Hi Everyone,
Recently one of our Scarborough teachers had an article published in one
of the leading newspapers. He talked about how there has been a lot of
misrepresentation in the media of the facts.
Currently in Ontario, we have a Minister of Education who was supposedly
going to create a crisis in Education in order to have an excuse to
restructure, etc. This, we believe, is in fact going on - however, we as
educators, and even parents, are becoming wise and fighting back.
This is the article that Bill Hynes, the author/journalist gave me
permission to forward to you...there are some spelling mistakes so
please excuse them.
BTW, the article deals with North American issues so includes the U.S.A.
as well as Canada. I hope you enjoy reading it.
                                                -Ruth
Oh almost forgot Bill wrote me the following when he gave his
permission:
RUTH: Make any use of my article you like, and also alert your U.S.
friends to the Bracey and Sandia Reports. The Bracey Reports appear in
every Oct. Phi Delta Kappan starting in 1991. (N.B. the 10/95 PDK is
misidentified on the cover [but not inside] as 11/95.) They should try
to get the uncensored (Third Draft) "samizdat" version of the Sania
Report. The official version cleared by George Bush had to be watered
down and even changed some of the stats. They can get Bracey's home #
from the Allexandria, Virginia operator or write to him via PDK.
                                                        -Bill
rz
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Globe and Mail Article by Bill Hynes
For about a decade, an increasingly shrill chorus of politicians, corporate 
stake holders,' journalists and "parent activists" has accused Canadian and 
American schools of failing in their tasks.
Educators have typically responded by assuming the criticisms were true and 
offering lame-sounding excusesÑmost notably that the schools are overwhelmed 
by immigrant students and by students who watch too much television and 
aren't read to at home, or disciplined, or loved, or properly fed.
A more useful response is to examine the critics' evidence' and discover that 
it is faulty. Indeed, whether judged by exam scores or real-life 
accomplishments, North American schools and their 'human product are 
magnificent, the best they've ever been and probably the best in the world.
The misuse of statistics to inflate dropout rates and libel our kids' reading 
ability and math skills, the push for a return to "standardised" tests, the 
indefensible argument that education was better 30 years ago is part of a 
wrong-headed effort to discredit and disinvent a school system that produces 
more highly skilled people and independent thinkers than business and 
government know how to em-ploy.
A case in point: One of the school-bashers favourite pronouncements is that 
Canadian schools don't use phonicsÑusing the sound of letters and letter 
groups to teach reading. In particular, they complain that Ontario's Circular 
14 (the infamous document that lists the books on which public money may be 
spent) forbids books about phonics. They also say that the whole-language 
approach to reading, especially the one presented in the mostly used English 
Canadian reading series, Impressions, is "antiÐphonics." They repeat these 
accusations routinely on television, in print and at public meetings. But the 
charges are baseless.
The fact is that Impressions includes Grade 1 workbooks in which just about 
every third page is a lesson in phonics. Impressions also includes 
sugar-coated phonics in the form of those ancient teaching tools, rhyme and 
repetition. There are also more than 100 additional sheets of phonics work 
that teachers can photocopy for kids who need them.
My point in raising this is not to argue that teaching phonics is a good 
idea, but that there is a deliberate attempt to mislead. This insults those 
of us who are interested in education: It suggests we are too stupid or too 
lazy to flip open a kid's workbook and see for ourselves.
Generations of research, much of it summarized in George Noizet's and 
Jean-Paul Caverni's Psychologie de l'Evaluation Scolaire, Herbert Kohl's 
Basic Skills, David Owen's None Of  the Above and my own 1994 article, "A 
Citizen's Remonstrance" (published in Phi  Delta Kappan, an education 
magazine based in Bloomington, Indiana),shows that neither statistically 
standardized machine-markable tests nor externally imposed "essay and 
problem-solving" exams predict real-life success or even university marks as 
well as teacher-assigned marks do.
Researchers from the Sorbonne have found that at least 85 per cent of what a 
student knows on exam day is forgotten within 18 months. The several hundred 
(and counting)brands and kinds of packaged exams vary more in their 
assessment of the same student than do "hard marking and "easy marking 
teachers, and even more in their ranking of students. The world's largest and 
most experienced test-designing outfit, the New Jersey-based Educational 
Testing Service, admits that each question on an ''objective multiple-choice 
exam represents 100 to 150 subjective judgments made, delegated or neglected.
There are two (sometimes) legitimate uses of testing: providing quick mutual 
feedback and blackmailing students into studying. But teacher-made tests 
spaced through the function better than external exams.
What produces a good exam- taker is the opposite of what produces a citizen 
of literate habits. Canadian and American studies, including a 1971 Toronto 
Board of Education report, have found a negative correlation between scores 
on standardised reading, writing and math tests and the number of times a 
student visits a public library, or reads a book without being forced to by a 
teacher.
