Teen pregnancy
May 10, 2006
When I think back to my own years as a teenage mom - pregnant at 16, and completely unprepared for the rigours of child-raising - I still can’t explain why it happened that way. I knew all about birth control, and had a mother who had no problem talking frankly about such matters. But I got pregnant all the same.
We can count it as a victory that Canada’s teen pregnancy rate has dropped significantly since then. While I’ve never doubted the decision to give birth to my dear son, who’s coming 32 in June, I don’t recommend teenage pregnancy as a matter of course.
In 1974 - the year my son was born - Stats Canada recorded a pregnancy rate of 58 per 1,000 in girls ages 15 to 19. By 1997, that had fallen to 43 per 1,000, and then to 31 as of 2004. Good on us for doing something right, because the U.S. rate of 100 per 1,000 in 1974 remains stubbornly the same more than three decades later, and in fact spiked all the way to 120 in the early 1990s.
But there’s an untold story about the differences between yesterday and today for Canadian girls, and the news isn’t nearly as good.
For one, Canadian teenagers are now more likely to have abortions than they are to give birth. Ninety-six per cent of them are single girls when they arrive for the procedure. Years into the so-called sexual revolution, the sad legacy of unexpected pregnancy is still a girl’s problem to sort out.
Nor has life gotten easier for the girls who do choose to have their babies. I know from my own experience that in fact, things have gotten considerably worse, largely because boys and men are no longer held to any standard of responsibility around pregnancy. If you didn’t know better, you’d think single mothers reproduced single-handedly.
People who hear that I had the first of my three children at the age of 17 often assume that it was tougher being a pregnant teenager in 1974 than it is in 2006. Not a chance.
When I was a teenage mother, I had a husband who worked at the mill in Campbell River while I stayed home and looked after the kids. We had two vehicles, a great house, and at least one holiday a year. I had no idea how to be a mother and a wife, but at least I had a guy who understood that being the father meant something.
These days, four-fifths of Canada’s single-parent families are headed by single mothers. More than a third of them live below the federal low-income cutoff. That’s an improvement over 10 years ago, when 58 per cent of them did. But it’s no 1974.
And while it’s great that fewer single mothers and their families are living in poverty, 36 per cent of them still are. Compare that to just two per cent of seniors, and seven per cent of two-parent families. Being a single mom in our country is a serious ticket to poverty.
Girls sometimes get pregnant for reasons that have nothing to do with knowledge of birth control methods, a point I proved in my own life 32 years ago. But that’s not to diminish the importance of keeping girls informed about birth control and sexuality. Avoiding unwanted pregnancy in the first place ought to always be the ultimate goal.
But once children are born, much of what ails Canada’s single moms could be solved through a drastic refit of the country’s family policies. A single mother of average circumstance simply isn’t going to be as financially comfortable as a double-income family, and will pay out a vastly higher percentage of her household income on childcare costs. She ought to be eligible for any number of tax breaks, job-related daycare benefits and temporary allowances to correct for that imbalance.
She’d be even better off if the father of her child stuck around more often. I mean no disrespect to single fathers and other fine dads, of which there are many. But the tough circumstances facing a significant number of teenage and single moms in Canada these days is all about fathers who have abdicated their responsibility.
In 1974, that really wasn’t an option. The term “shotgun wedding” was still heard from time to time, and there was a general expectation in the community that when a guy got a girl pregnant, he married her. Twice divorced, I’m in no position to tout a return of old-fashioned values. But when exactly did we decide that it was OK for our young men to walk away from their responsibility as fathers?
Life goes on even for teenage mothers, and sometimes it doesn’t turn out half-bad. But the lot of a young mom shouldn’t have to be this tough, nor fathers free to go missing in action.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Do something
May 5, 2006
Some of my family members think I write too much about street issues. Maybe. But somebody has to.
One of these days, our children’s children will be struggling to get out from under the social disaster in their city centres, and they’ll order up a royal commission that will lead straight back to us, making one mistake after another in the final years of the 21st century.
I just want to my part to get us thinking about that while there’s still hope of changing things.
