'Best Educated' or Bust in BC!

Finally, the BC Liberals have an educational priority we can all applaud.

It's right there on the official BC Government website, under the premier's photo and under the heading "Accountability Statement". Goal number one of the "Five Great Goals" is, "Make B.C. the best-educated, most literate jurisdiction on the continent."

That's a most worthy goal for a progressive province interested in the economic future of its citizens. It's even attainable. And it's no fair pointing out that Mexico and most American states aren't much competition.

However, it isn't going to happen and the premier's own government is going to have to carry the can for the failure.

Why? There's a direct link between literacy and class size, and class sizes have, as a consequence of government policies, exploded in the secondary classrooms of the province, nowhere more devastatingly than in middle-grade (grades 7 to 9) English classrooms.

Wente's wrong answers

When most of us think about literacy at all, we usually think of little children learning to read, or adults who haven't learned. So when journalists and parents examine the state of student literacy, they typically go looking at elementary schools, and particularly at what happens in the primary grades. Thus, you have a columnist like the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente who appears to be on a crusade to return the teaching of reading skills to a method based purely on phonics - you know, the kind of reading instruction many of us endured as children.

I'm pretty sure Wente is wrong in both her diagnosis and prescription, but in any case, one thing I know for sure: by concentrating only on decoding skills, she's focused only on the beginning of a long and complicated process.

Literacy is far more than possessing decoding skills. Just because a student can "sound out" words, doesn't mean he knows what those words mean or imply. For example, I had a grade 12 class a few years ago that was about to write the provincial exam. So I gave them a practice essay from an old exam. A significant minority completed the question very poorly: it turned out they were under the impression an "understatement" was something that came "under" - hence, after - a statement.

Thus, literacy is vocabulary. Literacy is also figurative language: knowing that when the essayist uses the phrase "carry the can" he isn't being literal; it's a metaphor. Those aspects of literacy go well beyond decoding and few of us grow up knowing them instinctively. Tyee readers, self-selected for literacy as they are, might well be astonished if they could look closely at the average high school English class. They would see for themselves that for many of the students, such "obvious" attributes of literacy aren't obvious at all.

Packed middle grade classes

Literacy is a continuum and both class sizes and class compositions in the English classes of the middle grades are putting that continuum at risk in BC.

By now, everyone knows that teachers overwhelmingly believe that class sizes are a major issue. Teachers know from everyday experience that large classes are not good for either students or themselves, for all sorts of compelling reasons. In BC, there is considerable evidence that the most pressing class-size problems - and those least likely to be resolved - are in the core subjects of the middle grades.

The reasons for this are obvious. For one thing, primary class sizes are defined by law, but intermediate elementary class sizes are not. And students don't have choices, so it's relatively easy to match the number of teachers to the number of students, and come up with an equitable, if not adequate, ratio.

In the middle grades, however, students get some course choices, and suddenly, things become very difficult to program. There are specialists like counselors, librarians and learning assistance teachers who don't have classrooms, but who, nonetheless, have to be considered as part of the student-teacher ratio. Some courses are not as popular as others. Some courses cannot accommodate as many students as others. Some classes simply require more consideration than others in order to function. Specialized programs may require unusually small groups and so on.

Yet in the "New Era" of underfunded classrooms, the middle grades get no breaks in their staffing ratios.

What administrators do in such circumstances is perfectly understandable, and completely wrong, if the premier's goal is to be met. They fill up the courses all students must take (typically English, math, social studies, physical education and science) to their maxima, so that they have some flexibility in dealing with the other priorities of the school.

In many districts, this means middle-grade English classes of at least 30, and I've even heard of classrooms with 38 middle-grade English students. That means a full-time English teacher teaches more than 210 students. And it means he or she teaches to the full range of student abilities in each class; from those still practicing decoding skills to the most literate.

How to succeed

Anyone who thinks that even the most accomplished English teacher of a typical class of 30 or more thirteen and fourteen year olds can be effective most of the time hasn't actually experienced such a class.

Add to that the fact that middle schools and junior highs frequently employ less-experienced and non-specialized teachers to teach English, and one starts to see why there might be a problem in the making. Then consider the workload (never mind the management problems posed by such classes) and one can easily see why an ambitious young English teacher might opt to leave.

It's just a question of time before literacy statistics reflect the fact that the least naturally literate students are being let down by the system.

If the premier is truly accountable for student literacy, he will do more than mandate provincial English exams in grade 10.

He will do something about student numbers in middle-grade classes.

He will make sure that there are professional English teachers in place and that the system makes it possible for them to do their jobs.

Justus Havelaar is a writer and newly retired English teacher who lives in Campbell River. If readers are interested in receiving a free, pdf copy of his manuscript, It Works For Me: A Practical and Opinionated Guide to Teaching English in the BC Secondary School System, he invites them to email him at justus.havelaar AT crcn.net.