Part Two
Stepping outside of the public school system is not a decision parents take lightly. When they decide to home school their children, send them to an independent school associated with the Ministry of Education, or to one with no ties to the system at all, how can they know how well their child is doing in the new environment? School Trustee Don Brett considers the issue an important one.
"The difficulty I have with that is that people start off with an issue which can be objectively measured – my kid doesn’t learn well in this school – and then they say, ‘my philosophy is this.’ Okay, you can have that philosophy, but if your starting point is a problem that you can measure, then at some point you’ve got to measure if what you do is having an effect on the problem."
Andrée Janyk, Whistler’s other school trustee, adds: "Somewhere along the line you have to ask yourself how your child is doing. You have to look at some indicators; schools have indicators, the district has them."
Brett points to the Program for International School Assessment (PISA) as an indicator of B.C.’s public school system. PISA looks at test scores from15-year-old students in 45 OECD countries. "Canada ranks, depending on which subject area, in the top two or three or four," Brett says, "and if B.C. were a country, it would score just below Finland, which tends to come out at number one. So there is some very hard evidence that B.C.’s education system is world class and near the top."
Looking within the province, Brett says, "the Fraser Institute puts together a report card of secondary schools, and Whistler Secondary scores in the top 15 per cent of all schools in the province. Half of the schools ranked ahead of Whistler Secondary are private schools. The Fraser Institute looks at the Grade 12 exams – it’s all standard testing."
Independent schools which receive public funding from the Ministry of Education must also subject their students to B.C. exams in Grades 4, 7 and 10, to be ranked against all other students in the province. But some parents question the very value of such standardized testing. Leslie Becker is one of the founding members of the Pemberton Alternative Learning Cooperative, a group of approximately 12 families who started a learning centre in Pemberton which is not affiliated with the Ministry of Education. The learning centre is multi-aged and uses an emergent curriculum which allows the children to help direct what they will be learning.
"Our philosophy," Becker says, "is that as long as the children are doing, they’re learning." She refers to alternative movements in food and health and suggests that education needs to evolve in a similar manner. "The schools are moving toward standardization and uniformity and technology, and moving away from all the creativity that makes up a human being," she says. "It’s the standardization that really scares me. Each child is a complete individual organism, and to rate them by comparing them to children of their own age is completely inaccurate."
Is the need to measure a child’s progress beneficial to the child, or has it become a means of justifying the educational system itself? In a recent Adbusters ’ education issue, Kier Miner writes, "Across the globe, learning is traded and assessed as a commodity. Through vast banks of educational data, student scores are compared like quarterly earnings. Education has become a product, geared not toward the needs or desires of students, but to the improvement of test scores. The result is a widespread containment of knowledge and a standardization of educational practice. Much like McDonald’s, school is beginning to taste the same everywhere."
Alta Lake School principal, Michelle Kirkegaard, is aware of the impact meeting test scores can have on students and teachers alike. "Because I was a teacher in the public system, what happens is the teacher teaches to what is coming on those exams. Unfortunately, I think that’s what dictates that year in curriculum which maybe could have been a different year for those kids, but the schools want to see good results, and the teachers know this is part of it. And that’s the thing with standardized testing: everything’s laid out, you want the school to do well, you want to keep your job, but I don’t know if that’s the best way for some teachers to be teaching that year or subject."
The notion of objectively measuring education should also be looked at in terms of who is creating the tests and who is ranking the schools. Whether a right wing think tank like the Fraser Institute is the right organization to be ranking our schools is debatable, and perhaps one’s opinion on the matter would depend on his or her politics. But beyond politics, so called objective measuring of a child’s or a school’s or a system’s success, can be more subjective than we tend to believe; it hinges on the values of those who create and administer the tests.
Our society tends to value cognitive aspects of intelligence such as memory and problem solving that are traditionally measured by IQ tests. But other areas of intelligence exist, such as emotional and social and intuitive thinking which science is increasingly coming to understand and to validate with scientific research. But a child’s development, or lack thereof, in these other areas of intelligence, might go completely undetected on standardized tests given by government or non-government organizations.