Were this a roadway falling apart beneath our feet, we would act quickly and decisively. We’d argue about the costs of the fixup and put off repairs as long as we could - that seems to be human nature - but we’d never let things deteriorate too far. Nobody likes a bumpy, dangerous road.
But bad roads are easier to think about than people whose lives are falling apart. Even though both represent a major problem, the forward thinking and common wisdom that keeps our roads in good repair have yet to become guiding principles of our social endeavours. We’ve been appallingly bad at having social policy of any kind, and even worse at doing any of it consistently. We’ve been adding fuel to the fire for more than 20 years now, so no small wonder that a firestorm is building on the horizon.
Every now and then, you still hear people reminisce of a time when a person could leave their front door unlocked without concern. When downtown visitors didn’t have to worry about someone trying to sell them drugs as they passed by.. When things were “different.”
What has changed since those kinder, gentler times? Us. Everything. The food we eat. The places where our goods come from. The kind of work we do. The world we see on television, and on-line. The number of children we have. The number of times we marry.
Even if we’d been paying attention these last few decades as to what all that change was doing to people, we’d still have had our work cut out for us just to keep up. But in fact, we weren’t paying attention. We weren’t doing anything for long enough to know if it worked, and mostly we weren’t doing anything at all. With the exception of short bursts of doing the right thing - the late-1980s Victoria Health Project comes to mind - we have done virtually nothing for years on numerous social fronts.
If you haven’t been to Streetlink, I recommend that you go. Volunteer. Talk to the people. Spend a few months taking in the environment, and get a sense of what’s going on among the people who frequent the place.
There was a time when a number of them would have been housed in institutions. That’s all over, wiped out back in the 1980s and never really replaced. You can argue the right and wrong of having institutions, but there’s no arguing that the people who used to go to such places now routinely land on the street.
We’ve slashed housing budgets and ignored aboriginal issues. We’ve cut welfare, and stumbled over our child-welfare policies to the point of inadvertently destroying untold thousands of lives by setting in motion a series of disastrous events. We’ve left people to stew in their tragic, debilitating addictions.
Our “hand up” is now a meager, mean one, and the lot of a single parent on assistance is increasingly grim. With that single act, we open the door for another generation that will struggle to thrive, and widen the chasm a little further between rich and poor. We’ve spent great wads of cash and talked up a storm even while barely figuring a single thing out, even while the problems have been multiplying right before our eyes.
We’re neck deep in potholes. And we’re still standing around blaming it all on Streetlink.
We can always pin it on government if we want. It’s so much easier than coming to grips with our collective inertia. I wish it was the government’ fault, too, because then I could still believe in elections as a cure for what ails us.
But really, it’s us. We’ve failed to see the utter disaster of our ways. We got so caught up in our own concerns that we forgot to apply even a fraction of the stewardship given to environmental causes to the vital work of sustaining our people.
Were we to start doing things right tomorrow, my grandchildren’s generation just might be looking back at this one with gratitude for the positive changes we set in motion for them. Some changes would come quickly, but well-managed social policy needs to be looking at least 20 years ahead. We can be the generation that changes the world.
Or we can continue to wait for somebody else to do something about that, and leave it to future generations to pay the steep price. Some legacy.
May 5, 2006
Some of my family members think I write too much about street issues. Maybe. But somebody has to.
One of these days, our children’s children will be struggling to get out from under the social disaster in their city centres, and they’ll order up a royal commission that will lead straight back to us, making one mistake after another in the final years of the 21st century.
I just want to my part to get us thinking about that while there’s still hope of changing things.
Were this a roadway falling apart beneath our feet, we would act quickly and decisively. We’d argue about the costs of the fixup and put off repairs as long as we could - that seems to be human nature - but we’d never let things deteriorate too far. Nobody likes a bumpy, dangerous road.
But bad roads are easier to think about than people whose lives are falling apart. Even though both represent a major problem, the forward thinking and common wisdom that keeps our roads in good repair have yet to become guiding principles of our social endeavours. We’ve been appallingly bad at having social policy of any kind, and even worse at doing any of it consistently. We’ve been adding fuel to the fire for more than 20 years now, so no small wonder that a firestorm is building on the horizon.
