Since the mid-1990s, Ontario has had the worst student-to-faculty ratio in Canada. While the number of students per full-time faculty member in other provinces hovered around 20-1, the Ontario ratio rose from 22-1 in the fall of 2000 to 27-1 by 2005-06 as the “double cohort” entered the university system.

A slight improvement occurred as the bulk of the double cohort completed their undergraduate studies, but the ratio looks to be worsening again. Even if universities hired as many full-time faculty as they planned in their Multi-Year Accountability Agreements (and the evidence to date suggests they have not), the ratio is now approaching 28 students for each full-time faculty member.

Higher student-to-faculty ratios mean larger classes, less student interaction with faculty, and reduced course choices. In order to preserve the quality of higher education in Ontario, we need to hire new full-time faculty – and we need to start doing it now.

< http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=ca9b5c14da55e36f1328eb0f1&id=12989ea537#story3 >

Car rental companies are infamous for encouraging customers to sign up for expensive liability insurance policies. Since many renters already have coverage from their own automotive insurance policies or can rely upon insurance coverage provided by their credit card issuer, the decision whether to sign up for a costly additional policy frequently depends upon who is paying the bill. If the individual is on the hook, they will often decline coverage and rely on their existing policies. If someone else is paying, it becomes easier to justify signing up for the additional coverage.

Last week, the Association of Universities and Colleges Canada, which represents dozens of Canada’s leading universities, signed up for one of the most expensive copyright insurance policies in Canadian history. The policy comes in the form of a controversial model copyright licensing agreement with Access Copyright, a copyright collective that licenses copying and distribution of copyrighted works such as books, journals, and other texts. Should AUCC members sign the agreement – it falls to each individual university to decide whether to do so – they will pay $26 per full time student per year for the right to copy works from the Access Copyright repertoire.

The deal marks a significant increase from the previous agreement, which had cost students less than four dollars annually plus ten cents per page for materials included within printed coursepacks. The new fees are likely to be passed along to students, who will ultimately bear the burden of the copyright arrangement with higher tuitions.

Those students may be puzzled by the AUCC decision to settle on an expensive new licensing model. Over the past year, many universities, including York, Queen’s, UBC, and Waterloo have operated without Access Copyright altogether.

Those schools have identified licensing alternatives such as campus wide electronic database licenses that offer access to thousands of journals and electronic books that can be incorporated directly into electronic coursepacks. Universities already pay millions of dollars for these licenses with the money flowing to database companies, publishers, and authors.

Moreover, open access licensing, where research publications are freely available online, constitutes a growing percentage of published research, with thousands of open access journals and hundreds of thousands of articles posted directly by the researchers themselves. Add public domain works, fair dealing, hundreds of millions spent on textbooks, and pay-per-use licenses for the remaining works and the decision to forego an Access Copyright licence becomes easy to understand.

Even more curious is the timing of the AUCC agreement. Bill C-11, the government’s copyright bill, features several provisions designed to assist education. These include an expansion of fair dealing for education and a new exception for publicly available materials on the Internet. The bill is expected to become law by the summer.

If that wasn’t enough, the model licence purports to grants rights for copying that does not require permission. For example, it defines copying as including “posting a link or hyperlink to a digital copy”, yet linking to content can hardly be described as copying materials. Moreover, the licence comes packed with onerous restrictions such as blocking the ability to store articles in online services such as Mendeley or Dropbox.

And the millions of dollars collected by Access Copyright? Last year, the collective spent 30 per cent of its licensing revenues on administrative expenses, including over two million dollars for Copyright Board applications and professional fees involving lobbying against copyright reform that might benefit educational institutions.

Given these circumstances, the AUCC decision to sign the model licence represents a stunning abdication of leadership that will cost students millions of dollars and slow innovation in Canada’s higher education community. So why sign an agreement when there are other options? Expensive additional insurance policies are easy to sign when someone else is paying the bill.

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law. He can be reached at or online at www.michaelgeist.ca.

