The New Brunswick Experience in Doing Right by All the Students

God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.

Thomas Huxley

            The most difficult lesson for new teachers is that we will never be the right teacher for all our students.  One of the most difficult things to explain to the parent of a student is that the thing you all agree would be best for their child may be a thing you cannot, in good conscience do, because it would not be good for her classmates. 

            These were the kind of issues New Brunswick faced when it took a long hard look at its French Second Language programs and realised that they were expensive, created ghettos and streaming and did not teach French effectively.  I read the Croll Lee Report with a sense of recognition; Ontario is not much different, we just aren’t ready to admit that the emperor has no clothes. 

The report was frank about what wasn’t working in the FSL programs and the perceptions of the people who were directly involved about where the difficulties lay.  As much as I love the academic world, I know that studies cannot be counted on to give us a guarantee that their results can be reproduced under all conditions.  I also know that teaching and learning do not exist in isolation. 

Children have peers and parents.  Teachers have time limits and families and lives outside the classroom.  Parents have prejudices and want what they perceive as best for their children more than they want what is best for a class or a school or school board.  Administrators want to go home in time for dinner and leave behind the bellyful of complaints, justified or unjustified.  Trustees want to do what’s right but they also want to be re-elected.  And I haven’t mentioned money, yet.  Or any serious politics.  In all these push-me, pull-you wants and needs, it is sometimes so hard to remember that education is about educating all our children as successfully as possible.

New Brunswick, God bless it, remembered exactly that.  In this post and posts to come, you may feel that they made mistakes, but they had their eye on the ball.  They were intent on providing an effective education in FSL to all the Anglophone students in the province and intent on doing it in a way that would be cost efficient.  Yes, it was about money, too.  You can’t be accountable to the public without accounting for the cost of the service you are providing.

Before the Reform of the FSL Program

            A bit of background:  New Brunswick has a population of under 800,000 people of whom 51% are urban dwellers and 49% are rural.  The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of education and rural populations is that very few children will be walking to school.  The second thing is that the elementary schools will be small and the secondary schools will draw from large geographical areas.  I’m not an expert, but I frequently drive through rural Ontario from Ottawa to Toronto and through rural Quebec from Ottawa to our cottage.  I see the schools and I see the buses.  At conferences, I talk to the teachers and hear how teaching in rural schools is different from the urban schools of my experience.

            New Brunswick is the province with the second highest proportion of rural population after Prince Edward Island.  I have cycled across PEI and I can vouch for the fact that nothing is very far from anything else in PEI.  The overall rural population in Canada amounts to roughly 20% and in Ontario it is 15%. 

            Educators in New Brunswick not only face unique demographic challenges but N.B.  has also declared itself a bilingual (French and English) province.  As a result, there is a political push to educate Anglophone children to functional fluency in French.

The three streams for FSL students in New Brunswick were: Early French Immersion (starting in Grade 1), Late French Immersion and Core French.  Money was not evenly distributed among these programs: one year of Early Immersion cost 28.69% of funds spent on French as a Second Language in New Brunswick.  Students in EFI made up only 19% of students in the FSL program.  LFI took an even larger per capita chunk of the FSL budget; they constituted 7.7% of FSL students but used 16.6% of the FSL budget.  By now you will have figured out that 71.1% of the students, those in Core French, those with 93.2% of children with special education needs, those who could use some extra help, were allotted 54.75% of the total FSL budget for one year.

These three streams were not the only systems for learning French in New Brunswick.  The count came to 14 different variations of immersion or core.  This included a technique called AIM and one called Intensive French.  Many of these systems would require follow through in subsequent years, so you can imagine how expensive this could get.  Two streams starting in grade 1 and a third splitting the core stream in later elementary school is costly enough.

When the ministry of education for New Brunswick asked “how well are our FSL programs doing in teaching French?” they commissioned Dr. James Croll and Patricia Lee to answer that question by creating a report on the current conditions and making recommendations based on what they learned.    

