Inclusive Education, Thirty Years after Salamanca: Why is New Brunswick “Giving Up” on Vulnerable Kids?*

Thirty years ago, the modern conception of inclusive education was born at a UNESCO World Conference on Special Needs Education held in Spain — and captured in what is known as the Salamanca Declaration. “Every learner matters and matters equally” is the guiding principle and that has meant including most students, if not all, in mainstream classrooms

Since 1995, school systems like New Brunswick and many around the world have shifted in their approach to serving learning challenged kids — from providing ‘special education’ support programs to including more children in inclusive learning environments.  While the principle is nearly universally accepted, few nations or states have followed one Maritime Canadian province, New Brunswick, in virtually eliminating specialized support programs for children with severe learning challenges and complex needs.

For a province that promotes itself abroad as an exemplar of ‘inclusive education,’ New Brunswick Child and Youth Advocate Kelly Lamrock’s latest report, Policy of Giving Up, is a devastating indictment. Maintaining all-inclusive classrooms comes at a steep price because hundreds of the most challenged, vulnerable and troubled kids are being excluded for days and weeks-at-a-time, just to maintain the current model.

One of those children is the 9-year-old son Riverview mother Cassie Martin,  a high-needs child who uses a wheelchair and lives with multiple and complex challenges, is more than a statistic. He’s a living example of a student sent home regularly and labelled a ‘partial-day student.’  Nor is he alone because it’s now happening in many cases, and to 500 or more children, in New Brunswick’s purportedly inclusive school system.

Lamrock’s latest investigation looked at the plight of students like Cassie Martin’s son, who are sent home and, in some cases, with “no educational services at all.”  While the practice was once relatively rare, Lamrock reported that today more than 500 children are being denied an education for most of the week.

Through its own investigation, Lamrock’s office found 344 students on ‘partial-day’ programs in the Anglophone school districts. While such students were not even tracked in Francophone schools, the office puts that number at around 150 students.

Under current, de-facto policy, students who pose the greatest challenges essentially disappear.  Many receive no additional services nor are they provided with alternative learning strategies. Even more disconcerting, Lamrock found no evidence that districts were tracking the impact of partial days on the children or monitoring their progress.

Then came the gut punch: “It is a policy of giving up on the children most in need.”

Children in care are the most in need of a proper education. Yet the Child Advocate found those students nearly 20 times more likely to wind up on partial days and be told not to come to school.  That is an utter travesty and completely indefensible.

School districts are not only breaking promises to be inclusive, they are actually breaking the law. That’s the view of Lamrock, one of the province’s better-known lawyers.

The Education department’s rationale for resorting to ‘partial-days’ is suspect, especially so when the publicly-stated policy is inclusive education for all. Under Policy 322 on Inclusive Education (2013), it is permissible to allow “variation of the common learning environment” when a student in a common setting pose “undue hardship.”  In such cases, there still remains a duty to provide some form of alternative provision.

In presenting his report, Lamrock provided an important clarification of what is required to fulfil the commitment to educate all students. “Placing a child in a setting where they receive short-term, targeted, and appropriate interventions to help them gain skills or master behaviours that they will need to return to the classroom is a variation of a learning environment,” he said.

“Sending a child home with no educational services is not a variation of the learning environment,” according to Lamrock. “It is a denial of any learning environment.” Taking a step back, it is also a clear indication that the inclusion model is full of holes.

Education Minister Bill Hogan’s response to the revelations was hard to fathom.  Put on the spot under the glare of cameras, he promised to look into the prevalence of ‘partial day’ plans but cast doubt on Lamrock’s claims that significant numbers of children and teens were cast adrift without education support services.

That’s completely at odds with the claims made by his immediate predecessor, Dominic Cardy. Almost exactly five years ago, in May 2019, Minister Cardy identified the spread of ‘partial-day’ plans as a problem and directed Anglophone districts to track and report on the growth in numbers.  This is, in all likelihood, the only reason the data even exists, albeit tightly guarded by school districts.

What’s standing in the way of rooting it out in the system?  The fundamental contradiction embedded in the N.B. inclusive education model.  Students with severe learning needs and complex challenges are now too numerous to be accommodated in regular classrooms. To restore proper support programs cuts against the grain of the gatekeepers, most notably Inclusive Education Canada, anchored in Minister Hogan’s home town, Woodstock, N.B.

Confronted by the usual deflections that we need to “address class composition” or to provide “more resources,” Lamrock called a spade-a-spade. “Whatever the response is,” he told CBC News, “it can’t be to take the 500 most vulnerable kids and send them home and say ‘Good luck, we’ll see you when you are homeless or in jail.’ And that’s what we’re doing right now.”

Thirty years on, New Brunswick’s inclusive education provision falls short of the laudable Salamanca principles. Adopting the language of inclusion means little when so many kids are ‘left out’ and underserviced in publicly-funded schools. It amounts to covering up the cracks and implicitly accepting exclusions through the back door.   Let’s hope the message sinks in, this time around.

*An earlier version of this commentary appeared in The Telegraph-Journal (Provincial), June 14, 2024

What is the true state of inclusive education if hundreds of children are excluded regularly and placed on “partial day plans”?  In adopting the total inclusion model, did New Brunswick create the problem by eliminating virtually every support program serving those with severe needs or disruptive behaviours? Is the province violating its own education law by failing to educate every child? Is it a matter of funding and resources or trying to fit everyone into a preconceived model of school provision?

Read Full Post »

Student Behaviour and Inclusion: How well are “Coke Bottle Kids” being served in total inclusion classrooms?*

New Brunswick disabilities advocate Heather Chandler, the mother of a hearing-challenged daughter, is no fan of the what she describes as the “illusion of inclusion.” On an April 2023 CBC NB radio panel of parents, she described what it’s really like for her daughter Alison and far too many other children in New Brunswick’s one-classroom-for-all model.

Social isolation, anxieties and frustrations are an everyday school experience for many children. That’s what vocal N.B. parents such as Chandler are saying publicly, some for the first time. It all surfaced during the tension-filled consultations over the aborted French language reforms threatening the French immersion program

Chandler is far from alone in speaking out about how it’s adversely affecting her own daughter and children with disabilities of all kinds. “She’s holding it in,” Chandler says, while others are “blowing up in class” causing disruptions. It all comes out when she gets home. “For deaf kids, it’s actually exclusion.” In short, “it’s not working.”

Chandler’s daughter displays the classic behaviour of what are known as “Coke bottle kids.” That term, coined by American education observer Jay Elizabeth Brownlee, originally used to describe neurodivergent children, has far wider application. It helps to explain why teachers say school kids are “fine” or “had a good day” yet the second they get home (or before they leave the school parking lot), they simply “blow up in your face.”

Chandler and that CBC NB panel, including Moncton parent Clinton Davis and French immersion parent Weh-Ming Cho, identified, in considerable detail, how challenging it can be trying to cope in today’s classrooms. Each of them, to varying degrees, supported structural changes building-in more “fluidity” for kids, including a broader range of options to ensure meaningful inclusion for most, if not all kids, right across the spectrum.

Student behaviour and the remarkably rigid N.B. inclusion model are intimately connected. Investing some $30-million more may provide some temporary relief, but it’s not getting to the root of the matter. Without some fluidity in movement, it can be, in Chandler’s words, “an isolating experience.”

