EDUCATION

Also read:
THE GRADES: The provincial grade report on education
Crunching the Numbers
Number Theory
Selected results from our survey

Open the newspapers on any given morning and the studies rain down in an often confusing torrent of numbers — many of them concerning how well our schools are doing their job. Of course, any parent with children in the public system knows that the quality of education varies from teacher to teacher in a single school, let alone within school boards and provinces. But the charts of national test results and attitude scores still rankle — some provinces always seem to come out on top. Why is that? Are they putting more money into public education? Do they pay their teachers better? Is the curriculum more demanding? What are the real differences between provincial education systems in this country?

We decided to find out, though many educators and researchers said it would be impossible. It is impossible to provide a definitive reading of how the provinces’ public education systems stack up against each other. After all, each one faces different demographic and economic challenges, and has a somewhat different approach to curriculum and funding. And even the experts don’t agree on the relative importance of basic indicators like testing.

But there are piles of stats out there worth looking at, to give us all a better sense of where our education systems shine, where they fall short — and where they’re working feverishly under financial siege to educate our kids.

We talked to educators, pored over major studies assessing education systems at home and abroad and examined the pool of reliable data. This gave us 39 indicators — everything from student-teacher ratios to number of classes of phys. ed per week — which we then grouped into five categories, assigning a weighting to each: Teachers (30 percent), Test Scores (25 percent), Beyond Reading and Writing (15 percent), Scholastic Environment (15 percent) and Community Supports (15 percent). For details on the research and how we organized it, see Crunching the Numbers.

Our final ranking assessed the overall performance of each province, with Alberta getting an A and Nova Scotia and PEI getting Ds. But remember, the ranks themselves are broad measures. What’s more telling are the real numbers: For example, in the problem-solving component of the Canadian School Achievement Indicators Program (SAIP) math tests in 2001, 76.5 percent of 13-year-olds in Alberta achieved level two or higher (the number-one province), while just 50.9 percent of Nova Scotia’s kids did (they came in last). That’s a range of 25.6 percent, fairly significant. We don’t have enough pages (nor you enough patience) to go through all the numbers this way — if you’re interested, check out the September highlights page on todaysparent.com — but it is possible to provide some context and give you greater insight into the big picture of education in Canada.

At the top of the class, Alberta happens to be Canada’s wealthiest province. But it doesn’t outspend others. Our Statistics Canada information showed that Alberta spent $6,499 per student annually in 1998, about $1,200 more than PEI (the lowest) at $5,264, and considerably less than biggest spender Ontario at $7,580. Yet Ontario floated in the middle of our ranking — so it doesn’t necessarily follow that the more you spend on students, the better educated they’ll be.

But money does talk, says Marilyn Fisher, who lives outside Medicine Hat and is president of the Alberta Home and School Councils’ Association. “We have lots of supports for our kids — there’s less poverty, our kids eat better, so that supports their learning,” she says. “The expectations that both parents and the public put on our system are very high.”

“Our parents are the most highly educated in the country,” adds Larry Booi, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association and a board member of the Canadian Teachers’ Federation. And Alberta kids are accustomed to formal tests. The government began testing sample populations in the early ’80s, and slowly introduced universal testing through the ’90s.

But Booi believes there’s another reason Alberta and Quebec kids routinely ace the SAIP tests. Both provinces have curricula that perfectly fit the material that’s tested. “Our curriculum is absolutely articulated with the tests,” he says. “Fine arts, languages, practical arts, all these other areas — physical education, health — none of them factor into the schools’ rankings, and so we’ve seen the deterioration of those programs because everyone’s obsessed about what their school gets ranked on. At the same time, we’re trumpeting the great virtues of our system.

“Elementary teachers are violently opposed to it [universal standardized testing in grades three and six in Alberta],” continues Booi. “Every year we get protests from teachers who are saying ‘leave the little kids alone.’ The testing is so misguided. It has led to an appalling degree of ranking schools. Each year, the newspapers come up with these rankings, and of course the inner-city schools are held up to public scorn despite the fact that that’s where some of our best work is being done with kids. And then the teachers in the wealthy suburban schools are hailed as paragons of pedagogy.”

