Restorative Justice in Schools: Does it Work in Improving School Culture, Academic Tone, and Student Behaviour?

Restorative justice is very much in vogue in Canada’s K-12 schools.  Widespread adoption of restorative justice theory and practice, commonly reflected in “circle conversations,” is largely aimed at moderating punitive, and at times harsh, discipline in schools.  Defenders of the new student behaviour management approach, claim that it works to the benefit of ‘labelled students,’ drawn disproportionately from racialized and marginalized communities. Since the recent advent of Black Lives Matter and the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, it has gained fresh currency in public schools everywhere.

Restorative justice flourished first in the criminal justice system as a preferred law reform venture for juvenile offenders and aimed at, in the words of leading expert Dalhousie law professor Jennifer Llewellyn, “repairing or addressing the harm cased to social relationships when wrongdoing happens.” It attempts, not always successfully, to bring together offenders, victims and affected community members to resolve conflict, normally after the judicial system or school disciple committee has rendered its decision.

The whole approach is not really new because it was actually pioneered fifty years ago by American criminologist and devout Mennonite Howard Zehr, a justice system reformer committed to humanizing what he saw as a punitive and harsh  justice system for both offenders and victims.

While popular in law reform circles as a way of promoting ”forgiveness,” it has struggled to gain acceptance, particularly among victims or crime and their families. It’s hard for victims, often suffering from life-altering trauma or witnessing blatant wrongdoing, to see let alone appreciate the harms being done by harsh sentences or punitive measures.  From the beginning, restorative justice resolutions have suffered because of the public perception that offenders or juvenile violators tend to “get off easy” and rarely face meaningful consequences.

Implementing restorative justice is definitely not the panacea envisioned by its ardent proponents. One professional review of School Restorative Justice, published in March 2019 by Mikhail Lyubansky in Psychology Today, identified the nine most common criticisms of the current practice. Restorative justice in schools, according to practitioners in the field, often suffers from a few or many of these shortcomings:

• Takes too long to implement in busy schools
• Can be emotionally draining
• Cuts into actual teaching time
• Lacks in accountability leaving too much to self-responsibility
• Little follow-through on agreed remedial actions
• Perceived as just a gentler way of controlling student behaviour
• Places unfair expectation on victims/survivors to talk with those who harmed them
• Victims/survivors unlikely to ever forgive perpetrators of sexual assault or overt racism
• Elements of compulsion creep into the process, causing victims and community members to harbour substantial resentment and demonstrate resistance.

Its mass application in elementary, middle school and high school classrooms is more about ‘humanizing kids’ through the latest mutation of what American education researcher Daniel Buck has termed “community-building prophylactics.”  It also remains essentially experimental because, until recently, no independent, evidence-based research has been conducted demonstrating its effectiveness.

Two reasonably sound RAND Corporation studies, conducted in Pittsburgh and Maine, have shown mixed results in implementing Restorative Justice in schools.  Twenty-two Pittsburgh public schools’ engaged in a restorative justice program were studied by RAND Corporation researchers over two school years, 2015-16 and 2016-17 in what was reportedly the most comprehensive study utilizing the first randomized trial — the gold standard in social science research.

Suspension rates were reduced somewhat in restorative justice schools, as 12.6 percent of students were suspended at least once, compared to 14.6 percent in regular schools. Fewer Black students received suspensions under to the program, though they were still much more likely to be suspended than white students. Most significantly, restorative justice all but eliminated expulsions and the placement of students in “alternative” schools.

While schools may have been a little safer, student academic results did suffer under restorative justice conditions. The effect was less pronounced in reading, but math scores for students in grades 3 through 8 did fall significantly. More concerning, it was black students, not white students, whose scores fell. A black student at the 50th percentile dropped to roughly the 44th percentile during the implementation of restorative justice.

The Maine study, published online in March 2019 by the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, found that adopting RJ in middle schools made little or no difference in school climate. While the study didn’t look at academic grades or suspension rates, it showed RJ had little impact on bullying and related school Indicators. It also revealed how hard it is for schools to implement restorative justice even after two years of teacher training, monthly consultations and visits by coaches. Students’ survey answers revealed that it didn’t really impact their behaviour,” teen resistance to “buying-in,” and reluctance to meet face-to-face with classmates seen as ‘enemies’ or threatening figures. It’s a voluntary process and not every kid wanted to talk.

Restorative Justice can also go awry when it drifts into the realm of professional mental health practice. Identifying and treating children and youth with serious mental health disorders should remain the domain of health experts. While most teachers have some background in psychology, social therapy is fraught with risks and best left to those who are trained and licensed psychologists.