< http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1165965–geist-the-most-expensive-copyright-insurance-policy-in-canadian-history >

If you were trying to make an argument against higher education, you could not do a better job of it than the striking students of Quebec. A more self-serving, self-satisfied, self-dramatizing collection of idiots could not have been assembled in one place without prolonged exposure to Foucault and Lacan.

The students have been “on strike,” i.e. skipping classes, for months in protest against a scheduled increase in tuition fees. Until lately they have relied upon intimidating other students and annoying the public; in recent days they have displayed an escalating propensity to outright violence. All in response to a plan that, while it will oblige them to pay much more than they were, will still leave them paying much less than students in the rest of Canada.

The 75% increase in fees over five years would raise the basic undergraduate tuition fee to $3,792 — versus the $5,000 or more common in other provinces. That would still leave Quebec’s undergraduates paying just 17% of the costs of their education. Indeed, it is just enough to return fees, frozen for many years in the province, to where they were in 1968, after inflation.

Nevertheless, that could still pose a barrier to students from poorer families. That is, it might have, had not the province offset the increase in tuition with an equally hefty increase in bursaries: enough to entirely wipe out the increase for anyone on low income.

So what we are left with is a collection of mostly well-to-do students — for that is who, disproportionately, go on to higher education, for reasons that have less to do with fees than with family background, starting with whether their parents did — agitating against any increase in the amount they contribute to their own education, preferring instead that they should be supported out of general revenues. And, by and large, I agree with them.

Well, in a way. All of the things I’ve said above are true, not just of Quebec, but for the country as a whole. Students, especially in undergraduate programs, still pay a fraction of the cost of their education, though they tend to come from wealthier-than-average families and though the cost of their education, as every study shows, will be repaid many times over in the higher earnings they will enjoy.

That argues pretty strongly that students should pay a greater share of the tab. Indeed, I’d argue they should pay all of it. This isn’t only a matter of fairness. When universities depend on students, rather than governments, for the greater part of their revenues, they will devote a lot more energy and resources to their core mission — teaching students — than they do now. Conversely, students who are paying full freight will devote a good deal more time and attention to getting the most out of the experience than, for example, I did.

But to say that students should pay more does not mean they should pay now. It isn’t so much the cost of tuition that can impede accessibility as the timing. It’s all very well to provide assistance to students in need, but it is sometimes unclear exactly who is in need: just because a student’s parents have adequate income does not mean he does. Student loans, meanwhile, impose the same monthly payment schedule, regardless of the ups and downs — or just downs — a recent graduate’s earnings may experience.

So while it is true that there is little correlation between tuition fees and access overall — about the same proportion of Quebec’s population goes on to higher education as in the other provinces — that does not mean all is well. The one-third increase in student fees (after inflation) across the country over the last decade has been accompanied by a similar increase in student debt. Even at current historically low interest rates that cannot be an easy thing to carry around. One-third of graduates reported difficulties repaying their student loans in 2007, versus one-quarter 20 years before.

As I say, it’s cash flow that’s the issue, not the amount. So: What if, instead of paying tuition now, students could pay it later? That is, what if they were staked all or most of the money up front, and repaid it over the course of their working life? Only what if, instead of repaying principal plus interest in fixed amounts, as with conventional loans, they paid a share of their earnings? As they earned more, they’d pay more; as they earned less, they’d pay less.

The model is not new. It’s sometimes called an income contingent loan, or a graduate tax. But in reality, it’s not a loan or a tax. It’s an investment. Think of a student as a kind of high-tech startup firm. Like students, these entrepreneurs are often wary of taking on debt, again because of cash-flow uncertainties. (For their part, banks aren’t always keen to lend to them, given the difficulties of assessing the risks of such enterprises.) So typically they turn to venture capitalists, who take a share of a firm’s equity in return for their investment, rather than charge interest.

That’s what the government (it could even be the universities themselves) would be doing here. In return for investing in students’ “human capital,” they’d be entitled to a share of students’ lifetime earnings. That’s not only fairer to students, it’s fairer to everyone: fix the cash-flow question, and you can begin to ask students to pay the full cost of their education.

