Douglas Stewart is professor of education and chair of educational foundations in the Faculty of Education, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan S4S 0A2, Canada; e-mail: douglas.stewart@uregina.ca. His areas of research interests include philosophical analyses of educational issues, moral and character education, and curriculum theory.

JCS invites comments responding to the views in this paper. Such comments should be addressed via e-mail to westbury@uiuc.edu.

Copyright © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd. ISSN 0022-0272. Copies may be made under the normal terms of copyright law.

 National testing in Canada is a relatively new educational venture. The scheme was launched in 1993 under the direction of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), and is scheduled to continue to the year 2002. To date, five rounds of nation-wide standardized assessments have been completed in mathematics, reading and writing, and science. According to CMEC, student achievement in these areas is a primary indicator of ‘the overall health’ of an educational system (Palmer and Brackenbury 1993). Samples for each round consist of 48 000 13- and 16-year-olds (grade 8 and grade 11) randomly selected from across the provinces and territories. Tests are conducted in both Canada’s official languages, English and French.

In this paper I examine the dramatically poor results for the province of Saskatchewan in the 1997 national assessment in mathematics and explore the implications of those results for curriculum, instruction, and the education of teachers in the province for mathematics. I say ‘dramatically poor’ because of Saskatchewan’s last-place finish in the knowledge-of-content component of this assessment and because these results came in the wake of a massive and expensive province-wide K-12 curriculum reform project that began in the mid-1980s. The reasons for poor results in any major testing scheme are complex and controversial. I identify what I take to be the main explanatory factors at work in the Saskatchewan case, including the impact and legacy of a little-known story of the off-and-on-again relationship between the provincial department of education (hereafter Saskatchewan Education) and CMEC’s national assessment scheme, and seek to relate these factors, where appropriate, to the province’s curriculum reform project of the past 15 years. I also pinpoint the more critical factors to be addressed in the situation around mathematics education currently facing the province, given the revelations of the 1997 assessment.

Although my immediate discussion pertains essentially to one Canadian province, they provide lessons for other jurisdictions. Moreover, because education in Canada is situated within a federated form of governance and involves policy issues at provincial, inter-provincial and federal-provincial levels, the Saskatchewan case cannot be discussed and analysed independent of the wider national historical and political contexts.

The wider context

The federal, two-tiered system of Canadian governance is based on the principle of division of powers between the governments of provinces (and territories) and the national government in Ottawa. The responsibility for public education (elementary, secondary and post-secondary) falls to the provinces. Each province has its own ministry of education with authority, in the K-12, sector to establish curricula, standards, and school districts, approve textbooks, certify teachers, provide support and consultative services to local school boards, and extend financial assistance to boards through grants-in-aid.1 There is no national ministry of education to which provincial and territorial systems are accountable, nor is there a national curriculum or any national policy on goals of schooling.2 This decentralized (but provincially concentrated) arrangement owes its constitutionality to the British North America (BNA) Act of 1867, the act of Canadian confederation. According to Section 93, provinces were granted exclusive rights to make laws with respect to education, subject only to the protection of already established denominational schools.3 Although the Canadian constitution does not prohibit the federal government from becoming involved in the domain of public education, under the BNA Act the provinces retain the legal right to reject any federal initiatives or intrusions. With few exceptions, such as the schooling of Aboriginal children4 and provisions for vocational education, the federal government has not entered the education sector per se, other than fiscally in the form of transfer or equalization payments to the provinces.5

Until quite recently the prospect of a national testing scheme was unthinkable for most Canadian educators and teachers, and for many it still is. They fear (in part) that such a scheme is the first step towards a national system of education that ultimately would strip provinces and territories of their autonomy in education, the BNA Act notwithstanding. Also, with Canada’s official status as a multicultural nation and the enshrinement of cultural pluralism as a dominant ideology,6 a centralized ministry of education at the federal level would arguably be much less willing or able than more immediately-positioned provincial ministries to respond constructively to the social, cultural and economic diversities of children in the different regions. Yet the question of whether the federal government should be taking a more aggressive role in Canadian education has been the subject of renewed discussion and public analysis (Nagy and Lupart 1994), a situation no doubt nurtured by the recent active role CMEC has played in bringing national testing to a reality.

