Reviewing the top 10 events in Canadian educationAnne-Marie Jackson
The initial postmortems on the "Oh-ohs" have now appeared. Celebrity couples, rogues, fraudsters, technology, pop culture and even the new lexicon dominated those conventional end-of-decade features. Yet curiously absent from such rather cheeky appraisals was any direct mention of the world of education, one inhabited by millions of Canadian families.
Although the state of education consistently ranks high in opinion polls on Canadians' list of public concerns, especially among the young adult (19 to 35) age group, it still flies largely below the radar screen. Personal and family concerns, it seems, do not always find their way onto the public agenda.
A major reason for this scant national attention is, as pollster Nik Nanos recently pointed out, the fact that education in Canada remains the preserve of the provinces. And it's not easy to take the pulse of a system spread over 10 provinces with about five million students, 375 school boards and about 15,000 schools.
Throwing caution to the wind, here are my choices for the top 10 "tipping point" events over the past 10 years, in no particular order:
ADVENT OF GOOGLE AND WIKIPEDIA Google provided finger-tip access to all types of information, and online "open source" resources such as Wikipedia replaced library encyclopedias and revolutionized the whole concept of student research.
9/11 AND SCHOOL SECURITY The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, brought the "war on terrorism" home and the schools responded with stricter security policies, entrance-door buzzers and cameras. Parents armed their children with cellphones, citing personal security concerns.
PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE OF SCHOOL RANKINGS Public education authorities gave ground in the ongoing struggle over standardized student testing and the ranking of schools, responding to the Provincial Report Cards initiated by the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute and extended, in 2003, by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies ranking all public high schools in Atlantic Canada.
HARRY POTTER PHENOMENON Schoolchildren were captivated by J.K. Rowling's seven-book Harry Potter series, culminating with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007). The series may not only have created a new generation of readers, but also given the printed word a second chance with our children.
SMART BOARD CRAZE Schools and school districts experimented with "one-to-one" laptop systems, pioneered in New England, Ontario's Peel Region board and ritzy private schools, but, with the introduction of SMART boards in the early 2000s, many more jumped on the latest bandwagon, attracted by the snazzy "interactive whiteboard" technology and the much more affordable one-per-classroom model.
SOCIAL NETWORKING The 2000s saw the emergence of "digital teens" armed with smart phones and living a "online adolescence," best exemplified by a virtual addiction to sites such as Facebook, which enjoyed its highest penetration rates in Canadian cities such as Toronto.
OPENING OF TORONTO'S AFRICENTRIC SCHOOL Less than two years after a fierce public debate, the Toronto District School Board opened Canada's first Africentric Alternative School in September, 2009, aimed at reducing the alarming 40-per-cent dropout rate among black students and modelled after projects in the United States and North Preston, N.S.
REVIVAL OF ALL-BOYS SCHOOLS Single-sex boys' education was long considered quite considered unusual (and limited to a group of traditional Canadian private schools supported by a small worldwide Boys' Schools Coalition), but in late October, 2009, Toronto District School Board director Chris Spence unveiled a proposal for the first all-boys school in Canada's elementary public school system.
HOMEWORK BACKLASH Piling on the homework became more popular in the 1990s and educational progressives, sparked by Alfie Kohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve (1999) and an influential 2008 report by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the University of Toronto, persuaded many school boards to back off on homework demands, particularly in the early grades.
SPECTRE OF SCHOOL CLOSINGS The most recent wave of school closings was the hottest local education issue, spawning major provincewide "save our schools" resistance movements in Ontario, British Columbia and English Quebec and provoking intense local skirmishes in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., Vancouver, Halifax and Bass River, N.S.
Education remains too often an afterthought in the mainstream media. Even though a 2007 Canadian Education Association survey reported that Canadians' level of confidence in education had fallen dramatically since 1994, that alarm bell has gone largely unheeded. The Globe and Mail's decade review provided yet another classic example of this blind spot. Although CBC's Mr. Dressup, Ernie Coombs, was revered by a whole generation of Canadian kids and their parents, his passing in September, 2001, received no mention whatsoever in this coverage.
Paul W. Bennett is director of Schoolhouse Consulting in Halifax and author of The Grammar School: Striving for Excellence in a Public School World .