Curriculum overhaul risks change for sake of change

Simpler report cards are a start but real results will take years

Ontario’s education ministry is about to start a major overhaul of the whole school curriculum, questioning what we teach, how we teach it, and how we evaluate whether students have learned it.

The project has a dreamy goal in two conflicting parts: helping students do better in “core skills” such as math, and “increasing emphasis on transferable life skills that can help students of all ages meet the changing demands of today and tomorrow.” Those include “communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity and global citizenship.”

The government hopes to, for instance, “help students take full advantage of their education experience with a new curriculum that better engages every aspect of a young person’s interests and potential.” It’ll start with public consultations. Years will pass before much of it gets into a classroom, though Premier Kathleen Wynne promises to start with simpler report cards in 2018.

Wynne and Education Minister Mitzie Hunter announced it all at Lawrence Park Collegiate in Toronto, where Wynne’s own kids went and where she began her political career as a school-council activist. A bunch of politely quiet teenagers in their second day of classes, assembled in the school library, formed a physical backdrop.

“It’s about the whole student,” Hunter told them. “And that’s something that’s really important to us … The world is a changing place. It’s dynamic, it’s complex. But as students, you have to survive and cope in the world. But not only that, you have to thrive.”

The political backdrop is yet another alarming set of scores from the province’s Education Quality and Accountability Office, especially on students’ math achievement. Grade 3s and Grade 6s are doing worse and worse on those provincewide tests, to the point where now only half the Grade 6s meet a standard based on Ontario’s own math curriculum.

Written tests are an imperfect way of assessing students’ abilities but they are one way, and if the kids are doing worse and worse every year, that’s bad.

Maybe the problem is “discovery math,” the notion that drilling times tables is less useful than teaching young students strategies for figuring their own ways to answers. Maybe the problem is that we’re still doing too much drilling (turning off kids whose minds just don’t work that way) or evaluating too narrow a set of skills. The answer isn’t clear. Or, rather, a bunch of divergent answers are utterly clear to different people.

Canadian students do well on international evaluations, what few of them there are. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development runs major tests of 15-year-olds every three years, with different focuses each time, and in 2015 Canadian kids did noticeably better than the OECD average on reading, science and math — the three areas the tests tested. Within Canada, Ontarians didn’t top any of the three charts but our teens were among the best in all of them, very strong all-around performers.

But everyone is worried that Grade 6s who aren’t good at math will become Grade 9s who aren’t good at math and then adults who aren’t good at math and have a hard time finding work in an economy that values technical skills.

The government is already spending $60 million on a plan to improve math instruction — to make teachers, especially elementary teachers, better at it and to make more homework help available to kids who need it. Three years after declaring math a serious problem and one year after beginning the repair plan, no upswing is obvious.

So, a cynic might say, having failed to improve students’ performance against the standard, we’ll change the standard.

“Do you all assume that you’re going to develop the skills or be exposed to opportunities that are going to allow you to take the next step and have a job or a career that you want?” Wynne asked the Lawrence Park students, to general agreement that yes, that’s what high school students expect they’re in school for.

Well, she said, we’re letting some of you down.

“Do any of you know people in your lives who, you know, are really, really smart and really, really capable but they really don’t like school and they don’t feel engaged in school?” Wynne asked. The students nodded.

The premier talked about meeting a young man on a northern Ontario canoe trip, a guy who didn’t do well in school but had rebuilt a sailboat on his own. That took a whole lot of math-related skills even if he couldn’t demonstrate them on a written test, Wynne pointed out. Other people might be good at co-operating in teams, at leadership, at creativity, at other things that don’t show up in traditional evaluations.

“How do we make sure that we evaluate the whole person?” she asked rhetorically.

Well, good question. It’s hard to evaluate a whole person, in all his or her nuance and complexity, using a rubric designed to assess a very particular type of learning and set of skills.

And when will we do this, in the limited time in a school day, which we’re already cramming with more exercise, more math, more life skills, and more mindfulness time so stressed-out students don’t vibrate themselves to pieces right there in the hall.

Anyway, should schools seek to evaluate the whole person? If we set out to evaluate the whole person, is there any plausible result other than telling everyone that they’re OK, whether they’re good at math and history or not? That’s a parent’s job, or a priest’s. A math or history teacher’s job is to teach math or history, and evaluate how well students learn.

We already seek everyone’s inherent worthiness in report-card comments, which emphasize achievements rather than flaws. “With assistance, Joey is often able to complete most of the assigned number-operations problems” is how teachers have to hint that Joey can’t add (a message that, of course, many parents don’t want to hear).

Wynne and Hunter recognize this, it seems, because they’re also promising simplified report cards starting next year.

That’s an actual specific pledge a lot of parents will welcome, but it’s hard to make evaluations simpler and more nuanced at the same time. Not much is simpler than a letter or percentage grade, but those leave out a lot of potentially important detail. Tailored comments, even if they were a lot blunter than the ones Ontario parents are used to seeing, are detailed but don’t convey crucial information on how a kid is measuring up to provincial expectations or a class average.

So the pendulum swings. Nobody’s necessarily against an overhaul of the school curriculum — it does need to be updated periodically, obviously, and the government trotted out everyone from Annie Kidder of the leftish People for Education to Dino Trevisani of IBM Canada to toot in favour of the general idea — but the danger is that we’ll just change things for the sake of changing them. Simplify that which is complex, complicate that which is simple.

“If we don’t get this right, then you, and all of your colleagues … then they’re not going to be able to perform at their full potential and that’s exactly what we need in Ontario,” Wynne said to the teenagers. “Our people are our advantage.”