It is ironic that throughout a good part of its history7 CMEC operated in a rather low-key and secretive manner (Bergen 1979). Composed of ministers of education for the provinces, their deputies and support staffs, the council convened periodically to exchange information, discuss matters of mutual interest, and undertake liaison work at interprovincial or federal-provincial levels where necessary or desirable (Bergen 1979). Such activities are hardly designed to catch the attention of either the media or general public. However, in 1987 when the results of an independent and hastily-constructed study of literacy in Canada were published, the low profile of CMEC, to which it had become accustomed, soon disappeared.

The literacy study was conducted and published by Southam News, a Canadian news-gathering service and publishing conglomerate. It purported to show a 17% illiteracy rate among Canadian high school graduates and a 26% rate for the 18-25 age group (Holmes 1998). Although questions were raised concerning the validity and reliability of the Southam instrument and although the educational community on the whole consequently chose to take little notice of the findings or attach any significance to them, the ‘quality’ of Canadian schooling was nonetheless brought sharply into full public view. Thus, the reaction of the wider public and the business and corporate sectors in particular became another matter (Palmer and Brackenbury 1993). Concerns over the claimed poor state of elementary and secondary schooling across Canada grew, fuelled in part by a flurry of subsequent news items and reports proclaiming the fall of standards, challenging the high cost of public education, and wondering how Canadian tax-payers could possibly be getting good returns on their ‘investment’.8 Provincial politicians and premiers came under mounting pressure to respond, and at the annual conference of provincial premiers in 1991, CMEC was directed to put in place ‘effective mechanisms for appropriate evaluation and improved accountability in provincial and territorial education systems’; to develop these mechanisms with ‘teachers, parents, trustees and other interest groups’; and to make ‘high standards of numeracy and literacy, and the development of a true lifelong learning culture’ major educational objectives (Palmer and Brackenbury 1993: 467).9

The upshot was the implementation of a criterion-referenced national assessment scheme in mathematics (1993) and in reading and writing (1994). The scheme, known as the School Achievement Indicators Program (SAIP),10 was field-tested in selected provinces (Alberta, Quebec, and New Brunswick) first and then nation-wide in 1992. As Palmer and Brackenbury (1993: 467) put it, ‘For Canada, this was an unprecedented commitment to a national education initiative’. Science assessments were added to SAIP in 1996.

A Saskatchewan saga

During the early planning and development phases of SAIP assessments several provinces, including Saskatchewan, had expressed serious doubts about participating in the national testing scheme even though all were officially part of CMEC. They feared the tests would be culturally insensitive to children of racial and other minorities, which might negatively skew the results of a province’s overall performance. With the launching of the first SAIP assessment in 1993 and after cultural sensitivities had been carefully addressed, and with the input of subject councils and others from the provinces and territories, all provinces and territories except Saskatchewan agreed to participate.

When ministry officials were asked why Saskatchewan alone had abstained, the best reasons they could muster at the time were that financial costs of participating could not be justified and that a need for the province to enter the scheme did not exist because plans were afoot in Saskatchewan Education to implement a made-in-Saskatchewan series of province-wide assessments for grades 5, 8, and 11 (Saskatchewan Education 1994). The first reason seemed flimsy. Saskatchewan at the time was in a much healthier economic position than several of the participating provinces, having had one of the higher rates of employment in the nation. The second reason seemed flawed. Provincial and national testing programmes are not mutually exclusive and provincially-produced tests cannot yield reliable comparative data. Moreover, other provinces, including some of the least well-off, had been using province-wide tests for some time11 and none had refused to join; nor had provinces like Ontario who were committed to implementing similar internal assessments.

Not everyone in the province was happy with Saskatchewan Education’s posture of educational isolationism or the hint of smugness that some of its replies seemed to convey. Some parents had been upset with what they believed to be a system of public schooling that was altogether too slack. They welcomed the national testing initiative. The business and commercial community concurred. It felt that too many school graduates were deficient in basic literacy and numeracy skills, in general academic knowledge and understanding, and in sound attitudes towards work.12

