After the Bell: Teaching Tips With a Twist

Frogs and Boiling Water: Talking Declining Academic Scores With Professor John Richards

• The Stunt Brothers • Season 2 • Episode 33

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In Episode 63, Martin & Roy ponder the history making Artemis II space launch with the spacecraft hurtling through space at thousands of kilometres per hour with a malfunctioning toilet. This moment sparks a powerful analogy: in both space travel and teaching, when something goes wrong, you can’t simply stop, you have to keep going. And in the classroom there are times when you know something’s not working properly but are unable to pinpoint the problem or the cause. All the while you must plough ahead, reaching for seemingly unattainable outcomes. To explore this concern, our duo sits down with John Richards, professor at Simon Fraser University and a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute. Together, they unpack troubling trends in declining math, science, and reading scores among Canadian students based on PISA scores.(Programme for International Student Assessment, an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students' knowledge and skills in the areas of reading, mathematics and science.) But as the conversation unfolds, the Stunt Brothers find themselves with more questions than answers. What will the next round of PISA results reveal? What can Canada learn from countries like Finland and Sweden, which have taken bold steps to strengthen their education systems? Meanwhile, the landscape continues to shift. In the United States, AI-powered schools are beginning to emerge, and even the White House has floated ideas about robotic teaching assistants. Others argue for a return to fully analog classrooms and removing technology altogether. In the end, this episode doesn’t offer easy answers but it does ask the right questions.

Learn more at stuntbrothers.ca

Key Topics:

  • Decline in Canadian student scores
  • Long-term trends in education performance
  • Educational quality and teaching standards
  • Impact of technology and AI on learning
  • Societal and cultural influences on education
  • Strategies for addressing educational decline
  • Importance of foundational skills
  • Teacher training and professional standards
  • Role of societal attitudes and family influences
  • Balancing technology with traditional learning methods

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STS With The Stunt Brothers

Speaker 4

After brothers, after brothers. After brothers, the stunt bells. Is that the new name? Say that backwards and then you get wow.

Speaker 3

After the bell, the stunt brothers.

Speaker 4

That's and that's that's what we get. Sometimes it takes two of us to get the show rolling, and it always takes two of us. So what episode is this? This is episode 63 of After the Bell. 63. So then season two, thirty-three? Yes, that's it. Wow. Yeah. And this is where we're online on video with Riverside again. I'm Martin Stuible, along with Roy Hunt. Yeah, and we are the Stunt Brothers and just merrily moving along on our season two here.

Speaker 3

Well, it it's interesting. And now I have to look at myself. There you go. We don't have makeup people. I know you find that hard to believe. Hard to believe.

Speaker 4

We're 95, actually, so we're looking pretty good for it.

Speaker 3

Looking pretty good for 95. Yeah.

Speaker 4

So how you how you been doing? How is Mr. Hunt doing?

Speaker 3

Uh I've been doing well. Yeah. Um caught up in the uh the great weather that we've been having. It's been nice. Spring has finally come. Yes. And uh you kind of break from all the rain. And with that great weather, uh south of us, they had a a rocket launch.

Speaker 4

They did. They did. And and I must say it's bringing back some of my boyhood joys of the Apollo missions and all those things that I was just too young to really appreciate, but I was aware of them, and now it's been 50 years, and Artemis is going back to the moon. Going go going back to the moon. Doing a slingshot around the moon. Yeah. Right. And uh with a Canadian. Yes. Yeah. Hansen is the Canadian. Great. I I've seen him interviewed a couple of times on CBC, just a real great ambassador for Canada. Like he really is, just a really seems like a good, kind-hearted bear of a man. He's he's tall. I think he's pushing six seven feet or something. He's a very b very large man, just so well trained, so well educated, so thoughtful, so kind, and it's just wonderful to see him there as uh as they make their way around the moon.

Speaker 3

Yes.

Speaker 4

So you've been watching it. I've been watching it a bit. Yeah.

Speaker 3

And uh, you know, I was interested in knowing uh really how fast are they going through space once they get escape the Earth's atmosphere. So they are traveling uh approximately 1,913 kilometers an hour.

Speaker 4

And once they get to that speed, they're actually not using any power anymore. First they use the moon, first they sorry, first they use the earth to go slingshot around, and then they use the gravity of the moon, and that's what's powering them, right? It's remarkable to do something that really, you know, Newton and Einstein talked about in theory, and now here it is in practice.

