Go now, do not pass go,

and read Diana Hamilton and Matt Litvak’s excellent commentary, “Flawed report, flawed conclusion,” published this morning in the T-J.

FYI

have started a separate page to list the many critics of the Lamrock plan and/or the Croll/Lee report. In most cases there is a link to a news story or media release. Please let me know, in the comments or via email, of any I have missed.

From the Fredericton demonstration:

Interesting

editorial in the Kings County Record. It begins:

By now Education Minister Kelly Lamrock should have learned a valuable political lesson. By this point, he should have discovered that you can mess with a lot of things and still survive to stand up in the Legislature another day.

By now he should have realized that you can mess with people’s roads, you can mess with people’s taxes, you can even mess with people’s jobs and still survive, but the thing that will bring them out fighting like cornered dogs, that one thing you cannot do is mess with people’s kids.

All I can add is, grrrr!

If you aren’t reading

the comments sections after the online news articles, you’re missing half the fun. Cut and pasted from one such comment by Tyler Durden:

A list of those who support EFI removal:

• Kelly Lamrock
• Doug Willms

A partial list of those who oppose the Lamrock plan:

• The Commissioner of Official Languages, NB
• The Commissioner of Official Languages, Canada
• The Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers
• Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities
• The Center for Research on Education at the Université de Moncton
• The Second Language Research Institute of Canada
• Liberal Party Riding Association Presidents in Kings-East, Tantramar, and Nigadoo-Chaleur.
• Co-Author of the Official Languages Act Robert Pichette
• Political Scientist and Liberal Party Strategist Donald Savoie
• Association Canadienne des Professeurs D’Immersion
• L’Association des enseignantes et des enseignants francophones du
• Nouveau-Brunswick (AEFNB),
• Consortium of Universities Advising the Canadian Association of Immersion Teachers
• Association Francophone des Parents du NB
• Canadian Parents for French
• Paul Zed, Liberal MP
• Saint John Mayor and City Council

Update (Apr 15/08): I have added a page that lists critics of the Lamrock plan and/or the Croll/Lee report.

From

Diana Hamilton and Matt Litvak’s blog:

Drs. Jimmy Borque and Rodrique Landry, directors of the Centre de recherche et de développement en éducation and de l’Institut canadien de recherche sur les minorités linguistiques, respectively, held a press conference on their evaluation of Minister Lamrock’s decision to terminate Early French Immersion in NB Anglophone schools. They concluded that the Croll and Lee report, the report that was the basis of Minister Lamrock’s decision, was severely flawed. They suggested that whatever the goal, the policy developed cannot be said to be research-based. They challenged the Minister to submit the report to a panel of experts for further review

Read all about it, en français, or listen to Radio Canada.

Despite

Kelly Lamrock’s reported comment that concern about FSL is confined to “yuppies” in Fredericton and Moncton, people in the Mirimichi seem interested, if the slew of articles in the Mirimichi Leader is any indication, including Patricia Lee wading in and the Minister’s multi-part series. See in particular Alison Ménard’s excellent open letter and Raissa Marks’ guest editorial which concludes, “I leave you with one more question, Mr. Premier. Are you prepared to lose the next election on this issue?”

My mother was wrong!

She always told me, “you get what you pay for.” How, then, can it be that the shelved Rehorick report, written by four experts, cost $30,000, while the Croll/Lee report cost the Dept. of Education the taxpayer $180,000?

Gosh, I wish I were Kelly Lamrock’s friend. (Though admittedly, that possibility is looking less and less likely.)

Okay,

here’s my question: how can Kelly Lamrock, with a straight face, impugn the integrity of Bernard Richard, when he has himself scrapped a report that contradicted his own pre-existing position and commissioned another from a long-standing advocate of that position and a family friend? And why, when we are on the topic of integrity and ethics, is anyone still listening to Doug Willms on this issue? His mind was made up about early French immersion long ago so he is hardly impartial, and his company enjoys contracts from the Dept. of Education so he is hardly disinterested. Then there is Kelly Lamrock himself, a man who insults and dismisses those who don’t agree with him, who arrogantly refuses to listen to anyone who doesn’t parrot back his own ideas, and who is willing to trash the N.B. education system for the sake of some test scores that he thinks will ensure his electoral success in 2010.

Perhaps it’s Botox.

So the academic community

is pretty well united, barring an anomaly or two, in their condemnation of the Croll/Lee report and the Lamrock plan: Members of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UNB Fredericton sent a letter to NB Ombudsman Bernard Richard. And on Monday, there will be a press conference at UdeM.
See both documents below the fold:

News flash: Kelly Lamrock is Acting Premier; Shawn Graham on extended vacation

I mean, how else can one explain the following form email from the Premier’s office? It sounds like it’s directly from Minister Lamrock’s crib notes of a few weeks ago:

Thank you for your email concerning French Second Language Programs.

The decision to change the way French Second Language (FSL) programs are being delivered in this province was a difficult one. It was premised on the need to make two things happen. First, we want to ensure all students have the opportunity to gain proficiency in French. Second, we want to ensure New Brunswick students’ achievement in literacy, mathematics and science is on par with other Canadian students. Our students consistently score lower than those of all other provinces on PISA, (Programme for International Student Assessment). Given this, and the fact that only 34% of our anglophone students reach the provincial target for French proficiency, there was no option but to undertake a major reform. To ignore this situation would be unconscionable.

