Senior kindergarten students read at a Toronto school on Dec. 8, 2009.Kevin Van Paassen
Teachers are our heroes." That declaration was perhaps the strongest single message that was conveyed by http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/general/abcs/rcom/full/index.html , the 1995 Report of the Ontario Royal Commission on Learning. I know. I was co-chair of the commission, and I coined this statement that my four other colleagues were happy to accept.
I was also, as it happened, the only parent among the five of us, and I was able to test some of our ideas against the reality of having a kid then just completing primary school. In our extensive hearings, the commission heard a mountain of contradictory stories about teachers, ranging from the superlative to the unacceptable. I also learned first-hand, from unhappy experiences with our own kid, that by no means all teachers lived up to an heroic billing.
Still, given the overall experiences of our son and his pals, combined with the large number of classes I observed while the commission was operating, I concluded that only a remarkable person could endure the daily grind of classroom teaching. And teachers are the decisive factor in a child's education.
But they're not alone. We also pointed to the critical role of parents in determining a child' s attitude towards school. And key to that was the need for parents to have a clear understanding of how their kid was doing in school and how the family could be supportive. That of course depended on the teacher, and how she/he communicated with the parent. But that communication was not as easy as it sounds, on either side.
Families need reports that are easy to understand and easy to act on, whatever their own level of education or grasp of English, a major factor now in many Canadian cities. Surely that's self-evident. Otherwise, report cards serve only a small portion of their potential.
Yet on their part, teachers are trying to convey, even for very young students, impressively sophisticated material. Our commission emphasized that the old-fashioned idea of stuffing a kid's head with isolated factoids - the dates of wars or the names of the prime ministers, the prevailing method of "teaching" in my school days that the Dominion Institute has promoted - was a useless exercise. It's inherently meaningless, it's guaranteed to turn kids off, and it's fruitless. We are all overwhelmed with limitless information that can't remotely be absorbed: I can hardly keep up with the available material on the tiny country of Rwanda. The role of schools is to introduce the fundamental concepts in key areas of knowledge and to teach kids how to think, reason and learn more when they need to, as they will need to do all their lives.
I must say that the Ontario Ministry of Education doesn't do a bad job of trying to follow these guidelines. I have here the latest kindergarten program, and it's quite impressive. And comprehensive. It includes everything from personal and social development to language and math to science and technology to health and physical activity to the arts. Bravo! But how do teachers convey to anxious parents how their little darlings are doing in all these areas. Not so impressively, I fear.
Last year, suddenly, a small flurry of stories appeared mocking some of the language that's used in current report cards. Example: The student "systematically describes the relative location of objects or people using positional language." This apparently means your kid "can tell you if she's in front or behind someone or last in line." Who knew?
These tales led some of my friends and neighbours with young kids to ask me to look at their own report cards. Here's one from senior kindergarten: Joe has made "excellent progress," it seems, but what does that mean? In certain areas, Joe performs with a "high degree of effectiveness," in others with "considerable effectiveness," and in another still with plain old "effectiveness." Presumably this reflects a hierarchy within levels of effectiveness, but that's not clear and the comments don't indicate what difference it makes anyway.
Similarly, there are four levels on an achievement scale, which makes sense, but I can't get these to correlate to the effectiveness scale. Nor is it clear what Joe's poor neurotic folks should do since he's only at the third level in "patterning" and "understanding of media material" while he's tops at "data management and probability."
This is not only non-heroic, it's unacceptable. Yet these kinds of comments are being used by teachers whom the kids love and who by all accounts are doing a fine job in the classroom. But if parents aren't an organic part of the teaching/learning process and can't help their kids, the system isn't working properly.
There are indications that the Ministry of Education is at last about to issue guidelines for report cards that actually convey clear information that parents can use to help their kids do better. I believe overworked and overstressed teachers will welcome them. I don't pretend it's a simple task, given the ambitiousness of the teaching program. But neither is it Einsteinian science. It can be done, it should have been done long ago, and it can't be delayed any longer.
Gerald Caplan is a former New Democratic Party national campaign director and is author of The Betrayal of Africa