Speaker 3

Well, and what what I'm really interested in in knowing is as they're traveling at this great speed, how are they solving their plumbing issues?

Speaker 4

They have had trouble with the toilet.

Speaker 3

They have, they have.

Speaker 4

But what am I gonna say? Occam's razor, my friend. Occam's razor, right? It got frozen, so what do you do? What do you do to unfreeze something when there's some I think some urine has been blocking it because it's frozen.

Speaker 3

Well, that's one that's one theory. They they've tried it, but they're still having a bit of a problem. But yes, because they they uh release the urine outside of the spaceship.

Speaker 4

Yeah, and they also and they also turn the spaceship towards the sun to try to melt it, right?

Speaker 3

Wow. But they still have another plug happening in there. And it's amazing to think, you know, there's five of you in this small capsule traveling at this incredible speed, and you you can't pull over to the side of the road and say, let's fix this. No. You just have to do it while you're moving.

Speaker 4

You're kind of like, yeah, you're the show has started, you're on. You gotta you can't just call someone up and get a plumber in there, right? Right. Kind of reminds me of something.

Speaker 3

Yeah. It's kind of you know, except uh instead of five people in a capsule, it's maybe 27 people in a room.

Speaker 4

Yeah, it's just like teaching, really, right? Right? You things are going on, the show has started, things go wrong, and you just gotta deal with it on the fly.

Speaker 3

You can't it's it's hard to stop the machine once it gets rolling, and uh so you have to pivot. And well, I'm glad we don't have to deal with toilet problems in the classroom.

Speaker 4

But we have other things going on and I'm gonna bring it back to Earth and go there. We kind of have to pivot in in the sense of what looking at the education system, and we've seen things that on the fly we go, there's something going on in this class. We've noticed things over the years. We've talked about it. It's the attention, we've talked about Andrew Cantaruti, it's other issues, is it too much technology? But a lot of it has to do with also the scores that are happening in terms of science, math, and reading.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I I like to use the analogy of you know, trying to find a problem with your car. You're in your car, you hear this weird squeak, you shut off your air conditioning, you shut off the radio, and you just listen and and you know something's not quite right, but you can't put your finger on it, but you know there's gotta be some kind of a change that has to happen.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 3

And I think both of us towards the end of our career, seeing the complexities of the classroom, I would say as the problems started to increase, things were tossed at teachers. That squeaky noise became louder and louder and louder at the end of my career, but we just couldn't figure out, or we can't figure out, or we need to figure out what is that thing.

Introduction to Professor John Richards

Speaker 4

Yeah, and I think to focus on one thing in this episode is to look at the PISA scores, which is a recognized test around the world comparing countries. And there are those in the academic world that have looked at it, they've looked at Canada scores, which have always been in the top ten. We've always done very well, but there seems to be slight dipping going on. And there were certain co COVID things and things that happened there, but some say it's beyond that, right? And I think it wouldn't hurt to maybe talk to someone and uh talk to what we discovered was a professor, John Richards, who's with SFU. He also is a fellow with the C.D. Howe Institute, and he's written a paper just about how it's just like that proverbial frog in the water that's starting to boil, right? It's slowly getting worse. And sometimes when things are slow, we don't react fast enough. And I think he and his colleagues are trying to bring attention to this dip in Canadian scores. So I, you know, he's not gonna be the entire voice on this, but I think I would like to hear what he has to say in his view, looking back on these scores and maybe where we're headed, and maybe we'll learn some things. Maybe we'll get more questions than we thought, right? Which is always a good thing too. Sometimes I find the best podcasts are those that open up new questions that allow us then to want to bring in more people to try to get to the nitty-gritty of this. Yes. So let's go on a field trip. No homework this week. We got a field trip with Professor John Richards. Here we are with Professor John Richards. Thank you, John, for joining us. We're excited to welcome a guest who brings both deep expertise and a national perspective to one of the most important conversations in education right now. John Richards is a trained economist and professor at Simon Fraser University and holds the Roger Phillips Chair in Social Policy at the C.D. Howe Institute, where his work is focused extensively on educational policy, indigenous issues, climate change. I just read an excellent article by you, John, on climate change, and economic inequality in Canada. In addition, he is undertaking teaching and research in Bangladesh over the last dec last three decades. His current research focus is education in South Asia. He is the co-author of the Political Economy of Education in South Asia, published by the University of Toronto Press and reprinted in Bangladesh. His most recent activity is as one of three who prepared a final report on an ambitious NGO project to reintegrate 70,000 children who had dropped out in an early grade or had never enrolled. I'm hoping maybe at the end we can get a bit into that because it could be a whole other podcast, so we'll see, but that that would be fun. Over the years, John has become one of the country's most respected voices when it comes to student achievement and long-term trends in literacy, numeracy, and learning outcomes. I find his research doesn't just sit on the shelf. It actively shapes public debate and challenges educators, policymakers, and communities to think differently about what's happening in our classrooms. Today we've invited John on to help us unpack a growing concern, the decline we're seeing in math, science, and reading scores among Canadian students. What's behind it? How worried should we be? And most importantly, what can actually be done? John, welcome to After the Bell.

