Whitbourne, schools, and democracy #nlpoli

Parents in Whitbourne took the provincial government's English School District to court over the closure of the local school.

They won.

It's proof that a few determined people can use the tools at their disposal to fight for what they believe in.  They don't need some government-paid consultant, no matter what someone angling for a government job might suggest.  People need only have the courage of their convictions.

Courage.

Convictions.

That's all you need.  That's how democracy works.

Learn Now. Pay Later. #nlpoli

A college or university education has an undeniable value both to the student and to the society as a whole.

But should either party bear a disproportionate share of the cost of the education? 

Of course not.  The challenge for policy makers in the provincial government and at the university and the colleges in the province is how to strike a balance between the two. The one that’s been in place for the past decade works extremely well for students whose representatives  – not surprisingly – are pushing for an even sweeter and sweeter deal regardless of the financial implications to the university and the provincial government. 

Free tuition is fundamentally unworkable.  There’s no reason to believe that free tuition would improve participation rates,  successful completion rates, or any other desirable outcome for society.  By the same token, forcing students to bear the full cost of tuition up front would likely serve as a powerful deterrent since few individuals and families could afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars post-secondary education costs these days.

There might be an alternative.

Autonomy for Memorial University #nlpoli

One of the things about writing SRBP is that posts sometimes show changes in thinking as your humble e-scribbler gains more information.

Over the last few posts and on Twitter, some of you may have seen a comment to the effect that you could replace the government subsidy to the university with a tuition hike and be cash to the good.  Well, that just is’;t the case.  As Tuesday’s post showed, the government grant covers about 71% of the university’s operating revenue every year.  Tuition covered about the same percentage (11%) as it did in 1977.

Taking a hard look at the current numbers showed that tuition and fees from the 18,700 graduate, undergraduate, and distance students  at the university, full- and part-time brings in slightly less than $60 million annually.

What hasn’t changed, though, is the starting point of this mini series from last Friday:  the university needs cash.  The question is how to get it.

“China is already so yesterday” #nlpoli

Memorial University’s dean of graduate studies wasn’t so keen on China as a source of students in February 2011.  In a post on her blog Postcards from the edge, Noreen Golfman wrote;

The point is that Memorial, if it is to play seriously in the realm of international recruitment, cannot afford merely to be part of the bandwagon. It has to get ahead of it. China is already so yesterday.

The academics even invented a word for the trend – surprise, surprise  - at universities to seek more and more of their student population from other countries.  They call it “internationalization”.

The motivation is simple:  money.  Golfman acknowledged that point up front in the same blog post.  The available pool of young people is getting smaller, thanks to the fact that birthrates are dropping off in the developed world.  As a result, universities have to go on a hunt for students to keep everything operating:

And, so, yes, the motivation has been, in the first instance, largely economic.

None of that is a surprise.  Nor would anyone be surprised to find that by November 2011, Golfman was in China on a student-hunting safari. She was back there again in 2012.

The price of subsidy – MUN Tuition

In early June, a CBC investigation revealed that Memorial University is charging special fees for some international graduates students. That was just one of a series of problems with the international student programs noted in the report. 

Some of the students were Chinese.  As it turns out, 36% of [all] Memorial’s grad [international] students are from China.*  That’s a figure that turned up in a news release on June 27 that came out of the recent junket by the Premier, a couple of her retiring ministers, Ed Martin from Nalcor and Memorial president Gary Kachinowski.

One agreement signed on the trip set up “the China Scholarship Council and Memorial University of Newfoundland Joint Funding Program, which will support up to 20 qualified doctoral students who will be jointly funded by Memorial University and the CSC to pursue doctoral studies.”

We can get there from here #nlpoli

People across the province are astounded that some students at Memorial University cannot correctly identify countries, continents, and oceans on a map of the world.

