Keeping society on the same page

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

From time to time my blogs elicit comments and questions from readers. Most of the time, the questions are personal and do not merit a public reply. But the other day a reader asked:

Have COIVD-19 school closures or episodic interruptions from COVID-19 restricted the common ground that schools provide for interaction between different social groups? Do you believe that school closures and interruptions arising from COVID-19 will result in an erosion of social cohesion, diminishing the school’s contribution to keeping society on the same page?

My reply:

People learn who they are, to whom they are related, and the power they have from the institutions with which they and their families are affiliated and the myths they are told. Families, of course, are the first and most influential context for such learning. Peers are influential, increasingly so as youngsters grow older.

Families interpret the world for the young, communicating the possibilities open to them and the limits on those possibilities. Families tell the young what they can and cannot do based upon their experience. Most parents encourage their children to aspire beyond the limits the parents faced and want their children to have the advantages the parents did not have. “You can be anything you set your mind on” is a common message to our children.

Families are tribal. They also draw the lines between family members and those outside the family. Tribalism, defence of the extended family, is a genetically programmed response designed for its protection. For most of human history, the tribal mechanism ensured survival in socially hostile environments. But tribalism has its downside, too. In a socially diverse society, the admonishment, “Don’t play with kids like that,” and the injunction to “Stick with your own kind” establish the basis for discrimination and racism.

Religion, media, and politics are essential parts of society, but they too are tribal. They divide us along philosophical lines. The optimist in me would like to believe that although we may differ philosophically, those differences are equivalent pathways in the pursuit of common human needs and in accordance with similar ethical principles. Increasingly hostile expressions of antipathy in recent years, and especially during COVID-19, are eroding my optimism.

I would like to think that most of us want Canada to be a more socially cohesive and egalitarian society. We want our children to have a sense of who they are as Canadians based upon shared values and want them to live in a society where the similarities among us outweigh the differences, but one in which the differences are respected.

Those aspirations cannot be realized without an institution dedicated to helping us to transcend our tribalism in order to live and work together. The only institution I know that has the promise of doing that is the public school.  You will no doubt have noticed that I used the word promise. While I think public schools do help us transcend our tribalism, they are imperfect – so the promise is not completely fulfilled.

When I think about the history of Canadian public schooling, I see improvement. The overt appeals to xenophobia that were once common (“our Anglo-Saxon heritage”) and the open denigration of Indigenous peoples – are diminished. Diminished, but not extinguished. Vestiges of privilege and discrimination are baked into the institution. Canada and its institutions are still settler-dominated.

I am cautiously optimistic that the manifestations of privilege and discrimination can be eliminated. I am not naïve, however. Eliminating them will require significant, conscious, and persistent effort. Since most children are in school at a point in their lives when tribalism is not so firmly "baked in," public education is the only institution capable of communicating the values I hope we share.

Schools address the same tension between individual rights and the needs of the collective that are present in the larger society. We cannot and should not sidestep the tensions but work to prevent one set of values from eclipsing the other.

It is too soon to assess the long-term effects of COVID-19 closures, but the effects should be assessed. There is a variety of sound tools to assess the social climate of schools and a body of knowledge that can be called upon to improve social relations among students.

Undertaking such assessments and using the data to improve the social environment of school is not a trivial undertaking. If public schools cannot help to create a socially cohesive society, who or what can?

My mother was a social justice warrior

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Education is one of the means for achieving social justice: ensuring that everyone in society is treated fairly, that the dignity and rights of all human beings are respected, and that resources are equitably distributed. That is why education is sometimes called the great equalizer.

It is not surprising that Mother’s Day prompted me to think about my mother, who has been dead for almost 25 years. She was an elementary school teacher who taught for several years when she first completed her teacher preparation in the 1920s and again from 1960 until her retirement in the late 1970s. She was well into her 70s when she retired.

Although most of my mother’s generation of elementary teachers had only one year of preparation beyond high school, my mother had two years of teacher preparation beyond her high school degree.

My mother taught grade one for almost her entire career. Her last grade one class enrolled 35 students. Many of the students lived in publicly subsidized housing because their parents were receiving income assistance. Many of the children in the area had little exposure to reading before coming to school.

My mother was proud that year-in and year-out all of the children leaving her inner-city grade one classroom were reading at grade level. I recall asking her about her teaching, she said plainly, “I’ve never met a child I couldn’t teach to read. It may have been difficult for them and for me, but all of the children in my classes began grade two reading at grade level.”

I asked her what she thought accounted for her success. She replied, “On the first day of school, I would tell the children that they were very lucky to be in school because they would learn a very powerful secret – they would learn how to read. I’d say, ‘Once you learn to read, no one can hide anything from you. Learning to read will be very hard, but I will help you. I have never met a child who couldn’t learn to read.’ Then I would read them a story that I knew they would like.”

The methods my mother used were the ones she was taught during her two years of teacher preparation in the 1920s. “I read to the children every day, often twice a day. Who doesn’t like to have someone read to them?” she asked.

“We used basal readers,” my mother explained. “You know, the readers with Dick, Jane, Spot, and all of that. But every child also had a library card. Each week, beginning in September, I would take them to the school library to select their books. In my last few years of teaching, during choosing time the children might select a cassette tape with a story that they could listen to while they followed along in the book.”

I asked her whether many of the children struggled with reading. “It varied from year to year, but there were always children who struggled. Some might not have had much opportunity to hear and handle books. Others – even the ones with books at home – struggled too. But they all learned to read at grade level by the end of the year.”

Reading – perhaps more than any other capacity – is life changing. Those who can read are more apt to succeed in school, graduate, and make a life for themselves afterward. It is a capacity that often distinguishes them from those who do not achieve success in school, often leave school early, and have diminished life chances.

The priority my mother placed on learning to read meant that she did not always address all the topics recommended for grade one students. “None of the principals I worked for ever complained that the children were short-changed.”

My mother would describe herself as an ordinary classroom teacher, but I think she was a social justice warrior for having taught all the students in her grade one class to read at grade level. If I had told her that, she would have said, “Oh, go on!”

