Category Archives: Education

Nov 07 2014
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Business, Economy, Education

Will work for nothing? You’re hired

Put this kid to work. . .for free

Put this kid to work. . .for free

It must be awfully nice up there in his big office, shuttered with gilded blinds that stop the stark light of reality from reaching impertinently to his leather chair. Perhaps that’s why Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz likes to cheerfully blurt the odd absurdity from time to time.

Like this one to reporters in Ottawa on Monday:

“When I bump into youths, they ask me, you know, ‘What an I supposed to do in a situation?’ I say, ‘look, having something unpaid on your CV is very worth it because that’s the one thing you can do  to counteract this scarring effect. Get some real-life experience even though you are discouraged, even if it’s for free.”

Oh sure, I can just imagine Mr. Poloz bumping into “youths”. Why, it happens all the time, don’t you know. In fact, he must be plum tuckered out, what with all the questions about their futures Canada’s young people pose to him each and every day.

Why wouldn’t the $400,000-a-year fat cat throw up his hands in mock exasperation and, in effect, say: “Let ‘em eat cake”?

Or, more accurately, this to the House of Commons Finance Committee on Tuesday:

“Volunteer to do something that is at least somewhat related to your experience set, so it’s clear that you are gaining some learning experience during that period.”

Or this to Liberal MP Scott Brison (who worried that unpaid internships might favour kids from wealthier families, who could afford to stake their progency):

“There are issues like the ones you’re raising. . .but I still think when there are those opportunities, one should grab them because it will reduce the scarring effect, all other things equal.”

And while we’re about parsing Mr. Poloz’s recent ruminations, what is this “scarring effect” to which he refers?

Is it the humiliation of having to live in your parent’s basement because no one will give you a job that pays well enough to cover the monthly let on a cold-water flat down by the docks?

Or is it that empty feeling in the pit of your stomach that refuses to go away because you cant afford anything more nourishing than a tin of peanuts every other day?

Whatever it is, Mr. Poloz is, at least, on the bandwagon. Unpaid internships are all the rage these days.

A couple of years ago, the Daily Mail in the United Kingdom reported, “Firms across the country are increasingly relying on unpaid interns in a bid to cut costs in a tough economic climate, according to a new study. Bosses in the design and digital industry expect more work for less money, leading to fewer permanent staff members and more unpaid interns, according to think tank the Institute for Public Policy

Research, which carried out a survey of 500 agency workers.”

More recently, Susan Adams, a staff writer at Forbes, observed, “As the ranks of the unemployed have swelled and the surplus of jobless college students and grads has grown, increasing numbers of people young and old have been signing on for unpaid internships, wanting to make contacts and accumulate résumé lines that can help them get paying work.”

And according to a CBC report last March, “Unpaid internships are on the rise in Canada, with some organizations estimating there’s as many as 300,000 people currently working for free at some of the country’s biggest, and wealthiest, corporations.

The ranks of unpaid interns swelled in the aftermath of the 2008 economic recession, said Sean Geobey, a research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the author of a recent report entitled The Young and the Jobless.”

Still, a backlash does appear to be brewing. “This is not the sort of social contract that today’s kids saw their parents and grandparents grow up under,” Mr. Geobey said. “We’re starting to see Canadians – young people and their parents in particular – seriously question what exactly is going on here, and why are we apparently returning to 19th-century labour practices.”

I’ll make Mr. Poloz a deal. I’ll swap with him for a week. See how he likes it.

Mind you, my job’s not an unpaid internship.

Some days, it just feels that way.

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Nov 06 2014
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Education, Government, Politics

In Canada, all children are being left behind

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On almost every issue of significance to Canadian society, the federal Conservatives and NDP could not stand further apart. But on child care, in at least one important respect, they march in lockstep together: Both parties dramatically miss the point.

Early childhood education should, first and foremost, be about children – their welfare, their development, their opportunities to become happy, engaged, enthusiastic learners, thinkers and, eventually citizens.

So what, pray tell, does the Harper government’s determination to line parental pockets with a few more ducats every year under its Universal Child Care Benefit have to do kid-centred early childhood education?

On the other side of the ideological coin, what does the New Democrats’ proposal to subsidize as many as a million new daycare spaces across the country have to do with preparing the next generation of leaders, educators, professionals and skilled workers?

Granted, the NDP scheme at least attempts to acknowledge that, nowadays, families need two working spouses to make ends meet.