Jumping into Restorative Justice is a classic case of “putting the cart before the horse” and jumping over the research.   Giving students personal advice and career guidance is perfectly fine, but restorative justice remains problematic.  We need to recognize that RJ’s effectiveness has not been proven and, if today’s classrooms come to mimic group therapy sessions, it may well cause unintended harms. It’s time to recognize the limitations of restorative justice insofar as they apply to its overuse in schools.

What’s the philosophical rationale for implementing Restorative Justice in schools?  What are some of the most common criticism?  How effective is it, judging from the latest evidence-based research? In adopting RJ in schools what might be the rewards – and the risks?  How might the potential downsides be addressed by schools?  

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The Mindfulness Obsession: Is Relationship-Based Education its Latest Canadian Mutation?

Taking time to really get to know students sounds like good common sense for teachers.  The best teachers, in every school, have always done so while challenging students with high expectations, engaging learning activities, and an intellectually stimulating curriculum. The philosophy, espoused in Dr. David Tanter‘s 2018 Nelson Educators textbook, The Third Path, prescribes something completely different for today’s individualistic and anxiety-filled generation. It also appears to have turned the heads of the educational thinkers mobilizing under the banner of Ontario ASCD, a northern frontier branch of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, based in Alexandria, Virginia.

The central tenets of the The Third Path have also given rise to the “Third Path” movement to promote Relationship-Based Education (RBE).  That movement elevates “teaching through relationships” to a “core value” and proposes a third way forward – what amounts to a 21st century fusion of academics, well-being, and mindfulness.   The “Relationship-based Approach to  Well-Being and Achievement” teacher education program, funded by Nelson Education, features conventional workshops, You Tube videos, podcasts, and weekend conference retreats.

The Third Path pedagogical catechism envisions an imagined educational universe with three distinct paths: Path 1 (academics); Path 2 (well-being); and Path 3 (relationships). Prospective teacher-supporters are exhorted to “Do different, not more. Go deeper, not wider.” The Third Path integrates everything by “shifting the classroom focus from tasks to relationships, from check-lists to check-ins.” Then, the hook: “It views education as a journey of human development, not just for the student, but for the educator too. The Third Path focuses on the how of education.” All of this sounds, feels and looks strange and familiar at the same time.  Strange in its aspirational almost spiritual tone; yet with the familiar ring of romantic progressivism.

The Relationship-Based Approach

Focusing on the student-educator relationship is the first step in “following the Third Path.”  “Caring, intentional and responsive relationships are at the heart of learning and growth.” The focus is almost exclusively on the individual student, and “understanding each student, and truly knowing their strengths, struggles, and needs.”

The Eight Conditions

Third Path educational theory rests upon eight hierarchical conditions that are said to support student well-being and academic achievement. Together these conditions are supposed to “create an environment for students to flourish”:

1. Safety: Students need to feel emotionally safe in order to explore and learn

2. Regulation: Students need regulating relationships and supportive environments.

3. Belonging: Belonging comes from all the moments of connection with others.

4. Positivity: Every student has unseen potential. Positive feelings lead to optimal functioning.

5. Engagement: Engagement is about being fully open to learning, connected to others, able to take on complex challenges, and reach accurate conclusions.

6. Identity: School is important for students’ exposure to a variety of ways of being, and for them to develop a stronger sense of who they truly are.

7. Mastery: A feeling of accomplishment is essential to help motivate students to continue to learn.

8. Meaning: Meaning is a powerful force for ongoing motivation and personal fulfillment.

Surveying this rather dogmatic theoretical framework, encumbered with the label “The Third Path,” informed and engaged educators are bound to wonder if they and their students are being “led along a garden path” to the promised land. The fact that the theory is backed by teachers’ testimonials in the George Lukas Foundation’s education e-magazine Edutopia does little to assuage your natural skepticism about “magic beans” in education.

The principal author of The Third Path, Dr. David Tranter, Professor of Social Work, Lakehead University, is touted as the Third Path movement’s guru and guarantor of the authenticity of its research basis. It all originated, it turns out, in 2014 when the Ontario Ministry of Education released Achieving Excellence: A Renewed Vision for Education in Ontario, and identified “well-being” as one of the envisioned new pillars of the system.  That was a tribute to the influence of Dr. Stuart Shanker, a York University professor championing “mindfuness” and “self-regulation” as the latest classroom management panaceas.

Tranter’s claim to being a leading researcher rests principally upon a February 2016 Ontario Ministry of Education research note focusing on “self-regulation” and why “stressed students struggle to learn’ in our classrooms. The short, 4-pager, summarizes the academic literature in favour of mindfulness theory and its educational step-child “self-regulation.” “For students who experience ongoing stress,” Tranter concludes, ” learning self-regulation can be a difficult challenge; teachers have an opportunity to make a tremendous difference in these students’ lives.” Virtually all of his references are to the work of leaders in mindfulness research, including Stuart Shanker and John Ratey, author of Spark: The revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain (2008).

