I gave up watching Netflix to read a funding manual

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

“This guy needs to get a life” was probably the first thing that came to mind when you saw the title of this blog. There may some truth to that. But one can learn some very interesting things from obscure documents. Honestly. Ask Edward Snowden.

The Alberta Funding Manual for School Authorities for the 2020/21 school year is no Pentagon Papers or a vast trove of secret documents. You can find it by clicking the link in the previous sentence. The Manual contains one part of the not-so-secret recipe that helps to make Alberta one of the best performing school systems in the world.

The first ingredient in Alberta’s not-so-secret recipe begins on page 14 in section B under the heading Accountability and Assurance in Alberta’s K-12 Education System. It is there that Alberta Department of Education declares in unequivocal terms that “school authorities are accountable organizations” that receive funding from the provincial government so that they can carry out the educational responsibilities delegated to them by the province. This creates an explicit relationship between the Department of Education and school boards that “requires transparency and the obligation to answer for, and publicly report on the spending of public funds and results achieved. . . .” [my emphasis]. Moreover, school boards are obligated to assure “their local stakeholders and the public that they are fulfilling their responsibilities and students are successful.” School boards must:

• Establish a system of accountability for results that encompasses their schools.

• Interpret and report results to parents, students, the Department of Education and the public in a manner and at a time the Minister prescribes as part of ensuring transparency.

• Use results to improve the quality and effectiveness of education programs provided to their students and to improve student learning and achievement.

• Students use ongoing assessment feedback to reflect continuously on their progress, identify strengths and areas of need and set new learning goals.

• Students achieve prescribed provincial learning outcomes, demonstrating strengths in literacy and numeracy.

• Students are active, healthy and well.

• Students apply knowledge, understanding and skills in real life contexts and situations.

• Students advance reconciliation by acquiring and applying foundational knowledge of First Nations, Métis and Inuit experiences.

• Students demonstrate understanding and respect for the uniqueness of all learners. (p.18)

The assurance framework, developed in collaboration with education partners, is guided by a set of ten principles of which shared responsibility for student growth and achievement is the first. The framework addresses five domains - student growth and achievement; teaching and leading; learning supports; governance; and local and societal context. Although addressed separately in the framework, the five domains intersect with one another and are interdependent. Public assurance is achieved “when the public has trust and confidence that students demonstrate citizenship, engage intellectually and grow continuously as learners.”

Student growth and achievement – which the document treats as a unitary construct – is expressed in terms of six expectations or values that the document refers to as key elements:  

The remaining domains receive similar attention. Each domain is described and defined in terms of key elements.

The assurance framework is embedded in a continuous improvement cycle that speaks about three processes: evidence-informed decision-making; collaboration among partners; and learning and capacity building.

Progress monitoring is a key process in the public assurance process. School Boards are required to have and make public their Education Plans and their Annual Education Results Reports (AERRs). Here, too, Alberta Education set out its expectations using the language of key elements. The first of the key elements is:

The school authority [school board] has collected, analyzed and evaluated key performance data arising from the implementation of its previous Education Plan and the actions taken to meet its responsibilities in each domain. It has developed insights, drawn conclusions and determined implications arising from the results.

There is an explicit expectation that a school board’s analysis and evaluation will be reflected in its revisions to its Education Plan, considering contextual information and input from stakeholders. While school boards are accorded considerable flexibility in the form and content of the Education Plans they develop, Alberta Education sets out requirements for the timing, structure, analysis of results, strategic priorities, stakeholder engagement, and dimensions of the Education Plan.

Assessment of results is central to the development of an Education Plan. School boards are required to compile and assess results for their local performance measures as well as provincial performance measures. Alberta has developed provincial performance measures and requirements in each of the domains. In the student growth and achievement domain, Alberta administers Provincial Achievement Tests (PATs) and Diploma Examinations. It requires reporting of over all results as well as results for First Nations, Metis, and Inuit learners and students for whom English is a second or additional language.  

