Tory hopefuls oppose big curricula rewrite
Alberta’s three Progressive Conservative leadership candidates — Jim Prentice, Ric McIver and Thomas Lukaszuk — are following the lead of Alberta parents and teachers, raising questions about the direction of the province’s suddenly wobbly educational system.
I recently talked to all three to get their take on this crucial file. The big issues?
First, Alberta hasn’t built enough schools for its rapidly growing population, especially in our booming city suburbs, where kids are often bused to distant schools or packed into an overcrowded new school.
Second, parents are fearful about the quality of education in our formerly excellent schools. Alberta’s place near the top of international educational rankings has slipped a bit in some subjects, and dramatically in math education.
The Wildrose party blasted away repeatedly at Education Minister Jeff Johnson on these issues during the spring session of the legislature, and finally McIver, Prentice and Lukaszuk are proposing major changes in direction.
When it comes to building new schools, Lukaszuk proposes that before new suburbs are built, a school must be first erected there. The government should attempt to hire smaller housing developers, who will be keen to enter into public-private partnerships to build schools. “Developers are very excited by this proposition because they know they can sell a lot of houses, frankly, for even a higher price … They will (also) sell houses faster.”
Prentice proposes building 50 more schools in addition to the 50 new schools and 70 renovations of old schools already promised by the PCs. McIver calls for a sound plan to finance new schools where they are needed, rather than make promises that are sure to be broken.
Under Johnson’s tenure, the Alberta government is taking the unprecedented step of rewriting its entire K-to-12 curricula all at once on a twoyear deadline, but none of the leadership candidates embraces this plan.
If he becomes premier, Prentice says there will be no major overhauls of the curricula unless he’s satisfied — after talking to parents — that such a change is sensible.
“A massive revision to the entirety of the curricula all at once seems to me to be far too fast,” he says. “If there’s a concern from the math overhaul that took place, it’s the need for caution.”
Prentice is referring to Alberta elementary schools moving toward a discovery math curriculum in the past decade, with the teaching of standard arithmetic and the memorization of times tables no longer required. But at the same time as these changes were adopted, international PISA math tests show the number of math-illiterate students in Alberta doubled to 15 per cent. The number of top Alberta students who aced the PISA math test also dropped dramatically. These results have led many parents to worry that their kids aren’t going to reach their full potential and might not even master the basics of arithmetic.
McIver says it’s time to refocus on the basics: “You can’t build a structure of knowledge without a foundation, and the foundation is on reading, writing and arithmetic. I’m a big fan of making sure that our kids have that very solid foundation based on old math, phonics, things that have proven to work.”
Lukaszuk, who was education minister for half a year in 2011-12, also sees no need for a major curriculum rewrite, pointing out that Alberta students always scored well on international tests.
“Overall, I am not very supportive of any significant changes in the approach that we’ve had up until now,” he says. “Our system has proven itself to be rather successful historically.”
He rejects the notion now being pushed by Alberta Education consultants that the province should “change everything” about our approach to schooling. “When experts get together, they tend to go to rewrite things that have been functioning well … That’s where you need the resolve of the premier and the minister of education to say, ‘No, we are functioning exceptionally well compared to other jurisdictions and we’re going to build on the strengths that we have.’ ”
A related issue is that massive U.S. publishing and technology companies such as Pearson International, Apple and Microsoft are involved in the earliest stages of Alberta’s curriculum rewrite. Prentice says teachers, parents and educational experts should lead the process, not companies.
“Clearly, I don’t feel the curricula in our province should be driven by any business interests,” Prentice says.
These huge U.S. interests are pushing a digital discovery learning model. That same style of learning, where each student learns at his or her own pace on subjects of personal interest, is cherished by many Alberta Education officials. Prentice says discovery learning can work with some students and classes, but he’s not sure it will work system-wide, especially in crowded classes.
He’s talked to parents and teachers in schools where the class sizes are as high as 38, and they ask him, “How are we going to have 38 individual learning programs? We are hard-pressed just to deliver the standard curriculum to those 38 children.”
It’s welcome to see these three candidates are troubled by many of the same issues that have vexed so many Alberta parents and teachers. At the same time, it’s fair to ask if we can again trust this government on the education file, given the broken promises on building new schools, the broken math curriculum, and the bizarre ambition to change everything about a system that has functioned so well.
I’ll let Prentice answer this one, as he’s both the outsider (not currently a Tory MLA) and apparent front-runner in the race.
“This did not happen on my watch, and if you look into my own history, my own background and my own passion for education, I will be directly involved in this. It will be a priority getting these schools built, and I could not be clearer about the reservations I have about the curricula and some of the other things being looked at right now, and the need to proceed carefully.”