Critical education analysts quickly spot that Third Path theory carries an implicit bias against teaching knowledge and focusing on student achievement. On the cover of the book and between the covers, Path 2 (Well-Being) precedes Path 1 (Academics/Achievement) in order of precedence. Upon closer scrutiny, Path 3 (Relationships) is actually code for student-centered individualized teaching drawing heavily upon mindfulness and self-regulation practices.

All educators today should be skeptical of such simple formulas for success in connecting with, and effectively teaching,  students. Something like “The Third Path” with a strong whiff of mindfulness should raise cautions.  Mindfulfulness has not only gone mainstream, it has emerged as the magic elixir of our present age.

Presented as a peculiar hybrid of science and meditative discipline, its real founder, Jon Kabat-Zinn, inventor of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), claims that mindfulness has “the potential to ignite a universal or global renaissance.” He has bigger ambitions than just conquering stress. Mindfulness, he claims, “may actually be the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next two hundred years.”

Mindfulness is a recognized therapeutic strategy for individuals properly diagnosed with severe anxieties or debilitating stress. While the leading researchers know its limitations,it has now become a cure-all being introduced and spread to the broader mass of adults through self-help magazines and workshops and to students through the schools. Although derived from Buddhism, it has mass appeal to people seeking spiritual answers outside the church.  Some of the simplified versions. in the hands of amateur enthusiasts, amounts to little more than “concentration training” for hefty professional service fees.

The Third Path movement in Canadian education did not emerge fully formed, out of nowhere.  It’s a small piece of a booming global wellness industry worth over $4-billion. More than 600,000 books for sale on Amazon have a variation of “mindfulness’in their titles, such as Mindful Teaching, Mindful Schools, Mindful Parenting, Mindful Finance, and, believe it or not, Mindful Dog Owners. There is, of course, a Mindfuness Coloring Book, for kids as well as smartphone apps, bells, bracelets, and beauty products. Millions of dollars are being raked-in by educational celebrities on the speaking circuit and by facilitators at adult workshops. Mindfulness based programs have now proliferated in schools, district-after-district, particularly in Ontario, British Columbia, and the Maritimes.

A team of respected British psychiatrists registered major concerns in December of 2016 in a widely-read scientific research paper published in the journal of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. The proliferation of academic literature on mindfulness was, in their view, sustained by incomplete or inconclusive evidence-based research and “pervaded by a a lack of conceptual and methodological self-criticism.” Their two primary concerns were:

(1) the uneven benefits of mindfulness meditation: While “some people may benefit” from the meditation, “others will not be affected in a substantive way, and a number of individuals may suffer moderate to serious negative effects.”

(2) the insufficient of inconclusive evidence for its benefits, particularly when mindfulness-based interventions are compared with other activities or interventions.”

“Something has gone wrong with the science of mindfulness,” the British psychiatrists maintained.  “Orange robed gurus” had been replaced by “white-collared academics” who speak of the benefits of “being in the moment.” It was, they contended, “a social phenomenon” most likely “rooted in our culture’s desire for quick fixes and its attraction to spiritual ideas divested of supernatural elements.”

Mass application of mindfulness worried the British psychiatrists. While the psychiatrists stopped short of condemning the practice, they urged “caution” about “its widespread use as a therapeutic technique”  (i.e., McMindfulness)  and warned against the”assembly -line’ approach based on “a reductive understanding of the human mind.”

Much of this mindfulness obsession might turn out to be another passing phase and possibly a harmless one providing comfort and meaning to some.  What’s worrisome is the scientific evidence mounting of its potential to do harm if mass applied to larger populations, including students and teachers.

What’s driving the Third Path movement surfacing in Canadian schools?  Does “Relationship-Based Education” simply mean “get to know your students” or is it code for “Mindfulness” practice?  How much of the Third Path is inspired by Mindfulness and Self-regulation?  Are leading psychiatrists on the right track– has the science of mindfulness lost its mind? 

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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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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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Measuring What Matters Conundrum: Will Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Assessments Meet the Reliability Test?

Starting next year, students from Kindergarten to Grade 12 in Canada’s largest province, Ontario, will be bringing home report cards that showcase six “transferable skills”: critical thinking, creativity, self-directed learning, collaboration, communication, and citizenship. It’s the latest example of the growing influence of education policy organizations, consultants and researchers promoting “broader measures of success” formerly known as “non-cognitive” domains of learning.