Exam-haunted U.S. school boards have reacted to these findings by axing the 
once widespread rule that no student could pass English or history without 
showing the teacher a valid library card. Some suburban schools ask parents 
to forbid "unnecessary"library visits and to let their children read only for 
school assignments, vouched for by notes from school. At least one principal 
in Suffolk County, New York, periodically Nraids" the local public library to 
catch "violators."
There are many examples of attempts to defame the existing, learner-centred 
public system.
The American media, lead by conservative commentator George Will, have been 
saying that "40 to 50 per cent of American teachers send their own kids to 
private schools.
That's not true. Virginia-based researcher Gerald Bracey has reported that 
the actual rate is 16 per cent. That figure includes the one third of 
private-school teachers who send their children to private schools.
The Wall Street Journal confirmed Mr.Bracey's findings, but few other 
publications corrected Mr. Will's figures after being ex-posed to Mr. 
Bracey's. 
Another tactic of the education-bashers is to suggest that reading is on its 
way out. The truth is that library use virtually doubled in Canada as a whole 
from 1972 to192, and tripled in Quebec. (Ontario, with its notoriously 
permissive system of education,achieved a higher proportionate increase than 
English Canada as a whole.) Statistics Canada says the most frequent library 
users,not counting full-time students, are adults under 35, the finished 
products of the learner-centred and "permissive education systems of recent 
decades.Similarly, a 1992 federal study found that 94 per cent of Canadians 
read for pleasure in 1991, up from 88 per cent in 1978. The number of hours 
per week the average Canadian read had risen from six to seven. Book sales 
since the 1970s have grown faster than the population or the economy, except 
for a brief set-back after Parliament imposed the goods and services tax on 
books.
Our love of reading extends beyond books,too. The Newspaper Marketing Bureau 
reports that newspaper readership among Canadian adults under 35 rose from 58 
readers per 100 per day in 1984 to 64 in 1991, despite the increase in 
non-print news sources. Please see EDUCATION I D3
The rise in readership also occurred de-spite the sharp increase since 1965 
in the reading skills needed to cope with the average newspaper (a fact 
supported by school-based reading specialists and Canadian Press research).
Nevertheless, a recent study by Literacy. B..C. found that a large minority 
of adults have trouble understanding the daily newspaper. Like other reports 
touted as evidence that North American education is failing, this study 
actually recorded a dramatic rise in the quality of English used by the 
papers. If you doubt this, visit that crowded public library and compare the 
vocabulary level of newspapers of the l980s and 1990s with that in the same 
dailies in earlier decades.
This is par for the course. Statistics Canada, in concert with data agencies 
from such other countries as the United States and France, produced studies 
that supposedly found massive reading and math deficiencies among Canada's 
youngest adults. In fact, they discovered the opposite. Adults under 35 
invariably did better than those over 35. Even compared with people over 35 
who had had the same amount of schooling, plus decades of real world 
experience, the younger adults did no worse than a draw.
If you think education was better in the"good old days," do as I did when I 
had to come up with a topic.in a hurry for a Grade 7 English class. I gave 
out pages of the official English-language summary of Ontario's 1994 
Begin-Caplan royal commission report, For the Love of Learning, and asked the 
kids to search them for grammatical errors. They found so many, including 
some I missed, that they refused to believe they were reading the work of 
adults.
The widely quoted final report, in 1992,of the Economic Council of Canada, A 
Lotto Learn, said a 1991 Statistics Canada study found that 28 per cent of 
Canadians aged 16 to 24 (changed in many media reports to 28 per cent of 
Canadian-born people aged 16 to 24) were functionally illiterate." Stats can 
never used the term"functionally illiterate," although one could argue that 
in today's world anyone in the lower two of Stats can's four reading 
categories merits that label. Statistics Canada found that 16 per cent of 
Canadians, 6 per cent of Canadian 16-to-24-year-olds and 3 per cent of 
Canadian-born 16-to-24-year-olds were in the two categories(i.e., exhibits 
limited skill" or "serious difficulty).
Equally outrageous are statements that an international study discovered that 
Canadian and American 18-year-olds were less able than their peers overseas 
to read mildly technical" material, supposedly because our kids study too 
much literature" and not enough 'technical writing,'
The "technical reading study, though widely quoted by business people, 
doesn't exist.
The second study actually compared British scores on "advanced level" high 
school exams with U.S. high-school kids' scores on university level "advanced 
placement" exams.
Another oft-quoted study that doesn't exist is the one that found that the 
"most serious problems" in U.S. schools in the 1940s were infractions such as 
gum chewing and talking out of turn while today's are problems such as guns, 
drugs and venereal disease. The two made-up lists, like the alligators 
supposedly prowling the sewers of New York City, have unfortunately become an 
indestructible urban leg-end.
