Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission
to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
During the summer I was interviewed by an international panel that was studying British Columbia’s education system. The panel was trying to determine if high performing jurisdictions such as British Columbia shared common characteristics that helped to account for that high performance.
I divided my answer into two categories: social factors and education system factors. I chose those categories because most of the differences in student achievement can be attributed to social factors. About 70% of the difference in student performance is affected by social factors and about 30% to education-system factors.
On the social side, I said that, in comparison with most countries, Canada exhibits high social equity. For example, there is less income inequality in Canada than in the United States. Canada has roughly 70% of the income inequality of the US. Or to state it another way, inequality in the US is about 30% greater than in Canada.
Although there are persistent inequalities between men and women, there is greater social equity for Canadian women than in many other countries. At the negative extreme, in some countries females are denied education and have very restricted opportunities.
Selective immigration is a factor in social equity. In polite discussion, people say that Canada skims the cream from other countries, accepting migrants with significant educational, social, cultural, and economic capital. A more pejorative description for Canada’s immigration policy is “asset stripping.”
Canada possesses a social safety net that helps to reduce more radical inequalities. Our health system is one example of the services provided to Canadians that in other countries is much more restricted. Parenting leave, employment insurance, and old age security are others.
Another social equity factor is a balance between individual and group rights. Over time, Canada has developed what I describe as a social justice infrastructure that has contributed to social equity. While it is by no means perfect, that infrastructure includes human rights legislation, immigration reform and control, employment equity, anti-racism and multicultural initiatives, and acknowledgement of the mistreatment of Japanese, Chinese, and, more recently, Indigenous Canadians.
The second set of factors that has helped students in British Columbia to achieve comparatively high levels of performance in education can be attributed to the education system. Before describing the features of the system that have made a significant contribution, I should point out that I am taking the long view because I think that there have been challenges to those features in the past decade or so. To put it bluntly, many of the factors that contributed to high performance in the past have been eroded or eliminated.
For much of BC’s history the education system has benefitted from a strong ministry of education staffed by individuals with knowledge of teaching and learning. That pattern has been less true for the past two decades and much of the expectation of leadership has been devolved to the district level. However, capacity at the school district level is not uniform across the 60 public school boards in British Columbia. In the absence of a strong Ministry capable of providing expert guidance, some districts, and the students for whom they are responsible, suffer.
British Columbia once had a strong, detailed curriculum and curriculum support upon which teachers could depend. A common curriculum and common, provincially approved resources provided a foundation for teaching. Recent revisions to the curriculum, with its emphasis on big ideas and the diminution of subject-specific knowledge, provide less support for teachers.
About twenty years ago, the Ministry produced performance standards for numeracy, literacy, and social responsibility. Those performance standards set out grade-level expectations for student performance and, most important, gathered, and published samples of student work that fell below, met, or exceeded the standards. This was enormously useful to teachers because it helped guide professional judgment about grade-level expectations and provided them with example that they could use with students and parents to talk about the standards.
Another of the factors that contributed to student performance was formal, provincial assessments. The assessments were typically administered at the senior secondary level to ensure common outcomes, certify that achievement standards had been met, and determine eligibility for provincial scholarships. The scores on those tests were factored into the student’s final grade by weighting the provincial examination score and the score assigned by the teacher based on the teacher’s classroom assessments. Those provincial assessments are largely no longer administered.
BC once employed school accreditation, a practice that sought to encourage the members of a school to engage in self-study, to set goals for improvement and the means for achieving them, and to monitor progress toward the goals established over time. Although there was provision for external evaluation, the primary benefit of school accreditation was the self-study component.
School accreditation sought to inculcate among educators an ethic of self-regulation rather than externally imposed regulation. But, teachers’ union opposition to school accreditation diminished its potential as a means of collective self-study and self-improvement and reinforced the impression that teachers are disinterested – if not opposed – to improvement. BC no longer uses school accreditation.
A strength of the BC system is its comparatively well-educated and well-prepared cadre of teachers. The post-war improvement in teacher education helped to improve student performance but that trend has stalled in the past 30 or so years. There are many things that a teacher must know and be able to do to promote student success. They need subject-specific pedagogical knowledge, the ability to manage the classroom and student behaviour, and contextual awareness and understanding of their students. The amount of time devoted to preparation in these areas has eroded in the past 30 years.
A factor in British Columbia’s success relative to other countries is that, for the most part, the learning environments across BC schools are similar in the way that they influence student performance in core subjects. In technical terms, the proportion of between-school difference on PISA is around one-tenth of the OECD average. Provincial, rather than local, funding of education and an allocation model that considers cost differences among school boards are two factors that help to produce similarity in learning environments.
I would be remiss if I did not point out that British Columbia is fortunate that these conditions are present to a greater degree in BC than jurisdictions where these two factors are less well developed. However, as other jurisdictions improve, British Columbia’s status among school jurisdictions will diminish.
Yet, I am not particularly concerned with British Columbia’s performance in comparison to other countries or provinces. Schooling is not a horse race. I am concerned about British Columbia’s performance in the future in comparison to its current performance. The future I foresee is not so rosy: the diminution of a common curriculum (big ideas without underlying consideration of the evidence in support of them are like headlines without the story); the fragmentation of prior knowledge; and a decline in conceptual and procedural knowledge that PSE and employers ‘count’ upon when a student earns high school graduation.
I am mindful that “things are not like they used to be and never were.” In other words, the past was not as rosy as one might infer from what I have written. There were and are significant gaps among groups of students. Several exogenous factors prevented better performance. Poverty and racism are among the most potent of those factors.
I am worried about increasing
inequities. The income gap is growing, inter-group hostility appears to be on
the rise, COVID-19 has revealed holes in the social safety net, but more
specifically COVID-19 has also revealed inequities in educational opportunities
that more advantaged parents and guardians can provide their children that less
advantaged ones cannot. These are troubling developments and over the long run will
likely detract from the positive record of student performance in BC.