Ethical research is an important aspect of most university-based research. As a researcher one has to pay close attention to a series of critical guiding principles designed by the Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics’ Tri-Council Policy Statement on ethics. The guiding principles lay out a clear set of directives. These three principles are of particular interest in the question: “Does the Fraser Institutes’s report Card pass the ethics test?”:

• Respect for Human Dignity
• Respect for Free and Informed Consent
• Respect for Vulnerable Persons

Let’s consider each of these three principles in turn.

According to the Tri-Council policy respect for human dignity is the “cardinal principle of modern research ethics.” This is the fundamental principle that should govern research. Ethical research must place the dignity of the person first and foremost. This necessarily means insuring that any potential harm to a research subject is minimized or non-existent. It should also mean that any benefit to the research subject out way the potential harm. And that through the research process the dignity of the research subject is maintained.

Free and informed consent is a critical extension of respecting human dignity. It means that any subject of research, or in the event of a child or person incapable of giving informed consent, their caregiver/guardian, has reasonable time to provide informed prior consent to being a subject of a research project. This is an important point. Research that draws upon data collected for one purpose and then used for another does not pass the ethical review test.

Finally, respecting human dignity “entails high ethical obligations toward vulnerable persons—to those whose diminished competence and/or decision making capacity make them vulnerable.” This would include children under legal age. According to the Tri-Council Policies: “ethical obligations to vulnerable individuals in the research enterprise will often translate into special procedures to protect their interests.”

The Fraser Institute report card uses data that was gathered specifically for the purpose of the Ministry of Education to evaluate the effectiveness of learning. Drawing upon the Tri-Council Policy the use of this data beyond it’s initial purpose raises series ethical concerns.

(1) There is no informed consent on the part of parents. In fact, the Deputy Minister of Education has remained school administrators that the School Act specific mandates that all students take this exam. There is a very limit possibility of opt out. But, the basic approach is that everyone is involved unless special permission is granted to an individual. This violates standard ethics review procedures.

(2)This leads to a further concern regarding whether or not those participating as research subjects (i.e. students writing the FSA’s and/or their parents) felt that they could in fact refuse to participate. Or, perhaps their felt unable to refuse given the structural power and authority of school administrators and teachers administering the exam. From an ethical standpoint a potential research subject how is placed in a position in which they do not feel they can say no is seen as an undue abuse of power and thus unethical.

(3) Given the way the data is coded and stored and then made available to external agencies there is ultimately very little control over the privacy and confidentiality of the research subjects.

Of course the government can set aside ethical guidelines and act in an unethical fashion if it wants to -that’s part of the price of our form of government. Lobby-groups can also take up the date that has been collected without informed consent and then use it to advance their own political agendas.

Ethical Research Report Card:

• Fraser institute D-
• Ministry of Education F

Test prepping is big business. The linkages between advocates of expanded testing and corporations profiting are at times hidden behind multiple layers of faux-academic research and policy institutions -like the Society for the Advancement for Excellence in Education, the Fraser Institute, or the Technology Assisted Student Assessment Institute or the test-prep western success story -Castle Rock Research.

The alleged origins of Castle Rock Research have the aura of mythic entrepreneurial get-up-and-go. Allegedly its origins lie in the actions of an enterprising Alberta undergrad who would wait outside examinations and solicit copies of the exams from exiting students. He is then alleged to have bundled these exams and resold them to other students. Combine this with tactical alliances with prominent education ministry bureaucrats and you have corporate success story writ large.

Today Castle Rock is making a profit off of the drive toward standardized testing. Somehow it’s sales reps are getting direct access to students and their parents through BC Public Schools. One Vancouver Secondary School, fro example, used it’s direct email system to contact parents and students on Sunday May 6:

Hello [ . . .]! This is a message for our students in Grades 9, 10, 11 and 12! (Not this time Grade 8’s) On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week, the representative from The Key book sales will be in our Cafeteria offering study materials for sale. These study guides cover many course areas, mostly at the Grade 12 level, but representation is at the Grade 9, 10 and 11 levels as well. So remember, come to the Cafeteria on May 8, 9, or 10 with your money, $17.00 or $20.00. See you all tomorrow!