Portrait of Primary Schoolboys and Schoolgirls Standing in a Line in a Classroom

In announcing the latest provincial report card initiative in September 2017, Education Minister Mitzie Hunter sought to change the channel in the midst of a public outcry over continuing declines in province-wide testing results, particularly in Grade 3 and 6 mathematics. While Minister Hunter assured concerned parents that standardized testing was not threatened with elimination, she attempted to cast the whole reform as a move toward “measuring those things that really matter to how kids learn and how they apply that learning to the real world, after school.”

Her choice of words had a most familiar ring because it echoed the core message promoted assiduously since 2013 by Ontario’s most influential education lobby group, People for Education, and professionally-packaged in its well-funded ‘Measuring What Matters‘ assessment reform initiative. In this respect, it’s remarkably similar in its focus to the Boston-based organization Transforming Education.   Never a supporter of Ontario’s highly-regarded provincial testing system, managed by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), the Toronto-based group led by parent activist Annie Kidder has spent much of the past five years seeking to construct an alternative model that, in the usual P4E progressive education lexicon, “moves beyond the 3R’s.”

Kidder and her People for Education organization have always been explicit about their intentions and goals. The proposed framework for broader success appeared, almost fully formed, in its first 2013 policy paper.  After referring, in passing, to the focus of policy-makers on “evidence-based decision making,” the project summary disputed the primacy of “narrow goals” such as “literacy and numeracy” and argued for the construction of (note the choice of words) a “broader set of goals” that would be “measurable so students, parents, educators, and the public can see how Canada is making progress” in education.

Five proposed “dimensions of learning” were proposed, in advance of any research being undertaken to confirm their validity or recognition that certain competing dimensions had been ruled out, including resilience and its attendant personal qualities “grit’/conscientiousness, character, and “growth mindset.” Those five dimensions, physical and mental health, social-emotional development, creativity and innovation, and school climate, reflected the socially-progressive orientation of People for Education rather than any evidence-based analysis of student assessment policy and practice.

Two years into the project, the Measuring What Matters (MWM) student success framework had hardened into what began to sound, more and more, like a ‘new catechism.’  The Research Director, Dr. David Hagen Cameron, a PhD in Education from the University of London, hired from the Ontario Ministry of Education, began to focus on how to implement the model with what he termed “MWM change theory.” His mandate was crystal clear – to take the theory and transform it into Ontario school practice in four years, then take it national in 2017-18. Five friendly education researchers were recruited to write papers making the case for including each of the domains, some 78 educators were appointed to advisory committees, and the proposed measures were “field-tested” in 26 different public and Catholic separate schools (20 elementary, 6 secondary), representing a cross-section of urban and rural Ontario.

As an educational sociologist who cut his research teeth studying the British New Labour educational “interventionist machine,” Dr. Cameron was acutely aware that educational initiatives usually flounder because of poorly executed implementation. Much of his focus, in project briefings and academic papers from 2014 onward was on how to “find congruence” between MWM priorities and Ministry mandates and how to tackle the tricky business of winning the concurrence of teachers, and particularly in overcoming their instinctive resistance to  district “education consultants” who arrive promising support but end up extending more “institutional control over teachers in their classrooms.”

Stumbling blocks emerged when the MWM theory met up with the everyday reality of teaching and learning in the schools. Translating the proposed SEL domains into “a set of student competencies” and ensuring “supportive conditions” posed immediate difficulties. The MWM reform promoters came four square up against achieving “system coherence” with the existing EQAO assessment system and the challenge of bridging gaps between the system and local levels. Dr. Cameron and his MWM team were unable to effectively answer questions voicing concerns about increased teacher workload, the misuse of collected data, the mandate creep of schools, and the public’s desire for simple, easy to understand reports. 

Three years into the project, the research base supporting the whole venture began to erode, as more critical independent academic studies appeared questioning the efficacy of assessing Social and Emotional Learning traits or attributes. Dr. Angela L. Duckworth, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who championed SEL and introduced “grit” into the educational lexicon, produced a comprehensive 2015 research paper with University of Texas scholar David Scott Yeager that raised significant concerns about the wisdom of proceeding, without effective measures, to assess “personal qualities” other than cognitive ability for educational purposes.

Coming from the leading SEL researcher and author of the best-selling book, GRIT, the Duckworth and Yeager research report in Education Researcher, dealt a blow to all state and provincial initiatives attempting to implement SEL measures of assessment. While Duckworth and Yeager held that personal attributes can be powerful predictors of academic, social and physical “well-being,” they claimed “not that everything that counts can be counted or that that everything that can be counted counts.” The two prominent SEL researchers warned that it was premature to proceed with such school system accountability systems. “Our working title, ” she later revealed, “was all measures suck, and they all suck in their own way.”

