Well, that's it, that's it. You know, it is the strangest attitude I can possibly imagine. Except for the fact that when you talk about the teachers, their contract is not based on how good? How much a teacher makes in his province is not based on whether or not they're any good. It's based on simply two things: 1. Official credentials. So do you have a Bachelor's Degree, or a Master's Degree or a PhD (well a Master's I suppose is the highest)? And how long have you been teaching? Well, neither of those two things is reflective of whether or not you're a very good teacher. But, as you said, if, for instance, you had a problem: Say you were at a school and you were the teacher and your friend is the principal, and you talked and you said, "You know, we have a problem. We can see it in the results. Boys don't do as well as girls do in reading. And we know that there are certain neurological kind of things at work, but these are grade seven boys! So presumably the disadvantages that they might have had in terms of speed of development and that sort of thing would be mitigated after six or seven years of formal schooling." In fact, that's what teaching is all about: learning in a school situation is supposed to overcome difficulties. And yet, we're not doing that. And relative to the, and this is important to remember what I'm saying here, relative to the other schools in the province, relative to schools that have the same general characteristics both as regards students and families, we're not doing very well. What should we do about it? And we ask all of the teachers in the school and they say, "We're working as hard as we can. We really want the kids to succeed. We do have textbooks. We don't know. It must be the family characteristics, or it must be because the students don't have the capacity, or maybe the curriculum's wrong, or maybe we don't have enough trees in the schoolyard, or maybe?" Add anything you want to the list. But all they're saying is that they don't have any more good ideas, and that's absolutely healthy. It's healthy to accept the fact that you don't know what to do. It's not healthy to not know what to do and do nothing about it. So now you're at the point where you say, "You know, we've plum run out of ideas in terms of ways of how to ensure that these kids improve. So what are we going to do about that?" Well, let's find a source that tells us who has had that same challenge and has successfully overcome it. There must be some, maybe. So you look around and ask for the source. Well there is none. Why? Because we're not willing to admit that some teachers are better than others, that some principals are better than others, and some counsellors are better than others. And when you look at a school, what else is there that counts, what else is there that matters other than teachers, principals, and counsellors? If we're not willing to admit that some of those people are actually better in their job than others, then we're sure not going to have a list of the best ones. And, in fact, I was on a television show a week or so ago in Ontario debating, generally, the report card and whether or not it was a useful tool. And I said, "Well, without reference to our report card," to my opponent, I said, "can you tell me which are the top, the best, the most effective principals and teachers when it comes to ESL kids in the province of Ontario?" She couldn't tell me. I knew she couldn't tell me. Because nobody wants to recognize that. How stupid! How shortsighted! How bad is that for the children? Forget about the adults involved in the equation; you're dooming the staff that don't know what to do to continued failure. You're saying, "If you are in charge of a bunch of disadvantaged kids, and whatever it might be, poverty or ESL, if you accept that or special needs or whatever. If you're working with a bunch of those kids, and you don't know what to do about it - Tough." Well what kind of an attitude is that?
Mark: How much of the prevailing attitude is influenced by the fact that the union, the teacher's union, public-sector union, basically controls what everybody thinks? Even if you start out as a fresh-faced teacher eager to teach kids, eventually because the older, senior union members kind of stomp you down, kill you?
I think it's worse than that, though. I think it's worse than that, because it's this education business. This public, government-run, government-funded, government-regulated institution is run by the people? All of the people involved in that, all the people who work in that system eat at the same table. I mean, you won't find too many fresh-faced, fire-in-your-belly teachers starting their work, their life's work, their life's passion in British Columbia. Why not? Because they've come out of faculties of education. Who runs the faculties of education? The same people who are eating with the teacher's union, or the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Education, or the school board members. I mean it's a closed shop. So what kind of teachers do you think are going to come out of most of the faculties of education in Canada? I'll tell you! Teachers who think measurement is fundamentally bad for children, assessments of learning are fundamentally the work of the devil, which means you shouldn't have report cards, which means you shouldn't find excellence and reward it. Which means all the things that inhibit the ability to improve. That's why I can't imagine in the near future getting official endorsement and support for the report card but at the same time, that is why the report cards continue and expansion is critically important. Perhaps one last question. What should a parent do?