In contrast, the Tory concept seems tethered to weirdly antiquated notions about motherhood; its new $160-per-month, per-child under six, program is an undiluted attempt to resurrect the conviction that women with kids do actually belong in their homes until such time as they can make their great escapes back into the working world (yeah, after 10 or 12 years, good luck with that, ladies).

Still, each model, in its own way, utterly ignores the compelling bang for the billions of bucks each purports to spend, simply because neither focuses on kids, but rather on the adult parents, whose votes will fuel the next great democratic lottery come the autumn of 2015.

To this audience, Mr. Harper likes to say things like: “We have always been clear that money and support to help families raise children should not go into more bureaucracy. It should go to the real experts on child care. That’s mom and dad, and that is what we are doing.”

Well, no, actually, mom and dad are not always, or even usually, the “real experts on child care”. (My wife and I certainly weren’t when we had our two kids in the early 1980s).

Then again, neither are, necessarily, the legions of lightly trained, underpaid, overburdened daycare workers slogging away in frequently poor conditions from coast to glimmering coast in this country.

The real experts are those who have studied the science, research, policy and practice of early childhood development.

They are those who apply all of this where it matters – in the classroom, where kids benefit from structured play, early and often, where kids benefit from the certainty that what they learn in pre-school will carry them seamlessly into primary education systems.

And, in fact, this model works in Canada.

Look to Quebec, for one.

Just one decade after that province introduced a universal early childhood education system, integrated into higher grades, it went from the bottom to the top on many social indicators.

From having Canada’s lowest female labour participation rate, it now has the highest. Where Quebec women were once less likely to attend post-secondary education than their counterparts in the rest of Canada, today they dominate. Meanwhile, student scores on standardized tests have gone from below the Canadian average to above.

The research also shows that Quebec fathers are more involved in child-raising than ever before. Now, 82 per cent of fathers in that province take paid leave after the births of their kids, compared to just 12 per cent in the rest of Canada.

Moreover, childhood programs that allow mothers to work have slashed Quebec’s child poverty rates by 50 per cent.

I have lifted all of this, shamelessly and almost verbatim from the Early Years Study 3, published in 2011, because it is the gold standard of research on this subject in this country.

Here’s another:

“Based on earlier studies, we estimate that in 2008 universal access to low-fee childcare in Quebec induced nearly 70,000 more mothers to hold jobs than if no such program had existed – and increase of 3.8 per cent in women employment,” Montreal economist Pierre Fortin wrote in 2012. “By our calculation, Quebec’s domestic income was higher by about 1.7 per cent, or $5 billion, as a result.”

All of which should persuade any thinking person that public policy on child care should be about the child – not the venal, cynical intentions of political operatives looking to the next election, the next opportunity to lock in votes at the expense of real socio-economic progress.

In this respect, the lockstep march of the federal Conservatives and NDP is one step forward and one step backwards – which is to say standing still and, therefore, nowhere.

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Oct 15 2014
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Education

Don’t pinch the public’s pennies for affordable daycare

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For a study in contrasting world views, look no further than the federal Conservatives’ and New Democrats’ respective plans for daycare in Canada.

As the former ramped up its campaign rhetoric this week, promising tax cuts, credits and kiddie benefits for all – in effect, telling Canadians to take their own money and run – the latter unveiled a promising, though lightly coloured, early childhood education initiative that could find government-subsidized spots for up to one million pre-schoolers.

Of the two approaches, the NDP’s – which would charge parents a not unreasonable daily fee of $15 per child – is clearly the more thoughtful.

But the Tory scheme benefits both from its simplicity and its coarse, yet effective, appeal to base emotion: It doesn’t pick your pocket; rather, it appears to line your palm.

Try making the same argument about a multi-billion-dollar child-care program.

Right-wing politicos and their table-banging confederates in the chambers of public policy love to poke the mama bears of this country.

What right, they ponder provocatively, does the state reserve for itself – on the citizen’s dime, no less – when it interferes with a kid’s natural development in the home?

What’s wrong with babysitters, nannies, au pairs, or, for that matter, good, old mum and dad?

Stephen Harper’s “reformers” knew exactly what they were doing back in 2005 (before their ascent to power and prestige) when they promised to axe the Grits’ hard-won national daycare program and replace it with the Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB), which would dispense monthly cheques (each with a minimum value of $100) to families with kids under the age of six.