Castle Rock Research has managed to get hold of the test prep market in BC by gaining access to students and their parents with the seeming endorsement of school-based administrators and the Ministry of Education. Their Key Guide series is explicitly “designed to help students prepare for school tests, final exams, and standardized assessments.” Once has to complement them on their ability to gain access to captive markets of hundreds of students and to have gained the endorsement and support of school officials.

One wonders what was offered to the school to gain access to their students? If corporations want to make money off of the anxiety of a grade hungry education system -so be it. However there are serious questions to be asked about the ways in which certain corporation’s seem able to capitalize on their social connections. Sometimes this activity leads to criminal charges (see the BC Liberal Influence Peddling Case). Sometimes its just bad taste.

If we were to remove the mania around testing and achievement we wouldn’t have to worry about corporations preying upon our fears and anxieties.

The FSAs tell us far more about the demographics of a school community than they do about teaching effectiveness or school quality, which is why FSA results almost perfectly correlate to property values, income levels, educational attainment of the parents.

When our oldest child attended a school that served a very diverse and often disadvantaged population, teachers responded to kids who were failing/struggling by adding before and after school tutorials and many other forms of support. Many children came to that school with little knowledge of English, and for many their parents were not literate in any language. Few attended preschool. Some kids had never held a book before they started kindergarten. For our eldest, it was an amazing school filled with incredibly enthusiastic and motivating teachers. With that education, our child was able to go on as a successful honour student and get full scholarships and early admission to university. Sadly for many of our child’s classmates, parental drug problems, poverty, domestic violence and other issues overwhelmed the at-times Herculian efforts of staff to educate them. That school s/he went ranked near the bottom of Vancouver schools in Fraser Institute rankings, which to this day causes our child a lot of grief and resentment after experiencing first hand what an excellent school it was.

Our next two kids attend a different elementary school in a far more affluent community. When students at their school struggle, it is very common to have staff suggest tutoring, Kumon, Reading Foundation etc. Most kids there attended preschool and come from families where university graduation is the norm. This school ranks very high in FSA rankings.

I’ve believed for years that kids at our present school could play ball all day and still score high on FSAs as they are so well prepared for school, supported at home and have a rich range of extracurricular activities. When they struggle, parents have the means to obtain outside support.

So when these two different groups sit down and write FSAs, what are we really testing? It’s an apples and oranges situation and it’s getting worse as supports for students with special learning challenges (learning disabilities, autism, ESL) are steadily declining — at least in our district — year by year. A top-notch teacher with a few unsupported kids in his/her class can see the whole program derailed. We are holding teachers “accountable” for many factors that are simply beyond their control by administering a standardized test to groups that are not “standard” at all.

I sincerely believe these tests are misleading and damaging and provide no valuable information. As for what to replace them with -I’m not sure we need to replace them.

Guest Posting from a Concerned Parent

It’s school testing season again. The Fraser Institute is issuing it’s report card. The Teacher’s Federation is advising parents to pull out of the FSA. The government is debating achievement legislation. The Vancouver Sun has even published competing commentaries on this issue: download commentaries.

What’s the deal? For politicians and pundits, parents and almost every wag on the street, there is a deep seated belief that our education is failing. Even in the face of evidence to the contrary this is a persistent belief that has been growing over the past couple of decades.
Here’s a different tack – how about parental responsibility and accountability. Why do we expect the school system to do everything for our children? Isn’t it time that we grew up and accepted the consequences of our decisions to be parents?

It is so easy to say the system has failed. That teachers have failed. That politicians have failed. But don’t we all have some small bit of responsibility in this picture? The two income professional parents who warehouse their children in daycare from 7-5 and then can’t understand why their child is a ‘problem’ at school. The parent suffering from substance abuse who can’t meet their own needs let alone their children’s. The many parents who don’t really seem to think it matters whether or not their children play computer games and MSN all night long.

If 1000s of children are just being babysat all day, as one commentator said, then why don’t those parents go into the schools and do something?

Maybe it’s just easier to complain from the sidelines. It’s tough being a parent on call 24/7. It’s hard to do all the ‘right’ things. There are few among us (unless we are somehow able to walk on water) who don’t harbour regrets that they could have done more for their children or for themselves.

I constantly wonder why we expect so much from public education but seem so unwilling to give or do more?

If testing and measuring and comparing and setting standards is really about learning and teaching than why hasn’t it led to a better society? We still have poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, wars and crime all over the place.