Against this, the formal ‘partners’ in Saskatchewan education, the Saskatchewan Teachers Federation (STF), the Saskatchewan School Trustees Association (SSTA) and the League of Educational Administrators and Directors, were unanimous in their support for Saskatchewan Education’s isolationist stance. The province, people were (rightly) reminded, had a solid record within Canadian confederation for its early and courageous development of socialized medicine and other social welfare programmes that put values of community and co-operativeness very much to the fore. A child-centred approach to education had readily taken root in such a climate as had the development of close and collaborative working relationships between the partners and Saskatchewan Education. Any real (or implied) threat or challenge to this ideology, as might arise with forms of standardized testing thought to be grounded in values of individualism and competitiveness, would be a sufficient reason to ‘circle the wagons’. The fact that SAIP assessments had been designed deliberately to be ‘low risk’, implying that results would be reported only at the level of provincial systems of education rather than at the levels of school district, school, or individual student (Palmer and Brackenbury 1993) seemed not to matter. The partners remained firm in their opposition to the national scheme and the province’s participation in it. This intransigence and Saskatchewan Education’s fear of severe backlash from its historically trusted and reliable friends in the educational enterprise were doubtless the real, although unstated, reasons for Saskatchewan’s absence in the national testing scheme.13

Putting these considerations momentarily aside, much pride had been taken by Saskatchewan Education and its partners when, in 1984, the final report of the Minister’s advisory committee on curriculum and instruction review that chartered a major K-12 curriculum renewal project, was published. The report, called Directions (Saskatchewan Education 1984a), was arguably dishonest in part (having plagiarized large sections of its ‘Goals of Education in Saskatchewan’ from an earlier US curriculum document [Cochrane 1987]), and epistemologically superficial in making its case for a broad core of compulsory subject areas (Stewart 1987). In the years following the publication of Directions, new curricula for the seven ‘core’ subject areas14 and several non-core subjects (e.g. Indian languages, practical and applied arts, life transitions) were developed, piloted and implemented in accordance with a 10-year schedule that ran to the year 2000 (Saskatchewan Education 1996). A widely-held view emerged in the province that Saskatchewan had not only become a national leader in curriculum reform but the proud holder of an exemplary K-12 core curriculum, a view that incidentally seemed to find some support from educators in other provinces. Basking in a climate of success, and having judged national testing to be a politically risky venture at best,15 Saskatchewan Education saw no reason to have the province participate in SAIP assessments. Consequently Saskatchewan students were absent from the national samples of 13- and 16-year-olds tested for mathematics in 1993 and for reading and writing in 1994.

It is unclear what led Saskatchewan Education to reverse its original opposition to the national scheme. Yet with little public notice of its decision a (presumed) representative sample of Saskatchewan students sat the 1996 SAIP test for science and the 1997 test for mathematics.16 Although reasons for this about-face may be obscure, the results for Saskatchewan in mathematics were not. On the February 1998 release date for the 1997 findings, a CMEC communique (1998) noted that assessment designers ‘expected 13-year-old students to achieve at least at level 2 and 16-year-old students to achieve at least at level 3’ on a five-level achievement scale with level 1 designated as ‘basic’ and 5 as ‘the most complex’ (CMEC 1998).17 Using these levels to rate provincial performances in both knowledge of mathematics content and skills of problem-solving,18 Saskatchewan had some of the worst results in the nation. In mathematics content in particular the Saskatchewan sample of 13-year-olds placed last of all the provinces for levels 1, 2 and 4,19 and its sample of 16-year-olds placed last for level 1 and near the last for level 4 (CMEC 1997: 27-31). At level 2 for mathematics content, the level test designers expected 13-year-olds to achieve, only 47.9% of that age group in the Saskatchewan sample made the grade compared to 59.4% in the national sample as a whole; and at level 3, the level test designers expected 16-year-olds to achieve, 50% of that age in the Saskatchewan sample made the grade compared to nearly 60% in the national sample (pp. 27-31). As for the ‘problem-solving’ component of the test the province fared considerably better. Generally speaking, the performance for both Saskatchewan age groups in this part of the test fell within the middle to upper-middle range of provincial standings for levels 1 to 4. The rate for Saskatchewan 13-year-olds achieving level 2 in problem-solving was 51.2% compared to the national figure of 52.2%, and for 16-year-olds achieving level 3 in problem-solving it was 38.6% compared to the national average of 39.8% (pp. 32-36).

