Advocay groups concerned about the Bill 33 limits on students with Indiviual Educational Plans have issued a call for the government to withdraw the limitations proposed under the legislation for special needs students.

Download press release here.

See also, BCCPAC letter. Download letter here.The following is clipped from draft Hansard transcript and provides an indication of the timetable for bills, such as Bill 33, to pass the House.

Standing Order 81.1
COMPLETION OF LEGISLATIVE AGENDA

Hon. M. de Jong: I rise pursuant to Standing Order 81.1, and want to advise the House that following extensive discussions with the Opposition House Leader, we have managed to come to an agreement regarding the completion of business for the balance of the current sitting, which is ending on Thursday, May 18. [DRAFT TRANSCRIPT ONLY]
That schedule will see all of the estimates and bills presently on the order paper completed except for Bill 23, which is the Public Inquiry Act, and Bill 32, the Adult Guardianship And Personal Planning Statutes Act. Those bills obviously have been the subject of comments by stakeholders and interested parties, and the government believes it would be beneficial to hear further from those with views. Those two bills will not be forthcoming or proceeding this session. [DRAFT TRANSCRIPT ONLY]
The Opposition House Leader has also been advised that given the concerns expressed by the freedom-of-information and privacy commissioner with respect to section 9 of Bill 30, the Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act, the government doesn’t intend to proceed with that proposed amendment to the FOI Act. [DRAFT TRANSCRIPT ONLY]
[Applause.]
Well, I don’t know what to do next, Mr. Speaker. [DRAFT TRANSCRIPT ONLY]
Priority for the government has been to ensure that ample time is available for the Legislature to consider and debate Bill 35, the legislation around the children and youth representative. I believe that the Opposition House Leader and I have settled on a schedule that will allow us to do that. I am, as always, obliged to him for the time he has taken in working with me to settle on a schedule, which, I believe, serves the interests of this chamber and the people of B.C. [DRAFT TRANSCRIPT ONLY]

M. Farnworth: I just want to concur with my colleague, the Government House Leader, that the discussions I think have yielded a result that allows for the disposition of bills, which are clearly very much in the public interest, in a timely fashion. It also allows for legislation that the opposition has believed to be requiring further discussion and inputs to be carried over. I think that that is something that will serve this House and this province well. [DRAFT TRANSCRIPT ONLY]
It also, I think, is important to note that this session is the first full session on the new parliamentary calendar with a full opposition. I think it’s important that that calendar has remained intact, that we have been able to deal with business in an orderly fashion, and I think that speaks well for the future. [DRAFT TRANSCRIPT ONLY]

It’s testing time for BC’s grade 4s and grade 7s. Every year the issue receives discussion and debate. In fact, the provincial government has even introduced a motion in the house in support of the foundation skills assessment.

Be it resolved that this House support the Foundation Skills Assessment as it provides valuable information on how well BC students are learning skills necessary to succeed in life.

Read yesterday’s debate by downloading this file

The BCTF’s information on the FSA tests can be foundhere.

The BCCPAC also has a press release distributed today on the FSA. Download press release here.

The Ministry of Education’s publication for parents on Foundation Skills Assessments can be found here. This publication is available in several languages other than English here Also, the government provides explanations of the test results here.

The BCSPE also has testing related info on their web page.

And for those interested in seeing how one neo-conservative lobby uses FSAs click here.

For reference please find the BCCPAC budget here While government fudning has increased actual membership dues appear to be falling.

A recent blog on educational issues focussed on the Nanaimo area of vancouver Island is worth taking a look at and putting a link on your bookmark page to. The blog author describes the blog as follows:

This blog is for parents, students, educators and those who are passionate about education. It is a blog that is moderated by a parent and an educational professional. Its intent is to provide an online forum for educational debates, fact-finding, problem solving, and advocacy for students’ needs in this region.

You can find the blog at Nanaimo Edutopia. I’ve also added a permanent link to it in the Educational Resources Links sidebar.