The short answer to the ministry’s question was appalling.  Statistics were limited and only in recent years has the ministry begun to separate EFI stats from LFI.  Nevertheless, Croll and Lee did find appropriate statistics for the EFI students who started in Grade 1 in 1995 and would have been in Grade 12 in 2006. (Table 37)

Of the 1,469 Early French Immersion students who started in grade one in 1995, only 613 finished the program by going all the way to grade 12.  The standard expected for a student who had been in the immersion program for twelve years was New Brunswick’s oral proficiency of Advanced or above. Advanced is described as:

Able to speak the language with sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal, and in all informal conversations, on practical, social, and academic or work-related topics. Can describe in detail and narrate accurately. Can discuss abstract topics and ideas as well as events; can support opinions and hypothesize. Accent may be obvious but never interferes with understanding. Control of grammar is good and speech is fluent. Sporadic errors still occur, but they would not distract a native speaker or interfere with communication 

Of the 613 who did not drop out before grade 12, only 554 took the oral proficiency test.  Of those 554 students, 234, or less than 50% of them actually achieved the Advanced target level.  As low as this seems, if you consider dropouts as failing students and most school boards would consider students who dropped out before graduating, failures, then the failure rate is much, much higher. 

Similar results surfaced in the case of Late Immersion and Core French.  Although they were held to lower standards, those who did finish Grade Twelve French were as unlikely to meet their required standards.

Among the other questions the ministry asked itself was whether the standards were appropriate.  It’s a good question.  Why can’t students achieve a good level of oral French after 12 years of study, some of which were full days of French?  And why do so many drop out, no matter what the program?

The Croll Lee report makes good use of anecdotal reports as well.  A few things become clear in the anecdotes. French materials were in short supply throughout the province, presumably because the various programs, regardless of their quality, stretched the resources too thin.  Teachers of French were too often inadequate because either their French was too poor or because they had not been properly trained by the province’s education faculties.  Parents were placing their children in Immersion, especially EFI, not for educational reasons, but to keep their children out of the regular English program; that program had 93.2% of children with special education needs.

If these issues sound familiar to readers of my blog, it is because I have referred to them in my other posts on French Immersion.  The difference is that this is the first ministry or school board I have found that has frankly taken their obligation to education seriously and faced the facts about what was going on in their classrooms.  FSL in New Brunswick sucked and they wanted to fix it for all the students.

As a quick summary, here is a chart of some salient points.  SEPs are the New Brunswick equivalent of Ontario’s IEPs.  In other words a child with an SEP is exceptional and will require some modification or accommodation to their school program.

Equity & FSL in New Brunswick

	% Of FSL students	% Of FSL $	% Of students with SEPs
EFI	19%	28.69%	6.8%
LFI	7.7%	16.6%
Core	71.1%	54.75%	93.2%

 

In my next post on New Brunswick: listening to everyone, planning for change that works for the whole community.

 

 

 

Don’t Sell off Those Downtown Schools!

 In these times of declining enrolment, cuts to school budgets and no prospect of new income sources on the horizon, it is easy for a school board to look at the valuable downtown properties and consider selling them.  However, in many cities, such as Ottawa, there are still many families from all walks of life living in the inner city.  In the not far distant future, these families will be looking again for schools for their children, preferably community schools.

To achieve the goal of keeping downtown schools open and providing income or capital for the school boards, we need to rethink our use of property.  We need to consider sharing space the way stores have shared space with offices, apartments or condos above them for many years, even centuries, nay millennia.  The Romans had their stores or business places at the front of their homes, while the living quarters occupied the other three sides of the courtyard.  On many Canadian main streets there are stores with two or three stories of apartments or offices above them.

Obviously, because the health and safety of children is always a priority, schools sharing space with other facilities would require more careful planning than most arrangements.  In an age when we are locking school doors after school starts, questioning unknown adults on the schoolyard, insisting that visitors report first to the office for a badge and requiring all volunteers to have a police check, sharing property must be done with careful regard to student safety.

An example of the model I am proposing is this: in downtown Ottawa exists a former high school that takes up the better part of a city block.  Across the road from it are its former playing fields.  It would be too expensive to bring the building up to standard, but it is sitting on very valuable land ripe for development, eyed by property developers.  Here is what I propose.

