Media Clipping — Monday March 17, 2008, The Chronicle Herald

GPI Yardstick Better than Perfromance Snapshots

By Michael Corbett

Education is a complicated undertaking and there is nothing simple about assessing it well.

How Educated are Nova Scotians?: Education Indicators for the Nova Scotia Genuine Progress Index is a document produced by GPI Atlantic under the direction of Ronald Coleman and it is a breath of fresh air in what has come to be called the field of educational assessment and accountability.

Apart from the data and analysis circulated by government departments on student achievement and other educational indicators, a growing number of NGOs, right-wing lobby groups and even media outlets like the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s magazine have been joining in to rate and rank educational performance of publicly funded schools and universities.

These analyses are generally conceptually impoverished counting exercises that do little to help the public understand the complexity of educational processes in contemporary societies.

Rather, straightforward rank-order tables with easily digestible bottom-line scores help to create the opposite impression, i.e. that education is a simple input-output, production procedure like any industrial process.

The authors of the GPI Atlantic education indicators project understand this problem and understand how it has distorted and narrowed the popular vision of what counts as education.

The GPI Atlantic indicators project seems to embrace the complexity and challenge of more complex visions of what counts as education.

For instance, through a focus on multiple literacies, GPI Atlantic goes well beyond traditional definitions of print literacy to include scientific, health, nutritional, arts, media, civic, political, ecological, statistical and other literacies.

The indicators are also sensitive to indigenous knowledge and by the way that formal education has typically been constructed and measured as a neutral process which both ignores the culturally contested nature of knowledge and the way that identifiable equity-seeking groups have been excluded from full educational participation.

The assessment framework proposed by GPI Atlantic is derived from work of Jacques Delors and UNESCO. Delors articulates a "four pillar approach" to contemporary education that involves:

1) learning to do (socialization, practicality and work preparedness)

2) learning to know (cognitive skills and foundational knowledge)

3) learning to be (psychological wellbeing and pro-social participation)

4) learning to live together (creating an inclusive, just global society)

This vision of education is more challenging and sophisticated than producing the educational equivalent of GDP. It is also much harder to measure.

Rather than looking at education as a functional tool for the perpetuation of a particular kind of economy or an established set of social relations, the GPI Atlantic document positions education as a matter of transformative capacity.

Drawing on the work of Canadian philosopher John McMurtry, education is understood as a process for developing a more just, responsive, compassionate, sustainable society through the nurturance of an informed and critical citizenry.

In other words, it is about fostering a better quality of life. Whether or not this is unequivocally good for economic competitiveness is to a large extent beside the point. Yet, I suspect along with Delors that it is.

GPI Atlantic concludes that good, comprehensive data to assess education within a broader context are not generally available in Canada.

Currently available standardized tests and graduation statistics do not really tell us much about either the functional success of graduates or their ability to engage in positive, proactive social transformation.

The data which are actually presented by GPI demonstrate a weakening commitment by all levels of government to funding education.

At the post-secondary level, this has led to higher levels of student debt, causing students to work longer hours in order to survive in an increasingly privatized system of higher education. Universities particularly have been challenged to continue to offer quality programs with decreasing state support.

This is not exclusively a post-secondary problem. In the public K-12 sector, Nova Scotia has been at or near the bottom nationally in per capita student funding for the past decade.

The challenge for GPI Atlantic is to find and to develop and find indicators for educational questions and problems which have not been taken particularly seriously by many governance bodies and institutions with the resources to actually measure complex educational and social phenomena.

There is clearly much to be done. It is clearly easier to rely on fragmented, partial and narrow data that ignore the complexity introduced into conversations about educational assessment by considerations of social context, ecology, multi-literacies, transformative learning.

It is much easier to gauge those things which can be readily measured and imagine that they are valid and complete indicators of educational "performance."

GPI Atlantic challenges such assumptions about the validity of such limited indicators.

Bravo! This is exciting and important work. In my opinion, this work deserves the full support of anyone or any group that is seriously interested in improving educational quality in Nova Scotia by broadening the parameters of how we understand educational processes.

’This vision of education is more challenging and sophisticated than producing the educational equivalent of GDP.’

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