Too good to languish in the comments

Eric just posted the following comment in response to the previous post on humour:

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Kelly Lamrock: Because the chickens on this side of the road were causing streaming which hurt our test scores! For this reason, we are eliminating chickens and will provide each child with an egg in grade 6 from which some might produce their own chickens. Children who do not opt for the egg will receive chicken manure.

Donald Arseneault: The chicken had to cross the road so we could establish a Uranium mine on the chicken’s property.

Kelly Lamrock: People who oppose the chicken crossing the road are missing the hidden X factor! You often have to cross roads in fantasy football.

Victor Boudreau: Because the other side is not paying its fair share of taxes! The Liberals will increase the taxes on both sides as well as introducing a road crossing fee.

Kelly Lamrock: Following a court ordered consultation, I have decided to compromise and just make the chicken cross halfway. We’ll just hope that no cars come by.

Mike Murphy: Because it is more efficient to have separate systems! We’ll have chickens on that side and ducks on this side.

Shawn Graham: What did Kelly say?

Disappointing

is the only word I could think of that doesn’t have four letters. I am listening to the press conference from Fredericton. The mandatory intensive French programme is still in place, and early immersion will be less effective as it will only start in grade three. As far as I can tell that is the only bone thrown to the critics: the retention of some form of early(-ish) immersion. The rest of the original Lamrock plan remains, and the Minister is still trotting out much of the same disinformation: that poor and aboriginal children are clustered in core, without acknowledging that EFI is frequently not offered in the rural areas where those children often live (a situation that will continue with the new gr. 3 entry point as the Minister explicitly said that there are no plans to expand early immersion to rural schools); that students in K-2 need to develop language skills in their mother tongue; that intermediate French is bilingualism. Still fixated on testing, teacher “accountability” and “rewards”. There is to be a new “Ministerial Advisory Group” and more “stakeholder” meetings. Nothing about increased FSL resources. In a nutshell, lots of rhetoric but the result is a mishmash that will make few happy, neither the entrenched anti-EFI people in the DoE and elsewhere, nor those who blame immersion for streaming, nor those who want children to have the opportunity to develop advanced language skills. And significantly, our system in N.B. will still remain out of step with K-12 education in the rest of the country, making moving to and from the province difficult.

Lots of rhetoric, LOTS of self-congratulation, but no mention of the primary causes of the woes in N.B. education: our lowest per-capita spending, per student, in the country, followed closely by a centrally controlled, un-democratic DoE.

Unintentionally hilarious moments: both Graham and Lamrock repeatedly congratulating themselves on overseeing a province-wide debate on education.

So yes, disappointing. Very disappointing.

[Cross-posted to Living in interesting times.]

The final countdown

has started to Minister Kelly Lamrock’s announcement on August 5 about the future of K-12 education — at least for the next 2-3 years — in New Brunswick.

I hope he is thinking of the history books while pondering his decision.

Another comment worth quoting,

because it raises some issues new to me, at least:

From the department enrolment data, over 70% of NB students have access to Early French Immersion. In fact there are 8 of our smaller cites that have over 50% of the student in EFI Only in New Brunswick is there not early French Immersion Kindergarten and no assistance for any child who experiences a learning challenge. Only in New Brunswick is there no teacher training institute for FSL education for Anglophones It is as if New Brunswick has worked hard to make sure the program was weaker here and students had to leave or were forced to leave the program to receive any help which created the streaming This streaming does not exist in Alberta, Manitoba or BC. This appears to have been a deliberate move on the part of ministerial officials over many years, It may indeed be a defensive reaction on the part of the Anglophone sector. I can’t help but wonder what will happen to the Canadian Heritage dollars poured into this province (almost 24,000,000 a year) for minority language education- most of which the New Brunswick government has directed to the francophone sector for the past 20 years which starved the EFI program. If the amounts remain stable with fewer students in FSL education (none form Grade 1-4) the francophone population who now receives over 80% of that funding will get even more of that 24,000,000.

With the current FSL plan, in 11 years no Anglophone graduate could meet the requirements of the largest majority of civil service jobs as the late immersion only delivers an intermediate level of linguistic competency. If parents are able to afford sending their children on a Quebec or France exchange there might be some advanced level students from that group. A very few strong academic and motivated students from late immersion may also achieve the level required. But 90 + percent will be unable to meet any acceptable standard, The current 42 % of early immersion students meeting that standard will look good.
In today’s world and to have the best opportunities for global participation, more than one language needs to be the standard, Kelly has misguidedly chosen an option that will not deliver what he espouses. There are many positive initiatives that are occurring in elementary education that will assist NB to achieve the improved international scores. I commend those. The decision to implement an intensive French component in the Core French program which will occur over the next three years will improve the Core French program and allow rural children access to a better program than they have had. This has been proven in Newfoundland where the program was developed and has been in place for over 5 years.