Listening to his children, Moncton’s Clinton Davis got a good sense of what’s actually going on in different schools. His kids simply don’t feel like the regular teachers know how to support students with disabilities nor do they have the resources to manage students with behavioural problems. Some unruly students, he pointed out, do not have diagnosed disabilities and are simply ‘acting up’ and disrupting classes.

While French immersion classes run more smoothly, Cho thinks they too might benefit from some variation in delivery models, including enrichment opportunities. Allowing students to periodically interact with “new faces” might provide some relief as long as it’s not perceived as punishment of any kind. Being stuck with the same people all day, whatever your age, he added, could become a “hellscape” for anyone.

The latest provincial plan to address student behaviour challenges, announced in late July by NBTA Executive Director Ardith Shirley and Assistant Deputy Education Minister Tiffany Bastin, came up considerably short. Hiring “behaviour mentors” and adding contract supply teachers was presented as a “near-term” response. It looks far more like a band-aid to patch-up the existing model and quell rising parent and teacher concerns.

Education Minister Bill Hogan’s statement supporting the latest plan sounded like it was simply a matter of providing more classroom supports.  The behaviour intervention mentors, he said, were aimed at helping students “learn to self-regulate” and helping staff to “co-regulate” guiding students on a “more positive path” and “reduce interruptions that happen in class.” Assigning supply teachers to specific schools, Hogan added, provided more predictability for teachers and consistency for learning-challenged children.

A year ago, former N.B. Education Minister Dominic Cardy was preparing to revamp thar province’s rather rigid inclusion model to address the incidence of behavioural disruptions. The policy change, he wrote, was aimed at “making it clear that we defined inclusion as being inclusion within the school, not the classroom.” That meant all students would be included in the class unless and until the behaviour of a single student disrupted the entire class. In such cases, that student would be provided with an alternative placement with resource support.

Sarah Wagner, executive director of Inclusion N.B., strongly objected to any plan deviating from Policy 322 on Inclusive Education, claiming that inclusion should continue to mean every student, all the time, without exception. “The right of the child is to be with their peers and within the classroom,” she told CBC News. “The way we need to look at it is — what supports are required to make that successful.”

The interim report issued by in June 2023 by Shirley and Bastin backs away from that inclusion reform commitment.  It tilts more in the direction of maintaining the status quo, in line with the position of Inclusion NB, formerly known as the Association for Community Living.

New Brunswick’s “Coke bottle kids” are not really integrated into those classrooms and some are disruptive because teachers are overwhelmed and unable to cope with the frequency of class disruptions.  When disruptions occur, teachers simply keep the lid on or evacuate everyone except the student acting out and causing a disturbance.

Legitimate parent concerns about disruptive students and the social isolation of kids with disabilities in regular classes are not really being addressed. New Brunswick has settled for What Cardy described as “ rhetorical inclusion” and it’s not only an “absurd situation” but not sustainable for much longer.  Let’s hope this isn’t widespread in our provincial school systems.

• Extracted and adapted from an Education Beat column, Telegraph-Journal, September 23, 2023. 

What is “meaningful inclusion for so-called “Coke-Bottle Kids”? Why are today’s teachers so overwhelmed by students with complex needs and struggling to maintain safe, calm and mutually cooperative class environments? Is adding “behaviour mentors” going to make much of a difference? How many adults can a regular classroom teacher manage along with a class of kids? Where might policy-makers look to find a school system where severely challenged kids are identified, supported and integrated back into the mainstream classroom? 

 

Read Full Post »

Inclusive Education Test: What Good is an Inclusion Model sustained by Student Exclusions?

School districts across Canada are now gradually introducing “inclusion” and doing so by shutting down special education classes. Largely based upon research generated by leading academics like Mel Ainscow and championed by ‘inclusionists’ aligned with the Canadian Centre for Inclusive Education, they are replacing ‘intensive support’ with integration into mainstream classes. While the trend is not new, it is now facing stiffer resistance from a loose aggregation of parents of learning-challenged students and regular teachers on the frontlines of today’s complex, diverse and challenging classrooms.

Ontario parent Theresa McMahon, mother of 13-year-old Callum, profiled in a recent Toronto Globe and Mail feature story by Caroline Alphonso, is typical of the resistant parents. Her son who exhibits severe behavioural challenges, now splits his time between regular Grade 7 classes and an intensive support program space providing access to intensive support in the form of specialized teachers, education assistants, and social workers. It’s one of 18 congregated classes scheduled to close across the Peel District School Board this school year, bringing the total shuttered to some 71 over the past three years.

Promoters of the unitary inclusive classroom model, most fully implemented in New Brunswick, are facing significant pushback. Callum’s mother Theresa McMahon sees how her son is benefitting from the extra support and concerned about it disappearing next year. For their part, regular classroom teachers, already burdened with diverse and relatively large classes, have learned, over time, to expect little in the way of additional support. Inclusive classrooms, they firmly believe, are utilized to reduce education costs, especially by governments committed to austerity in K-12 education.

Proponents of the one-size-fits-all inclusion model rarely, if ever, confront the problems now visible and sparking intense debate in New Brunswick.   Class composition re-surfaced as the major issue out of the ashes of the failed French language learning initiative. It was raised forcefully in  Education Minister Bill Hogan’s February 2023 virtual consultation with some 350 English prime teachers and principals, held in conjunction with the New Brunswick Teachers Association (NBTA).

Classroom teachers used up the one-hour online conversation time driving home the message that they were “forced to ‘triage’ students’ because of the lack of resources.” While the teacher participants aired well-known teacher concerns, they skirted around the ‘elephant in the classroom ‘– the fact that the N.B. model of inclusion is crumbling and failing far-too-many students right across the spectrum.

Since then, disturbing stories about the incidence of exclusions in the province’s schools, sending kids home of 2-3 days a week, or weeks on end, have hit the local news. Former Education Minister Dominic Cardy, known for his outspoken style, did not mince any words.  Back on April 19, he told CBC News that maintaining the pretense of “inclusion” had become an “absurd situation.”

New Brunswick’s Child and Youth Advocate Kelly Lamrock was the first to blow the whistle on student exclusions. In October 2022, he issued a “guidance letter” to school districts warning them that it’s illegal to send a child home simply because a learning disorder made them too difficult to deal with. It was sparked by a series of parent complaints that school staff told them their children could only attend school for part of the day or a few days a week.

Child Advocate Lamrock put it clearly in October during a presentation to a N.B. legislative committee. “The Education Act in Section 12 is absolutely clear,” he stated. “All children have a right to be in school when their peers are in school. If the school’s open and kids are going, every child is receiving educational services.”

Speaking at the annual CAPSLE conference, on April 30, in Fredericton, Lamrock spoke on the Jeffrey Moore Decision (B.C. 2012) and its implications for Section 15 rights in the New Brunswick school system. That Supreme Court decision, he said, established the judicial principle that “inclusion” meant a child must have “meaningful access” to educational services. “If the child is sent home to do nothing, with no real support, that’s unacceptable.”

In New Brunswick, the province hailed by Ainscow and Canadian inclusionists as the exemplar, the reality is that it’s simply not working, largely because of the delivery model and the relative lack of resource supports. “There are too many cases of children being sent home, “Lamrock told his CAPSLE workshop attendees. “There is no legal or moral defense for that policy.” There are cases, he added, of kids being sent home for two to three years. “If a child is not progressing, it’s not defensible.”