Indeed, a modest scheme along these lines was proposed earlier this month by the Charest government, in an attempt to mollify the strikers. It doesn’t seem to have worked.

< http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/04/20/andrew-coyne-overhauling-how-students-pay-for-education/#more-75533 >

The average annual increase of 1.9 per cent in post-secondary and training announced in the recently tabled provincial budget may bring a sigh of relief in some corners. At first pass, it does seem better than the 1.5 per cent average recommended by the Drummond Commission.

A closer look is far more disturbing.

The projected 1.9 per cent increase is based on “all-in” expenditures by the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU), including operating and capital funding for universities and colleges, student support, and employment and training programs. Plans for the next three years of operating funding for universities actually limit increases to an average of 1.1 per cent per year.

Operating funding per funding-eligible student will decline once enrolment growth and the budget’s own assumptions for GDP inflation are taken into account. Per student funding has in fact been in decline since the financial crisis hit in 2008-09. The budget does nothing to help. By 2014-15, OCUFA projects that public operating funding for universities will drop by16 per cent. This is a huge loss in revenue that, if left unfilled, will damage the quality of higher education in Ontario. History tells us that institutions will attempt to fill the gap with higher tuition fees, continuing the unsustainable shift of costs onto students.

< April_5_Graph.JPG >

< http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=ca9b5c14da55e36f1328eb0f1&id=6633bb5a3f >

The Canadian government’s March 29 budget will be Ottawa’s latest crack at boosting the country’s middling record on innovation.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has indicated he wants a better return on the $7-billion that Ottawa spends to support research and development, and is expected to revamp the business tax credits that make up most of that funding, so they’re aimed at R&D that leads to successful products.

Finance Department officials might be wise to look to innovation guru Vijay Vaitheeswaran, a globe-trotting writer for The Economist, for insight on what works, what doesn’t and why. Mr. Vaitheeswaran is in Toronto next week to promote his new book Need, Speed and Greed: How the New Rules of Innovation Can transform Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness, and Tame the World’s Most Wicked Problems, including a stop at the Munk Centre March 19.

The Globe’s Jeremy Torobin caught up with Mr. Vaitheeswaran Tuesday just after his book was released. Here is an edited transcript of their conversation:

JT: I was struck by your fairly simple definition of innovation, as ‘fresh thinking that creates market value.’ It seems so obvious, yet countries with millions of really smart people and a lot at stake in finding ways to innovate have problems doing so.

VV: Everyone agrees they’re in favour of innovation, and yet we mean different things and part of the problem is it can be used as a cloak to justify all manner of unproductive, or even distorting and frivolous, investments. That’s a big reason why a lot of economies, especially developed economies that have proud economic achievements, scientific prowess and money to invest, have trouble with this. That’s part of what animated me. People in the middle class are feeling left behind by an innovation revolution that’s helping the very poorest on Earth – with mobile phones, micro-banking and so on – and which is helping the very great elites. But we’re increasingly out of touch with the ‘Ideas Economy’ in North America, and how to capture that was one of the animating factors for me in writing the book.

JT: Policy makers in Canada say businesses need to invest more on innovation and productivity. Businesses, meanwhile, say government should provide more incentives for them to innovate. Does needing an incentive kind of miss the point?

VV: Innovation is the only reason we don’t still live in the Stone Age, or why life today is better than it was 200 years ago. Think of the age of invention, the great Victorian era 120 years ago, which produced a lot of the breakthrough that led the foundation for the 20th century – electricity, the motor car, modern chemistry and so on. Providing incentives, such as the patent system, provided great impetus for all of what made modern life possible. So I think we do need incentives, and we actually need more incentives for socially useful innovation. The ‘greed’ part of my title is not about voraciousness, it’s about using incentives to harness the power of self-interest. In terms of money and profit, yes, but also more broadly, when we talk about social entrepreneurs, things like purpose, community, social goods are also motivations. So I want to harness the desire of entrepreneurs and innovators in companies and organizations, and give them ample rewards – more than we do now – but for innovation that tackles socially difficult problems. Where I think you’re right, though, is in sniffing out corporate welfare, companies wanting more government money to invest. The biggest prize of all is market success, right? Come up with products that sell well, and you don’t need subsidies.

