Albert Einstein, who knew a bit about numbers, cautioned: “What counts can’t always be counted; what can be counted doesn’t always count.”
Here in B.C., no matter what public schools accomplish on behalf of 500,000 children and their parents, the Fraser Institute, with its Report on Elementary Schools, continues to insist that Foundation Skills Assessment numbers are hugely important.
In 1926, the acerbic journalist, editor and social critic H.L. Mencken wrote: “No one in this world, so far as I know … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
I have yet to read anything that so successfully underestimates the intelligence of the parents of those 500,000 kids and their 44,000 teachers as the annual Fraser report.
The same logic applies to the dumbing down of popular music. Because there can be little doubt that music by Motörhead is infinitely superior to that of Chopin. It’s louder and so must be better. Harmonic complexity and timbral diversity have been gradually cast aside in favour of noise.
Or, as Ray Williams, columnist for Psychology Today, wrote: “There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism … It’s the dismissal of science, the arts and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance and deliberate gullibility.”
Which brings me back to the Fraser Institute’s latest ranking of B.C. elementary schools.
There was a time when the Fraser rankings were taken seriously, despite the inevitable implication that independent schools are superior to public schools.
The results, as published each year without benefit of any useful analysis or informed comment, were and still are a louder, blander, more predictable attempt to amplify and dumb down negative public opinion about public schools.
The complex reality of a child’s experience in either public or, for that matter, independent schools was lost in the noise created by the numbers from a single test.
The fact that the FSA was never designed or intended to provide a basis for comparison between schools meant nothing to eager media.
The annual rankings are based on data from the one-shot provincewide tests given to students in Grades 4 and 7, based on reading, writing and numeracy. As the Education Ministry website advises, there are practice tests which, if it is really important, improve a student’s chances of doing well.
The Fraser report provides the kind of breathtaking oversimplification of the complexities of both public and independent education that not only insults the intelligence, but loudly trumps any understanding about what teachers and kids do and what tests like the FSA do not measure.
What schools are and what teachers do beyond the three Rs, what populations they serve, the range of abilities and disabilities found in any public-school classroom, can be measured, apparently, by the 41Ú2 hours of tests taken by kids over three sessions in four weeks.
Mencken was correct. To publish the results with no further elaboration or detail could mistaken for a Donald Trump-like attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator of public opinion.
A moment’s thought clarifies that there are significant differences between public education and what independent schools are able to offer — at a price. That is simply a reflection of the divisions in our society but, as American humourist and commentator Garrison Keillor wrote: “When you wage war on the public schools, you’re attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You’re not a conservative, you’re a vandal.”
I’ll admit to being influenced by Keillor in the decision my wife and I, both long-time supporters of public education, made to send our son to public schools.
Keillor was a supporter of public education and community public schools as places where your child went “to find out who inhabits this society other than people like his family.”
That’s the experience we wanted for our son. The value of that experience is not measured by the FSA or by the Fraser rankings.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