I guess it all comes down to the belief that somehow teachers should be doing more. It’s as though we –parents- seem to feel that if teachers don’t deal with our child according to our expectations then there must be something wrong with the teacher.

But what do we really want from teachers?

• Do we really want them to be superhuman and more accomplished and dedicated than parents?
• Do we really want them to solve all of the world’s problems?
• Are we willing to allow them time to have their own family life, their own children, their own cares, worries, and pleasures?

Apparently not because if truth be told we seem to want them to solve every single problem that we have in society.

I must confess to having grown tired of the following complaints:

• If my child can’t read -it’s the schools fault.
• If my child is unhappy at school -it’s the teacher’s fault (how often have parents said/heard “that teacher doesn’t like my child? be honest).
• If my child is failing in math -the math teacher can’t teach.
• If my child is bullied at school -the school is at fault.
  and on it goes.

I think that we need to take responsibility for our own actions. And we need to start at home. Sometimes it’s a hard to accept that our children won’t be able to fulfill all of our dreams, or that our children have different dreams than we do.

But rather than that we opt to have ‘greater’ accountability (and the emphasis is completely upon counting). The way in which the ministry operationalizes accountability in terms of IEPs is to have measurable outcomes.

For example, in terms of a child confined to a wheelchair the measurable outcome is how many times did the child attempt to wheel themselves to the washroom rather than asking to be wheeled. For a child with a learning disability we have a measurable outcome that tracks how often the child self-advocated. Etc. . . These measurable outcomes are compared to rubrics listing expected outcomes in a range of items that can now be placed on a graph and in a table. These charts and tables are passed up the system and finally we read about ‘achievement successes’ in the deputy minister’s newsletter where he artfully combines school success stories with comparative data from across the province that ‘proves’ 8 out 10 students confined to wheelchairs have met or exceed the standard set for them. W o n d e r f u l. And this can be repeated for every category.

So what are the alternatives? The testing mania seems to be so ingrained in our psyches that it is practically unimaginable for most people to see an alternative. Further more, some of those who are opposed to the testing frenzy are opposed because it is simply one more thing that they are being told they have to do in the face of many other things that are far more important.

For solutions: How about individual responsibility combined with collective concern? Rather than complaining about school failure perhaps we should take a more active role in our children’s education. I don’t mean hire more tutors or raise more money. I mean take the time to be with your children, to learn about what they are learning, to read with them, to play with them, and to participate in the life of your children’s schools. We also need to take a greater social and collective concern for our education. Rather than relegating education to the realm of consumer choice we need to reinvigorate education as a n activity of learning which prioritizes exploring the world within which we live. We have to stop seeing education as training and job placement. We have to replace trust in testing with trust in teaching. In short we need to value education in a way that doesn’t involve charts, graphs, numbers, tables, or dollars. It’s time to create the possibility for learning absent the mania of accountability.

As part of the preliminary budget proposal the VSB presentation used a striking graphic that showed the increase in the ratio of staff to students over the past five years. The graph, as presented was visually convincing -clearly there has been a significant increase in the ratio. But, does the graph really tell the truth about the date?

VSB have an interest in justifying staffing cuts. The way in which the report presents the material a causal observer could be forgiven for thinking that indeed there has been a significant jump in staffing levels. However . . . .

The VSB Graphic

The difficult with this graph, though, is it is designed (either consciously or unconsciously) to convince; it’s not designed to explain. As noted in the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology

All too often graphs are used to confuse or deceive the unwary or naive viewer. Excellent graphs, those with graphical integrity, withstand such scrutiny and truthfully inform the viewer. They effectively explore complicated data and are tools for learning about, and gaining insight into, quantitative information.

A couple of points:

• restricting the vertical axis to values of between 92 and 104 visually emphasizes the increase in the ratio giving the impression that this has been a major increase
• accompanying explanatory text (see pages 6-7) draws attention to this increase in staffing and compares it to other districts without providing any contextualizing information other than saying that staffing in VSB is relatively higher than the comparison districts (which were not named).
• while the five year window is a common one it does not allow for an effective understanding of long term trends. Perhaps this momentary increase is a return to what was normal in period preceding the data represented in the chart; perhaps not. Nonetheless, the five year window is a very shallow time frame to suggest changes.