Alberta Education expects concordance between a board’s education plan and its budget and requires each board to post their Education Plans, their Annual Educational Results Report, and budgets on its website. It requires that school boards ensure that each school revises its plan and results report each year; engages the school council in preparing the report and plan; and posts them on the school’s or school board’s website.

There are many appealing features of the Alberta approach. The approach appreciates the link between provincial, school board, and school goals, plans and results. Expectations are explicit and clearly stated. School boards are strongly encouraged to make clear the connection between strategies and intended outcomes. Goals are, for the most part, accompanied by established metrics and annual monitoring of results. There is attention to overall results and to the results achieved by Indigenous learners and learners for whom English is not a first language.

I started this blog with a comment about one’s life choices. I gave up the time I would normally devote to watching a movie on Netflix to read a funding manual with a well-developed blueprint for continuous school improvement. You may be skeptical, but I am happy with my choice.

I hope you will be taking a break for some rest & relaxation until school begins again in September. I am. 

Be kind, be calm, be safe -  

What professional misconduct merits the cancellation of an educators’ teaching certificate?

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Many professions are challenged in regulating their member’s conduct. They need to do so in ways that give the public confidence that the interests of the public prevail over the interests of the members of the profession. Physicians, lawyers, dentists, nurses, and other professional groups – including teachers - have sometimes fallen short of achieving high levels of public confidence.

Courts at various levels have said that teachers are held to a higher standard of conduct than other professions because of the inherent vulnerability of children and youth and because teacher misconduct can call the entire institution of public schooling into disrepute.

The Ministry of Education, through the office of the Commissioner of Teacher Regulation, publishes the outcomes of investigations into certificate holders whose conduct is deemed to have breached the “Standards for the Conduct, Competence and Professional Education of Teachers in British Columbia.”  Most decisions are published as Consent Resolution Agreements, which succinctly and formulaically detail the allegations, the findings and the consequence meted out to the offending certificate holder. The sanctions can range from a reprimand to suspension to the revocation of a teaching license.

Two recent decisions from the office of the Commissioner of Teacher Regulation raise an important question: What professional misconduct merits the cancellation of an educator’s teaching certificate?

The first case involved a secondary school teacher who developed a relationship with a grade 12 student that transgressed the boundaries of acceptable professional conduct. The teacher and the student exchanged more than 5,000 text messages of which half were sent by the teacher to the student. The teacher said they[1] enjoyed spending time with and loved the student, made negative comments about the student’s parents and sibling; made derogatory remarks to the student about another teacher; discussed sexuality and sexual orientation with the student; shared personal information about the teacher’s childhood; commented about the intelligence and attractiveness of the student; pressured the student to allow the teacher to assist with school work; etc. The teacher gave the student gifts and neglected to report to school authorities that the student discussed self-harm.

The school district issued the teacher with a letter of discipline, suspended the teacher two months without pay, transferred the teacher to another school, required the teacher to complete the course Reinforcing Respectful Boundaries offered by the Justice Institute of B.C., and reported the teacher’s conduct to the Teacher Regulation Branch of the Ministry of Education. The B.C. Commissioner of Teacher Regulation entered into a consent agreement with the teacher who admitted to the misconduct and accepted a 2-month plus 2-week suspension of the teacher’s teaching certificate.  

The second case concerns a high school science teacher whose demeanor was negative, aggressive, and visibly frustrated in his interaction with students. He disclosed to students that he had gambled, been employed as a bouncer, and details of his sex life; posted a photo of himself and his wife on his publicly accessible Facebook page in which he and his spouse appeared to be nude; and possessed homophobic, sexist and racist memes that he stored on a school-issued computer and some of which he shared with students. The teacher said that a student whom he alleged was a cheater should get a sexually transmitted disease. He refused a student permission to go to the washroom because “you cannot run away from life’s problems.”  The teacher also made other inappropriate and disparaging remarks to students such as telling a student whose father was from Iran that, if he did not get good marks, he would be sent into the minefields; telling exchange students to go back to work on rice farms; asked a student of Japanese ancestry if he had failed to answer a question correctly because he had been watching pornography.  The teacher also engaged in other professionally inappropriate behaviour.

