Having not written a column in the past three weeks, I can assure readers and my good friends in the Sask Party that it was not a result of Herald Editor Jason Kerr becoming tired of editing out my occasionally “cryptic” comments regarding the intellectual capacity of certain members of the governing fraternity nor of my decreasing degeneration of faculties due to age.
In actuality – and thanks to an unfortunate computer crash, I have been able to change course in the way I’ve been trying to present columns that focus too much upon the vitriol driving Alberta premier Danielle Smith’s Ode to Separatism, and instead at least temporarily try to wrap my head around the factors that somehow led the Moe government to decide to abandon the necessity of having students not being taught by accredited teachers no longer having to write provincial exam finals.
In the past, having students take such exams was encouraged as a method to ensure students taught by teachers with less than normal subject knowledge were meeting the curriculum standards as expected by the Ministry of Education. However, that objective seems to have gathered some ill and very public reviews, as recent statistical studies have suggested that our “standards”. The very data derived from the results of such testing, was showing signs of its failure, and yet our government appeared not to be taking that trend seriously, despite our national reputation having been previously conceived as more than adequate when compared to other international communities.
Chief among our problems is the fact that our children only require 24 credits taken through Grades 10 to 12, while in some cases allowing students to avoid taking credits in Grade 12 Mathematics or Science, with even less attention being paid to the needs of students intending to move into so-called “blue collar” career choice, where the limitations of the educational budget hold back the need for school boards to have more subject-specific teachers on payroll, and courses leading towards such credentials being almost non-existent. Less than 20 years ago, it was not uncommon for graduating classes included a majority having taken anywhere from 30 to 36 credits, all of which were available locally, and in some cases (e.g.: Saskatoon’s Bedford Road or Walter Murray Collegiates) even 40, some being earned outside normal school activity hours.
The question of course is, why are we becoming so nonplussed that provincial examinations are being eliminated (even though other provinces are expanding their usage) in the first place? In actual fact, virtually EVERY good teacher I’ve ever met or worked with wants to know how their students performances “compare” with others – whether within the school district, the province, or even nationally and internationally. As a profession, we expect our Departments of Education to compute such factors utilizing whatever academic tools are at their disposal, and up to now those “tools” included the measurement of results gleaned from our having had students write these provincial exams – and yet “Saskatchewan is currently the only province that does not administer provincial assessments.” (That quotation, by the way, is taken directly from a Department of Education web page.)
In the past teachers have criticized such exams for interfering with well-founded pedagogical practices in delivering materials to the classroom that cover the entire curriculum stressing other points that might not be as highly regarded in the testing processes used to develop a typical provincial exam. In Saskatchewan, however, that rationale is overwhelmed by other factors that mitigate against our capacity to “measure” the learning potential of our children, be they racialized by the failure of so many Indigenous students to achieve success in these tests, or in our governments failing to consider and correct the “wealth gap” that segregates the performance levels of both reserve schools and their rural counterparts, when compared to our urban environments.
We can easily find elements of racial bias applied within non-reserve schools having classrooms filled with Indigenous students, such as occurred in Piapot in 2004, where the local school board was utilizing Grade 4 mathematics textbooks to teach Grade 8 and 9 students, apparently with the approval of their school division’s Director. It was stories such as this that eventually allowed me to state in my Master’s thesis that the more likely cause for subject resistance to mathematics by Indigenous students was more likely to be as a result of their personal lack of awareness of Indigenous accomplishments in the subject (particularly in the Dene people) and a lack of teacher role models (for which NORTEP and other university programs were designed to address), personally destructive socioeconomic environments within their communities, OR on reserve families still comparing such programs to the treatment their ancestors had received while attending residential schools.
Both rural and Indigenous schools lack sufficient funding, but not necessarily for the same reasons. Until 2018, the federal government funding levels for Indigenous locales was less than 60% of the value per student being allocated by urban communities. In non-Indigenous rural settings, however, large corporate farmers regularly sound more like spoiled children bemoaning the fact that they have precious few children attending school when compared to hectares under regular cultivation and yet are still being taxed according to the amount of land held by their operation, while simultaneously ignoring the reality that the agricultural research required for their operations to adapt to climate change are best conducted by qualified graduate candidates best able to perform such tasks -– their own children, brought up to understand and sympathize with the concerns of our rural constituencies.
Our ability to finally develop some formula that could effectively measure our students’ performance standards is also handicapped by our inability to provide potential teacher graduates with the opportunity to teach in our remote schools, as such placement must currently be undertaken with the financial resources already available to students through loans or judicious employment opportunity during the summer months. In 2023, acting upon the advice being provided by Rob Magee of the Sturgeon Lake Education Alliance and Marilyn Highway, former Director of PAGC’s Urban Services, my company put together a reasonably cost-effective grant proposal that would eventually see Ottawa providing such assistance to some 75 students annually, and provide pathways to allow another 300 more students in other provinces also participating in the endeavour, but as yet we have not heard back as to whether the revisions required to bring that project to fruition have been approved.
To this point, then, the actions taken by the government in cancelling these exam regimens show only a desire by government to cut educational costs by any means possible, and “sell” voters on an expectation of future success. As teachers we are well aware that the Scandinavian nations have produced pedagogically sound methods of providing such measurement, but for that roadway to be paved requires a first layering of a gravel foundation enlisting the efforts of educational consultants, Directors of Education and government before any teacher can conduct their “magic” show of student understanding.
Starting next week, I hope to be able to provide still more insight as to how such a formidable task can finally find its own framework.
