The Fraser Institute’s recently released 2011 report card on Ontario’s elementary schools sheds a useful light on provincial trends in student achievement (see page 14 of the report) where the average values for all schools are given for the last five years.
To say that the improvement in student achievement has been slow would be an understatement. Paint dries much faster than these test scores have been improving. Glaciers flow more quickly and tortoises look like race horses beside these test scores. You get the idea.
St. Michael's Choir School in Toronto was among the top-performing schools in the Fraser Institute's 2011 elementary school rankings, scoring a perfect 10 last year.
The report card will be of interest to most parents primarily because of the detailed information it provides about individual elementary schools and the amount of value each is adding to students’ learning.
However, there is more to the provincial testing trends than meets the eye. These tests are based on the provincial curriculum and because that curriculum has been dumbed down over the last five years, the tests have become easier. As well, test conditions have become more relaxed, with students being allowed more accommodation and time to write the tests. As a result of these changes, it is quite possible that Ontario students are actually learning less now than they did five years ago.
Over the same period, the Ontario government increased its non-capital education spending considerably – from about $16.6 billion in 2005-2006 to about $19.5 billion in 2009-2010. At the same time, student enrolment was falling – from 1,959,400 in 2005-2006 to 1,901,236 in 2009-2010. This means that more and more money was being spent on fewer and fewer students. Complete information on spending and enrolment is available here.
Something is fishy here. Despite an all-out effort on the part of the Ontario government to increase test scores – gobs of money, secretariats and turnaround teams, full-day kindergarten, and so forth – Ontario students are not learning much more, if at all.
In an effort to get to the bottom of this apparent paradox, the Society for Quality Education is holding a symposium in Toronto on April 26 to which the public is invited to help us come up with recommendations for improving Ontario schools.
As these recent test scores show, students need all the help they can get.
[Malkin Dare is the president of the Society for Quality Education and the author of a free self-help book for parents of students who are struggling in school.]
Full day kindergarten is working. Based on international test scores and evaluation, Ontario has one of the top 10 education systems in the world. Ontario's education progress report has just been released. See it here: http://bit.ly/mLFvFx