Educational reform or bust!

How wrong-headed can our Nova Scotia Liberal Government get?

I speak here of the fiasco that is their decision to move forward with recommendations from the Glaze Report, also titled, ‘Raise the Bar: A Coherent and Responsive Education Administrative System for Nova Scotia,’ that purports to improve the education system for children by realigning and refocusing the educational administrative structure in our province.

It sounds pretty impressive doesn’t it? Many reactions to this report have already made it to local media, but there are still a few other points worth thinking about.

The first thing that struck me about this report is that it lacks accountability, which is a major reason I was shocked at the government’s decision to move forward with these recommendations, aside from the Glaze Report’s relative merits, of which I can find very few.

In the worlds that I come from, justifications, or measurables are supposed to be part of any plans for improvements. When teachers prepare their daily lesson plans and their unit plans, specific outcomes for each activity or lesson have to be provided along with stated assessments to evaluate how well such outcomes have been reached. Unit plans and long-range plans are submitted to school administrators for their review, and should any of the plans, including their measurable, be found lacking, they go back to the teacher to be redone.

In the non-profit world, any organization applying for government funding to support the services that the organization offers to the community must state explicitly how many and in what way clients will be positively affected by this new funding. Over the course of the funding period, there is always an interim report and final report that must be submitted to the funder with statements of progress towards stated outcomes, and for some government funders, there are required monthly reports to be filed.

The Glaze Report simply makes global recommendations with no outcome benchmarks. As the stated purpose of these recommendations is to improve learning outcomes for students, then it stands to reason that each of Glaze’s recommendations should specify in measurable, perhaps incremental, terms how it will accomplish that purpose.

When these ill-informed recommendations are put into practice by the government, and they then fail to generate significant improvements for children in the classrooms, which is my prediction for how this will all turn out, Dr. Avis Glaze can sit back on her not inconsiderable laurels, and say to the government, “It was a solid plan, you just must have made mistakes with the imple- mentation,” and her hands come away clean.

For the Liberal government to immediately plan to implement the recommendations of the Glaze Report, that provides no benchmarks for success, and without first submitting the Report to a learned committee for study, it smacks of government incompetence or of government hidden agendas.

In the wake of having recently short-circuited the democratic negotiation process with teachers by legislating their latest contract, and now pushing forward with the recommendations of the Glaze Report, which among other things will remove principals and vice-principals from the teachers’ union, Premier Mcneil is further decimating the teachers’ union, and undermining the work of teachers.

It is early into Stephen Mcneil’s second term as Nova Scotia Premier, and I’m betting that he is thinking that following through now with this ill-supported plan, and upsetting a lot of people, will be all water under the bridge by the time the next election comes due. At election time he will make huge claims for having provided educational reform, and he will not expect to get spanked by voters at the polls.

I urge you to let him know now that he is wrong to do this, and at election time, let him know once again what you think.