Steve: We're talking to Peter Cawley who is responsible for the famous, or infamous, school report cards that come out at the Fraser Institute. How many years have you been doing them?
Peter Cawley: That's right. We began the report cards with a high-school report card in British Columbia that was released in 1998 after a year's worth of development. So I suppose we've been doing them for seven years. Now we have report cards on high schools and elementary schools in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and a high school report card in Quebec. And soon we'll be producing the first high school report card for New Brunswick. After that we will begin to produce report cards on specific student groups that, perhaps, are not accomplishing or achieving at the same levels as the main stream. And the first of those will be a report card on British Columbia's aboriginal students and how they're doing. I think what you are trying to do is to introduce accountability and choice into the education system. We do, of course, read the criticisms, particularly from the teacher's union and others that say that it tends to encourage parents to flee sort of low-wage or low-income areas of the city to go to schools in higher-income parts of the city. Is it possible for a school in a lower-income area to do well on your system?
Well, you know, I'd say an interesting thing. One of the over-arching purposes of "public education", and by that we mean government-run, government-financed, government-regulated schools is that they are obliged to level the playing field. That's what they're intended to do. The mission of public education was to make certain that, regardless of their background, students from every walk of life with every kind of disadvantage, would be enabled, through the education that they receive in the public schools, to share equally in the great wealth of this fabulous country. Now, if the teacher's union, for instance, says that in fact, our report cards show that in rich neighborhoods the kids do well and in poor neighborhoods they don't; that's an admission that the mission of the education system has failed. That they have failed to do what it is they're supposed to do. But your question was, "Can a school in a poor neighborhood do well on our system?" And the answer is of course! There is no skew of intelligence, I hope, from one neighborhood to another. I mean, the simple point is, I think, that it may well be that if you get in a situation where the kids at a school have some disadvantages, that you've got to take those disadvantages into account and you've got to figure out a way to overcome them! And that requires expertise, skill, motivation. And if you don't have those in the teacher core at the school or in the principal that isn't going to happen. But to be fair, and not necessarily playing the devil's advocate? Which you're certainly allowed to do. To be fair, if you have a school in an area where the parents? First of all, you have a higher percentage, let's say, of the parents who are together and not, say, dysfunctional families or whatever the term is. And if you have parents who themselves have a high level of education. That might be as big a factor or a bigger factor than the school itself, in so far as the results of the children in the school.
Well, you know, when people talk about the size of the effect of family characteristics, or individual student characteristics or school characteristics, they talk about it as you did, as if it a law, as if it is a rule that no matter what happens, the effect of the family characteristics will be paramount in the success of the kids at school. As if that is some kind of natural law. Well, in fact, it isn't. In fact, the better the schools, the less effect family characteristics and student characteristics will have. And that, I think, is the misunderstanding. It's very interesting to note that our calculations show that there is a greater impact coming from the family characteristics in British Columbia than there is in Alberta, or than there is in Quebec. In Ontario it's a little bit more like B.C. ; you can tell more about how the kid's going to do based on the family characteristics. Why would it be different? If these are immutable laws of the universe, then you would expect them to be the same in Alberta as they are in B.C. In fact, it occurs to me that in a jurisdiction like B.C., the size of the impact of family characteristics is a measure of the failure of education to do what it is it's supposed to do. Which is to take all those characteristics into account, to deal with the students based on those characteristics and to ensure that they succeed even though they have some of these disadvantages.
Are there examples of schools that do very well even though the family characteristics would suggest that they shouldn't do well? Yes, and that's the encouraging thing. Because when teachers and principals are given the challenge of doing well for their kids, even though they may have some disadvantages, these teachers and parents and principals must know, must be convinced, that success is possible. That it's an achievable goal to do well for their kids, and thereby, just as a by-product, score highly on our report card. And of course the answer is yes. The problem is that we have a culture in Canada that discourages the identification and celebration of excellence. I mean they talk a lot about excellence, but if what they do is they say, well if a principal is doing a good job and somebody notices, ?well hopefully they won't notice. Because if they do notice then this principal will get all sorts of publicity and everybody will say he's a national treasure, and that will demean all the other principals. Well, hold on a second. If you don 't discover excellence and celebrate it, how are you going to know what the other folks have to do to improve? There are excellent principals and excellent teachers within our system, but they're not going to stand up and be counted because they're worried that their peers, they're not really their peers, maybe, but the other principals will say, "You've abandoned us. You've forsaken us. You've shown yourself to be an individual rather than just one of this collective team that we have." The result of this kind of attitude is exactly the opposite of that which I'm sure is intended. I mean I'm sure that the people who want to diffuse responsibility and credit believe that it's the best for the kids, but I say it's the worst. Mark: It's a bit like my daughter had Sports Day, recently. I remember Sports Day when I was a kid: If you won the race, you got a first-place ribbon. Now, nobody wins, nobody loses, everybody just gets some sort of ribbon. What's the point? Yeah, well what's the point? It is a very worrisome thing, this idea. Just be sure again, if I were a principal or a teacher who was involved in a school in a neighborhood where the kids had disadvantages, and some of the disadvantages have more effect than others. For instance, single-parent families, where there's just one parent; you will find those at every level of income. And whether or not that's a major contributor, I think, is very doubtful. ESL, a lot of people say, "You know if you have a high ESL population, that will negatively effect the results of the school." But, just by defining ESL we expose our incredibly paternalistic, sort of 'white must be right' kind of thinking. Because there's no such thing as an ESL student. There may be a student who has limited capacity in English from a rich family in Hong Kong, and there may be an ESL or someone called ESL who may be a member of a family of recent immigrants from Guatemala. And those two students are so incredibly different in their capacity to learn and their preparedness to learn that their results will be entirely different. That privileged and not disadvantaged student from Hong Kong may in fact increase a school's performance because of their high level of understanding and skill in the wide variety of subjects, and their proven ability to learn things quickly. And all of their experience in learning things, they may do very, very well and may, in fact, boost the performance at schools. Whereas, well we had one principal from an elementary school in Houston, Texas, came up and gave us a talk a little while ago here about what she did at her school. You ask what's possible. Most of her students are recent immigrants from Central America, this school in Houston, Texas. And, with regard to the disadvantages that they might have, I must tell you this story if I have the time. It's about Arturo. Ok.