Every now and then, you still hear people reminisce of a time when a person could leave their front door unlocked without concern. When downtown visitors didn’t have to worry about someone trying to sell them drugs as they passed by.. When things were “different.”
What has changed since those kinder, gentler times? Us. Everything. The food we eat. The places where our goods come from. The kind of work we do. The world we see on television, and on-line. The number of children we have. The number of times we marry.
Even if we’d been paying attention these last few decades as to what all that change was doing to people, we’d still have had our work cut out for us just to keep up. But in fact, we weren’t paying attention. We weren’t doing anything for long enough to know if it worked, and mostly we weren’t doing anything at all. With the exception of short bursts of doing the right thing - the late-1980s Victoria Health Project comes to mind - we have done virtually nothing for years on numerous social fronts.
If you haven’t been to Streetlink, I recommend that you go. Volunteer. Talk to the people. Spend a few months taking in the environment, and get a sense of what’s going on among the people who frequent the place.
There was a time when a number of them would have been housed in institutions. That’s all over, wiped out back in the 1980s and never really replaced. You can argue the right and wrong of having institutions, but there’s no arguing that the people who used to go to such places now routinely land on the street.
We’ve slashed housing budgets and ignored aboriginal issues. We’ve cut welfare, and stumbled over our child-welfare policies to the point of inadvertently destroying untold thousands of lives by setting in motion a series of disastrous events. We’ve left people to stew in their tragic, debilitating addictions.
Our “hand up” is now a meager, mean one, and the lot of a single parent on assistance is increasingly grim. With that single act, we open the door for another generation that will struggle to thrive, and widen the chasm a little further between rich and poor. We’ve spent great wads of cash and talked up a storm even while barely figuring a single thing out, even while the problems have been multiplying right before our eyes.
We’re neck deep in potholes. And we’re still standing around blaming it all on Streetlink.
We can always pin it on government if we want. It’s so much easier than coming to grips with our collective inertia. I wish it was the government’ fault, too, because then I could still believe in elections as a cure for what ails us.
But really, it’s us. We’ve failed to see the utter disaster of our ways. We got so caught up in our own concerns that we forgot to apply even a fraction of the stewardship given to environmental causes to the vital work of sustaining our people.
Were we to start doing things right tomorrow, my grandchildren’s generation just might be looking back at this one with gratitude for the positive changes we set in motion for them. Some changes would come quickly, but well-managed social policy needs to be looking at least 20 years ahead. We can be the generation that changes the world.
Or we can continue to wait for somebody else to do something about that, and leave it to future generations to pay the steep price. Some legacy.
It's not the milk
April 29, 2006
Don’t get me wrong - I enjoy milk products as much as the next person. I’m very fond of cheese and butter, and cream in my morning coffee.
But the dairy industry’s relentless drive to convince us that milk is essential to human life really does get to be a bit much sometimes. Like this week, when the news was full of stories that not drinking enough milk during pregnancy was tantamount to smoking in terms of its impact on birth weight.
In fairness, CTV did mention that the study - published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal - was partially funded by the Dairy Farmers of Canada. But most news outlets didn’t note that detail. An average reader would likely conclude from the overall coverage that any pregnant woman who really cared about her child should be drinking plenty of milk.
In fact, sufficient Vitamin D was actually what made the difference in birth weight in the study of 279 pregnant women. The study, however, looked only at milk, noting slightly lower birthweights among the women who drank less than a cup a day.
“This is an important finding, because increasing numbers of women are restricting milk consumption during pregnancy,” noted the researchers, professors from Calgary and McGill universities.
Fears of weight gain, “self-diagnosed lactose intolerance,” and a belief that allergies in children may be linked to a woman’s pre-natal milk consumption are putting people off milk, say the researchers. They called for Canadian doctors to emphasize the importance of milk to their pregnant patients.
Indeed, fewer than 15 per cent of Canadian women drink cow’s milk. Milk sales across Western Canada are in decline. Were cow’s milk really the elixir of life, we’d be heading for a health crisis.
Fortunately, it isn’t. Milk has healthy properties, sure, and a lot of people love the taste of it. But you don’t have to be a biology genius to grasp that no species would evolve to be dependent on the breast milk of another species. We might like milk, but we don’t need it.