All the positive initiatives will not overcome the ultimate outcome of this single decision which is fewer bilingual Anglophones and disadvantaged graduates in the global and national community. The cognitive benefits of early bilingualism will be lost to New Brunswick children while a province like Alberta expands their number of early immersion programs to French, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese in their attempts to become a participant on the international scene. BC’s immersion numbers increase by over 6% a year, many of the children from immigrant families whose children are learning a third or fourth language.

This decision will likely be overturned by another government as the data comes in over the next 5-12 years that shows fewer children in immersion in Grades 7-12, an even more streamed middle years and high school groupings than existed in early immersion. (p.6)

Isn’t Google a wonderful thing?

An anonymous commenter on the media story today on the new blog by some anti-EFI parents wonders if the Anne Darrah mentioned in the article is the same Anne Darrah who has worked with Doug Wilms?

Just passing that on.

Excellent editorial

today in the Globe and Mail which begins

“Quashing” is a technical, but pleasingly expressive word for what happened to an ill-considered decision to phase out early French immersion (EFI) in New Brunswick, Canada’s most genuinely bilingual province, and our only officially bilingual one.

and concludes

Canada leads the world in French immersion, and hitherto New Brunswick led Canada in providing it. The provincial government must now engage in genuine consultation, and the result should not be a forgone conclusion. It has an opportunity to reconsider its rushed ending of this valuable program.

Hear hear.

Judicial Review

Message from the group requesting the judicial review:

VERY IMPORTANT: We need YOUR presence!!!

Where: 110 Charlotte Street, Saint John Provincial Court, Saint John
When: 12:30pm, Wednesday June 11th

Why: Judge McClellan will deliver his verdict on the Judicial Review of the Elimination of Early French Immersion. Media will be there in droves and will be reporting on how many parents show up to hear the verdict. We can send a STRONG message by being there – to respectfully hear the verdict – in large numbers. We need people on the sidewalk, in the streets, and standing room only in the court gallery.

Even if the judge doesn’t find that the law allows him to force the government to reverse the elimination of EFI, he may rule that the consultation process was flawed. In this case, we can point this out to media and deliver a strong message that we want the government to respect the judge’s comments and undertake a more fulsome consultation process.

We have worked hard to get to this point – it has cost a lot of time and money. Please make being there A PRIORITY.

Succinctly put.

In a comment to “French second language program reversal could cost $2M” in the T-J today, one commenter writes:

So the government line is, “It doesn’t matter if we’re wrong, we did it so fast that you should have to live with it now”.

That about sums it up.

Media coverage bias

Here is a comment to the letters to the editor today in the Daily Gleaner:

The Telegraph Journal, Daily Gleaner and the Times and Transcript are irresponsible in failing to cover significant news related to FSL news in NB. These papers have also failed to publish letters sent to them by experts that oppose Kelly Lamrock’s new FSL plan.
Some omissions by the major papers of southern NB:

• A letter to the editor by expert Dr. Fred Genesee
• A letter to the editor by expert Gene Ouellette
• A letter to the editor by expert Robert Leavitt
• A letter to the editor by expert Joseph Dicks
• Measha Bruggergosman’s public statements against the elimination of EFI
• coverage of the CEC meeting in Fred. with 200 people in attendance
• coverage of the CEC meeting in Moncton on May 27th
• the alternate FSL plan by Dr. Joseph Dicks
• coverage of the French for the Future conference held in Fredericton with 210 French Immersion and Francophone students, 35 teachers and 20 guest speakers in attendance.

Papers should not selectively omit important news and letters.

A Response to Minister Lamrock’s Justifications for His FSL Plan

[from CEC:]

In recent days, Minister Lamrock has been circulating the following text to justify his plans for French education in NB. A team of us from the Citizens for Educational Choice have taken on the task of annotating the Minister’s argument, pointing out errors in fact and argumentation. Although the details are to be found in the following pages, some general points arise repeatedly.

