Decision on data measurement reached after much deliberation
District 16 Department of Education council president and French Second Language Report Commissioner Patricia Lee says the decision as to how best to measure the information provided for the FSL report was reached after much deliberation.
"Within the report, there are some numbers reflected from Grade 4 and Grade 5 that have a little b after them. These numbers are from students at the end of a middle immersion program and the ... people at the department [were told] not to include those — some 140 numbers. That did not happen, so that is why the numbers look like they fluctuate.
"We decided to go ahead and use the numbers as recorded, and report it, but add a footnote to indicate these numbers reflected the group from middle immersion.
"We measured apples to apples and not apples to oranges. We told them, if they wanted us to follow policy 309 — which is what Canadian Parents for French are always quoting that they want the district to follow — we said okay, and that is what we used.
"We did mention in our report that not all districts are following Policy 309 ... We went back to the department and they went back through all their information and identified where the discrepancies were. That is why, when we went through, we compared apples to apples, noting ‘This is what it cost the teachers to teach this; this is how many years; this is what the program cost; and this is how many went through to the end.'"
Lee said what is interesting is that nobody is saying anything about the Core program. They are looking only at early immersion.
"Our results are out there. We have had many other faxes, emails and so on saying that we are right on. We don't need to debate it," said Lee.
She said looking at teacher training was not part of the report's mandate, but throughout the process she said they heard over and over that districts were having a difficult time recruiting.
"We said we believe that teacher training is so important, but ... people just aren't there to do that with and that's why we had a look at sustainability and we had to ask how are we going to sustain this when places like Moncton, Saint John and Fredericton, for example, were having such a difficult time recruiting," said Lee.
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But it does need to be debated, since the decision to abolish was already in place before
Croll/Lee were hired to do the work they did.
But there are some significant observations herein, such as lack of resources. And that, without
doubt, has always been the biggest problem. That said, why would there be better resources
under the newly proposed system? If commitment has not been there by now, why should
anyone believe commitment will be in the future?
Let's not deliver less French to more kids. Let's deliver better French to ALL kids (early and later).