Geographic illiteracy shocks people.  Well, it should, just like they should be appalled that 44% of the people over 15 years of age in this province read below the minimum level needed to function in modern society.  And they should be left speechless at the idea that 66% of the people in Newfoundland and Labrador over 15 years of age lack the numeracy skills for modern society.

Literacy plan still MIA #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Newfoundland and Labrador has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the country.

There’s a huge demand for skilled labour in the province and that illiteracy level doesn’t help.

The 1992 Strategic Economic Plan recognised the connection between literacy and economic development:  it’s not like government officials weren’t generally aware of the concept.

And yet:

“There are no province-wide initiatives to deal with family literacy, aboriginal literacy, English as a Second Language, GED (General Educational Development) preparation or workplace literacy and essential skills,” [Literacy NL executive director Caroline Vaughan] said.

That’s a killer quote taken from a story the Telegram ran Monday about a news release from Literacy Newfoundland and Labrador.  They are wondering where the heck the strategic literacy plan went. 

The Telegram again:

Literacy NL said is was told by the province last September the plan would be released in the 2011 calendar year.

In case you are left scratching your head, be assured that the provincial government started work on a literacy plan in 2008.  They even had consultations.

As you can see from the picture, they started work on it so long ago that the link is dead from the news release announcing the consultation to the consultation document. In fact if you try and find anything on “literacy” in the education department, you’ll find yourself out of luck.  Most the links in this search your humble e-scribbler tried on Monday night turned up 404s – page not found. Ditto another search run from the front page of the government website.

You really couldn’t make this shit up.

If you want a strategic literacy plan from the government, you can find one.

It’s a link to one developed 11 years ago when Judy Foote was education minister.

You really, really couldn’t make this up.

And if you want to find the adult learning and literacy section, you will have to guess that it is now part of Joan Burke’s new department of advanced learning and skills development.  The government’s website won’t tell you where it is, though.

A search of the advance education department website for “literacy plan” redirects to a search of the old human resources, labour and employment department. That’s foolish since adult literacy belonged to education before the recent re-organization. Luckily for the government types, people who have a problem with literacy likely don’t have enough computer knowledge to get totally frigged up by the government’s website. They wouldn’t be able to get to the advanced education site to get misdirected by the search engine.

You really, really, really could not make this stuff up.

That’s not to say that successive ministers of education haven’t done something about adult literacy.

In 2010, education minister Darin King issued a news release that endorsed an awareness program on literacy being launched by the four Atlantic provinces.

In 2009, the education department issued a news release on behalf of the Council of the Federation to announce the Council had recognised someone here for achievement in adult literacy.

Aside from those news releases, though, the education department hasn’t been able to deliver the latest update to the provincial literacy plan. 

Regular readers of these e-scribbles will be noticing a familiar pattern here.  For whatever reason, the current administration cannot seem to deliver anything. They’ve got a chronic problem.:

• Serial Government:  the “Northern Strategic Plan” that was out of date before they released it.
• Serial Government:  the original business department.
• What plan was that again? The NSP also wasn’t much of a plan;  it was pretty much just a list of spending.  Sounds suspiciously like the $5.0 billion infrastructure “strategy” in the most recent Auditor General’s report.
• A list as long as your arm:  Check the section on building maintenance in the AG report and you’ll find another example of government’s fundamental management problems.  Hundreds of buildings need repairs.  Some need so much overdue maintenance work it would be cheaper to tear the buildings down and build a new one.
• The missing oil royalty regime:  according to the energy plan from 2007, the Tories were supposed to deliver a natural gas royalty regime (under development since 1997) as well as a completely new oil royalty regime.  They posted something called a gas royalty in April 2010 but the thing isn’t back by regulations.  Is it real or just a fake?
• There’s also the churn in senior management.
• And the fact that massive cost over-runs and delays are now the norm in provincial government public works.

The literacy plan joins a long list of commitments that are missing in action or went missing for years.

You can read Literacy NL’s  submission to the consultation on the literacy plan here.