Replace the high school with a three-story high school at the base of a multi-story condo. Immediately below the high school put a parking level for teachers, parents and visitors.  There set a security camera outside the stairwell and elevator leading to the school.  When visitors pressed the bell for admission the office would remotely unlock the door or elevator after checking the person through the camera.  If the elevator and stairwell opened immediately in front of the office, then visitors from the parking lot could be observed as they arrived on the main floor of the school.  Make the front entrance also visible from the office and security may not be perfect but it will be very good.

The condominiums would be from the fourth floor up.  Their lobby would be at street level, but on a street where there are no doors to the school; if the entrance to the parking lot was on the same side, there might not even be space for first floor windows in that side of the school.  The condominium lobby need not be much larger than the area required to accommodate an appropriate bank of elevators, mail boxes and small waiting room.  The elevators would serve the lower parking levels reserved for the use of the condominium owners, but skip the school parking level and the school itself.

This may sound complicated but this kind of mixed use or designated elevators is already being used commercially.  If you have ever been to a late movie in a theatre in an office tower, you might have noticed that the elevator was programmed to go only to certain floors and the parking garage.  On the other hand, if you have gone to dinner outside the building, leaving your car in the garage, you will find that access to it from outside would have been only through a door found in the building’s airlock.  Not only is there no need to go into the building to get your car, but those inner doors to the building will be locked!

Security cameras are not ubiquitous in our city and rightly so.  However their judicious use at entrances has been employed by organisations that are concerned about who is admitted to their building.  Women’s hostels are a case in point.  While I would not advocate security cameras within a school, their use at entrance and exit points is well worth considering.  It would certainly ease concerns about a high school and homes sharing the same building.

Why would people consider buying a condominium over a high school?  In this case, the view will be magnificent: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau Hills, the Parliament Buildings and much of Ottawa would spread below you.  Secondly, if carefully thought out, it might be possible for the condo and the school to share sports facilities.  A swimming pool, weights room and gym on the school’s third floor that was accessible to the owners of the condominiums outside of school and extra-curricular hours might be attractive.  In addition, the playing fields over the road could be accessible for Ultimate Frisbee and soccer and the track around it would be great for the runners.  There might be room in one corner for a tot lot.  Careful tree planting would provide shade in summer and make the playing fields attractive.

The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board does work to make school facilities available (for a modest fee) to the public outside of school hours; in fact the schools that are open most evenings and weekends are called Lighthouse Schools.  This would be an extension of that concept. 

Many schools these days are allowing day cares and even private schools to move into their unused facilities as enrolment shrinks.  The smart thing to do would be to design this high school with decreasing enrolment in mind.  One corner of the school could be designed to be shut off from the rest of the school if necessary and the rooms rearranged to suit offices or day cares or whatever organisation might be looking for space in the area. How could that be done?  I’m not sure, but isn’t that what good architects are for?  It would certainly be a challenge as walls that successfully block noise between classrooms are not easily removed for remodelling.

Enrolment does decrease from time to time, but eventually that earlier big wave of children will have children and enrolment will increase again.  We need to design our schools with the flexibility to meet the challenges of changes in enrolment.  We need to rethink how to effectively use expensive downtown space to the financial advantage of education.  Let’s not sell off our biggest financial assets but use them to guarantee schools within walking distance of the students who need them.  Let’s be innovators!

Is French Immersion a Money Maker for School Boards?

 

                 Exploring the financial costs of French Immersion proved to be an eye opening task. There are two main factors involved.  First is the funding the province provides for the different amount of minutes per day which each pupil spends studying French or studying in French.  The second is the cost of transportation for students in French Immersion or its little sister, Extended French. Extended French is a program offering one or more subjects in French.  

The grants provided by the Ontario government are the same regardless of the board.  I will keep to the elementary grants; the secondary grants differ only as secondary students and their needs differ, the one exception being that secondary students get a larger base grant (larger by 25%)*.  There is a basic per pupil grant of $4,045.80. The school receives a grant, too, for the cost of principals and office staff.  On top of the base grant come grants for special needs; French is included as a special need.

