Grade 1, 2005 curriculum: Vague reference – “introducing the concept of equality using only concrete materials.”

Measurement of angles:

• Grade 6, new curriculum: “use a protractor to measure and construct angles up to 360°, and state the relationship between angles that are measured clockwise and those that are measured counterclockwise.”
• Grade 6, 2005 curriculum: “measure and construct angles up to 180° using a protractor, and classify them as acute, right, obtuse, or straight angles.”

Graphing data:

• Grade 8, new curriculum: “select from among a variety of graphs, including scatter plots, the type of graph best suited to represent various sets of data; display the data in the graphs with proper sources, titles, and labels, and appropriate scales; and justify their choice of graphs “
• Grade 8, 2005 curriculum: “select an appropriate type of graph to represent a set of data, graph the data using technology, and justify the choice of graph”

Improvements in the 2020 Math curriculum are incremental at best likely insufficient to make a significant difference. Providing students with effective instruction in mathematics is, after all, what ultimately leads to confidence, motivation, engagement, and critical thinking. Starting with confidence-building exercises gets it all backwards. Elementary mathematics teachers will be guided, first, to developing social and emotional learning (SEL) skills:  (1) identify and manage emotions; (2) recognize sources of stress  and cope with challenges; (3) maintain positive motivation and perseverance; (4) build relationships and communicate effectively; (5) develop self-awareness and sense of identity; (6) think critically and creatively. Upon closer scrutiny these are generic skills which are not only problematic but also entirely unmeasurable.

The fundamental question raised by the new Ontario math curriculum reform is whether it is equal to the task of improving stagnating student test scores. Student results in English-language schools in Grade 3 and Grade 6 mathematics, on EQAO tests, slid consistently from 2012 to 2018. Back in 2012, 68 % of Grade 3 students met provincial standards; in 2018, the mean score dropped to 58 %.  In Grade 6 mathematics, it was worse, plummeting from 58 % to 48% meeting provincial standards. On international tests, Ontario’s Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) Math scores peaked in 2003 at 530 and dropped in 2013 to 509, then recovered slightly in 2018 to 514, consistent with the provincial slide (See Graph – Greg Ashman). Tinkering with math outcomes and clinging to ineffective “mathematical processes” will likely not be enough to change that trajectory.

Building self-esteem and investing resources in more social and emotional learning (SEL) is not enough to turn-around student math achievement. Yet reviewing the new mathematics curriculum, the Ontario curriculum designers seem to have lost their way. It all looks strangely disconnected from the supposed goal of the reform — to raise provincial math standards and improve student performance on provincial, national, and international assessments.

What’s the real purpose of the new Ontario mathematics curriculum reform?  Does the latest curriculum revision reflect the 2018 commitment to move forward with fundamentals or is it a thinly-disguised attempt to integrate social and emotional learning into the program?  Where is the evidence, in the proposed curriculum, that Ontario education authorities are laser focused on improving math standards? Will this latest reform make much of a difference for students looking for a bigger challenge or struggling in math? 

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Mandating Online High School Courses: What’s Driving Ontario’s Bold e-Learning Initiative?

The Ontario government’s multi-headed education announcement, released on March 15, 2019, gave new meaning to William Shakespeare’s infamous dictum, “Beware the Ides of March,”  judging from the chilling effect it had on educators and close observers of the school system.  Rooting out ‘Discovery Math,’ restoring the basics, and realigning an ‘age-appropriate’ sex education curriculum were entirely expected, but not the declaration that all secondary school students would be required to take four online courses. Mandating online courses appeared to come out of nowhere.

Secondary students will be required to take a minimum of four e-learning credits out of the 30 credits needed to earn a Grade 12 Ontario Secondary School Diploma, equivalent to one credit per year of high school. All we really know about implementation is that the changes will be phased-in starting in 2020-21 and that the delivery of the e-learning courses will be centralized.

Where the online learning initiative originated and what it actually meant for students and teachers generated plenty of speculation. That was largely because Ontario Education Minister Lisa Thompson announced it as a fait accompli with nothing approaching a detailed rationale.

Now that the furor over mandating online courses has subsided the question of where it came from can be pieced-together. It is looking, more and more, like a foray into ‘disruptive innovation’ rather than another sleight-of-hand scheme to reduce the $26.6 billion education budget.

Online learning and virtual schooling show great potential for transforming student learning, but Ontario like other provinces has pursued a ‘growth-management’ strategy quite different than most American states. Unlike the U.S., the free market remains regulated and private providers are largely absent.  South of the border, “virtual schooling” outside of bricks-and-mortar schools has grown by leaps and bounds in a largely unregulated education environment.

Online learning in Ontario evolved out of what were known as provincial correspondence courses. Since 1994-95, many of the province’s school boards have established their own district programs and then in 2006 twenty of the boards formed the Ontario e-Learning Consortium (OeLC).  That joint venture has helped increase course offerings and the sharing of resources with positive results.

From 2008-09 to 2009-10, online student enrolments in OeLC boards jumped from 6,276 to 9,695. The consortia model has also been replicated by Ontario’s French language boards and by the province’s constitutionally guaranteed separate Catholic school boards. In 2010, a Northern e-Learning Consortium (NeLC) was established to allow remote northern Ontario school districts to address shared challenges (Ontario Education 2011).

Ontario’s regulatory regime, outlined in the 2006 E-Learning Strategy and codified in school regulations initially imposed limits on the delivery of online learning.   “In some instances,” North American online learning expert Michael K. Barbour reported, “the Ministry requirements were once quite restrictive.”