At the time, Mr. Harper said, “The only people who should be making these choices (about pre-school) are parents, not politicians, not the government.”

In effect, though, the future prime minister was signaling his intention to wield whatever authority he would soon possess to limit, not expand, options for working mothers and fathers. And recent reports from Ottawa indicate that he hasn’t changed his mind in the run-up to next fall’s general election.

According to National Post columnist John Ivison, writing on Saturday, “The Conservatives are planning to enhance the universal child-care benefit in the upcoming fiscal update, so that parents with children older than six will also receive $100 cheques, multiple sources suggest.”

All of which merely adds insult to the injury inflicted years ago when the Tories first propagated the absurd notion that $100 per child per month was a perfectly adequate, no-strings-attached alternative to universally accessible, publicly subsidized child care for kids aged 2 to four.

Still, many parents will prefer to embrace the Harper approach (and the money it provides) and dismiss the evidence, which is, frankly, overwhelming.

A report last year by Queen’s and McMaster Universities concluded that children who tend full-day kindergarten (FDK) are “better prepared to enter Grade 1 and to be more successful in school” than those who don’t.

A compendium of expert research and opinion on the subject, The Early Years Study 3, published in 2011, also states: “Researchers have found that parents whose children attend programs that are integrated into their school are much less anxious than their neighbours whose kids are in the regular jumbled system. Direct gains have also been documented for children. Evaluations of Sure Start in the UK, Communities for Children in Australia and Toronto First Duty found children in neighbourhoods with integrated children’s services showed better social development, more positive social behaviour and greater independence/self-regulation compared with children living in similar areas without an integrated program.”

Yes, establishing and operating an effective system will cost billions of dollars. And yes, overcoming the inevitable problems, both large and small, won’t be easy.

But, as the The Early Years Study 3 points out, “Investing $1 million in child care would create at least 40 jobs, 43 per cent more jobs than the next highest industry and four times the number of jobs generated by $1 million in construction spending. Every dollar invested in child care increases the economy’s output (GDP) by $2.30.”

With such facts staring us in the face, how can we take the money and run?

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Oct 15 2014
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Education

Let’s give our kids the tools to rebuild our economy

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It’s another day, another study, and another crushing disappointment for New Brunswick’s educators.

Evidence of this province’s long, slow slide to academic perdition continued last week with the release of the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program – from the Council of Ministers of Education Canada – which showed that Grade Eight students here ranked either last or second-to-last in math, science and reading evaluations, compared with their counterparts elsewhere in the country.

The results confirmed what everyone knows, but few have wanted to admit: in every important way, we are failing our kids both figuratively and literally. And, in so doing, we are ruining ourselves, squandering every opportunity to build a competitive, innovative, nimble workforce and, by extension, economy.

The growing learning gap in New Brunswick is, inarguably, a more serious problem than accelerating income disparities. In fact, in measurable ways, the latter stems from the former. So does the province’s perennially rising rates of outmigration among lightly educated young people. There are simply not enough low-skilled jobs in this corner of the steppe to keep our youth from seeking, and finding, higher-wage equivalents in other parts of the nation.

The obvious question, of course, is: should we even want to try?

Math, science and reading frame the backbone of critical thinking, which, in turn, engenders empathy, ingenuity, calculation, citizenship and a proclivity to solve, rather than retreat from, problems. What, by contrast, are we doing? The Assessment is unequivocal.

In math, New Brunswick’s mean provincial score was 480, just ahead of Manitoba’s 471, and far off the pace of Quebec’s 527. In science, we came in dead last at 474, compared with top performer British Columbia at 513. And in reading, New Brunswick and Manitoba were statistically tied at the bottom of the pack (with respective showings of 471 and 469); Ontario earned top marks at 524.

In fact, none of these better, national results are especially encouraging, either. They indicate, broadly, that Canada lags many other developed nations in the way it prepares its children for productive, satisfying, durable work lives. But, given the large problems facing New Brunswick’s economy and fiscal condition (and even larger expectations of local politicians for a convincing turnaround), the challenge here is both arch and immediate.

To meet it, we must first understand its particulars, without recourse to partisan and vested interests. We must undertake that which we, apparently, do not teach our children well enough: an empirical, evidence-based approach to problem-solving.

What are the root causes of our system’s failure to adequately educate? What, specifically, are we not doing or doing improperly?

