All Posts Tagged With: "ontario education"
Ontario students fall short of standards
68% of students meet reading, writing and math standard, government wants 75%
The world might be content with a passing grade, but Ontario has set its sights higher, Premier Dalton McGuinty said yesterday in defending why a two-year-old target for standardized test scores has not been met.
Figures released by the Education Quality and Accountability Office show 68 per cent of students in Grades 3 and 6 are meeting the standards in reading, writing and math, up from 67 per cent in the previous year. But that’s still short of the 75 per cent target the governing Liberals wanted to meet for Grade 6 students by 2008.
Speaking at a newly constructed school in Kitchener, McGuinty said that in other parts of the country and the world the standard is simply passing. In Ontario the standard is a B, or 70 per cent. “If we said the Ontario standard was going to be a C, or 60 per cent, 93 per cent of Ontario students are meeting that standard right now,” McGuinty said.
McGuinty said his government set its sights on that level so students will be well equipped for post-secondary study. “We want them to have the tools and the level of proficiency so they can actually graduate from high school and, if they so choose, go on to an apprenticeship, college or university,” he said.
The Canadian Press
Put students in warehouses
Ontario opposition wants closed factories converted to classrooms, and McGuinty is open to the idea.
Using shuttered factories and stores as college classrooms to ensure as many would-be students as possible are accommodated this fall is an idea that can’t be dismissed out of hand, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Monday.
With applications to Ontario colleges projected to be up by almost 15 per cent, with a 23 per cent jump in applications from non-high school students, the Opposition is calling for such unorthodox steps to address what it calls a “crisis” created by the government. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to the folks within the ministry, in particular the minister,” McGuinty said when asked about the scheme. “It’s an interesting idea and I think it would be irresponsible of me to reject it out of hand.”
Monday was the deadline to apply to Ontario colleges for the year beginning Sept. 6, and the Progressive Conservatives said the government has failed to properly plan for a big increase in the number of applications from unemployed workers. “Mr. McGuinty is to blame for this unprecedented situation we’re in now,” said Tory critic Jim Wilson. “It’s the first time in several generations that those young people that want to go to college may not have the opportunity to do so.”
The final number for college applicants won’t be known for a few days. The non-high school applicants are mainly people who’ve lost their jobs.
Some colleges have seen a 47 per cent jump in applications, said Wilson, who warned a lot of high school students could find themselves shut out of college by the older competition. “We know in the short-term in this crisis there’s going to be thousands of students who won’t be able to find a place,” he said.
McGuinty didn’t dispute Wilson’s claims but said there was an upside to the problem: more and more people are recognizing the value of higher education and want to return to college. “I embrace that challenge,” McGuinty said. “I believe it’s a legitimate point that’s being made.”
It’s no surprise that in times of economic challenge people are going back to college, said the premier, who promised the government would address the problem of limited spaces in the March budget.
There are lots of closed stores and factories that could quickly be converted into college classrooms, said Wilson. “Open up some of the factories that are closed in our ridings and some of the shops on the main streets, put some desks and chairs in them, bring back retired professors if you have to,” he said. “We have lots of vacant storefronts and I’m sure we could get a pretty good deal from landlords.”
This is a crisis situation and the government seems to have no plan to deal with it, added Wilson. “I don’t think there’s a reason at all — except for lack of planning — for the government to be turning away students,” he said.
The Liberals should have known they’d create problems for high school students with their second career program, which has resulted in a surge of applications for post-secondary education, said Wilson. “The government should have seen this coming,” he said. “Instead, laid-off workers and Ontario students are left fighting each other over opportunities to improve their education, training and job prospects.”
College administrators have said they would not give special priority to the Grade 12 candidates over the other applicants.
The Canadian Press
Ont. to streamline ‘overcrowded’ curriculum
Too many “expectations” placed on students
A review of Ontario’s school curriculum seeks to make sure children in Grades 1 to 8 have enough time to learn the skills they need to continue their education. It is not meant to overhaul the entire system, the province’s education minister, Kathleen Wynne said Tuesday.
Wynne said teachers have been complaining about the curriculum for some time, saying it’s overcrowded and doesn’t give kids the time needed for practical learning.
“One of my concerns is that there’s a lot of content that teachers have to cover when they’re teaching in elementary school, and so what I want to make sure of is that there’s the right content and that kids have enough time to practise the fundamental skills so that they’re ready when they leave elementary school,” Wynne said.
The government has set up a special advisory group to conduct the review and expects to receive its recommendations—based on input from teachers and school boards—in February. An initial discussion paper found that too many “expectations” were built into the curriculum designed 10 years ago.
“For many respondents, ‘overcrowding’ was not only about the amount of academic content that needed to be covered but also about the need to address social, physical, emotional, cultural and developmental aspects of learning,” the paper said.
But Wynne said the move wasn’t about creating a new curriculum. “We just want to take that arbitrariness out of it, streamline it, make sure that the skills are still there, but making sure kids have enough time to learn the fundamentals,” she said.