Here’s a more ‘objective’ representation of the data.

From this graph it would seem that there has been no significant change over the five year period at all. It is important to point out that there are difficulties comparing these two graphs visually. The VSB graph is the equivalent of cropping away all but the section of most interest and blowing it up in size. The second graph show the entire range, but could be accused of minimizing the impact (which it does). At the end of the day one needs to be confident that the way in which data is represented does tell the truth about the data.

The VSB graphics are important because they aren’t simply a piece of meaningless homework my children have been asked to do. These graphs are representations of real people and, when all is said and done, the VSB graph is being used to justifying ending a real person’s employment. This is the explanatory device that will be used to explain cutting supervision aids, cutting teaching assistants, cutting teachers, cutting administrators.

I don’t think it is too much to ask that the graphs are honest representations.

Changes to the School Act are a throwback to earlier decades.

Guest Commentary by Noel Herron

Nowhere is the provincial government’s obsession with testing and assessment more evident than in the recently tabled Bill 20, which provides for the unprecedented appointment of four new ‘super’ superintendents of achievement to “inspect” the province’s public schools.

Overshadowed by the uproar over school fees the startling emergence of a new inspectorial regime, linked to student achievement, confirms, if ever a confirmation was needed ,that testing and assessment will ,if Bill 20 is passed in its present form ,relentlessly drive the BC public education system for years to come.
More than four decades ago Victoria ceded the right to appoint superintendents of schools to local school boards but here we are once again with Victoria-based superintendents of achievement being appointed to” inspect” and “direct” local boards and schools, all in the name of “student improvement”.

Unprecedented in Canada, this startling and heavy- handed power grab will have(despite the province’s claims to the contrary), a chilling and negative impact on both the quality of instructional programs and on school climates in BC’s elementary and secondary schools.

Under the act four (the act permits more) new ‘super’ “superintendents of achievement” will be put in place by the minister of education. With wide-ranging powers they will have the legislative heft to override local school superintendents and local school boards.

Local school board governance will take a huge hit as these, Victoria-knows-best, educational czars and the education minister issue educational “directives” and regulations to ensure what was formerly labelled school board “accountability contracts” now morph into newly designated student “achievement contracts”.

In case one is in any doubt about this pointed authoritarian switch by the provincial government, the four newly appointed ‘supers’ will have wide-ranging powers to inspect records, interview students and employees plus attend any meeting of a board.

Local superintendents of schools are warned that they “must promptly provide to a superintendent of achievement for the school district any information or report required by the superintendent of achievement.”

And to make sure that nothing is being hidden from Victoria the act accords these powerful new bureaucrats onsite “powers of inspection” to “enter a school building, or any other building, or any part of a building used in conjunction with the school or offices of the board.”

If there is any lingering doubt about the real intention of this hard- ball legislation, note that the act further specifies:” failure of a board to comply with an administrative directive is grounds for the appointment of an official trustee “.In other words the board will be fired.

Alarms are already being sounded at a recent Vancouver School Board meeting by presenters about another key amendment in Bill 20 that allows the minister to create provincial schools outside the jurisdiction of school boards thereby opening the way for charter schools.

In recent closed door meetings with selected parents ministry of education officials made it very clear that they were discussing a new governance model for “demonstration schools” that was non-negotiable.

That such major changes to the School Act would be contemplated by a provincial government using an authoritarian, back door, approach mocks legitimate and necessary dialogue that should proceed the tabling of a key education bill.

Apart from the strictly structural changes in Bill 20, the pressing need to examine three key student instructional improvement components such as, the downward slide in ESL support, the growing wait lists for essential special education services, and the erosion of crucial professional development programs for teachers, remains unaddressed.

Anchored in distrust of our high performing public school system (as reflected in international assessments) this massive centralization of authority, plus the lack of public dialogue, undermines local school board governance. It will unquestionably create a chilling effect (as some provincial ESL audits have already done) with the advent of instructional czars descending on our schools.

The education ministry may talk a good line about “building partnerships”, “engendering co-operation”, “building capacity “ and “harnessing collective energy” but there is an unmistakable and undisguised iron fist in this velvet glove.

All of this is presented with amazing chutzpah– especially when many key instructional support issues are ignored– by the deputy minister of education in the official guise of “supporting” schools and school boards.