- srbp -

The value of education, redux #nlpoli #cdnpoli

The most recent report from the Council of Ministers of Education of Canada shows that Grade 8 students in Newfoundland and Labrador score among the lowest in Canada for tests of mathematics and below the national average score for English.

Education minister Clyde Jackman, a former teacher himself, has tried to shift attention away from what the results are:  yet another reminder of the dismal state of the province’s educational system.
None of this is surprising.

As SRBP noted in August 2010, the province’s population consistently scores poorly in national evaluations of reading comprehension and mathematics scores.

Reading and writing is a challenge. 

Almost half the adult population of Newfoundland and Labrador doesn’t have a literacy level that would allow them to “function well in Canadian society.”  

Basic math skills are an even bigger problem. 

Almost two out of every three adult Newfoundlanders and Labradorians don’t have the skill with numbers and mathematics – they call it numeracy – to function well in Canadian society. 

Numeracy is actually a far greater problem because it involves not just an ability to add, subtract, multiple and divide.  Numeracy also involves logic and reasoning, probability and statistics.

The problem is not a lack of money.  The provincial government spends significant amounts on education.   Ask any provincial Conservative and that’s about the only bit of informational they will cite that rings true.

Other politicians want to spend even more money on education.  In a  demonstration of the findings about problems with logic and reasoning, these well-intentioned souls advocate policies that would not produce the desired result.  In fact, evidence suggests that the ideas like free university tuition would make worse the issue of access for people from low income families.

The problem is not that we don’t spend enough.

The problem is  that we do not recognise there is a problem in the first place.

Clyde Jackman’s response is typical.

Nor do we collectively seem to appreciate the extent to which education is the foundation for future success both individually and collectively. 

Social  progress.

Economic development.

Improved health.

Innovation.

All come from improved education.

The third order problem is that what changes or reforms we have pursued in the past decade have been the wrong ones, driven entirely by the wrong motive.  The collapse of the educational system in 2005 under the Conservatives to a series of five super educational districts was entirely an exercise in bureaucratic consolidation of power.

The current school districts are too large, as former education minister Philip Warren noted in 2008.  Additionally, the 2005 reforms took the community out of education.  The reforms that Warren and his cabinet colleagues initiated in the 1990s aimed at increasing local control of education and of giving parents a greater level of involvement in education.

Recent changes to the school system in the metropolitan St. John’s area are an example of the pernicious, deleterious effect the 2005 school board re-organization has wrought. Education bureaucrats in the government department and the school district concocted a plan among themselves, discarded an earlier understanding with parents and then engaged in a cynical manipulation to force their pre-conceived outcome on those directly affected by their decisions.

It is no accident that all of this took place in an environment in which political leaders and their associates took every effort to stifle debate, ruthlessly attack those who dissented and pushed attention instead toward crusades that were, in truth, little more than political Punch and Judy shows.

Some of those who fought most zealously for the political theatrics are now shifting their stories, trying to ignore their own past involvement in making the mess. Others have not. They all still rattle around in the Echo Chamber.

The state of education in our province, like the state of our politics, is a sign of the extent to which we have turned away from the values that we once shared as a society.  We have lost sight of what is valuable and lasting and replaced it with the superficial, the trivial.

The first step to changing that is to recognise there is a problem.

And with yet more evidence that the provincial education system is failing, the problem is getting harder and harder to ignore.

- srbp -

What he said: education bureaucrats version #nlpoli

The Telegram’s Brian Jones puts the new school board policy on  dishonesty in the correct perspective:

Behaviour is not separate from their beloved “academic outcomes” (curses on educational jargon; in former times, teachers simply and more accurately referred to “results”).

In fact, behaviour is an essential aspect of academics.

Responsible parents encourage their children to be diligent, hardworking and interested in their studies: put in effort; don’t be lazy; do your best.

The district’s new policy on cheating makes a mockery of parents’ efforts.

More importantly, the policy mocks students who don’t cheat. It insults their honest efforts to study and to learn.