Originally, the Ontario provincial Learning Management System (LMS) could not be used for either blended learning or the professional development of teachers. That led school districts to run parallel systems, the provincial LMS as well as their own separate LMS for those other purposes.

Ontario has gradually loosened its regulations and, in September 2011, finally embraced blended learning as part of the system. By 2013-14, it was estimated that 52,095 students were taking e-learning courses, including summer school, from school boards through the Ontario Ministry’s virtual learning environment. In addition, 20,000 Ontario students were enrolled in correspondence courses and about 6,000 in private online schools.

The leading Ontario parent lobby group, Toronto-based People for Education, emerged after 2013-14 as a champion of “digital literacies” (information, media and ICT) and the promotion of ICT to enhance student learning.

Expanding e-Learning became a contentious issue at the bargaining table. Back in 2010, the big issue, for the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) was not quality programming but rather closing the so-called “digital divide” separating students fully equipped with the latest e-tools and those without such access.  Closing the “ICT competency divide” between urban and rural Ontario proved to be a stumbling block to progress.

Online learning has grown, but at a carefully managed rate. Today, the Canadian e-Learning Network estimates that only 65,000 Ontario students (2017-18) take at least one online course and that represents approximately 10 per cent of all high school students. If the PC plan goes forward, the numbers enrolled will balloon to as many as 630,000 students a year.

Such a dramatic change is a classic example of what Clayton Christensen and his Harvard University Institute team of researchers mean by ‘disruptive innovation.’  The goal of such a change is to open the door to a whole new population of consumers (students) at the bottom of a market access to a product or service (online learning) that was previously denied to them and accessible only to the few with the access, resources, or expertise.

Lifting technology use regulations and removing barriers may be messy and fraught with risk, but students, according to Christensen, thrive in such a dynamic, competitive learning environment. Free to embrace e-learning in all its forms, they gain access to the full range of teaching modalities, ranging from strictly online, self-paced learning to blended learning combining online and face-to-face classroom instruction.

The Ontario Progressive Conservative education ‘brains trust’ has definitely latched onto technology-driven educational change. Mandating online high school courses is a clear sign that the Department has embraced the kind of market experimentation and disruptive innovation common in the United States.

Education reforms implemented in Florida from the late 1990s to the 2000s, spearhead by Republican Governor Jeb Bush and known as the “Florida Formula,’ now hold sway among PC education policy-makers at Queen’s Park.  Ford’s “Back to Basics” education reform echoes most of the five key Bush policies – high expectations, school accountability, student performance targeted funding, teacher quality standards, and school choice.

Florida, under Jeb Bush, was among the first to mandate online learning as a secondary school graduation requirement.  Today, five states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Michigan and Virginia – require one compulsory online course.  Some other states, including Georgia, New Mexico, Massachusetts and West Virginia, have passed legislation or approved regulations supporting the inclusion of online courses. No state goes as far as requiring the four courses stipulated in the Ontario plan.

Ontario’s shotgun online learning initiative deserves to be challenged. Classroom teachers and informed researchers have much to contribute as school systems wrestle with how effectively integrate technology into classroom practice. Front-line practitioners bring real life experience and a healthy skepticism to bear on ephemeral fads and what might be termed ‘hair-brained’ transformation schemes.

Top-down educational initiatives, especially in ICT and technology integration, die a quick death or simply languish without the active support and engagement of regular classroom educators.  That is why innovative and disruptive ideas like the ‘flipped classroom’ and a Virtual Enriched learning environment dreamed up by corporate change management  experts and delivered from on high have, so far, not succeeded in changing the trajectory or improving the quality and variety of student learning in K-12 education.

What sparked the Ontario Doug Ford government’s move to introduce compulsory high school online courses? Was the policy announcement driven by change-management theory, sound e-learning research, or a commitment to reducing education costs?  Is it feasible to expand online courses so significantly over such a relatively short timeline? Will it now be possible for Ontario educators to come to terms with the change? Is “disruptive innovation” destabilizing, by definition, or potentially beneficial when it sparks new ways of thinking and deepens learning for students?  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sex Education Curriculum Reform: What does Acting in loco parentis Mean in Today’s Schools?

Today’s public school teachers are expected to serve a number of masters — provincial education authorities, regional school boards, students and parents, and teachers’ federations. Traditionally, under Canadian education law,they have been seen to stand in loco parentis ––to have within the area of their responsibility the same authority over students as would a reasonable, kind and judicious (careful) parent and to be expected to act, at a minimum, in that manner.  Today, Canadian education law expert Dawn C. Wallin has noted that teachers act more and more as “educational state agents.”

The initial expectation of teachers acting in loco parentis has been substantially supplemented and, in some cases supplanted, by legal duties and requirements of teachers acting as agents of the state. The role of parents has also changed, as governments have come to play a more active role in shaping the framework and terms of engagement in family-school relations. The raging controversy over Ontario sex education curriculum reform in June and July of 2018 has, once again, brought the struggle for dominance in this “contested terrain” to a head.

Fundamental questions supposedly laid to rest with the 2015 Ontario sex education curriculum have resurfaced, much to the chagrin of former Queen’s Park education insiders, politically-active teachers, and allied health professionals.  Who speaks for the majority of today’s parents? For which parents, in urban school settings –and rural/small town school settings?  And in which of Ontario’s diverse range of etho-cultural communities?  Do “teachers know best” what today’s children and teens need to know about sex, gender identities, and leading healthy lives? 