Speaker

Thank you for flattering.

Speaker 3

So because this is a podcast about teaching and about teaching issues, I have to ask you something about teaching. And the question I want to ask you is do you have a favorite teacher from your past that had an impact on you?

Speaker

This will take up half the hour, which would I say? I've worked for the last two decades of my academic role and the manager director of that particular public policy school, she was very good. Now that's not really what you want.

Speaker 4

Is there someone like go back even to your to secondary school?

Discussion on PISA Scores and Educational Decline

Speaker

No, no, no, of course, of course. I'm too old to go back and failed the first.

Speaker 3

So K-12 teachers report that students are often two to three grades levels below reading and in in reading and math, and they they're constantly trying to catch up students to where they should be. Does this align with the data that you you're seeing from uh your PISA scores?

Teaching Methods and Foundational Skills

Speaker

The PISA scores, by the way, I I do think PISA is an excellent organization. Uh it's got about 80 partners across the world, and uh they don't tell you exactly how to teach. I mean, that's not their business. So you we should use their data, but that doesn't solve the problem of how you train teachers. The one interesting piece of information that you get out of the last PISA round of 2022, I don't soon will be the results of 2025 round, but there was a big difference in terms of up over the average is Quebec. And what is the probable reason for Quebec is that their secondary level teachers have got more math under their belt as becoming teachers than on average in the other provinces, and that's probably the best explanation.

Speaker 4

Do you feel that there's been some changing in the way we teach math that it's become more inquiry-based, right? Oh, where let's discover the answer rather than learning we need to get some of the just the hard nitty-gritty down pat first.

Speaker

Well, I mean, I'm I admit that I'm an old-fashioned person on this stuff. You probably know Anna Stokey. Does that name ring a bell? Yes, it does. Okay, so to your audience, not everyone will know who Anna Stokey is. She works, she teaches in University of Winnipeg, North End Winnipeg, equivalent of East Vancouver. Most of her students are weak. And she blames mostly on teachers not being willing to do the teaching. And that it is silly to use the discovery math issues. She's very much conservative on this. And she's all in favor of memorizing the multiplication tables, for example. And she believes in doing lots and lots and lots of questions to do from sub subtraction through to multiplication and division and addition.

Speaker 4

And I found like even things like memorizing your times table, it's kind of been pushed up, up, up into later grades. Like it used to be something like, you know, grade three or so, you should know your times table. But now it's, you know, it's it's suggested you work on them, develop them, but there's no hard time where they say, you know, you need to know your times tables. By this grade. Yeah. And I find that if you don't have some kind of core understanding of something, it doesn't matter what you do, right? And you can pull out that calculator. But if you look at the answer and you don't know whether it's right or wrong, you're not really learning.

Impact of Technology on Education

Speaker

Well, even old people like me can remember our multiplication tables. Lastly, what is seven times nine? Sixty-three pops up without having to wait for the brain to work. So, I mean, a lot of this stuff should be at the lower grades, kids under age ten, flexible brains, and most kids can do basic arithmetic.

Speaker 4

Yes. Do you do you worry about, especially now, because you know, we seem to almost be going in the other direction with AI and all these new things that, you know, rather than going back to what you're talking about, we're actually going further away in the other direction.

Speaker

So I I I agree. I mean, I had a very pessimistic view of this. The math is one component. The moment that students can get hold of a mobile phone cell phone, they can don't have to learn anything. And the worst of it is writing. I mean it is so damn easy now to do it via AI.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker

And on the one on the what a good second level teacher in literature in grades eleven and twelve. It's a magnificent contribution to that kid's education. Organizing, writing it down, you're not expecting it to be a brilliant, brilliant thesis at grade 11. But doing that is worth doing.