When one considers the new, million dollar, layer of powerful senior bureaucrats being imposed on schools, plus the implications of the introduction of provincial schools outside the jurisdiction of publicly elected school boards, there should be a strong push to have these two elements deleted in their entirety from this new bill.

For starters, certainly, those four new, ‘super’, superintendents of achievement have got to go with other changes to follow.

————————————————————————–
Noel Herron is a former school principal and Vancouver School Board trustee. This article is published in the Vancouver Elementary Teachers’ newsletter “VESTA NEWS” currently arriving in schools.

School age children appear to be disappearing from our provincial schools. Provincially the decline is very evident and has led to school closures and funding shortfalls. Even as a common sense understanding might lead one to believe that declining enrollments equal declining costs, that isn’t the case. According to a Vancouver School Board senior administrator, even taking into account the likely reduction of teaching staff for the 2007-2008 year will currently leave Vancouver School Board in the red by 6-8 million dollars. Ultimately Vancouver is likely to be forced to decide between paying to keep schools of 35, 45, 55 students open or closing these schools to reallocate the funds to where there are schools spilling over the edges with enrollments of 350, 450, 550 students in buildings that weren’t designed for these large numbers.

In addition to budgetary problems recent news coverage raises claims that students are being bled from one part of the city to feed other areas. And, that parents are doing so using problematic data sources such as the Fraser Institute school ranking publications. To further complicate the picture there is a wide spread belief that the private school system is also taking students out of the public system to the ultimate detriment of an accessible, quality education for all students.

This posting takes up the details of the de-enrollment problems and looks at three BC school districts, Vancouver, Prince George, and Prince Rupert in an attempt to see what is actually going on in terms of the public/private split.

I downloaded the data from the ministry web page in excel spreadsheets school by school for the private schools and for the entire Vancouver, Prince George, and Prince Rupert School Districts for comparative purposes. A summary table for comparison of the three districts can be downloaded here.

Non-resident students (ministry term for students who’s families do not normally reside in BC) and adult students were subtracted from the over all totals to reflect school age resident enrollments. In the Case of one Vancouver-based private school, Columbia, students enrolled in post-secondary placement courses were also excluded (this was about 30 students in each year).

Over the five years reported private school enrollment in Vancouver has increased by 847. The public school enrollment has decreased. However, if one assumes that each increase in the private school can be equated to a decrease in the public school this only accounts for 847 and 1,449 students are unaccounted for.

The Vancouver private school numbers do not reveal how many of their enrollments come from outside the VSB area. It is also important to note that in both of the other two districts compared private school enrollments have been decreasing at the same or similar rates as their neighbouring public school system. Vancouver dos stand out as having a large contingent of ‘elite’ private schools that use economic mechanisms of exclusion to structure their student populations and thus attract a segment of the student population that may not ever have really been part of the public school population. Outside of Vancouver religious private schools, particularly conservative Christian and Catholic, are the primary form of private education.

Based upon the BC Ministry of Education data we can infer that private schools in Vancouver have been able to pick up some students from the public system but the growth in the private sector can not be seen to have occurred totally at the expense of the public system.

It is also interesting to note that non-resident enrollment has dropped significantly in the private system (~25%)while it has only modestly dropped in the public system (1%).

Not noted in this data are enrollment data for the Francophone system in Vancouver that, according to some anecdotal evidence, has been increasing.

Additional background Information.

• A quick summary of enrollment data as provided by the Ministry of Education.
• BCTF Research Report on Enrollment
  

The combined committee III (Education and Planning) and committee V (Finance) met at the VSB offices last evening to hear delegations speak regarding the proposed ‘phase I’ cuts to the VSB operating budget (see November 12 entry for details). The necessity to cut the budget has arise as a result of a serious under estimate of Vancouver’s declining enrollment. Previously this fall the board cut 48 full-time equivalent teaching positions from the schools. What they are calling Phase I involves an additional 1.6 million dollars of cuts.So-called phase I cuts involves a combination of not filling currently vacant positions, reducing (by a small amount) school-based administration positions, cuts to the districts research agenda. Phase II cuts (to be considered in December 20060 would include an across the board cut to school supplies in the order of almost $700,000.00.

