“The Mended people are quite mixed NAS, some on both sides.

“Quality is not about money?“ You actually believe that? You are very naive my friend.

The studies are in on testing which is why Diane Ravitch (among hundreds of other experts) says testing is destroying educaton but I’m sure you know more.

In fact the EQAO results show great results. I don’t believe them because they are not the same test every time, not the same rules every time, many other changes.

Go tell you parent friends that since money doesn’t buy quality we have decided to spend more money on other schools but not yours since you don’t need it. Your argument is a joke.

Even the business community, and you know how much they love taxes, is beginning to realize that if we don’t SPEND A LOT MORE MONEY on education, we will just not be internationally competitive.

Do you have any idea how many engineers and scientists China and India are graduating these days? Do you? Guess what, for us to compete we need more secondary students to enter university in more buildings that are bigger with more profs in them than ever before. Guess what noasheep- it ain’t free. It ain’t free from K-university.

Depends what you want I guess. You want Canada to move ahead and create a nation where more people are useful and happy there is a BIG price tag for that.

1) Your argument is full of holes. Koreans (I assume you mean the south) are in classes of 30 now to which they attribute a great deal of their spectacular gains in recent years.
2) If you want to attract the best people to any field you need to pay wages that actually attracts them out of other fields. Teachers make less for the same education than almost anybody in their education bracket.

3) Ontario spends the least per student of any province west of us and even Quebec spends more. Newfoundland will pass us very soon, they are right behind us.

4) Charter schools have lower academic performance that public schools. They are no answer.

5) Social promotion? Are you still on that old chestnut? Every scrap of research says retaining kids at grade level causes them to do worse.

6) Our poor teaching has created the world’s second most literate 15 year olds and the highest rate in the world of post secondary education.

7) Smaller class sizes, 18 at the most, are directly related to academic achievement.

8) Nothing special in Edmonton, Calgary has better results.

9) Highest ranked nation on Earth does the most teacher training, guess who?

10) where do you get this skip a grade for immigrants stuff? Off the top of your head?

11) The spelling of Korean is just wild and Chinese gets a capital letter.

Mr.Little, I agree with you that a student that needs to repeat a grade level because he hasn’t learned would be hurt.

I would argue the child would be hurt less in the long run than if allowed to cruise and keep falling behind quietly and then two or three years later be told he has “learning disabilities” so he has to lower his expectations.

The question is: why, after being taught by a certified teacher and after $10.000 has been spent on his attending school that year, the student is not at grade level?

I am against social promotion because social promotion covers up problems and therefore allows them to grow bigger and hurt the student more.

I am against social promotion because parents don’t even know that their child is not at grade level.
That means that they are not able to seek help sooner rather than later.

I am against social promotion because it hurts the other students in that classroom.

It hurts the other students motivation by having different expectations for different students and therefore why work and study if it doesn’t seem to matter?
It hurts the other student’s fairness, because if they all pass anyway, why bother ?

It hurts the other students ability to learn as much as they should for the current grade level because now the teacher, if he is able and wants to do a good job, has to either:
a) divide the teaching time between the students at grade level and the ones that are not at grade level.
This results in less teaching time per group and in discipline problems
b) dumb everything down so hopefully each student would get something out of it.
This results in the students that are not at grade level falling further behind and in the students at grade level being bored.

These are the practical, real life problems of social promotion.

The question is: if the student has been taught why he hasn’t learned?
Could there be a problem with the teaching?

Why isn’t the student at grade level?
Why is this situation hidden from the parents? What good does that do?

There is a strong belief around here that “if the student has not learned, the teacher has not taught”.

People who are close to schools, not just teachers but proncipals, supers, directors, psychologists know that this is simply not true.

If the patient dies, did the Dr not heal? If the legal case is lost, did the lawyer not argue? if there is crime in the city, did the police not police?

Teaching and learning are two different things as anyone who has actually done it knows. I was a high school teacher for many years so I will use HS examples but ES is basically the same.

1) Some children have a great deal of difficulty learning.
2) Some children are very seldom in the building let alone the class
3) Some children resist learnng for a host of reasons
4) Some children are bone lazy
5) Some children have many more problems than just school, drugs, alcohol, divorce, abuse, FAS, etc
6) Some children are quite good at one subject and try quite hard but have a great deal of difficulty with another subject.

I am quite aware that the chorus around here will say “these are just excuses.“ Try it some time, then talk. If you are not a teacher you just have no clue how difficult it is.

fromEurope, I’m sorry that someone on the blog insulted your spelling.  Of course other languages spell countries and nationalities differently than we do.  You have the good fortune to be fluent in more than one language.  (I wish our children here had the same opportunity.)
I’ve warned people from both Europe and Asia who were trying to decide whether or not to immigrate to Canada to beware of our educational system!  I hope that you send this blog to anyone in your country whom you know is considering settling here:  they need to see what it’s like before making a decision…

Ya that Canadian system is pretty bad. Second highest 15 year old literacy rate in the world, highest rate of post secondary grads in the world. Ya I would be nervous about a system like that.

Yes, my native language took over and my spelling was incorrect in this case.

I learned English in school, in a public school. The teaching approach was the “old-fashioned” one, we were taught spelling, reading, english grammar, we had big one hour tests at the end of each semester where we had to correcly solve grammar exercises and to retell Jerome.K.Jerome stories or to write compositions in English.

How many Ontario students are able to follow instructions or read papers written in French?

I used to believe in a centralized public system; there are such systems around that still seem to produce produce literate students in other places such as France for example.
But there, in France, most people share the same beliefs. There, in France they have a national curriculum, they all use the same textbooks across the country. Based on what people have told me, if you go to any school in France in any let’s say grade 3 class, in all these classes the students would be working on material in the exact same chapter within a few pages difference from one class to another.
The same performance is expected from all the students.
Parents can always tell what their children are working on and what they are expected to know.

They have the baccalaureat as an exit exam.

Personally, I would be very happy with a public school system like the French one.

I don’t think such a system is possible here.

It is a different culture in North America and people have different beliefs and backgrounds.

Moreover, at the present time, there is a belief that if something cannot be learned right away with very little effort, then that’s something that a person is simply not good at and cannot be learned. That’s one of the reasons that makes it very acceptable here for students to not be expected to learn things that would be considered basic in other cultures - things like grammar, geography, a second language.

Taking into account that here, in Canada the people have different expectations abouth how schools should do things I think the only fair way to spend the taxpayer’s money, our money, would be to set provincial or national minimum standards, enforced by exit exams or admission exams and give real autonomy inside the public system to have different types of schools or to allow charter schools.

Right now, standard tests at the end of each school year, exit exams and admission exams would very quickly give feedback both to students and to teachers and would let parents know about what exactly is expected and how their children are doing.