Student academic achievement is heading downhill in every single province in Canada. That’s what the latest Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report shows.
Over the last twenty years, there has been a steady decline in the math, reading, and science skills of Canadian students.
To make matters worse, Manitoba scored significantly below the Canadian average in each of these areas. In math, which was the primary focus of the latest PISA assessment, Manitoba tied with Nova Scotia for third last among Canadian provinces.
While this might, at first glance, seem like an improvement from our dead last position in 2018, all it means is that the skills of Manitoba students declined slightly less rapidly than the skills of students in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland & Labrador. This is not something to be proud of.
Right on cue, the usual actors began making excuses. The president of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society tweeted that instead of worrying about the PISA results, we should focus on the impact of seven years of chronic underfunding and on the need for a universal student meal program. In other words, student achievement would improve if the province spent more money on education.
However, Manitoba already spends the second highest amount per student among the ten provinces and has little to show for it. If more money was the solution, Manitoba students would be near the top in Canada, not scraping the bottom.
Obviously, there are external factors that affect academic achievement. Child poverty, dysfunctional homes, and neighbourhood violence are but a few examples. Of course, these problems must be addressed on a system-wide basis and cannot be the sole responsibility of teachers and principals.
However, there is one thing that is absolutely under the control of each school—the quality of classroom instruction. Students are in school for about six hours per day, five days a week. That is a lot of time, and it can make a huge impact in students’ lives.
Research shows that students benefit from knowledge-rich classroom environments. For example, there is a strong causal relationship between background knowledge and reading comprehension. This means that teachers should do everything they can to help students acquire lots of subject-specific content knowledge.
In addition, the science of reading shows that phonics instruction is vastly superior to the widely used, but ineffective, three-cueing approach. Instead of having students guess the meaning of words based on the context, students need to learn how to sound out individual letters and phrases. This requires a significant amount of focused classroom instruction by competent teachers.
As for math, students fall behind when teachers fail to help them master essential skills. Students need to memorize basic math facts such as multiplication tables. They also need to learn the standard algorithms for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
If students do not acquire these basic skills, they will struggle in math, particularly when they encounter complex math problems. Just as a pianist needs to practice scales before playing Handel’s Messiah, students must commit basic math facts to memory before trying to solve complex algebraic equations.
Changing how we do things in school does not require extra money. We need to work smarter rather than harder.
Manitoba’s downward trajectory is unacceptable. It is time we did something different.
Michael Zwaagstra is a public high school teacher and a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
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