Have you been noticed that more students are not handing in assignments on time (or at all) and are asking for make-up exams with flimsy excuses; that class attendance is down and more students are dropping your classes? Well, it may be because Ontario high schools are not only enabling these things but that the Ministry of Education is directing schools to do so through a series of policies, including the ‘Credit Recovery Programme.’ This slackening of standards is all part of recent initiatives by the Ministry to increase high school completion rates (85% of secondary students by 2010-11). As more students attend university who have become accustomed to not be held accountable for their ‘behaviour’ as opposed to their ‘academic potential’ in high schools, professors are finding themselves scrambling to teach students that they must abide by self-management standards previously accepted as obvious.
The only people who seem to be happy about these Ministry initiatives are administrators. High school teachers are
hopping mad about it, and recently released the results of a study on the negative consequences of these policies. A petition protesting aspects of policies associated with the ‘no-fail’ practices they have produced has also been circulated. Meanwhile, a
recent study of university professors in Ontario found that most professors feel that incoming students are not as well prepared as in the past. The national media picked up on
both of these expressions of dissatisfaction, but the Ontario Ministry has not indicated any willingness to consider seriously these concerns.
Last spring, Ben Levin, an OISE professor seconded as the Deputy Minister of Education, issued a
memo attempting to neutralize criticism of Ministry policies, claiming “It’s important to correct and clarify facts.”
I contributed to the recent media coverage and will use this post to respond to Levin’s memo to point out how the Ministry has been ‘correcting facts’ to mystify people about its policies.
Based on Levin’s memo, it is clear that there is little understanding in the Ministry regarding why teachers are concerned about the issue of failure in our high schools.High school teachers are upset about how to deal with students who put out little or no effort in a course. Teachers who feel obliged to fail students on substantive grounds face numerous obstacles in doing so, and those who attempt to do so in a given course commonly report that they will not do so again because of the unpleasantries they face from their administrative personnel. These teachers are not calling for a quota of Fs; the students who should be failing in the current system are not meeting the barest of standards, like attending classes and sitting for exams.
Common sense tells us that if students know there are no penalties for non-compliance with course requirements, some will play the system. The emphasis here is on ‘some’ students. We can certainly ensure that virtually all students complete high school by ignoring non-compliance with basic academic standards and behavioural requirements, but what kind of education are these students receiving? It is naïve to assume that the entire system should bend for the sake of a minority of students who do not have the behavioural maturity to meet basic course requirements. And, given what those on the ground—teachers and students—are reporting about the deleterious effects of these practices, the majority are being made to suffer for the sake of this minority.
At the same time, university professors are increasingly voicing complaints, and they too are finding the same indifference from administrators. It is a common gambit for those who want to defend a practice to attack the credibility of critics, rather than dealing with the substance of a criticism. Levin does this by claiming that complaints by university professors about standards and poor student preparation are not new. This type of ad hominem argument implies that anyone who is unhappy with current practices is some sort of old fogey who is blinded by a longing for some sort of gilded past. The further implication is that such critics were wrong in the past, so they must be wrong in the present.
The main problem with this type of argument is that the existence of past complaints does not prove that a current complaint is incorrect. Indeed, some past complaints about educational practices may well have been correct.
Levin compounds this problem with his ‘cherry-picking’ methodology of citing evidence, and even then he misrepresents that evidence. He claims that professors have been complaining about the poor preparation of first-year university students for over 200 years, but to support this claim he makes reference only to an obscure magazine article published in 1991. Those who would bother to track down this source, as I did, will find that the evidence in that article does not involve a professor’s lament at all, let alone one from two centuries ago, but rather a novelist from 1958 writing in Life Magazine. In the midst of the Cold War, this novelist argued that the American educational system should be more competitive with the Russian system.
Aside from these logical and evidentiary flaws in Levin’s argument, why should we be surprised to hear that educators have spoken up in the past about elements of a system that they experience on a daily basis and over which they have a fiduciary duty? Indeed, shouldn’t we be surprised if there were not some complaints when things were thought to be at risk of going off the rails? On the one hand, teachers are in a unique position to see what students are actually doing and learning, much more so than administrators in remote offices. On the other hand, in modern democracies, major institutions are—and should be—the object of criticism. Such criticism shows that there is some health in our democracy and that our institutions can evolve rather than ossify. Administrators like Levin should be encouraging open debate, not trying to shut it down with internal memos encouraging his minions to instil ‘public confidence’ by subverting critics.
Levin concludes his memo by urging his colleagues to challenge criticisms of government policies and local practices by talking about ‘Ontario’s high standards’ and encouraging successful students to ‘share their views.’ Essentially, he is taking recourse to ‘viral’ public relations measures whereby issues are managed rather than rectified, and facts are massaged rather than openly disclosed. In speaking for the Ministry, Levin is calling for ‘public confidence,’ when he really means public compliance and the submission of teachers to seriously misguided policies.