The parent Involvement issue of UBC’s School Leadership centre is up and online. A range of articles, including my own reflection on the October Teachers’ Strike, can be found that discuss forms of parental involvement. Here is the opening to the editor’s introduction:

Two years ago the School Leadership Centre joined with representatives from several of the major educational partner associations in BC and with UBC researchers to engage the topic of parent involvement. The Parent Involvement Research Committee (PIRC) has since undertaken a number of activities to advance the understanding and practices of parent involvement. Ann Henderson and Karen Mapp (2004) have methodically collected a large array of American research studies that conclusively argue that parent involvement in schools makes a positive difference for students. However, when Ms. Henderson presented in 2004 to an audience of parent leaders from the lower mainland, sunshine coast, and the Island, it quickly became evident that parent involvement in British Columbia was already functioning at a level of sophistication that her research was just beginning to suggest might be fruitful. From that time forward, it has been clear that researching our own parent involvement practices in BC is a necessity. Not only is there much that we can offer to the global educational community, but if we don’t understand and theorize the strengths and weaknesses of what we do, then we are prone to give up valuable traditions that have evolved here through generations for the latest policy flavour of the month. Moreover, as many visitors I have met here at UBC over the last few years have observed, the education community here is like no other. The articles in this issue of the BC Educational Leadership Research reflect our uniqueness: from innovative leadership, to successful experiences, to lack of minority parent inclusion, to political fractiousness.(Continue reading the introduction and Table of Contents)

Sign up for email updates from FeedBlitz and never miss another post from “In Support of Public Education.”

Just type your email address into FeedBlitz form on left sidebar of “In Support of Public Education” and voilà…

Or click on this link and fill out the form:

http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=37450

by Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross
Original Source: BCTF Teacher Newsmagazine.

“Educators today are besieged by a movement that demands higher and higher scores on standardized tests. Anyone who has looked carefully at these tests knows that they are loaded with trivia—questions that most successful adults cannot answer and would indeed scorn to answer. Our children are being fed intellectual junk food, and we would do well to insist on a healthier educational diet.
– Nel Noddings, “War, Critical Thinking, and Self Understanding,” Phi Delta Kappan, March 2004.

The high-stakes-accountability road has been taken in many countries, especially the USA. Changes are occurring that suggest Canada is headed down the same road (for example, the Fraser Institute report card on schools, the Ontario School Secondary Literacy Test as a graduation requirement, provincial tests of reading, writing, and math at the elementary and secondary levels, and a media that implicitly supports high-stakes accountability). While there is great promise offered by the rhetoric of high-stakes accountability there is also great peril. We should take advantage of what is known about the false promise and the unanticipated perils of high-stakes accountability, and map an alternative route.

What is high-stakes accountability? It is most often manifest in systems of accountability called bureaucratic-outcomes-based accountability. These are systems in which students, teachers, and/or administrators are accountable to a central government authority for demonstrating success on a small set of common indicators of student performance. And there are tangible consequences at the individual and school level for failure.The promises of high-stakes accountability

There are a number of promises and assumptions that are part of the rhetoric of high-stakes accountability:

* Teachers will teach all children and have uniformly high expectations.
* Outcome measures will motivate teachers to teach well and students to learn well.
* Achievement differences based on race, ethnicity, gender, and first language will be eliminated.
* Students not well served by public schools will be.
* School credentials will be more meaningful.
* Meaningful schooling outcomes (at the individual and organizational levels) can be captured by annually administered census standardized tests.
* High school graduates will meet workplace expectations.
* National and international market competitiveness will be enhanced.
* Measurement techniques and technology are up to the task.

This last point is important because faith in educational measurement assumes that single standardized tests are valid for the purpose, that the important outcomes of schooling can be captured with a standardized test, and that the scoring and reporting of scores are trustworthy.

The perils of high-stakes accountability

The perils of high-stakes accountability, in large part, stem from the underlying assumptions of the promise of high-stakes accountability.

* Treating everyone the same all the time does not constitute fairness.
* External motivation (based largely on punishment) is not the only, or the best way, to get people to change, and in fact diminishes a love of learning.
* Consequences, rewards, and sanctions have unanticipated and undesired impact—like defining the curriculum as that which is tested, increasing drop-out rates, increasing the number of kids in special education.
* The professionalism of teachers is diminished because it is assumed they cannot be trusted to do the right thing or a good job.
* Uniform and single measures of learning are just bad evaluation practice.
* Annually administered standardized tests capture only a fraction of academic expectations (the curriculum cannot be covered in a one-shot test).
* Annually administered standardized tests capture nothing about other important schooling outcomes (citizenship, social development, work habits, antiviolence).
* When social indicators are used for important decision-making there is a high likelihood the indicators and the uses of those indicators will be corrupted.