The teacher, who resigned his teaching position in 2018, had been issued with a letter of discipline in 2008 and suspended with pay from January 22, 2008 to January 3 I, 2 009 and suspended without pay from February 1, 2009 until June 30, 2009. The letter and suspensions arose from allegations that the teacher “had made comments to students that were discriminatory, offensive, threatening and otherwise inappropriate, and that on one occasion, he had used physical force against a student.” The District required the teacher to complete anger management training, an anti-racism program, and to undergo medical treatment and counselling. He subsequently returned to work and engaged in further misconduct that, in 2019, resulted in the BC Commissioner of Teacher Regulation entering into a consent resolution agreement with the teacher. The teacher admitted that his behaviour constituted professional misconduct and was given a three-day suspension of his certificate.

The teacher’s actions in the first case are indicative that the teacher was preparing the student for sexual exploitation (“grooming”). This is not an example of a teacher who made a momentary error of judgement that one could expect the teacher to reflect upon and alter. It displays a fundamental violation of the trust relationship between teacher and student.

The actions described in the consent resolution agreement for the second case reveal a pattern of misconduct over time. According to the summary published by the Commissioner, the teacher in the second case resigned his position with the Vancouver School District. One might say that, in losing his teaching job, the teacher paid a severe penalty for his misconduct. There is, however, a difference between losing one’s employment and losing one’s license to practice. A teacher, after serving a brief suspension, is eligible to teach - if the teacher can find a willing employer. Without a license, no teacher can teach in any public school in the country.

The decisions of the Commissioner are a matter of public record and prospective employers have access to a password protected website that reveals that licensure status and discipline history of any prospective employee. Most school districts use application forms that require an applicant to disclose if he or she has ever been subject to an investigation or disciplinary action as an educator. One hopes that employers would be careful in vetting prospective employees

Not all teachers deserve to retain their certificates. Some actions and breaches of the trust are so severe as to merit the withdrawal of the privilege to practice that is conferred by the license issued by the Ministry. The Supreme Court of Canada made the point that it is important to uphold high standards of conduct for public school teachers when it upheld the dismissal of a teacher for conduct that compromised the positive, inclusive and non-discriminatory nature of the learning environment. Based on the standards established in that case, the teacher in the second case should have lost his license. His conduct created a poisoned learning environment, caused significant harm to students, and undermined the confidence that the public should have in its schools.

The Commissioner has rendered his judgment in these cases. The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation has discharged its obligation to represent these teachers before the Commissioner. The BCTF could now revoke the teachers’ memberships, sending a clear message that the teachers of British Columbia do not want them among their ranks.

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[1] The published case summary uses language that is designed to protect the identity of the student and, therefore, of the teacher, including the use of pronouns that may obscure the gender identities of the individuals.

It shocks the conscience

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia

[permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]

The enduring police racism toward Black men shocks the conscience. “Shocks the conscience” is a legal judgment that a government’s agent has acted in a manner that is outside of the boundary of human decency. Such racism is systemic, by which I mean discriminatory values and practices are deeply imbedded in society’s laws and institutions, including the legal, political, economic and its education systems.

Let me illustrate another system in which racism operates in the United States, and then show how it works in Canada and show its connection to education. The forcible separation of a child from their asylum-seeking, immigrant parents in the United States was abhorrent. In a ruling requiring that children must be reunited with their families within 30 days, a judge said that the Government’s practice of separating children from their parents and failing to reunite them shocks the conscience.  

Family separation was a deliberate strategy of the U.S. government designed to deter migrants from attempting to enter the United States without authorization. The strategy provoked outrage around the world. One subtext to the outrage was that the cold-hearted policy was simply another manifestation of the contempt that the current US President has espoused toward immigrants and people of colour. A second subtext in this country was self-righteousness: “Canada would never do anything like that!”

Well, we did. Canada has systematically separated Canadian parents from their Canadian children. 