When, in their young lives, do kids learn best and under which circumstances?

Is it through a universally accessible system of early childhood education, integrated into the existing public school architecture, that might cost $2 billion over 10 years, as it does in Norway, Finland and Sweden, where job and economic opportunities for educated young people remain the envy of the world? Indeed, is it mere coincidence that Quebec – which has maintained a standardized, publicly-funded, play-based daycare apparatus since 1998 – scored best in the Pan-Canadian Assessment in math and second-best in reading?

Are we listening to teachers in this province, or just to their administrators – each of whom face their own systemic restrictions, their own status-quotients to fulfill?

And are we listening to the parents of kids who emerge from Grade Eight? Those fresh-faced imps who – not knowing how to read, write, factor a binomial, or parse the scientific method sufficiently well – are forced to issue an inquiry no more penetrating than this: “do you want fries with that?”

Naturally, there is a way out of this morass. Naturally, It begins with us, whose educations afforded us the chance to rise above the least common denominators of our social and cultural pedigrees.

We should examine what other jurisdictions in this country and around the world do best. We should even strike a working group with our counterparts in Manitoba – our national partner in educational perdition – to determine how their experiences intersect with our own, and maybe, just maybe, solve our shared problems together.

You know, the way adults do.

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Sep 05 2014
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Education, Politics

Hey teacher, don’t keep those kids at home

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If Ontario’s government hopes to maintain public support for its new full-day kindergarten (FDK) program, it had better abandon its inexplicably dismissive attitude about the regime’s evident growing pains.

News reports this week suggest that the province’s ministry of education has been flooded, in recent months, with complaints by both parents and educators about bloated class sizes and the noise, disruption and confusion this caused in several schools last academic year.

In at least once instance, as many as 40 tykes were crowded into a room. Documents obtained by the Globe and Mail through a freedom-of-information request indicate that “about 640 kindergarten classrooms, or eight per cent of those that introduced the (full-day) program had more than 30 children. . .according to a confidential briefing note to the minister in January.”

Moreover, the Globe reported, “Martha Hradowy, who represents early childhood education workers at Windsor’s Greater Essex County District School Board, said the situation has become so dire that some schools have created learning areas for full-day kindergarten students, which hold about 100 children. Classrooms are divided into four separate corners.”

This is exactly the kind of bad press no government should want as it implements the final phase of an FDK soft launch to all schools in the province. And yet, so far, the ministry’s response has been decidedly tepid.

Noting that daycares in the province are required, by law, to maintain a one-to-eight caregiver-child ratio and that pre-school primary programs must limit class sizes to no more than 23 kids, government officials blithely allowed that, at present, there is no comparable cap for FDK, only a requirement that school boards preserve an average class size of 26 throughout the system. 

Certain Ontarian editorialists of my acquaintance are, no doubt, itching to get busy scribbling their provocative nonsense in response to this new, so-called crisis in public education. “Ontario’s kids crammed into classrooms like sardines in a can”, “Ontario’s schools turning into factory farms”, “Ontario’s kindergartners pay the price for nanny-state meddling,” the headlines will scream.

The overcrowding, these pundits will write, proves that Ontario is nowhere near ready to assume the responsibilities of providing efficient full-day kindergarten; indeed, that such a monumental task is probably beyond the administrative and fiscal capabilities of any province in this country.

They will then use the point to segue into an entirely separate, if equally specious, argument: that there is no credible proof that FDK or, indeed, any form of early childhood education provides lasting social, psychological or educational benefits to kids; and that those youngsters who do evince advanced interpersonal and academic skills as a result of their exposure to such programs lose these advantages over their more classically schooled peers by the end of Grade One.

The arguments that it can’t be done and that it’s not necessary, anyway, have dogged the discussion about publicly sponsored and subsidized child care and early education for decades.

But it’s only been within the last 50 years when rigorous research and empirical evidence have shown that state investments in these programs have generated multipliers (in the reduction of public costs related to poverty, drug addiction, alcohol abuse, crime, illiteracy, innumeracy, and mental illness) worth billions of dollars a year in countries that have had the perspicacity to spend the money accordingly.

And the suggestion that all kids eventually even each other out, regardless of their early childhood education backgrounds (or lack, thereof), is hardly a resonant reason for abandoning such programs.

Who would want his enriched, curious, empathetic kid suddenly leavened in grade school by the lower common denominators in his midst?