I admit to a certain bias, having not consumed more than 10 glasses of milk - and even then, all of them probably chocolate-flavoured - since emerging from my milk-mandatory childhood. “I always made you drink milk!” my mother often reminds me, and I remind her in turn that my compliance didn’t mean that I actually liked the stuff.
To each her own, however. Like I said, I eat plenty of other kinds of dairy products. But a study that clearly sets out to scare pregnant women into drinking more milk - well, that’s just wrong.
Research funded by industry interests is nothing new in Canada. Almost all research these days, including that done at universities, is funded at least in part by somebody with a business interest in the outcome.
So no surprises that the milk study concluded that the way to ensure a better birthweight for infants was for pregnant women to drink more milk - an extra cup a day. Wouldn’t that turn out to be a most perfect development for an industry with a major product line in decline? If every pregnant woman could be convinced that a lack of milk was virtually as harmful as smoking to her unborn child, milk markets would boom around the world.
What are the unbiased facts around Vitamin D? That turns out to be a tough question to answer, what with the Vitamin D supplement industry also hard at work these days spinning the health benefits of higher doses.
Once upon a time, the amount of sunshine we got in a day was all we needed. Our bodies produce Vitamin D in abundance when our skin is exposed to sunlight for at least 15 minutes daily. We’d have to drink more than 110 glasses of milk a day to get the same hit of Vitamin D that a little bit of sunshine can deliver.
But these days, sunshine is the enemy, and sunscreen the norm. People living in northern countries such as Canada generally don’t see enough sunny days anyway, particularly in the winter. Obesity is also thought to be interfering with people’s Vitamin D production, likely due to fat stores below the skin soaking up the vitamin before it can make it in to the rest of the body. Some researchers suspect that more than half of North Americans are Vitamin-D deficient.
Then again, none of that is a sure thing either.
“The reality is that we do not know what the Vitamin D requirement during pregnancy is,” noted independent researchers Bruce Hollis and Carol Wagner, of the Medical University of South Carolina, in their review of the milk study. “For that matter, we do not know the requirement for the general population, either.”
In the meantime, keep drinking your milk. Just don’t let them tell you that you have to.
April 29, 2006
Don’t get me wrong - I enjoy milk products as much as the next person. I’m very fond of cheese and butter, and cream in my morning coffee.
But the dairy industry’s relentless drive to convince us that milk is essential to human life really does get to be a bit much sometimes. Like this week, when the news was full of stories that not drinking enough milk during pregnancy was tantamount to smoking in terms of its impact on birth weight.
In fairness, CTV did mention that the study - published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal - was partially funded by the Dairy Farmers of Canada. But most news outlets didn’t note that detail. An average reader would likely conclude from the overall coverage that any pregnant woman who really cared about her child should be drinking plenty of milk.
In fact, sufficient Vitamin D was actually what made the difference in birth weight in the study of 279 pregnant women. The study, however, looked only at milk, noting slightly lower birthweights among the women who drank less than a cup a day.
“This is an important finding, because increasing numbers of women are restricting milk consumption during pregnancy,” noted the researchers, professors from Calgary and McGill universities.
Fears of weight gain, “self-diagnosed lactose intolerance,” and a belief that allergies in children may be linked to a woman’s pre-natal milk consumption are putting people off milk, say the researchers. They called for Canadian doctors to emphasize the importance of milk to their pregnant patients.
Indeed, fewer than 15 per cent of Canadian women drink cow’s milk. Milk sales across Western Canada are in decline. Were cow’s milk really the elixir of life, we’d be heading for a health crisis.
Fortunately, it isn’t. Milk has healthy properties, sure, and a lot of people love the taste of it. But you don’t have to be a biology genius to grasp that no species would evolve to be dependent on the breast milk of another species. We might like milk, but we don’t need it.
I admit to a certain bias, having not consumed more than 10 glasses of milk - and even then, all of them probably chocolate-flavoured - since emerging from my milk-mandatory childhood. “I always made you drink milk!” my mother often reminds me, and I remind her in turn that my compliance didn’t mean that I actually liked the stuff.