The Duckworth-Yeager report provided the most in-depth analysis (to date) of the challenges and pitfalls involved in advancing a project like Ontario’s Measuring What Works.  Assessing for cognitive knowledge was long-established and had proven reasonably reliable in measuring academic achievement, they pointed out, but constructing alternative measures remained in its infancy. They not only identified a number of serious limitations of Student Self-Report and Teacher Questionnaires and Performance Tasks (Table 1), but also provided a prescription for fixing what was wrong with system-wide implementation plans (Table 2).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Duckworth went public with her concerns in February of 2016.  She revealed to The New York Times that she had resigned from a California advisory board fronting a SEL initiative spearheaded by the California Office to Reform Education (CORE), and no longer supported using such tests to evaluate school performance. University of Chicago researcher Camille A. Farrington found Duckworth’s findings credible, stating: “There are so many ways to do this wrong.” The California initiative, while focused on a different set of measures, including student attendance and expulsions, had much in common philosophically with the Ontario venture.

The wisdom of proceeding to adopt SEL system-wide and to recast student assessment in that mold remains contentious.  Anya Kamenetz‘s recent National Public Radio commentary(August 16, 2017) explained, in some detail, why SEL is problematic because, so far, it’s proven impossible to assess what has yet to be properly defined as student outcomes.  It would also seem unwise to overlook Carol Dweck’s recently expressed concerns about using her “Growth Mindset” research for other purposes, such as proposing a system-wide SEL assessment plan.

The Ontario Measuring What Matters initiative, undeterred by such research findings, continues to plow full steam ahead. The five “dimensions of learning” have now morphed into five “domains and competencies” making no reference whatsoever to the place of the cognitive domain in the overall scheme.  It’s a classic example of three phenomena which bedevil contemporary education policy-making: tautology, bias confirmation and the sunk cost trap.  Repeatedly affirming a concept in theory (as logically irrefutable truth) without much supporting research evidence, gathering evidence to support preconceived criteria and plans, and proceeding because its too late to take a pause, or turn back, may not be the best guarantor of long-term success in implementing a system-wide reform agenda.

The whole Ontario Measuring What Works student assessment initiative raises far more questions than it answers. Here are a few pointed questions to get the discussion started and spark some re-thinking. 

On the Research Base:  Does the whole MWM plan pass the research sniff test?  Where does the cognitive domain and the acquisition of knowledge fit in the MWM scheme?  If the venture focuses on Social and Emotional Learning(SEL), whatever happened to the whole student resilience domain, including grit, character and growth mindset? Is it sound to construct a theory and then commission studies to confirm your choice of SEL domains and competencies?

On Implementation: Will introducing the new Social Learning criteria on Ontario student reports do any real harm? Is it feasible to introduce the full MWM plan on top of the current testing regime without imposing totally unreasonable additional burdens on classroom teachers?  Since the best practice research supports a rather costly “multivariate, multi-instrumental approach,” is any of this affordable or sustainable outside of education jurisdictions with significant and expandable capacity to fund such initiatives? 

 

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The British researchED Movement: What’s Causing the Buzz in Canadian K-12 Education?

“Asking the right questions” is what most of our best teachers encourage and expect from our students. It’s also what our leading education researchers do when trying to grapple with a particularly thorny or “wicked” problem besetting students and teachers in the schools. Yet far too many teachers across Canada remain reticent to do so because they are essentially trained to carry out provincial mandates. Raising the difficult questions is not always welcomed or appreciated where it counts — among those who set education policy, prepare teachers, and implement curriculum in our K-12 school system.

Working out what works in education is not as simple as it seems, particularly when it comes to improving student learning and deciding upon the most effective pedagogical approach for widely varying cohorts of students. Unfreezing fixed positions, both “progressive” and “traditionalist,” is what opens the door to more meaningful, productive conversations.  We see that in the recent success of Stephen Hurley’s VoicED radio conversations, introducing passionate educators representing differing perspectives to one another for the first time in living memory.

Since its inception in September 2013, researchED has championed creating space for regular classroom teachers in “working out what works” in their classrooms.  Posing those difficult questions can ruffle a few feathers, especially among curriculum leaders and in-house consultants. It’s not easy to venture outside the safe confines of social media “echo chambers” and to consider research generated outside the established “research bubbles.” It’s most encouraging to see Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation president Harvey Bischof and his Provincial Executive actively supporting the movement.

Grassroots, teacher-led organizations can also, at times. be messy  Teachers are given a new platform to express not only their real life frustrations but also to share their discoveries during forays into the education research world. Independently-minded teachers are free to speak for themselves, but do not speak for researchED.  Debates can get overheated, especially on social media. We do need to be reminded that educators, whatever their persuasions, have to be prepared to listen, consider divergent viewpoints, and treat each other with respect.