The Doug Ford PC Government, judging from Education Minister Lisa Thompson‘s latest statement, is preparing to review the 2015 health curriculum and to maintain the 2014 status quo until the Ministry of Education has conducted a new round of parent consultations. That’s a watering down of its 2018 “For the People” election promise to revert back to the 1998 curriculum, but still honours a commitment made to the public. The revised policy position makes considerable sense, since only some 10 per cent of the curriculum deals specifically with sex education and is really in contention.

Much of the populist opposition to the 2015 Ontario sex education curriculum is rooted in the deep distrust engendered by the final term Kathleen Wynne Liberal Government. For those swept up in Ford Nation, it was a glaring example of Ms Wynne’s ideological adherence to costly progressive solutions, close connections with well-healed downtown Toronto do-gooders, condescending manner in telling parents what was good for their children, and preference for moving forward without listening enough to everyday concerns. 

Ontario’s 2015 sex education curriculum was always based upon what might accurately be termed a ‘forged consensus,” patched-together after Premier Dalton McGuinty ditched the proposed 2010 reforms in the face of fierce opposition from Catholic parents and boards as well as vocal social conservatives. Current claims that the Wynne round of consultation was all-inclusive does not stand up to close scrutiny. Her government relied heavily upon the usual OISE-Toronto insiders and appendages, well-known progressive education experts, 2,400 teachers, and some 4,000 parents drawn from the notably friendly confines of elementary school PACs.

Manufacturing consent can work to block populist educational ventures, as it did in staving-off British Columbia traditional schools, but it relies upon marginalizing opposing forces and can unravel after achieving the target objective. Shaming old-fashioned “moral traditionalists” and labelling “Christian fundamentalists,” and hidden “homophobes” might have worked again. It was the groundswell of new Canadians, mainly Asian, Middle Eastern, and East Indian, families with more conservative values in Toronto’s suburbs like Thorncliffe Park and the GTA, that upset the best-laid plans of the Liberal-dominated Ministry of Education.

‘Common sense’ seems to be is short supply, possibly because the term bears the stigma of the earlier incarnation of Ontario conservatism during the wrenching and divisive Mike Harris years. That’s a shame because it’s exactly what Ontario needs right now to resolve the sex education conundrum.

With respect to sex education, finding a more stable, common sense resolution starts with a different assumption – that parents are every child’s first educators and have to be meaningfully engaged because they are sill primary responsible for raising and rearing children, albeit in close partnership their child’s teachers. Acknowledging the critical role of parents and families is the first step to winning over skeptical traditional and ethnic minority parents and setting Ontario on the road to a more satisfactory resolution.  It’s also a good reminder that the teacher is, after all, still expected to act in loco parentis and, where possible, with the consent of parents and families.

Any new Sex Education task force should be composed of a new set of players, as much as possible independent of the ideologues and activists on both sides. It should be carefully constructed so as to achieve a legitimate balance, involving liberal and conservative-minded parents, recognized scientific authorities, and respected members of religious communities. Sorting out the differences will not be easy, but will only happen if proponents of more conservative views, rooted in character education, morality, and modesty in sexual matters have a legitimate place at the table.

Reforming the sex education curriculum now means listening harder and working to resolve the fundamental objections over a few critical pieces of the sex education program and applying an more nuanced “age-appropriate” lens to the contentious components.  Imposing a state-mandated curriculum without further consultation is out-of-the question. That’s why there’s so little consistency in what is taught and when, from province-to-province across Canada.

Without a consistent federal presence in education, assessing the state of sex education province-to-province can be quite a challenge.  The best we have is a fairly reliable survey conducted in 2015 for Global TVNews , illustrating the full spectrum of variations in ages when the key topics are introduced:

• Proper Names of Body Parts: British Columbia and Manitoba required children know in kindergarten, while PEI and New Brunswick wait until Grade 6.

• Sexual Orientation:  It was taught in Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Nova Scotia in Grade 3, but Newfoundland only taught LGBT awareness in grade 9 (Manitoba had no clear agenda.)

. Sexual Consent: Nova Scotia introduced the topic in 2011, in advance of Ontario. It is also part of the Quebec curriculum, but it makes only a passing reference to reproductive rights, described as the risk of “going through an unwanted pregnancy.”

• Sexually Transmitted infections (STis) and Prevention: Taught in Nova Scotia starting in Grade 5 but New Brunswick avoided the topic until Grade 10.

• Birth Control:  Taught in Grade 6 in BC and in Grade 9 in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. While N.S. taught STI prevention in Grade 5, it waits until high school to introduce birth control.

When Ontario introduced Gender Identities and LGBT concerns in 2015, they were in the vanguard with Nova Scotia and Quebec, but  in some provinces like Saskatchewan it was still not mentioned at all. Alberta followed Ontario with sex ed curriculum changes that included sexual consent, sexual orientation, and cyberbullying/ sexting.

Love and Intimacy: The only province to teach love, attraction and intimacy is Quebec. Its curriculum is closely aligned with teaching human biology and makes a clear distinction between love and the purely physical aspects of puberty and reproduction.

Central to the newly-announced Ford sex education curriculum review will be a careful study of the readiness of children to learn certain topics in the early grades, Children can and should be taught the biological facts in the early grades, but it’s hard to justify teaching sexual preferences before children understand the nature of sexual desire. Warning young children about sexual pornography, internet porn, and sexting cannot be postponed, nor can teaching about same-sex couples when children see that for themselves among parents in their own school.