Few in the province were ready for the weak scores in knowledge of mathematics content. The newly designed elementary mathematics curriculum had been in place since 1992-1993 following a two-year period of field-testing (Saskatchewan Education 1997a) and was generally thought to be working effectively. Indeed, a February 1997 survey of public perceptions of the quality of education in Saskatchewan showed that roughly 48 percent of those polled in the province considered elementary schooling to be ‘excellent’ or ‘good’, and another 36 percent considered it to be ‘adequate’, while slightly less confidence was expressed in high school education with ratings of 43 percent and 34 percent respectively (Saskatchewan Education 1997b). The minister at the time the SAIP results were released seemed as caught off guard by their gravity as anyone, although her department had evidence from its own in-province assessments of grades 5, 8 and 11 in the previous year that students were falling below even provincial expectations in mathematics (Saskatchewan Education 1998b). ‘We obviously have a problem’, she conceded in a curt but honest response to the SAIP results, and then announced an ‘action plan’ to improve the mathematics performance of Saskatchewan students (O’Connor 1998a).

Reactions from the partners to both the SAIP results and the minister’s announcement were entirely predictable. The SSTA president thought the minister’s action plan, which pointed to more class time on mathematics and called for a mentoring of teachers inexperienced in the subject, ‘a bit premature’, adding that ‘we need to find out what the problem is so that we can fix it’ (O’Connor 1998a). The newly-elected head of the STF seemed to concur: ‘I think we sometimes get a little premature and rush to a solution. If there is something going on in math that shouldn’t be going on, we first of all have to identify what it is’ (O’Connor 1998b). Nor was the annual STF Spring Council in April 1998 in any mood to support the minister. Seventy percent of delegates voted in favour of ending the province’s ‘new affiliation’ with SAIP, a move the minister refused to endorse (Richards 1998). The hitherto well-established solidarity between ‘partners’ and Saskatchewan Education was at risk of unravelling.

Analysis

Those who speak of needing to find what the problem is and of not rushing to premature solutions may be fairly accused of grandstanding or of failing to take the situation seriously enough. At least at one level the ‘problem’ is both obvious and serious. It is a battery of unacceptably low results in mathematics knowledge, and particularly so for a province which boasts of its achievements in curriculum reform. Underlying causal factors need to be identified urgently. For her part, the minister moved quickly to commission a study to examine the amount of time devoted to mathematics instruction and the quality of interaction in mathematics classes in the province’s schools.20 In light of the lop-sided results for Saskatchewan between the two components of the 1997 SAIP assessment, it is a pity she did not ask the study to examine the relative emphasis schools place on ‘mathematics knowledge’ as against ‘problem-solving’, and whether that emphasis is justified or needs to be re-configured. Although it is too early to tell if her plan will bear fruit, the minister at least had ideas about ‘causes’ and about what could be done.

Several explanatory factors seem to underlie the SAIP results. First, and for want of a good understanding of mathematics as a discipline of thought and of clear perspectives from which to teach the subject, too many elementary school teachers and students in elementary teacher education in the province are ill-at-ease with mathematics and with teaching it.21 Second, and for a variety of reasons but frequently because of poverty or low socio-economic status, too many homes are failing or are simply unable to provide the necessary parental support and monitoring of homework necessary for good academic performance. This is a situation Saskatchewan Education (1998a) has acknowledged. Third, aspects of the newly-approved secondary mathematics curricula for Saskatchewan are arguably weak.

(1) The minister’s plan to examine the amount of time devoted to mathematics instruction in classrooms across the province is an obvious measure to take, although it does not go far enough. It is worth noting that the roughly 200 minutes per week allotted to mathematics in the province’s curriculum renewal project for grades 1-6 is substantially less than half the 560 minutes per week allotted to English language arts for the same grade levels (Saskatchewan Education 1987). Nor did the renewal initiative allow sufficient mathematics time in grade 9, the critical bridging year to secondary school mathematics, to ensure the subject could be scheduled daily for grade 9 students. These miscalculations may yet prove to be tragic. Moreover, the allocation of mathematics time relative to language arts time seems markedly out of step with the views expressed by Saskatchewan people in a poll taken by Saskatchewan Education during the early evaluation phase of its curriculum reform project, namely that both language arts and mathematics should be equally primary objectives of schooling (Saskatchewan Education 1984b). The minister’s other idea of having experienced mathematics teachers coach peers less confident in the subject and act as support groups is also a reasonable measure, although some elementary teachers report that such strategies are of little help (Seaman 1999). More lasting solutions are needed for achieving greater mathematical competence and confidence among elementary school teachers and students in elementary teacher education.