“Are mainstream classrooms set up to accommodate the range of diversity we see in our students?”  That’s the key question posed by Globe and Mail education reporter Caroline Alphonso.  In the case, of New Brunswick, the answer is decidedly ‘no.’ Two Education Ministers, immediate past and present, and the provincial Child Advocate concur on that answer.

“Putting students first” is the priority, in Lamrock’ s words. That means providing “meaningful access” to educational services, ideally in that child’s home school. Where he disagrees with Education Minister Hogan is on the criterion for determining a student’s class placement. He’s concerned that Hogan is back-sliding by defending “inclusion as long as students meet disciplinary standards.”

Child Advocate Lamrock’ s next report, expected in mid-May 2023, will tackle the whole thorny problem. “We have to maintain inclusive classrooms,” he says, expressing a firm commitment to the fundamental principle of providing “meaningful access” to everyone. The only exception, in his view, would be in cases where students are so challenged that they cannot be expected to meet those ‘disciplinary standards.’  In such cases, it’s up to school districts to provide viable, properly resourced alternative provisions.

Is full inclusion in a regular classroom, widely acknowledged as an aspirational ideal, an achievable goal?  What are the lessons of the 2012 Jeffrey Moore decision on Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms?  What is needed for the vast majority of students to be integrated into mainstream classes?  Is affordability an issue or is it a matter of human rights settled by the courts? Why is the New Brunswick model under so much critical fire?

 

 

Read Full Post »

“Data My Ass” in Education: Why is Evidence brushed aside in education reform?

“Data my ass” is a term of derision that will live on in infamy in New Brunswick education. Uttered by Premier Blaine Higgs in early October 2022, and directed at Anglophone Deputy Minister of Education George Daley, it was seized upon by former Education Minister Dominic Cardy as a clear indication of two things: the premier’s distain for ‘evidence-based’ decision-making and the dismissal of expert advice proffered by a senior civil servant.

That closed door meeting with the Minister and his senior staff proved to be the last straw in a strained and testy relationship. Soon after, Minister Cardy was dropped from cabinet and a few weeks later, on November 9, the object of the premier’s ire followed the Minister out the door.

Pragmatic politicians like New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs focus on the numbers – in public opinion polls and on the latest provincial student assessment tests. Immediate and reactive political responses drive decision-making.  Politicians and far too many education policy-makers, as Canadian education genius Bernard Shapiro once remarked, “jump over the evidence” in making decisions.  That’s relevant in this particular situation.

Educational changes in New Brunswick and across North America come in distinct cycles, often repeated over time.  That may come as quite a revelation to policy-makers from outside education. A surprising number of ambitious and upwardly mobile educators also get taken in.  It’s called ‘riding the wave’ to the next rung on the educational career ladder.

Serious students of school reform, familiar with the research, particularly David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s 1995 American classic Tinkering Toward Utopia, know that supposedly new ideas and innovations tend to be rebranded and recycled, leaving the status quo unchanged.  In the plain-spoken language of New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, “it’s déjà vu all over again.”

In the case the New Brunswick school system, big changes come in little bites.  It took N.B.’s former Auditor General Kim MacPherson to point this out back in January 2019, before the pandemic threw us completely off-course. Back then, a fellow named George Daley, then president of the New Brunswick Teachers Association (NBTA), heartily agreed that “many changes” were being made to the system “too often” and “affecting its stability.”

“We’ve had 37 major changes in 35 years in New Brunswick education,” Daley told CTV News Atlantic.  Teachers had, he noted, raised that issue time-and-time again with a succession of governments no matter what their political stripe. “Political parties,” he added, “use us (teachers and students) as a football and opposition parties use us as a way to poke holes in government.” In short, the system is “falling apart” when you are in opposition, but just fine when you are in government.

Such popular analyses tend to muddy the waters.  “Major changes” upon close examination are usually “course correction” initiatives. They also lump-together the three distinct phases of the policy process: (1) policy talk – identifying and framing critical issues; (2) policy action – strategies and innovations to affect change; and (3) policy implementation – making the changes happen in practice in the schools.

Given the fact that it takes 3 to 5 years to bring about enduring system reform, most of the proposed changes either falter or simply peter-out in implementation. That’s particularly true when changes initiated by one education minister are handed-off to their successors, politicians who in many cases, either waiver in their commitment or have their own agendas.

One thing is clear – former Education Minister Cardy was not only cerebral in personal style, but also, to a remarkable degree, committed to evidence-based analysis and ‘following the data.’ It was his personal strength and, in that sense, he was an ‘un-politician.’ What Higgs, the pragmatist saw, after four years, was initiative-overload and what is known as ‘paralysis by analysis.’

Two of the province’s most ‘wicked problems’ were priorities for Higgs when he appointed Cardy to cabinet four years ago: reversing the decline in literacy, starting in elementary schools; and addressing the ineffectiveness of an Anglophone sector French immersion program where, at the end of Grade 12, only 10 per cent of all students achieved the expected language proficiency. While that figure remains low, Canadian Parents for French NB put more stock in the levels of oral proficiency of those in Grade 12 in the FSL program (See 2021-22 data).

Whatever one thinks of Cardy’s public persona, his grasp of what it takes to initiate real change was essentially sound. The pandemic changed everything, turning school systems upside down, derailing every major initiative, inflicting learning losses, and aggravating inequities, especially among poor and disadvantaged children.  Some allowances for the learning recovery challenge and readjusting implementation timelines makes common sense.

When phasing-out French immersion became Higgs PC government policy, it was on the understanding that it would take time to develop an effective, properly staffed and resourced alternative in the form of a more intensive French as a Second Language program for all Anglophone students. Notwithstanding the pandemic upheaval, the Premier simply lost patience and refused to budge on a September 2023 phase-in implementation timetable.

Converting a French immersion system into and intensive universal FSL program model, grade-by-grade is a massive undertaking, and the Department is best positioned to determine the optimal implementation timeline. Bungling implementation is far more likely when it’s rushed and that’s likely to be the real lesson of the education turnover.

A dismissive quip like ‘data my ass’ speaks volumes about government priorities.  Election cycles trump policy implementation planning cycles. Ignoring or brushing aside research evidence may be expedient, but will likely prove to be short-sighted in the long-run.  Rushing policy changes like abandoning French immersion in New Brunswick may well add to the list of initiatives eventually cast aside and filed under “flawed in implementation.”

Why do education policy-makers “jump over the evidence” in making critical decisions like establishing implementation timetables? Which weighs heavier in the balance – opinion polling or policy implementation forecasts? What proportion of provincial or state education policy reforms actually get implemented? What happens to policies en route to implementation?

Read Full Post »

Early Reading Instruction Reform: Why was New Brunswick Canada’s first province out-of-the gate?*

Speaking at the  researchED National Conference on Saturday September 3 in London, UK, New Brunswick’s Minister of Education Dominic Cardy provided the scoop on how it happened. A full-year before the April 2022 release of the Ontario Right to Read Inquiry report his province got the jump on Ontario and pioneered in the adoption of the Science of Reading (SoR) and the shift to “structured literacy.” His presentation, “Literacy in New Brunswick: successes and lessons learned,” filled-in the blanks.

What was truly remarkable about Minister Cardy’s researchED talk was how candid he was about the “literacy crisis” and what he famously described as “the biggest scandal in education over the past fifty years.” While the Minister refrained from repeating his controversial ‘biggest scandal’ declaration, he left no doubt that he continues to hold that view. Challenging the prevailing orthodoxy in the form of “balanced literacy,” he acknowledged raised hackles and was not without its risks. 