To each her own, however. Like I said, I eat plenty of other kinds of dairy products. But a study that clearly sets out to scare pregnant women into drinking more milk - well, that’s just wrong.
Research funded by industry interests is nothing new in Canada. Almost all research these days, including that done at universities, is funded at least in part by somebody with a business interest in the outcome.
So no surprises that the milk study concluded that the way to ensure a better birthweight for infants was for pregnant women to drink more milk - an extra cup a day. Wouldn’t that turn out to be a most perfect development for an industry with a major product line in decline? If every pregnant woman could be convinced that a lack of milk was virtually as harmful as smoking to her unborn child, milk markets would boom around the world.
What are the unbiased facts around Vitamin D? That turns out to be a tough question to answer, what with the Vitamin D supplement industry also hard at work these days spinning the health benefits of higher doses.
Once upon a time, the amount of sunshine we got in a day was all we needed. Our bodies produce Vitamin D in abundance when our skin is exposed to sunlight for at least 15 minutes daily. We’d have to drink more than 110 glasses of milk a day to get the same hit of Vitamin D that a little bit of sunshine can deliver.
But these days, sunshine is the enemy, and sunscreen the norm. People living in northern countries such as Canada generally don’t see enough sunny days anyway, particularly in the winter. Obesity is also thought to be interfering with people’s Vitamin D production, likely due to fat stores below the skin soaking up the vitamin before it can make it in to the rest of the body. Some researchers suspect that more than half of North Americans are Vitamin-D deficient.
Then again, none of that is a sure thing either.
“The reality is that we do not know what the Vitamin D requirement during pregnancy is,” noted independent researchers Bruce Hollis and Carol Wagner, of the Medical University of South Carolina, in their review of the milk study. “For that matter, we do not know the requirement for the general population, either.”
In the meantime, keep drinking your milk. Just don’t let them tell you that you have to.
Democracy
April 25, 2006
We don’t devote too much time in our daily lives to caring for our democracy, in Canada or anywhere else in the world. Maybe we think we don’t have to.
But with the news this month that only a third of Canadians believe they’re being governed by “the will of the people” - well, that’s a pretty strong sign that we do. And it’s not just Canada. The figures weren’t much different in several other long-time democracies elsewhere in the world whose citizens were asked the same questions. All over the world, people are feeling disconnected from their governments.
The questions about democracy were part of a much larger global poll that Gallup International conducted a year ago in 68 countries, news of which broke this month with the release of a book on the findings: Voices of the People 2006. Almost 54,000 citizens took part in the poll - the largest in history.
Around the world, almost 80 per cent of those polled said democracy is the best governance system. In Canada, 85 per cent of us affirmed our support for “rule by the people.”
But only 30 per cent of respondents thought that they were actually reaping the benefits of democracy, or being ruled by the will of the people. In Canada, barely a third of us believed that the will of the people was guiding our goverments.
Germany came in at a truly disturbing 18 per cent. The French rated the state of their country’s democracy almost as dismally, at 26 per cent. Mexicans (20 per cent) and Russians (18 per cent) weren’t any happier. Even in the countries that scored the highest on that question - Israel and Kosovo - fully half of the population still didn’t believe they were governed by the will of the people.
A third of Canadians disagreed when asked if Canada had free and fair elections. So did almost that many in France and Israel. In the U.S., almost half said their elections didn’t meet that test.
That’s not good. We appear to love democratic principles, but are clearly becoming convinced that our countries are no longer governing themselves in ways that adhere to those principles. Democracy is on the ropes.
“The gap between those two perceptions. . . leads us to the hypothesis that many mature democracies in the world are undergoing a deep disillusionment about the ability of democracy to deliver rule by the will of the people,” said Marc Leger, the Canadian who supervised the global poll.
The original intent of the Greeks who invented it as a form of governance was that every man (women and slaves were excluded) would participate directly in all decision-making. The Greeks took the literal meaning of “democracy” seriously in governing their ancient city-states.
Other nations would follow the Greeks’ lead, but often with significant modifications. The men who created the United States stopped short of full-on “rule of the people,” and chose instead to elect representatives to run their country. Canada went with the party system, in which whatever political party wins the popular vote gets to declare their leader prime minister.
