Failure of our schools

Our provincial government wants to make B.C. the best-educated, most literate jurisdiction on the continent. As it stands, “31 per cent of British Columbians may have difficulty reading this sentence.”

According to Literacy B.C., more than 40 per cent of working-age people in the province have a hard time with the every day demands of reading, writing and using numbers. This negatively affects their ability to work, as well as to access information essential to their own and their family’s health, safety, and well-being.

Nationally, close to half of Canadian adults – some nine million people – do not have everyday reading skills, according to the latest International Adult Literacy Survey. This puts canada squarely in the middle of the pack of OECD nations. Worse still, Canadian literacy has barely budged in over a decade.

Where are all the functionally illiterates coming from? Is their a factory grinding ‘em out? The answer is yes, and it’s called the neighbourhood public school. Most children who struggle with the printed word in Grade 1 still have difficulty in Grade 4 and are most at risk of having trouble reading as adults, Simon Fraser University education professor Judith Scott says.

To put it bluntly, our schools aren’t making the grade for many. We may even have a ‘quiet crisis’ on our hands. As BC School Trustees Association puts it: “Schools are not going to hell in a hand basket. Nor are they prospering in a land of milk and honey.” Although the sky is not falling, it's not entirely sunny either.

True, schools are a reflection of society. The question becomes where to start for an “A” for education reform. The answer? We can’t fix society but maybe, just maybe, we can improve society by fixing our schools.

Now, the sad truth is that there has been no sustained, discernable improvement in the public school system in at least a generation, where all we have been doing is cranking up the alibis and letting our kids down. I say, let’s stop the blame game and quit trotting out the tired old excuses such as “those poor souls.” CD Howe report cautions us ‘not to judge our school by its neighbourhood’.

In fact, some of the real villains happen to be the unresponsive school boards; stonewalling bureaucratic administrators; spiral curriculum that is mile wide and inch deep; instructional programs (e.g.” fuzzy math,” whole language now discredited renamed “balanced literacy”) that are not evidence based; and the sagging standards that resemble a limbo stick.

To get real about improvements in the education system and provide great public school for every child, we must start with the question; If results don’t matter, what’s the point? This should lead us to the next logical question: Are the programs presently in use actually working efficiently and effectively?

Following preventive medicine, we need to catch ‘em before they fall. It’s far better to put up a fence at the top of a cliff than station an ambulance below it.

Revisiting where it all begins – the focus on reading – we know that learning to read is the key to learning every thing else. It’s tragic but true kids who haven’t mastered reading by Grade 3 are more likely to struggle throughout their schooling and are less likely to graduate from high school. So, let’s put reading front and centre. “Behind almost every headline about failing schools and public dissatisfaction with public education system is the story of struggling young readers who never got the kind of support they needed,” says AFT president Sandra Feldman. “Yet, failure needn’t occur.”

As it stands, teaching of reading in our school is like a game of musical chairs where a third of the players lose their seats even before the music starts. That is a shame when, according to Dr. Barbara Bateman, a well-known authority on education, “near failure-proof methods of teaching all children to read are already available. Continued failure of schools to employ the [phonetic-based] programs is at least negligent and at worst malicious.” Hence this challenge:

Through the use of a Linguistic/Phonetic approach, the Holy Grail of reading,

virtually any child can be taught to master the mechanics of reading within a year of having learned to speak the English language.

It needs stressing that the public school system is in decline not because of lack of money. It’s more about how money is being spent. Just how much public spending it takes to provide a quality education? At upward of $ 8,000 per pupil yearly, BC already ranks among the highest spenders on education in the country – all this money to serve a measurably smaller student population. It’s clear we do not have a funding shortfall, we have a productivty crisis. Throwing more money at the problem would not necessarily improve teaching and learning; it only fattens the bureaucracy. Let ‘spending smart’ be our mantra.

One of many success stories in schooling today is called AMISTAD Academy, a New Haven’s superstar charter school that has won national acclaim for blasting the test scores of Connecticut’s neediest kids through the roof, without the school spending oodles of money. And the formula for school’s breathtaking success; Simply put, it’s the use of rigorous, evidence-based programs like phonics reading and Sexon math programs. Also, the school boasts a no-excuses culture of success.

This story exemplyfies what an ordinary, secular school can accomplish once liberated from the usual bureaucratic entanglements. Why can’t all schools be like that?

Lal Sharma, Ph.d. (Education, U. of A.)

Former school trustee sd#73 (Kamloops-Thompson)

Chilliwack