Corporate Grooming

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Most people know, “if the service is free, you are the product.” Facebook and Instagram are two of the many applications that people use that are free. Facebook’s business model depends upon harvesting browsing history, location data, consumer behaviour, and other information from users who use its apps. Zuckerberg has been compared with J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who infamously kept records on countless individuals. In 2019, Facebook was fined £500,000 in the UK for its part in the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal where personal data was harvested from millions of Facebook users for targeting political messaging.

The US National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) recently sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter asking him to cancel plans to launch a version of Instagram designed for children under the age of 13. In their letter, the attorneys general remind Zuckerberg of Facebook’s poor record of protecting the privacy and safety of children who use its platform.

The letter from NAAG refers to a similar plea from the campaign for a commercial-free childhood (ccfc) that cites research on the impact of social media on children and youth:

A growing body of research demonstrates that excessive use of digital devices and social media is harmful to adolescents. Instagram, in particular, exploits young people’s fear of missing out and desire for peer approval to encourage children and teens to constantly check their devices and share photos with their followers. The platform’s relentless focus on appearance, self-presentation, and branding presents challenges to adolescents’ privacy and wellbeing.

The specific research to which ccfc refers shows the links between excessive screen use and a lengthy list of risks:  obesity, decreased happiness, decreased quality of sleep, depression, suicidal ideation, bullying, pressure upon Adolescent girls to “post sexualized selfies as a means of generating attention and social acceptance from their peers,” and more. Although the protection of children’s privacy has received attention from time to time from organizations like NAAG and ccfc, it has not received the attention it deserves.

Facebook’s business model is being threatened by Apple’s new operating system. The new iPhone (iOS14.5) has turned off a feature that follows users around on the internet by default. That means that apps (like Facebook) will need to seek permission from the phone’s user to use the tracking technology. Apple, of course, makes its revenue from selling people new phones and from the purchases users make from “in-app advertising”.

Spending time online has become a ‘way of life’ for most of us during the pandemic. Online learning during COVID-19 has dramatically increased the time that children and youth spend on computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Online engagement has been encouraged by schools and school boards eager to ensure the continuity of learning. School Boards have licensed the use of a variety of platforms for communicating with and instructing students (learning management systems). Students are not obligated to use the platforms provided by school boards. If they (more likely their parents) opt out, boards are obligated to make provision for alternatives. But I suspect that few parents opt out.

Most of the student data generated using online learning management systems is stored in the “cloud” (not on the school’s or board’s servers). It is not clear to me how the learning management systems use the data they store. Are the data linked to other data that they or related corporate entities hold? Are they using the data to develop other tools that they can market to schools or school boards?

In September 2020, the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA) released a report titled Troubling clouds: Gaps affecting privacy protection in British Columbia’s K-12 education system.  The report was written by a friend, lawyer Matthew Levine. Levine raises important question about whether student privacy is adequately protected from breaches or from exploitation and offers recommendations for improvements.

The corporations providing online learning management applications are not philanthropies. They are not giving something away without the expectation of some return. Whether it is collecting a fee for each user, instilling a positive identification with its brand, collecting data for marketing purposes, or manipulating consumer preferences, the cynic in me thinks about it as corporate grooming of children and youth.

Mark Zuckerberg abandoning his plan to create an under-13 Instagram at the behest of the NAAG or ccfc is like expecting Midas to divest himself of his gold.  As my granddaughter quipped, under-13 Instagram is Facebook’s ‘gateway drug’ to Instagram and Facebook’s other applications. As a grandparent, I am glad to see groups like NAAG, ccfc, and the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association (FIPA) raising privacy issues.

Language Matters

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 The term potential refers to something that is hidden or undeveloped. The term is used in legislation and regulation from Nova Scotia to British Columbia. Nova Scotia explains that the mandate of its publicly funded school system is to  “provide education programs and services for students to enable them to develop their potential and acquire the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to contribute to a healthy society and a prosperous and sustainable economy 2018, c. 1, Sch. A, s. 2”.  British Columbia explains that “ . . . the purpose of the British Columbia school system is to enable learners to develop their individual potential and to acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to contribute to a healthy society and a prosperous and sustainable economy.”

The association of potential and ability was very much influenced by Alfred Binet’s and Theodore Simon’s[1] efforts to develop measures of mental measurement for the purpose of better matching instruction to the abilities (aptitudes, potential) of children:

“. . . a profound knowledge of the normal intellectual development of the child would not only be of great interest but useful in formulating a course of instruction really adapted to their aptitudes” [p. 261] . . .the instruction should always be according to the natural evolution of the child, and not precede it by a year or two. In other words the child should be taught only what he is sufficiently mature to understand; all precocious instruction is lost time, for it is not assimilated. [p. 262]

But what about students who are seen to be out of the “normal” range of development or aptitude?

Adapting instruction to cultivate the intelligence of the learner was Binet’s and Simon’s intention. But it is not difficult to see how the concept of potential can be used to restrict the education that might be provided to students whose potential, abilities, and aptitudes were perceived as “limited.” Indeed, the techniques Binet and Simon developed to measure metal abilities were perverted by others to deny education to some, stream others and, worse, to abet eugenicists bent on improving the genetic stock and eliminating “inferiors.”[2]

When applied to students, “their potential” and “their individual potential” are synonymous with “to the best of their ability.” The term is so strongly connected to schools that the Cambridge Online Dictionary uses the following example of its use in sentences: “I have children in my class of very mixed abilities (= different levels of skill or intelligence).”

There are many contemporary manifestations of categorization of students with the intention of providing educational programs adapted to their “potential.” The most notable example is students with special needs defined as: “students who have a disability of an intellectual, physical, sensory, emotional or behavioural nature, have a learning disability, or have exceptional gifts or talents . . .”

Categorization of students using the standard of “the normal intellectual development of the child” makes, by definition, deviations from that standard “abnormal” and potentially stigmatizing. Those who are categorized often internalize the label applied to them and become confirmed in the identity associated with the label. Such confirmation makes addressing the needs of that student more complicated.