On the one hand, the voting processes of democracy have never in history been as inclusive as they are now. More of us have the right to vote than ever before , and discriminatory practices against women, ethnic minorities and other disenfranchised groups have largely ended. In terms of providing the most number of people with the opportunity to vote, we’re doing a lot better than the Greeks.
But on the other hand, very little is democratic about our governments beyond that brief casting of votes every four or five years. Royal commissions, inquiries and legislative committees come to town to ask our opinions every now and then, but government rarely acts on our advice. Big money is spent and major decisions made, and the public by and large has no idea about any of it. We have abdicated.
At the time of the Gallup poll last year, Canadians were coping with the grim revelations that were surfacing daily during the Gomery inquiry. Given that time frame, what’s most surprising is that the Gallup pollsters found anybody at all in those terrible weeks who still believed that the will of the people governed our decision-makers.
That’s not to say that all is lost. Less fortunate countries would go to war for a chance at the democratic rights that Canadians enjoy. We’re still a really great country for the majority of the world.
But we can’t go on dreaming idealistically about democracies while our actual governance drifts further and further from the people. We’ve got to seek change. We’ve got to revitalize this most vital of systems. We owe it to all the people who will come behind us as the centuries unfold.
History has shown us in clear and devastating terms the price that nations pay for hubris. Canada won’t be any different. Our only hold on democracy is the will of the people not to let it go.
April 25, 2006
We don’t devote too much time in our daily lives to caring for our democracy, in Canada or anywhere else in the world. Maybe we think we don’t have to.
But with the news this month that only a third of Canadians believe they’re being governed by “the will of the people” - well, that’s a pretty strong sign that we do. And it’s not just Canada. The figures weren’t much different in several other long-time democracies elsewhere in the world whose citizens were asked the same questions. All over the world, people are feeling disconnected from their governments.
The questions about democracy were part of a much larger global poll that Gallup International conducted a year ago in 68 countries, news of which broke this month with the release of a book on the findings: Voices of the People 2006. Almost 54,000 citizens took part in the poll - the largest in history.
Around the world, almost 80 per cent of those polled said democracy is the best governance system. In Canada, 85 per cent of us affirmed our support for “rule by the people.”
But only 30 per cent of respondents thought that they were actually reaping the benefits of democracy, or being ruled by the will of the people. In Canada, barely a third of us believed that the will of the people was guiding our goverments.
Germany came in at a truly disturbing 18 per cent. The French rated the state of their country’s democracy almost as dismally, at 26 per cent. Mexicans (20 per cent) and Russians (18 per cent) weren’t any happier. Even in the countries that scored the highest on that question - Israel and Kosovo - fully half of the population still didn’t believe they were governed by the will of the people.
A third of Canadians disagreed when asked if Canada had free and fair elections. So did almost that many in France and Israel. In the U.S., almost half said their elections didn’t meet that test.
That’s not good. We appear to love democratic principles, but are clearly becoming convinced that our countries are no longer governing themselves in ways that adhere to those principles. Democracy is on the ropes.
“The gap between those two perceptions. . . leads us to the hypothesis that many mature democracies in the world are undergoing a deep disillusionment about the ability of democracy to deliver rule by the will of the people,” said Marc Leger, the Canadian who supervised the global poll.
The original intent of the Greeks who invented it as a form of governance was that every man (women and slaves were excluded) would participate directly in all decision-making. The Greeks took the literal meaning of “democracy” seriously in governing their ancient city-states.
Other nations would follow the Greeks’ lead, but often with significant modifications. The men who created the United States stopped short of full-on “rule of the people,” and chose instead to elect representatives to run their country. Canada went with the party system, in which whatever political party wins the popular vote gets to declare their leader prime minister.
On the one hand, the voting processes of democracy have never in history been as inclusive as they are now. More of us have the right to vote than ever before , and discriminatory practices against women, ethnic minorities and other disenfranchised groups have largely ended. In terms of providing the most number of people with the opportunity to vote, we’re doing a lot better than the Greeks.