            After being appointed Education Minister four years ago, Cardy realized that early reading was a serious and largely unacknowledged problem in the system.  “We didn’t have politicians asking the right questions,” he said. “They left it to the experts and assumed that they knew best how to teach kids to read.” When questions were asked, he found most were posed in relation to what other provinces were doing, and most notably Ontario.

            Digging deeper, Cardy reported that a clearer pattern emerged.  Virtually everyone in the N.B. system was enthralled with “balanced literacy” even though one-third to one-half of all students were unable to read properly by the end of grade 3. School districts were totally dependent upon one particular program, Fountas & Pinnell, for not only resources but assessment tools. While the ‘science of reading’ was gaining ground and being employed in private tutoring centres, evidence-based practices had not penetrated the system. “None of the province’s faculties of education,” he said, “recognized the problem either.” 

            Cardy did not come to this realization himself.  Julia Smith, an early reading specialist based in Fredericton had a major influence upon his thinking.  She joined him in the researchED presentation and tackled some of the technical questions related to the specific reforms.

            “Some 56 per cent of New Brunswickers are at the lowest literacy level,” Cardy stated, and “it starts in the schools.”  “We have public schools,” he added, “that have outsourced the problem to parents.” What that means is that those who are well-off either move their kids to private, alternative schools or enroll their children in after-school tutoring programs. 

            Simply surrounding kids with books may work for some children, but Cardy insists that “most do not magically learn to read.”  Drawing upon his own experience as a flying instructor, he finds it preposterous to think this way. “Few would train pilots by letting them teach themselves,” he told the audience.

After convincing the education department to take the plunge, Cardy turned to winning over the cabinet. He made good use of a few vignettes snapped up from real-life classrooms to illustrate how elementary kids were guessing what words meant and unable to read by sounding-out the words or reading with much comprehension.  Learning that students were routinely guessing “pony” for “horse” did the trick.  

            Cardy’s early literacy reforms were piloted in a small number of elementary schools last year. The initial results, according to Smith, were impressive in terms of improved reading fluency and comprehension. “Literacy rates in the pilot schools went up by 90 per cent,” Cardy reported, and success bred success. “The teachers tried it, it worked, and – much to our amazement – began sharing it amongst themselves.”

            All of this may explain the Minister’s rather peculiar response to the September 2022 release of the latest 2021-22 provincial student assessment results. While the results showed a drop in some English literacy and francophone math success rates, nothing was reported on mathematics so numeracy remains a question mark.

“I’m not horribly disappointed,” he told CBC News, “given that we were expecting pretty steep drops because of the huge interruptions in learning we’ve seen over the last couple of years with months of school cancelled and being online and back and forth.” What he didn’t say was that all was not lost for the early literacy reforms were still awaiting fuller implementation.

            Minister Cardy is truly unique in provincial politics and passionate in his defense of democracy anywhere in the world. His personal campaign to tackle early literacy is really an extension of that fierce commitment.  Right at the outset of his London talk, Cardy provided an insight into what drives him in his recent quest to improve early literacy. “Those who cannot read are at a lifetime disadvantage,” he stated. They are also, he claimed, more susceptible to “social media manipulation’ which, in his estimation, “can be damaging to democracy.”

*Adapted from an earlier version published in the Telegraph-Journal, 23 September 2022.

How did the Maritime province of New Brunswick get the jump on implementing evidence-based early literacy reform? How important is political will in a province/state and determined leadership in the system?  Why were provincial faculties of education so resistant to the Science of Reading (SoR)?  What will it take to successfully implement and embed the changes?

Read Full Post »

Re-engineering Education Governance: What Should Replace Unaccountable School Boards?

Asking “Who is, in fact, in charge here?” is a fair question, but it is now a “no-no” judging from a recent regular public meeting of an elected Ontario school board.  You may find yourself cut-off in mid-sentence, told to “stay positive,” then sanctioned by a Board Chair acting on behalf of elected trustees. That is exactly what happened on April 26, 2022 to Zorra Mayor Marcus Ryan when he attempted to address the Thames Valley District School Board (TVDSB) raising the serious matter of glaring irregularities in recent governance practices.

The TVDSB’s handling of two recent issues – the disbanding of a Rural Education Task Force and the Director of Education overruling elected trustees on the mandating of masks – brought matters to a head.  Speaking up as a local Mayor and concerned citizen, Ryan got more specific: “Who makes the decisions about how one billion dollars of our tax money is spent on our children’s education in our communities? The board passes resolutions, but then the senior administration seems to do whatever they want.”

TVDSB Board Chair Lori-Ann Pizzolato interrupted Ryan to request he keep his remarks positive, then Trustee Corrine Rahman raised a point of order warning Ryan to be respectful of staff and trustees and consider the stress everyone has been under over the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was abundantly clear, watching the TVDSB meeting on video, that Mayor Ryan was being silenced for having the temerity to “criticize the board” in public. Acting upon the advice of an in-house “parliamentary advisor,” the elected trustees no longer feel bound to listen to criticism, let alone respond to delegations challenging their decisions.

Why do elected regional school boards exist if not to listen to and act on behalf of parents, taxpayers and local communities?  That is a pretty fundamental question worth pondering in the months leading up to the Ontario school board elections in October 2022.  What’s gone terribly wrong with elected regional boards? Whose interests do they represent?  Are any of the trustee candidates committed to re-engineering the system? If not, what should replace our top-down, senior administration dominated and unaccountable school boards?

Elected school boards always seem to be in crisis or threatened with extinction somewhere in Canada.  Close observers of Ontario education would be well aware of the troubled boards with a recent history of governance problems, including Limestone District School Board, Rainbow District School Board, York Region District School Board, and, most recently, Waterloo District School Board. Currently, Greater Victoria District School Board (BC District 61) is in turmoil and New Brunswick’s week sister imitation of regional boards, known as District Education Councils (DECs) are on notice.

Over the past two decades, New Brunswick’s hollowed-out version of elected regional boards has been in a gradual cycle of decline. Acclamation disease, plummeting voter participation, role confusion, and aversion to public engagement have all conspired to render the DECs largely irrelevant to most New Brunswickers. The DECs are on life support and that province’s activist Education Minister Dominic Cardy is looking seriously at decentralizing education governance.

Followers of Educhatter Blog will be familiar with my proposals to re-engineer education governance. My 2020 book, The State of the System, provides a detailed prescription, but it’s rather lengthy and a hard slog to get through.  So here is my “Coles Notes” version:

Adopt a “Community-School Governance Model”

Copying and pasting in an education model from elsewhere in Canada simply won’t work because each province is unique in its own way.  Most provinces still have conventional elected regional boards so New Brunswick is something of an anomaly.  Stepping back and taking stock of the differing local contexts, I still believe Ministers and their departments would be best advised to design and build what I term a “Community-School Governance Model” combining school-based governance/management with, in a second stage, completely re-engineered regional education development councils.

School-based management supported by school governing councils holds out exciting possibilities for creating a new education governance culture and revitalizing local school-level democracy. In designing the framework, the province would be well-advised to look first to the Edmonton Public Schools model of school-based management (SBM) and budget development process.  It is the best and most proven strategy for transitioning to a more decentralized form of educational decision-making.

The Edmonton model of SBM, adopted in 1976, and developed by Superintendent Dr. Michael Strembitsky in the 1980s, has stood the test of time. Alberta Education published a School-Based Decision-Making Guide in 1997 and opened the door to other boards adopting school-based budgeting. In 2003, when the World Bank started championing SBM in developed countries across the globe, a feature story in Time Magazine described Edmonton’s public schools as “the most imitated public school system in North America.”