Isn’t the better idea to raise everyone’s standards by providing a commonly accessible, superior system of play-based, pre-school education that’s integrated seamlessly into the higher grades where meritorious principles (team-playing, integrity, love of learning) may continue to flourish?

The growing pains the Ontario government’s FDK program now suffer are serious, but they are perhaps predictable and, more importantly, eminently fixable.

Now is no time for officialdom to take them lightly.

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Aug 26 2014
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Economy, Education, Workplace

Leaders must read the writing on the wall

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Like creating jobs and ending poverty, no issue is more liable to elicit a chorus of unanimity from otherwise divergent political voices than building a literate workforce.

The question that customarily divides campaigners along traditional party lines during an election cycle is: How?

Specifically, in New Brunswick’s case, how do do we improve adult literacy levels (56 per cent of people in this province can’t read well enough to function competently on a daily basis), and burnish language, numeracy and problem-solving skills among anglophone and francophone children here (they come in last among their peers across Canada, according to one well-respected Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development study)?

Conservative Leader and reigning premier David Alward seems to think the challenge requires superior multi-tasking abilities: “Certainly, the work we have begun on inclusion and ensuring that every child has an opportunity to learn to their fullest extent,” he told the Saint-John Telegraph last week on his way to never quite finishing his thought, let alone sentence. “The work as well to ensure we have healthy bodies through increased physical activity.”

He’s right, to the extent that a lazy, unfit frame more often houses a similarly afflicted mind, unsuited to and ill-equipped for learning.

But New Democrat Leader Dominic Cardy is more in line with current pedagogical thinking when he suggests a simple, elegant fix. “If we create a universally accessible, affordable high-quality early childhood education system, linking existing private infrastructure in schools and centres with government-supported ones where necessary, that is going to unleash a huge amount of economic,” he told the T-J.

How much economic potential ECE manages to unleash in jurisdictions where it is systematically introduced and integrated with later grades in the public school system is a matter of some debate.

Still, the results of one recent study, published last fall, of 693 Ontario kids in Grade One indicated that those who had participated in two years of full-day kindergarten (FDK) in that province were much better equipped to thrive in school than those who had not.

The research, undertaken by Queen’s and MacMaster universities concluded, “Overall, students in FDK are better prepared to enter Grade 1 and to be more successful in school. In every area, students improved their readiness for Grade 1 and accelerated their development. Comparisons of children with two years of FDK instruction and children with no FDK instruction showed that FDK reduced risks in social competence development from 10.5 per cent to 5.8 per cent; in language and cognitive development from 15.8 per cent to 4.3 per cent; (and) in communication skills and general knowledge development from 10.5 per cent to 5.8 per cent.”

In fact, in recent years, the efficacious effects of early child education on literacy, numeracy and problem-solving has been rigorously studied all over the world. And the findings all lead to the same conclusion: It works.

Last October, the Solutions Network of the United Nations issued a report that recommended that  “all girls and boys complete affordable and high-quality early childhood development programs, and primary and secondary education to prepare them for the challenges of modern life and decent livelihoods (and that) all youth and adults have access to continuous lifelong learning to acquire functional literacy, numeracy, and skills to earn a living through decent employment or self-employment.”

At virtually the same time, The Economist appealed to the world’s governments to demonstrate some timely common sense: “Investment in the young should focus on early education. Pre-school is a crucial first step to improving the lot of disadvantaged children, and America is an international laggard. According to the OECD, it ranks only 28th out of 38 leading economies in the proportion of four-year-olds in education.”

Can New Brunswick afford a universal, integrated, accessible system of early childhood education in an age of massive, structural public deficits and debt? It is, admittedly, an enormously tough sell only because it defies any short-term rationale.

But if we don’t start thinking in the long term, and demand that our political leaders follow suit, our fiscal and economic perdition will become permanent features of our society – a society where illiteracy and innumeracy run rampant among the increasingly ignorant majority. 

Jul 10 2014
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Education, Workplace

Building a skilled workforce begins with early education

 

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When an organization dedicated to fluffing the pillows of the country’s most pampered calls for a trans-Canada strategy for improving public education and skills training for the comparably disadvantaged, then, gentle reader, you know the worm has turned.

The barbarian one-percenters have crashed the gates that keep the remaining 99 per cent effectively penned and let slipped the dogs of democracy.     