Speaker 4

I like the way you wrote in one of your papers, like grade 10, having to mark those essays is pretty hard. They're not very good, but they shouldn't be good. They're learning. And it's better to me. Learning is messy. It is messy. And yes. I've ever even heard like, and I have to say, for most classrooms in elementary, I think they're still doing it the old-fashioned way when it comes to writing. But I have heard of some uh schools in in America mainly, where they'll use AI to generate ideas for their stories in elementary school to come up with the kind of the to me, that's taking away the cognitive ability of your brain to do the work and you've offloaded it to this this computer. And that is like it's one thing if you've got the skills and you're using it. And you're if you're uh working on a trip to Mars and you're a physicist and you're using a calculator, well, that's okay. You've got the skills and it's a tool, right? But you need to have developed those skills first. One when the paper that I guess first got my attention that you wrote was the case of the boiling frogs, right?

Speaker

Credit for that title is not mine.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker

It's a longtime friend who works at the CD Howe. He said he went over the weekend, he didn't like the title that we were fiddling with, and he came up with the boiling frogs. So he gets at least half the credit for that particular.

Speaker 4

And it's good. And I f I first heard it, I think, when I was at university in the late 80s, and Dave Suzuki came to speak about what we're facing.

Speaker

He had boiling frogs, by the way.

Speaker 4

Yeah, but that was his big comparison to what's happening to the climate at the time. We're like frog and water that's slowly hotter and hotter versus when if you throw the frog in boiling water, it's gonna jump out, right?

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 4

So why did you why do you think that? It is it kind of like you see a was there, has there been a quiet decline in in the PISA scores? It's not sudden. It's not like Canada suddenly seen their scores drop, but it's been a slow drop, and people maybe don't take it seriously enough.

Speaker

That's right. And the way PISA was set up, three subjects reading, math, science, they they benchmarked. And what that means is that among the countries at that time, in the first decade of this century, there were about 35 OE OECD members. And so they just they stabled the they used as the benchmark, 500 was the average and with a hundred uh points as the standard deviation, and so that was the benchmark. Canada was well above the benchmark, so they put it at 500, and we were around 530 in all three of the disciplines, reading, math, science. They benchmarked in the first round reading, the second in math, and the third in science, and we have slowly declined. Now, we shouldn't get our and get too passionate on this point. We have declined slowly. We're still fifth or sixth among the OECD member countries. But it is a disturbing aspect. The declines between the 2018 and the 2022 round, that decline is not particularly interesting because there was so much chaos due to COVID-19.

Regional Educational Disparities

Speaker 4

Of course, yes. So when was the biggest decline?

Speaker

It was 2018 round to 2022. It was about 15 points.

Speaker 3

So i is this as kind of a national decline in all of in these three areas? Uh, I know you did mention about mathematics as a regional area in Quebec, maybe be not being as as um as bad in compared to other regions because the uh the teachers there are are required to to have more math skills.

Speaker

That's probably the explanation. It's probably the explanation. But it's messy. A lot of life is messy. Yes. The pro ten provinces can each make their own decisions about when and where we shut down schools.

Speaker 4

Is there were there provinces that fared worse? Oh, yes.

Speaker

No, I mean that one of the questions that you put to me was what worries me? Yes. And if you look at the PISA 2020 math, the four big province, big provinces, big population provinces, BC, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, Quebec is by far the best. But even the lowest, and I think it's actually BC, but that's a very small difference between Ontario and BC, all of the big population results are better than any of the small population provinces. So if you want to worry about something, there's lots to worry about. Newfoundland is actually below and statistically uh statistically satisfying any good statistician, it's below the OECD average. So whereas Quebec is at keen as by memory was what is good. And whereas Newfoundland is down at below 460. That is half a standard deviation. Any theory why? I don't have a good theory on this. Maybe salaries are lower relative to those in the big population provinces. Maybe we ought to be looking at some working together among the four Atlantic and two uh weak small provinces, Saskatchewan and El and Manitoba.

Speaker 4

Now you you you said, I mean, of course, it was chaotic times with COVID. How do we how do we know that this is all not because of the declines in teaching that happened during COVID and more online learning? I guess are we looking forward then, I guess the next one's 2026 this year?

Speaker

Is there a no no, it'll be it's every three years. 2025 survey has probably been done.

Speaker 4

So how but looking back in history, when when did the Canada scores begin their sledge?

