http://www.literacy.ca/literacy/literacy-sub/

I`ve always heard it`s worse than this..

Wonder why the discrepancy.
TD Report from December states it as 42% as well?

http://www.literacy.ca/literacy/literacy-sub/

PISA tests up to age 15…is that why?

Every businessman talks about the frustration,there seems to be a disconnect..maybe it`s the test,multiple choice..doesn`t pick up on spelling errors and writing weakness.

” Innovation is essential to a high-performing economy. Countries that are more innovative are passing Canada on measures such as income per capita, productivity, and the quality of social programs. It is also critical to environmental protection, a high-performing education system, a well-functioning system of health promotion and health care, and an inclusive society. Without innovation, all these systems stagnate and Canada’s performance deteriorates relative to that of its peers.”

However it does not help when the Conference Board of Canada gives an A in education, while downplaying the increasing numbers of Canadians with low literacy and numeracy skills. Some would say it suits the Conference Board of Canada just fine when 50 % of the adult population have low literacy to numeracy skills, and the cynic would say, the Conference Board of Canada calling for more STEM graduates to enhanced innovation and productivity is a bit of misnomer when STEM graduates are still the same percentage as it was in 1974, which ranges from 20 % to 30 % depending on the classification of STEM jobs. There is others that would insist that the Conference Board of Canada has the hidden agendas of the globalists who really want the majority with lower skills and knowledge sets, so they are just smart enough to make a living but dumb enough to be compliant for the globalists.

Either way, it boils down to the K to 12 education systems of the 22 countries, and here you will find the K to 12 well defended by all the players,  in the political arena. CBC a national media network, like the others will downplay the numbers and talk about - ” OECD study reveals Canada’s polarized workforce
A large number of Canadians have great problem-solving skills, but too many lag in numeracy and literacy”
By downplaying the numbers, it misleads Canadians there is no serious problems. People will have a tendency to do, when only talking about the numbers falling at level 1 and below, without explaining that people falling at level two in literacy and numeracy are part and parcel of people with low literacy and numeracy skills.

OECD key facts - http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/Key facts about the Survey of Adult Skills.pdf

The above will explain the levels in numeracy and literacy. For the problem solving in technology-rich environments, there is only three levels and here is a sample problems in this link - http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/Sample Items_all_rev.pdf

The Canada Results - http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/89-555-x/89-555-x2013001-eng.pdf

The above link will give the breakdown in percentages for Canada, and the provinces.

For Literacy - Levels 4 & 5 - 14 %, Level 3 - 38 %, Level 2 - 32 % and Level 1 and below - 17 %.  Low literacy at Level 2 and below is at 49 %.

For Numeracy - Levels 4 & 5 - 12 %, Level 3 - 33 %, Level 2 - 32 % and Level 1 and below - 23 %. Low numeracy at Level 2 and below is at 55 %.

For PS-TRE - Level 3 - 7 %, Level 2 - 29 %, and Level 1 - 30 %. There is subcategories that makes up in part, includes people who did not take the computer test - approximately 34 %. Level 1 percentage of 30 % would indicate low numeracy and literacy skills trying to navigate in a computer environment. Nothing to write home about, but apparently Canada is at the top for PS-TRE skills. However, if one takes a peek at the sample problems in the second link - I am pretty sure a 10 year old should be able to do this and obtained a level 2 or higher.

Unfortunately, the respective players including the economic/political powers and the education establishment really don’t want to discuss the low literacy and numeracy skills, when there is profit to be made off the low literacy and numeracy skills, or to be used to advanced the hidden agendas of the players. No discussions take place because it would require the major players to look inside their own organizations of private and government to dismantled the barriers that prevents Canadians from obtaining good literacy and numeracy skills. And that won’t do with players like the Conference Board of Canada who moans about - “But there are areas of weakness as well. Canada needs to improve workplace skills training and lifelong education. Canada’s adult literacy skills are mediocre, with a large proportion of adults lacking the literacy skills necessary to function in the workplace.” Moans about it, and erects more barriers according to the size of one’s pocketbook and social-income standing.

Realizing that we are all Canadians, whether immigrants, or native (meaning those born and raised here), I’m curious to know, what would be the cultural breakup of the the statistics for the above.

Essentially, of the quarter of Canadians who are neither literate or numrate, how many are born and raised in this country, and how many became citizens upon immigrating here?

