Educhatter

• Delaying March Break: Would a “Catch-Up Week” have made more sense in Ontario?
  Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce ended the public confusion on February 11, 2021 by announcing that March break would be postponed to the week of April 12. His public rationale was that such a move was prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic and intended to keep students safe while containing community spread of the virus. The […]
• Educational Spending: Who’s Minding the Store in the Canadian K-12 System?
  Some things in education return, year after year, like clockwork. So the dawn of 2021 produced the latest iteration of the Fraser Institute’s perennial report on “Education Spending in Public Schools in Canada.” Everyone in Canadian K-12 education attuned to public policy, from coast-to-coast, knows what to expect as regular fare from one of our […]
• Education Outlook 2021: Who’s Tackling COVID-19 ‘Learning Loss’?
  The “COVID-19 slide” is real and it is setting back learning for all students, but particularly for those from disadvantaged, racialized and marginal communities. Looking ahead in 2021, the urgent priority is to confront the profound impact of the COVID-19 onslaught on the ‘pandemic generation’ of students
• School Council Pandemic Breakdown: Is the Time Ripe for Re-engineering School-Level Governance?
  Effective school councils, at their best, truly engage parents and give them a meaningful voice in shaping school-level policy affecting students. Far too many of them devolve into ‘window dressing’ and instead expose the limits of parent involvement. When schools shut down in March 2020, local parent consultation committees were rendered almost invisible and sidelined […]
• Pandemic School Shutdowns: What were the Lessons of the First Wave?
  Flattening the curve of the pandemic is a long slog, but a few lessons are being learned, particularly in the K-12 education domain. When COVID-19 hit in March 2020, pandemic emergency response plans embraced a singular education strategy – close all K-12 schools and default to hastily-assembled and largely-untested “home learning” programs. Following public health […]
• The Big Disconnect: Whatever Happened to Alberta, Canada’s Best School System?
  Suspending Alberta diploma exams in October and November 2020 is understandable in the midst of a global pandemic, but it will have unintended consequences. Replacing exams with sound, reliable, standards-based and replicable alternative forms of summative assessment is a formidable challenge. Taking a longer-term view, it will most likely only exacerbate the gradual and well-documented […]
• Pandemic Assessment Matters: What’s Missing without Provincial Tests and Examinations?
  The ongoing COVID-19 crisis may be claiming another victim in one of Canada’s leading education provinces – sound, reliable, standards-based and replicable summative student assessment. After thwarting a 2017-18 Learning Province plan to subvert the province’s Grade 3 provincial student assessment and broaden the ‘measures of success,’ the Ontario Doug Ford government and its education […]
• Pandemic Disruption and Learnification: Will the Education Crisis Help Us to Reclaim Teaching?
  Learnification has finally been exposed and classroom teachers everywhere are gradually awakening to its debilitating effects on their professional autonomy and teaching practice. It took a global education system shutdown to reveal that all things educational had been, over the past forty years, redefined in terms of “learning” and reducing “teaching” to the “facilitation of […]
• Righting the School System: Will the COVID-19 Education Crisis be the Tipping Point?
  The global shock of the COVID-19 pandemic proves, once again, the old adage that “it takes a crisis” and especially so in the world of K-12 education. Surveying the fallout from the school shutdown, the six-month hiatus, and the rocky school-start-up in September, everyone from school leaders to students, educators and parents, is absorbing the […]
• ‘World Class’ Education System in Crisis: Why are the Canadian ‘Systematizers’ Ringing the Alarm Bell?
  “Canada’s public schools are the envy of the world.” So claim two of Canada’s leading architects and promoters of the current centralized, bureaucratic and learning-focused Canadian K-12 public education system, Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves. What’s most surprising and indeed shocking to them is that anyone would question that claim, let alone want to tamper […]