After careful consideration, the Department of Education has decided to move to a more comprehensive approach whereby all students will receive seven years of instruction in a quality second language program.

This will be achieved through the Intensive French (IF) program provided in grade 5 whereby all students receive an initial, intensive exposure to French, followed by parents and students having the choice in grade 6 of either the Post Intensive program or Late French Immersion.

There are several advantages of initial exposure to French in grade 5. By that grade, students will have a firm foundation in English literacy skills and will also have acquired the building blocks of numeracy in their first language. First language mastery provides a solid foundation for learning subsequent languages. An additional benefit of freeing a thirty-minute period daily in grades 1 through 4 will be the chance to offer students art, music, increased literacy, physical education and enrichment opportunities. Finally, mastery of basic French through IF in grade 5 will help students and parents to make informed decisions concerning the French program option that will best meet their needs in grade 6.

The announced reform will result in more students achieving better results, not only in second language learning, but in literacy and mathematics and other subjects.

Further information regarding French Second Language Programs and a complete list of improvements may be found at http://www.gnb.ca/0000/eng-cu-e.asp.

Thank you for taking the time to express your views on this important subject.

Sincerely,
Shawn Graham

Go below the fold for excellent responses from Sarah Touchie, Sarah Ingalls, and Paula & Raymond Small:

Happy April 1st

So for some time now

there has been considerable speculation about just what in the world Education Minister Kelly Lamrock is thinking. His recommendations on public education in New Brunswick are certainly not the first, um, ill-considered idea to come out of Fredericton in the last year, but up until now one could tease out some sort of explanation. Not a justification, mind, but an explanation. Take the post-secondary debacle: now on the surface it makes little sense to move in the opposite direction of virtually every other post-secondary system in the entire known universe and decommission university campuses and downgrade them to trade schools. But — and one needs to be delicate here — when one considers certain realities of the way things actually run in this province, particularly in Saint John, sacrificing a clear and ongoing social good for the sake of some short-term gains, in this case taxpayer-sponsored job training for industry, one can perhaps discern some wisps of cause-and-effect. Wrong or right, we need to make narratives. People are story-tellers; adults need something to answer when their little munchkins ask plaintively, “Why are they taking away my school, Mummy?” Responding “Because they’re frickin’ boneheads!” does more harm than good — I speak from experience — no matter how easily the words come to ones lips.

So, what narratives can we come up with to explain the newest inexplicable move from our provincial capital? The wished-for answer — these changes were proposed in response to painstaking research in accordance with all credible research practices — is patently false: instead we have one report shelved in favour of another, more amenable but less, er, rigourous one. These changes were proposed after extensive consultation with the people of this province? Well, no. No. To eliminate streaming? A laudable goal, but one that is hardly met merely by postponing it for five years. So okay then: these changes are strictly economic? That would be bad enough, of course, but at least it would make some sense, from a particular perspective. But no, that can hardly be the case either: why go through the grief of trying to implement an intensely unpopular change in order to save, according to some estimates, a mere $5 million of a $943 million budget? It’ll probably cost them close to that just to change all the signage and stationary.

But at last, a bare outline of at least a potential narrative has emerged from the miasma.

Many of you may not have heard this, but Doug Willms’ incorporated company, KSI, has the contract to do testing in N.B. schools. (For those who find it odd that such a task would be contracted out, welcome to the Brave New World.) Now Doug Willms is on record as a critic of early immersion in N.B. — in fact, he has practically been tag-teaming with Kelly Lamrock in media stories about the issue and he was recently quoted as having said that EFI is “fundamentally not worth anything” — so having him assess the success or failure of the new regime does not inspire confidence. For one thing, he would be less likely to place what will probably be a slight rise in test scores in the appropriate context: as a small, and temporary, rise because of the sudden absense of the usual lag-time in the scores of EFI students in literacy. Someone with predetermined ideas might, er, misinterpret such a temporary rise in test scores as success.

This “success” would come, coincidentally, just before the next provincial election.

Singlehandedly taking responsibility for this “success” might add considerable lustre to ones political fortunes.

But all this is just crazy talk! Pay no attention to my ramblings. A conspiracy under every stone, that’s me. Good grief, no-one would be such a … I mean, even someone as … Surely …

Mon dieu.

This government

takes a completely adversarial stance. To the citizenry, certainly: look at how Kelly Lamrock is deliberately stirring up the old language debates. You don’t think so? Just take a look at the comments sections of almost any online article on French immersion: all the French-bashing yahoos are feeling safe enough to come out of the woodwork. Certainly this government are adversarial to anyone with any real expertise, no doubt in an effort to protect their own tame “experts” — Croll, Lee, and Miner and L’Écuyer on post-secondary education — who need all the help they can get. And they are adversarial to those with the most investment in the things they so blithely want to change: teachers are gagged and, we have heard, have begun to get transfers or pink slips; parents are ignored; and the Minster is quoted in the national newspaper as saying that “My job isn’t to make people of doctorates feel good.” (File that under “just as well.”)

With such a long and comprehensive list of opponents, you have to wonder who they think they are doing it for. That elusive creature, the “taxpayer”? Well, we’ve got news for them: we are the taxpayers.

Petition

Petition to reject Croll/Lee report and keep EFI. Please download this PDF, print it, circulate it, and either bring it to the rally Thursday or get it to someone who is, if at all possible. (If not, keep getting signatures and send them in later to the address on the petition).

(The petition is also available for download on the Documents page.)