To the editor;
B.C.’s decision to jettison provincial exams is a bad idea. The move is sending students backwards, not forward. What set our students above other provinces and many American states educational systems is all graduating students had to be proficient in the basics, which provided employers with a known criteria for hiring.
Now you will find no agreed criteria for any grade. Some English teachers will emphasize Shakespeare while another will teach grammar and another short story writing with no educator following a curriculum because of the IEP. It will also require students seeking higher education to write university entrance exams similar to American SATs which students begin taking in grade 11, take classes to master and universities use as entry qualifications.
Were parents or employers consulted in the decision making process or did the ministry make a unilateral decision as has been their track record? Remember dual entry kindergarten that was tried and rejected in the U.S. 50 years ago and attempted here to parents’ dismay?
Individual Lesson Plans (IEP) are wonderful.........theoretically, but in reality are dysfunctional because students are not failed at the end of the year when they do not complete their IEP, so the educational deficit is cancelled leaving the next year’s teacher to scramble to try and include the deficit in the new year’s IEP.
Canceling senior exams had to the brainchild of the same Victoria “thinkers” who trashed phonics and handwriting in elementary school, replacing them with “holistic reading” which failed miserably leaving children to enter their high school years with a reading and writing deficit.
If parents don’t speak up now, they will be rubber stamping the ministry’s ignorance and hobble their children for their future.
Jon McCormick
100 Mile House