One such remedy would necessitate faculties of education in the province to boost the minimum mathematics requirements in elementary teacher education, thus acknowledging more fully the critical role that elementary schools must play in establishing a sound basis of mathematical concepts and operations. In some cases, and in particular my own institution, the current mathematics requirements for graduation from elementary teacher education is a one-semester (13 weeks) class in theory and practice of teaching primary school mathematics and a one-semester introductory class in mathematics. This is embarrassingly thin, given that students are in the elementary teacher education programme for four years and that admission to it does not demand any senior mathematics course in the final year (grade 12) of high school. These are insufficient conditions for the achievement of understanding in school mathematics and for building levels of confidence needed to teach the subject well in elementary schools.

While mathematics anxiety has become something of a commonplace in society, the extent to which it is present among elementary school teachers, and those studying in faculties of education, to be elementary teachers may be more surprising. This fear of mathematics stems from at least three sources: a lack of understanding of basic patterns of mathematical reasoning and their everyday practical applications to the human world; insufficient study of methods of elementary mathematics instruction and of the logic and psychology of how children learn mathematics; and the cyclical phenomena in which many who enter elementary teacher education have unintentionally learned to fear mathematics from being taught by teachers who are themselves mathematics-anxious. Making mathematics make sense to student teachers, and nurturing in them at least an attitude of instrumental caring for the subject (Noddings 1992) to help prepare them better for their chosen calling, are imperative. Recent empirical studies purport to show (what may actually be a conceptual truth) that good teacher preparation in mathematics subject-matter does, in turn, have a salutary effect on the mathematics achievement of children in school (Goldhaber and Brewer 1998).

(2) On the second point concerning a lack of parental support and monitoring of homework, the issues here are complex and extend well beyond schooling proper. They involve individual and social attitudes towards life, work, and family as well as tough challenges concerning the achievement of greater social-economic justice overall. Neither a minister of education nor a department of education can be expected to tackle this agenda single-handedly. Unless and until families of all backgrounds and particularly those worst-placed (i.e. least able to cope with the social, economic or technological changes in society) are more equitably situated they will not have the time, energy or interest in the educational ‘good’ of their children to give them the help and encouragement for learning they need.

Child poverty, which educators are only now beginning to understand, is one factor that puts children at considerable educational risk. So far as I am aware, its impact on specifically mathematics performance has not been studied in Saskatchewan, or certainly not to the extent needed, given the number of identified ‘poor’ children in the province. Nor has it been studied widely in Canada though this is changing dramatically with work that is on-going under the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research 22 and by the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (Philp 1999). These and other studies (Mustard 1998) are demonstrating at least two salient points. First, children from poor homes or homes with serious social and economic dislocations, unlike those from generally more stable and supportive higher-income homes, have not developed the cognitive capabilities that ready them intellectually and behaviourally to learn mathematics when beginning school (Mustard 1998). Substandard mathematics test scores are traceable to low academic scores recorded in kindergarten. And second, with enriched or compensatory programmes for child development, especially in ages four to six, the gap in mathematics performance between poor and not-poor children can be narrowed dramatically by the time they have reached grade 8 (Mustard 1998). This is not to suggest that Saskatchewan children are more at risk for reasons of poverty than children in other regions of the nation, or that poverty alone would explain the poor performance of the province’s 13- and 16-year-olds in mathematics knowledge on the 1997 SAIP assessments. Nevertheless, for a province that reports in excess of 55 000 children in poverty (Saskatchewan Education 1999) and representing about 24 percent of its school population, child poverty is surely having an impact on the test results.