The Internet and smart technology has changed the rules of engagement, bringing the latest research within a few keyboard clicks.  One would think that providing a forum for asking deeper questions would be more widely accepted in assessing province-wide and school board-wide initiatives before they are rolled out every September in our K-12 school system.  It can, however, be a little threatening to those promoting theory-based curriculum reform or pedagogical initiatives. Questioning such initiatives, most teachers sense– at least in some school systems –is not always conducive to career advancement.

We should all welcome the arrival of the latest book on Canadian education, Pushing the Limits, written by Kelly Gallagher-Mackay and Nancy Steinhauer and published August 29, 2017.  In many ways, it’s a hopeful and encouraging book because it identifies well-funded “lighthouse projects” in the GTA and a few other Canadian jurisdictions.  While the title is somewhat puzzling, the sub-title is far more indicative of the books real intent, i.e., explaining How Schools Can Prepare Our Children Today for the Challenges of Tomorrow. For Canadian educators and parents looking for a  popular, well-written, fairly persuasive brief for the defense of current policy directions, this is the book for you. For serious education researchers, it will be a goldmine of information on recent initiatives sparking further inquiry into the state of evidence-based teaching practice.

Teachers familiar with researchED will immediately spot a few contentious assertions in Pushing the Limits. Success stories abound and they serve to provide credence to provincial curriculum initiatives underway, particularly in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. The overriding assumption is that schools exist to “prepare our students for the future” and to equip them with “21st century skills.”  Grade 7 teacher Aaron Warner, creator of the two-hour per week  “Genius Hour,” repeats a very familiar claim: “Sixty per cent of the jobs of the future haven’t been invented yet.” That buttresses the overall thesis that lies at the heart of the book.

As leading members of the Ontario People for Education research team, Gallagher-Mackay and Steinhauer, as expected,  do make a case for broadening provincial student assessments to include SEL, short for “Social and Emotional Learning.” That’s hardly surprising, given the Ontario Education- P4E partnership  driving that initiative across the province. Digging more deeply, it will be interesting to see what evidence the authors produce that it is either advisable or can be done successfully.

The wisdom of proceeding to adopt SEL system-wide and to recast student assessment in that mold remains contentious. On this particular subject, they might be well advised to consider Anya Kamenetz‘s recent National Public Radio commentary (August 16, 2017) explaining, in some detail, why SEL is problematic because, so far, it’s proven impossible to assess what has yet to be properly defined as student outcomes. They also seem to have overlooked Carol Dweck’s recently expressed concerns about using her “Growth Mindset” research for other purposes, such as proposing a system-wide SEL assessment plan.

Good books tackle big issues and raise fundamental questions, whether intended or not. Teachers imbued with the researchED spirit will be well equipped to not only tackle and effectively scrutinize Pushing the Limits, but to bring a broader and deeper understanding and far more scrutiny of the book’s premises, contentions, and prescriptions. That, in turn, will  hopefully spark a much better informed discussion within the Canadian K-12 educational community.

What’s causing all the buzz in the rather small Canadian teacher education research community? Is it the appearance of a new player committed to raising those difficult questions and to assessing initiatives, through a teachers’ lens? Is it our seeming aversion to considering or supporting evidence-based classroom practice? And is there room for a new voice in Canadian teacher-led education research and reform? 

 

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Social Justice Education: Is SJE a Broadening or Narrowing Classroom Pedagogy?

Ontario elementary school teachers are now being totally immersed in the new pedagogy of Social Justice Education. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario’s newish resource, Social Justice Begins with Me, is being rolled out as a teaching resource for the Early Years to Grade 8.  It’s a prime example of the deep inroads being made by “social justice educators” in transforming “character education” into a vehicle for addressing social injustices through the schools.

The EFTO promotes Social Justice Begins with Me  as an “anti-bias, literature-based curriculum resource kit” that is designed for year-round use and is aligned with the Ontario Ministry of Education’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy.  The ten monthly themes are explicitly aimed at inculcating nine core “social justice principles”: acceptance, respect, hope, empathy, inclusion, diversity, human rights, and equity. It also targets some identifiable 21st century ‘evils’: anti-Semitism, ageism, heternormality, sexism, racism, classism, ableism, prejudice and faith.

The EFTO teaching resource, like the SJE movement, thrives in a culture dominated by ‘political correctness’ and has found a comfortable home in Canada’s largest education graduate school, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, in Toronto.  That movement now has its own exclusive research unit, replacing what was left of the Department of History and Philosophy of Education. Full disclosure – I’m an unrepentant graduate of that now defunct research department.

