By James Côté and Jon Cowans
Preamble: Over the past couple of months in the Province of Ontario, Canada, the media has been covering a story about reactions to Ontario Ministry of Education policies intended to reduce high school dropout rates. High school teachers in the province recently released the results of a study on the consequences of these policies and established a petition protesting aspects of policies associated with the ‘no-fail’ practices they have produced. Meanwhile, a recent study of university professors in Ontario found that most professors feel that incoming students are not as well prepared as in the past. The national media picked up on both of these expressions of dissatisfaction, but the Ontario Ministry has not indicated any willingness to consider seriously these concerns.
More recently, Ben Levin, the Deputy Minister of Education, issued a memo attempting to neutralize criticism of Ministry policies, claiming “It’s important to correct and clarify facts.” Its belief that it can ‘correct facts’ illustrates the Ministry’s bafflegab concerning its policies and how misguided it is to keep steering a course that is widely opposed by teachers and parents.
We contributed to the recent media coverage and are using this blog to respond to Levin’s memo to point out for the public how the Ministry has been ‘correcting facts’ to mystify people about its policies.
His introduction:
From the outset, Levin’s memo misses the point entirely regarding why teachers and parents are upset about the issue of failure in our high schools, and he seems to be confused about why the issue has come to public attention, so we will clarify. Teachers are upset about how to deal with students who put out little or no effort in a course. No one is calling for a quota of Fs as evidence of quality. The students who are failing in the current system are effectively doing it to themselves by not meeting the barest of standards, like attending classes and sitting for exams. At the same time, teachers who feel obliged to fail students on substantive grounds face numerous obstacles in doing so, and those who attempt to do so in a given course commonly report that they will not do so again because of the unpleasantries they face from their administrative personnel.
Common sense tells us that if students know there are no penalties for non-compliance with course requirements, some will play the system. The emphasis here is on “some” students. We can certainly ensure that virtually all students complete high school by ignoring non-compliance with basic standards and requirements, but what kind of education will these students receive? It is naïve to assume that the entire system should bend for the sake of a minority of students who do not have the behavioural maturity to meet basic standards. And, given what those on the ground-teachers and students-are reporting about the effects of this practice, the majority are being made to suffer for the sake of this minority.
Failure
Just as no one works harder than teachers to help students succeed, no one regrets it more than they when their students fail. Accordingly, teachers may regard Levin’s recommendation in the memo that “we should be seeking ways to help students improve and experience real success” as not only stating the obvious, but insinuating that they do not do so already. The key phrase in the statement, however, is “real success.” Many of us ‘at ground level’ believe that the artificially set graduation numbers (85% of secondary students by 2010-11) which the Ministry is now pushing schools to meet are merely self-fulfilling benchmarks, established largely for political gain, and not necessarily indicative of any ‘real’ success. Setting artificial numbers may save face, but not ensure that students receive a quality education.
Regrettable as subject failure is, it serves a necessary and protective function by preventing struggling students from moving on to a higher level of study for which they are not prepared. Repeating the course successfully at day, summer, or night school provides students with the needed second chance to acquire missing knowledge and skills. In Ontario, minimum competence for promotion is set at 50%, an arbitrarily low prerequisite, hardly conducive to successful study in the future. But, in fact, the passing mark is even lower than this, since teachers are pressured to “bump up” marks of between 46 and 49 to a 50. Principals, in turn, are pressured to keep school failure rates below a certain politically acceptable level, usually 10% or lower. Conveniently, the Education Act empowers Principals to adjust student marks (invariably meaning ‘raise’ them) as they deem necessary-with or without teachers’ knowledge or approval. Many teachers see this practice as undermining their professional authority and as subject to abuse.
The usual reason for most academic failure is not lack of student ability or opportunity, but lack of student effort and attendance. The fact is that, in spite of teachers’ repeated pleadings, warnings, and offerings of help, some students simply allow themselves to fail. Passing these students merely to get them to the next grade or out of school entirely can hardly be seen as helping them attain either real success or real self-esteem. Nor can the Credit Recovery Programme as it is currently configured in our schools; many students regard it a soft touch, generating easy credits for light work. In order to ensure real success for our struggling students, schools must take firm but positive measures, such as demanding higher levels of student attendance, effort and discipline, raising the passing mark of 50% to a level appropriate to success, and augmenting the school’s remedial facilities and programmes.
