‘21st century learning’ gurus aren’t being held to account

We now have two-tiered public education in Alberta.

One tier has high academic standards. It’s being embraced by the haves and the highly motivated.

The other tier is in the grips of an over-emphasis on discovery learning. It’s increasingly for the have-nots and for our most vulnerable students.

The creation of a top tier is being driven by parents. They are increasingly clamouring to get their children into special public school programs with higher academic standards, or signing up their children for private afterschool tutoring.

The fastest-growing special program in the Edmonton Public system has long been the Cogito program, which has an enriched curriculum and high academic standards. At Calgary public, there are now 14 Traditional Learning Centre schools, which also boast rigorous academics.

Then there is Calgary’s public charter Foundations for the Future program, which started up two decades ago with one school and a focus on academic excellence. Foundations now has 3,455 students over seven campuses and a waiting list of 13,000. To have any hope of enrolment, you must sign up your child at birth.

Desperate Alberta parents are now seeing the need for private tutoring. For example, there’s been a stampede to private Kumon math and English tutoring.

There were 4,069 students enrolled in Kumon in Alberta in 2006. By 2012, there were 5,495. Then came news of Alberta’s disastrous results in math on 2013 international PISA testing, which saw a doubling of our rate of math illiterate students from 7.4 to 15.1 per cent in less than a decade. There are now 9,439 kids enrolled in Kumon. Students there attempt to learn the basic skills that many of our schools have downplayed.

This is an educational disaster, with our most vulnerable students hammered hardest, but not once have discovery math’s architects — an army of “21stcentury learning” educational consultants, professors and gurus — been held to account.

Instead, the NDP appear to be almost as much under their influence as the old, tired and gullible Progressive Conservatives were. The “21st-century learning ” gurus are now pushing for yet more focus on schooling with a massive, over-riding focus on the same concepts and buzzwords: discovery, inquiry, exploration, child and student-centred learning, 21st century competencies. Essentially this boils down to teachers acting not as instructors, but as facilitators and guides, as students learn at their own pace with project and group work, with more computer time thrown in as a razzle-dazzle element.

The 21st-century learning gurus are evidently trying to manufacture consent through the Alberta government’s new survey on its curriculum rewrite. The survey’s stated purpose is to find out what teachers and parents think about the rewrite, but it also pushes a discovery learning and activist agenda.

Our education system’s thrust evidently isn’t for students to acquire knowledge. Instead, as one teacher in the survey’s promotional video puts it, the system wants to create students “who are agents of change to create the globe that they want to be a part of.”

The propaganda effort continues in the first section of survey, where you are asked how much you agree with the following statement: “Through learning outcomes, curriculum should support the development of literacy, numeracy, and 21st century competencies.”

But as University of Alberta math professor Vladimir Troitsky asks: “What if I support literacy and numeracy but not 21st-century competencies? How possibly can I answer this question?”

The survey is flawed in its overall focus, Troitsky says. “It misses that school education is about learning, which means acquiring knowledge and skills.”

Adds Stuart Wachowicz, former director of curriculum for Edmonton Public Schools: “Many of the questions being asked are not reflective of the need to have a strong knowledge base in the key subject areas.”

For one thing, Wachowicz wonders why the survey suggests the need for kindergarten to Grade 3 students to learn computer keyboarding.

“There is no reliable neurological research that supports the need for early keyboarding,” Wachowicz says. “Good phonetic awareness, spelling and early conventions of good language usage and strong vocabulary development do far more to develop the young brain.”

The silver lining? Even within the public system, motivated parents can locate pockets of excellence for their children. But pity the increasing number of students who in the name of keyboarding and discovery ideology will not be taught to fluently read, write or do basic math.