Students with special needs bring additional resources to many school boards because of the additional effort and resources that are thought to be necessary for their education. Parents cognizant of the challenges their children face often seek diagnoses and labels that will qualify them for categorization and the attention that the additional resources are supposed to provide.  

The association of extra funding to categories of students with special needs creates an incentive to seek such designations. Collective agreements that place limits on the number of designated children in a class, sharpens the demarcation between “normal” students and those the system considers “abnormal.”

One only needs to look at definitions across jurisdictions to see how fluid designation and language are. Consider students who manifest externalizing behaviour and symptoms of mental illness. As Tong[3] points out

In British Columbia, the category is titled “Behavioural Needs or Mental Illness” and within this category, students can be identified in one of two ways, “Students Requiring Moderate Behaviour Support or Students with Mental Illness” or “Students Requiring Intensive Behaviour Intervention or Students with Serious Mental Illness” (BC Ministry of Education, 2011). Alberta Education also identifies two categories of students with behaviour disorders and mental illnesses using the terminology “Emotional/Behavioural Disability” and “Severe Emotional/Behavioural Disability” (Alberta Education, 2011). . . . British Columbia does not formally categorize students with mild behaviour disorders and mental illnesses whereas Alberta Education includes students identified with mild behaviour disorders and mental illnesses in the “Emotional/Behavioural Disability” category. 

One wonders whether and how much the educational programs for such students differ.

Our education system is predicated on age-related definitions of normality that make deviations from those norms stand out. It is a deficit model of schooling that begins before children enter school. Getting children “school ready” is predicated on such thinking. As I have argued before, maybe we need to rethink the assumptions behind the way we organize education and take children as they are and not as we wish them to be.

Language matters. It reflects our cultural assumptions. And when enshrined in policy and practice to which funding is linked, and in contracts, it gets baked into the system and becomes systemic. Terms like potential, ability, and aptitude have significant consequences for the way the persons to whom they are applied are treated. And the ways they are treated have consequences for them.

In British Columbia, Indigenous students are overrepresented among students categorized because of behaviour disorders and mental illnesses. The graduation rate for these Indigenous students is significantly lower than those of their peers. When one finds that some groups of students are over-represented in a category, you must ask whether some form of systemic discrimination is at work.

---

[1] Binet, A. and T. Simon. The development of intelligence in children (The Binet-Simon Scale).; Kite, E. S., (Trans); Baltimore, MD, US: Williams & Wilkins Co; 1916. 337 pp.

[2] See, for example, Thompson, G. (1999), Remove from our Midst These Unfortunates: A Historical Inquiry Into the Influence of Eugenics, Educational Efficiency as well as Mental Hygiene upon the Vancouver School System and its Special Classes, 1910-1969. The University of British Columbia, Ph.D. Thesis.

[3] Tong, J. (2017) An Exploration of School Related Factors Associated with School Completion for Children and Youth with Behaviour Disorders and Mental Illness in BC. The University of British Columbia, Ph.D. Thesis.

Math is the new Latin

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduced granted if authorship is acknowledged]

When I was in grade eight, I enrolled in Latin I “because,” my mother said, “you can’t get into university without Latin.” This view was corroborated by the school guidance counsellor and the parents of all my friends. Going to university was not a matter of discussion as far as my parents were concerned.

I was not Ovid’s most avid fan or of Caesar for that matter. In fact, most of my adolescent concentration (which in retrospect strikes me as a contradiction in terms) was on Friday night. Long term planning extended to Saturday night. From my perspective, university was as distant a prospect as landing on Mars and about as likely.

So, the following summer I found myself enrolled in Latin I again, and not for the love of the language. This linguistic purgatory was necessitated by the requirement that I have two years of Latin to qualify for university. I had no idea that when my mother referred to having to take Latin for admission to university it was an indeterminate sentence. Or at least it appeared that way from the vantage point of a 14-year-old. Prayer works, apparently, because I eventually passed Latin II.

Latin is no longer required for admission to university. Its place was usurped by mathematics much like the invasion of Rome by the barbarians. In other words, mathematics has become the arbiter of those worthy of attending university. In British Columbia, for example, a student seeking undergraduate admissions to Arts is required to have taken Pre-Calculus 11 or Foundations of Mathematics 12.

Increasingly, however, mathematics’ vaunted status and utility are being questioned. Among those dubious about mathematics is G.V. Ramanathan, a professor emeritus of . . .wait for it . . . mathematics, statistics, and computer science at the University of Illinois (Chicago). To say Ramanathan is questioning mathematics is a bit of an understatement. He compares the marketing of mathematics to “the marketing of creams to whiten teeth, gels to grow hair and regimens to build a beautiful body.”

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Ramanathan asks, “How much math do we really need?” He says we should be asking ourselves that question and the next ten people we encounter – such as “your plumber, your lawyer, your grocer, your mechanic, your physician or even a math teacher.” Ouch!

Ramanathan is just one of the increasing number of academics asking us to think about how much math we really need and, by extension, how much emphasis should be placed on mathematics in school. Andrew Hacker, a professor of political science at Queens College (City University of New York), was interviewed by a New York Times journalist for a 2016 titled “Who Needs Advanced Math? Not Everybody.”

Hacker comes at the issue from a slightly different direction than Ramanathan. He said:

At the very time we should be honing and sharpening quantitative reasoning skills we punch students into algebra, geometry, calculus. The Math People take over and ignore much simpler needs. Arithmetic is super essential — we quantify everything.

Notice that he distinguishes between quantitative reasoning and the topics typically addressed in school - algebra, geometry, calculus. Hacker is not advocating teaching quantitative reasoning as a means of improving critical thinking, but because everything is quantified. Besides, as Ramanathan points out, the claim that courses such as “quantitative reasoning” improve critical thinking is unsubstantiated.

Hacker’s piece in the Times is a teaser for his entertaining book The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions. Hacker and mathematician at large of the Mathematical Association of America, James Tanton, debated one another at the [US] National Museum of Mathematics before an audience of mathematicians, an account of which was reported in the New Yorker.