In his memo, Levin’s assessment of the effects of failure (“Outright failure tends to reduce effort and cause people to avoid their area of weakness”) is simplistic and unduly pessimistic. For many students, failure serves as a sometimes painful, but needed rite of passage, prompting a changed direction, self-examination, increased effort, and improved academic performance. For other students, early withdrawal from school is not the dead end the Ministry makes it out to be. Exposure to the realities of fulltime work provides an opportunity for maturation and growth unattainable by some students in the classroom. Many so-called dropouts succeed in life in spite of leaving school; others resume their education later, and become better students for the experience of having once left the system and matured elsewhere.
Missed Assignments, Deadlines, Plagiarism, and Cheating
To many teachers, parents, and students, the new Ministry ‘no-penalty’ policy governing missed assignments and deadlines, plagiarism, and cheating, appears nonsensical and counterproductive. That Levin in his memo would continue to defend such an egregious guideline shows how far the Ministry is out of touch with the realities of education. At the school level, response to the policy has been uncertain and inconsistent. Some schools and teachers are following it, others not. But what is certain and consistent here is this: the majority of secondary teachers want back their traditional right to impose academic penalties where they deem it appropriate. Regrettably, the new guidelines represent yet another instance of teachers’ professional authority being disrespected, once again to the detriment of education as a whole.
How and why teachers lost this authority exposes two grievous flaws in the way public education is administered in Ontario.
First, the province’s secondary teachers were not directly consulted in the matter. Had they been, the no-penalty policy would not have gone through. No doubt the Ministry decided that on this issue, as in others, teachers in the schools could not be trusted to arrive at the ‘right’ decision, namely the one already made by enlightened educrats in comfortable government, faculty, and board offices.
And, second, the new policy reflects the bogus pseudo-educational theory so popular in those offices, an ideology imported from the very pinnacle of public education, the United States. Why wouldn’t you go American when searching for best practices in education? Just look at how well their public schools are doing.
The argument in favour of academic penalties is simple: they work. Like a traffic fine for most drivers, the threat or use of an academic penalty serves as a necessary and effective deterrent for most students, a fact that can be verified by any experienced classroom teacher. As a direct result of the new Ministry guidelines, many teachers are now complaining that even strong students are disregarding deadlines. Why shouldn’t we?, the students argue, teachers can’t deduct marks anymore. Sadly, the current Ministry-recommended practice of giving students another deadline or two for late work, a second chance on a plagiarized essay, or a behavioural comment on the report card, is not only grossly irresponsible but also unfair to those students who complete their work on time and on their own. If Levin is in any doubt on the latter point, he need only ask the students themselves. The latter will probably also tell him that they are now learning their sense of discipline not at school, but at their part-time jobs, where tardiness and dishonesty have real consequences.
The Ministry argument for its no-penalty policy on assessment runs like this: because missed assignments and deadlines, plagiarism, and cheating, are behavioural matters, not academic ones, they may not be subject to academic penalty. The Ministry’s argument in this case is invalid, stemming from an overly restrictive understanding of the nature of assessment. All assignments-tests, examinations, essays, and seminars-include two implicit expectations, understood but not articulated in the Ministry guidelines: that they be completed within a certain period of time, and be done in an honest manner. When these underlying expectations are not fulfilled, and there are no valid mitigating circumstances, then the offending students should be as much subject to receiving a reduced mark as when they give a wrong answer or misspell a word on a test. The penalty must, of course, fit the situation, and for this schools must set appropriate guidelines for teachers to follow.
Low standards?
