EDITORIAL: ONT education progress shows poor results

The Minister of Education, Paul Calandra, criticizes the progress of educational improvement in Ontario. He may be correct. So what’s the solution?
[Read the for story at EQAOresults]

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Education Minister Calandra, Ford’s troubled ministries’ bull dog, criticizes educational improvements in Ontario as shown by the EQAO scores. The scores show improvements in the education of Ontario students are relatively nonexistent. Calandra poses his strategies for improvement to Ontario education.

Advisory panel
Calandra’s first step is the creation of an advisory panel to study the situation and develop clearer and more detailed information relating to results.

The advisory panel will be directed to:

• examine and interpret the EQAO scores, their meaning;
• determine if teachers are properly ‘prepared and supported;’
• examine the impact, role and effectiveness of trustees in education.

Calandra’s strategy for educational improvements may be an exercise in futility, a waste of time, or worse, more waste of taxpayers’ money.

Here are some alternatives and possibly better considerations:

• Get and distill input from the ground root sources: from teachers, the feet-on-the-ground administrators, the school department heads, from trustees, from parents;
• Get input from school boards: their response to the claim and their strategies for improvement;
• Assess and review input from all sources as to ‘meat vs sizzle,’ concrete strategies vs hot air generalities;
• Demand timelines, concrete strategies to undertake and …….
• MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL: How results will be assessed.

Educational improvement is an uphill battle, with increments of improvement slow and minuscule. The improvements may come if there is accountability and obligation rather than blame and finger-pointing.

The EQAO score results may show the questionability of educational improvement in Ontario, but all the strategies in the world will affect no improvement without a change in attitudes across the board of everyone involved in the educational process.

Rather than finger-pointing and looking to place blame, enlist everyone involved in finding concrete, practical and real strategies to affect change and improvement. Instead of looking for a target to blame, examine the attitude of everyone involved. Are all of us actually doing our part? Any part? Could our attitudes about effort, work, goals and drive need examination, self-examination, introspection? Everyone of us has to do this examination. However, this could be a vague and sweeping generalization with no meaningful strategy behind it.

Rather than state generalities and throw a blanket of universality and generality on the problem, instead, put the question to the school boards. These are the score results. How can you improve them? What concrete strategies can you suggest and undertake? How will you measure the success of your strategies in terms of impact and time?

Accepting mediocrity, using mediocre determination, making average effort will cause the same results that we have, little or no progress or improvement. Everyone must examine the role they play in education and evaluate their input. That’s a big ask.

Place the problem where it exists. Have the schools themselves come up with the answers. A government-appointed advisory panel will fail, fail in terms of concrete solutions. It will create confusing and deceptive results to make it seem like important work has been done, and those suggestions will be repeated. A waste of time, energy and money.

The schools themselves are the better strategy, but they must be asked to be accountable for the results. How can they produce real and clear improvements?