The amount of the French grant increases depending on the number of minutes per day a pupil spends studying French or studying in French.  The allocation for an average of:            20 – 59 minutes (Core, Grades 4 to 8) is $270.82

60 – 149 minutes (Extended, Grades 4 to 8) is $308.55

150 minutes or more (Immersion, Grades 1 to 8) is $345.18

75 minutes or more (Immersion, JK and K) is $345.18

Bear in mind that these allocations are on top of the per pupil grant.  No other subject, to my knowledge, receives an extra allocation. My information above on grants is from Technical Paper 2008–09, Revised October 2008, Ontario Ministry of Education. My best guess is that part of the reason behind the grants is the cost of materials in French.

This is where it gets very interesting.  The Peel Board on its web site states:

                 The budget to schools for teachers, instructional supplies

                  and equipment for French immersion is exactly the same

                   as for the regular school program.

(Get the Facts: Cost of French Immersion

http://www.peelschools.org/facts/facts/french.htm )

The same site went on to explain that the board receives roughly $1,789,000/year for the elementary French Immersion students.  Since the cost of bussing those 5,160 students is $1,400,000, the implication is that the board comes out ahead.   And if their only cost for French Immersion is transportation, which comes out to $271 a head, the Peel Board is providing FI at the same cost as the funding for Core French.   Please note that the funding is all going on transportation.

            All my research at the Ministry of Education site could not tell me whether school boards are allowed to use savings from one envelope of grants such as French to top up another envelope of grants such as transportation or vice versa.  However, I did find that information in the minutes of the French as a Second Language Advisory Committee Minutes, Feb. 5, 2008 for the Toronto District School Board. http://www.tdsb.on.ca/wwwdocuments/parents/parent_groups/docs/FSLACMin080205.pdf

                 As the staff member explained to the committee members, the boards are under no obligation to use their FSL grants from the ministry for French language teaching.  At the TDSB much of it is “used for preparation time delivered by Core French”.  I wonder whether it is used in other boards to cover the cost of bussing French Immersion students.  Only the PDSB distinguished the cost of transportation for its FI students. The grants at the PDSB and TDSB must be modest amounts compared to the Ottawa Carleton District School Board.  PTSD has 5% of their elementary students enrolled in FI, TDSB has 2.5% in FI and OCDSB has 38% enrolled in FI.  It is a lot of students and a lot of money.

                It is not clear that all French grant money is transferred to other envelopes, however, of the three boards I looked at, only the Peel Board distinguished the French Immersion grants from the regular French grants and only the Toronto Board pointed out that French grants did not have to be spent on the teaching of French.  There may be more information on all three of these boards’ web sites, but it was not easy to find.

            This brings me to a few question: Are school boards pushed to dipping into the French envelope by the tightening of the purse strings or has it been ever thus?  Is French Immersion a money maker for school boards? 

            Would parents rethink placing a child in French Immersion if they though that the cost of transportation would be the same as the extra money available to enhance the French program?   How would parents feel if they knew that the extra funds were largely being diverted?  Bear in mind that teachers’ salaries are already covered by another, separate grant.

      If one assumes that most or all of the grant money for French Immersion, Extended French and Core French is being redirected regularly how much better could each of these programs be if the money was actually spent on the programs?  How much less translating and photocopying would the teachers have to do?  How much more audio-visual equipment would be available to all French teachers?  Would there be any Core French teachers left teaching their program from a cart and preparing at a desk in the staff room?  Would boards be able to afford French monitors from Quebec to assist in enlivening the Core French classes?

            I keep thinking I must be missing something.  I would love to hear from people who know more than I do on the subject!

S. D. Scaiff

For more information on French Immersion and transportation, see the Canadian Parents For French (Ontario chapter)’s Study of Transportation to French Immersion and Extended French Programs in Ontario School Boards, written by Fran Sutton in 2001

© Sheila Diane Scaiff and Teachers Outside the Box, 2008. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sheila Diane Scaiff and Teachers Outside the Box with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.