conditional relevance

“ESL: The trouble with our schools”

The Vancouver Sun published an article this morning (p. A2!), by Shelly Fralic entitled, “ESL, the trouble with our schools: Looking past altruism, and political correctness”.

The title says it all, really, from the sweepingly simplistic deficit-orientation all the way to that curious extraneous comma in the sub-title: this is an article that is so riddled with inaccuracies, distortions, and misinformation that it’s hard to believe it was vetted by an editorial board, much less published in a leading daily newspaper that serves a diverse, multilingual, multi-ethnic metropolitan readership…in 2014 no less.

It makes me wonder if the Sun had other ideas when it green-lighted this polemic: generating page-hits and boosting sales, perhaps, rather than illuminating the number and complexity of issues that are so easily lost in labels like “class size and composition.” If that’s the case, it’s an egregious journalistic disservice considering a central sticking point in the BC public school teachers’ current job action concerns exactly this issue: class size and composition.

Contextualized thus, the message that Fralic’s article appears to convey is this: “pull ELLs from mainstream classrooms and the matter of class-size and composition will be resolved”… a message so reductive and uninformed it defies comprehension.

I’m drafting a response from my department about this… I’ll post an unexpurgated version of that later.