JT: High-risk loans and venture capital for startups are severely lacking here, which impairs companies’ commitment to innovation, according to a recent report by the Conference Board of Canada. How can countries ensure this is not the case?

VV: A willingness to embrace failure is a cultural value, as it is expressed through political, regulatory and legal norms. The old joke is entrepreneurs have to rely on friends, families and fools, because banks often don’t want to talk to you. In Canada, conservative traditions and tough regulations held the country in good stead during the crisis, but in the area of startup capital, you need to learn from some of the more innovative economies. You could look at Israel, Taiwan, parts of the Indian venture capital community in Bangalore, and in China there’s a wonderful community of so-called sea turtles, the Chinese that have gone back from overseas experiences and are now funding a lot of the startup work in Shanghai and Shenzhen.

JT: Does the plodding global recovery suggest that innovation-friendly steps like reducing protectionism or increasing labour mobility are harder to achieve? Aren’t governments everywhere showing they’ll err on the side of national self-interest?

VV: One of the great risks is of a trade war, because when economies turn down it is too tempting to point the finger at the other guy, rather than take difficult decisions at home. I worry, for example, about the ‘blame China brigade,’ which is still quite vocal, especially among politicians. A lot of problems that we have in North America are home-grown, and blaming a rising power like China is very tempting but in fact, most of the solutions to what ails North American economies can be found here.

JT: Are there any other key points of your book that you would stress?

VV: I think there is a real problem with the education systems that are prevalent in OECD countries. Canada is no exception to this argument. They were developed at a time when they were training people for the industrial model of production, so we tend to have one-size-fits-all schools, and the mode of education is fundamentally the ‘tiger mom’ mentality. Look at the debate that started about why China is eating everybody’s lunch, it was discipline over play, deference to authority over dissent, memorization and standardization over creativity. I think that’s exactly the wrong way to think about education. Every increase in value added in Canada will come from the Ideas Economy, and if you’re going to have an educational system that’s suited to that and prepares people, you have to train original thinkers, people who are willing to challenge authority, not follow hierarchy or teach to the test. Memorization, harmonization, standardization; these make an easier job for educational bureaucrats and teachers, but what we need to do is teach our children, and teach ourselves throughout our careers, to keep re-learning how to learn.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/daily-mix/north-america-is-out-of-touch-with-ideas-economy/article2369252/singlepage/#articlecontent >

It’s reflexive in certain quarters, especially when teachers unions are up in arms, to chastise Canada’s school systems for all manner of weaknesses. Facts, as we know, never deflect ideology, or else some of these now-ritualistic attacks would have long yielded to a more balanced analysis.

Canadian teachers are among the best paid in the world. They have no claim whatsoever to even more during tough fiscal times. Their strike in British Columbia and their grumbling in Ontario are unjustified.

And yet, teachers deliver very good results, judged by international tests. Far from being the shipwreck some describe, Canadian school systems have produced some of the best test scores in the world: second best in the Western world (after Finland) and behind only Korea and Japan in Asia. Canadian results shame those in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and France.

With all its faults, Canadian school systems deliver value for money judged by outcomes that can be compared internationally, something that can’t be said for the health-care system. Teachers and the organization of the school system contribute to these results; family support (especially a respect for learning), cultural assumptions and community norms are also critical – more critical than class size or school funding formulas.

So why would anyone, given the international evidence, pull away from such a system? Apparently, Canada’s aboriginals want to – or at least their leadership does. And so does the recent panel on First Nation Elementary and Secondary Education for Students on Reserve.

Note the words “on reserve.” This three-person study, appointed by Ottawa and the Assembly of First Nations, looked only at education on reserves that produce, sadly but predictably, very substandard results – as for every other indicator of social and economic well-being from employment to poverty, infant mortality to child abuse, earned income to per capita income.