It is a common gambit for those who want to defend a practice to attack the credibility of critics, rather than dealing with the substance of a criticism. Levin does this by claiming that complaints by university professors about standards and poor student preparation are not new. This type of ad hominem argument implies that anyone who is unhappy with current practices is some sort of old fogey who is blinded by a longing for some sort of gilded past. The further implication is that such critics were wrong in the past, so they must be wrong in the present.
The main problem with this type of argument is that the existence of past complaints does not prove that a current complaint is incorrect. Indeed, some past complaints about educational practices may well have been correct.
Levin compounds this problem with his ‘cherry-picking’ methodology of citing evidence, and even then he misrepresents that evidence. He claims that professors have been complaining about the poor preparation of first-year university students for over 200 years, but to support this claim he makes reference only to an obscure magazine article published in 1991. Those who would bother to track down this source, as we did, will find that the evidence in that article does not involve a professor’s lament at all, let alone one from two centuries ago, but rather a novelist from 1958 writing in Life Magazine. In the midst of the Cold War, this novelist argued that the American educational system should be more competitive with the Russian system.
Aside from these logical and evidentiary flaws in Levin’s argument, why should we be surprised to hear that educators have spoken up in the past about elements of a system that they experience on a daily basis and over which they have a fiduciary duty? Indeed, shouldn’t we be surprised if there were not some complaints when things were thought to be at risk of going off the rails? On the one hand, teachers are in a unique position to see what students are actually doing and learning, much more so than educrats, like Levin, in remote offices. On the other hand, in modern democracies major institutions are -and should be-the object of criticism. Such criticism shows that there is some health in our democracy and that our institutions can evolve rather than ossify. Leaders like Levin should be encouraging open debate, not trying to shut it down with internal memos encouraging his minions to instil ‘public confidence’ by subverting the critics.
International standards
Levin makes reference to Ontario’s (and Canada’s) high ranking on the 2006 PISA results, and then raises the question of why our graduation rate is lower than those countries with whom we are apparently equivalent. Had he delved further into this question and looked at multiple sources of evidence, he would have had his answer, but it would not have supported his argument.
First, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests are specifically designed to assess the ability of 15 year olds to use simple skills to solve everyday problems. These tests do not assess an advanced academic aptitude that would be associated with a readiness for the university curriculum. In fact, if we look at the results for reading literacy, only a small minority of Canadian 15 year olds scores at the highest level of literacy (Level 5), the level that would be most compatible with university-level reading comprehension. The majority of students at this age are capable at best of only a moderate literacy, at Level 3 or lower. Looking at the results in this way helps explain why so many Ontario high school students have such difficulty with our own literacy tests (the EQAO tests), and why so many have difficulty making the transition to the university level.
Second, other international tests assessing more advanced abilities tell a different story about the ‘success’ of the Canadian system, placing us in the middle of the pack on international comparisons (e.g., Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)), with recent indications that we are slipping even from this mediocre position. Thus, full disclosure reveals that Canadian students are not well represented among the front-runners on these more difficult tests. It is with the more advanced abilities that we should be concerned in preparing students who would go on to our universities and eventually contribute to our international economic competitiveness.
So, to answer Levin’s question for him, our schools appear to be good at hitting a target of mediocrity, but not excellence. If we are not providing secondary school students with a meaningful and challenging education, is it any wonder that some opt to leave before graduating and others lack the suitable preparation for post-secondary education? If Levin were committed to a full disclosure of the facts, he would be directing the Ministry of Education to address the limitations of the system over which it has a fiduciary duty, not ignore the facts that point to those limitations. A disservice is being done to all by his misinformation.
Public confidence
Levin finishes his propagandistic missive by urging his colleagues to challenge criticisms of government policies and local practices by talking about ‘Ontario’s high standards’ and encouraging successful students to ‘share their views.’ Essentially, he is taking recourse to ‘viral’ public relations measures whereby issues are managed rather than rectified, and facts are massaged rather than openly disclosed. He wants his colleagues to tout Ontario’s performance on one international assessment, rather than to facilitate an open discussion of the actual performance of all students by those who teach those students.
Levin is calling for ‘public confidence,’ when he really means public compliance and the submission of teachers to seriously misguided policies.