As summer draws to a close, and the five teachers/administrators in our family (three children, and two daughters-in-law) and grandchildren, head back to school, I reflect on my school days, and my career, in the public school system and how things have changed since I was a student, a young teacher and administrator. Sadly, student learning has steadily regressed during this time.
Today, extraordinarily large numbers of students cannot do math at grade level and cannot read at grade level in our public schools. It was reported in a recent News-Optimist article that a national study showed a decrease in the average scores in math, science and reading in every province (Lockhart, Sept. 21, 2011). In addition, it was noted in another article in the Regional Optimist that a number of years of research showed Saskatchewan students performed well below the Canadian mean score in mathematics, science and reading (McPhail, Aug. 24). I personally know students who recently graduated from Grade 12, but cannot spell and are unable to write a sentence. In addition, most of our young people leave high school knowing very little about Canadian history.
Frankly, these students are not in possession of a solid high school education if they know nothing about the struggles and sacrifices our forefathers made to build and defend this great nation. And, educators and health professionals are now referring to the numbers of students in the public system who are overweight and obese as an epidemic.
These are some of the of the basic problems confronting our teachers and students, in addition to a long list of other school problems.
Why do we sustain such deplorable educational outcomes when we have highly trained teachers, excellent facilities, state-of-the-art curricula and sophisticated teaching methodologies? We had none of these when I was a student back in the 1960s.
Fifty years ago, we sat in desks in rows. The primary teaching methodology was direct instruction which meant the teacher stood at the front of the classroom, lectured, explained how to solve problems and wrote examples and notes on the chalk board, which we copied into our notebooks. We did not have computers and we did not have calculators with which to do math and science. We leanerd math timetables by rote in the elementary grades. If a student wished to speak, he (she) put up his (her) hand. Generally, the teacher talked and students listened. The teacher was in charge of the classroom, not the students. We wrote tests, which we had to pass to advance to the next grade. Discipline was usually swift and uncompromising. No student would have thought of using the "f" word in the classroom or hallways. Importantly, most of us had a sense of responsibility and a work ethic, instilled in us by our parents and teachers.
Despite the lack of sophistication in the teaching and learning process, almost everyone learned English, mathematics, history, science and other subjects, and graduated from Grade 12. Many students excelled in their studies. I can also remember my mother, a wonderful teacher, instructing a class of 40 pupils in a Grades 1 to 9 in a rural school in the 1950s. These one room, multi-graded schools also enjoyed a record of high success in their day.
So why are we faced with such immense and seemingly intractable problems in our public education system today? It's a fundamentally important question. Despite the decade I spent at the university (seven years on campus and an additional three years enrolled in summer school, intercession and night classes), I'm not writing from a theoretical, ivory tower perspective although I understand that kind of thinking); I'm discussing these horrendous school problems from the point of view of a teacher and principal who spent all of his professional life in the trenches.
Does this mean that we should go back to the 1960s education model, and that there is nothing good about our present education system? Of course not. The issue is the disproportionate number of students who underachieve. The problem is that ideology, not research, drives education. We need to start making major educational decisions based on evidence. I will present my ideas in a subsequent article on public education.
