Manitoba students still not making the grade

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This article was published 30/04/2018 (2858 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba’s education system has once again produced the highest percentage of under-performing children anywhere in Canada on a major international or national test — and once again, we’ve produced the smallest group of high achievers anywhere in the country.

That combination once again places Manitoba students dead last among Canadian children in reading, math and science.

The news came at 4 a.m. today with the release of 2016 testing results of 30,000 Canadian Grade 8 students by the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC).

Our kids were last in reading and math, far behind the Canadian average, and tied for Saskatchewan for last in science, again way behind the Canadian average.

Nevertheless, the data say three out of four Manitoba children are doing very well in school in reading, learning and succeeding at the same rate as their peers across Canada.

“It gives us a target group” for improvement, Education Minister Ian Wishart said this weekend in an interview. “We also want to shift the three-quarters into the higher group.

“We have to adjust our education system, really, kid by kid — there’s some really innovative programs out there,” said Wishart, who emphasized that teachers know their students better than anyone and are best placed to come up with solutions.

What dooms the results every time in national and international testing is that a higher percentage of Manitoba children is in the lowest category of performance than in other provinces, while a lower percentage of Manitoba children is in the highest category of performance than children in other provinces.

The CMEC says 74 per cent of Manitoba children read at acceptable levels, the same as Canadian children overall; however, 17 per cent of Manitoba children read at the lowest level, compared to 12 per cent in all of Canada. Nine per cent of Manitoba kids read at the highest level, compared to 14 per cent of Canadian children.

The CMEC testing focused on analysis of reading results and did not break out the levels of performance in each province for math and science.

It’s become the norm for Manitoba children to be at or near the bottom among Canadian provinces in testing in the three core subjects, be it the CMEC’s Pan-Canadian Assessment Program of Grade 8s every three years released earlier this morning, or the Organization of Economic Development and Co-ordination’s similar testing of 15 year olds from industrialized nations.

A series of anguished education ministers — the NDP’s Peter Bjornson, Nancy Allan, James Allum, now Conservative Wishart — has heard the gnashing of parents’ teeth and struggled to figure out what’s wrong with our schools and our education system.

Indeed, Manitoba children performed better overall than kids in most industrialized countries in the last OECD testing released in December of 2016, but it’s at the bottom and top of the performance scale that Manitoba’s numbers within Canadian provinces come crashing down.

Wishart said too many people get hung up on how other provinces are doing. The CMEC data show Manitoba children have made progress in the past six years, even if the relative standing hasn’t changed.

It will take time to turn the results around and figure out what’s working, Wishart said.

CMEC analysts don’t provide breakdowns of the data within the 190 Manitoba schools tested, but have reported that while most provinces get consistent results across their systems, Manitoba is one of three provinces in which the results are inconsistent.

“They don’t get into the why,” Wishart lamented.

Officials in Manitoba’s education system are determined to figure out what’s happening, and to change it, Wishart said.

There are no plans to bring back the type of intensive standardized testing of grades 3 and 12 in the 1990s that would have expanded into grades 6 and 9 and more core subjects had the Filmon Conservatives won the 1999 election.

“I look at long-term trends. We really do compare well on a world scale,” the education minister said.

“I’m happy progress is being made from the original baseline years,” said Jennifer Maw, the department’s assistant co-ordinator for the assessment unit in the instruction, curriculum and assessment branch.

Girls have performed far better than boys in reading throughout Canada, which is consistent with previous testing.

Within Manitoba, girls and boys are pretty much equal in math, but girls are way ahead in reading and well ahead in science.

Results within the English-language system are generally better than results in French-language schools.

Both the NDP and Conservatives have focused on improving early-years numeracy and literacy, and most of the kids that have been targeted by those strategies are young enough that they may have to wait for the next round of testing or the one beyond that to see if any of those plans worked.

Allan restored basic 1950s arithmetic for very young children: adding and subtracting, simple multiplying and dividing, and memorizing times tables. Then the NDP invested heavily in small class sizes, primarily capping classes at 20 children in kindergarten to Grade 3.

The Tories are emphasizing early-years math and reading.

The latest report noted Manitoba’s overall reading scores are up since 2010, but so are the results from across Canada.

“In Manitoba, both girls and boys achieved mathematics scores below the respective Canadian means by gender. There was no gender gap in mathematics achievement in Manitoba, which is consistent with the pattern in Canada overall,” the CMEC found.

Students completing the reading test also filled in a questionnaire, which researchers say showed there was a correlation between the results and parental level of education, language spoken in the home and number of books in the home.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca