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  Chapter 15: Universal Standards, Answerability and Streaming Up

  You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down. Mary Pickford, Canadian actress and producer

  I spent an enjoyable week in a small town outside Vancouver with Marilyn, a second-grade teacher who not only hosted me but generously invited me to join her and her family for Canadian Thanksgiving and fed me three types of pie (pumpkin, chocolate and pecan). As in other countries, I offered to help out at school in any way I could, and Marilyn asked me to take her Grade 2 students out of the classroom one by one, to run through a basic, one-to-one assessment with them. This involved me asking them to count as high as they could (but stopping them once it was clear they could get past 110), to read certain words and to point to various body parts as I said them.

  Now, one of the little boys decided to have a bit of a joke with me. As you can imagine, as I’m from England, I have an English accent. And the word ‘ear’ sounds different in an English accent, compared to its Canadian pronunciation. So when I first said ‘ear’, he said ‘Huh?’ – at this stage, genuinely confused. When I then said ‘eearrrr’ in my best Canadian accent, he smiled and pointed to his ear. From then on, though, any word I said in an English accent was met with ‘Huh?’ and a cheeky giggle, so I had to say all the body parts in ‘Canadian’.

  This type of assessment, and the colourful charts and graphs outside the staffroom displaying the proportion of children at ‘grade-level’, illustrate a broader point about expectations for children in Canada. British Columbia has developed ‘BC performance standards’ for teachers’ use in classrooms. These describe what it is expected of children at each grade level, and provide detailed descriptors of what counts as ‘not yet within expectations’, ‘meets expectations’ (minimal level), ‘fully meets expectations’ and ‘exceeds expectations’ for each descriptor.198 For example, the Grade 3 writing standards include ‘Literary Writing’ (writing stories and poems). A snapshot of the criteria to meet performance standards for the latter are shown in the table below, although in the official documents it is then further broken down into different aspects: meaning, style, form and conventions.

  Table 3: A section of the British Columbia Performance Standards for Literary Writing, Grade 3.

  These standards are accompanied by real examples of what work looks like at each level. This is a particularly important addition, because humans aren’t naturally very good at comparing work to descriptors – what counts as ‘interesting detail’ for example? How about, ‘My favourite song was The Simpsons because I didn’t know they knew The Simpsons’ about a trip to a concert, or ‘I felt a bit scared when Mrs Schimdt said the people that painted the pictures above the Orpheum laid down on a high board’? Having the examples allows teachers to compare their own students’ work with the different exemplars, and decide if each piece is relatively better or worse, a skill our human brains are much better at.199

  This outcomes-based approach to the curriculum and the assessment of what children should be able to do was introduced in the 1980s, after a period in the late 1960s and 1970s in which the curriculum had been decentralised to local school boards and even individual schools, to allow more flexibility for individual children.196 The more flexible approach had originally been brought in to challenge what were perceived as ‘inflexible programs, outdated curricula, unrealistic regulations, regimented organization and mistaken aims of education’ (as told by a report on Ontario’s education in the late 1960s), but less than 20 years later, the curriculum shift was back in the other direction, with policymakers specifying what outcomes students should meet in what grades – an approach that has survived to this day. It was also in the 1980s that Canada’s international test results began to climb.

  Canada’s performance standards are mainly used in the classroom by teachers, who create their own assessments that help them decide if the students have met the criteria and report on students’ progress to parents. They can also use resources such as the BC exam bank to help them, which provides curriculum-linked multiple-choice questions for those subjects that are assessable in this format, like science and maths. However, there are also provincial skills assessments in Grades 4 and 7 in reading comprehension, writing and numeracy – which are externally marked, go beyond multiple-choice questions and give a snapshot of how different students are doing against the Performance Standards – and also a smattering of provincial exams in Grades 10–12. Ontario has the same set-up, with standards that students are expected to meet at each grade level, but they give their students the external assessments in Grades 3 (general), 6 (general), 9 (maths) and 10 (literacy) instead. In a similar pattern to the one for the existence of provincial standards described above, these provincial assessments had been abolished in the 1960s and 1970s, but were brought back in throughout the late 1980s and 1990s in response to mounting criticism that standards were slipping and there was a glaring lack of accountability in schools.