Superintendent Chris Kelly acknowledged the difficulty that the district has been facing given the so unanticipated decline in students. “It is important to acknowledge,” he said, that there is no assumption that this [proposal to cut] is a better educational solution, an improvement to education, it’s quite the opposite.” Noting the difficulty the superintendent stated that the reduction is not what they wanted. Rather, they have tried to “go about this in a reasonable, balanced way to face the negative consequences of the decline in student enrolment.

The phase I cuts that were most discussed by the delegations to the committee involved the reduction of school-based administration at Britannia Scondary and Sir Charles Tupper Secondary. The District Management Team (DMT) has recommend that based upon strict enrolment numbers these two secondary schools are ‘over staffed’ in terms of administration full-time equivalents. DMT was supported in principle in this contention by the Vancouver Secondary Teachers Association whose president, Bill Bargeman, and Tupper VSTA Union Rep, Bonnie Brunell, both commented that the VP’s were in fact taking away from realtime teaching blocks and therefore the reduction of administration would benefit students. Bill Bargeman qualified the unions comments by suggesting the choice of Tupper and Britannia were misplaced, but the overall concern with administration positions was of less impact then the proposed 10% across the board cut to the school supplies and discretionary budgets.

Britannia PAC Chair, L.K. Chieh and Vice-Chari Cynthia Wong, spoke passionately about their school, the diversity and the unique features of the school which would be put in jeopardy by the reeducation in school-based administration. Their commentary was followed by school teachers who also spoke to the importance of retaining the local vice principal in their school on a fulltime basis.

While the likely outcome of all of this will be the adoption of the phased in cuts the issue that has not been addressed in any public forum is the ongoing problem of management by crisis. We need to move to a longer term, more predictable funding structure so that we are able to operate the system with some degree of certainty and regularity.

On Wednesday, November 1, I was one of among 50-75 parents, teachers and students who were able to meet Ministry of Education staff as part of the current review of the graduation portfolio. The key points that were raised by parents at the meeting are as follows (with thanks to Van DPAC coordinator for the notes):

• Lack of extra resources and funding for its implementation
• Query re value of portfolio in its current form – too much like a series of checklists
• There were so many mistakes in implementation – can they be rectified or is it a lost cause?
• There was not enough representation – e.g. wider numbers of teachers and parents – in this review process. (and what is the difference between a consultation with wider participation and a review, which seems to bring in fewer people?)
• Students aren’t being listened to
• Fatal flaw: issues of equity between districts, between students in a district in ability, family support to do all portfolio strands
• Need for training and in service for teachers (as was pointed out before implementation by BCCPAC, trustee, superintendent and teacher organizations)
• Need for clarity of purpose: why are we making the kids do this?
• Lack of consistency from one district to next re verification requirements, physical activity requirements, etc.
• Mandatory nature of portfolio reduces the choice – and room in timetable to take – arts and technology courses
• Some people expressed a desire to somehow keep the community service, physical activity and reflection bits in students’ graduation programs.

For those interested in listening to most of the evening’s proceedings click here for an audio recording of the nights commentary.

You can contact the government directly with your comments by using this email address: EDUC.Portfolio@gov.bc.ca

Ministry of Education portfolio review page.
Surprise announcement putting portfolio on hold.
Student petition against graduation portfolios.

Deputy Minister’s cheery comments on the graduation portfolio.
BCTF graduation portfolio review page (October 16, 2006).

From the Vancouver Housing Blog.

The story seems to suggest that the kids are still living here, but not enrolling in kg. I don’t get that – I presume the number of kids would come from a projection of some kind of population model. My first instinct would be to think their model got it wrong, rather than the kids playing truant. Twelve-hundred children did not enroll for school in Vancouver this year and that’s causing a budget shortfall at the VSB. The deficit amounts to around 1.5 million dollars. Ken Denike with the VSB speculates on where the children have gone. He says the hundred dollars that the federal government is handing out to parents of children under 6 could mean they’re waiting until next year to send their kids to kindergarten.

The Vancouver Housing Blog suggests that the missing students can be explained by the ‘bubble effect.” According to the blog the same things has “been happening in bubble zones in the US as formally family neighbourhoods become unaffordable to new families and simply stagnate with existing owners sitting on their over-sized equity.” The author of the blog directs readers to the articles that come up from Ben Jones’s site in this google search.