During his presentation Tanton confessed, “I have never used the quadratic formula in my personal life. I don’t think I have ever used it in my research life. But learning the formula wasn’t the point. It was the story of quadratics. And, from that story, I know I can nut my way from most any problem to do with that subject.” He seemed to be making Hacker’s point:

Every other subject is about something. Poetry is about something. Even most modern art is about something. Math is about nothing. It sounds like ‘Seinfeld.’ Math describes much of the world but is all about itself, and it has the most fantastic conundrums. But it is not about the world.

Time in school is limited. There is much more of value to be learned than can be accommodated in that limited time. Ramanathan, Hacker, and others ask us to consider how much of that time should be devoted to mathematics. Is mathematics the new Latin?

Risky Business

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 The Delta School Board deserves praise for its vigorous pursuit of environmentally friendly technologies. But it also deserves admonishment for neglect of risk management.

Delta School District finds itself “on the hook” for millions of dollars. To diminish its carbon footprint, Delta entered into an agreement with FortisBC Alternative Energy Service for the installation of more environmentally friendly technologies. The technologies were expected to reduce emissions by 69% which would be equivalent to taking 450 cars off the road each year. When it approved the agreement, the B.C. Utilities Commission expressed concern about the financial risk the school district was assuming. Years later, FortisBC applied for and was granted a rate increase by the B.C. Utilities Commission that required the school district to pay about $1million dollars more each year for energy.

My hunch (and it is only a hunch) is that the Board neglected to think about the risks associated with the commitment they made. When you do not think about risks, you are really self-insuring – saying in effect that we can pay the price or suffer the consequences if something goes wrong.

It has too often been my experience that school boards do not think about risks. Early in the pandemic I wrote a blog about its economic impact on international student enrollment and school board budgets. In a more recent blog, I wrote about post-pandemic budgetary belt-tightening.

It is prudent to think about risks. When we buy a appliance, the salesperson often asks, “do you want to buy an enhanced warranty?” They are asking us to consider protecting ourselves against the cost of repair or replacement if the appliance malfunctions after the normal warranty period has expired. The protection is the extended warranty. The manufacturer has protected itself against the risk of appliance malfunction by excluding from the warranty operator error or misuse of the appliance. If we decline the extended warranty or the rental car insurance, we are choosing to self-insure.

Thinking about what could go wrong sounds pessimistic but is simply being cautious about protecting oneself. People living in areas that flood in the spring have sandbags at hand to protect their homes from flooding. Drivers purchase insurance in the event their cars are damaged or stolen, or they are involved in an accident in which people have been injured.

Thinking about what could go wrong needs to be coupled with thinking about the likelihood of the risk occurring and about the consequences of the occurrence of the risk. How likely is the anticipated risk? What impact will the anticipated risk have if it is does occur? Answering these questions is a probability/loss impact assessment. That is what actuaries who work for insurance companies do for a living. They ask, “what can go wrong?” and ‘how likely is it that will go wrong.” Once they determine that, they establish a premium that the insurance company charges to protect itself from losing money paying off the claims people make when whatever it was they were protecting themselves from takes place.

When Delta chose to install the new energy systems, they must have decided that those systems would work. I know this because they removed the systems the new technology replaced rather than keeping them as a parallel backup system. That calculation is just like the calculation computer users make when the decide to back-up their files. Among those who protect themselves from loss of information by backing up their files, there are those who calculated the impact and cost of having the back-up stolen or destroyed. They back up their files to the cloud. Back-up systems, extended warranties, automobile insurance, and running parallel systems are all strategies to mitigate the risk of loss.

Monitoring risks is another consideration. If I did not take the extended warranty, I had better begin putting money aside to replace the appliance as it ages because eventually it will need to be replaced. If I do not, I run the risk of making an unanticipated large expenditure. The lawyer representing Delta in its dispute with Fortis said, “The impact on my client's financial position is going to be very significant… the estimated $1 million in additional costs . . .  is going to have to come out of the program budget by which the district operates its schools.”

I said earlier that my hunch was the Delta Board neglected to think about the risks associated with the commitment they made. I said that because I do not think that, having evaluated the risks, they would have chosen to self-insure against them knowing the potential impact on programs and services for students.

Of course (and I say this tongue in check) the Delta Board could have attempted to protect itself against the annual loss of $1million by buying a lot of stock in Fortis!

Predictable response and unintended consequences

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

The looming reductions in school board budgets should not come as a surprise to anyone. The COVID 19 pandemic has been devastating for most people and costly for governments. School Board business officials have been warning school trustees that the dramatic decline in international students, increase costs for the efforts to alleviate the pandemic’s impact on school children and staff, and enrollment decreases were putting strains on budgets despite the additional money that governments provided to boards. Formal warnings probably weren’t necessary, but some governments have issued formal notice that belt-tightening is on its way.

School boards with sound strategic plans for the provision of education are likely well-positioned to cope with reductions. It will not be easy, but having a plan enables boards to prioritize the allocation of the resources that will be available. Those without such plans will have a more challenging time.

I have observed the school board budget setting process for more than 50 years. The response from teachers’ organizations is predictable. They will point out that children suffer when budget reductions occur, and that vulnerable children will suffer more than others. Thus, when CBC described the likely budget reductions, I was not surprised to read that the president of the BC Teachers’ Federation said:

When budgets aren't sufficient and when cuts have to be made, those who really suffer are children, and they tend to be the most vulnerable children that need the most supports.

As an advocacy organization for its members and for public education, a teachers’ federation must try to enlist support from the public to resist reductions to school board budgets. I get that.

There are a few unintended consequences of making such a statement. First, the claim is misleading. School boards typically go to great lengths to prevent budget shortfalls from affecting the classroom. And never have I seen a board focus budget reductions on services to vulnerable groups of students.