The Canadian Council of Chief Executives is not normally prone to outbreaks of egalitarianism, but it is doing a fair job of public scolding on behalf of the working stiff these days, as its president and CEO John Manley (he of former federal, Liberal government fame) ably demonstrated in a statement earlier this week.

“As Canada’s economy evolves and grows, employers face an increasing need for highly skilled and qualified workers,” he wrote. “What is required is a broad national effort to strengthen our country’s education and training systems. Canada’s business leaders encourage the federal, provincial and territorial governments to find creative solutions to the labour market challenges that confront employers, employees, students and future generations.”

Indeed, in places, Mr. Manley sounded almost quaintly optimistic: “We urge all levels of government to work together to expand and align our country’s labour-market information systems in ways that will help more people find rewarding and fulfilling careers. Equally important is the need to harmonize apprenticeship programs, a key step in building a more balanced, highly qualified Canadian workforce.

“To ensure a high quality of life for all citizens, it’s time for a new approach and an honest conversation about what’s working and what isn’t working in Canadian education and skills training.”

He’s not wrong, of course. But neither is he original. For such a putatively great country, Canada’s various education systems and skills development programs (which are, incidentally, almost accidentally coincidental) are a national disgrace. Everybody knows it; nobody does anything about it.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has even made a institutional project of clucking its tongue over this country’s incomprehensible approach to education. “In 2010, only one per cent of three year-olds and 48 per cent of four year-olds were enrolled in early childhood education programmes (OECD average in 2011: 67 per cent and 82 per cent, respectively),” it recently reported.

That’s only one finding of many that leads to the inescapable conclusion that almost everybody else in the developed world does a better job educating its young people. Certainly, Sweden does.

“The system of pre-school education is outstanding: (a) in its fidelity to societal values and in its attendant commitment to and respect for children; (b) in its systemic approach while respecting programmatic integrity and diversity; and (c) in its respect for teachers, parents, and the public,” the OECD declares in one of its frequent country reports.  

Then, there’s Finland, about which the OECD observes: “The early childhood education workforce has several strengths, such as a high qualification level of staff with teaching responsibilities, advanced professional development opportunities and favourable working environments. 

“Staff with teaching responsibilities are well educated and trained with high initial qualification requirements. There is broad provision of initial education, with full-time and parttime programmes provided publicly and privately. Professional development is mandatory for all staff; and training costs are shared between individual staff members, the government and employers. Working conditions in terms of staff-child ratio are among the best of OECD countries.”

Note the emphasis on “early childhood education” as opposed to primary, secondary or post-secondary schooling. That’s because almost everywhere in the OECD, except Canada, a national strategy exists to inform public policy on pre-school. Take care of that, in a structured and play-based fashion, and all the research says the rest takes care of itself. 

Some programs are are better than others, of course, but few countries limp along utterly devoid of a plan, let alone a system, for their children.

Mr. Manley and his privileged ilk are right to sound the alarm. 

But if they want real results, they ought to marshall whatever influence they possess and entreat this country’s political class to establish a trans-Canada network of early childhood education centers that integrate seamlessly into existing public school systems.  

That’s how you begin to build a truly skilled, job-ready workforce.

 

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Jun 03 2014
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Education, Politics

It’s time to walk the talk on education

 

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Fisheries and Oceans minister Gail Shea’s heart is in the right place when she says that education is the key to Canada’s long-term prosperity.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s heart (such as it is) is likewise in the right place when he urges the international community to emulate this country’s commitment to improving maternal and child welfare around the world. 

Still, actions always speak louder than words, and when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are here at home – where functional illiteracy rates are among the highest in the industrialized world and the federal government’s conception of early childhood education is nothing more than a grab bag of measly tax giveaways to individuals and families – national leaders are mute to the point of perpetual silence.

“A skilled workforce leads to a stronger economy with more and better jobs,” Minister Shea told a graduating class of Holland College in Prince Edward Island last week. “For governments, more people working means more people paying taxes. Taxes are necessary for providing things like health care and education. So, it is an investment in the future, it is an investment in you, and it is an investment in the province and the country, as well.”

She added: “Everybody graduating here tonight has recognized that having a better education and greater skills will help you achieve success.”

Elsewhere, Prime Minister Harper told participants in a three-day summit of maternal and child health, “It’s a philosophy of our government, and I think of Canadians more broadly, that we do not measure things in terms of the amount of money we spend but in terms of the results we achieve.”