A Ford Government sex education curriculum will, in all likelihood, leave teaching more contentious and contested topics until the later elementary and junior high years. Exploring the full range of sexual desire in all its diversity is still best left to adolescence. Newly created teaching resources such as the “Genderbread Person Charts” fall into that category and should not be employed when students are simply too young to fully understand the complexities of gender identity, sexual preference, and biological sex types.

Teaching about sexual fluidity remains a radioactive topic, especially when the biological science is so contested and there is still a risk of doing harm by exposing young children to unproven, possibly harmful theories. In the case of one Sacramento, California, charter school kindergarten, a teacher’s well-intended strategy to demonstrate transgenderism backfired badly when children came home in distress, with some five-year-old boys left “afraid they were turning into girls.” Children can be taught to accept and respect peers who are different without applying labels at such an early age.

Parent knowledge, wisdom and counsel are critical in finding a better way forward and one, as Calgary professor Yan Guo reminds us, that respects the very real diversity among families in contemporary Canadian society. It presents a fresh opportunity to find a more flexible approach, making reasonable accommodations consistent with differing community and family values. State-mandated sex education without accommodating differences does not accord so well with the time-tested “Canadian way” of finding a workable consensus.

Should sex education curriculum be essentially family-centred or state-mandated on the basis of changing child rearing theories and practices? What’s wrong with an “age-appropriate revision” postponing certain topics to the later grades? Is it still possible for Ontario to proceed with most of the 2015 curriculum revision, with the exception of a few hotly-contested topics? How prepared are we to take the time to get it right by accommodating more of the unresolved concerns, and especially those expressed by new Canadian families from other religious, cultural and family traditions? 

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Ontario Education Reform: Can the “Ford Nation” Agenda be Transformed into Sound Policy?

Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford swept into power at Queen’s Park  on June 7, 2018 with an explicitly populist agenda in K-12 education. Campaigning with the slogan “Ford for the People,” he pledged to reform the school curriculum, defend provincial testing,introduce a moratorium on school closures, and consult more with disaffected communities. Most of these planks in the Ontario PC education “promise package” were presented in plain and simple language that appropriated “back to the basics” philosophy and “common sense” reform.

Presenting these policies in such unvarnished “populist language” made it easy for the Ontario media to caricature “Ford Nation” and earned him the derision of the Ontario education establishment.   On what The Globe and Mail  aptly termed “the mourning after,” the core interests who dominated the 15-year-long Dalton McGuinty- Kathleen Wynne era sounded traumatized and completely disoriented.  Premier Doug Ford clearly scares the Ontario education “elites,” but such straight talk only endears him more to “Ford Nation” supporters committed to “taking back” the public schools.

Doug Ford’s PC Education promises, once dismissed as “bumper sticker” politics, will now get much closer scrutiny.  The fundamental challenge facing Ford and his new Education Minister will be to transform that reform philosophy and list of education promises into sound and defensible education policy.  It not only can be done, but will be done if Ford and his entourage seek proper advice and draw upon the weight of education research supporting the proposed new directions.

The overall Ontario PC education philosophy rests on a complete rejection of the Wynne Liberal Toronto-centric vision and education guru driven brand of “identity politics” in education.  “At one time, Ontario schools focused on teaching the skills that matter: reading, writing and math. This approach helped to prepare our kids for the challenges of work and life. Today, however, more and more of our schools have been turned into social laboratories and our kids into test subjects for whatever special interests and so-called experts that have captured Kathleen Wynne’s ear.”

Premier-elect Ford’s campaign captured well the groundswell of public dissent over top-down decision-making and the tendency to favour “inclusion” in theory but not in practice. It was expressed in this no-nonsense fashion: “By ignoring parents and focusing on narrow agendas or force-feeding our kids experimental curricula like ‘Discovery Math’ the Liberals are leaving our children woefully unprepared to compete with other students from across Canada and around the world. And instead of helping our kids pass their tests, the NDP want to cancel the tests altogether.”

The Ford Nation plan for education appealed to the “little guy” completely fed-up with the 15-year legacy of “progressive education” and its failure to deliver more literate, numerate, capable, and resilient students. Education reform was about ‘undoing the damage’ and getting back on track: “It’s time to get back to basics, respect parents, and work with our teachers to ensure our kids have the skills they need to succeed.”

The specific Ontario PC policy commitments in its 8-point-plan were:

• Scrap discovery math and inquiry-based learning in our classrooms and restore proven methods of teaching.
• Ban cell phones in all primary and secondary school classrooms, in order to maximize learning time.
• Make mathematics mandatory in teachers’ college programs.
• Fix the current EQAO testing regime that is failing our kids and implement a standardized testing program that works.
• Restore Ontario’s previous sex-ed curriculum until we can produce one that is age appropriate and broadly supported.
• Uphold the moratorium on school closures until the closure review process is reformed.
• Mandate universities to uphold free speech on campuses and in classrooms.
• Boost funding for children with autism, committing  $100-million more during the mandate.

Most of the Ford Nation proposals are not only sensible, but defensible on the basis of recent education research.  Ontario Liberal Education policy, driven by edu-gurus such as Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves and championed by People for Education was out-of-sync with not only public opinion but education research gaining credence though the emergence of researchED in Canada.   The Mathematics curriculum and teacher education reforms, for example, are consistent with research conducted by Anna Stokke, Graham Orpwood, and mathematics education specialists in Quebec.