(3) With respect to the third factor, the quality of new mathematics curricula for secondary schools in Saskatchewan, there are concerns about the relatively shallow and undemanding nature of their content which may leave many students ill-prepared for further and higher studies (O’Connor 1997). The mathematics curricula for grades 10 and 11, piloted in 1993-1995 and implemented in 1995-1996 (according to the published schedule), and the ones most relevant to the SAIP results for Saskatchewan’s 16-year-olds, are modest by any reasonable standard. In grade 10, for example, only linear functions and equations are attempted, along with topics on lines and segments, angles and polygons, and basic consumer mathematics. Simple quadratic functions and equations are not introduced until grade 11, the last mathematics class required for high school graduation in the province, and a class that many actually fit into their grade 10 year. These are students who may graduate without a single mathematics class in the final two years of high school and still be accepted in various university programmes, including elementary teacher education.

Admittedly, a stronger emphasis has been placed on practical problem-solving in the new secondary mathematics curricula which may help explain the better performance by Saskatchewan’s 16-year-olds in the problem-solving component of the 1997 SAIP assessment. But it must be asked if this emphasis has somehow been achieved at the expense of mathematics knowledge. The new secondary curriculum is also making much greater use of computers and graphic calculators. Although this clearly benefits those from already-advantaged backgrounds, it puts others and especially those whose parents cannot afford this technology or who may be intimidated by it and less able and willing to offer homework assistance, at a much greater disadvantage. In sum, further critical analysis of Saskatchewan’s new secondary mathematics curricula and the implications for mathematics equity of using their associated technologies are needed even though the ink on these curricula has scarcely dried.

Conclusions

To avoid the embarrassment of coping with poor mathematics results another time, Saskatchewan Education might be strongly tempted to revert to its original position of abstaining from all further remaining SAIP assessments (mathematics in 2000, reading and writing in 2001 and science in 2002), as the 1998 STF Spring Council decreed it should. Doing so would find much favour among the educational ‘partners’. Alternatively Saskatchewan Education may choose a more selective strategy of sitting out the last round of mathematics assessment while finishing the remaining rounds for reading and writing and science, areas where the performances of Saskatchewan 13- and 16-year-olds have been generally stronger and more pleasing to deal with. There is little likelihood that either path will be pursued. The wisest policy for Saskatchewan Education is to stay the course as a full participant in all the scheduled SAIP assessment to 2002, no matter how distasteful to the ‘partners’ this may be. Important lessons have been learned and should continue to be learned from participating in large-scale national assessments of the SAIP type, despite any lingering implications of these assessments for the larger questions of provincial autonomy in public education and of a national agenda on goals of schooling.

A number of considerations lead to these conclusions. As a result of its first-time entry into the national testing scheme for mathematics, Saskatchewan has a set of valuable base-line data on the ‘math’ performances of its 13- and 16-year-olds, data that can be used to good advantage to secure a more reliable reading on any progress Saskatchewan students might subsequently make in the subject area the province is currently the weakest nation-wide. It should be of particular interest to local educators and the Saskatchewan public in general to know in light of the next SAIP mathematics assessment (2000) whether Saskatchewan students will have narrowed the gap between ‘mathematics knowledge’ and ‘problem-solving skills’ by improving their performance in the former, and to what extent if any the province might have advanced in its overall ranking relative to other provincial jurisdictions.

The discrepancy revealed by Saskatchewan’s participation in SAIP (1997) between knowledge of mathematics content and problem-solving abilities and the generally weak mathematics performance of the province have highlighted a number of issues for critical analysis. These include: the problem of mathematics anxiety among elementary teachers and student teachers and how to address it both in the workplace and in teacher education programmes; the need to achieve a greater curriculum balance between the ‘knowledge’ and ‘problem-solving’ perspectives of school mathematics (K-12) and to sensitize those teaching and intending to teach this subject area to these two perspectives; the adequacy of methods of mathematics instruction being used by Saskatchewan teachers; the time spent on mathematics in Saskatchewan schools; and the impact of poverty on the mathematics achievements of Saskatchewan children. Much work remains to be done by Saskatchewan Education and the universities if the province is to compare more favourably in mathematics achievement and if its young people are to fare more equitably in their life prospects and opportunities wherever in Canada they may choose to live and work. Saskatchewan Education would be well advised to consider a higher level of mathematics achievement for grade 12 graduation and to examine carefully how other provinces with much stronger mathematics performances in the SAIP assessment have dealt with the above (and related) issues. Two good places to start for this purpose would be the provinces of Quebec and British Columbia.