Well, we have a start. The report card is a start, and the report card is designed for parents. It's not, in the first instance, designed for administrators or ministries of education but for parents, and it brings to parents, gives parents some control over their children's future as regards education. And it does it in two ways. This is how parents use the report card. First, where they have a choice of schools, and across Canada the ability to choose from more than just one school is becoming more accepted. In British Columbia, for instance, the law, the School Act has changed so that starting on September 1st of this year, 2003, parents will have the right to send their children to any school that they want within the public system anywhere in British Columbia. So there's no longer any of these things they call catchment areas or enrollment areas, where a school board can say, "You live in the poor part of town so you have to go to the school in your neighborhood. Period." So where parents do have a choice they need objective information along with subjective information to make a good decision. And don't forget: the establishment, the ministries and the boards, will not compare schools because that would admit that some are better than others. But everybody knows some are better than others! I've never talked to a student or an ex-student at a school who doesn't say, "I remember that some of my teachers were really good, and some of my teachers were really not good, and some of my teachers should have found other jobs immediately." We all have those recognitions. Same with parents: Ask any parent who's had a child in school, and I don't care if it's public, or private or any other kind of school, the parents will say, "There are some teachers, when you talk to them they provide you with useful information about how your child's doing. There are others who just say 'Oh, she's a wonderful child. Next!" So there are better teachers and not-so-good teachers, and everybody knows that. But again, what the report card does then for parents who are choosing, it provides them with objective information on how one school is doing compared to others. And there are lots of useful comparisons that can be made. Perhaps the most important thing for a parent to see is simply how is the school doing versus its previous history? Is it getting better or not? But you can also compare schools to other neighbourhood schools and so on and so forth.
Mark: Presumably, private schools do things differently than public schools. Do they score much differently than public schools?
Well, you know, the concept of a private school or private schools as a lot of people think of them is sort of like that ESL. You know there's a bunch of power in labels, and you know if you talk about private schools as one type of school, you're wrong! Just like you're wrong when you talk about ESL students as one kind of student. Because when people think about private schools, when people compare them to the public schools, they're usually thinking about a very small percentage of the private school population. They're talking about what you maybe call 'University Prep Schools' or 'Elite Private Schools' that probably cost you $15000 or more to send your child to. But those are the small minority of private schools in Canada. Most of the private schools in Canada are schools that are run by religious organizations that charge, in fact, very little to have kids attend. The performance at those schools, while in general I would say better than the public system, are not hugely better. Because, after all, the mission is a little bit different. The mission in the Catholic school system is not only to provide a good education but to provide it within a Catholic context. So the other important difference between those kind of private schools and the elite ones is that the elite private schools are the ones that everybody talks about in terms of the fact that they select their clientele. They say, "Unless you have previously proven that you're academically excellent, we don't want you." That's not the case in the Catholic schools or the Mennonite schools or any of those, they say, well the Catholic schools and the Jewish ones, for instance, they believe that people of the faith have the right to have their kids educated within the context of their religious beliefs and we'll bend over backwards to ensure they can attend even if they can't afford it. The other thing, just to get back to it, so the report card allows parents some objective information that they can use when they're deciding on a school. Of course we would say there's other sources and they should certainly look at them. The other thing that the report card does for parents is where they already have a child enrolled in a school, again, the report card, which everybody gets, provides a basis to look for opportunities to improve. We usually have more than one indicator, well we always have many indicators of school performance. You open it up and you say, "Ooh! Let's see what percentage of our kids failed exams", or what the average mark was, or what the difference was in achievement levels of, say, boys and girls. It provides a number of different points of view of how the school's doing. And, as a result, suggests areas for improvement that can't be hidden from parents by principals. This isn't a report that only the principal gets; everybody gets this. So when those interested in the school sit down and say, "Well what are we going to do better next year?" There may be three or four, or two or three opportunities within the report card to say, "Hey, why don't we focus on the gap between the boys and the girls, or the failure rate on exams?" or whatever. And so they can become more knowledgeable and more active in helping the school improve on a year-to-year basis. So with those two things we increase the ability to have a positive in-back of the parents.
Mark: Yeah, I don't think I've talked to any parent who doesn't appreciate finding out the results of the survey, that isn't interested. I mean, the teachers complain but they also are forced to react. I mean, they read it too and they know it's their school that's being talked about so I think it's got to be effective. Yeah, I think I agree with you, that most people, whether they express concern about it, and there are legitimate concerns, whether they express concern about the report card or whether they're full-fledged supporters, they do read it and that's the important thing. Because, as I say, I mean, it's a third-party point of view on how your organization is doing. Well, I think that's been a very interesting discussion about the reports themselves and about education in Canada, and I very much thank you.
