Amazing,this has to get to newspapers!
The Agenda as well.

I`m in the literacy field and I met some Presidents of Community Colleges at a dinner party at Niagara on the Lake last spring,they tell me the same on the literacy spectrum.Totally unprepared students.

What`s your take on the cover up or is this as much as you are willing to disclose,it`s already a great deal,thank you.

This makes a mockery of our claims for world-beating graduation rates.  Such educational puffery would be harmless if Ontario didn’t have to compete internationally.

But we do, and the rest of the world takes education more seriously.  In the US, the new ‘Common Core’ is attempting to bring rigour into the curriculum.  Comparing it to Ontario’s slack guidelines is an eye-opener.

For example, our grade-8 curriculum talks about comparing ‘representations of numbers’, and has students multiplying fractions and calculating percentages. http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/math18curr.pdf

The grade 8 Common Core requires solving simultaneous linear equations, introductory probability, and cubic geometry.  http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/8/introduction/

As the head-of-math pointed out, the problem starts in elementary school, and our middle-school kids are nowhere near ready to tackle high-school math.  The only option for high school is to water the curriculum down.  And congratulate everyone for graduating.

Not a whisper from the teachers, who that, under the current circumstances, they can’t do their job properly.

Where’s the media?  Why aren’t investigative journalists doing their job and reporting this?

Parents, get your kids into online courses so they can be prepared for post-secondary schooling. 

State-run monopolies are a disaster.  Billions upon billions of taxpayers’ $$ wasted, and most children’s lives ruined, because they’ve learned nothing.

Did anyone mention that Canada is the world’s best educated population and a large part of our overwhelming success is community college grads.

The grade 12 Math courses are now called:

Advanced Functions

Calculus and Vectors

Data Management.

Algebra, Geometry separate Calculus and Trig disappeared many years ago.

Sooo, Doug, Ontario won’t be producing any engineers nor people for stem jobs?

I heard that in Ontario they also want to get rid of teaching fractions.  If this is true, then, why?

Barry,

If I am not mistaken it was the Professional Engineers of Ontario that put pressure on and eventually saved the gov’t from nixing Calculus from the secondary math curriculum.  If the MOE brain trust had had their way it would have been gone completely from the curriculum.

In smaller, rural schools it’s sometimes impossible to find teachers who can teach the higher level math classes, who actually understand it themselves.  This actually happened in our small school.  When graduates and their parents began complaining that when their budding engineers/science students were told by the post-secondary institution that they had no grasp of the basics of Calculus, yet were put through based on what was taught it became an issue.

So what happened?

The next year there were just a handful of students needing to take Calculus. Not enough for a class but also no teacher to teach it.  The remedy. Have the physics teacher who KNEW how to teach Calculus do double duty and have the course offered on-line.

This past year the capable and able physics teacher is now the Calculus teacher…..but not before many students had to find out the hard way that the Calculus education they rec’d was useless to them.  Most, including my own child, ended up needing tutors to barely get through the course.  The students themselves took to developing their own social media page so they could support one another.

How many more like this?

“Just do the best you can” has a lifeline today Barry. Not too much has changed.

Bev

There is an engineering surplus right now. Too many grads plus immigrant engineers.

http://m.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/

Last year I attended a math night sponsored by our District PAC.  The Grade 6 teacher there said the Ministry of Education deemed that kids weren’t ALLOWED to learn fractions until Grade 6.  When I asked her why not change this ridiculous rule, and just teach the kids in the younger grades the most basic of fractions, such as 1/2+1/2, she pointed me to the Ministry of Education website to complain.  Boy, that’s helpful.  And surprisingly, it’s already in the curriculum that kids are supposed to be learning basic fraction by Grade 3.  Too bad many of the classroom teachers don’t follow their own curriculum guidelines, which is why we now have over 30-50% of school aged children enrolled in Kumon or obtaining their basic foundational math skills through a learning centre.  Someone want to explain who’s at fault here?

So according to Doug’s argument, a surplus of engineers is the reason why kids aren’t allowed to learn foundational math skills in public school.  Hard to follow that particular line of thought as being credible…

Ministry guidelines…I’m incensed,truly,this is as unbelievable as outlawing phonics.