Aboriginal children were separated from their parents and sent to residential schools beginning in the last quarter of the 19^th century, a practice that continued for about 100 years but whose impact may be felt for generations to come. The education Indigenous children received in residential schools was a form of cultural genocide; Indigenous children were prevented from speaking their languages and their contact with families and communities was restricted in a conscious attempt to “take the Indian out of the Child.”  The children and grandchildren of residential school survivors have suffered from the impact of the trauma their parents experienced directly.

Just prior to the Judge’s ruling in the US family separation case, the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) issued a “statement of evidence” in which it documented the body of research showing that family separation has damaging psychological  and health consequences for children, their families and communities. According to the SRCD, the problems engendered by parent child separation do not end when parents and their children are reunited.

The research, to which the SRCD referred, dates to studies of the impact of family separation during the Second World War showing that the effects can be long-lasting – even when parents and children have been reunited.  The effects include increased risk of mental illness, poor inter-personal relations, reactivity to stress and even mortality. Both parents and children can be affected by the separation and separation can produce negative consequences across the lifespan of the children and their children’s children.

In Canada, even after the closure of most of the residential schools, removing Indigenous children from the homes of their parents and placing them in foster homes was a relatively common practice that was evident through the 1980s.  The practice was not confined to Indigenous parents and children. Children of Sons of Freedom Doukhobors and unwed mothers were also separated from their children (who were defined as ‘illegitimate’ children) and placed in foster or adoptive families.

The children and grandchildren from families that have been separated may suffer most but the entire community is affected by them as well. Schools, health, justice, and social welfare systems must address the cognitive, emotional, physical, and inter-personal effects of family separation.

The disgust we felt about the use of family separation as a method of social control signals greater empathy on our part. But we should not be so pious as to believe that it cannot happen again. The roots of such practices are built into the human calculus of the social system, suggesting that some lives are more valuable than others. Those roots must be completely removed from all systems.

Canadian public schools today are more likely to address the devastating impact of colonization on Indigenous people than in the past. But they still teach history as if the settlers are central to the stories and the Indigenous peoples are “other” and marginal to the dominant narrative. Canadian history begins with settler contact as if there was no story prior to the arrival of Europeans.

Because of their centrality in the social system and their influence on beliefs and behaviours, schools are pivotal to the elimination of racism. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has pointed the way toward reconciliation.[1] We must acknowledge the injustices done, recognize that they were part of the human calculus of the Canadian social system, commit to their elimination, and ensure that the values we profess – equality among all people – are built into our social system.

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[1] Many of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action address education, language, and culture. https://nctr.ca/reports.php.

Should we care about the decline in PISA scores?

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

There is little doubt that results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) get attention. If you enter the search term “PISA results” in your browser under the heading news as I just did, it will return more than 67,000 references in about a quarter of a second. Every three years the results are celebrated by politicians in jurisdictions that are ‘winners,’ like Canada, and loathed by those presiding over education in jurisdictions that are ‘losers.’  

PISA is the name given to the assessments administered to 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science. The assessments are administered in more than 35 countries (which PISA often calls “economies”) and more than a dozen partners that include countries, such as Brazil, and economic regions such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau. It is convenient for PISA to use the term ‘economies’ to speak of all participating entities. 

Each administration of PISA assesses all three domains (reading, mathematics, and science), but gives prominence to one of the three domains in each cycle. In 2000, 2009 and 2018, the principal assessment domain was reading. In 2003 and 2012, it was mathematics. In 2006 and 2015, science was the focal domain. In 2021, the focus will be on mathematics again with an additional test in creative thinking. And, in 2024, PISA will measure “Learning in the Digital World,” the ability of students to use self-regulated learning while they employ digital tools.

PISA derives its support from the countries and economies that participate in the assessments. To sustain itself PISA must maintain the continuing support of previous participants, but it also tries to encourage new participation. PISA combines the assessment of the three domains with the assessment of abilities in other areas: financial literacy, creativity, and digital learning, for example.  

