In this commentary, Bislimi Group Foundation founder and president Tony Bisimli explains how the education establishments in Canadian provinces embellish international results in order to pat themselves on the back. This has serious repercussions for Canadian students, as well as parents, teachers and society as a whole.
An excellent example of a high quality international testing program is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). According to the latest PISA results, Canada’s education system ranks highly. However, Canada does not deliver education, the provinces do. If you look past the false bluster and consider the actual results on international tests, the differences between provincial scores become all too obvious. Unfortunately for Atlantic Canada, sometimes the truth hurts.
The public was presented with a different story when provincial ‘educrats’ told a much brighter picture of Atlantic Canada’s poor scores by comparing them to the results of other countries and focusing on the advantages of the provinces with higher scores, if they acknowledged the results of the other provinces at all.
In We’re number…34!, Bislimi asks, does the spin put on the results matter? If it deflects criticism of the education system so it can focus on doing its job, is it really a bad thing? Bislimi answers yes and yes. Further analysis done by the OECD shows that being genuine and honest and most importantly open about the results indeed makes a difference. Transparency is necessary if we want to address the decreasing trend downward in Canada’s overall scores and improve our public education systems.
Click here to read the full commentary.