School boards, especially the ones with good plans, keep budget cuts away from the classroom by reducing or deferring expenditures for transportation, custodial care, day-to-day maintenance, district administration, school-sponsored extra-curricular programming, etc. No one likes making such decisions, but that is why we have school boards: to make decisions about how to spend scarce resources.

I do not deny that these decisions have an impact. Some students are affected by these decisions. Their travel time to school may be lengthier, their school less clean and well-maintained, their teachers with less support from district staff, and fewer extra-curricular programs. But it is a mistake and misleading to imply that students are suffering and that the students most vulnerable suffer more. It is untrue.

By almost any standard I can think of, students today are better educated than at any time in the past. They receive more solicitous care and support than ever before. Performance and graduation rates have, for the most part, steadily increased over the past 50 years. I do believe the school system should serve vulnerable students better. No one should be complacent about the equity gaps between groups of students. But, by any objective standard, students will not be worse off because of budget shortfalls.

Besides being untrue, pronouncements about students suffering cause stress for parents, and especially parents of children who are vulnerable. Pronouncements like these erode confidence in public schools and prompt those who can afford the tuition to move their children to private schools.

One only needs to look south of the border to see the impact that 50 years of rhetoric about ‘school failure’ has had on education in the United States. There are two education systems: one public and one private. Over time, the public system has been increasingly starved of the social and political capital that those who now attend private schools brought when their children attended public schools. Even within the public system, boutique programming has increasingly separated students and families by social class, colour, and language.

Few Canadians want such a system. I know I do not. That is why I worry about the spectre of ‘suffering students.’ There are better arguments to make for increasing resources to public education.

COVID 19 draws attention to students missing from school

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 

Heightened attention to systemic issues in education is one of the few good thing to have come from COVID 19.  The inadequacies of online learning and the challenges facing vulnerable student populations are two prominent issues. Another that has only recently received much attention is students who are completely absent from school; they are neither attending school or receiving instruction at home or elsewhere.

Chronic student absenteeism has been a problem as long as there have been formal education systems. In 1874, the provincial government in British Columbia introduced legislation to reduce student absenteeism by linking it to teachers’ pay. This approach to curbing absenteeism, very unpopular with teachers, was abandoned.  Two years later, the Public School Act was amended to put the onus on local boards of school trustees to enforce school attendance for students aged seven to twelve. In 1901, another amendment to the Act raised the minimum school leaving age to 14.

There is a long history of governments, school boards, and schools trying to address student absenteeism. The literature devoted to the topic is voluminous, but the evidence of success is limited.

Chronic absenteeism occurs for numerous reasons.

·       Family factors affecting school attendance include aversion to school because of the child’s or parent’s prior negative experiences; homelessness; insufficient resources for the food, clothing, supplies, and transportation that are needed for school; children who work to supplement family income or care for siblings so that their parents can work; peers or family members who do not value schooling; and the necessity of attending significant cultural community occasions – to name only a few. 

·     Student factors affecting absenteeism include lack of sleep; low self-concept or lack of confidence; boredom; criminal involvement; lack of prior school success; poor health (such as childhood obesity) and mental health (self-harm, suicidal ideation); frequent residential movement; dependence upon unreliable others to accompany or transport the student to school, etc. 

·         The school or the classroom environment can affect absenteeism: unwelcoming environment; lack of challenge or remedial assistance; bullying or shunning by peers; discrimination; in-school and out of school suspension; placement in special education; grade retention; etc.[1]

Confronted by a problem affecting large numbers of students, school systems try to find and implement programs to address the problem. But the enormous range of factors affecting absenteeism makes it difficult to craft a ‘program.’

There are many descriptions of programs designed to address absenteeism, but the evidence is scant. The programs that have demonstrable evidence of success are few, and their impact is limited. In fact, even successful programs only produce marginal improvement in attendance. Although the programs improve attendance, chronic absenteeism remains.

A second challenge to addressing chronic absenteeism has been the episodic attention to the issue. Absenteeism is not a problem that can be eliminated. Student absenteeism – especially chronic absenteeism – is an enduring problem for school systems, one that requires constant attention.

The idiosyncratic and persistent nature of chronic absenteeism makes it an expensive problem to address. Tackling absenteeism is not something that can be done off the side of someone’s desk, making it relatively costly.

But anyone prompted to think that the problem of chronic absenteeism in so intractable that additional resources should not be spent in addressing it should think twice. Everyone is paying the price of chronic absenteeism, not just the student.

• Chronic absence affects the student and the student’s peers. The student achievement of all students is affected by the absences of their peers. Chromic absent students make the teacher’s job more difficult. Adjusting instruction for students who are chronically absent reduces instructional time for other students and slows the pace of instruction.
• Chronically absent students are more likely to be disruptive when present. Classroom disruption eats up valuable instructional time. The impact is particularly great at the elementary school level where students remain with the same teacher throughout the day. Students at the secondary school level do not remain together for every subject, minimizing somewhat the impact of chronically absent students who are disruptive.

The impact of chronic absence is cumulative. Chronically absent students find their educational and life trajectories altered. Their achievement is poorer than their peers who attend school regularly. Lower graduation rates and higher school leaving rates take a toll on their employability, health, and may increase their involvement in crime.

I am hopeful that the attention that COVID 19 has drawn to students missing from school prompts efforts to bring missing students back to school and address chronic absenteeism.

---

[1] See, for example, Reid, K. (2008) The causes of non-attendance: an empirical study. Educational Review, 60(4) 345-357.

Caring for and Educating Students in Care

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

I have been thinking about the students who are most likely to be vulnerable to the negative impact of COVID 19. Near the top of my list are students in care, children and youth receiving out-of-home care who should be in school because of the difference that school makes in their lives. Although estimates vary, there are likely 85,000 to 100,00 students in Canada who receive out-of-home care.

Placement in out-of-home care can occur for many different reasons: physical, sexual, psychological, or emotional abuse, neglect, deprivation, maltreatment, etc. The circumstances leading to children being in out-of-home placements and the challenges they face while in care have immediate and long-term consequences, including poor academic performance, dropping out of school, poor mental health, and poor attachment to the labour market.