Speaker

Well, as I was saying, if you think of a bell curve 500 average, yes, Canada was well above the average on all three subjects. We started out in the first decade in around 530. Yeah. So that was pretty that's pretty good. Now, just to put this into the context of the Western Hemisphere, by far, let's just stick to math for a moment. We are far and far, far better than America. America is US is below the OECD average. Every country in Latin America is below the OECD average.

Speaker 4

Which countries are doing the best?

Speaker

Well, in Western Hemisphere, it's Canada. But if you want the best of the OECD, it's in its Southeast and East Asia. If you want to be very simplistic about it, people in China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, the actual top was in Singapore.

Speaker 4

And is that across the board at all in science, math, and reading?

Speaker

Can't stop families in East Asia from telling the kids to go and to go back to the room and study some math more.

Speaker 3

Yeah. So how does um the concerns about the use of technology, especially in the Western Hemisphere, and their connection with their scores, is there a correlation between that and the the overuse of technology?

Cultural and Societal Influences on Education

Speaker

My quick answer is yes, but uh I have really not dug in that very deep. If one of the one of the interesting people to invite, uh there's been a bit of a fuck of a screw up in Ontario with uh midgrade six to nine, which they run in Ontario, and they've hired quite a handsome amount per day to people to look at top and bottom. Why have our Ontario Ontario math results declined. One is the former head of the C.G. Hell Institute, Bill Robson. The other is a prof who's specialized. He's an economist, but is specialized in the world.

Speaker 4

But we look to certain areas of the world that do better. But do their families promote more learning, more reading? Then we've we maybe we're losing that too. Do you think at the home where we don't go home to where we see our parents read, we we're surrounded by books, everyone gets up their screen. Like I think it's not just the school that may be affecting this. Of course. Of course. It's a it's a societal thing, right? Yep. That's definitely the break.

Speaker

It's one of the if you look at all of the quality newspapers around the world, they're all worried about kids spending too much time on their mood rails. Adults too.

Speaker 4

Yes. I mean it's it's the talk of the day. It certainly is, right? Humans, we talk a lot. Then we jump onto the next one. Here comes AI and we jump onto it, right?

Speaker 3

So that's the concern. One of the discussions, especially among teachers, is they're they're teachers who want to support their students and have them move forward, but they're battling with short attention spans, the the difficulty of students being able to sustain for any period of time work or independent work, and teachers constantly redirecting students based on managing behavior and disruptions. This this is kind of the environment of the classroom and how many teachers who want to help their students don't know how to move forward. I know you bring in bring in this data. So what what do you think?

Speaker

Well, like one, let's not say Canada is in the bottom. It's doing reasonably well. Getting teachers to make their subjects interesting, that's part of being a professional.

Speaker 4

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker

And so a good teacher has got pr professional standards, is damn interested in the kids, but nonetheless is going to try and make the kids, depending upon the grade, learn multiplication, learn factoring the equation, etc. I know that it's it's not it's not brilliant learning of some special prize. It is this it is something which teachers need to have a profession, respect, and that parents respect that. The senior people in governments are prepared to pay for reasonable salaries. One of the dangers here is that you get two groups, the senior government people in the cabinet. They've always got various things they would like to spend on. And then on the other side, you've got a tough teachers' union, and they just baffle each other. And BC is well known for its strikes. That does harm to education. And the same story can be told in the health sector, where the provincial ministry does not want to increase the health budget, but feels maybe it has to. Doctors of BC, in the case of British Columbia, are organizations run by professionals at the top. It is not a particularly healthy situation.

Speaker 4

Don't you think sometimes some governments almost they want certain public systems not to work because they support a certain ideology that then says, well, let's thing, let's bring some private enterprise into this, right? Especially with the healthcare system you talk about, right? Often it's falling apart, there's problems with it, so let's just bring in the the solution will be private. And then we do drift more and more, I think, then towards the states where you'll have great schools for certain people, but not public education, which is kind of the point of public education. It's this great equal playing field that let allows everybody to have opportunity.

Speaker

Well, maybe we're making everybody bored here because the three of us are more or less in agreement. We are a good education system is concerned, deeply concerned with the average kid.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker

And that's important. You're happy to have really good kids who are up in the top, but don't ignore the average kids. So you can have a fairly broad distribution. Nothing is simple here.

