Plan to reform math education doesn’t add up
For years, the Ontario government has been baffled by students’ alarmingly low scores on annual standardized math tests.
The latest results show that a modest 62 per cent of Grade 3 students met the provincial standard for math and that the number dropped to 50 per cent by Grade 6. Those numbers have declined by five and seven percentage points respectively since 2013.
There seemed to be only three possible reasons. Perhaps the curriculum and its focus on creative problem-solving wasn’t giving children a good enough grounding in basic skills. Maybe there was a problem with the teaching. Alternatively, kids could just be getting a little bit more stupid every year.
The first two choices would mean the government had screwed up and the last is rather unlikely, so who to blame? At last, the government has demonstrated some creative problem-solving of its own and identified the real culprit. The problem isn’t with the learning or the teaching, it’s with the tests themselves.
The province wants a whole new way of measuring student achievement, and it has appointed a panel of experts to take a look at what is done now, specifically the work of the Education Quality and Accountability Office, which administers the standardized tests.
Teachers have been complaining for years about the tests, which offer parents the only objective information about what is going on in our schools. For government, the tests are mostly a headache, a yearly thrashing for failing to achieve their own modest goal of 75 per cent of students getting a B mark on core skills such as reading, writing, science and math.
Parents have been overly quiet in response to years of weak math results.
Expect the standardized tests to be either eliminated or so watered down and buried in edu-babble that they will be meaningless. Then the government can go back to assuring us, as it did this week, that Ontario’s education system “ranks among the best in the world.” Actually, it’s about average for Canada in science and reading and a little under in math, but let’s not get all facty.
On a more positive note, the government is promising to “modernize” the entire school curriculum, and specifically has identified a goal of improving core skills in math. Not to say there is anything wrong with the skills now, of course. One has to wonder what a modernized math curriculum would look like. The problem with the curriculum now is not that it is insufficiently modern, but that it is based on trendy education concepts that don’t seem to work.
Changing the curriculum won’t change teacher competence. Research in that area shows teachers with a liberal-arts background struggle with math. Some don’t even know how to multiply or divide, according to a University of Toronto researcher who has studied teacher skills. Colleges of education are increasing math training to help compensate, but the average elementary teacher will remain a generalist with a smattering of math knowledge. Is that good enough?
A moderately skeptical observer might consider the province’s vague announcement this week more of a pre-election placeholder than a plan, but at least it provides an opportunity for parents to speak up. They should take advantage of it.
Parents have been overly quiet in response to years of weak math results. The two favourite solutions are: hope for the best, or hire a math tutor.
There are big questions that should be asked. When it comes to math, are we expecting too much, or delivering too little? The discovery math that infuses the Ontario curriculum attempts to turn children into creative math thinkers. Perhaps that is optimistic. It would be nice if they could at least add, subtract, multiply and divide.
The province is also promising new report cards. Parents should ask for ones with real marks, not generic reassurances. And let’s keep standardized tests. As this government likes to say, facts still matter.