Read the whole column.  Jones nails a bunch of other aspects.

- srbp -

The importance of education: education and the economy

The National Post’s Kelly McParland offered a colourful chart last November comparing a number of things, including federal transfers to provinces (on a per person basis), provincial gross domestic product and the amount spent per person on education.

There are also some bullet points. 

One stood out:

Newfoundland has strong investment, high GDP, generous transfers, yet still has the country’s highest unemployment and spends very little on education. Might those last two be related?

They might well be related. 

But then again, it is hard to know for sure given that the figures for per capita education spending, for example,  are from 2006 and unemployment is from 2010. There’s no indication why the figures are from different years but they are;  it’s not like the information is secret or otherwise unavailable. 

As for employment rates, in October 2010 it was around 13%  - according to the Post chart - and in October 2006, it was 14%. The participation rate is up slightly in 2010 compared to 2006 (61% versus 58-59%).

Still, it’s hard to escape the idea that there is a connection between education and economic performance.

Consider this some food for thought.

- srbp -

Drop-out drop detail

The 2008 report on schools from the provincial education department is a wealth of useful information on one of the most important government service areas.

Chapter 10 is about school leavers.  In light of the Statistics Canada report on drop-outs, it’s worth taking a closer look at the way the drop-out rate dropped in this province.

As we know from the Statistics Canada report, 19.9% of young people dropped out of school in Newfoundland and Labrador, on average, in the three years 1991-1993.  By 1996, that figure had declined to 16.7%.

By 2006, that number was down to 8.9%. The rate was lower in 2003, continued downward for the next two years and then jumped up in 2006. The current rate  - 7.4%  - is actually about what the rate was in 2005. The table is taken from the provincial government report.

Media reports indicate that a higher percentage of males than females dropped out in this province in 2009 (103% versus 6.6%). That’s a change from a decade and more ago when the male rate was dramatically higher.  According to CBC, “while rates have declined for both sexes, the rate of decrease was faster for men, narrowing the gap between the two.”

The provincial education department has another statistic, though.  It compares rural versus urban rates of school-leaving.  Here’s the provincial government table comparing the rates for all provinces and for the country as a whole.

This sort of statistic doesn’t bode well for economic development in rural Newfoundland and Labrador. And it doesn’t get any better when one considers the trend in the Eastern district, for example, that shows those graduating high school in rural areas are more likely than urban students to leave with a general pass.  n other words, they aren’t necessarily more likely to enter post-secondary education or training.

If a provincial government could only focus on one area in order to produce economic and social benefits to individuals and to the community as a whole, improving educational performance would be it.

Now it is interesting to pick up on comments on the other post on this report.  Both noted the possible influence of the cod moratorium in 1992 on the decline.  On the face of it, the answer seems to be that the moratorium did influence the rate.  Young people in rural areas, especially males, tended to leave school since they could make a living in the fishery or other similar work with a limited education.  Without the cod fishery they might have stayed in school.

Maybe.

The idea is worth exploring but the answer is likely to be more complex. Don’t forget that about 70,000 left Newfoundland and Labrador in the aftermath of the moratorium.  While the drop-out rate declined dramatically in the period between 1993 and 2005, the persistence of a high drop-out rate in rural Newfoundland  suggests there might be other factors at work.

Still, these numbers bear further consideration.

Especially considering the literacy and numeracy rates in the province.

- srbp -

Success by the wrong measure

As you’ll discover fairly quickly in reading a Telegram story on class sizes, the idea of capping the number of students per class is aimed at improving student achievement:  more of them will pass;  they’ll get higher grades; that sort of thing.

In other words, by giving each classroom teacher fewer students to work with, you improve the chances that each student will do better in school.  You can measure that a number of ways, one of which would be the national testing administered in Grades Three, Six and Nine.

So it is more than a bit odd that the very first sentence in the story says this:

School enrolment numbers suggest the provincial government's plan to cap class sizes has been mostly successful.

