Letter to the Premier

for “Write the Premier Week” (Facebook):

April 5, 2008

Hon. Shawn Graham
Office of the Premier
Centennial Building
PO Box 6000
Fredericton, NB
E3B 5H1

Dear Premier Graham,

I am writing to you to urge you to reconsider your government’s stance on the educational changes proposed by the Minister of Education.

I won’t rehearse all the many reasons against cancelling early French immersion, because I am sure you have by now heard them: how all credible research on the subject demonstrates that children learn languages best early; how it is nonsensical to dismantle the most successful programme in our system; how we will be the only province without early French immersion; how the decimation of N.B. French immersion will open old divisions between the two linguistic communities; how the sudden panic over N.B. test scores is bogus as our children score comparably to children in other small provinces according to the government’s own information (see A Benchmark Report on the targets of When kids come first – 2007).

Nor will I say much about the many problems with the process: the shoddy report; the lack of public consultation; the ignoring of all credible experts; the Minister’s intransigence; and the disrespect the government has shown to parents, to the Ombudsman, and to the political process.

Instead, I would like to make a few points about the proposed Intensive French programme:

Purpose: The people who developed the programme have stressed again and again that it was never meant to replace early French immersion; rather, it was designed to improve the Core French programme. And yet the Minister is plunging ahead against all disinterested expert advice (I exclude his one supporter here, Doug Willms, as he has a clear conflict of interest given his government contracts). He is plunging ahead, and he is taking your government with him.

Streaming: The Minister has abandoned his defence of the Croll/Lee report and appears to be focusing his entire justification for his plan on streaming. But the proposal contains nothing that would address the streaming that happens in grade six between late Immersion and Core French. Renaming the programme Post-intensive French will not change the fact that streaming will still go on. The Minister has been silent on this issue, so I hope you will ask him, Mr. Premier, how he can claim his plan is going to eliminate streaming when it will clearly just postpone it?

Bilingualism: The Minister claims that his plan is going to allow 70% of N.B. students to become bilingual. This is clearly impossible. Even the students who take late immersion can only expect to achieve an intermediate knowledge of French, and those who do not elect immersion can hardly achieve more. Early immersion is the only programme that gives students a chance to approach bilingualism, but it will be gone.

Early vs. late immersion: Fewer students go into late immersion than early immersion, no doubt because by grade six they have made friends whom they don’t want to leave, among various other reasons. There is no reason to think that this trend will be dramatically reversed by the few months of the Intensive French programme. In other words, the N.B. public school system will graduate fewer students with even an intermediate knowledge of French than ever before, and virtually none with advanced knowledge after the final cohort of early immersion students have gone through.

S.E.P. resources: The Minister readily admits the difficulty in finding professionals to work with students with challenges, in French. How, then, does he intend to answer the needs of such students when they are forced into Intensive French in six months time? And why will he not admit that there are some students for whom this programme would not be suitable?

“Transferability”: You may remember this term from the PSE debates; we heard it a lot. What kind of transferability will we have in N.B. by adopting a system so out of synch with the rest of the country? The Minister has dismissed the parents opposed to this plan as “yuppies”; he has said that it it not his job to make “people with doctorates” happy. This characterization is false: my son attends early French immersion in Saint John at École Millidgeville North School and I can assure you that his class is very mixed in terms of the backgrounds of the students. But even if it were true, are not “yuppies,” meaning young professionals, and people with doctorates, meaning highly skilled professional people, among the different sorts of people we would like to entice into moving here? People seeking to relocate look at school systems, and these changes to our educational programmes would make New Brunswick much less attractive. People are threatening to leave over this issue; surely, then, very few would actually come here.

Problems will remain: The Minister is claiming that his programme will eliminate the problems with education in the province. This is ridiculous. We have problems with education in this province because we spend much less on each student than the national average. That, coupled with the fact that most New Brunswickers have lower incomes than the national average means that our children are disadvantaged in ways too broad and deep to be in the least bit affected by the disruptive tinkering proposed by the Minister. Want better test scores? Invest in our schools. It is very simple and I can’t imagine why the Minister can’t see it. But then, spending money is hardly ever popular and investing in education is a long-term commitment. The Minister seems more interested in achieving a short-term blip in test scores just in time for the next election.

Mr. Premier, I urge you to listen to the suggestion of the Ombudsman to delay implementing these changes for at least a year. By doing so, you will counter the charges that your government is arrogant, you will respect due process, and you will demonstrate a willingness to listen to the people of this province, a willingness that has been in short supply lately.

I look forward to reading your response to the points I have raised here.

Sincerely,
Miriam Jones