Global Comparisons and Educational Systems

Speaker 4

No, but we often hear people with simple solutions, don't we? Sometimes, right? It's it's it's voucher schools, right? It's whatever it is. They come along with this idea that it's a complex problem. And we just yeah.

Speaker

Well, I mean, uh we we should at some point say some critical things about the Western Hemisphere's South and Southern in Latin American countries. If OECD Mexico is the bottom, why is it in the bottom? It's undeniable that the union of the teachers in Mexico are linked to the left-wing party, and they do what the union wants. And they're not prepared to fire teachers who are clearly weak. There's no way, in my opinion, of having read a fair bit about Mexican politics and education. That's a serious problem. And the Mexicans are not dealing with it. There's a lot of problems in Mexico, and like many other things, starting with fentanyl, if you like.

Speaker 4

Do you I mean, do you you you put it on the union then that it's on this issue, yes.

Speaker

Okay. Okay. Now the way of there was a there was apparently up to 2018, there was a more or less conservative, old-fashioned uh president of the country who did want to seriously improve the results of Mexico. And when the next fellow came along, he was very linked up with the unions and said, okay, let's scrap this exercise in trying to improve the quality of teaching. And sure enough, Mexican results remained at the bottom.

Speaker 4

But did he try to improve it by saying, let's increase funding to teach your training programs, reduce class size, supports for the you're you're you're digging into the end of my knowledge of Mexican politics.

Speaker

You just didn't you didn't want us to get along so well. So I'm trying to find I'm trying to find something to Well I mean, one of the more interesting examples is you the Scandinavian countries claim that they're excellent. And they're not. Back in the early teens, Sweden, and in I think it was the 2012 round, it collapsed in a large, quite a large decline. This resulted in a lot of uh aches and pains of the press and the teachers' unions, etc. And they did clean things up. So it's it's not brilliant in Sweden. One of my speculations is that Finland, which for many years was near the top in the uh PISA rounds, but this time they collapsed too.

Speaker 4

So what's going on then?

Speaker

And Doug here and there for explanations is that when Nokia, the electronic firm, collapsed, there wasn't the same incentive of kids in secondary level or then going into maths and post post-secondary, there's no longer the same incentive because you can't get the same career in Finland that you could prior.

Speaker 3

So then when we have this continuous decline, what are we looking at is for the long-term risks for a country, long-term risks for for Canada, let's say, if we don't address these issues?

Speaker

There's no quick answer to that. One, I d I do think we should be concentrating more on the six small population provinces. The biggest one is formal education among the indigenous population. The Metis are far better off than the First Nation. The problems are worse in the prairies, and that's a real problem, which is very delicate and very hard to work with. In the 2018 round, four western provinces, as I recall, two with a small population, Atlantic provinces, making six out of ten, and yes, we would like an identification of indigenous kids who were taking part in the 2018 round, but the the four other provinces said that would be racist. Now, one of the interesting little bits of history here is a a good friend of mine who's a senior guy in education uh ministry in Victoria was part of constructing assessments of both native and non-native in reading, writing, and math. And we still have that. There are the unions, teachers' unions try and kill it every time they can. It has survived. But it is the only province that has an assessment system that publicly identifies what's going on among students in indigenous students and non-Indigenous students. Now, that's a that's a crude breakdown, and there's been a lot of statisticians trying to figure out what's going on. And one of the interesting aspects of it in BC, you should bring some people along who are still interested in it. There is a huge range in British Columbia between the performance of native kids and non-native kids. My friend, who's a senior guy, he came up with all kinds of schemes trying to increase the native results, bring in the elders, decide what books to be read in grade 11. I'm just giving examples here. And in some of the districts, the difference between the native and the non-native kids is not big.

Speaker 4

We had Brad Baker on, who's the uh superintendent of indigenous education in British Columbia, and he spoke quite positively that in terms of the the graduation rate and how it has really improved in the last 10, 15 years for Indigenous students.

Speaker

Yeah, I mean you you do want to be careful that you really do have achieved the grade twelve.

Speaker 2

Right.

Speaker

As opposed to some second some kind of consolation certificate.

Speaker 2

That's a big deal.

Speaker

Now if if you've got the interest in doing it, I've written a couple of monographs on BC native versus non-native. How are we doing is the publication of the education ministry over in Victoria. And you can disaggregate results down to school districts. And that gives you an idea of what school districts are taking seriously, getting onto this. But I don't want to just blame the bureaucrats in the superintendent in the district. There is a lot of, in my opinion, silly hostility on the part of First Nation leaders to be spending all this time and effort and trying to learn math and read English, etc. We should go away and learn our own Korean language. That kind of attitude is just guaranteeing there's not gonna be don't you think we can have both we can have both?

