Failing math standards need to be fixed
Erosion of standards cause for worry, Adele Blair says.
The chance discovery in a dusty cedar hope chest of yellowed second-grade scribblers belonging to seven-year-old Bryan Jones in 1953 caused me to reflect on Ontario’s mathematics education.
Bryan was taught in a rural, one-room schoolhouse near Cobden, Ont., with roughly 20 children in grades 1 through 8, by Miss Mary Petahlegoose. She likely had a Grade 12 education, as was common, and some teacher training. She lived beside the school, had virtually no resources, no helpers, no indoor plumbing, and lit the stove herself to heat the schoolhouse on a frosty winter’s morn.
I flipped through Bryan’s newsprint, blue-lined notebook from that 1954 winter and randomly saw one page with 36 handwritten addition problems, with three columns of numbers, containing three digits across. All involved carrying, and all had a big “C,” indicating correct calculation. Flipping further, I saw another page with five-digit numbers subtracted from five-digit numbers involving borrowing, with verification through addition underneath. All correct.
On his March 1954 report card, Miss Petahlegoose had awarded Bryan a B in arithmetic and commented in cursive script, “Satisfactory.”
A high school mathematics teacher in Ottawa estimated the level of the work today at about fourth grade and a review of the Ontario curriculum confirmed that. A teacher’s college student with a mathematics degree recently said he loved a placement with grade 5 and 6 students, but found skills very weak, his lessons focusing on counting backward from 20. A bright 10-year-old in Grade 5 could not tell me, or figure out in her head, 6 x 8 or 9 x 9 without begging for her cellphone.
A retired gifted high school geography teacher said he was unable to teach mapping skills in Grade 9 by the 1990s without teaching place value and decimals. A bank manager told me clients wanting mortgages regularly fail to understand compound interest. A waitress told me her gifted son complains of learning nothing in his Grade 9 mathematics class, describing rowdy, back-talking students and noise.
The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education tested every student teacher in Ontario in 2018, and despite being top university graduates, a full one-third were unable to pass the Grade 6 EQAO standardized test in mathematics for Ontario children. I wonder how many who graduated, qualified to teach mathematics in Ontario elementary schools, would have passed the ninth-grade test, let alone aced it?
The provincial government has reacted to the declining standards in mathematics achievement. After March 31, those applying for membership in the Ontario College of Teachers will be required to take a mathematics proficiency test and attain a mark of 70 per cent or better. While this is a start at ensuring our new teachers have mathematical proficiency themselves, what about all the educators out in our children’s classrooms right now?
How would any of us feel going to a children’s cardiac surgeon working at CHEO who had not been completely vetted and deemed 100-per-cent competent with a superlative track record of successful operations behind him or her, if life-threatening surgery was needed for our child? What would we think of the leaders in the medical profession, their regulatory bodies and the administrators of CHEO, if they did not set standards of knowledge and performance that guaranteed 100-per-cent competency?
I was a teacher, and still think of myself as a teacher, though now retired. When I see young teachers in action, I want to still get out my red pen and check all the wonderful things they are doing as correct with a giant “C.” However, when I see room for improvement I want to nudge them in the right direction, so they can be the best they can be.
Young teachers should ask their leaders about the erosion of standards, especially in mathematics in Ontario schools.
They should advocate and demand knowledge competence testing for any professional teaching this subject, to any Ontario child right now.
We are spending more money, have smaller classes, and better qualified teachers these days, by a country mile, with poorer outcomes. We need not lay blame anywhere, but we need to correct this significant educational problem.
Because it’s just not adding up.
Adele Blair, MSW, is an Ottawa writer and former teacher.