Provincial testing, school closure reform and addressing autism education needs all enjoy wide public support. Former Ontario Deputy Minister of Education Charles Pascal, architect of EQAO, supports the recommendation to retain provincial testing, starting in Grade 3.  The Ontario Alliance Against School Closures, led by Susan Mackenzie, fully supports the Ontario PC position on fixing the Pupil Accommodation Review process.  Few Ontarians attuned to the enormous challenges of educating autistic children would question the pledge to invest more in support programs.

The Ontario PC proposal to reform sex-education curriculum is what has drawn most of the public criticism and it is a potential minefield. The Thorncliffe Park Public School parent uprising and the voices of dissenting parents cannot be ignored, but finding an acceptable compromise will not be easy.  Separating the sex-education component from the overall health and wellness curriculum may be the best course of action.  Tackling that issue is a likely a “no-win” proposition given the deep differences evident in family values. Forewarned is forearmed.

How will the Doug Ford Ontario PC Government transform its populist electoral nostrums into sound education policy?  How successful with the Ford govenment be in building a new coalition of education advisors and researchers equipped to turn the promises into specific policies? Where are the holes and traps facing Ford and his Education Minister?  Can Doug Ford and his government implement these changes without sparking a return to the “education wars” of the 1990s?  

 

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Measuring Student Progress: What is Gained by Phasing-out Ontario Provincial Testing?

The latest student achievement results, featured in the April 30, 2018 Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) 2016 report, prove, once again, how system-critical testing is for K-12 education. Students in every Canadian province except Ontario saw gains in Grade 8 student scores from 2010 to 2016 and we are now much the wiser. That educational reality check simply confirms that it’s no time to be jettisoning Ontario’s Grade 3 provincial tests and chipping away at the reputation of the province’s independent testing agency, the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO).

The plan to end Grade 3 provincial testing arrived with the final report of Ontario: A Learning Province, produced by OISE professor Carol Campbell and her team of six supposedly independent advisors, including well-known change theorists Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves and Jean Clinton. Targeting of the EQAO was telegraphed in an earlier discussion paper, but the consultation phase focused ostensibly more on “broadening measures of student success” beyond achievement and into the largely uncharted realm of “social and emotional learning” (SEL).

The final report stunned many close observers in Ontario who expected much more from the review, and, in particular, an SEL framework for assessment and a new set of “student well- being” reports for the 2018-19 school year.  Tampering with Grade 3 testing made former Ontario Deputy Minister Charles Pascal uncomfortable because it interfered with diagnosis for early interventions.

It also attracted a stiff rebuke from the world’s leading authority on formative assessment, British assessment specialist Dylan Wiliam. He was not impressed at all with the Campbell review committee report. While it was billed as a student assessment review, Wiliam noted that none of the committee members is known for expertise in assessment, testing or evaluation.

Education insiders were betting that the Kathleen Wynne Liberal-friendly review team would simply unveil the plan for “broader student success” developed by Annie Kidder and her People for Education lobby group since 2012 and known as the “Measuring What Matters” project. It is now clear that something happened to disrupt the delivery of that carefully nurtured policy baby. Perhaps the impending Ontario provincial election was a factor.

Social and emotional learning is now at the very core of Ontario’s Achieving Excellence and Equity agenda and it fully embraces “supporting all students” and enabling them to achieve “a positive sense of well-being – the sense of self, identity, and belonging in the world that will help them to learn, grow and thrive.”

The Ontario model, hatched by the Education Ministry in collaboration with People for Education, is based upon a psycho-social theory that “well-being” has “four interconnected elements” critical to student development, with self/spirit at the centre. The whole formulation reflects the biases of the architects, since grit, growth mindset, respect and responsibility are nowhere to be found in the preferred set of social values inculcated in the system. Whatever the rationale, proceeding to integrate SEL into student reports and province-wide assessments is premature when recognized American experts Angela Duckworth and David Scott Yeager warn that the ‘generic skills’ are ill- defined and possibly unmeasureable.

Evidence-informed researchers such as Daisy Christodoulou, author of Making Good Progress (2017), do not support the proposed change in Ontario student assessment focus. Generic or transferable skills approaches such as Ontario is considering generate generic feedback of limited value to students in the classroom. Relying too heavily on teacher assessments is unwise because, as Christodoulou reminds us, disadvantaged students tend to fare better on larger-scale, objective tests. The proposed prose descriptors will, in all likelihood, be jargon-ridden, unintelligible to students and parents, and prove particularly inaccessible to students struggling in school.

One of the reasons Ontario has been recognized as a leading education system is because of its success over the past 20 years in establishing an independent EQAO with an established and professionally-sound provincial testing program in Grades 3, 6, and 9 and a Grade 10 literacy test that needs improvement. Legitimate teacher concerns about changes that increase marking loads do need to be addressed in any new student assessment plan and so do objections over the fuzzy, labour-intensive SEL student reports.

The proposal to phase out Ontario provincial testing may already be dead in the water.  If it is, you can guess that the April 30, 2018 editorial in The Toronto Star was definitely a contributing factor.  If the Wynne Liberals go down to defeat in the June 2018 election, the whole plan will likely be shelved or completely revamped by a new government.