Speaker 4

We certainly should use indigenous languages and also English literacy.

Speaker

Well, you've got you've got to you've got to do both. Yeah, I mean I have to be blunt about it. If you want to become get out of the out of poverty, you've got to be able to read and write English or French.

Speaker 4

Yeah. Well, I'm looking at the time where we're we're almost time to wrap up. I I I don't think we should get into the I know you've done work in Bangladesh, but I think that's probably a huge topic of discussion. Um can you just end up maybe letting us know what brought like how long have you dealt with dealing with the education?

Success in Sri Lanka

Speaker

A long time. And I I submitted to the University of Toronto Press yesterday the first draft that they are going to publish for the second edition of the work that we've been doing. And it it is fascinating, but very, very depressing given the corruption, massive corruption in government, public schools, in all countries in South Asia with one wonderful outlier, which is Sri Lanka.

Speaker 4

What makes a liar? Is there a can you can you sum that up in a minute?

Speaker

I've got only a minute. The history of social policy in Sri Lanka goes back for a century, even before 1947, which was the year of the end of the British Raj, th the the Minister of Education was there for two decades. He was a real tough bastard, insisted that we're gonna be able to read our funny languages. Tamil from those are the folks who came from a state in southern India, and Sinala, which is its own language, he was brilliant. He just kept going. And by the time that the Sri Lanka was independent from Britain, it was really two-thirds of kids could read either one or the other. And so there is a certain parallel with Canada. The ghastly civil war, which killed a lot of people in the first decade of this century. They've managed to decentralize, they've made some copies on Canada, how we have managed bilingualism. It's an interesting subject. Think about it later.

Speaker 4

Yeah, no, for sure. Well, th thank you, John. We really appreciate that. Thank you so much. And then we'll be back. Happy to be of help. Glad we worked out all the technical issues. Yes.

Speaker

I am a klots. I I just came at this assuming that I would screw it up. It worked out just it worked out well.

Speaker 4

So thank you.

Speaker

Okay, thanks for the invitation. Thank you.

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Speaker 2

Right.

Wrap Up With Roy and Martin

Speaker 4

Well, that was Professor John Richards. Yes. And that's a lot to unpack. He's got a lot of opinions. Yes. Right. And uh I think listeners will probably have some feelings about some of those things, right? We were just trying to get to the point of in terms of the PISA scores and is it something that's long term? And I'm still not I'm still not sure if it's something that's COVID-based or maybe the n ones that I guess 2025 was the last test. And when we see those results, maybe we'll start to see an improvement, right? What do you think?

Speaker 3

Well, I think looking at the scores was the idea of identifying that there's a slip. There's a there's a a problem in the areas of uh science and math and reading. But with those scores, then the issue isn't say, oh, just get better at reading, or just get better at science, or just get better at math. It's a veneer, if you want to look at it. It's a veneer of things that that make education successful. Yeah. So we have to start peeling back some of those layers and looking at them.

Speaker 4

And that uh you're absolutely right. It's getting those layers peeled back. And John himself used well, we've talked about how it's messy. It's messy trying to get the answers, right? And we often look for simple solutions. And I think we're just trying to explore talking to different people and peel back those layers and figure out what's going on because you are right. That car is making a sound. There is a sound in that car. It's not that there's nothing going on, right?

Speaker 3

And there are people all over the world trying to trying to find out how to fix that sound with the introduction of AI. Some people are going in that direction of, hey, AI will fix this, right? We uh we I talked about some AI schools that are opening up in the United States. There's 50 of them right now where students would spend two hours with a um with AI that specifically catered to their interests and their wants and and it supports the their needs, their needs that are identified. And then the rest of the day, they work with the other students in a social environment. Okay. It sounds great. And then there was something again from the Southwest. The White House was talking about robots and uh robotic teachers as as a means of the future of educating students. And then at the same time, we we were talking about with uh talking with Andrew Cantaruni about we need to help our students have sustained attention and pulling out technology and uh the the idea of creating an analog class where we encourage prolonged reading, uh, handwriting, cursive writing, memorization of memorization of and so there's these different approaches, but much like Artemis going across space, they're trying they're trying to fix a plugged toilet as they travel through space. And and as we're teaching, there are people around us trying to fix what they think is the fix for teaching um as we're as we're moving forward. Uh we can't stop this thing. No. But how do we implement the things at each level of that veneer to make the education system better and to meet the needs of our students?