Reading this report was like going back to the 1960s when “child-centred education” was in vogue. Everything in schools was to become culturally sensitive. Objective measurements were deemed bad for pedagogy. Self-affirmation by students was in; measuring up was out. Tests were bad, report cards a thing of the past.

The “child-centred” philosophy proved disastrous and, by the 1980s, parents and ordinary citizens were up in arms. Their struggle met resistance from civil servants in the education ministries, the teachers unions and university theorists. Eventually, the pressure from parents, coupled with the decline in students’ results, ended the “child-centred” system and ushered in a more balanced approach. Similarly, Asian immigrants thought the “child-centred approach” to be rubbish. Today, the much improved results for Canadian students reflect the abandonment of the philosophy of this latest report on aboriginal education.

The report, which uses the phrase “child-centred” as a mantra, is heavy with new structures and systems designed to give on-reserve Indians the power to run school systems themselves, with or without links to the provincial school system.

The report is long on aboriginal students feeling good and short on practicalities. Is there, for example, a “funding gap” between aboriginal schools and provincial ones? Aboriginal groups insist the gap is wide; the Aboriginal Affairs Department told the Auditor-General last year that no such gap exists. Or how would a National Commission for First Nation Education possibly operate, even with provincial chapters, for more than 600 aboriginal communities, many with fewer than 500 people?

Systems and structures are fine and necessary, as is proper funding. But the University of Ottawa’s Ross Finnie (among others) has convincingly shown that results from formal education have more to do with parental attitudes, cultural assumptions about the importance of education and community norms than anything else.

Which means that aboriginal education can’t be divorced from its core contextual problem – the reserves themselves that the panel correctly notes display socio-economic and health inequities, poverty, suicides, youth incarceration and abuse, high teen pregnancy rates, lower life expectancy and chronic disease.

Fix those problems, which flow from the reserve system, and better educational results have a chance.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/it-still-comes-down-to-fixing-the-reserves/article2368368/ >

EVERY so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?”

I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask.

Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction — yet it has the fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence — men and women. I always tell my friends in Taiwan: “You’re the luckiest people in the world. How did you get so lucky? You have no oil, no iron ore, no forests, no diamonds, no gold, just a few small deposits of coal and natural gas — and because of that you developed the habits and culture of honing your people’s skills, which turns out to be the most valuable and only truly renewable resource in the world today. How did you get so lucky?”

That, at least, was my gut instinct. But now we have proof.

A team from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., has just come out with a fascinating little study mapping the correlation between performance on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, exam — which every two years tests math, science and reading comprehension skills of 15-year-olds in 65 countries — and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of G.D.P. for each participating country. In short, how well do your high school kids do on math compared with how much oil you pump or how many diamonds you dig?

The results indicated that there was a “a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population,” said Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams for the O.E.C.D. “This is a global pattern that holds across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment.” Oil and PISA don’t mix. (See the data map at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/9/49881940.pdf.)

As the Bible notes, added Schleicher, “Moses arduously led the Jews for 40 years through the desert — just to bring them to the only country in the Middle East that had no oil. But Moses may have gotten it right, after all. Today, Israel has one of the most innovative economies, and its population enjoys a standard of living most of the oil-rich countries in the region are not able to offer.”

So hold the oil, and pass the books. According to Schleicher, in the latest PISA results, students in Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan stand out as having high PISA scores and few natural resources, while Qatar and Kazakhstan stand out as having the highest oil rents and the lowest PISA scores. (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran and Syria stood out the same way in a similar 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or Timss, test, while, interestingly, students from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey — also Middle East states with few natural resources — scored better.) Also lagging in recent PISA scores, though, were students in many of the resource-rich countries of Latin America, like Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Africa was not tested. Canada, Australia and Norway, also countries with high levels of natural resources, still score well on PISA, in large part, argues Schleicher, because all three countries have established deliberate policies of saving and investing these resource rents, and not just consuming them.

Add it all up and the numbers say that if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don’t count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students. “Today’s learning outcomes at school,” says Schleicher, “are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.”