Students in care are typically less engaged in school. High rates of tardiness and absenteeism are symptomatic of their more tenuous engagement. They are often disorganized (do not complete in-class and homework assignments), have poor mental health, and are involved in disciplinary incidents that often lead to suspensions and expulsions. Students in care are more likely than average to dropout. They have lower rates of graduation and are less likely than average to transition to post-secondary education because of their poor academic records.

Their negative experiences at home, in out-of-home care, and at school have a cumulative impact. When students in care become adults, they have more difficulty finding work, keeping jobs, and maintaining a stable residence. It is not surprising that many former students in care live in poverty, are homeless, and more likely to become involved in the criminal justice system.

Education is one of the key ingredients to ensuring the success of students in care. Several years ago, my colleagues and I reviewed the literature devoted to school-related efforts to support students in care. Although the literature was a bit of a hodgepodge, we were able to identify several factors that seem to play an important part in propelling students in care along a successful trajectory.

It will not surprise anyone that relationships matter. As it does with everyone, stable and trusting relationships with adults and peers, and the development of a stable social network make a big difference. Connection to others and the benefit that social and emotional support provide are very important.

It may be tempting to cut students in care some slack because of their circumstances. But doing the opposite appears to have a bigger impact. Setting high expectations and encouraging students in care to push themselves leads to better outcomes if the environment is physically, emotionally, and socially safe. Schools are often the safest environments that some children and youth experience.

The reasons why they are in care and circumstances in which students in care find themselves differ significantly from one student to another. That means students in care require services and supports tailored to their needs. The educational services and supports that students in care require will not have an impact until their basic needs are met.

Schools can make a difference but not without collaboration with agencies outside of school. Cooperation between schools and community agencies is essential to preventing students-in-care from falling through the cracks. Collaboration is not easily achieved without attention to clear definitions of roles and responsibilities, and resolving policy differences (privacy and information sharing, for example).

It appears crucial that there be someone in the school that the student in care attends who is designated as a case manager, an advocate and mentor for the student. Educators designated as a case manager must be freed from other responsibilities to carry the case management responsibilities effectively. Another approach to case management would be to designate the responsibility to a child and youth worker or a school-based social-work trained professional.

The case manager can help to ensure coordination among community agencies and services and supports in school for the benefit of the student in care. The active involvement of the student in care is also important. That involvement builds capacity for self-advocacy, a trait that will help the student in care when s/he leaves school.

Post-pandemic belt-tightening coming to a school district near you

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

The roll-out of emergency funding in response to the pandemic was accomplished more quickly in Canada than in the US because of our Westminster-stye of government. But provincial governments are beginning to issue warnings that the COVID emergency funding will not continue indefinitely. Ontario’s Deputy Minister of Education wrote a cautionary letter to Directors of Education (Superintendents in other jurisdictions) in school boards throughout the province with the subject line “2021-2022 School Year.” She wrote about “the extraordinary steps that school boards and their staff have taken to safely support the learning journey for Ontario students in what continues to be unprecedented times.”

She points out that the actions of boards and their staff were made possible in part because the Government of Ontario disbursed more that $CDN 1.6 billion dollars to support the safe reopening of schools. The letter enumerates the hiring of 7,000 “one-time additional staff” in every group of personnel from principals to custodians, the latter indispensable to ensuring the health and safety in schools.

Having recounted the Provincial Government’s assistance, the letter turns to its main purpose. She reminds Directors that the boards they lead reported to the Ministry that there had been an enrollment decline of approximately 40,000 students attributed to COVID. The letter recaps that the Ontario Government helped to mitigate the impact of the decline by providing $400 million in “one-time stabilization funding” that enabled boards “to maintain teaching and education worker positions and a high standard of programming.”

The fourth paragraph advises that in planning for the coming school years “school boards should take a cautious approach in their planning given the uncertainty in enrolment and adjust accordingly for the probable loss of one-time funding that was provided for  2020-2021” The letter was prompted because labour agreements require staffing decisions to be made this Spring for the Fall. That school boards will layoff “more than the typical number” of staff is understandable.

I recount this announcement because similar letters will likely be issued across the country regardless of the political stripe of the governments. Provinces and territories do not have the revenue to maintain emergency and stabilization funding. And, although low interest rates make borrowing less expensive, such borrowing would be politically risky.

The good news is school boards that have strategic educational plans and regularly evaluate their program will be better able to adjust to the withdrawal of emergency and stabilization funding. Having a plan allows boards to prioritize the allocation of scarce dollars. Regular evaluation enables them to know which programs are effective, efficient, and economical. That knowledge enables them to know which programs might be eliminated in times when funds are limited.

The bad news is that most schools boards do not have strategic educational plans that provide a reference point and help boards to prioritize spending. Most school boards do not evaluate programs, leaving decisions about program reductions subject to anecdotal information about their effectiveness and efficiency.

Boards facing immediate decisions about the allocation of scarce resources do not have the time to develop strategic education plans and evaluation frameworks to help them make the difficult decisions they are facing. But it is not too late for boards to develop plans and evaluation frameworks that will guide their long-term planning and their responses to exigencies like the ones they are currently facing. Resources are always scarce. Even when they increase, there is never enough funding for everything one would like to do for students. It is better to have a strategic educational plan and evaluation framework than to take the “journey” without a road map.

All teachers teach to the test (or at least they should)

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Opponents of large-scale assessments say that they prompt teachers to teach to the test. As I have said in an earlier blog, if the assessments measure performances on things that are important to be able to do or know, teaching to the test is not a bad thing.

But all teachers “teach to the test.” What I mean by that is all instruction begins with establishing a clear objective or destination. Although they may not (should not) wait for external assessments to determine whether the students have achieved the objective or reached the destination, teachers use classroom assessments that they have devised to monitor student progress along the way and, often, at the end of a unit.

Sometimes called backward design or backward planning, the process starts with the end point of the unit or lesson and works backward toward the beginning. Once the goals (and big ideas) are established, teachers develop the instructional sequence that they think will help the students reach the goals, including the ‘way points’ or indicators of progress that teachers assess along the path.

