Media Clipping — Wednesday February 20, 2008, The Chronicale Herald

Jury still out on how well-educated we are

By John Gillis

How well-educated are Nova Scotians?

GPI Atlantic has spent three years looking into the question and concluded: it's really hard to tell.

"We wanted to find out . . . do people know what they need to know to live a decent life, to improve their well-being, to live sustainably?" Ron Colman, executive director of GPI Atlantic, said Tuesday at a news conference at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

The non-profit organization is committed to the development of the genuine progress index, a measure of sustainability and well-being, a process it began 12 years ago.

"Education, more than any other component of the GPI, is potentially the connective tissue, the link, the binding factor between all of the components of the GPI," Mr. Colman said.

Traditional measures like high school graduation rates and standardized test scores give a very limited picture of what and how Nova Scotians learn, he said.

The latest batch of test results was released by the Education Department on Tuesday. Two-thirds of Grade 3 students tested last spring achieved a satisfactory performance (67 per cent or better) on the test.

Students did particularly well in areas like basic mental calculation, counting and interpreting data, scoring over 80 per cent on average.

Teachers don't believe in snapshot pictures because education is a lifelong process, said Mary-Lou Donnelly, president of the Nova Scotia Teachers Union.

"What we're trying to do in public education is to produce good, productive, contributing citizens," Ms. Donnelly said.

Those are difficult concepts to measure, she admitted, but she said individual teachers and schools work to give students opportunities to develop constructive skills and attitudes and then apply them through programs like peer mediation.

She said the provincial school accreditation program provides a more well-rounded evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of individual schools.

Parrsboro Regional Elementary-High School was the first to be accredited last May. All schools in the province will be through the process by 2010, Education Department spokesman Peter McLaughlin said.

He said the five-year process involves school officials and parents setting achievable goals - like better student achievement, or offering more second-language instruction in communities with large immigrant populations - working toward them and evaluating progress at the end of the cycle.

"It's a school improvement process," he said. "Trying to move those yardsticks year after year."

Besides focusing only on the traditional "three Rs," such tests tend to reflect and reinforce socio-economic differences - the most disadvantaged students tend to fare poorest - and don't indicate how students apply knowledge.

"We're trying to distinguish not just how information is transmitted, but how values are transmitted," Mr. Colman said. "How are people able to use what they have learned to affect their lives?"

The 109-page report calls for a raft of new measures to assess things like how well people learn what they need to know to stay healthy, and their ability to find reliable information in a multimedia world.

What information is available is disturbing, Mr. Colman said.

Basic adult literacy rates did not improve significantly between 1989 and 2003, hovering just over 50 per cent.

Meanwhile, the "civic literacy" of young Canadians has fallen over time. The percentage of correct answers to general political knowledge questions dropped among all age groups from 18 to 49 between 1984 and 2000. Eighteen- to 23-year-olds scored slightly over 30 per cent in a 2000 survey.

Mr. Colman said better civic literacy should lead to greater voter participation and more informed voters.

The Education Department is always looking for more ways to measure performance and the GPI Atlantic report will be helpful, said Stuart Gourley, senior executive director of the department's skills and learning branch.

"I think we can use it to move forward," he said.

Mr. Gourley said it's important to look at literacy as more than basic reading and writing.

While standardized test scores are easy to understand and attract a lot of attention, they don't necessarily carry a lot of weight for employers, he said.

"If you got a 60 in mathematics or a 75, it's really not all that important," he said. "What they're looking for as an employer is, can they apply that mathematical learning in the workplace as I want them to?"

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