The same applies to the rest who scored in the upper three quartiles: how many of those who are doing really well are native vs those who are immigrants?

If it turns out that the majority of those doing well, especially in the area of numeracy are immigrants, then we have a bigger problem on our hands.

I’m not saying this is the case, just wondering if the breakdown of the above study could be done to reflect different cultures and backgrounds.

In Canada, because we are this melting pot of people from all over the world, rather than focusing on cultural negatives, we may learn quite a bit from researching and understanding cultural positives, such as attitudes towards education and remedial education via tutoring programs, or obtaining help outside of school - any school.

On page 54 - “This section analyzes three groups: recent immigrants, established immigrants, and people born in Canada. The results are broken down for Canada as a whole, and for each of the three provinces that were oversampled.
Immigrants show lower proficiency in literacy and numeracy than the Canadian-born population
Immigrants in Canada aged 16 to 65 have lower average scores than the Canadian-born population for literacy (Chart 3.4) and for numeracy (Chart 3.5). The same holds true for immigrants in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. The results show further that there is no major difference in scores between recent and
established immigrants, even though their respective socio-demographic profiles are different.
Looking at the distribution of literacy skills, in Canada as a whole there are lower proportions of recent (7%)
and established (9%) immigrants scoring at Level 4 or 5 than among the Canadian-born population (16%).
Immigrants in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia follow this pattern. At Level 1 or below, recent
immigrants (28%) and established immigrants (26%) across Canada are more heavily represented than the
Canadian-born population (13%).
Similar — but not identical — results are obtained for numeracy. At Level 4 or 5, the proportions of recent
and established immigrants (9% and 10% respectively) are lower than the proportion of their Canadian-born
counterparts (14%); at Level 1 or below, the proportions of recent (34%) and established (33%) immigrants
are above that of the Canadian-born population (19%).”

On page 17 - “The perils of jumping to quick conclusions are well illustrated by the case of Canada, whose national results derive from provincial and territorial ones. In addition to large differences between provinces and territories, there are major differences between populations within them — and these differences can only be understood in a wider context. For example, respondents in Canada were given the test in English or French, yet a portion of the Canadian population has neither as their mother tongue. As a result, the PIAAC scores for these populations are measuring skills in a second language.
Further examples of the differences both between and within provinces and territories include: the sociodemographic composition of their populations; the educational attainment of these populations; the
proportion of immigrants in a population; the distribution of residents living in rural areas versus those living
in population centres; and the nature of labour markets and local economies. These factors reflect the diversity
of the Canadian population, but they inevitably complicate analysis of the results and undermine simple
comparisons between jurisdictions.”

From what I can understand, immigrants were selected based on the percentage residing in each province. The actual results includes all Canadian, natives and immigrants. Either way, the report will provide the reasons. Check out the gender breakdown - the old population 55 to 65, the males have superior numeracy skills. Something to think about eh?

We are the most educated people on the planet by a long shot. Those under 44 even better.

Literacy scores are slippery.  The great majority of low-scoring children are limited by poor decoding skills.  Because reading is stressful, they seldom read texts that will expand their vocabularies and knowledge bases—both of which are essential components of most reading tests, which are largely measures of verbal intelligence (when controlled for decoding ability, ‘reading comprehension’ scores are essentially the same as verbal intelligence).

However, general intelligence has a significant genetic component.  In other words, there are many children who will get low scores on the sort of literacy tests used by PISA no matter how well they are taught.  We shouldn’t be wringing our hands simply because a lot of our children are never going to be brain surgeons.  After all, no matter how our economy evolves, we are always going to need a lot of people to work in care homes and other low-tech occupations.

Rather, we should be worrying about how much our most able children are learning.  In the STEM subjects, where the school curriculum is fairly well-defined, we know we are doing worse than many Asian countries.  Once again, PISA has serious limitations: tests are generally ‘skills’ oriented.  A clever pupil can do well with guesswork, even when their subject knowledge is weak.  That child will have very little chance of reaching the ‘cutting edge’ of the relevant discipline.  PISA tests are generally ‘skills’ oriented because it’s easier to design reliable tests of intelligence than to design tests which will reliably test subject knowledge and understanding—and because that’s what educators want.  It’s harder to identify weaknesses in your education system if you aren’t measuring what has been learnt.