Superintendent Darrel Robertson, in an August 2016 Edmonton Journal news story, reported that school-based decision-making was still going strong in the district. It remained the core philosophy because it successfully “empowers and engages staff, students and parents.”

Governance Lessons – from New Zealand

New Zealand’s transformation to a decentralized governance under David Lange’s 1984-89 Labour government provides many valuable lessons for policy-makers. Faced with a tug-of-war with ten different education boards, Lange sought to reinvent government with his 1988 Tomorrow’s Schools initiative. It provided a blueprint for transformative education reform based upon the model of self-governing schools. Each school’s parents were authorized to elect their own board of trustees, the new legal entity entrusted with the educational and financial well-being of the school.

The N.Z. structural reform embraced school choice for parents and generated plenty of upheaval in its first decade before it solidified and gained acceptance. Twenty-five years after its inception, Cathy Wylie, lead researcher at NZCER, judged it a success overall, urging the NZ government to look at a system refresh rather than a return to “archaic” regional boards in any shape or form.

Creating a New Education Leadership Culture

Educational restructuring would not be deemed a success unless and until the top-down school system was turned right side up, building from the school level up.  School community-based decision-making will not happen on its own. It does require structural change to foster a new culture of more flexible, responsive educational leadership.  Simply put, we need to reprogram district administration to ensure that the system exists to serve the needs of children, teachers, parents, and local communities.

Regional school boards, as presently constituted, are far too bureaucratic, too big and unresponsive to be effective. Those who continue to argue for their retention on the grounds that they represent the people are, in the words of veteran Ontario educator Peter Hennessy, “missing the point” that “elective parent councils” have been established precisely because “the boards were and are out of touch with the grassroots.”

A Proposed Cure for the Local Democratic Deficit  

With school boards staggering from crisis-to-crisis, now is the time to transform the education governance system to cure the now-visible deficit in public accountability and local democratic engagement. The best course of action would be to announce a gradual, planned transition, replacing the existing regional education bodies with autonomous, elected, self-governing school councils. That sets a clear direction. It vests far more authority where it belongs, in school-level councils, and paves the way for the construction of a new community-based model of education.

Re-engineering local education governance will take time to get it right, so plan on implementing the change over 3 to 5 years. Invest heavily in public engagement and democratic education programming to attract and prepare a new cohort of school-level council members. Phase-out the existing regional boards and DECs and prepare for a roll-over in decision-making responsibility in two-to-three years’ time. While the school governing councils are under construction, plan for the re-establishment of regional coordination and planning bodies with membership drawn from the elected school governing councils.

Community-School Based Governance operates better when it is properly integrated into a broader regional and provincial governance system. Regional coordination is essential and that could come from newly-constituted regional coordinating bodies (i.e., District Education Development Councils).  Unlike the current unaccountable boards, they would have the political legitimacy that comes from being first elected at the school-level and be clearly accountable to the school communities.

What can be done to restore local democratic accountability in Canadian K-12 provincial education systems? Can elected regional bodies be saved or is it better to start again, rebuilding from the schools up?  Which provincial government will be first to embrace more decentralized school-level education decision-making?  What democratic accountability benchmarks do we need to assess the effectiveness of such governance reforms?

Read Full Post »

Masks in Schools: Have Mask Mandates become a Proxy for Trust in Public Health?

The latest COVID-19 variant is “spreading like wildfire” in and around schools by all accounts. With daily case counts reaching 100,000 in Ontario, teachers and parents, with the support of Toronto infectious disease specialist Dr. Isaac Bogoch, are speaking out demanding that mask mandates be re-instated and similar movements are afoot in New Brunswick and all other jurisdictions without such mandates.

“COVID-19 is not over” is the rallying cry as teachers and education workers report record student and staff absenteeism – and are now openly challenging public health authorities to respond to mushrooming case counts.  Masking up in schools has become a strange kind of proxy for public trust in medical science and our public health officials. That’s the underlying but fundamental public policy issue, two years into the never-ending pandemic.

The counsel of chief medical officers of health, once considered unbiased, Manitoba physician Jillian Horton aptly pointed out, is now  being challenged as simply parroting the latest gyrations of politicians.  It hasn’t helped that the CMOHs, in Ontario and elsewhere, went relatively quiet over the past month.

One of the clearest statements came from the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association (OECTA).  The province’s third largest teachers’ union appealed to the province on April 8, 2022 to undo the decision to end masking in all schools on March 21 because teacher and student absences due to COVID-19 are causing “whiplash disruptions to the learning environment.”

Surging case counts and high absenteeism are causing havoc in  many school districts, including the London-based Thames Valley District School Board (TVDSB) and in Scarborough, where one Catholic elementary school of 540 students averaged over 100 student absences a day last week. Similar absentee rates have been registered in mask-mandate-free New Brunswick schools

Lifting mandates with students and staff returning from March break has precipitated a raging controversy, especially in New Brunswick. With the post-March break COVID-19 surge breaking out, the latest Omicron BA.2 variant running rampant and restrictions lifting, Education Minister Dominic Cardy balked at reinstituting masks in schools. “Leave it up to the experts” was his repeated response.

Concerned parents and worried teachers, seeing first-hand evidence of mounting case counts, organized a Change.org petition in early March and began speaking-out, demanding the return of masks and fuller disclosure of actual case counts and rates of absenteeism. The “Protect our Province” (PoP) petition for masks in schools appeared in early March and immediately attracted some 700 signatures Post-March break fears drove the number of signatories up to 1,300 by March 17 and stood at 1,514 in early April.

In the first week of April, a group of 19 pediatricians answered the Minister’s call for expert opinion. “We do not believe we are out of the woods yet with the COVID-19 pandemic,” they wrote in an open letter to Minister Cardy, Premier Blaine Higgs, Chief Public Health Officer Jennifer Russell, and Health Minister Dorothy Shephard.

New Brunswick’ pediatricians confirmed that COVID-19 was an airborne virus, masking and vaccinations were the best protections against infection, and it was time to bring back masking for the rest of the school year. That was to no avail because Minister Cardy kept insisting it was up to public health and Dr. Russell weighed-in holding firm on resisting a mask mandate in schools.

While New Brunswick politicians passed the ‘hot potato’ back and forth, COVID-19 case counts were ripping through the whole Atlantic region. At the time Atlantic Canada had the highest rates of COVID-19 infection in Canada.

On April 2, the Canada Health Agency reported that Prince Edward Island ranked first among the provinces and territories with 350.6 daily cases per week in the final week of March, registering 2,216.6 average daily cases per million.  New Brunswick ranked fifth with 567.0 average daily cases per million, a higher rate of infection than Quebec and Ontario.

When the case counts were released, New Brunswick was also an outlier. Students in Nova Scotia were still required to wear masks and New Brunswick was more restrictive in providing access to testing. In N.B., PCR testing was only available to those over 50-years-of-age, or under two years, or those deemed to be vulnerable or at higher risk.

Entering our third year of the pandemic, provincial public health officers are committed to keeping schools open for the mental health and well-being of children, but, beyond that, they are all over the map, especially on disclosure of case counts, access to testing, and precautionary measures.