The minister of education 23 seems more willing than most of his predecessors to acknowledge the conflicting pressures to which Saskatchewan Education is subjected as far as the province’s continued participation in SAIP testing is concerned. The government, he recently conceded, is under ‘tremendous pressure’ to have ‘some sort of national-identifying measurement in place’, even with its flaws (Nielsen 1998: 3). The sources of ‘intense pressure’ were not identified but it is likely they stem from some of the newer political realities the Saskatchewan government is facing and that is forcing it to put the traditional hardened attitudes of the partners towards standardized testing in general, and SAIP in particular, into better perspective.

For their part, faculties of education in the province need to re-consider the number and type of grade 12 courses needed for admission to elementary teacher education. They should also review the need for additional university classes in relevant mathematics knowledge or methods of mathematics instruction (or both) and in theories of how children learn mathematics.

Overall, the best prospects for significant advances in the mathematics performance of Saskatchewan students (K-12) lie primarily with improving the quality of mathematics teaching in elementary schools and strengthening the mathematics programmes in elementary teacher education. How this is to be done in points of detail is for those in mathematics education in the province’s universities and those who are exemplary teachers of mathematics in its elementary schools to say.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Rick Seaman and Don Cochrane for their constructive reactions to earlier drafts of this work, and to the former in particular for his thoughts on teacher ‘math’ anxiety. All opinions expressed however are those of the author.

1. The level of provincial funding earmarked for local school board revenues varies considerably from province to province depending on financial formulas in place. In some cases (e.g. the Maritime provinces), provincial funding accounts for almost 100 percent of school board revenues while in others (e.g. Manitoba and Saskatchewan) for about 50 percent with the balance made up through local residential property and business taxes levied by municipal governments (Dibsky 1987). In the face of declining revenues from provincial tax bases there is a tendency among provinces to ‘download’ more of the cost of education to local communities (Barlow and Robertson 1994). In Saskatchewan (for example) the government reduced the portion of its total provincial budget allotted to public education from 19% in 1991-1992 (Saskatchewan 1998a) to roughly 17% in 1996-1997 (Saskatchewan Education 1997c).

2. A survey of provincial curricula in Canada would reveal a strong likeness in at least core areas of study. If the central epistemological goal of schooling is to initiate students into basic forms of human thought and inquiry (Daniels 1993), such a finding should be expected. The means taken to achieve this end however may vary considerably.

3. A good deal though by no means all of the diversity present in the educational systems of the provinces can be attributed to the ‘denominational clause’ and the various ways in which provinces have historically and politically responded to it.

4. The federal government’s responsibility for the schooling of Aboriginal children dates from the Indian Act of 1876. At that time and for roughly the next 100 years the federal Department of Indian Affairs delegated most of this responsibility (while maintaining ultimate authority) to the Christian churches, primarily Anglican and Roman Catholic but also Methodist and Presbyterian, with the agreed aims of assimilating Indian children to the values, beliefs, customs and language of the dominant White Anglo-Christian culture (Miller 1996, Milloy 1999).

5. These cost-sharing arrangements are for certain high-cost programmes (e.g. education, health care and social welfare) that exceed the financial capabilities of provinces to fund single-handedly. In theory, transfer payments made in proportion to the different economic situations of the provinces are to help equalize their tax burdens while protecting the autonomy of provincial governments in the process. If equalization is an ‘intrusion’ into the provincial domains of education, it is one the provinces are unlikely to spurn.

6. Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism has arguably been more divisive than constructive. It has not found favour with most in the Aboriginal and the French Québécois communities, or with numerous Canadians of both mainstream and other minority cultures (Bibby 1990, Bissoondath 1994, Magsino 1998).

7. CMEC was formed in Canada’s centenary year, 1967, and modelled after a similar council in West Germany that had operated since the founding of the new Republic in 1949 (Bergen 1979).

8. In 1989-1990 Canadian provinces as a whole spent $44 billion (or 2.6% of the nation’s gross domestic product) on education for all levels, ranking as the fifth highest-spending nation among 16 OECD countries, well ahead of France, Germany, the UK and the USA (Newton et al. 1992).

9. The idea of a national testing scheme had been first aired at a June 1988 meeting of provincial educational officials in Edmonton in reaction to the Southam literacy study and as a follow-up to a 1987 CMEC study of student and system evaluation in Canada (Palmer and Brackenbury 1993: 467).

