I have some grave concerns with the monumental shifts to our education system here in Alberta.
I have concerns on two fronts. Not the least of which is, we are one of the highest performing education systems in the world, ranked 2-3 in the English speaking world and 11th overall. This is with the current ways of doing things. Why do we need to have such a monumental shift? What kind of improvements do you think we will make from 2 or 3? Will we really improve all that much from a major overhaul and how long will it take to see that growth? I am also concerned about the idea of “cherry picking” for school improvement. We are going to pay a high price for this enormous refurbishing of a system that is performing very well already, and it is unlikely that without utilizing the sustainable aspects of school improvement, those gains would be long term. Let us not forget that the ‘high price’ I am talking about are students, and how they are going to fare during all of this and beyond. If students are left behind how long will it take for them to get caught up? Is there a plan for filling in the gap?
My second chief concern is the experience that I have had working with special needs students and working in the inner city. When research is done, often they leave out these populations so as not to skew the results. The problem is that reports are often published with the efficacy reports high, and without inclusion of these two groups. Often they lack the ability or background knowledge/experience to do the kind of learning that “discovery learning” entails. Does that mean we quit or give up? NO. But it does mean that these two groups will be significantly more disadvantaged in this new system of teaching and learning. Let us not forget the ‘whole language learning’ debacle. When the Alberta government shifted from phonics based instruction for reading, to the highly talked about and championed whole language approach. It took them seven years to realize that significantly more students were failing to learn to read than had been when we used phonics. Millions of dollars spent, much time, energy and resources wasted. And for what? Think about all those students who failed to learn, or took significantly longer to learn to read, while we figured out that we shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken. Was it perfect? No. But broken? Not so much. What ultimately happened was that they took the best parts of each practice (phonics and whole language) and blended them for a balanced approach. Couldn’t there be room for that in our educational system? We could improve on our existing practices without ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water.”
Adventures in Education 