Economists have long known about “Dutch disease,” which happens when a country becomes so dependent on exporting natural resources that its currency soars in value and, as a result, its domestic manufacturing gets crushed as cheap imports flood in and exports become too expensive. What the PISA team is revealing is a related disease: societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills.

By, contrast, says Schleicher, “in countries with little in the way of natural resources — Finland, Singapore or Japan — education has strong outcomes and a high status, at least in part because the public at large has understood that the country must live by its knowledge and skills and that these depend on the quality of education. … Every parent and child in these countries knows that skills will decide the life chances of the child and nothing else is going to rescue them, so they build a whole culture and education system around it.”

Or as my Indian-American friend K. R. Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company Bloom Energy, likes to say, “When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.”

That’s why the foreign countries with the most companies listed on the Nasdaq are Israel, China/Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, South Korea and Singapore — none of which can live off natural resources.

But there is an important message for the industrialized world in this study, too. In these difficult economic times, it is tempting to buttress our own standards of living today by incurring even greater financial liabilities for the future. To be sure, there is a role for stimulus in a prolonged recession, but “the only sustainable way is to grow our way out by giving more people the knowledge and skills to compete, collaborate and connect in a way that drives our countries forward,” argues Schleicher.

In sum, says Schleicher, “knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.” Sure, it’s great to have oil, gas and diamonds; they can buy jobs. But they’ll weaken your society in the long run unless they’re used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning. “The thing that will keep you moving forward,” says Schleicher, is always “what you bring to the table yourself.”

< http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/friedman-pass-the-books-hold-the-oil.html?ref=opinion >

The release of the Fraser Institute’s annual report card has sparked controversy over how much weight should be assigned to Ontario’s provincewide testing.

Fraser’s report card ranked elementary schools on the basis of how well students performed on annual standardized reading, writing and math tests.

Critics of Fraser’s rankings see them as a “narrow” snapshot of a school’s performance.

They charge the effort is unfair to under-performing schools, such as Toronto’s Regent/Park Duke of York, which scored an overall rating of 1.7 out of 10 but is located in an area of the city known for crime and poverty.

Those at the Fraser Institute see the rankings as a tool parents and school boards can use to see how schools stack up when it comes to their delivery of core academic subjects.

Chris Spence, director of education for the Toronto District School Board, calls Fraser’s rankings too narrow, and “not helpful” when it comes to getting an accurate look at the quality of a school.

“By not providing (context), you allow the public to make a judgment about the quality of a school without knowing enough about the school,” Spence said. “There are more (things involved) than EQAO scores… Are the parents involved? Is it a safe and welcoming environment?”

The Fraser Institute published its annual rankings for elementary schools in Alberta on Feb. 26. Alberta Education Minister Thomas Luaszuk — a long-standing critic of the Fraser report cards — says standardized testing is in place to measure only a “narrow aspect” of what goes on in schools and should not be used as a way to rank them.

“This test has been designed to measure a narrow aspect of our curriculum,” argued Lukaszuk.He is currently planning “comprehensive packages” that will one day come with Alberta’s test results in hopes of luring parents away from Fraser’s report card.

Additional data would include things such as graduation rates and the rate of parental involvement at a school.

“When children learn, they do more than take in information and regurgitate it,” he said. “How is a child processing information? How are they growing emotionally? How are they developing from an artistic standpoint?”

Those at Fraser see it differently.

While it is true the report card does not look at the socio-economic environment of a school, save for parents’ annual income, it does provide a focused look at how the school is delivering academics, said Fraser Institute associate director Michael Thomas.

“It doesn’t tell you if it’s a good school or a bad school, these are judgments parents have to make. The point of the report is how well (a school) delivers its program in academic areas.”

Thomas argues that “hardships” outside of a school — such as poverty or a community with a large number of single parents — are not necessarily determinants of academic failure or success.

Of the 2,695 schools ranked in Fraser’s Ontario report card, Thomas said 21% achieved ratings above the provincial average despite having an average family income falling bellow the provincial average — at times as much as $30,000 below.