  Canada’s outcomes-based approach to assessment is known as criterion-referenced and grade-based, and differs from the way some other countries approach assessment. Singapore’s Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE), for example, is cohort-referenced (as opposed to criterion-referenced), meaning that rather than measuring students’ performance against set criteria, they are measured against each other. Their actual mark in the PSLE is adjusted to give a PSLE T-Score, which takes into account how well everyone else did. This creates a situation where if you do badly, but everyone else does worse, you get a high mark, whereas if you do brilliantly, but everyone does even better, you will get a low mark (remember Little Boy’s explanation of how this leads to increasing difficulty in the exams in Singapore). It only matters indirectly whether you’ve mastered the curriculum, because the main determinant of your grade is how you score compared to your classmates. In contrast, in Canada, it is theoretically possible (though practically unlikely) that the whole Grade 4 cohort in a province could fully meet the provincial expectations for Grade 4.200

  It sounds technical (and it is), but it also demonstrates something quite fundamental about different philosophical approaches to education. Is the assessment designed to distinguish between children, to divide the smart from the less smart, the worthy from the unworthy, and allocate opportunities accordingly? Or is it to establish whether or not, and to what extent, children have succeeded in learning the knowledge or skills that society has decided they ought to have? Both have their place, and it surely ought to depend to some extent on the stage of education. But if you’ve decided that all students are capable of meeting common standards and attending common schools until the age of 14 or 15, as Canadian legislators have, then there is no need to cohort-reference pupils’ assessments and rank students against one another; comparing their performance to criteria and exemplars gives you all the educational information you need. The results don’t need to be as fine-grained as you are able to get with cohort-referenced assessments if you are using them as a basis for a conversation about how to teach better or what individual students need to work on, rather than as a basis for which student should go to which school, or which teacher should be paid more money.

  Facing the Facts about Intelligence

  I had a long chat with the principal of a comprehensive high school, an articulate man with a big oak desk and a blonde moustache, about the philosophy behind this idea that children should be aiming for common standards until aged 15. Bob told me, ‘In a perfect world I’d never stream kids. The intellect is not the issue any more – it’s interest, it’s passion, it’s how people want to work – and I think as you divide by ability you’re setting the stage for identifying where someone can go, and what they’re able to do. I’m very aware of trade teachers I have in this building, outstanding educators, who were pushed towards a non-academic career when they were at school because they weren’t ready at that time, not because they weren
’t able. So I’m not about to dictate a person’s life on the basis of readiness.’

  He paused and shifted in his chair, considering his next point.

  ‘At some point you may have to do that, but you certainly don’t have to do that when someone’s 13. In fact, to me that’s almost abuse. It’s saying, you know, “you’re not going to be able to because you’re not smart enough”, whereas what we really should be saying is, “you know what, you’re not able to right now, but we don’t think it’s because you can’t, we think it’s because you’re not ready”. I have those conversations in this room all the time.’

  Bob makes a point about intelligence not being the only trait of relevance in the modern workplace (a point that we will return to), but he makes two more implicit assumptions about intelligence too. One assumption is that intelligence is not a fixed entity, but something that develops (so you might not be ready, but that doesn’t mean you are unable). The other is more subtle; in acknowledging that different children are ready at different ages, he is recognising that talents and abilities develop at different rates in different people.

  These assumptions about the nature of intelligence are well supported by scientific research. More so, in fact, than the assumptions underlying either the Singaporean system (which is structured around the idea that intelligence is fixed) or the Japanese system (which is structured around the idea that everyone begins equally intellectually capable). I’m not implying Bob’s comments represent the views about intelligence held by all Canadians, but the way that education is structured in Canada takes both of these points into account.

  Intelligence does develop, even if IQ doesn’t (as was discussed in Chapter 7). It doesn’t develop in a steady linear fashion – it develops in fits and starts, with children making great progress in one month and then plateauing for the following two, just like children’s height develops in growth spurts. As articulated by Janet, the Canadian approach to identifying children who are struggling with reading and catching them up is based on this idea that all children can achieve with the right input. As expressed by Bob in his office, the pan-Canadian decision to delay even setting (let alone streaming) until high school means that no one’s options are closed down at a young age due to them not having reached the required stage of development yet.

  But the Canadian system recognises and caters for the other half of the story too – not everyone’s intelligence develops at the same rate. Some do find learning harder than others. And this is partly heritable, suggesting that some people are born with brains that make academic learning easier, and others with brains that mean they’ll have to work extra hard to reach the same level. We’ve seen that they cater for the latter in the same way that the Finns do – they don’t lower the level expected, they support them to meet that challenge with qualified teachers like Janet who give extra time and support to enable them to keep up with their peers. But the Canadians cater to the top end too.

  Janet invited me to join her for one of her pull-out groups for children who aren’t finding regular classwork that challenging. One of the other teachers told me, ‘In primary school we encourage them to help their friends, and this helps them to understand stuff too. But sometimes it can be quite repetitive.’ To make sure they have the chance to be stretched too, they are often taken out in small groups to work on additional projects. The class I attended was made up of seven students from different grades, and the students were reporting back on their progress researching a famous Canadian. The older children were delivering short talks to the rest of the group on the best way to go about researching a topic based on what they’d learned through their previous projects – such as which online sources you could trust, and how to use search terms to retrieve relevant results.