But on the other hand, very little is democratic about our governments beyond that brief casting of votes every four or five years. Royal commissions, inquiries and legislative committees come to town to ask our opinions every now and then, but government rarely acts on our advice. Big money is spent and major decisions made, and the public by and large has no idea about any of it. We have abdicated.
At the time of the Gallup poll last year, Canadians were coping with the grim revelations that were surfacing daily during the Gomery inquiry. Given that time frame, what’s most surprising is that the Gallup pollsters found anybody at all in those terrible weeks who still believed that the will of the people governed our decision-makers.
That’s not to say that all is lost. Less fortunate countries would go to war for a chance at the democratic rights that Canadians enjoy. We’re still a really great country for the majority of the world.
But we can’t go on dreaming idealistically about democracies while our actual governance drifts further and further from the people. We’ve got to seek change. We’ve got to revitalize this most vital of systems. We owe it to all the people who will come behind us as the centuries unfold.
History has shown us in clear and devastating terms the price that nations pay for hubris. Canada won’t be any different. Our only hold on democracy is the will of the people not to let it go.
Measuring schools
April 14, 2006
The Fraser Institute and I often differ in our views, but I can’t argue with the think tank’s comments this week that the institute’s annual “best of show” ranking measures only academic performance at B.C. secondary schools, not overall school success.
“The rankings certainly don’t tell the whole story of a school, no question,” said Peter Cowley, who helped put together this week’s report and is director of school performance studies at the Fraser Institute.
The academic performance of a school’s students is obviously an important measure of a successful school, said Cowley, but just one part. And it’s even less of a meaningful measure in terms of knowing whether we’re teaching our students to be good citizens. Scoring well on tests is all well and good, but it takes a lot more than that to build a healthy community.
Are our students growing into good human beings? Are they voting? Healthy? Earning a decent income and sharing their good fortune through fair taxation? Raising their kids to be peaceful, responsible citizens? Connected to community? Surely those are the questions that we need to ask.
But as Cowley pointed out, nobody is measuring for such outcomes. The challenge, then, is to rethink this mild obsession we’ve developed with high-school marks and figure out other ways to gauge whether our schools are successful.
Many of the schools topping the Fraser Institute’s list would probably top a number of other lists, too; they’re just excellent schools, on all fronts. But others would surge ahead in different ways - perhaps as bastions of tolerance and diversity, or of critical thinking and engagement.
Such ideals sound somewhat la-la even to my own ear, but why should that be? Such successes are much more relevant to the ongoing progress of our world than test scores and sports prowess among teenagers, but we cling to those measurements in our schools as if they tell us everything we need to know.
A kid who gets straight As and a scholarship to McMaster’s clearly knows how to perform in school, it’s true. But how are we doing at preparing young people for the world? Are they going to be able to rise to the challenges of their adult years with grace, strength, goodwill and wisdom? Those are big questions to leave to chance. Societies change quickly when their citizens forget to keep an eye on things.
Yes, high-school test scores are part of that, but really quite a small part. Nobody asks you about your high-school grades once you’re out of school. We work ourselves into a lather over the ability of our schools to churn out kids who do well on tests, even though tests of the kind you do at high school are probably never going to be a factor in your life again in adulthood.
Perhaps parents are assumed to be managing the big job of raising good people single-handedly. But schools are powerful socializing forces - our children attend them daily for 13 or more years. A family’s role in raising good human beings can’t be overstated, but we still learn the shape of the world through the schools we attend.
For better or worse, our schools have a powerful influence on the shape of tomorrow’s citizens. Their halls are the incubator for coming generations of leaders, thinkers, criminal minds and immensely troubled people. The lessons we learn in our school years inform us in how we shape our communities, and very little of that will be revealed through our schools’ test scores alone.
Cowley issues an interesting challenge: If B.C. really wants to know which of its schools are successful on fronts beyond test scores, then somebody needs to be asking different questions. I didn’t get the impression it was going to be him - the Fraser Institute has a distinct point of view, and that limits the kinds of statistics it gathers. But other groups and agencies can gather what we need to know. We just need to come up with the questions.