“Parents deserve to know why a school is performing the way it is,” insists Thomas, adding that it is also “important among schools to know if something happened at a school that caused the marks to go up or down.”

Ontario Progressive Conservative education critic Lisa MacLeod calls results from standardized testing a necessary “measuring” that school boards can use to see which of their schools need assistance.

Ontario Education Minister Laurel Broten was unavailable for comment.

Ontario’s elementary and secondary school boards will receive $21 billion in funding this school year, according to Ontario’s education ministry. Of that, almost half will go to boards in the Greater Toronto Area.

< http://www.ottawasun.com/2012/03/04/fraser-report-raises-questions-on-provincewide-testing >

A child growing up on a reserve has to decide: Shall I live on-reserve or “go to town” and adapt to life in mainstream Canada? Both should be viable options. To make them viable, reserve schools have two major tasks – to teach traditional culture and the core competencies of reading, writing, science and mathematics necessary for success in the mainstream economy. With honourable exceptions, on-reserve schools are failing at both tasks.

That is the first message to take from the report of the panel on K-12 on-reserve education released this month. This panel was a joint venture of the Assembly of First Nations and the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. In the diplomatic language of the panel’s report, “The education attainment among first nation students is not sufficiently strong … to allow them to reach their potential.”

“Not sufficiently strong” is a serious understatement. Over the past two decades, reserve schools have made negligible progress in terms of reducing dropout rates. Among young first nations adults, ages 20-24, about 60 per cent living on-reserve are without a high-school certificate; even among those living off-reserve 30 per cent have incomplete secondary studies. The figure among young non-aboriginal Canadians is 13 per cent.

So what can be done to bring about convergence of school outcomes between first nations students and other Canadian children?

Rightly, the panel insists there is no silver bullet. The sad legacy of residential schools justifies a certain skepticism toward formal schooling among first nations leaders. Even with generous budgets, organizing successful schools in isolated communities – aboriginal or not – is hard to do well. And many reserve school budgets are not adequate.

But there are other reasons. The panel identifies an important barrier to education success: “The education ‘system’ for first nations students on reserve is a far cry from any system that other Canadians would recognize in terms of … degree of input, accountability, and democratic governance most Canadians take for granted.” Reserve schools operate, the panel concludes, in a “non-system.” Each band council runs its own school much as, a century ago, each rural municipality in the Prairies ran its own one- or two-room school.

In diplomatic language, members of this panel are advising band chiefs and councils on the need for “first nation education authorities” – in other words, the need to professionalize school management by introducing school boards that assume responsibility for running a number of reserve schools across, say, all of southern Saskatchewan or northern Manitoba. Such “authorities” would be democratically accountable to the first nations living within the region, but schools would no longer be primarily accountable to individual band councils.

The panel members insist there should be no standardized “education authority” imposed from one end of the country to the other. Nonetheless, they acknowledge a necessary condition for better school outcomes is that “education authorities” be able to exercise many of the activities performed by school boards for provincial schools. These include hiring of teachers, including specialist teachers, who may rotate among schools based on need, negotiating salaries and terms of teacher employment, designing curriculum, testing and reporting student outcomes.

In addition to “education authorities” there are other recommendations, such as a first nations education act and a national commission for first nations education “to support education reform and improvement.” As expected, panel members call for increased and stable funding.

It is too soon to know whether there will be “an understanding” or whether this report will be ignored. Skeptics can point to a long list of ignored reports – by the Senate, by the auditor-general, by policy institutes, by aboriginal and non-aboriginal academics – all of which contain pleas for reform of the reserve school “non-system.” Skeptics will remind us that shortly after this panel was formed, some provincial first nations organizations condemned it as a threat to treaty rights. Opposition MPs may seek partisan advantage and damn the government for having taken six years before turning to the problem. Government MPs may retort that, when in office, the Liberals did no better.

The skeptics may well be right; I hope not.

John Richards teaches at Simon Fraser University’s Public Policy School and holds the Roger Phillips chair in social policy at the C.D. Howe Institute.

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