Authentic accountability: An alternative

There is an alternative to high-stakes accountability—authentic accountability—a more locally based although still public system of accountability where schools are accountable to parents and the public for how well a school is educating its students and about the quality of the social and learning environment through the use of authentic and multiple indicators.

There are four basic principles of authentic accountability:

1. Improvement. Use of a wider range of strategies to improve the quality of schools and learning, such as professional development.
2. Equity. Closing the race, ethnicity, and class achievement gaps and overcoming the consequences of poverty and racism, through the provision of health and social welfare care as well as academic care.
3. Democracy. Control over and responsibility for schools must be grounded in sound principles of participatory democracy, such as informed involvement of local stakeholders.
4. Informing the public. Providing accurate information about the functioning, successes, and problems of public education, such as information about libraries, health care, availability of enough and current textbooks, clean and equipped bathrooms, and so on.

Authentic accountability is characterized by:

* local authentic assessments.
* school quality review model.
* low-stakes standardized testing in literacy and numeracy.
* annual local reporting by schools to their communities.
* consequences at the school level, not the child or teacher level, for failure.

The rhetoric of outcomes-based accountability is appealing—who wouldn’t want all kids to succeed and high-school graduation to be meaningful? It is imperative that teachers, school administrators, trustees, parents, and students work together to champion authentic accountability, an accountability based on shared democratic responsibility and not on simplistic signs like test scores.

Sandra Mathison and Wayne Ross are professors in the Faculty of Education at UBC.

In 2002 and 2003 graduate students enrolled in my anthropology methods course conducted a series of research projects on public education. At the core of these projects was a concern with the impact of changes in legislation and funding on the K-12 public education system in the lowermainland, specifically Vancouver. These five reports document a range of situations from the nature of media coverage of education issues through to the impact on inner city schools of the withdrawal of funding that has beset public schools since 2001.

Project Reports from 2003
EXTRA! EXTRA! Public Education Chokes on Cup of Campbell’s Soup (media representation of education). Download file
Keeping it Together: Challenges for Inner City Education in Vancouver. Download file

Project Reports from 2002
Clark and Campbell Sitting in a Tree, C-U-T-T-I-N-G. Download file
Effects of the Wrecking Crew: Maintaining the House of Education in Vancouver’s Inner-City. Download file
Cents and Sensibility: The State of Special Education in Vancouver. Download file

BCCPAC seeks feedback from PACs and DPACs on their involvement in deciding how to spend the Ministry’s grants of $50 per student per school and school district. Feel free to share.

On December 8, 2005 the Ministry of Education announced that grants of $50 per FTE student would be distributed in schools and districts throughout the province:

“The Province will provide one-time funding of $50 per student for each public school. In addition, all 60 school districts will receive one-time funding of $50 per school-aged student. Schools and districts will work with education partners to decide how to spend the funding”
– Ministry of Education News Release, “Province Provides $126M for Education from Savings”, December 9, 2005

The objective of the BCCPAC survey is to collect data on the consultation process that took place, which involved parents from across the province. This data will be used as an important reference tool for future discussions with provincial Education Partners.

Survey

The following information was circulated in Vancouver yesterday related to the one-time funding coming from the teachers’ October Strike.

From:* Rick Krowchuk (VSB)
*Sent:* Tue 1/3/2006 6:54 PM

Further to previous emails on this subject (December 16th and 22nd ), attached is revised information about the One Time School and District Grants announced by the Ministry on December 9^th . This information reflects discussions with VSB education partner representatives at a meeting this morning.

Please note that the deadline for submitting Spending Plans is this Friday (January 6th ). The Board Chair has requested that the Ministry provide more time for schools to prepare these Spending Plans. At this time we have not heard back from the Ministry. Accordingly, we request that schools adhere to the January 6th deadline. We will advise schools immediately if additional time is permitted.

December 19, 2005 entry and related files.

New info sent Jan. 3, 2006
Download Spending Plan Template (excel file).
Download Education Grant Tech Order Form.
Download School Memo file.