Whether you support the EQAO or not, the agency has succeeded in establishing reliable quality standards for student performance in literacy and mathematics. Abandoning Grade 3 testing and gutting the EQAO is not only ill-conceived, but ill advised. Without the PCAP and provincial achievement benchmarks we would be flying blind into the future.

What can possibly be gained from eliminating system-wide Grade 3 provincial assessments?  How does that square with research suggesting early assessments are critical in addressing reading and numeracy difficulties?  Without Ontario, would it be possible to conduct comprehensive Grade 3 bench-marking across Canada?  If staff workload is the problem, then aren’t there other ways to address that matter?  And whatever happened to the proposed Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) assessments and reports? 

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Stealth Assessment: Where is Ontario’s Student Well-Being Assessment Heading?

Ontario now aspires to global education leadership in the realm of student evaluation and reporting. The latest Ontario student assessment initiative, A Learning Province, announced in September 2017 and guided by OISE education  professor Dr. Carol Campbell, cast a wide net encompassing classroom assessments, large scale provincial tests, and national/international assessment programs.  That vision for “student-centred assessments” worked from the assumption that future assessments would capture the totality of “students’ experiences — their needs, learning, progress and well-being.”

The sheer scope whole project not only deserves much closer scrutiny, but needs to be carefully assessed for its potential impact on frontline teachers. A pithy statement by British teacher-researcher Daisy Christodoulou in January 2017 is germane to the point: “When government get their hands on anything involving the word ‘assessment’, they want it to be about high stakes monitoring and tracking, not about low-stakes diagnosis.”  In the case of  Ontario, pursuing the datafication of social-emotional-learning and the mining of data to produce personality profiles is clearly taking precedence over the creation of teacher-friendly assessment policy and practices.

One of the reasons Ontario has been recognized as a leading education system is because of its success over the past 20 years in establishing an independent Education Quality and Accountability Office  (EQAO) with an established and professionally-sound provincial testing program in Grades 3, 6, 9 and 10.  Whether you support the EQAO or not, most agree that is has succeeded in establishing reliable benchmark standards for student performance in literacy and mathematics.

The entire focus of Ontario student assessment is now changing. Heavily influenced by the Ontario People for Education Measuring What Matters project, the province is plunging ahead with Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) assessment embracing what Ben Williamson aptly describes as “stealth assessment” – a set of contested personality criteria utilizing SEL ‘datafication’ to measure “student well-being.” Proceeding to integrate SEL into student reports and province-wide assessments is also foolhardy when American experts Angela Duckworth and David Scott Yeager warn that the ‘generic skills’ are ill- defined and possibly unmeasureable.

Social and emotional learning is now at the very core of Ontario’s Achieving Excellence and Equity agenda and it fully embraces “supporting all students” and enabling them to achieve “a positive sense of well-being – the sense of self, identity, and belonging in the world that will help them to learn, grow and thrive.” The Ontario model is based upon a psycho-social theory that “well-being” has “four interconnected elements” critical to student development, with self/spirit at the centre. Promoting student well-being is about fostering learning environments exhibiting these elements:

Cognitive: Development of abilities and skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, and the ability to be flexible and innovative.

Emotional: Learning about experiencing emotions, and understanding how to recognize, manage, and cope with them.

Social: Development of self-awareness, including the sense of belonging, collaboration, relationships with others, and communication skills.

Physical: Development of the body, impacted by physical activity, sleep patterns, healthy eating, and healthy life choices.

Self/Spirit:  Recognizing the core of identity whieh has “different meanings for different people, and can include cultural heritage, language, community, religion or a broader spirituality.”

Ontario’s new student report cards, proposed for 2018-19 implementation, will incorporate an distinct SEL component with teacher evaluations on a set of “transferable skills” shifting the focus from organization and work habits to “well-being” and associated values, while retaining grades or marks for individual classes. The Ontario Education “Big Six” Transferable Skills are: critical thinking, innovation and creativity, self-directed learning, collaboration, communication, and citizenship.  Curiously absent from the Ontario list of preferred skills are those commonly found in American variations on the formula: grit, growth mindset, and character. 

The emerging Ontario student assessment strategy needs to be evaluated in relation to the latest research and best practice, exemplified in Dylan Wiliam’s student assessment research and Daisy Christodoulou’s 2017 book Making Good Progress: The Future of Assessment for Learning.  Viewed through that lens, the Ontario student assessment philosophy and practice falls short on a number of counts.

1. The Generic Skills Approach: Adopting this approach reflects a fundamental misunderstanding about how students learn and acquire meaningful skills. Tacking problem-solving at the outset, utilizing Project-Based Learning to “solve-real life problems” is misguided  because knowledge and skills are better acquired  through other means. The “deliberate practice method” has proven more effective. Far more is learned when students break down skills into a ‘progression of understanding’ — acquiring the knowledge and skill to progress on to bigger problems.
2. Generic Feedback: Generic or transferable skills prove to be unsound when used as a basis for student reporting and feedback on student progress. Skills are not taught in the abstract, so feedback has little meaning for students. Reading a story and making inferences, for example, is not a discrete skill; it is dependent upon knowledge of vocabulary and background context to achieve reading comprehension.
3. Hidden Bias of Teacher Assessment: Teacher classroom assessments are highly desirable, but do not prove as reliable as standardized measures administered under fair and objective conditions. Disadvantaged students, based upon reliable, peer-reviewed research, do better on tests than of regular teacher assessments. “Teacher assessment is biased not because they are carried out by teachers, but because it is carried out by humans.”
4. Unhelpful Prose Descriptors: Most verbal used in system-wide assessments and reports are unhelpful — tend to be jargon-ridden, unintelligible to students and parents, and prove particularly inaccessible to students struggling in school. Second generation descriptors are “pupil friendly” but still prove difficult to use in learning how to improve or correct errors.
5. Work-Generating Assessments: System-wide assessments, poorly constructed, generate unplanned and unexpected marking loads, particularly in the case of qualitative assessments with rubrics or longer marking time. In the U.K., for example, the use of grade descriptors for feedback proved much more time consuming than normal grading of written work Primary teachers who spent 5 hours a week on assessment in 2010, found that, by 2013, they were spending 10 hours a week.What’s wrong with the new Ontario Assessment Plan and needs rethinking?

