Open letter from anonymous Ontario teacher (2021)
karlstack.substack.com
karlstack.substack.com
A) the test had outcomes that heavily favored teachers who grew up in Ontario and spoke English. Part of this is that there were no prep materials available at the time and no real description of what was on the test
B) the province failed to demonstrate a need to use this particular test or that tests like this led to better student outcomes.
For reference on A, here are some sample problems:
Question 1: "Based on Learning For All, which is a shared goal or strategy of differentiated instruction and Universal Design for Learning? A) To use the same textbooks B) To use only whole-class instruction C) To meet different needs of the students in a class D) To meet the requirements for curriculum expectations"
Question 6: "Assessment that occurs before a period of learning to assess a student's readiness for learning and learning preferences would be considered which of the following? A) assessment of learning B) assessment as learning C) assessment for learning D) assessment of learning skills"
Question 15: "As outlined in Growing Success, how does Ontario’s criterion-referenced assessment and evaluation approach require teachers to assess and evaluate students’ work? A) by ranking student performance B) by comparing work done by other students C) by referencing performance standards developed by teachers for their own classrooms D) by referencing the established criteria for four levels of achievement that are standard across the province"
Those aren’t basic math knowledge, those are trivia on the Ontario curriculum (and again, no prep material was available). If the province had demonstrated that this improved student outcomes the ruling may have been different.
Re: Question 2, I know all the ins and outs of pre-assessment but have no idea which of these answers is supposed to be correct. Probably D but perhaps C? In any case, it doesn't seem like knowing the answer would improve or demonstrate my understanding of pre-assessment in any way.
In fact, it's like a vocabulary test but the vocabulary term itself mostly just demonstrates that the conceptual framework you're being tested on was designed by folks who need to get much better at precision in communication! In any case, 100% pure trivia.
More importantly, the lack of a thorough rubric and set of prep materials is egregiously embarrassing for an exam that specifically asks about pedagogy...
Right. Only that their proficiency mustn't be tested. Not with this test, anyway. They must use a hypothetical test where all groups perform equally well.
Yes, it's a common tactic to use the most abstract terms to obscure the meaning of policies and rulings like these. Lets be more concrete: the test was excluding minorities how?
However, it’s simultaneously true the math test didn’t pass the Oakes test because the math test is not really about testing for competent math instruction and therefore unjustifiable; and the judges did not simply "rule on the law" or rather the Charter.
At various points in the ruling the 3 judges just hotrodded right over Section 15 of the Charter by treating race as a real trait that could be ascribed to individuals by them. Part of the s15 meaning of race is that it is a social construct and therefore Canadians deserve protection from this ascribed categorization and decisions made thereby; and such kith and kin identifications can only be self-decided and self-described. Anyone appointed to the Superior Court should know this.
The judges even blithely decided and declared the race of a witness after a lengthy enumeration of the witness’s self-description. I was floored.
The judges make an argument that relies on a premise that some races are better at math than others.
They had to make an argument like that to invoke Oakes because the evidence entered was statistics by race showing some “races” did worse.
It is a simple logical error that s15 is meant to protect against. If you racialize the statistical analysis you will conclude racial causes. Section 15 says those arguments are disallowed.
It is more likely there are better explanations that are not based on race. Such better explanations would have equally caused the math test to fail Oakes. It would have been better to force the litigants to find true sociological data by denying the evidence presented. However that would be difficult to achieve.
Anyway now we have a ruling that appears to invert Section 15 of the Charter completely. This encourages more racialization. If race is decidable, ascribable, and causal enough to win rulings then race becomes an effective legal construct.
It was a very strange and bad ruling.
It is clear from the rest of the ruling the judges think racially. It makes me sad and frustrated.
Here is a link to some full practice tests: https://mathproficiencytest.ca/#/en/sample-questions-pre
The math questions are incredibly simple, and I'm astonished that people planning to become teachers had the chutzpah to complain about having to do middle-school math, let alone challenge it in court. The fact that they won is shameful for everyone involved.
> Pedagogy is also presumably taught as part of the teaching degree that the test-takers complete.
The above isn't general pedagogy, it's Ontario-curriculum-specific. Applicants are not required to have Ontario diplomas, and there were no prep materials available. This has the end result that the test was effectively testing whether you happened to be educated in Ontario.
> The above isn't general pedagogy, it's Ontario-curriculum-specific. Applicants are not required to have Ontario diplomas, and there were no prep materials available. This has the end result that the test was effectively testing whether you happened to be educated in Ontario.
Responding to your edit... Wow. So someone can become an Ontario teacher with no knowledge of the Ontario curriculum? That seems like a bigger problem than testing prospective Ontario teachers on what they will be implementing in the classroom.
As a software dev I’ve read more than 100-200 pages worth of material to grok things; surely we can expect math teachers to spend the 5-10 hours it takes to ingest the curriculum/identify weaknesses to improve on.
People with an axe to grind (on either side of the political spectrum) immediately act like the court made it impossible to even consider rewriting the law. Nuances are lost. The world is ending.
From the letter, quoting Malcolm Gladwell: "Take a random group of 8-year old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away."