Most North American dailies ignored or buried in the business pages the Japan 
Productivity Centre's 1991 report that found that Canadians are the most 
productive employees in the world despite averaging about 4 per cent as many 
hours of on-thejob training as the Japanese or Swedes. It would seem that 
Canadian kids really do learn how to learn. The same report placed Americans 
third.
Only USA Today, Toronto-based Now magazine and some teachers' magazines 
printed revelations that the countries that score" higher than Canada and the 
U.S.on international math and science tests routinely cheat. Some 
governments, as Kazuo Ishizaka of the Japanese National Institute for 
Educational Research admits,allow only the best schools, students or 
districts to be tested. Some regularly lose" the results from low-scoring 
schools. Some, with elections, careers and national "honour" at stake, 
identify and coach the test-takers in advance. One report on South Korean 
"performance" on the exams was released before the students were tested. If 
the same countries were caught cheating at sports it would be headline news 
throughout North America.
Another exam scam involves the sup-posed decline in scores on the (Nelson) 
Canadian Test of Basic Skills, its parent American version the Iowa Test of 
Basic Skills and the SAT (scholastic-assessment tests) university-entrance 
exams. The CTBS and ITBS have been repeatedly "re-normed upward so a student 
has to do better than his or her l96Os' or 1970s' counterpart to get the same 
rating. The Canada version has, in any case, changed so drastically since 
1966 that any comparison is absurd.
Every U.S. racial group's SAT average increased between 1975 and 1992. The 
over-all average has declined because formerly low-scoring black, EIi Panic? 
and.native groups have been increasing their participation in the exams even 
faster than theirs cores have been gaining on white and Asian-American 
scores. Similarly, girls have increased their SAT participation faster than 
their scores have gained on male scores. (The SATs were drastically changed 
after their designers noticed, in 1992, that Asian-American scores had 
overshot white scores and that black scores were rising three times as fast 
as white scores and slightly faster than those of Asian Americans. Many 
believe that denying blacks an even break is a major purpose of standardized" 
testing.)
Another measure of our education is the acceptance of Canadian students by 
foreign institutions. The number of Canadians attending post secondary 
schools out-side Canada rose from 14,132 in 1975 to 27,437 in 1995, with both 
American and over-seas schools contributing to the increase.
This rise in acceptance cannot be dismissed as reflecting a lowering of 
standards, as other evidence can. Indeed, declining high-school dropout rates 
might be shrugged off as being due to lowered standards. So might any rise in 
average high-school marks and decade-long increases in the proportion of 
high-school graduates going on to university or college,the pro-portion 
actually graduating from university and the Pro Portion attending graduate 
and professional schools. Higher standardized test scores could mean an 
easier edition of an exam is being used, or teachers and students have become 
"test wise."
But the whole world's universities and colleges can't have lowered their 
standards for Canada. A Canadian accepted in a foreign school means a local 
citizen and taxpayer turned away. The planet has given Canada's 
learner-centred elementary and secondary schools a remarkable vote of 
confidence that a country not befuddled by organized school-bashing would be 
celebrating.
Before Ontario's Tory government chose high school dropout John ('let's 
invent a crisis") Snobelen as Education Minister,critics cited the dropout 
rate as an index of schools' success or failure.
In 1991, Stats can reported an "ever left school rate" of less than 24 per 
cent and a net dropout rate (after subtracting people who return to school 
and eventually graduate) near 18 per cent. These figures were widely 
published in the media, including in The Globe and Mail. The U.S. Department 
of Education reports that 83 per cent of high schoolers "graduate on time" 
and at least 91 per cent graduate eventually.Researchers who track dropouts 
beyond age 25 say both countries' "ultimate" drop-out rate may be less than 9 
per cent.
Beginning in April, 1992, school-bashers began to publish "dropout rates" 
much higher. American school-bashers usually cite a "24-per-cent U.S. dropout 
rate.n In Canada, many experts (Maclean's, Reader's Digest, the Economic 
Council of Canada, the federal government's "stay ins school campaign, Kim 
Campbell and Jean Charest among them) have set the dropout rate at 30 per 
cent or higher. (Maclean's later switched to 18 per cent, blaming "educators 
for its own earlier misstatement.)
New Brunswick vocational-training  David Roberts and spokespersons for the 
Conference Board of Canada have claimed that the 'North American dropout rate 
is 50 per cent. Even if "North American includes Mexico and Central America, 
there just aren't enough Mexican and Central American kids to bring the North 
American rate to 50 per cent even if they all drop out.
When someone says 18 per cent or 9 percent is an unacceptable dropout 
rate,that's opinion. When someone says the dropout rate was lower before the 
days of learner-centred education, that's baloney.
Maybe we can't defeat the school-bashers, but we must try.
The kids are worth it.
--- PCBoard (R) v15.3 (OS/2) 5
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