Education system starting to resemble Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island

Perhaps the best way to form a constructive opinion on such an emotional issue as inclusive education is to assess the success of its two originally planned outcomes.

The first was to close the inequality gap, by including atrisk students in “regular” classrooms. The second was to raise academic standards for all, to avoid system mediocrity.

Including everyone in the same classroom drastically changed the composition of classrooms.

Many classrooms included at least two-thirds of students on individual program plans, modifications and adaptations, which presented extra challenges that usually exceeded the capacity of classroom teachers. And those classrooms became dysfunctional.

Survival mode kicked in and academic standards were replaced by the cycle of low expectations, which included an automatic promotion policy to move students through the system and have them graduate with declining knowledge levels.

Students who arrive with less are still leaving with less, which casts doubt on the success of the first outcome.

However, the second outcome has been an absolute disaster. Instead of raising academic standards, student knowledge levels in Nova Scotia are now among the lowest in Canada.

Classroom composition has a tremendous effect on a child’s education. If the standard for instruction is one hour per course per day, students in a sin- gle-group classroom could potentially receive 190 hours of instruction per course per year, for a total of 1,140 hours throughout Grades 4-9.

However, if equal time is allotted to all groups, those in a fourgroup classroom would receive only 285 hours of instruction over that same period. That’s an 855hour teaching-learning deficit in those four-group classrooms.

Such classrooms are producing increasing numbers of lowerknowledge students, and making our system so dysfunctional it looks alarmingly like Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, where children had fun, living care-free, but eventually turned into donkeys, symbolizing their low intelligence.