From the court decision: "There were reasonably available alternatives to the MPT that on their face appear to be less impairing and at least as effective in achieving the goal of improving student achievement in math. These include requiring a minimum number of hours of math instruction or a math course in B.Ed. programs, requiring an undergraduate math course as an admissions requirement for B.Ed. programs or waiting to see the effects of the other parts of the Respondent’s four-year math strategy."
Unfortunately, the author is more interested in giving up than solving the problem. The productive action would be to say "Hm, OK, the court gave us a list of practical alternatives which stand a good chance of passing review, so I'm going to start advocating for one of those."
In fact, the court notes that "Research from the province of Quebec, where student math test scores are high relative to the rest of Canada, attributes that province’s student achievement to 'a uniquely strong emphasis on requiring trainee teachers to undertake more courses in both mathematics methodology and mathematics content.'"
That seems promising! Requiring trainee teachers to take mathematics courses is even one of the ideas the court recommended.
Ah well.
The full court decision is a good read, by the by. The court thought hard about this, and balanced quite a few factors. The reasoning behind the decision is laid out in great detail and there's certainly enough there to engage with if a critic wanted to do so. The author of the letter does not actually address the court decision at all.
I know this isn’t really your point, but like a lot of Gladwell anecdotes this smells like the kind of thing that’s more interested in selling a story than telling a story.
Is this from a real study, or is it a story that feels right because it flatters certain preconceptions? Are the Japanese students ultimately more successful, or do they just spend longer failing? Are they more afraid of disappointing adults? Of appearing ignorant? Maybe they’re just more willing to toil pointlessly at arbitrary tasks. What’s the criteria for “giving up”, that they hand back the paper themselves? Maybe they’re done but are ashamed to admit it, something like a salaryman sitting at his desk doing nothing because he can’t bring himself to leave before his boss.
Just saying, this has a strong Gladwell-tinged odor of “the real story is probably more complicated and maybe less interesting than you’re trying to make me believe”.
That’s fine to be honest. They aren’t the Ministry. They simply had to enumerate some reasonable alternatives to satisfy the Oakes test requirements.
However I felt dumber after reading the ruling. They really leaned into the idea that race is real, which is a red flag for a judge in Canada.
If the people want the government to have specific education standards, then they need a much greater consensus to modify their constitutional framework to include that and its implementation.
Only spelling it out to remind people.
Okay I tap out, I dont understand Canadian identity politics enough to begin to understand how you think that is relevant here and its hard to take it seriously since I cant be emotionally invested in it either
> Politically homogeneous communities are more susceptible to witch hunts, particularly when they feel threatened from outside.
The situation is one borne of politics being hoisted upon an institution that should be politically agnostic.
I don't think the solutions will be able to avoid anything the hegemony deems apolitical since that tends to require things fit it's narrative.
This is just another lesson as to why meritocracy isn't a dirty word and that identitarianism has no place in politics.
Maybe it should be but when has it been?
Ruthless punishment of cheating for example, and extreme measures to discipline and prevent it are just as idealogical as permitting it. Just as political, even.
There's a good conversation to be had about cost, consequences, balance, etc here. Or a poor one where this is framed as a one-sided imposition of "politics" on a somehow uniquely pure, apolitical institution.
Is the declaration in question. Anyone know what the "reasonable alternatives" mentioned are?
edit: The full document linked makes it look even worse. Facts 12 to 14 on page 3. There are no required math courses during the degree and new teachers are often assigned to teach math to get a foot in the door.
edit2: Apparently one of the alternatives are requiring actual math classes. See the comment by "542458" about what was currently asked.
Specifically, math classes without any disparity in the pass rate between races. Why the court believes there would be no disparity is unstated. At least in the US, the disparity is present in both final tests and class grades.
On one hand you have the college professors with ridiculous policies (lockdown browser, not being able to go back a question) in the name of preventing cheating, unnecessarily strict policies (late 1 minute = automatic 0, this doesn’t actually pan out in real life), “weed out” classes and downward curves, obscure assignments and bad lectures. And the smartest people aren’t always the best teachers: you really don’t have to be a genius to teach high school.
On the other hand, I agree with the author that public school teaching and leniency is insane. I wouldn’t be surprised if some math teachers didn’t know math, because I know that my 5th grade math teacher thought that anything divided by 0 is 0 (and I went to one of the better public schools).
It’s actually a dual situation where the smart motivated kids are sometimes pushed to burnout (see: grad school) and the dumb unmotivated kids sometimes get away with stuff and impact the class. People need to learn how to educate. I really think the future of education will mostly be online courses with teachers acting as tutors for those who need them.
What was wrong with the old "zero" policy?
>Meanwhile, competitor countries continue to emphasize traditional, rote-like teaching and learning methodologies when it comes to math.
Rote memorization is good for a few things, like the 36 nontrivial entries on the multiplication table. But it's just not true that Singapore teaches math "by rote" in general. It is true that math teachers in East Asia are expected to know math. See this comment by jacobolus:
https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/qqwhyy/comment/hk51xv...
The relevant book:
https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics-Mathe...