Later, in an interview with the Globe and Mail, he elaborated: “We’re in a truly global world. So I do think it is in our broader, enlightened self-interest to make the world a better place. But I also do think some of these things are just worth doing in their own right. We are a very wealthy and lucky people. . .Most of us were fortunate to be born at this point in history and in this particular country.”

But how will history and this country’s future generations judge this particular point in time? 

Mr. Harper is absolutely correct. On a per capital basis, Canada is, compared with its trading partners, awash with cash. The country is set to return to surplus within the next few months and, barring unforeseen events (such as those that afflicted world financial markets in 2008), natural resources development will buoy the economy, injecting sustainable volumes of black ink into federal government coffers for years to come. 

What should we do with that boon? Should we instruct our elected leaders to return it to our individual bank accounts? Or should we take a longer, more considered view of our nation’s true source of wealth and economic durability? 

Universities and vocational colleges consistently complain that our children (when these institutions get their hands on them) are woefully ill-equipped to compete in the labour markets of the world. The kids are, in fact, not alright. Higher education scrambles to undo what lower education has done to little Johnny and Jane. 

Meanwhile, the pressure to train young people to fit existing job roles mounts, even as advanced disciplines in critical thinking, communications and cultural awareness fade to the vanishing point along the horizon most other – and less economically promising – economies as ours, dutifully chart. 

A half-century of hard-won experience in places like Norway, Sweden and Finland convincingly argues that state investments in national early childhood education programs are the best hedges against illiteracy, lassitude, crime, and social dissolution among young people.  

And yet, with few exceptions, Canada – with all its money and resources, with all its hearts in the right places – chooses to spend the money it hasn’t promised to return to taxpayers on prisons, military aircraft that don’t fly and staged commemorations of wars it may or may not have won two centuries ago. 

It’s long past time to put our money where Gail Shea’s mouth is.

 

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May 22 2014
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Economy, Education

To reduce poverty, improve education

 

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Any political regime, regardless of ideological bent, that claims the high ground in the perennial war on poverty rallies the faithful with empty rhetoric and promises it knows it can’t possibly keep.

So it was last week when New Brunswick’s Conservative government laid out a plan to reduce penury in the province – one that looked very much like a version its predecessors in Shawn Graham’s Liberal administration introduced five years ago. 

How did that one work out for us?

“New Brunswickers want to know the results of the last plan,” Grit MLA Don Arsenault observed earlier this week. “Where do we stand now in making sure that we are heading in the right direction? The government is hiding those numbers, hiding those results, because we are just a couple of months away from the election.”

As for the new plan, Mr. Arsenault said, “There are 28 actions with no deadlines. How can the government measure whether the plan meets its objectives?”

To which Education Minister Marie-Claude Blais sneered, “It (criticism of the plan) is for political gain. That is what the members opposite want to do. That is what they like to do. There are measurables, and the measurables are being attained right now. . .We are doing all of that, and we will continue to do that.”

In fact, neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals have the foggiest notions for reducing poverty in New Brunswick. They trot out the few remaining numbers the gutted  Statistics Canada can provide and arbitrarily decide to chop income disparity by between 20 and 50 per cent over, say, five years. All of which are nice, round numbers that signify precisely nothing.  

Politicians play the poverty card because they think it makes them appear virtuous. But as they stop chasing their opponents’ tails, they merely set their sites on their own.

Poverty is one of those social bedevilments, like illiteracy, that’s impregnable to partisan maledictions or entreaties. It does not recognize doctrinal superiority. In fact, you best attack it by throwing politics out the window, joining hands across party lines and drinking deeply from the wishing well of good public intentions. 

Once that’s done, you spend a whole bunch of money literally reinventing pre-school and primary education systems in this province.

Progressive think tanks, university educators, child advocates – even the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – have all come to the same conclusion: Early Childhood Education, or ECE, plays a vital role in ameliorating the effects of poverty on families and provides disadvantaged kids with a leg up and out of their impoverished circumstances.

The Carolina Abecedarian Project conceived 30 years ago at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina ay Chapel Hill remains one of the best-known and persuasive longitudinal studies in the field of early development. The initiative, a controlled experiment, was designed to ferret out the  benefits for poor children, if any, of early childhood education. 

