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David Robitaille, "How Are Canadian Students Doing?" How are Canadian students doing relative to their counterparts in other countries? Results from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSAA) indicate that the performance of elementary and secondary school students in this country is significantly higher than the international average. The results alos show that there is considerable variability in performance among provinces, with Alberta being consistently strong. John Bishop, "High School Diploma Examinations: Do Students Learn More? Why?" Some provinces have reintroduced provincial diploma examinations. Should the others do the same? A review of the Canadian and international evidence suggests they should. By a number of measures, students from countries and provinces where such exams are used tend to outperform their counterparts elsewhere. Helen Raham, "Building School Success Through Accountability" Canadians expect stringent quality reviews to ensure their multi-billion dollar education investment has the greatest possible impact on student learning. However, current methods to evaluate system performance do not do a good job of demonstrating how well students achieve intended goals or the impact of program spending. A shift is needed to focus the system on results. What policy options are available to achieve this goal? Some promising new strategies are examined here. Bob Rae, "The New World of Education" Education reforms of the 1960s and 1970s went too far. There is need to get back to fundamentals. We need to place greater emphasis on early education. Parents must get more involved. Greater effort should be made to ensure that the television and computers play a more positive educational role. The most important ingredient for more successful schools is effective, fairly compensated, well-motivated teachers. Lorna M. Earl, "Developing Indicators: The Call for Accountability" There are two reasons to create accountability indicators -- public accountability and educational improvement. The author warns against reliance on simplistic, one-dimensional indicators. If educational performance indicators are to enhance rather than distort policy decisions, they must be comprehensive, well designed and carefully executed. And educators, policy makers and the public must become more sophisticated consumers of those indicators. William J. Smith, "Public Schools, Accountability and the Search for Quality Education" There is currently in education policy circles an all but exclusive emphasis on outcomes. The author discusses some of the complexities involved in measuring particular school outcomes. He suggests that it may be a grave error to focus on outcomes to the exclusion of school conditions if the objective is to improve the quality of our schools. J. Douglas Willms and Elizabeth A. Sloat, "Schooling Outcomes for Youth at Risk" Many youth are "at risk" in many ways -- dropping out of school, facing prolonged unemployment, participating in delinquent activities and experiencing mental and physical health problems. Intervention programs aimed at helping youth cope with these problems have traditionally been provided by government, but as the demand for services escalates, and government resources diminish, local communities are being called upon to provide urgently needed services and support. At the same time, funding agencies want to know if the programs they are asked to support truly achieve their intended outcomes. The authors report on efforts being made to develop a practical and inexpensive model to evaluate community-based programs serving youth at risk. Kelly Bedard, "Streaming and Inequality: Who Wins?" Streaming is an important element of educational policy. Both the age at which students are streamed into specialized programs and the proportion of students placed in each stream influence student outcomes. Given the variety of educational structures that exist, and the influence that education has on labour market outcomes, it is important to examine the institutions that children are exposed to before they are old enough to make their own academic and career choices. The author outlines what we know with regard to the impact of streaming on student outcomes. Clément Lemelin, "Rendement et système scolaire" Sorry, the abstract for this article is not available. James N. Tooley, "Is For-profit Education an Oxymoron? The Case of Education Action Zones in the UK" Why should the state be in education at all? This question arises out of a radical education reform pilot project in the UK that would privatize the management of the education process. The author draws on that experiment and other international and historical evidence to critique the traditional justifications for public delivery of education. Robert Skidelsky, "The Failure of Centralism: Why British State Schools Should be More Independent" In the UK, successive Conservative governments have centralized education, taking unprecedented powers to reshape the content and structure of education, while allowing schools a limited autonomy to compete for parental custom. New Labour has said education is the priority. Its answer to the problem of failing schools is the Education Action Zone, a concept that, in theory, opens the way to privatization of the management of schools. The authors outlines what he feels are the major flaws with the EAZs and suggests what changes would be necessary if the command approach is to be given up in favour of meaningful choice and diversity in provision. Marie Duru-Bellat et Alain Mingat, "L'opacité du fonctionnement du système éducatif français : Quelle pistes pour une meilleure régulation ?" The French education system strives to be both efficient and equitable. A relatively high degree of centralization has been the approach taken to pursue those obectives. However, there is a good deal of variation in practice, and that variation has consequences for student outcomes. The authors show how the current system is deficient and suggest a number of improvements. George J. Bedard and Stephen B. Lawton, "The Battle Over Ontario's Bill 160 and the Shape of Teacher Collective Bargaining" Important issues in the nature of publicly funded education were at stake in the battle in Ontario between teachers' unions and the government over Bill 160. The Harris government's changes in collective bargainig, in school board amalgamations, in a new fudning model, in curriculum development and assessment, all point to a degree of centralization that puts the government and the Ministryof Education and Training back in the driver's seat of publicly funded education. The authors look at the background to the conflict last autumn and provide an assessment of the changes that have been introduced with Bill 160. Paul T. Hill, Lawrence Pierce and James Guthrie, "Public School Contracting" The authors propose to make every public school an independent organization, funded on a per-student basis and following a teaching plan or philosophy spelled out in a contract with the local public school board. Government would pay for schools but it would not operate them. Any school supported with public funds and operating under a contract with a duly constituted public education board would be considered a public school. Their contracting proposal would separate responsibility for funding and establishing general policy (which remain in the hands of public education authorities) from the responsibility for operating schools (which is put into private hands). Richard Marceau et Jean-Luc Migué, "La question scolaire au Canada" Sorry, the abstract for this article is not available. Lynn Bosetti, "The Dark Promise of Charter Schools" Advocates of charter schools say they introduce market like forces that will improve educational performance. Critics of school choice and charter schools fear that they just perpetuate inequity, creating a two-tiered educational system where disadvantaged children who are not in the position to play the educational market to their advantage are shut out of the game. Don Tapscott, "Reinventing the University" Information technology will radically transform the role of the teacher and student in the learning process. The new model is interactive, learner-centred and customized. It will entail a shift away from pedagogy to the creation of learning partnerships and learning cultures. Those universities that do not adapt will be swept aside. Deryn M. Watson, "The Reality Behind the Rhetoric of Information Technology Policy for Schools" Despite the hype and massive injection of funds, research suggests that the impact of information technology on schools, both in the UK and elsewhere, has been disappointing. The overriding problem is a dichotomy of purpose. Is IT a subject in its own right,with a knowledge and skill base; or is IT a tool to be used mainly for the learing of other subjects? The author suggests that the failure of attempts to introduce IT is rooted in a background of cultural and economic assumptions. Philip H. Winne, "Technology and Education Reform" Quality education is not likely to be achieved by parachuting word processors, programming languages or the latest hardware and Internet tools into classrooms. Without careful attention to how students and their teachers are prepared to use systems, and to fundamental principles of learning that must underlie educationally effective systems, the results of adventures in technology-led reform are unpredictable. Some turn out quite badly. Among excursions that are harmless, one should ask whether they were cost effective. Teachers are responsible, both professionally and legally, for organizing lessons to enhance student learning. What they do in this role matters more than what appears on computer screens. |