The number of students in a school isn’t a measure of success for capping the size of classrooms.  It’s one of the things that can influence the outcome  - better performance by each student – and it is a factor that varies despite the efforts of school administrators.

After all, as the story acknowledges, “[f]rom June to September, for example, a lot of things can change, he said. Children can move away from a certain school or a certain area; children can move into an area.”

So this story doesn’t do anything but tell us all that the people working at school boards managed to put enough teachers in classrooms to hit a target ratio of students to teachers.

That’s nice but it doesn’t really mean they achieved the goal, which, you may recall, was about ensuring students did better in school.

Where’s the measure of that?

- srbp -

The politics and challenges of education reform in post-Confederation Newfoundland and Labrador (Part I)

by Philip J. Warren

Introduction

It's been argued that education goes through cycles, where periods of heightened public criticism and change alternate with times of stability and calm. Certainly, that's what's happened to education in this Province since Confederation. We've had our share of educational changes and reforms, as well as periods of relative calm and public satisfaction, like the one we're now experiencing.

I plan to discuss some of these post-Confederation reforms and their results, in context. What were the major ones in elementary and secondary education? How did changes in our demographic, social, and economic way of life help to shape them? What was the political context in which they occurred? For my purposes, I've defined a reform as a plan or movement, largely government-directed, which attempts to bring about a systematic improvement in education, province-wide.

Because of time, my comments on the reforms of the 1950s 60s, 70s, and 80s will be brief. I'll discuss the 1990s in more detail, because it was then that the Province experienced one of the most significant educational changes in its history: the reform of the denominational system. While I'll discuss the reforms separately, of course they overlapped and were interactive. I'll conclude with some of the more important challenges with which I believe elementary and secondary education in Newfoundland and Labrador is now faced.

The 50s and 60s – The Access and Equality Agenda

The 1950s and 1960s were decades of dramatic physical growth and expansion in Newfoundland education. Largely because of our high birth rate and heightened expectations as a result of Confederation, enrolments doubled between 1949 and 1964. The numbers of teachers and classrooms more than doubled during that period. (Would you believe that Newfoundland had 1266 schools in 1964-65, compared with 280 today.) The education agenda, then, focused primarily on providing greater access and equality: building more schools, educating more and better teachers, improving school retention, and reducing inequalities between rural and urban schools.

To increase access and enhance equality, the Government developed several new programs, including the construction of regional and central high schools. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, over 100 such schools were constructed and many elementary schools consolidated. These consolidations were made possible by an improved network of roads which had reduced the isolation of many Newfoundland settlements. Programs of scholarships and bursaries were expanded so that many high school students could leave their small communities and attend larger schools elsewhere.

In the late 1960s, major changes were made in the governance of Newfoundland education, including changes to the denominational system. The Anglicans, United Church, Salvation Army, and Presbyterians fully integrated their educational services. Religious leaders like Bishop Robert Seaborn, and leading educators such as Cec Roebothan, and John Acreman, were particularly important in that process.

Other structural reforms, including the reorganization of the Department of Education along functional lines, the elimination of literally hundreds of small school boards (we had 270 school boards in 1964), and the further consolidation of schools, were prompted by the work of the 1960s Royal Commission. The primary goal of that Report was to provide greater equality of educational opportunity, particularly for students in rural areas of the Province, and to make more efficient use of our scarce financial resources.

A word about the politics of the times. Premier Smallwood was very passionate about the importance of education, not only for personal development, but also to address social problems and promote economic growth and development. He firmly believed that the real hope of Newfoundland lay in education. Later in life, he described his accomplishments in education, particularly the establishment of Memorial University, as his second most important legacy.

I believe that the Government brought about a virtual transformation of our educational system during the 1960s. Somewhat ironically, Mr. Smallwood later became a victim of the revolution in education over which he presided. The new generation of educated voters became a major force in his political demise.

Part 2...

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