Ontario’s Ministry of Mediocrity
Chalk boards may have gone out of style, but the imagery of a new school year as a time for a clean slate lingers: a fresh start, with a focus on yearto-year continuous improvement for the majority of students.
Not so in Ontario, where, according to recent Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) results, a fourth consecutive year of falling math scores means 50 per cent of seventh graders — tested last May in Grade 6 — returned to school this week with an intractable problem for which there is no quick solution.
The latest EQAO news cycle, driven by the nowfamiliar ideological battle in Ontario and elsewhere between discovery math and old- school multiplication tables, will fade away, leaving these students, the real casualties of the math wars, to suffer the consequences. Most of them will spend the school year banging their heads on cinder- block walls in frustration because they are unable to catch up to their peers. You couldn’t invent a better strategy to turn kids off of school if you tried.
And what about educators who must teach two halves of the same class? The students who are lagging will, through no fault of their own, stymie the progress of those ready to move forward. The disparity is unfair to everybody.
No, in Ontario, we have the opposite of a clean slate: we have, to quote the lawn signs erected in honour of the Liberal government, “A no- Wynne situation.” The grim EQAO results are complex, but ultimately they point to a failure in leadership. This rot comes from the top.
The government of Ont ario has f ailed to stay grounded or to make the best use of the means of consultation it once deemed essential to the education portfolio. The formation of a curriculum council was a 2003 election promise made by then- premier Dalton McGuinty. It was meant to bring together a diverse group of education experts to provide strategic policy advice to the education minister about the province’s curriculum.
A spokesperson for the ministry says the council, which was finally established in 2007, has provided advice on environmental education, financial literacy, bullying prevention and not much more. While public debates over controversial courses, such as sex education and math instruction raged on, the council quietly slipped into oblivion. Today, it makes a nice talking point on a website if you want to give the illusion of a consultative, community- minded government at work — however misleading that may be.
Even the Ontario Ministry of Education’s “Renewed Math Strategy” to which members of the media have been directed in the wake of the EQAO results is a cutand- paste job from an April 4, 2016, news release circulated almost two months before the latest round of EQAO tests were even administered in schools.
A fourth consecutive decline in math scores and yet the government has nothing new or substantive to say?
And what it said in the spring, by the way, was as close to an acknowledgment of mission creep as you will ever hear from the Ontario Liberals. It promised “An average of 60 minutes each day ( five hours a week) of protected math learning time in Grades 1 to 8.” From whom do teachers need to “protect” instruction time if not from an overreaching government that has compromised academics by conflating education and social work?
The latest round of social engineering came home in my son’s backpack this week: a consent form to participate in “pathways to success,” the ministry’s new “education and career/ life planning program” for students in kindergarten to Grade 6. Just in case my son’s future career requires numeric proficiency, I would rather the school focused on that, instead, and left the “Who am I?” and “What do I want to become?” to us.
The precious hours of a school day, finite as they are, are not rubber bands to be stretched to accommodate education fads and social engineering. If teachers must also be nutritionists, environmentalists, moralists, child psychologists, and professional fundraisers — just to name a few of their other duties as assigned — we should fully expect academic results to suffer.
The education ministry says it can “do better,” so it’s spending an additional $ 60 million on math. Even though the government has overseen an unprecedented lowering of the academic bar, its tendency is still to emphasize superlatives such as “excellence” and “best in the world” to describe the state of education in Ontario.
Here’s a humbling truth the provincial Liberals can’t ignore: more awful than the EQAO results themselves is that they normalize a new baseline of non- performance, what a friend of mine calls “t he new terrible.” Should this math-challenged phoenix rise from its ashes by a few percentage points next year or the year after, we’ll find ourselves cheering that we made it back to the old terrible, which will be the new normal, and that’s just sad.
Quality and accountability you say? Mediocrity is more like it.
Ontarians are a people for whom the pursuit of academic excellence has become a meaningless endeavour. It will be no small irony if, ultimately, that proves to be the lasting legacy of 13 years of Liberal rule.
CHEERING THAT WE MADE IT BACK TO THE OLD TERRIBLE. — MICHELLE HAUSER MATH SCORES HAVE PLUMMETED AGAIN. THIS IS, SADLY, THE NEW NORMAL IN THE PROVINCE’S SCHOOLS.