1. The Generic Skills Approach – Teaching generic skills (SEL) doesn’t work and devalues domain-specific knowledge
2. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) models — carry inherent biases and are unmeasurable
3. Breach of Student Security – Data mining and student surveys generate personality data without consent
4. Erosion of Teacher Autonomy – Student SEL data generated by algorithms, creates more record-keeping, more marking, cuts into classroom time.

The best evidence-based assessment research, applied in deconstructing the Ontario Assessment initiative, raises red flags.  Bad student assessment practices, as Wiliam and Christodoulou show, can lead to serious workload problems for classroom teachers. No education jurisdiction that lived up to the motto “Learning Province” would plow ahead when the light turns to amber.

A summary of the researchED Ontario presentation delivered April 14, 2018, at the Toronto Airport Westin Hotel. 

Where is the new Ontario student assessment initiative really heading? Is it a thinly-disguised attempt to create a counterweight to current large-scale student achievement assessments? Is it feasible to proceed with SEL assessment when leading researchers question its legitimacy and validity? Are we running the risk of opening the door to the wholesale mining of student personal information without consent and for questionable purposes? 

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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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The Ontario Hall-Dennis Report, Fifty Years On: What Remains of Its Legacy?

Fifty years after its appearance, the June 1968 Ontario Hall-Dennis Report lives on in the philosophy and pedagogy that it seeded in the schools of Ontario and right across Canada. In its ringing endorsement of child-centred learning, its imagery of playful school children, its spirit of experimentation, and its flirtation with gradeless education, the Report left its mark and defined the limits of so-called “progressive education” for a generation or more. It also ushered in a student-centred philosophy harkening back to days of the renowned American educational progressive educator John Dewey that remains deeply ingrained in elementary education.

The “progressive education” mantra bequeathed by Hall-Dennis exposed deep divisions over core philosophy and preferred teaching practice.  Education professor Ken Osborne perhaps put it best in his 1999 guide to the Canadian education debate:  In its day, the Report was revered as “the shining star of educational reform,” but two decades later it was considered passe — and “painted as at best wholly-minded idealism and, at worst, reckless irresponsibility.” 

Child-centred teaching, teacher as facilitator, and learning centres many not have originated with the Hall-Dennis Committee, but all were sanctified in the Report and became preferred methodologies associated with ‘good teaching.’ From that time forward, child-centred approaches did become like a “Holy Writ” among elementary school teachers, while high school educators considered it symptomatic of “dumbing down” subject teaching.  A few smaller elementary schools, even today, like the Halifax Independent School, are explicit in their adherence to Hall-Dennis inspired progressive ideals.

One Toronto elementary school, Alpha Alternative School, founded in 1971, continues to hold a candle for the educational philosophy and approach to education espoused in the Hall-Dennis Report.  It also provides a lens through which to examine and take stock of the Report’s key principles.  The first line of the 1968 report “The truth shall make you free” remains today as the essential mission of Alpha and its 2007 satellite site, Alpha II.

Student-directed education inspired by Hall-Dennis springs from Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations enshrined in the 1968 report. Based upon that Declaration, the Report proposed fundamental principles for Ontario school education:

1. the right of every individual to have equal access to the learning experience best suited to his needs, and
2. the responsibility of every school authority to provide a child-centered learning continuum that invites learning by individual discovery and inquiry.

While the principles conveyed a spirit of openness, it was firmly committed to “progressive education” and surprisingly prescriptive about “how child-centred learning should take place.” The key tenets of the Hall-Dennis Report convey a sense of certitude that implies imparting a “new wisdom” in education:

The Child-Centred Curriculum

“The curriculum of the future must be child-oriented and must provide opportunities for choice within broadly defined limits. Teachers at every level, supported by qualified counselors, will be required to guide each child along his own critically determined path, far more flexible than a computer guide, but critical in the sense that the learning programs initiated and developed will best meet the needs of each child at the time best suited to his development. ” (H-D R, p. 52)

The Open and Flexible Learning Environment

“There is increasing evidence that children are often better taught in groups centered around interests, and as individuals, than in classes consisting of 30 or 40 pupils. Group teaching and individual learning programs break down the old formal class organization. But despite advocacy of clustering children around interests, supported by appropriate resource teachers, children, particularly young children, seem more relaxed and at ease when identified with at least one home teacher…., so that she may be aware of the child’s changing moods and responses. “(H-D R, p. 56)