A final decision about what changes are needed will be made by the spring of next year, with the goal of implementing them for September 2011. NDP education critic Rosario Marchese said the review was overdue, and hoped it would focus on the right priorities.
“If they simply correct some of that overwhelming information that we have given to students, some of it that is a bit too much for the level where it is taught . . . that would be great,” he said. “I’m hoping that’s what the government is going to do, and not more than that.”
The Canadian Press
Two cheers for Ontario’s school information website
Ontario’s new School Information site a (small) victory for parents
“Due to high volumes,” explains the Ontario ministry of education’s new School Information site, “you may experience problems accessing the School Information Finder. Please try again later.” Oh, I’ve been trying again later. Time and again, hour after hour. For most of this afternoon, I was unable to get beyond the homepage. The reason? Ontario’s new, searchable database of elementary and high schools is apparently very popular — as popular among parents as it is unpopular among a certain group of professional education lobbyists.
The website doesn’t tell you much that you don’t already know — this has been the government’s main defence against the critics — but it’s pleasantly surprising nonetheless. Ontario’s education ministry and establishment has a long-standing aversion to the gathering (let alone the publication) of any data that might allow anyone to identify problems in the province’s public education system. We don’t have standardized test, we don’t have high school leaving exams, we have little with which to measure school progress (or lack thereof) and little useful data for parents choosing a school for their child, or parents who would like to figure out where their school stands so as to light a fire under the administration to improve things.
Which may explain the response to the School Information site, which today apparently overwhelmed the Ontario’s government’s web servers. People are starved for information. Does the site give them everything they want? No. Not even close. But it does offer an opportunity to see how your local school(s) measure up in a variety of areas. When you’re starved for information, even the smallest disclosure is likely to attract your excited attention. People may have been even more frantic to get on to website because news stories published earlier today seemed to be suggesting that the site might be shut down, or at least curtailed. (And a “compare schools” feature was removed before I had a chance to look at the site. Not to worry: all this means is that you can’t make side-by-side comparisons on the screen. You can still do them yourself with a printer and/or a pad and paper.) I’m sure many parents had the same reaction I had: if somebody doesn’t want us to see this information, it must be good.
The lead spokesperson of those opposing the website has been Annie Kidder of People for Education. She told the Globe that her problem with people having access to the info on this website is that, “[y]ou see divisions along class lines in terms of the schools parents are choosing… But the job of government is to look out for the overall public good. Their job is not to help me work the system or get around the rules.”
It’s not clear what “rules” this website would help people to get around. Ontarians already have some (limited) choice when it comes to deciding where their kids will go to school within the public system. They may (or may not) be able to choose among more than one local school that has not reached its enrollment limit, and is accepting students. They may be able to choose between a local publicly-funded Catholic school and a local public school. Its hard to understand how anyone is better served if these choices are made in an information vacuum.
People for Education may be opposed to the new website, but People Who Want My Kid to Get An Education are the reason the site is overwhelmed by visitors. Information is power. People want information. They want to feel that they have choice and that they can in some way influence the often unhappy outcomes generated by a monolithic, bureaucratic education system where quality education is rarely the first priority for anyone, save parents. For parents, their child’s education is not some abstract and theoretical construct, to be balanced against other goods. They want their child to attend the best school possible and they want information showing that the school their child is attending is meeting the highest standards. (And if it isn’t, well, they want to know that too — along with what the school is doing to improve). Parents are going to grab on to any and all information that will help them meet those goals.
People for Education is particularly upset about the inclusion of demographic data on the website: for each high school, for example, you can see what percentage of its students met the average on the province-wide literacy test or in Academic Math, but you also learn the percentage of students whose first language is not English and the percentage of parents with a university education. Demography can sometimes be destiny; for example, the children of upper income, university educated parents are more likely to themselves perform well in high school and attend university. The fear that People for Education seems to have is that People Who Want My Kid to Get An Education will use this website to make bad choices. You know, the weathy and educated will be scrambling to get into schools filled with students of the similarly wealthy and educated.
But to some extent that already happens. It happens because people with means have always chosen to live in certain neighbourhoods, close to certain schools. If they are wealthy enough or frugal enough, they do it by sending their kids to private school. Parents will make rational choices to benefit their children, and woe betide the politician who seeks to thwart them. But most parents can’t do what the wealthy can do. Their only hope is for the local public school to be as good as possible. That’s their battle. It’s impossible to imagine how less information — in particular information about underperforming schools — makes that outcome more likely.
As I browsed through the database (I finally got into it this evening), what jumped out at me is how some schools in Toronto with high non-English speaking populations perform at an extremely high level, while others do not. What are these schools, these neighbourhoods, these parents, these kids getting right? What other factors are at play? And at those schools that are falling behind, what can the province, the school board, the administration, the teachers, the parents and the students do to raise outcomes?
We as a society can either provide as much information as possible so that parents, armed with information, can deeply involve themselves in the project to improve schools, or we can try to try to keep a tight lid on information that might highlight areas of failure, for fear that such information will be misused.
I know what most course most parents, and most citizens, would choose.