  This approach of getting the students together with intellectually equal peers and equipping them with the skills and time to follow their interests through independent work is in line with the guidance given for educating gifted children on the British Columbia government website, which is based on feedback from 33 academically-gifted students at Vancouver’s University Hill Secondary School. They were asked, ‘If we as teachers could provide the very best learning situation for you, what would you have us do?’ Common responses included ‘Provide independent study opportunities – let us study something we are interested in’, and ‘Let us work with older kids. We can fit in.’ 201

  John Hattie’s meta-analyses of research into programmes for ‘gifted’ students suggest that the most effective form of intervention is acceleration – putting particularly able children into classes with students in the grade above. This approach has an effect size of 0.8 (which is high) when students are compared with others their own age, but no effect compared with the students in their new class – possibly putting them at a disadvantage in important tests later in their school careers. Hattie looked at two types of ability grouping – one in which the gifted children follow a different curriculum specifically designed for them (0.3 – low to medium), and one in which children are selected into different classes where they follow the same curriculum but at different speeds (which I’ve been calling ‘setting’ throughout this book). The latter only has an effect size of 0.14 (low) on those in the top set. The other common approach of enrichment classes, as exemplified by Janet’s small research group described above, has an average effect size of 0.39 (medium) on the students that take part, although the effectiveness of these programmes varies depending on the experience of the teacher.202

  The extent to which more able children are given these opportunities, and in what way, differs across provinces in Canada.203 No provinces make these programmes mandatory, but neither do they forbid their implementation. And while none of the provinces select children into different streams or classes before the age of 14, once they are at high school they make use of the type of ‘ability grouping’ based on providing some more able children with a different curriculum. Since reading about the negative effects of selection into different schools and classes on equity, I’d been wondering whether it was possible to group students in a way that was to the benefit of everyone, without one group’s gain being at the expense of another’s. It was a question that had been playing on my mind, and so I was particularly interested to hear about the approach taken in one high school I visited on Vancouver Island, which I learned was typical of many high schools in Canada.

  I met Marie in a chemistry lab which was full of stuffed toy moles (I believe in reference to the ‘mole’, which is a unit of measurement for chemical substances). She’d invited me to watch an Advanced Placement Class of hers, who were working in groups to design their own experiments investigating factors affecting the rate of a reaction. Advanced Placement (AP) classes are for the ‘top’ students only, allowing teachers to teach more advanced material to those who can handle it, in preparation for university. But rather than dividing students into several sets of different abilities, this was the only ‘ability group’ they had. There was the AP class, and then there were mixed-ability classes made up of everyone else; no one was placed in a bottom set.

  Marie explained to me after class, ‘We stream up rather than down. We think a rising tide lifts all boats, but if you stream down, you have students giving up or thinking they’re dumb. Some people think this is bad for the other kids who aren’t in the top stream, but we find that those kids in the normal set that used to be too scared or slow to put up their hands when the more advanced kids were in the class with them now get more involved.’ Food for thought.

  Expectations and Accountability

  You might be surprised, given what we were saying about the focus on individualisation in Canada, that the performance standards for students are still grade-based (i.e. by the end of Grade 4 pupils should be able to…). This means that up to the age of 14 or 15, everyone in the same grade is working towards the same thing, as they are in Finland, Japan, Singapore (at primary) and Shanghai. This contrasts with the more individual approa
ch used until recently in England: students were judged against performance descriptors, as they were in Canada, but these matched up to ‘Levels’, which didn’t necessarily go hand in hand with school years. You would start at a Level 1 when you started school and, at your own pace, work your way up through the levels as you progressed through the years. Most students were expected to reach Level 4 by the end of primary school, but if you didn’t: well, here’s where an approach with grade-based expectations (Canada) and individualised expectations (‘old’ England) differ.

  Let’s take two identical twins, Conor and Edward, separated at birth and brought up in different continents. Neither have special needs, but nor are they natural academics. Let’s say that Conor in Canada is ‘not yet within expectations’ at the end of primary school (despite the early intervention from qualified teachers). He gets extra ongoing support to help him meet those expectations, but even if he doesn’t reach them now, he’ll be in the same class as his friends at middle school. He will still be expected to work towards the standards set for the first year of middle school, and be exposed to the same content and teaching, like everyone else, but he will get extra support to help him reach them. When he goes to high school, he might take one less elective subject, allowing him to spend that extra time in the support room to ensure he keeps up with his friends in class. I should add at this point that there is no need to tell Conor that he is ‘not yet within expectations’ in a certain subject – especially while he is in primary school – but to acknowledge as teachers and parents that he is below where he should be so that he gets sufficient support in keeping up, and doesn’t fall further behind.