The Student- Attuned Curriculum for Young People

“A good curriculum must meet the needs and expressed desires of pupils. It creates in the school a pleasant and friendly environment in which young children know that they are appreciated and accepted; in which maturing young people will find that they and their ideas are respected; and in which all pupils find interest and satisfaction in learning. It gives a realistic and objective exposition of society and its institutions. It encourages pupils to ask questions, to contribute further information, and to express their opinions freely, and it encourages teachers to answer pupils’ questions truthfully as often and as fully as possible. At the same time, such a curriculum provides for studies related to institutions of higher or further education or which are needed to obtain specific qualifications.” ((H-D R, p. 56)

Eliminate Grade Promotion and Curtail Examinations

“The curriculum must provide for the individual progress of pupils. To make this possible, two major innovations are indicated: complete abolition of the graded system throughout the school; and the use of individual timetables at the senior level. The introduction of graded textbooks and the placing of pupils in ‘books’ or grades undoubtedly improved education in Ryerson’s day…. But during the last fifty years, as it has become increasingly difficult to retard and eliminate pupils at an early age by failure, the graded system has become an anomaly…. [Formal examinations are] “arbitrary measures of achievement” and “concepts of promotion and failure” should be “removed from the schools not to reduce standards, but to improve the quality of learning. The evaluation of pupils’ progress should be a continuous part of the learning process, not a separate periodic exercise….” (H-D R, p. 72)

Page 93—Developing a Sense of Responsibility in Students

“Teachers can take definite steps to develop a sense of responsibility in children, such as: Have pupils plan and manage their own routines of study; Encourage pupils to suggest ventures in learning which they would like to undertake;Encourage joint or group undertakings; Reduce assigned homework in favor of pupil-planned study or practice; Apply only those rules that are necessary for the maintenance of a healthy, invigorating and pleasant learning atmosphere; Give pupils practice in making decisions of a personal and social nature. ” (H-D R, p. 93)

The Teacher as Guide at the Side

“The modern professional teacher is a person who guides the learning process. He places the pupil in the center of the learning activity and encourages and assists him in learning how to inquire, organize, and discuss, and to discover answers to problems of interest to him. The emphasis is on the process of inquiry as well as on the concepts discovered.” (H-D R, p. 93)

Innovative Learning Environments – Cooperative Learning, Study Centres, Learn Through Doing

“In the future a school will contain various kinds and sizes of learning areas, including classrooms, small study centers, and large open areas. In a well-organized schoolroom efficient, flexible use is made of available resources, and routines proceed with a minimum of confusion and interference….. The organization of schoolroom routines should be regarded as a co-operative activity of teachers and pupils, operating within the general organization of the school. The establishment of routines should be an exercise in democracy in which pupils establish and maintain as many as possible of their own ‘rules,’ evaluating and revising them as conditions demand. This exercise provides for the development of self-discipline and responsibility….

The spotlight in the school is shifting from methods of teaching to experiences for learning, and the truly professional teacher now employs in each situation the methods that will enhance the quality of the learning experience of the pupils in his care….In establishing the atmosphere for learning the professional teacher remains sensitive to the interests and problems of pupils, and allows the direction or pace of the lesson to change as the situation demands. He realizes that for an individual child the sequence of steps in the lesson may be less important than a word of praise or kindness, or a sign of recognition or reassurance; indeed, such actions are themselves part of teaching ‘method.’ A teacher may actually be teaching very well when he is apparently doing little more than observing pupils at work; he does not believe that effective teaching demands constant activity on his part.” (H-D R, pp. 139-40)

Student Evaluation – and Assessment for Learning

“With the introduction of a child-centered program, evaluation is changing in both function and form: its function is to determine the effectiveness of the program in the pupil’s development; it takes the form of day-by-day observations of the pupil’s interests and activities, difficulties and achievements. Evaluation is part of the learning program, is often planned jointly by the pupils and the teacher, and provides for self-evaluation as well as for diagnosis. The process may involve a discussion of the effectiveness of a learning situation, of the degree of participation of the pupils, and of suggestions for improvement of study habits, research and discussion procedures, and use of reference materials.”(H-D R, pp. 142)

Democratic Schools and Teacher Autonomy

“The structure of the system and of the school itself should be a democratic one-one where the teacher has freedom, not one that is so rigidly bound by rules and regulations that he feels his freedom is being questioned. The teacher’s loyalty to the system will be conditional upon the degree to which the system and the individual school serve to make it possible for him to do his best work. The system that meets the professional needs of its teachers will usually have the highest teacher morale. “(H-D R, p. 157)

The Principal as Curriculum Leader

“The principal who sees himself as the curriculum leader of the school acts as a consultant, adviser, and co-ordinator, and spends most of his time with children and teachers in psychological, sociological, and curricula activities. He subscribes to the theory that the aims of education are determined philosophically, and he realizes that striving for uniformity through standardized tests, external examinations, and other devices and controls has little to do with the attainment of objectives in education. Subjectivity is his accepted mode for educational endeavor; objectivity is desirable only in specific instances, subordinate to the major purposes of education. “(H-D R, p. 170)

Looking back, it is striking to see how much of the so-called “progressive orthodoxy” was articulated and extolled in a document that is all-too-often forgotten, especially among teachers born after its appearance. Few who lived through the Hall-Dennis era would miss the connective tissue linking contemporary “innovations” with concepts and ideas espoused in that Report.

What contemporary educational principles, concepts and pedagogical approaches find earlier justification in the Hall-Dennis Report?  Which of the Hall-Dennis reform proposals proved the most successful?  Which of the proposals simply fizzled and went nowhere?  Will there ever come a time when the vision is fully realized in K-12 education? 

Third and Final commentary in the Series.

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