One day Arturo and his mother arrived at Kim Fontano's school. Kim Fontano is the principal I'm talking about, the school is Ed West Elementary in Houston. And Mrs. Arturo, I'm sorry I don't remember her last name but, the boy's mother said, "Miss Fontano, we're so happy to be here today. We heard that you have a wonderful school here and as a result, I'm here to give you my son to be educated at the school. And you should know that Arturo is a lovely boy, he's a very good boy. He helps his father with his work, he helps me around the house, and he looks after his little sisters and he's an excellent fellow. And I'm sure you're going to help him a lot." And Miss Fontano said, "We are proud to have Arturo as a member of the Ed West community and we hope that you, his mother, will be able to benefit as well because we have all sorts of special programs for you. And if you could just give me Arturo's paper work from his last school so that we can see where he fits in I'll be sure to get him set up right away and we can get him into class this afternoon. It will be fine." This is a very joyous occasion. And mother said, "Well you may be a wonderful principal and I'm sure you are, Miss Fontano, but you don't understand. Arturo's ten now, it's time for him to go to school. He's never been to school before." And so Miss Fontano said, "Well, welcome anyway. Let's get started. Now we know what we have to do." The important thing is that we can't make allowances. They have to know what the background of the kid are. But Miss Fontano can't make allowances for Arturo and say, "Because it's Arturo, because he's never gone to school before, we'll only expect that he can learn a little bit of broken English in a year. Because learning a little bit of broken English in a year isn't goinhg to be useful to Arturo, and Arturo's mother doesn't want that, either. Arturo's mother wants him to be at grade-level in a week! Because, that way he'll be able to get on track. Whereas if he can learn just a little bit of broken English in a year, he'll still be five grades behind! So, you know parents bring the best children that they can to the school, and it's up to the school to make a huge difference in those children's lives. That's what dedicated teachers and principals want to do. But we can't make allowances for these supposed disadvantages. But, realistically, how can you get, say, a child who's never been to school to catch up with?? Ask Kim Fontano. Look at her record.
And she does that?
She does that. But she's not the only one. No.
I mean, there's Sandra Dean in Simcoe County in Ontario. We had another principal here from Newham, East London. Dockside London. Very, very poor socio-economic characteristics. The families were poor, many of them recent immigrants. Very little education in the family, much less in the student. And through dedicated and planned improvements in the school, Sharon Hollows, who is the head teacher at that school, Calverton Primary School, took the students and allowed them to achieve, helped them achieve at a level unforeseen in that school ever in its history. It went from, just to give you an example, this was in between 1995 and 2000, and in England the performance levels of kids at various grades are tested with the standard tests that all the kids in England take. Whereas, when she got there, the kids at Calverton Primary were in the bottom 25% in Science, I think it was, only 25% of them ere achieving at grade-level in Science in grade four, I think. Five years later it was 80%. Now, it wasn't 100%, but it was an awful lot better than it was five years previous. And that's what all these outstanding principals and teachers will tell you. If you have a student population with disadvantages of one kind or another, it's not easy to bring them up to grade-level or to ensure that they succeed in the same sense that the mainstream might. It's not easy but it's also not impossible. And if you believe that that's why you're there, you're going to find ways and means to accomplish what's so hard. Now I guess what you're saying is, let's say if we come back to British Columbia or in Canada, that the? sort of the teaching establishment is unwilling to celebrate those outstanding achievers, to publicize what they've done and to learn from them as outstanding initiators. Is that true? I mean, do they really not try to learn from these outstanding performers?
