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Grant Frost: Education data used to score points in Nova Scotia

On April 30, teachers across Nova Scotia were surprised to receive an email from Education Minister Brendan Maguire.

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The missive included a rather tepid acknowledgment of all their hard work, followed by a declaration that lagging test scores showed they weren’t really working hard enough. To help our teachers along, he and the Tim Houston government were going to be “rebalancing” the system.

In case teachers needed to have his message explained to them, the minister included two graphs; one showing public education funding increases from 2021-27 and the other showing a decrease in test scores as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) from 2015-22. (The fact the test scores preceded the funding increases probably should have been enough to call conclusions into question, but I digress.)

PISA is a test distributed every few years by a group known as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). An internationally funded think tank, the OECD looks, predominantly, at issues of global economic impact. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, an idea emerged that education and economics were inherently connected. Driven primarily by the neo-liberal idea that free market thinking could be applied to all systems of human interaction, educational authorities became enamoured with the idea of comparing education systems. They lacked a tool by which to do so, and the OECD obliged by creating PISA.

Not only did teachers find the message from the minister insulting, the letter caused tremendous confusion around how this “rebalancing” would affect jobs, a clarion cry quickly picked up on by Nova Scotia Teachers Union president Peter Day. Although acknowledging that the education system in Nova Scotia has some gaps, Day suggested that a systemic, broader approach to increasing student supports would be more appropriate. He told CBC that government claims that this shift would provide........

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