EDMONTON - Alberta students used to be ranked at the top of the world academically, but they are sliding. At the same time, Edmonton public Grade 12 students are dropping on provincial diploma exams. Yet in our classrooms, we are pushing a fantasy that our students are better than ever.
In the past decade, Grade 12 classroom marks at Edmonton public school board schools have shot up.
Since 2002, the number of EPSB students who have been graded as “excellent” or “acceptable” on provincewide diploma exams has dropped by 1.9 per cent. In the classroom, however, the number who have been graded “excellent” or “acceptable” has gone up by seven per cent.
The generation of kids that got soccer trophies just for showing up at the tournament is now getting passing and honours marks even if they haven’t always earned them.
At the Grade 12 level in math, for example, there was almost no separation between diploma and classroom marks in 2002, but now the gap is wide. In 2013, 78 per cent of EPSB students were graded “acceptable” on the Math 30-1 diploma exam, but 94 were graded “acceptable” in class.
Public school superintendent Darrel Robertson says he expects there would be a gap. One set of grades come from one-shot, pressure-packed exams, Robertson says, but classroom marks are a “richer form of assessment” based on a long term, more intensive look at the student.
That may be, but why is the gap widening? Why the inflation?
Rampant grade inflation does no favours to students. They need a rigorous education. The inflation also hides from parents that our schools have got off track somewhat because of ill-advised changes to our curriculum and to teaching methods.
The drop in our academics achievement isn’t going unnoticed by others, as seen by the gold standard of international academic rankings, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment or PISA.
Hundreds of thousands of 15-year-olds around the world write these tests every three years. In 2000, Alberta ranked top worldwide in reading, third overall in science and math. Our teachers and curriculum were top notch and our accountability, through provincial exams, was state-of-the-art.
Since then, however, Alberta has steadily dropped. This week when the 2012 PISA results came out, we ranked 11th in math, fifth in reading and fourth in science.
Not bad. Pretty good, in fact, but not what we were, especially in math where Alberta is sliding toward the mediocre middle. Of course, this will come as no surprise to parents and educators who have noticed how ineffective our “new math” curriculum is.
Our top-ranked system clearly wasn’t broken, but educational theorists and consultants have been hard at work earning fees and successfully convincing Alberta Education to “improve” our system.
Our new math curriculum no longer focuses on elementary school students mastering the basics of arithmetic. Math drills are out. Math drills are so 2000.
Instead, our children, the new masters of their own learning, are asked to somehow discover the ways of arithmetic by trying to figure out wordy math problems. Today’s math isn’t about numbers, it’s about words and theories, as if the curriculum was written by folks who hate the clear logic of pure mathematics.
It is little wonder that Edmonton parents are flocking to private learning programs like Kumon, or to special public school programs like Cogito, where the slow but satisfying mastery of arithmetic is the focus.
Where does that leave parents who can’t afford Kumon, or others who can’t get their kids into a popular program like Cogito? It leaves them stuck on the second rung of a two-tier educational system.
No doubt, as a result of the “new math” and other quack reforms, high school teachers are getting students increasingly less able to do the work. But the response hasn’t been to fail these students, which would essentially blow the whistle on the botched reforms. Instead, it’s been to refuse to hand out zeros to students who don’t do the work, pass kids through, perpetuate the notion that all is excellent, or at least passable, and even to fire a teacher, Lynden Dorval, who dares question the new orthodoxy.
As Alberta’s previous excellence demonstrates, we have many outstanding teachers and administrators. But it’s time to get rid of unproven theories and get back to what made our academics the envy of the world, back to masterful teaching of fundamental math, reading, writing and composition skills, and back to honest report cards, with more accountability through increased provincial testing.
