Ontario vowed to fix math in schools; that hasn’t happened

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Just 52% of Grade 6 students in Ontario’s publicly funded English schools could meet the provincial standard in math. The really sad part is that this is an improvement from 51% in the 2024-25 school year and 50% in the 2023-24 school year.

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Back in 2022, just 47% of Grade 6 students met the provincial standard.

It’s been a puzzling feature of Ontario’s education system for some time now: Math results stink, while students meet the standard in reading and writing. While just 52% of Grade 6 students met the math standard last school year, 85% met the writing standard and 86% met the reading standard.

We’ve been listening to education ministers promise change for years and it hasn’t really happened. Grade 6 math scores were at 49% meeting the standard in 2018, the last year of the Kathleen Wynne government, but dropped to 47% in 2022 and are now at 52%.

That’s hardly progress.

Still failing the test

In the 2018 provincial election, Doug Ford promised that if elected premier, he would turn things around.

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“Our kids are failing their tests because Kathleen Wynne has failed our kids,” Ford said in May 2018. “It’s time to focus on the fundamentals and that includes proven methods of teaching.”

Clearly, that hasn’t happened. Math scores are still in the toilet.

The Ford government promised to get rid of discovery math, an experimental learning system that only works once the basics are mastered. They also promised to take a back-to-basics approach, which hasn’t helped if it indeed happened.

In 2021, the province published a new math curriculum that was anything but back to basics.

“Mathematics has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges and a decolonial, anti-racist approach to mathematics education makes visible its historical roots and social constructions,” the curriculum says.

The Ford government initially defended that statement before the premier himself said to let math be math.

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Eight years, no excuses

It was a ridiculous statement that showed a complete ignorance of how mathematical knowledge develops. Different cultures have built upon one another’s discoveries for centuries, regardless of cultural, ethnic or religious divides. Yet time and again, we have activists in schools and within the Ministry of Education pushing ideas that math is akin to white supremacy or claiming that 2+2=4 is a form of racism.

The province needs to show zero tolerance for this kind of activism in our school system and remove those who want to perpetuate it.

Fundamentally, though, the province needs to get serious about fixing the problems with teaching math in our school system. Doug Ford and his team have been in charge for 3,036 days, which equals eight years, three months and 22 days.

They cannot blame anyone else at this point. They own the curriculum, they own the bureaucracy and they own the results.

After last year’s equally disastrous EQAO scores, Education Minister Paul Calandra said he wanted a full review of the system. How many more years of horrific results are we going to accept before we say enough is enough?

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Billions spent, little to show

We spent $42 billion on education last year. Of that, $32 billion was spent on what is called “core education,” meaning money aimed at classrooms. Most of that money went to salaries for teachers who are making $100,000 or more in Ontario after a few years on the job.

These are well-paid people. They should be expected to do the job.

It’s up to the province to give them the tools to do the job correctly. If the province is doing that and still not getting results, then it needs to find better people.

The only answer that isn’t acceptable is the status quo.

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