Speaker 4

And there's so many different responses, because I read an article in the New York Times about a school in somewhere in the Midwest US where they are going to more of the analog schools and they have excelled in their reading levels. And it's a I think it's a real working class kind of school. They are exceeding, they're doing so well. So in some ways, this is an exciting time because I think there's a lot of discussion going on. People are all listening to that car and they're hearing something going on, and some of them may be coming up with things that, oh, I don't know what you're doing. But I think at least we're talking about it. Like maybe it's not like the cell phones when they were brought in or the computer we all jumped on. I there was there was always voices, but not a lot. Most people just jumped on the bandwagon. I think right now people are saying, well, maybe we go back to cursive writing. Maybe there's other changes we make. Maybe we don't do this, maybe we do this. We got to keep talking.

Speaker 2

Right.

Speaker 3

There's a great interest in in privatization of schools, having schools work with a corporation, um, having uh students choose the school they uh they want to go to, the parents having vouchers or they say, Oh, I want my own. And and so areas of schools, uh areas of communities where the schools uh are vacated and other schools are uh overcrowded and you can't get to.

Speaker 4

Sorry when you said the voucher, because I always thought of that as an American thing, but you got me onto this comparison of Sweden and Finland. And I think f Finland has done much better for the most part than Sweden has over the last few years. Um it may have changed again, because these pieces scores have changed for a lot of people. But Sweden actually was doing a kind of a voucher system, right? There was privatization going on in Sweden, so maybe that explains it. Like that those are the layers to this. It makes it so complicated.

Speaker 3

Well, and is the view from that is well, if we create a competitive environment, then uh those people will work hard to keep that level up. And that competition will bring up the student scores and and and improve the quality of education. It didn't work. That's the theory, right? But it doesn't work. Then on the other side, when you're talking about Finland, Finland decided to go in a direction where let's value our teachers. So what they they did is they they upped the ante for teachers. Teachers all all teachers have to have masters. Yeah. Yeah. Those teachers are paid quite well. And then when they're when you're when you're looking at jobs for engineers and and for doctors, those teacher salaries are in that range of professionals.

Speaker 4

And they're well respected. People want to be a teacher. The the the waiting list to get into university to get into the master's program for education in Finland is long because it's such a well-respected job. I think that plays a big part, right? Yes. John talked about Mexico and writing some opinions on there that I, whoa, really? Okay, I wasn't so sure about. But I think part of it may be the status of the teacher and what they're dealing with and the struggles that Mexico is going through with many levels, right?

Speaker 3

Yeah. Well, and you and that's it, that's the other layer, right? I mean, we we um as we were part of a union here in BC. I I can remember the number of times I was out on strike. Yeah. And uh to to in improve our wages.

Speaker 4

Uh and or to improve class size and make money off than it wasn't for wages. It was for making the system better, right?

Speaker 3

Yes. But did I want to be out of the classroom? No. I was a someone who loved teaching, but uh I wanted an improvement in the conditions in which I taught, and I wanted uh an improvement in in my wages. And as a as a result of that, I stood on the picket line. And so when you have those things that are coming up, whether in schools, whether it's in in Mexico or in any other country, the unions right now are are the the only means in which teachers can negotiate changing the uh the conditions and and the wages uh that they receive.

Speaker 4

So as with all things done brothers and after the bell, we want to hear your voice, right? And we have guests on that sometimes we agree, sometimes we don't. We we we want to hear your voice. Maybe we'll agree, maybe we won't, maybe you won't agree with us. This is why we're organic, right? Maybe something's touched the nerve today, maybe some things you disagree with, some things you go, yeah, bang on. Let us know. Go to our website, go to our Facebook group after the bell, find us at stuntbrothers.ca, and let us know. Share, share, share. This is how we get better, this is how we learn. This is part of our professional development, I find, right? Getting this chance to hear people from different places, from academia, from those working right into the trenches, other areas of mental health, all those things that we've been bringing on to our podcast over the last two seasons that I think help all of us. So thanks everyone for listening, and we'll see you again on After the Bell.

Speaker 3

I look forward to some great comments.

Speaker 4

Yes.

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The Stunt Brothers

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