Requiring masks to be worn indoors in schools is a perfect example. On the same day that Prince Edward Island’s medical officer Heather Morrison announced masking in P.E.I. schools would continue, her New Brunswick counterpart Dr. Russell held a media briefing to announce the opposite. While strongly encouraging students and staff to mask-up on their own, Russell claimed that “vaccination is actually more important” at this point in the pandemic.

Navigating our way out of the pandemic is proving to be an uncertain journey full of contradictions.  Following the wisdom of the “experts” in government appears to mean different things from one province to another. It’s made more perplexing when leading pediatricians, most notably Dr. Andrew Lynk and his team at Halifax’s IWK Children’s Hospital, change their positions in response to surges in infections affecting children. That sounds like following the science.

If determining whether mask mandates are necessary is truly based upon medical science evidence-based criteria, one might expect more consistency right now.  What is a medical necessity for some, is a restriction on freedom for others.  When public health experts disagree, someone has to make a decision. Intervening to settle the matter opens the door to further criticism from skeptics hyper-sensitive to any sign of the politicization public health decisions.

What has happened to public trust in our provincial public health officers? With the latest COVID-19 variant ripping through schools and communities, why is there resistance to reinstituting mask mandates in schools?  Is the whole question of mask mandates become a proxy for trust in public health authorities?

Read Full Post »

Right to Read: What’s Standing in the Way of Fixing Early Reading?

Three weeks ago, the earth shook in Ontario and sent reverberations across the Canadian system of education. The Ontario Human Rights Commission ruled that children had “the right to read” and were being denied it in that province’s schools. Most “learning disabilities” labels were actually the result of reading failures, the latest OHRC inquiry found. And most tellingly, students from disadvantaged communities were the most likely to bear the brunt of ineffective reading instruction in elementary schools.

Thousands of Ontario parents with children struggling to read have now broken the silence. Over the past two years, they came forward, sometimes with their kids, to provide heart-wrenching personal testimonies about how current early reading programs have failed them. On February 28, 2022, that Commission, headed by Chief Commissioner Patricia DeGuire and backed by the latest evidence-based research, simply demolished prevailing methodologies and programs which left far too many kids unable to read to a level of functional literacy.

An estimated nine out of ten children are capable of learning to read when provided with the proper instruction. That factoid, generated by International Dyslexia Association (IDA Ontario) research, was confirmed by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The fundamental problem is that one-third of our youngest students, the vast majority enrolled in so-called “balanced literacy” programs, simply cannot read with the fluency needed in today’s world.

Starting in October 2019, the Right to Read inquiry looked at a representative cross-section of eight English language school boards, including Peel District School Board and Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, and all 13 English-language faculties of education and Ministry of Education sanctioned curriculum. In addition to listening to a multitude of concerned parents, the inquiry tapped into the research expertise of leading learning disabilities researchers, including Linda Seigel of the University of British Columbia and Jamie Metsala of Halifax’s Mount Saint Vincent University.

While Chief Commissioner DeGuire refrained from pointing fingers, it was clear that current early reading methods were not working and the commission got a “mixed response” from education faculties regarding the findings. That’s no surprise because most faculties provide little if any preparation informed by the science of reading and model curricula based upon the ‘balanced literacy’ dogma peddled by the dominant learning resource providers.

When one-out-of-three students graduate without reaching provincial or international standards, someone, somewhere, has to assume responsibility for the outcomes. Vulnerable students – those from impoverished and marginalized communities – were already struggling before the two-year-long pandemic school disruptions. OHRC’s legal counsel Reema Kawaja said it best: “No child should go to school for 14 years and not learn to read.”

Current reading instruction methods are deeply entrenched and their defenders have succeeded, for three decades, in sinking periodic assaults on that hegemony. Generations of elementary teachers have stayed the course, rebranding ‘whole language,’ applying the reading recovery band-aid, and fuzzing up the whole question with ‘balanced literacy’ providing continued cover for those same methods.

This transition has been facilitated and enabled by Canada’s faculties of education where teachers are introduced to literacy programs and inculcated in provincially-sanctioned texts and learning materials, exemplified by Fountas & Pinnell, North America’s largest purveyor of ‘balanced literacy’ learning resources, teacher training, and classroom assessment tools.

New Brunswick Education Minister Dominic Cardy was one of the first off-the-mark in reacting to the Right To Read findings. With news of the earth-shaking February 28 Ontario report breaking, he took to Twitter with another impossible-to-ignore and quotable declaration heard across the K-12 education world.

“Our approach to reading instruction was a disgrace,” Cardy tweeted. “We gave teachers a job and didn’t give them the tools to do it. For me, this is the biggest education scandal of the last fifty years.” Just in case you thought Minister Cardy was simply blowing-off steam, he repeated his claim for Brunswick News in much greater detail.

Minister Cardy and his Department were one of the first to wade into the latest iteration of the ‘reading wars.”  “It’s crazy,” he told Brunswick News. “[There are] two camps. One is based upon reality, and one is not. And for a long time, we followed the one that is not based upon reality.”  Like the thousands of Ontario parents, Cardy challenges the prevailing theory that “if you surround [children] with lots of books, they will learn how to read.”

The Right to Read inquiry report may well tip the balance and, it should be noted, Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce was quick to endorse the report and its 157 recommendations for change The most critical of those is Recommendation 30 which fully embraces systematic reading strategies, including phonics, and rejects the still popular ‘three-cue’ guess-the-word methodology.

What is astounding is that the OHRC actually spelled-out in detail the key requirements to successfully teach and support all students:

“ Curriculum and instruction that reflects the scientific research on the best approaches to teach word reading. This includes explicit and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics, which teaches grapheme to phoneme (letter-sound) relationships and using these to decode and spell words, and word-reading accuracy and fluency. It is critical to adequately prepare and support teachers to deliver this instruction.

Early screening of all students using common, standardized evidence-based screening assessments twice a year from kindergarten to Grade 2, to identify students at risk for reading difficulties for immediate, early, tiered interventions.

Reading interventions that are early, evidence-based, fully implemented and closely monitored and available to ALL students who need them, and ongoing interventions for all readers with word reading difficulties.

Accommodations (and modifications to curriculum expectations) should not be used as a substitute for teaching students to read. Accommodations should always be provided along with evidence-based curriculum and reading interventions. When students need accommodations (for example, assistive technology), they should be timely, consistent, effective and supported in the classroom.

Professional [Psycho-educational] assessments, should be timely and based on clear, transparent, written criteria that focus on the student’s response to intervention. Criteria and requirements for professional assessments should account for the risk of bias for students who are culturally or linguistically diverse, racialized, who identify as First Nations, Métis or Inuit, or come from less economically privileged backgrounds. Professional assessments should never be required for interventions or accommodations.”

The OHRC inquiry report provides plenty of sound research and detailed policy guidance for Ontario, New Brunswick, and other provinces . By the end of next year, 2022-23, the New Brunswick version will be in place in Kindergarten to Grade 2.  It’s already being implemented in a few Ontario pilot schools, including those in the York Region Catholic Distract School Board, north of Toronto, and the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board was the first to commit to acting on the OHRC recommendations.

Tackling the problem will not be easy because prevailing ‘balanced literacy’ approaches are deeply entrenched in most faculties of education.  One of the first to cast a stone was Shelley Stagg Peterson, professor of literacy at OISE/University of Toronto, and , since then, Brock University professor Diane Collier, who represents a group of literacy researchers from nine different education faculties Ontario.

