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Truth in Advertising
A frequent commenter to our blog is in the habit of making confident pronouncements about education - but fails to provide chapter and verse. Here is The Bible for his latest series of assertions.
1. “The claim that 40% [of Ontario students] cannot do basic skills is bogus proven by the EQAO that you love and I think is worse than useless.”
The EQAO’s tests are based on the Ontario curriculum. They are not designed to evaluate the mastery of basic skills, but rather to assess whether or not the students have mastered their grade’s curriculum sufficiently to cope with the work of the next grade. The EQAO reports that roughly 35% of students (depending on the subject and the grade) are not ready for the next year’s work. Regardless of one’s opinion of the Ontario curriculum and the value of testing students’ mastery of it, the Ontario Auditor General has confirmed the reliability and validity of these tests. They are sending an important message.
2. “It is not me it is ‘standardized testing’ like PISA and TIMMS by the OECD that says we are #2 in the world.”
The Programme for International Assessment (PISA) is indeed administered by the OECD. In the most recent iteration (2006) Canadian 15-year-olds placed 3rd in science, 4th in reading, and 7th in math. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is administered by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. In the most recent iteration (2007), the Canadian performance was expressed in terms of the four individual provinces that participated. Ontario placed 16th in grade 4 math and 8th in grade 8 math. In science, Ontario placed 12th in grade 4 and 11th in grade 8. Approximately 60 countries participated in both assessments, and they include quite a few educationally-backward countries like Yemen, El Salvador, Morocco, and Algeria.
3. “I agree our students don’t learn enough but their teachers are totally blameless in this because the system is totally starved of the funding that it would take to make us #1 with the literacy of 15 year olds.”
There is no evidence that increased spending, except in cases of extreme deprivation, leads to more student learning.
4. “We graduate more people from post secondary than any nation on the Earth. Am I satisfied with this? No I want to widen the gap and pull away on the other nations.”
According to the OECD, in 2007 Canada ranked 21st out of 25 OECD countries in terms of the percentage of its young people who are first-time graduates from university-level and vocationally-oriented tertiary education.
5. “As you can see the level of satisfaction with teachers, local schools etc. Ontario voters want higher taxes and much more money spent on schools so the classes can be smaller and there are more SE teachers. What part of this is difficult for you?”
The part that is difficult for us is that we think that Ontario voters are clutching at the straw proffered by the usual suspects. If the public realized that money is not the problem (see the paper referenced in #3 above), they would likely withdraw their willingness to pay more. All this poll result shows is that Ontario voters are unhappy with the province’s public schools. After all, if they thought the schools were doing an excellent job, they would scarcely want to pay more for them.