The patients are definitely running the asylum.

Tara:  I doubt that Doug actually read the Atlantic article.  He’s a former education bureaucrat, and likes to take the wind from our readers by telling us to trust education bureaucrats instead of the evidence around us. 

The Atlantic article DID talk about the numerically limited scope of the STEM workforce, bit it was also quite clear about the role of education: 

“No one should conclude from this that American K-12 science and math education does not need major improvement. Emphatically to the contrary: Every high school graduate should be competent in science and mathematics—essential to success in almost any 21st century occupation and to informed citizenship as well.”

The comments are supportive of this point.  Several point out that top programmers and engineers are paid $150K in their 20’s, but companies cannot find them.  They only find graduates who think they are worth $150K but cannot tie their own shoelaces.

Nope wrong Tara but what is true is that our school system as organized is producing all tbe engineers and scientists we need.

So big biz types like Bill Gates keep demanding more so we can overproduce them to the point that he can pay them less on a supply demand basis.

There is zero crisis in the STEM area.

Mathematicians In High Demand - Forbes

In April our radio station CKNW had a series going — Putting BC To Work. 

They had Forbes Magazine writer, Susan Adams, discussing Best and Worst Jobs for the Future.  She said the #1 Best Job was Mathematician with an Average Salary of $100,000. 

She further said the forecast is that there is a projected 23% job growth in the field. 

Mathematicians are not engineers or scientists and $100 000 is not much in today’s world.

Forbes? Really? Consider the source.

Doug reinforces the 19th century industrial narrative that the economy only needed 20 percent maximum of students being well educated to supply the labour forces of upper management in physicians, engineers, scientists and other high-skilled jobs.

Back then, the goal of public education was to ensure that the students with the higher social-income status were given first preference over the students with lower social-income class for high-skilled jobs. How? By educating students according to their social-income status.

That goal is still in place today, buried under an avalanche of discovery learning pedagogy, other progressive education theories, and the agendas of the K to 12 and government.  In a middle-class high school, 20 % of the senior school population is enrolled in the STEM subjects. That percentage drops as one goes down the social-income ladder.

Simply put, the 21st century K to 12 establishment are determined to keep to the goals of the 19th century educationalists. In the 21st century, it means curriculum standards have become guidelines. It means the LD students in the inclusive classroom must give up learning to read and write well. It means to accept that 4 X 3 = 11, providing the student can explain his reasoning in numbers, words and pictures. It means the Canadian economy are operating on 19th century goals of supply and demand of the labour force.

There are 3 great, overarching reasons for education in general or public education.

1) to serve the economy

2) to help people to feel fulfilled and therefore happy.

3) to make people useful agents in helping others to create a better world.

Think of it a a 3 legged stool. It does not fulfill its role with one leg missing.

Serving the economy will always be a critical element.

Doug speaks of the original three-legged stool model. However, it is the 21st century the three-legged stool model has undergone changes by the K to 12 crowd. The three-legged stool model is now a pedagogy model to keep parents, students and the general public from interfering with the agendas of the K to 12 estabishment. Ergo, the parent leg is much shorter than the other two legs.  http://www.gemseducation.com/uploads/image/_MEDIA_MANAGER/GEMS_Other-Media/PART-2-HOME-TO-SUCCESS432323.pdf

The only trouble is that the K to 12 crowd, only want parents that will not deeply probe and question the education policies and practices of the school. Take for example the parent-teacher interview. Parents are encouraged to be positive about their children in their comments addressed to teachers without undue focus and attention on the weaknesses and deficits of their children, they have observed at home.Rarely are the academic and skill deficits concerns of parents are addressed at a parent-teacher interviews.

Lawyer parents and other professional parents who have the trained skills, have provided advice on the how-tos to effectively overcome the parent-teacher interviews of civil and smiling faces to address the concerns of parents that educators views as negative feedback and an attack on teachers’ professionalism.

Note Doug’s model, the term parent is not mentioned.  Quite common from the union crowd, who would rather make parents agents working on the best interests of the teachers’ union at the expense of their children.