“Reading English is not phonetical; it is visual,” Stagg Peterson wrote in an Ottawa Citizen Letter to the Editor. “If a child has a good visual memory, he or she will be able to read anything they can understand by the end of grade one.”  Then came a couple of astounding statements: “Poor readers can have wonderful careers in many fields. Phonics is a useful tool in learning to read but it is not a method.”

Education faculty literacy professors have rallied in defense of the dominant pedagogy and mandated resources.  “There is no one-size-fits-all for reading,” Professor Collier told CBC News. “A highly systematized, step-by-step approach is not necessarily accessible for all students who have all kinds of needs, so it could further marginalize readers.” Their counter-strategy is clear – paint the Right To Read findings as an endorsement of “phonics” and attack it as advocating a “narrow” approach, sidestepping the findings and the ineffectiveness of current methods.

The Ontario Right To Read inquiry report put existing literacy programs on notice but their defenders, ensconced in the education faculties, are not about to yield or give ground when learning resource alliances and training contracts are at stake. Reading reformers now know that it’s going to be a long siege and will require vigilance throughout the implementation process.

Will the Right to Reading Inquiry tip the balance in the ongoing “Reading Wars”?   What’s entirely different about this latest phase in the struggle to introduce the Science of Reading into classroom practice? What role do giant learning resource publishers and consultants play in perpetuating the status quo in the form of ‘balanced literacy’?  Will provincial learning consultants and education professors recover and succeed in gaining control of curriculum reform implementation?

Read Full Post »

School Boards in Crisis: Are Elected Regional Boards Self-Destructing?

Regional school boards are gradually losing their democratic legitimacy and always seem to be threatened with extinction in one province or another across Canada. All seven of Nova Scotia’s elected English boards were sacked in favour of Regional Centres of Education (RCEs) in early 2018, and Manitoba school boards were recently spared the axe and linger on now claiming to represent the “public voice” in K-12 education. With school governance reform in the air in New Brunswick, that province’s hollowed-out substitute for elected boards, District Education Councils (DECs), are next in line for review.

Deeply troubled by New Brunswick’s current review of education governance options, Canadian School Boards Association (CSBA) president Laurie French produced another ‘Hail-Mary’ opinion column. It would be tragic, she claimed on January 24, if New Brunswick’s District Education Councils (DECs) were swept away in the coming reform.  With school boards under increasing public scrutiny from province-to-province, salvaging that province’s weak sister version of elected school boards has taken on new urgency.

What was remarkable about the CSBA appeal is that it simply repeats the usual feel-good bromides that seek to create the illusion of solving the problem. Salvaging the DECs in their current form would only maintain the façade of ‘local decision-making’ because the regional bodies have simply lost all claim to democratic legitimacy.  Acclamation disease is rampant and voter participation in free-fall, and it is looking, more and more, like it’s time to completely re-invent governance to restore meaningful public voice in that K-12 education system.

Rearranging the deck chairs on the DEC ship will not likely prevent it from capsizing in the coming year. Tuned-out citizens and turned-off parents sent a powerful message in the May 2021 local elections. Out of 68 DEC seats, only 18 (or 26.4 per cent) were contested, leaving the rest ether filled by acclamation or vacant because no candidates surfaced before election day. In Anglophone district council elections, the average participation rate plummeted to 15.6 percent, down from 19.2 per cent in 2016. Only 22,035 electors out of 140,633 cast votes, half the number who voted five years ago.

A post-election survey of electors, conducted by Elections NB and based upon 400 respondents, revealed that some 40 per cent did not vote for certain contests, mostly school district and health authority positions, because they were “not interested.”  Delving more deeply into their reasons, the most common explanation was “I did not know enough about who was running.”  One general comment jumped out: “We didn’t know who they were. And I talked to a lot of people who voted that felt the same way.”

School district governance is in a truly sorry state when few want to run for DEC seats and there’s plenty of blame to go around. Chief electoral officer for Elections NB Kim Poffenroth was absolutely right. “Persuading people to run,” she told CBC News, “in not part of our mandate.” Indeed, and the problem runs far too deep to be amenable to such unconvincing public entreaties.

Claiming that DECs are comparable to elected school boards with trustees representing education districts is almost farcical, given the constraints and limits placed on the authority and responsibilities of local councillors. Most DEC members are completely under the thumb of district administration and that’s plainly obvious watching DEC meetings online.

The DEC coordinating group of chairs, guided by DEC manager Stacey Brown, enjoy privileged access to the Minister of Education, and function more like a private social club than a corporate board. Without any term limits, DEC ‘boardies’ such as Harry Doyle (2008 – Present) and Robert Fowler (2004-2021) come to occupy sinecures. When Fowler stepped down after 16 years, he was succeeded by veteran Joe Petersen (2008-Present) with 35 years of service, including time on his local school support committees.

Twenty-seven years ago, local education democracy was far healthier under the former elected school boards. In the last school board elections (1995), 196 school trustees were elected or acclaimed for 245 elected positions, and 49 had to be appointed. Instead of acting on the key recommendation of the 1992 Commission on Excellence in Education to strengthen school board accountability, then Education Minister Paul Duffie announced, without consultation or warning, that all school boards would be eliminated and elected trustees removed from office, effective March 1,1996.

Since being established in 2001, DECs have focused almost exclusively on system maintenance and utterly failed to connect with the voting public or with the vast majority of local parents. From 2008 onward, the number of seats has been slashed, electoral districts enlarged, and voter participation has dropped with each election. It’s a classic case of what political scientists term the “turned-off electorate” and it breeds growing detachment from elected school district representatives, then a loss of public trust.

Abolishing school district governance without replacing it with a better, more democratic system would be a mistake. That’s what happened four years ago in Nova Scotia when that province’s seven elected Anglophone school boards were dissolved and left to devolve into more highly centralized regional centres for education.

Wiping out elected regional representation is not a solution when it means, in effect, handing over total responsibility to an empowered group of regional potentates with title to match, transforming superintendents into ‘regional directors of education.’ Appointing fifteen regional educational representatives to a Provincial Advisory Council on Education (PACE) provided political cover. The vast majority of Nova Scotia parents have no idea that PACE even exists and, in most cases, have nowhere to turn when policy concerns surface or local matters cannot be resolved by school administrators.

The current crisis at the Greater Victoria School District (SD 61) Board suggests that education governance in British Columbia is floundering. Allowing a regional school board to suspend two publicly-elected school trustees Diane McNally and Rob Paynter whose only crime was asking tough questions is a sign of deeper problems with respect to providing proper public accountability to parents and local taxpayers. It even sparked a vote of non-confidence from the local branch of the BC teachers’ union. The relative silence emanating from the British Columbia School Trustees Association (BCSTA) speaks volumes. Perhaps elected boards are only there to shield district administration and maintain a façade of local democratic representation.

New Brunswick is a good place to start the process of local democratic renewal. That province needs is a complete break with current form of education governance and it will not come from inside the system, but from best, evidence-based practice in governance outside the provincial sector. That sounds like what Education Minister Dominic Cardy has in mind in the months ahead.

Saving the 68 seats on DECs will only sustain the status quo and do little, by itself, to invigorate local school-level democratic decision-making. The Minister’s got it right in a recent Times & Transcript interview: “We actually need more people doing more work who are democratically elected and accountable across the province.”

That’s music to my ears and my 2020 book, The State of the System, makes the case for building back democracy from the schools up over a period of 3 or 4 years. Starting with the creation of school governing councils entrusted with wider responsibilities for school-level management, a more decentralized model would ensure that far more decisions are made where it really counts in the schools by educators working in genuine partnership with parents and community members, including representatives of local businesses and social service agencies.