10. CMEC’s work has continued to expand in scope and public profile. Its publications of results for each round of testing generates considerable coverage and analysis in the national and regional press. As Hunter (1997: 11-12) notes,

CMEC has begun to develop a Pan Canadian Education Indicators Program to collect a wider array of information about the performance of education systems across Canada. The first Biennial Report on Education in Canada was released in November 1995, and a Pan Canadian Indicators Report was released in November 1996, as auguries of a national reporting system.

11. E.g. British Columbia, Alberta, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland (Leithwood et al. 1990).

12. In a February 1997 poll of Saskatchewan people on the perceived quality of public education, some 60 percent of those surveyed believe that students are either ‘somewhat unprepared’ or ‘very unprepared’ by high school for the workforce (Saskatchewan Education 1997b). According to a recent survey by the Regina Chamber of Commerce, the views of employers regarding the preparedness of high school students for the workplace have not changed significantly over the past six to eight years. The survey was designed ‘to learn more about the skills employers want to see in new employees and whether prospective employees in fact possess them’. Fifty-two percent of employers surveyed rated new recruits ‘fair or poor’ on writing effectively in the language business requires, though 82% rated them ‘good or excellent’ in speaking and understanding the language of business. Fifty-one percent of employers rated the ability of newer employees to think critically (solve problems and make decisions) as ‘fair or poor’ (O’Connor 1999).

13. In fact, opposition to SAIP assessments comes from both ends of the educational spectrum, the political ‘left’ and ‘right’. Right-wing supporters of national testing oppose SAIP on the grounds that it is not sufficiently robust to produce meaningful and useful data. SAIP (they argue) should include larger samples, assess students across a wider range of grades than just grade 8 and 11, and report performance results at individual, school and school district as well as provincial levels. See Holmes (1998) for a sympathetic treatment of the more conservative position.

14. English language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, arts education, health education, and physical education. The ‘core’ also includes a number of designated skills, abilities, attitudes and values know as ‘Common Essential Learnings’ that are to be integrated ‘across the curriculum’: communication, numeracy, critical and creative thinking, technological literacy, independent learning, personal and social values and skills (Saskatchewan Education 1987).

15. Among the partners, STF has been the most vocal opponent to standardized testing. STF’s immediate past-president states the case well: ‘We need to focus our curriculum and to evaluate our students on our curriculum, not on standardized tests . . . you can[not] have a standard national test which tests individualized provincial curricula unique to each province . . . .’ There are spurious elements in this argument. The areas of curriculum addressed in SAIP assessments can hardly be described as being uniquely different in each province.

16. For the 1997 SAIP mathematics assessment the Saskatchewan sample consisted of 3 600 students. There are approximately 193 000 students in the province’s schools (Saskatchewan 1998a).

17. It is worth noting that for purposes of its own province-wide internal assessments Saskatchewan defines level 1 in lesser terms than CMEC, i.e. as ‘limited and poor’, and level 2 as ‘only basic understanding of routine mathematics and lack[ing] consistency’ (Saskatchewan Education 1998b: 17).

18. Questions of mathematics content cover topics on numbers and operations, algebra and functions, measurement and geometry, data management and statistics. Questions on problem-solving deal with topics on formulation of problems, production of accurate and approximate solutions, applications of various strategies, the verification of solutions, etc. (CMEC 1997: 5, 11).

19. Percentages appearing for all provinces in performance level 4 are small on the whole, and in level 5 virtually negligible. The one exception is Quebec which consistently placed highest at these levels (CMEC 1997).

20. The study is being conducted through the Saskatchewan Instructional Development Research Unit at the University of Regina. A final report was scheduled for 1999.

21. Given the high percentage of women in teaching and particularly in elementary school teaching, the gender question can hardly be ignored. Wotherspoon (1998) reports that 61% of teachers in Canada (both levels of schooling) were female in 1993. For elementary schooling the figure would be in excess of 70%.

22. According to a recent press release by the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada (1998), several investigators with the Institute are studying the effects of different socio-economic statuses of families on the mathematical abilities of children.

23. In a cabinet shuffle on September, 1998 the incumbent ministers for Education and Health traded places, the latter having been subjected to severe criticism for his policy of hospital closures in the province.

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