1. The Minister misuses French language learning scholarship. For example, his many misrepresentations of the ideas of Dr. Fred Genesee of McGill has resulted in a letter from Dr. Genesee explaining the problems. If the Minister wants the benefit of experts in FSL, he should assign them with the task of devising an FSL plan for the province or, at very least, heed their warnings regarding the Croll and Lee recommendations.
2. The Minister seems to persist in misunderstanding the nature of French immersion. In this text he presents it as a challenge that suits higher-achieving students; whereas we understand from the works of Dr. Dicks, Dr. Genesee and others, and from the experience of other provinces such as Nova Scotia, that EFI can be accessible to nearly all children.
3. The Minister erroneously argues that the many studies before Croll and Lee support his innovations: they simply do not, and we encourage all to read these reports and determine the truth for themselves. In fact, since the Scraba report of 2002, NB has been encouraged to improve participation and retention in EFI by increasing the resources required to support students within the EFI program.
4. The Minister argues weakly against this less disruptive and more standard solution: he claims that it cannot be done because it has not been done or because a fully detailed plan for this approach does not exist.
5. The Minister frequently suggests that any report or expert opinion which supports an entry point for French immersion later than the current grade one entry point also lends support to his plan for immersion to begin only in grade 6 because such opinions support a ‘later’ date. We believe that if he were to consult with the authors of these reports, he would find that they consider the grade 6 entry point which he proposes to be quite worse than the grade 2 or grade 3 entry points that some experts advise.
6. Finally, in the title of the piece and throughout, the Minister wishes to suggest that the past two months have been a time of ’study’, which should now conclude in a decision. We hope our comments will show that the Minister and Croll and Lee are very far from having studied the topic well, and that the decisions made in haste and ignorance thus far should be delayed so that a true and careful course can be plotted for this important aspect of our province’s public education system.

Below you will find the Minister’s original text in italics and our critique in plain text following each point he makes.

Orphaning a programme: a “how-to” list

Stephanie McCarty recently had the following letter published in the T-J:

A central tenet of Minister Lamrock’s embattled plan for French language instruction in our province is that children currently in the early French immersion program will be “grandfathered.” Recent events suggest that it will be more like “orphaned.”

Children in Grade 1 should expect to have 11 more years of their program; yet District 2’s website has expunged any mention of the program.

As a hint of worse to come, District 18 has removed all remedial help for EFI students, and similar programs are being cut in District 8.

Studies over the past decade have argued that the proper way of reducing streaming out of EFI is to provide it with better support, as is done today in Nova Scotia.

However, when Lamrock apportioned funds from the joint commission on classroom composition last year, more than $1 million were provided for special help in the core program, and only $4,000 for EFI students. No wonder parents of struggling students are encouraged to migrate to the core program.

It seems that if Lamrock is allowed to continue down this uncharted path, he will do even more to ensure that EFI becomes the “elitist” program he has criticized.

To this we can add

• The Dept. of Education is putting Gr. 1 EFI materials up for sale. Apparently Nova Scotia, being infinitely more enlightened, is interested in buying them.
• District 2: no new resources will be bought for EFI.
• District 6: there will be two French supervisors starting next year, one for IF and the other for LFI. EFI will be handled between them.
• Last year the CPF Sussex Chapter received 3 grants from the provincial Department of Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour to hire bilingual counsellors for their Summer French Immersion day camp for EFI students. There are to be no provincial SEED grants to hire summer students this year.
• District 10: in previous years District 10 gave the CPF St. George Chapter a grant to help them with their Summer French Immersion day camp for EFI students in elementary school. This year the grant is “no longer available.”
• Also on the block: summer reading programmes and literacy support offered by young B. Ed student tutors.

Feel free to add to the list in the comments. But don’t crash my server.

Read CEC’s

excellent, excellent commentary in the T-J, “The other side on education.” Very useful for countering Lamrock’s misinformation.

I think this is a good likeness. Don’t you think this is a good likeness?

[source]

Did you know?

More to the point, one wonders if Shawn Graham knows that

• about 44% of children in Fredericton are in French Immersion from Gr 1 to 8.
• just over 50% of children in the Greater Moncton area are in French Immersion from Gr 1 to 8.
• about 50% of children in Sackville are in French Immersion from Gr 1 to 8.
• Provincially, where EFI is available, enrolment is 40.45%.
• The following percentages represent EFI enrolment in grades 1-5:
  • Grand Falls — 62%
  • Shediac Cape — 60%
  • Sackville — 50%
  • Riverview — 50%
  • Campellton — 49%
  • Moncton — 48%
  • Salisbury — 45%
  • Fredericton — 41%
  • Bathurst — 38%
  • Kennebecasis Valley — 37%
  • Hampton — 33%
  • Dalhousie — 32%
  • Oromocto — 30%
  • St George — 30%

Hardly the 20% statistic shopped around by the Minister. Perhaps he forgot to subtract Kindergarteners from his stats, as they are all listed under “English”. Oops.

These numbers reflect a significant voting block, one would think …

Okay here’s

a quick question: if in the last two years over 70% of enrollments in French immersion were in early French immersion, how on earth does Kelly Lamrock think only offering late immersion is going to get more students learning French? Does he expect that whole 70+% to take late immersion? Anyone with an adolescent can tell him it is a lot easier to convince a six-year of something, than an eleven-year old.