Understanding Education Policy in Ontario

Who are the academics feeding policy makers' "evidence-based research" decisions?

Through my property taxes, I pay a lot of money each year to support Toronto District School Board (TDSB) operations. Approximately $1,600, to be a bit more precise. I also live and work around TDSB graduates. You might say I’ve got skin in the game.

So I think I’m justified in wondering how that money is spent and how those students are educated. To that end, I recently spent some time scouring the website of the Ontario Ministry of Education looking for information. I found many variations of the claim that the ministry ensures:

…that each curriculum reflects current research and pedagogical practices, responds to current and future market, economic and workforce needs and conditions, and is aligned with provincial priorities.

Excellent. But just what are those “research and pedagogical practices”? Could I access them myself so I can assess their academic rigor and the underlying data that drives them?

Apparently not. I couldn’t find any references to the specific research on which those curriculum policies were based. Ever the optimist, I emailed the Ministry through their website asking for help. When that evoked no response, I contacted my MPP for help. Her staff had me sign a consent form authorizing them to act on my behalf and then launched their own inquiries.

The subsequent silence was calming and restful, but hardly enlightening.

It’s possible that the person responsible for reading and processing incoming emails retired and forgot to designate a replacement. I guess it could also be that no one was able to find the official in charge of curriculum development, but the news never found its way back to me. Or, perhaps, everyone in the office that day knew exactly where to find the research but preferred that ignorant outsiders like me shouldn’t get their grubby, uninitiated hands on it.

Normally, I’d lean to the more charitable alternatives. But since there’s been no reply at all, I’m free to assume the worst.

As it turns out though, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) isn’t nearly as bashful about the origins of their policies. References to “evidence-based polices”, “educational research”, and “best practices” abound. But they bring the receipts: links to underlying research documents are there, too.

There was one academic’s name in particular that came up over and over again in both individual schools’ communications and board-wide Academic Pathways documents: Stanford University researcher, Dr. Jo Boaler. Now that’s interesting.

When clicking through, you’ll discover that some of the links to Boaler’s papers are no longer active. This might (or might not) be connected to the significant controversy the work has attracted over the years. We’ll get to that later.

But why let something as trivial as invisible content get in our way? The internet, after all, never forgets. In this case, multiple versions of Boaler’s (and David Foster’s) 2003 paper, Raising Expectations and Achievement, are available through the Internet Archive’s WayBack machine.

The main argument of “Raising Expectations” is that we should eliminate enhanced and basic tracks in math education and, instead, deliver the same curriculum to all students. As a parent and a recovering teacher, I can tell you that level tracking does indeed come with its own problems, but proving that those problems outweigh the many benefits of tracking will be an uphill battle.

The study on which “Raising Expectations” was based involved applying a de-tracked curriculum, the use of "rich math problems", and the adoption of formative assessment practices (using Mathematics Assessment Resource Service tasks) in five unidentified school districts in California. Three other school districts continued using traditional methods as a control.

Boaler and Foster report that students in the five de-tracked districts “significantly outperformed” their tracked peers. That finding was the key claim on which the paper as a whole relies. Boaler’s ideas were subsequently the inspiration for California’s Oct., 2023 adoption of their California Math Curriculum Framework (CMF). And it’s clear that the TDSB has also worked to implement Boaler-inspired policies right here at home.