Christine Martin is one of the founding parents of Squamish’s Cedar Valley (Waldorf) School. In terms of gauging how each child is doing, Martin says: "In our school, and in all Waldorf schools, the children work through books which they create themselves, and really this is where you see the whole child, because in these books they write not only what the teacher has asked them to reiterate, but also their own thoughts, and their drawings, and they’ll put their creativity in there. There’s so much you can perceive out of looking through these books: what are they writing, how are they writing, how accurate are they in their ability to spell and to articulate themselves?"
Martin says they try to look at all aspects of the child. "How are they reacting with other children, because that’s such a key point in success for the future – their social and their emotional skills. This is something that Waldorf education really takes time to look at: their academic aspects, their emotional and social aspects, and their physical aspects, are really taken into consideration, and really enhanced and supported and directed in a positive way, and the teacher’s watching all these aspects of the child grow, and knows the child really well.
"And there will be some children who are more advanced in some areas than others, and that’s natural; but how do we aspire to have each child reach their capacity – that’s really the success of it."
The success of an individual child, like that of a school, a government ministry or a society as a whole, is not easily measured. One’s findings will ultimately depend on his or her values.
Parents who home school or are involved in independent school movements, tend to place less importance on government standardized tests. To varying degrees, they’ve stepped outside the system that administers and lives by those tests, and they’ve replaced them with measures of their own. They often hold a strong belief in the form of education they’ve embraced; they’ve chosen the values they want imparted to their children.
Home school and independent school movements tend to be grassroots organizations, created by an interested group of parents; their structure grows from the bottom up. The public school system, by dint of its size and its administering authority in Victoria, appears to be a top down structure. Both of Whistler’s school trustees, however, insist that public schools are directed as much by parents and the community as they are by government.
"The government is working hard in response to the electorate to give parents more input into education," says Brett. "There have been two key elements: one is the School Planning Councils and the other has been the roles of PACs and DPACs (Parent Advisory Councils and District Parent Advisory Councils) that have been incorporated in the legislation, two or three years ago."
"All our schools have gone through a process where they determine the values that are important to them," adds Janyk. "So in one school you’ll see the social values are three key words; in another school it’ll be three different key words. It’s not that the district or the ministry has said, ‘these are the standards of behaviour.’ These people have gotten together and discussed it, the whole school population: teachers, students and parents have come to an agreement on the values that they believe in. All of our schools have done that."
While the required curriculum still comes down to the schools from the Ministry of Education in the form of Integrated Resource Packages and learning outcomes, Janyk says those things get massaged. "With English and Math, talking about learning outcomes, we have a core of teachers that get together across the district and say, ‘what are we looking for in English 4?’ They’re coming up with these more common perspectives and understandings of what are some good core expectations at Grades 4, 7 and 10. We’re trying to do this in a very collective and collaborative method that we embarked on in our schools six years ago."
The extent to which schools, boards and the ministry are open to input from parents may have changed considerably since my son’s kindergarten year in 1998. The Ministry of Education currently has a pamphlet available on its website titled: "Developing More Choices Within the K-12 Public Education System: Do you want a particular type of school or program in your district?" The pamphlet states: "A parent, or a group of parents, may want to develop a type of school in their home district that is not currently offered." How far the ministry is willing to go with such an initiative could affect the shape of both public and independent schools in the province. For example, would the public system be willing to incorporate secular independent schools with differing value systems and teaching philosophies? Such schools-within-schools could broaden the offerings of public schools, bring active parents back into the system and take the issue of payment for alternative education completely out of the equation.
Janyk, Brett and Kirkegaard were asked whether they thought such schools-within-schools could become a reality in the Sea To Sky corridor.
"Absolutely," says Brett. "There’s no regulatory or curricular reason why the public system can’t offer these types of approaches."
"Are we open to it, yeah we’re open," adds Andrée Janyk.
"And we’re open as well," says Kirkegaard. "I don’t think the Waldorf School was previously ready to ask. We were creating a school. Now we have a foundation, and a strong presence in the community; we’re being recognized for our contribution to the community. So it’s something that would be exciting to look at, but how do we make sure that the integrity of the program is still there – even the things that aren’t always visible – can you maintain that belief system where it’s more than just the intellect?"
Brett Adds: "You asked is there room and we both said yes. How we do that, well we don’t know."
"That comes out in further discussion," says Janyk.
Perhaps the greatest strength of our public school system is its flexibility and willingness to change and grow. And the area where independent and public schooling meet, where they share resources and ideas, might prove to be the most fertile ground of all for learning.
