Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink wrote in yesterday’s Toronto Star that at a time when Ontario is pressing ahead with mandatory testing of students, Britain—whose model Ontario follows—is abandoning it.
Why Ontario doesn’t measure up
Oct. 25, 2005. 01:00 AM
When Ontario students returned to school in September, it was hard not to notice the sea change in the educational climate of the province. There is a renewed energy and optimism in schools that nine years of “more for less,” “naming, shaming and blaming,” and Tory crisis management had eroded.
The McGuinty government has ensured labour peace by orchestrating four-year contracts with teachers, pumping badly needed money into new textbooks, class-size reductions, and building upgrades. We applaud these efforts.
Yet we remain concerned for the long-term sustainability of the province’s educational system. Despite its laudable initiatives, the government remains fixated on imposing short-term targets and aligned tests in literacy and numeracy.
By setting the goal that 75 per cent of 12-year-olds will reach the required standard on province-wide testing by 2008, for example, it has boxed itself into a policy that will actually work against its attempts to return the Ontario educational system to its place as a world leader.
Ironically, the government has modelled its approach to imposed targets on that of Britain.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s international student achievement comparisons, Britain is less successful than Canada and Ontario in literacy and mathematics.
Moreover, the most recent research in Britain demonstrates that the so-called British achievement gains, based on imposed short-term targets and aligned testing, are mainly an illusion — partly because test items just got easier each year.
Britain’s own inspection agency has reported that since the introduction of the country’s National Literacy Strategy, fewer children are reading for pleasure.
In addition, the strategy’s overemphasis on the old basics of literacy and numeracy has narrowed the curriculum and short-changed British students on the new basics which they also need to compete in a dynamic knowledge economy: creativity, teamwork, multiliteracies (oral, written and visual), environmental responsibility, and ability to use modern technologies.
Britain is now turning around before it is too late.
Wales has abolished all educational testing up to and including age 14. England is starting to test younger children individually when they are ready, not in a state of high anxiety, all at once. And more emphasis is being put on teacher-designed tests that give them information they can use to help their students, which leads to better results.
All this has come about because of parent pressure. Strangely, Ontario is adopting a strategy th
at Britain is leaving behind. The international evidence is clear: Ontario’s strategy is unsustainable.
Our own research, in Ontario and New York State as well as our extensive involvement with educational systems in more than 40 countries worldwide, has convinced us that more sustainable educational policies preserve and develop deep learning for all students; they spread and last, in ways that do no harm to — indeed, create — positive benefit for others, now and in the future.
In our book, Sustainable Leadership, we identify seven interrelated and essential guides to sustainable educational policies that are derived from principles of ecology and successful organizational development in the business world.
The Ontario government’s approach to imposed, short-term achievement targets transgresses every one of these principles.
Depth: Sustainable policies address things that matter: teaching, learning, and caring for all students. Imposed, short-term achievement targets push most schools to focus on testing before learning; they put a priority only on learning that is easily measured; they narrow learning to the old basics, to the detriment of the new basics.
Length: Sustainable policies last and do not shift with every swing in the political climate. Government ministers and system leaders who implement top-down mandates frequently find they are unable to deliver the targets on time — and then their jobs are gone. Some do reach targets by forcing or faking them, but the results quickly plateau once the system runs out of tricks.
Breadth: Sustainable policies depend on widespread acceptance and broad support. Acceleration and standardization of imposed change and its targets reduces teachers’ time to work together and to learn from each other.
Justice: Sustainable policies are just; they do not favour a few to the disadvantage of many. Target-driven forms of competitive accountability create disincentives for neighbouring schools to share their learning and expertise.
Diversity: Sustainable policies promote cohesive diversity and avoid aligned standardization in teaching and learning. Short-term targets turn the focus on deep standards into a damaging fixation with standardized testing.
Resourcefulness: Sustainable policies develop and do not deplete material and human resources. High-speed implementation, driven by short-term targets, uses excessive energy, leaves no time for renewal, and makes teachers and leaders run out of gas.
Conservation: Sustainable policies honour and learn from the best of the past to create an even better future. Short-term targets force us to think and work in the present and future tense. Their creative destruction makes it hard for us to take the time to acknowledge, learn from, recombine, then move beyond the past.
There are ample grounds for optimism about the future of Ontario schools.
The infusion of more resources, a renewed belief in the professionalism and dedication of our teachers, and the government’s willingness to learn from evidence of what works, provide the firmest of foundations for improvement.
It would be a tragedy if all of this were undermined by a temporary fixation with short-term achievement targets designed to give the government quick but misleading results within one election period. It’s up to the electorate, like Britain’s parents, to press the government to produce something more long-lasting and sustainable than this.
The Liberals could follow the example of Alberta, Canada’s most successful province in student achievement, which has worked with its teachers and principals to develop shared, rather than imposed, targets for each school — with impressive benefits for achievement scores over three years.
Or it could take its lead from Finland, the most successful nation on OECD comparisons of literacy and numeracy, which continues to achieve stellar success by trusting its highly qualified teachers to deliver strong results without a top-heavy apparatus of targets and testing.
Our best way forward is not for bureaucrats to impose external targets in cultures of anxiety and fear that turn schools into little Enrons of educational change, prepared to do anything just to get the numbers right.
Instead, we should call for schools, with government support and monitoring, to commit to their own shared targets, in cultures of hope that bring real and lasting achievements in old and new basics, for all our students.
This government will persist with short-term, quick fix targets as long as it believes that’s what Ontario’s voters want. Let’s show them that we have a bigger and better vision than this.
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