The DECs as presently constituted are dying of natural causes. One trenchant critic Donald Gallant nailed it in a recent rather terse CBC News story comment: “Who would ever want to sit on those silly committees where nobody listens to anything you say.” That’s the brutally honest truth, but it does not mean that we should turn the entire system over to regional ‘educrats’ and school consolidators in charge of regional facilities planning.

There has got to be a better way forward to invigorate democratic engagement in local decision-making.  It starts by investing time and resources into developing school-level decision-making capacity, attracting a whole new generation of actively engaged parents and educators, introducing term of service limits, and taking the time to build school-based community councils in support of thriving, sustainable communities.

Why are elected school boards constantly trying to stave off the provincial executioner?  What’s wrong with the existing regional school board model?  Are elected boards salvageable or are we better to phase them out and start again?  In doing so, should we start from the schools up?  Will it be possible, this time, to overcome the resistance of the education establishment to  school-level, community-school -based education governance?

Read Full Post »

Bridging the Two Solitudes: Is French Immersion still the Best Route in Canada’s Only Bilingual Province? *

New Brunswick’s French immersion program, currently serving fewer than half of the province’s Anglophone students, is under review once again.  The latest report, produced by John McLaughlin and Yvette Flinn, in tandem, and released February 2, 2022, proposes that it be replaced by an upgraded core French language program offered to all students. It has, predictably, exposed the language fault line never far below the surface in Canada’s only officially bilingual province.

Judging from the initial reaction, bridging the “two solitudes” through early language immersion in schools is still a dream beyond reach. Ongoing debate over bilingualism, especially in schools, consumes a lot of time and energy, for one good reason – it’s fundamental to the unique regional character of the province. Strangely enough, finding common ground is made doubly difficult by the provincial administrative structure itself, maintaining linguistic separation in the provision of services.

After three policy pivots on different entry points for French Immersion since former Premier Shawn Graham’s 2008 overhaul of the program, a “two-tiered system” continues to adversely affect the majority of Anglophone students. Most New Brunswickers would agree with McLaughlin’s recent pronouncement: “It is time for this exhausting and unconstructive cycle to end.”  Whether dismantling French Immersion is the answer is very much in question.

Watching the debate rear its head again, the searing insights of Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 classic, Two Solitudes, came to mind. While written about Quebec and mostly during the height Second World War conscription crisis, that novel put a finger on the psychological and cultural separation between Anglophone and Francophone which, in some ways, haunts us still.  “Two old races and religions meet here and live their separate legends, side by side,” MacLennan wrote, referring to Anglo Montreal and rural French-speaking countryside villages. “If this sprawling continent has a heart, here it is. Its pulse throbs out along the rivers and railroads; slow, reluctant and rarely simple, a double beat, a self-moved reciprocation.”

Government reports never rise to such poetic elegance, especially in a more straight-forward and less florid provincial culture. That’s a shame because culture and language inspire passion and ingenuity as well as laying bare underlying divisions. Reconciling those linguistic tensions is, after all, what makes both Quebec and New Brunswick unique or, put another way, ‘not provinces like the others.’

Contemporary New Brunswick, in spite of a succession of policies fostering bilingualism, remains, in the words of the report, “a bilingual province in name only.” Only 33.9 per cent of New Brunswickers considered themselves bilingual, according to the 2016 Canadian Census. While 73.2 per cent of francophones reported that they spoke both languages, that was the case for only 15.7 per cent of anglophones. That’s not a ringing endorsement of provincial core language programs in K-12 schools.

With a little imagination, we can still see fleeting glimpses of Hugh MacLennan’s Protestant Anglo Montreal in the provincial capital of Fredericton and of the French-Canadian village of Saint Marc-des-Erables in Madawaska. Industrializing villages and towns may not spark the resistance found in the classic novel, but it’s not far fetched to spot contemporary examples of fictional characters like Ontario businessman Huntley McQueen and the odd Paul Tallard, at home in both languages, but trying to reconcile the tensions between French Canadian and English identities.

Over the past two years, the Blaine Higgs government’s proposal to change the French Immersion program in the province has sparked robust debate in both languages.  Blunt statements by People’s Alliance leader Kris Austin that French Immersion was a “failed program” were met with stony silence from Education Minister Dominic Cardy on Global News.

Simply touching French Immersion was enough to send its passionate advocates in the local branch of Canadian Parents for French (CPF NB) into panic mode. Introducing pilot programs in more than a dozen school drawing upon “best, evidence-based practice” in providing enhanced core French suggested that under Minister Cardy the ‘fix was in’ on the likely alternative. That explains why Green Party leader David Coon recently provided a stout defense of French Immersion programs.

Coming on the heels of a provincial review of the Official Languages Act, required every 10-years, the McLaughlin-Flinn report dovetails with proposed plans to create a government department dedicated to advancing the two official languages. It did lift the veil on the stubborn “challenges,” including “confusion over what it means to be bilingual,” the net effect of “intergenerational linguistic tensions,” and how better performing students are siphoned away from mainstream Anglophone schools.

Government reports don’t make a dent when it comes to rectifying entrenched problems. Back in January 2020, Minister Cardy flagged them on CTV Atlantic. A large number of New Brunswick Anglophones lacked access to French Immersion and there was a shortage of French language teachers. “We’ve got a problem with geography,” he said, in that “you’re more likely to access French Immersion in the cities than the countryside [and] we’ve got a problem with teaching capacity.” It’s going to take some time to successfully address such obstacles.

Everyone agrees that French Immersion fades as a favoured option in high school, reflected in sharply reduced graduation numbers. Shrinking numbers in Grades 11 and 12 are a problem that needs to be addressed, according to Dorothy White of CPF New Brunswick.

Developing student fluency in two or more languages is possible, as demonstrated in Quebec and many European nations.  There’s a rather draconian element of compulsion in Quebec where French is the official language buttressed by language laws limiting the use of English in the public sector. In the case of Europe, students are more immersed in a multi-language universe where they can easily travel to visit places nearby where different languages are spoken in the streets.

One constructive proposal in the latest report is to embrace the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, to assess and identify students’ levels of proficiency. Establishing six evidence-based levels of language fluency would help, but the greatest advantage may lie in acquiring teaching resources geared to seeing more students master conversational French and far more at level C2, approaching native fluency.

Former Deputy Minister of Education John McLaughlin, the report’s co-author, is right in recommending a gradual approach to advancing French instruction so as the minimize the potential backlash.  “Set the table properly, get people on board and then create a movement that nobody will want to stop” sounds like it was ripped out of a superintendent’s playbook for school change.

Passion and poetry are more likely to inspire such a movement. At the risk of sounding passionate about promoting French in an Anglophone world, might I suggest going back to the original conception of “two solitudes,” coined by Rainer Maria Rilke and popularized in MacLennan’s novel?  “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” Simply put, crossing over and marrying someone from the other side does wonders for bilingualism. Look around and you will see examples of this generational solution.

*Reprinted from The Telegraph-Journal, February 11, 2022.

What can be done to advance bilingualism in Canada’s only officially bilingual province?  Is French Immersion still central to that overarching goal?  What’s standing in the way of graduating more students fluent in French in New Brunswick?  Is it better to improve French Immersion or to greatly enhance core French programs in all Anglophone schools?

Read Full Post »