According to its findings, “Children who participated in the early intervention program had higher cognitive test scores from the toddler years to age 21. Academic achievement in both reading and math was higher from the primary grades through young adulthood. Intervention children completed more years of education and were more likely to attend a four-year college. Mothers whose children participated in the program achieved higher educational and employment status than mothers whose children were not in the program.”

Even some economists now believe that ECE is a formidable weapon in the public-policy arsenal for combatting poverty. 

In a paper he published last October, Craig Alexander, senior vice-president of TD Bank Group, wrote that “more access to affordable and high quality pre-school education could help to boost literacy and numeracy skills and would help to reduce income inequality in the long run. . .Most studies show that a one dollar investment reaps a long-term return of 1.5-to-3 dollars, and the return on investment for children from low income households can be in the double digits.”

ECE will not eliminate poverty right away; it efficacious effects are generational. And it does cost money – a commodity that’s in short supply in these parts these days.

But collaborating to find a funding solution is a far nobler way for our elected Grits and Tories to pass the time than is sniping at each other over poverty reduction policies and programs that won’t work anyway.

 

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May 01 2014
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Culture, Education

Liberal leader journeys back to the future on language

 

It is bitterly ironic that the only province in Canada that considers itself officially bilingual has never quite figured out how to teach french to english-speaking kids. Of course, political pronouncements are easy to make. What’s hard is translating aspirations into action.

New Brunswick Liberal Leader Brian Gallant is on the right side of whatever angels ennoble a candidate for elected office when he insists that we’ve got to nab our children young if we expect them to learn a second language well enough to wield it confidently in and out of the classroom. Otherwise, we may as well equip each of the province’s adult anglophones with a copy of Rosetta Stone, and wish them luck.     

“One of the things that I believe we have to do is change and bring back the former entry point that we had for french immersion,” he said in a speech to the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce. “I will push as leader of the Liberal party for us to have an early entry point of Grade 1, if not even looking at kindergarten, to start teaching our children, giving the opportunity to pursue french immersion.”

All of which sounded very much like a mea culpa by proxy, as it was Mr. Gallant’s own Liberal predecessors who, while in office in 2008, pushed to end early immersion programs on the grounds that they weren’t working – at least according to one report authorized by the government of Shawn Graham.   

Among the many problems with the approach (lack of resources within the districted system was a crucial, if rarely mentioned, one) was the tendency towards streaming, in which well-off anglophone students disproportionately clustered in the immersion programs, leaving the poorer kids to languish in the truly ineffective core french classes. 

Still, Mr. Gallant insisted in his address, “There are ways to address that. We can ensure that we raise awareness, making sure that anyone from any socio-economic background that maybe less likely to pursue french immersion or have their children pursue french immersion are made aware of some of the benefits, what type of support they have, and exactly what the program means.”

What’s more, he added, “We have to ensure that we address all issues to ensure that all New Brunswickers and all children have the support they need in the classrooms no matter what program, no matter which school, no matter which region they’re from.”

It’s refreshing to hear a politician deploy a vernacular favored by neurobiologists and developmental psychologists, who talk about the urgent need for evidence-based policy in public school systems across the country. 

Among the many persistent myths they fight daily is the notion, still cherished by many, that people don’t require a structured, early start to their education to thrive academically, socially and economically. Hey teacher, Pink Floyd was right: Leave those kids alone. We’re all different. Vive la différence!    

It’s a nice idea, especially to those (including more than half of all members of parliament) who make it their business to mistrust anything they, themselves, have not been educated to understand. But cognitive biases do not sound arguments make.

The science is unequivocal. Children are virtual learning machines from the moment they are born (and even in the womb) to about age five or six. This is the optimal time to grab them and teach them, especially languages. About this, there can be no serious debate, and Education Minister Marie-Claude Blais’ determination to keep the current french immersion entry point at Grade 3 is more about political survival than anything else.

When early immersion programs fail to work, that says more about the weaknesses in the system, itself – a lack of pedagogical resources, conflicting curricular priorities, staffing shortages – than it does about a young child’s propensity to acquire a language. This was the lesson the previous government should have learned.

Mr. Gallant’s determination to restore the system is laudable. But if he is given the chance, he’ll have to do more than issue aspirational statements. 

He and his confreres will have to ensure that the educational apparatus in this province is sufficient to support the goal of producing a new generation of literate New Brunswickers, proficient in both official languages. 

 

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