However, the real disaster is in the humanities.  Our educators distrust most texts written more than a generation ago because they will almost certainly violate PC canons.  The dangers were demonstrated by a fractious pupil who had to write a paper on a work of fiction from the school library and read it aloud to the class.  He found a collection of stories by Conrad, and promptly chose “The Nigger of the Narcissus”.

We now have a generation of children growing up in England who have never heard of the Duke of Wellington, and who know nothing about the evolution of free societies.  They simply take our freedoms for granted, oblivious to the growing powers of the state.  Their mental horizons extend no further than video games and social networking sites.  My son, who never went to school after the age of 8 and is now 30, is terrified at the speed with which the younger generation is being lobotomized by our knowledge-lite curriculum.

Tom, you are my type of teacher. I hope that you do not mind my web snooping this morning, based on the content of your post that raise my curiosity, who is Tom Burkard.

http://www.cps.org.uk/experts/tom-burkard/

And here - http://www.derby.ac.uk/education/centre-for-educational-research/professors-and-fellows/

Just a note, that if the world was composed of only people who had the ability to become brain surgeons, I doubt the world would be as advanced in areas of technology to human rights to codified constitutions to keep the politicians penned within the parameters of the Constitution. As you stated it is the diversity of humans that makes the man-made world go around, and it is the diversity that is under attack by the K to 12 education system. I call it dumbing down the world, cutting our children from the knowledge networks, by ensuring the majority of students are limited in the skill sets of the 3 Rs. In turn, as adults they no longer have the capacity and and understanding to effectively decode the information / knowledge networks of our media-saturated world.

Results in the younger generations knowing nothing about the evolution of free societies nor the great struggles by the peoples’ of the world to keep governments in check and as well, institutions such as the K to 12 education who have evolved into beasts of serving their best interests, at the expense of the students’ education,  their futures and society.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/most-educated-countries-world-102232490.html

As you can see from this article, generally speaking, the more you spend on education the more you get. Russia has now moved into #1 Canada #2 in tertiary education.

Let us used the OECD numbers - http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/content/book/factbook-2013-en

Education expenditure - “In 2009, taking into account both public and private sources, OECD countries spent 6.2% of their GDP on educational institutions at the pre-primary, primary, secondary and tertiary levels. More than threequarters of this amount came from public sources. The highest spending on educational institutions is in Denmark, Iceland, Israel, Korea, New Zealand and the United States, with at least 7% of GDP accounted for by public and private spending on educational institutions. Seven out of 37 countries with available data spent 5% or less of GDP on educational
institutions; in India and Indonesia these shares are at
or below 4%.
Nearly one-quarter of OECD expenditure on
educational institutions is accounted for by tertiary
education. On the one hand, Canada, Chile, Korea and
the United States spend between 2.4% and 2.6% of
their GDP on tertiary institutions; these countries are
also among those with the highest proportion of
private expenditure on tertiary education. On the other
hand, in Belgium, Brazil, France, Iceland, Norway,
Switzerland and the United Kingdom expenditure on
tertiary institutions, as a portion of GDP, is below the
OECD average; yet, these countries are among those
with a share of GDP spent on primary, secondary and
post-secondary non-tertiary education higher than the
OECD average.”

Russia education expenditure is rank at 24 and Canada is rank at 16.  There is no solid evidence that the higher the education expenditures of a country, leads to higher achievement. Now before I leave, take a look at the public and private expenditures on education for all levels of education. Where is Canada?  In the middle of the pack at 16. Where is Russia? At 24.

So education expenditure seems to have little bearing for high levels of tertiary education levels. Hum…...perhaps after all, it might be the education systems of the country playing the greater role in the number of people obtaining high levels of education.

Now back to this page - http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/content/book/factbook-2013-en  Check off education attainment.

Now go back and check off education expenditure per student. “In 2009, the average level of expenditure per tertiary student, across OECD countries, was USD 13 728. Spending per student at tertiary level ranged from
USD 7 000 or less in Chile, Estonia, Indonesia, the
Slovak Republic and South Africa to more than
USD 20 000 in Canada, Switzerland and the United
States. OECD countries in which most R&D is
performed by tertiary educational institutions tend to
report higher tertiary expenditure per student than
countries in which a large part of research and
development is performed in other public institutions
or by industry.”

Some numbers to ponder on eh Doug?