Social Justice Education has now taken on a life of its own in many Canadian urban elementary school divisions. Serious concerns raised by the infamous June 2012  Maclean’s Magazine cover story, “Why are schools brainwashing our Children?” have done little to derail the movement. Nor has North American education research lending support to an alternative version of “character education,” founded on a different set of core principles aimed at developing student resilience.  Curriculum-informed parents will also spot the complete absence of critical success attributes, labelled ‘old school,’ such as grit, perseverance, resilience, and accountability for actions.

True believers in social justice education see elementary teaching through an engaged sociopolitical lens. Working for social justice in the schools requires “a deliberate intervention” that challenges society’s “fundamental inequalities” and seeks to advance the cause of “better educational and economic outcomes” for “marginalized children.” Social justice pedagogy aims to develop in teachers and students an understanding of “critical literacy” and its key dimensions: 1) disrupting the commonplace; 2)interrogating multiple viewpoints; 3) focusing on sociopolitical issues; and 4) taking action and promoting social justice.

Pursuing social justice in the early grades stirs up considerable controversy, especially among parents more focused on raising standards and improving student performance. Maclean’s writer Cynthia Reynolds certainly unearthed some outlandish, and undoubtedly extreme examples, of actual “social justice education ” activities:

During the 2011-12 school year, first graders in Toronto brought home student planners marked with the international days of zero tolerance on female genital mutilation and ending violence against sex workers, a means to spark conversation on the issues. In Laval, Que., a six-year-old boy was disqualified from a teddy-bear contest because a Ziploc was found in his lunch instead of a reusable container. The  Durham Board of Education in Ontario came under fire for discouraging the terms “wife” and “husband” in class in favour of the gender-neutral “spouse,” and the words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” in favour of “partner.” And in the name of inclusiveness, some school boards include Wiccan holidays in their school calendars.

Such examples of how Social Justice Education can go awry cut little ice with surprising numbers of Education School faculty entrusted with training elementary school teachers. Deeply committed to social justice reform, they believe that the classroom is the front line in the battle to address social ills and establish “safe spaces” for the children of marginalized families. It’s really just the latest battle over the age-old question: who gets to decide on the best way to educate the very young?

Middle-school teacher David Stocker, author of the textbook  Math That Matters: A Teacher Resource for Linking Math and Social Justice, for Grades 6 to 9,is in the vanguard of the movement. His math problems include items focusing on issues like  workers’ rights, racial profiling and homophobia.  “All material carries bias of some sort,” he writes in the introduction. “Really the question is whether or not we want to spend time educating for peace and social justice. If we do, let’s admit that bias and get to work.”

Psychologist Robin Grille, the author of Parenting for a Peaceful World,takes a far more balanced approach, recognizing the inherent risks in imposing a social justice perspective in the early grades. Getting too political in elementary school, where the power differential between teacher and student is vast, verges on manipulation. “You can’t use children as fodder for your cause,” says Grille.

Nor is Grille afraid to pose the right questions: “How do you know these young kids aren’t just parroting what their teacher is telling them? How easy would it be to get them to protest, say, abortion? How much are the young truly able to make up their own minds?”It’s particularly true in classrooms where kids are being graded. So what does she recommend? Children, she points out,  need to develop emotionally before they can develop politically.

The controversial 2012 Maclean’s feature story provided a few of what be termed teacher survival tips. Elementary school teacher and Simon Fraser University education professor Rhonda Philpott identified one of the biggest risks: You can’t walk into a classroom and just start a social-justice activity. It takes trust.” Not all parents appreciate the politically-driven pedagogy either. Professor Ng-A-Fook of the University of Ottawa urges practitioners to “know your students” and “prepare your parents” so you do not “offend families or traumatize kids.”

Social justice education is fraught with difficulties and tends to narrow the focus of classroom activities around issues drawn solely from a rather narrow, albeit well-intended sociopolitical perspective. More recent education research tends to focus on addressing student underperformance and ways of instilling resilience in children.

Character is now seen as the “X-factor” in explaining why some children succeed and others get left behind in and out of schools. Toronto-born writer Paul Tough,author of How Children Succeed, influenced by Angela Duckworth’s research, called the character-based X-factor “grit,” but parenting expert Dr. Michele Borba favours the term moral intelligence. 

Character education also tends to be broader and more inclusive in its reach than social justice education, particularly as exemplified in the EFTO Social Justice curriculum. The Peel District School Board, west of Toronto, embraces a “character education” model that embraces six different character attributes and seeks to educate children who are caring, cooperative, honest,inclusive, respectful and responsible. That approach is not only broader, but includes two factors related to “grit” – respect and responsibility. It’s no accident that the PDSB credo ends on this note: “Demonstrate initiative and perseverance in overcoming difficulties.” 