The assessments may entail simple observation on the part of the teacher, the completion of a task or problem the teacher has set, a quiz, a demonstration, a dramatization, a graphic representation, essays, presentations, project work, portfolios, etc. All teacher assessments are high stakes in the sense that cumulatively they will figure in a teacher’s overall appraisal of a student’s performance.

Teacher-made assessments are very “costly.” They are more costly than large scale assessments when you add up the amount of time teachers spend creating and marking the various assessments that they use.

With both teacher assessments and large-scale assessments, validity is a big deal. Are the judgments or decisions made based on the assessment(s) justified by the data generated by them? For instance, I do not eat at [restaurant name] because the first time I ate there I had food poisoning. The tenuous connection between my decision and the data is insufficient to justify my conclusion. Can a recommendation for a gifted program be made because the student produced an imaginative science-fair project? Does a two-minute audition justify a director’s decision to offer or deny a leading role in a school play?

Reliability is another important consideration in assessment. Does the assessment accurately measure whatever it is trying to measure? As I have mentioned in an earlier blog, when I was a child our furnace was fueled with oil from a large tank in our basement. Each fall my father would climb a step ladder and put a stick into the tank to determine how much oil we needed. This was important because the truck that delivered the oil served many customers. The driver, to ensure that there was sufficient oil in the truck, would ask in advance, “how much do you need?” My father would tell him. But my father’s measurement of the oil in the tank was very inconsistent. Sometimes he would insert the stick in the tank on an angle. In the low light in the basement, he would sometimes misread the level on the stick. His appraisal of the volume of oil we needed was often mistaken because of the measurement errors he made. The driver would be annoyed when my father’s assessment was too low, and the driver would have to return to finish filling the tank.

Individual teacher assessments are often unreliable. Fatigue, the pressure of time, ambiguous instructions, and many other factors detract from the reliability of teacher assessments. It is fortunate, however, that teachers make (or should make) many individual assessments before arriving at a judgement about performance (assigning a grade for the year, for example). Although notoriously imprecise, the use of multiple assessments throughout the year is assumed to average out the measurement error.

Interpretation (by parents and other teachers, for example) of the judgements that teachers make about student performance in an area of study is very challenging because teachers vary in what they consider in making an assessment. For some, the assessment reflects work habits, punctuality, task persistence, engagement, etc. There is little consistency across teachers and, often, little consistency from one assessment to another for the same teacher.

Lack of consistency about the features that a teacher is taking into account and inconsistency across teachers compromise the validity of the judgements and decisions made on the basis of assessments. These undisclosed aspects of a teacher’s assessment might be one reason why some teachers complain about “teaching to the test.” The “test” is only one of several things that a teacher uses to gauge student achievement.

That all teachers “teach to the test” is definitely not an indictment of what they do. Teaching to the test is a crucial element of all instruction and should be celebrated.  

Enjoy Your Spring Break, Charles

I will post again on March 31st

The Challenge of Classroom Assessment

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Teachers’ classroom assessments are high stakes. They are the basis for decisions about promotion of students from one grade to the next, the awarding of graduation diplomas and scholarships, and they are often consequential for admission to post-secondary studies.

High stake decisions are not the only purposes to which classroom assessments are put. Teachers use classroom assessments to inform students about whether they have mastered the knowledge they are supposed to have acquired, to plan and modify the teachers’ instructional plans, to provide opportunities for students to practice and apply what they have learned, to determine the knowledge and understanding students need to progress to the next level, to communicate to the student and the student’s parents how the student is doing, to motivate students and more.

Teacher classroom assessment occurs daily and is labour intensive. Observation of student performance happens frequently albeit unsystematically throughout the day. Teachers create numerous kinds of assessments. Assessments include quizzes, tests, and opportunities for demonstration and oral presentations. Appraising performance on each of the teacher-created assessments is time-consuming.

The challenge with teacher assessment is that there isn’t agreement among teachers about what should be assessed. Teacher assessments are driven by a teacher’s professional judgment and, thus, by the teacher’s values. Some teachers believe that assessment should be confined to performance in the subject being assessed. Others believe that assessment should consider student attitude, motivation, or work ethic. Most teachers are aware that a student’s background, gender orientation, and/or personality are not relevant considerations for assessment.

Some teachers argue that assessment should be confined to the student’s performance in the classroom. Others say that homework is an extension of the classroom. Those opposed to assessing homework point out that homework is a form of practice – the most important facet of which is the teacher’s feedback. Others take a developmental perspective, arguing that a formal assessment of homework (beyond just the teacher’s feedback) is acceptable, but that teachers should take a developmental perspective by weighting the assessments more heavily the closer they are to the end of the unit. Some teachers are opposed to assessing homework because it is difficult to determine whether the student worked independently or with the assistance of others.

Teachers sometimes say that colleagues place too much value on print-based assessments (quizzes, tests, essays, reports, etc.) penalizing students who understand the material but have difficulty demonstrating what they know in writing. These teachers supplement written assessment with other demonstrations of understanding (oral presentations, dramatizations, diagrams, use of manipulatives, etc.).

Educational researcher Susan Brookhart and her colleagues reviewed the literature devoted to grading over the past 100 years with a particular emphasis on the meaning and value associated with grades. Among the many important findings of this review were:

·       Teachers primarily assess achievement using tests.

·       Teachers assess many non-academic factors in assigning grades, including effort, improvement, perceptions of student ability, completion of work, and other student behaviour.

·       The relative emphasis teachers assign to academic and non-academic factors differs markedly across teachers.

·       Assessment varies considerably by grade level.

The conclusion that Brookhart and her colleague draw is worth quoting at length:

This review suggests that most teachers’ grades do not yield a pure achievement measure, but rather a multidimensional measure dependent on both what the students learn and how they behave in the classroom. This conclusion, however, does not excuse low quality grading practices or suggest there is no room for improvement. One hundred years of grading research have generally confirmed large variation among teachers in the validity and reliability of grades, both in the meaning of grades and the accuracy of reporting.