It is doubtful whether PISA would earn repeat business if there were significant differences from round to round in the major domains. “If you want to measure change, do not change the measures” – at least not too much.  Thus, while the assessments do change from one round to the next, the folks who analyze the results perform a variety of statistical operations to assure participating jurisdictions of the equivalence of the assessments. They also adjust the results so that they are related to the same scale. Thus, adjustments are made so that the score is centered at 500 with a standard deviation of 100 score points.

Large-scale assessments are helpful in determining if school systems are producing better student outcomes and reducing educational inequalities among groups of students over time. The jurisdictions that have such mechanisms are advantaged. Ontario, for example, has an Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO). A body that has some independence from the provincial Ministry of Education , EQAO conducts province-wide, census-type, large-scale assessments in reading, writing and mathematics at the primary and junior divisions; applied and academic mathematics at Grade 9; and the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) administered at grade 10. But education systems that do not have their own census-type large-scale assessments are at a disadvantage and thus must rely on external benchmarks against which they can measure their progress over time.

Because of my interest in improving student outcomes and reducing educational inequalities, I have been an observer of PISA since it began at the turn of this century. I am primarily interested in how jurisdictions interpret the results and what use, if any, they make of them to improve outcomes.

Earlier in this blog I used the terms ‘winners’ and ‘losers.’ I did that because the leadership in most jurisdictions treats PISA like a horse race. “Who won?” Who lost?” “How well or badly did we do?” There are some significant challenges to making use of the results.

Those who are responsible for PISA want PISA to attract attention and earn support. But they caution that PISA results are not a measure of the impact of schooling per se, but a cumulative measure of the prior experiences that the 15-year-olds have had and the many factors that influence those experiences such as poverty, parental education, etc. They also caution that PISA is not aligned with curriculum in the many countries and economies that participate.

Notwithstanding these significant limitations, I have spent quite a bit of time reading and consulting with colleagues about the decline in PISA scores over time. The decline has occurred in all three major domains (reading, mathematics, and science) on an international level and within Canada. I have represented that decline in the chart below devoted to mathematics. I chose mathematics because it is an area about which there has been much hand wringing. It includes the data for all the Canadian provinces, Canada, and the OECD average (excluding the partner economies since because they are not countries).

 

 This chart produced from data extracted using the PISA International Data Explorer.

I and my colleagues, many of whom have international reputations in measurement, statistics, and education are baffled. We are not certain to what the decline should be attributed or  its significance. There is no shortage of hypotheses.

With repeated measurements of the same phenomenon, there is a tendency for scores at the extreme ends (high or low) of the distribution to be followed by ones that are closer to the mean. The trend in the PISA data may reflect such a tendency. Another hypothesis is that over the nearly 20 years of PISA assessments, students spend more time on computers and less time reading print material, and the kind of reading they do has changed - if not in kind in degree. According to this hypothesis, students devote less mental effort to reading and the loss of mental effort is reflected in all subjects. Still another hypothesis is that the effort to retain students who would have dropped out of school has paid off, but that the students retained are less able and, thus, ‘diluting’ performance over time. Yet another hypothesis is that successive generations of students have become desensitized to large-scale assessments, attributing less importance to them, and expending less effort on them than in the past. I could go on, but I won’t.

Do these tentative explanations deserve examination? These hypotheses are worthy topics for a dissertation. But, if a jurisdiction has a robust system of large-scale assessments upon which it can rely for examining change over time, it would be more productive to focus on the data produced by those systems than to depend upon PISA. This is particularly true if the large-scale assessments are closely linked with the jurisdiction’s educational goals and curricula; allow for assessment at regular intervals throughout students’ educational careers; and are amenable to close analysis of the relationship between factors over which schools have control and the outcomes measured. 

Jurisdictions that do not have robust systems for large-scale assessment and do not have the resources to develop them will be dependent upon assessments such as PISA. For them, understanding why PISA scores are declining is a necessary prelude to understanding the results their students obtain.  Jurisdictions that depend on PISA alone for an external measure of system performance would also be wise to invest in some oversampling so they can track performance of subpopulations.