The Matthew Effect in Ontario Public Education

Dear Aunt Malkin,

I work as an Education Assistant in an Ontario public school, and after learning about teaching strategies to help LD students learn, I was expecting to see programs to provide intense instruction to student, but nothing of the sort exists. When I am trying to scaffold children, I am told leave him or her alone, they can do it (but they can't and don't). I keep saying that integrating students with cognitive deficits in the general education classroom does not make the children operate at the general education level. They may be among their peers, but they need intense support if they are to make any progress, and the sad thing is that they do not get it.  It seems to me that my school board's philosophy is that it is a waste of time to expend resources on students who are not likely to succeed academically. Signed, EA

Dear EA,

I cannot speak to your school board's philosophy about saving money on the backs of its struggling students, although from my observations the board staff are driven more by ideology and self-interest than rationalized budget decisions. Certainly it is true that ever since the province untied spec ed funding from specific students, the school boards have been diverting some of their spec ed funding to other spending envelopes. Is this because they don't care about their spec ed kids? Or is it that they prefer to spend their money on trendy fads and trips to Finland? Only the Shadow knows.

Part of this puzzle, for sure, is an ideological commitment to "mainstreaming" whereby students with special needs get placed into regular classrooms - notionally with "support" that will allow these kids to catch up with their peers. In practice, however, much of the time either the kids get little or no support, or else the situation you describe arises. In this latter case, the classroom teacher is a fervent believer in osmosis (also known as discovery learning) and thinks that just surrounding the special needs kids with learning opportunities will do the trick. It's sort of like throwing a three-year-old into the deep end of the pool and expecting him to discover how to swim, and it works just about as well.

And no discussion of this topic would be complete without mention of the effect of this same ideology on kindergarten and grade 1 kids - the very place where the learning problems begin and are allowed to snowball. In what Keith Stanovich calls "The Matthew Effect", the kids who discover the necessary learning get richer and the kids who don't get poorer.  As the grades go by, the poor kids get poorer and poorer until by, say, grade 6 or 7 it is virtually impossible for them to ever catch up and then they get written off by the system. 

In summary, the problem is not so much a question of money, IMHO, although it is a factor, but rather a question of teaching philosophy, of research-based methods and materials, of a determination not to let kids get behind in grade 1, of a commitment to the needs of all students. The cancer in the Ontario education system is deeply rooted, and simply diverting more money into special education is unlikely to make much, if any, of a difference.

Signed, Aunt Malkin

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