Together with 35 other students from across Canada, predominantly doctoral and post-doctoral students, Masha Krylova, a M.A. student from the University of Manitoba, has been selected to take part in the innovative training program, the Summer Program in Aging (SPA)....
On October 24th, Manitoba voters will head to the polls to elect school trustees. But, citizens are increasingly becoming disaffected from school board politics and the turn out may be low. Many wonder if it is worth voting at all. There are, however, good reasons to...
WINNIPEG, MB, October 22, 2018 - The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has just released a new research paper, Never Enough: The Increasing Cost of Public Education in Manitoba and How to Curb it by Rod Clifton, a senior fellow and Alexandra Burnett, a junior...
Marijuana will become legal in Canada on 17 October. Some students can hardly wait, but the question is whether their universities are ready. In curricular terms, the institutional response has been impressive. Many Canadian universities have already begun new courses...
The cost of actually building a house does not vary that much across Canada The Ford government’s plan to expand the land supply available for housing has evoked the usual dog whistles about “urban sprawl” by interests apparently unaware of the strong...
Reading is the most important skill taught in school. If students don’t learn how to read, not much else that happens there is going to matter. That’s because being able to read is important in virtually every job. Without the ability to read, life itself will be a...
The buzz in the education community is that Peter Bjornson, Minister of Education, Citizenship and Youth, has quietly abolished the standards tests in Grades 6 and 9. Unfortunately, the Minister did not make a public announcement, which probably means that he knew...
Three policy changes to improve the performance of universities
Residential schools also provided benefits to native students.
This paper proposes a merit pay plan for Manitoba teachers based on models that have been successfully implemented in the United States. It creates a new salary grid which replaces increments based on experience and the teacher’s years of university education. A teacher’s merit level placement would depend partially on in-school evaluations and student performance on standards exams. Principals will also have six possible merit levels, determined entirely by student performance
Public education is in crisis and something needs to be done about it.
The reformist approach to better education involves decentralizing control of the product to the school level, rewarding teacher performance and holding principals responsible for outcomes.
In the mid-1990s the former Conservative government introduced standards tests for students in Grades 3, 6, 9, and 12. These tests were designed to reflect the widespread concern that learning outcomes needed to be assessed at various stages during the educational lives of students.
This paper will examine the question of standards testing in public schools. What is its purpose? Are standards tests an effective and acceptable tool for measuring public school performance? Should we keep them or discard them?