Their conclusion is troubling. Inconsistency in the assessment process means that teachers other than the one who made the assessment find it difficult to know how to interpret their colleague’s assessment. It takes a leap of faith to believe that, in the aggregate, teacher assessments can support the high stakes decisions on which they are based.

Some ministries and school boards try to reduce the variability of teacher assessments by encouraging the use of performance standards and separating the appraisal of academic and non-academic factors. While those efforts are to be commended, those practices are also inconsistent across jurisdictions.

Notwithstanding these efforts, much more work is needed to improve classroom assessment, including clarifying the purpose of assessment, distinguishing between academic and non-academic factors, improving teacher preparation in assessment and in communicating results of assessment to students, parents, and others who make use of assessment results.

_______________

Brookhart, S. M., Guskey, T. R., Bowers, A. J., McMillan, J. H., Smith, J. K., Smith, L. F., Stevens, M.T., Welsh, M.E. (2016). A Century of Grading Research: Meaning and Value in the Most Common Educational Measure. Review of Educational Research, 86(4), 803-848.

The fallacies of a sampling approach to student assessment

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

My previous blog examined some of the claims made about large scale student assessment: that they prompt teachers to teach to the test; waste valuable time and resources; do not assess everything that is important; are stressful for students and teachers; do not take into account differences among students; and allow some individuals and organizations to make invidious comparisons among schools.

Another argument that opponents make about large scale student assessment is that they should be administered to a percentage of students (a sample) rather than all the students at a particular level (census approach). That, it is argued, would save resources, and prevent those who misuse the results from doing so. It is doubtful that a sample approach to large scale student assessment would achieve those desired outcomes. But there is a more serious problem: sampling will not work if one is really concerned about equity of outcomes for all students because it reduces the ability to identify factors that impede success for each and every student.

 A sampling approach (as opposed to a census approach) has other deficiencies. Sampling prevents examining the trajectories of students. In other words, with a sample, it is almost impossible to tell whether the students who performed poorly at grade 3 had improved by grade 6. Sampling doesn’t allow the system to see what has happened to transient students, a particularly vulnerable population that is easy to overlook. It also increases imprecision by increasing measurement error. If you want to know how students’ prior performance relates to their subsequent performance, you need to survey all students.

I can illustrate the benefits of a census approach from a study in British Columbia. In 2006, the Minister of Education described high school completion rates of students for whom English was a second language (ESL) to be better than any other group the Ministry assessed (Victoria, Parliamentary Debates, p. 3530). After a closer examination of the data, Bruce Garnett and I (Garnett and Ungerleider, 2008) confirmed the accuracy of the Minister’s statement, but found that the high achievement of the numerous Chinese speakers masked the fact that smaller subgroups of the ESL population were faring poorly in the school system. We found that the strong performance of Chinese speakers (the largest ESL group in the data set) pulled the aggregate ESL graduation rates upwards. The graduation rates of all groups except Chinese speakers were very low, generally below 60%. The worst outcomes were among ESL speakers of Spanish, Vietnamese and Filipino languages. Identifying the differential success of various ESL groups would not have been possible if the data set had been generated on a sample basis. You cannot systematically address problems that you cannot identify.

Another advantage of a census approach is that it permits analyses that can help to identify factors over which the system exerts influence that facilitate or impede educational progress of groups of learners (for example, First Nations, Metis, and Inuit students, second language learners, students with special needs, etc.).

Most important, if equity among students is a priority, samples simply do not work. Even with carefully drawn samples it is difficult to detect small sub-populations of students to support meaningful analyses. I can illustrate this with reference to British Columbia’s student population which, at the time of the calculations below, was about 40,848 students at grade 4. With a student population of that size, we could draw a sample of 1,481 student, a number sufficient to meet the requirements for sound statistical analyses of the grade level population.

However, if you wanted to break down results by school board or wanted to study the performance of sub-groups of students, the sample would not work. Here is an illustration of why it doesn’t. The illustration assumes that the assessment is intended to produce results that fall within a confidence interval of +/- 2.5% 95 times out of 100 at the school board level.

School Boards	Number of Students available for assessment in 2019/20	Number of students required for a sample with a confidence interval of 2.5 at a 95% level of confidence
Abbotsford	1524	765
Alberni	294	247
Arrow Lakes	34	33
Boundary	99	93
Bulkley Valley	144	132
Burnaby	1740	816
Campbell River	397	316
Cariboo-Chilcotin	305	255
Central Coast	26	26
Central Okanagan	1690	805
Chilliwack	1022	614
Coast Mountains	271	230
Comox Valley	631	448
Conseil Scolaire francophone	601	432
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~	Table truncated*	~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Richmond	1377	726
Rocky Mountain	288	243
Saanich	484	368
Sea to Sky	409	323
Sooke	868	555
Southeast Kootenay	466	358
Stikine	15	15
Sunshine Coast	235	204
Surrey	5459	1199
Vancouver	3493	1067
Vancouver Island North	94	89
Vancouver Island West	35	34
Vernon	610	437
West Vancouver	501	378
Grand Total	40,848	22,200
*FULL TABLE AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

         

In very large boards such as the Surrey School Board, the number of students sampled (1199) would be a relatively small proportion of the grade 4 student population (5,459). In a smaller board such as Vancouver Island North, the sample required (89) would encompass almost all the 94 grade 4 students in the Board. In the Conseil Scolaire Francophone Board the sample required would be more than two-thirds (432) of the 601 grade 4 students.

Overall, if you wanted to break down results by school board or wanted to study the performance of sub-groups of students, you would need to sample more than half of the total number of students at grade 4.

It is inconsistent for those concerned about the role education plays in helping to achieve social justice to want to restrict large scale student assessments by arguing in favour of sampling students. Those determined to achieve social justice ought to want to shine a light on discrepancies, not obscure them. My hunch is that, when considering the evidence of the limitation posed by sampling, advocates for social justice will see the benefits of a census approach to large scale student assessment.