In practice it led to turning a blind eye rather than facing the aftermath of a cheating accusation. And I doubt that a more relaxed approach is teaching kids to cheat. Kids learn the mechanics of cheating from one another.
Also, kids could get into a hole that they couldn't get out of, for instance being assured of a failing grade no matter how much further effort they made. They essentially become dead weight in the classroom.
Cheating students would fail classes, hurting the school and teacher metrics.
What's actually happened is that a math proficiency requirement for teacher certification in Ontario has been declared unconstitutional by an appellate court under a disproportionate adverse impact theory. Some quick Googling suggests that the Supreme Court of Canada opened the door to disproportionate impact several years ago. It'll be interesting to see if this ruling is upheld.
In the U.S. conservative and moderate judges have held the line against disproportionate impact. And it won't ever past muster in the Supreme Court anytime soon. Notwithstanding that reality, many U.S. progressive commentators talk as-if it's a firmly established legal theory here, which it's not.
Government policies do, of course, have disproportionate adverse impacts on many groups, often reflecting systemic bias. But elevating the theory to the point of permitting constitutional claims is... let's just say it poses extremely difficult problems and dilemmas.
I will not comment on the actual court judgment itself simply because I'm not super privy to conversations surrounding public schooling in Ontario. I will, however tackle one point the author brings up about "rote-like teaching and learning methodologies". I grew up in one such "rote-like" learning system, and I'm witness to how it _kills_ the beauty of math and sucks all joy out of it. I was privileged enough to find Khan Academy around my HS days and Sal's intuition-backed approach to math was a godsend in a place where we were told to redo the same problems till our "hands memorized the problems". Rote-learning is great for multiplication tables, but anything after that is begging your students to fear/despise math. We need creative ways of teaching math so students are actually interested in the subject, and I see far more of that in the west (I have worked part-time as a math tutor in Toronto) than the rote system I was subject to.
This romanticisation of rote-methods and painting all activism as Marxism leads me to believe the author is no better than those he/she seeks to criticize and is victim to the same intellectual trappings they accuse their opponents of. If I had a kid in the Ontario public system, I'd probably be wary of my kid learning anything from this teacher - my political beliefs notwithstanding.
[1] - I'm not denying the author their right to criticize the system (they probably have valid criticisms), but if they're going to do it in a self-important manner, I'd expect more intellectual rigour than calling anything moderately activist as "Marxism".
But even secondary English teachers should be able to pass a mathematics proficiency exam.
Would we want barely literate folks teaching Mathematics? No, because mathematics does not exist in isolation. Someone who can't read and write reasonably well very likely can't teach mathematics in a contextually useful way. If someone cannot pass an English/French exam, I'm not so sure that they are literate enough to teach.
Similarly, a basic competency in number sense and Mathematical constructions is necessary to teach any subject, including English. If someone cannot pass a Mathematics exam, I'm not so sure that they are numerate enough to manage a grade book and interpret basic statistics about their students' progression. Not to mention teaching students how to write expository texts on technical subjects.
Remember: these exams are relatively low bars. We're not testing teachers on university mathematics; we're largely testing them on material they should have learned in order to graduate from high school in the first place. See https://mathproficiencytest.ca/#/en/applicant/learn/about:wh...
The EQAO (in charge of creating the test) found through a literature review that "the fundamental goal of teacher licensure tests – to improve student learning – is often not met." Adding math courses to the B.Ed would be a much better way of improving teachers' math proficiency. It seems strange to have an extra standardized test when you have a specific program designed to graduate teachers.
This is inaccurate. It’s never met. There are no known examples of teacher education improving their effectiveness. Education degrees have no effect on how god teachers are at their job.
> It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness
> Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
for grade 7 and over you need a qualification in math, however, you can still be assigned, so
>Therefore, even a teacher without a qualification in intermediate or Senior Division Mathematics can be asked to teach math in those divisions.
and
>The Respondent’s evidence is that due to the competitive nature of teaching positions, newly certified teachers may find that the only positions available to them are positions that require them to teach math, whether or not this was their intention. When few teaching positions are available, new teachers will often take positions outside of the subjects or divisions on their teaching certificate.
From page 3 (points 13 & 14) of https://www.otffeo.on.ca/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/...
Where does race even come in in the context of 6th grade arithmetics?
The author starts with the problem of declining standards (okay), takes a detour via Haidt/Peterson (groan [1]), and by the end of the article the author is frothing at the mouth about Marxism or something.
--
[1] Haidt/Peterson are to the right wing as Zizek is the left wing. It's less that I disagree with them per se and more that I find their entire style appeals to lazy and excessively emotional thought patterns. They're the humanities version of highly cringeworthy pop sci TED talks.
Peterson uses this to attack the idea self-acceptance and embracing your identity or expression. It's meant to be a foil to the "You're perfect just the way you are." mentality that isn't meant to engender the idea that everyone is infallible, but rather we needn't change our identity to conform to e.g. gender norms.
Of course, Peterson purposefully misinterprets this as a declaration of infallibility and acceptance of mediocrity, which fits nicely into the narrative the author is weaving.
Yeah, quoting this guy and the phrase "judicial activism" shows where the author stands politically.