Some of the work is already underway, through community-mapping projects that pair up health and social indicators to measure the overall “wellness” of a particular neighbourhood. To properly gauge school success, we’d need census-style follow-ups of B.C. secondary students that went on for years - school by school, even class by class. We’d end up with a genuinely broad understanding of the impact our schools are having on our young people, in far more detail than the “good grades” model allows for.
Schools that know how to push kids to the top of their academic game deserve recognition for their accomplishments. Excelling academically takes a great deal of effort and focus.
But great schools don’t always have high test scores. Good human beings don’t always get good grades. Academic performance counts, but not for everything.
April 14, 2006
The Fraser Institute and I often differ in our views, but I can’t argue with the think tank’s comments this week that the institute’s annual “best of show” ranking measures only academic performance at B.C. secondary schools, not overall school success.
“The rankings certainly don’t tell the whole story of a school, no question,” said Peter Cowley, who helped put together this week’s report and is director of school performance studies at the Fraser Institute.
The academic performance of a school’s students is obviously an important measure of a successful school, said Cowley, but just one part. And it’s even less of a meaningful measure in terms of knowing whether we’re teaching our students to be good citizens. Scoring well on tests is all well and good, but it takes a lot more than that to build a healthy community.
Are our students growing into good human beings? Are they voting? Healthy? Earning a decent income and sharing their good fortune through fair taxation? Raising their kids to be peaceful, responsible citizens? Connected to community? Surely those are the questions that we need to ask.
But as Cowley pointed out, nobody is measuring for such outcomes. The challenge, then, is to rethink this mild obsession we’ve developed with high-school marks and figure out other ways to gauge whether our schools are successful.
Many of the schools topping the Fraser Institute’s list would probably top a number of other lists, too; they’re just excellent schools, on all fronts. But others would surge ahead in different ways - perhaps as bastions of tolerance and diversity, or of critical thinking and engagement.
Such ideals sound somewhat la-la even to my own ear, but why should that be? Such successes are much more relevant to the ongoing progress of our world than test scores and sports prowess among teenagers, but we cling to those measurements in our schools as if they tell us everything we need to know.
A kid who gets straight As and a scholarship to McMaster’s clearly knows how to perform in school, it’s true. But how are we doing at preparing young people for the world? Are they going to be able to rise to the challenges of their adult years with grace, strength, goodwill and wisdom? Those are big questions to leave to chance. Societies change quickly when their citizens forget to keep an eye on things.
Yes, high-school test scores are part of that, but really quite a small part. Nobody asks you about your high-school grades once you’re out of school. We work ourselves into a lather over the ability of our schools to churn out kids who do well on tests, even though tests of the kind you do at high school are probably never going to be a factor in your life again in adulthood.
Perhaps parents are assumed to be managing the big job of raising good people single-handedly. But schools are powerful socializing forces - our children attend them daily for 13 or more years. A family’s role in raising good human beings can’t be overstated, but we still learn the shape of the world through the schools we attend.
For better or worse, our schools have a powerful influence on the shape of tomorrow’s citizens. Their halls are the incubator for coming generations of leaders, thinkers, criminal minds and immensely troubled people. The lessons we learn in our school years inform us in how we shape our communities, and very little of that will be revealed through our schools’ test scores alone.
Cowley issues an interesting challenge: If B.C. really wants to know which of its schools are successful on fronts beyond test scores, then somebody needs to be asking different questions. I didn’t get the impression it was going to be him - the Fraser Institute has a distinct point of view, and that limits the kinds of statistics it gathers. But other groups and agencies can gather what we need to know. We just need to come up with the questions.
Some of the work is already underway, through community-mapping projects that pair up health and social indicators to measure the overall “wellness” of a particular neighbourhood. To properly gauge school success, we’d need census-style follow-ups of B.C. secondary students that went on for years - school by school, even class by class. We’d end up with a genuinely broad understanding of the impact our schools are having on our young people, in far more detail than the “good grades” model allows for.
Schools that know how to push kids to the top of their academic game deserve recognition for their accomplishments. Excelling academically takes a great deal of effort and focus.
But great schools don’t always have high test scores. Good human beings don’t always get good grades. Academic performance counts, but not for everything.
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