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Opinion: K-12 education needs change and choice

A new poll shows Canadians don't like the direction schools have taken in recent years. They want to go back to the basics in reading and math

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Canadians have long entrusted their children’s education to public schools. Unfortunately, new data suggest the vast majority think government-run K-12 systems have lost their way and need to return to their roots.

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A new poll conducted for SecondStreet.org by Leger shows 53 per cent of Canadians believe the K-12 system has gone in the wrong direction over the past 20 years, with only about one in four confident we’re on the right track. In 2020, only 32 per cent of respondents thought the system was headed in the wrong direction — a clear indication things have gotten worse.

Why? The latest numbers show Canadians are concerned about both the way core subjects like reading, writing and math are taught and the safety and discipline of the environment in which students are asked to learn. The data also show the public is interested in more choice — in particular, in copying a successful education model currently in use in Alberta.

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Since the 1990s, Canada’s public schools have shifted away from “structured literacy” based on phonics (sounding words out) toward a “balanced literacy approach” that uses cues and clues like pictures to guess words. This shift, which was formalized over the past 20 years, has led to a documented decline in literacy rates. Over the same period, public schools also changed how they taught math — moving away from explicit instruction and rote memorization (e.g. times tables) to “discovery math.” As the name suggests, this method encourages students to discover their own approach to math problem-solving without first explaining basic arithmetic and math facts. It turns out kids aren’t good at discovery, with some data suggesting current students are now testing two school years below where students were in 2003.

Understandably, the majority of respondents to this year’s poll (56 per cent) think schools should get back to basics and use more traditional approaches to teach core subjects, with only one in four supporting continued use of the new methods.

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Canadians also believe that before proceeding to the next grade students should be able to demonstrate they have learned what they were supposed to learn. That’s not always required, however. Many provinces and school boards have introduced “no-fail” or “automatic advancement” policies: students move to the next grade whatever their grades and whether or not they grasped the grade-level subject requirements. An overwhelming majority of respondents — 77 per cent — think such policies should be scrapped.

Of course, teaching and grading styles don’t matter much if the learning environment is disruptive or even unsafe. But teachers and administrators have few options for controlling unruly behaviour. Three in four Canadians (72 per cent) therefore favour a return to more traditional responses to student misconduct — not corporal punishment but options such as sending misbehaving students to the principal’s office or suspensions for set times. A similar proportion (74 per cent) think teachers should also be able to reduce a student’s mark on an assignment if it is handed in late, which some schools and boards don’t allow.

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Implementing the changes parents want would involve educational bureaucracies and teachers’ unions, which means they would take time.

One option to help parents unhappy with the current school system would be to expand the publicly-funded choices available to their children. A majority of Canadians (56 per cent) would like their province to copy Alberta’s public charter schools. They’re run by non-profits but funded by government. They don’t charge tuition and they follow the provincial curriculum. But they often differ in terms of their focus and how they teach subjects. For example, the STEM Innovation Academy in Calgary targets science, technology, engineering and math, while the Calgary Classical Academy focuses on classic literature, art, Latin, history and so on. Recent SecondStreet.org analysis found students at Alberta’s charter schools scored 9.3 points higher than students in public schools across 22 different provincial tests. On Grade 9 math charter school students scored 14.1 points higher on average.

A more limited approach still within the traditional public school system would be wider adoption of “open enrolment” policies. This would allow parents to send their child to any government-run school in the province instead of being confined to neighbourhood options. Students unhappy with their local school could enroll elsewhere at no cost. Choice could be increased even further with a voucher system that allowed tax dollars to follow students to any school — public or private.

Although change is inevitable not all change is for the better. Canadians are clearly unhappy with how government-run K-12 has changed over the past 20 years. We can’t go back in time but we can reintroduce tried and tested approaches that served students well for generations. Our children deserve no less.

Bacchus Barua is research director at the think-tank SecondStreet.org.

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