What is driving the movement to introduce Social Justice Education into elementary schools in Ontario and elsewhere? What are the risks of implementing a Primary School curriculum with such an overt sociopolitical agenda?  Are the fears that kids are being “brainwashed” all that exaggerated?  What’s wrong with pursuing a more balanced approach in the pursuit of character education? 

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Testopoly and Social-Emotional Learning: Is the ‘Pearson PLC Plan’ a Bridge Too Far?

“Learning isn’t a destination, starting and stopping at the classroom door. It’s a never-ending road of discovery and wonder that has the power to transform lives. Each learning moment builds character, shapes dreams, guides futures, and strengthens communities.” Those inspiring words and the accompanying video, Learning makes us, left me tingling like the ubiquitous ‘universal values’ Coke commercials.

Eventually, I snapped out of it –and realized that I’d been transported into the global world of  British-based Pearson Education, the world’s largest learning and testing corporation, and drawn into its latest stratagem- the allure of 21st century creativity and social-emotional learning. The age of Personalized (or Pearsonalized) learning “at a distance” was upon us.

Globalization has completely reshaped education policy and practice, for better or worse. Whatever your natural ideological persuasion, it is now clear in early 2017 that the focus of K-12 education is on aligning state and provincial school systems with the high-technology economy and the instilling of workplace skills dressed-up as New Age ’21st century skills’ – disruptive innovation, creative thinking, competencies, and networked and co-operative forms of work.

The rise to dominance of “testopoly” from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to the Common Core Standards assessment regime, and its Canadian variations, has made virtually everyone nervous, including legions of teachers and parents. Even those, like myself, who campaigned for Student Achievement Testing in the 1990s, are deeply disappointed with the meagre results in terms of improved teaching and student learning.

The biggest winner has been the learning corporation giants, led by Pearson PLC, who now control vast territories in the North American education sector. After building empires through business deals to digitalize textbooks and develop standardized tests with American and Canadian education authorities, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the company was again reinventing itself in response to the growing backlash against traditional testing and accountability.

Critics on the education left, most notably American education historian Diane Ravitch and BCTF research director Larry Kuehn, were among the first to flag and document the rise of Pearson Education, aptly dubbed “the many headed corporate hydra of education.” A June 2012 research report for the BCTF  by Donald Gutstein succeeded in unmasking the hidden hand of Pearson in Canadian K-12 education, especially after its acquisition, in 2007, of PowerSchool and Chancery Software, the two leading  computerized student information tracking systems.

More recently, New York journalist Owen Davis has amply demonstrated how  Pearson “made a killing” on the whole American testing craze, including the Common Core Standards assessment program. It culminated in 2013, when Pearson won the U.S. contract to develop tests for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, as the only bidder.

When the pendulum started swinging back against testing from 2011 to 2013, Pearson PLC was on the firing line in the United States but remained relatively sheltered in Canada. From Texas to New York to California, state policy makers scaled back on standardized assessment programs, sparked by parent and student protests. In Canada, the Toronto-based People for Education lobby group, headed by veteran anti-tester Annie Kidder, saw an opening and began promoting “broader assessment” strategies encompassing “social-emotional learning” or SEL. Pearson bore the brunt of parent outrage over testing and lost several key state contracts, including the biggest in Texas, the birthplace of NCLB.

Beginning in 2012, Pearson PLC started to polish up its public image and to reinvent its core education services. Testing only represented 10 per cent of Pearson’s overall U.S. profits, but the federal policy shift represented by the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) tilted in the direction of reducing “unnecessary testing.” The company responded with a plan to shift from multiple-choice tests to “broader measures of school performance,” such as school climate, a survey-based SEL metric of students’ social and emotional well-being. 

“For the past four years, Pearson’s Research & Innovation Network has been developing, implementing, and testing assessment innovations,” Vice President Kimberly O’Malley recently reported. This new Pearson PLC Plan is closely aligned with ESSA and looks mighty similar to the Canadian People for Education “Broader Measures” model being promoted by Annie Kidder and B.C. education consultant Charles Ungerleider. Whether standardized testing recedes or not, it’s abundantly clear that “testopoly” made Pearson and the dominance of the learning corporations is just entering a new phase.

How did Pearson and the learning corporations secure such control over, and influence in, public education systems?  What’s behind the recent shift from core knowledge achievement testing to social-emotional learning?  Is it even possible to measure social-emotional learning and can school systems afford the costs of labour-intensive “school improvement” models?  Will the gains in student learning, however modest, in terms of mathematics and literacy, fade away under the new regime? 

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