While many provinces are falling in step with Alberta, other educators share Booi’s discomfort with regular testing. Margaret Stewart, president of the PEI Teachers’ Federation, is one of them. “PEI is the only province in Canada that does not use standardized tests or provincial exams,” she points out. “We have been told by people from other parts of the country that we’re 50 years ahead of our time.” And John McEwen, a retired physics teacher and education researcher from Ottawa who passed away earlier this year, called provincial tests “a kind of a parlour game. What they really measure is socio-economic status in the community.” He added that it’s experiences that aren’t testable which often have the strongest impact on children: “We all know that the drama class has sometimes kept a kid in school — or the football program.”

James Christopher, executive director of the Canadian Educational Standards Institute, agrees. “When people think back on their school experiences and what they learned most from,” he says, “it’s that combination of things — field trips, the band and the school play.”

McEwen, who found Alberta’s test-oriented education model deeply alarming, dubbed it, “the grade-A large factor. But our kids aren’t like a box of eggs. They develop at different times, in different ways. There is no place for the late bloomer or the troubled kid in the kind of curriculum that is envisioned by Alberta,” he said.

Others counter that, flawed though the test-driven system may be, we have no other measure by which to judge how well our kids learn the basics. Testing also reveals that Canada has a narrower achievement gap between poor kids and more financially secure kids, as John Hoffman’s story, World Class, points out. “That is extremely important, although it doesn’t mean we’re doing well enough,” says Penny Milton, executive director of the Canadian Education Association, a policy research organization. “If you look at the performance of aboriginal students in all provinces, it’s really a desperate situation, with 30-percent high school completion rates.”

That poor showing reflects poverty, not race — a factor that also affects the Atlantic provinces, which generally fared the worst overall in our standings (though New Brunswick managed to scrape up more funding for education, and did much better). As Milton warns, though, we shouldn’t assume poverty inevitably damages a kid’s chances of getting a good education: “If you start off with the belief that children from poorer homes are not going to do as well in school as children in middle-income or rich homes, then what we know about education is that it is replete with evidence of self-fulfilling prophecies.”

Nor should we assume throwing money at a problem solves it, adds Paul Axelrod, dean of education at Toronto’s York University, “though removing large amounts of money from the system doesn’t solve things either.”

Ontario, which in 1998 spent the highest percentage of its school board budgets on students, came in around the mid-mark overall, but has undergone profound change in the past few years. “Major things were done on the organizational, the funding, the curriculum sides,” Axelrod observes. “They’ve had over a billion dollars in cuts,” while the government simultaneously began demanding — and testing for — stronger academic performance.

But, Axelrod points out, “you can’t suck and blow at the same time — you can’t put higher demands on the schools and take away the resources. There’s not been sufficient time and sufficient resources to make the educational reforms work in the way they’re intended to work.” He fears similar damage is now being done in BC, where “it looks as if they are in some ways even going beyond what Ontario did in terms of the cuts.”

PEI, which of all the provinces spent the lowest percentage of its school board budgets on students, came seventh overall in test scores (the national ones) and took last place in our survey. But that doesn’t mean its kids are destined for mediocrity. Georgina Allen has two children at Miscouche Consolidated School and one in high school, near Summerside, PEI. “The quality of their education, I think, ranks right up there with any province. I think our teachers are excellent.”

Allen knows the island’s education system, both as a parent and as past president of the PEI Home and School Federation. “We certainly don’t have enough money to go around, and there is a funding review going on now,” she says. “But I don’t think because we have less money to spend on our kids that they aren’t as smart as ones in Alberta or Ontario.”

In fact, some suggest it’s a tribute to PEI children that they do fairly well on national standardized tests despite their province’s low spending on education. “In a fairy-tale world, we would have all kinds of money and programs that we need in every school, but things don’t work like that,” says Allen wistfully.

Indeed, they don’t. But whatever the shortcomings in various provinces, “the one thing that is true about Canadian students across the board who leave high school with good grades,”as John McEwen put it, “is that they are uniformly welcome all over North America.”

Also read:
THE GRADES: The provincial grade report on education
Crunching the Numbers
Number Theory
Selected results from our survey

September 2002