Readers have no doubt become aware of city parents' concerns regarding a certain Grade 11 math teacher at New Westminster Secondary - parents believe that she has had an upwards of 60 per cent failure rate with her classes. Readers have also learned in the latest instalment of this story that rather than fix the problem, the school district's response has been to stonewall parents, arbitrarily raise the students' marks (how do they know that the students have learnt the curriculum?) and lawyer up.
Unfortunately the story continues: when the district finally realized last December that they had a problem with this math teacher, their response was neither to discipline her nor provide her with retraining opportunities, but in January of this year, to shuffle her out of Grade 11 math and give her Grade 9 math classes to teach for the second semester.
Her teaching wouldn't get any better, but at least she wouldn't be affecting the university entrance grades for the Grade 11 and 12 students.
But all this did was transfer the problem to my son, who found out the first day of the new semester that he was now in one of her math classes.
Problems started immediately - for the first quiz of the year, she gave the class five minutes to complete it (compared to the 15 that the other Grade 9 classes received) with the result that over 70 per cent of the class failed.
And problems have continued. Two weeks ago, my son's class was given a test on their recently completed section of course work. My son, who is good at math, did poorly on the test, receiving about a 65 per cent grade. When he told me about the test result, I sent a note with him the following day, asking the teacher to please send his test home.
You can imagine my surprise when he texted me later in the day and told me that the teacher refused to do so. In subsequent emails to the teacher and the vice-principal, I was informed that the math department has a policy whereby, to protect the "test bank" of math questions, they do not allow the tests to leave the school (apparently even if parents request them).
This "policy" makes little sense, as we're talking about Grade 9 math, not university entrance exams. A typical student only has to study about 30 minutes in order to know the material for this type of test. So why would a student make the effort to get an old test from someone and memorize the answers?
And if the math department has a proper "test bank,"then the questions are randomly selected from the bank so no two tests are the same anyway (at least I hope that's how they do it). But even if they only had set tests in their "test bank" (hopefully they would have at least three), then statistically it makes no sense for a student even to try to cheat from old tests as the odds are that they'll have memorized the wrong test.
And besides, as the tests require the student to show their work in order to get marks - even if a student did try to cheat using old tests, the effort involved in memorizing the steps effectively teaches them the math.
Finally it should be noted that the student wasn't requesting the test, but a parent was.
Ignoring this flawed policy for a minute, at least the school's response provided an answer for the high failure rate of this teacher's classes of students.
As this math teacher has no control over the test bank questions, an inability to teach the curriculum will inevitably result in a high failure rate for the students - which is what we have seen.
So how did this teacher, the math department head and the vice-principal respond to my enquiry and the obvious problem?
One would think that the first step would have been to look at the math results for the class and if a problem was identified (the student survey was that the entire class did very poorly on the 50 per cent of the test that was made up of word problems), the teacher would take the time to review that section with the class.
However, that wasn't what happened.
The vice-principal didn't bother checking what the class average was, but did take the time to check what my son's attendance was - and told me that his missing classes (for sports) was the reason for his low mark. And the teacher carried on with the next math section - no review at all on the failed word problems.
When I brought this situation to the attention of the assistant superintendent, I had to wait a week to get a reply, but when I did it was a doozy.
It appears that the head of the math department gave him the runaround as well. He informed me that he was first told by the head of the math department that the licensing agreement with the third party provider of the test bank did not allow the tests to leave the school.
Upon requesting and reading a copy of the test bank agreement, he found no restriction on release of the tests, so he went back to the math department head to re-request the test.
The response at that point is absolutely astounding: the math department head told the assistant superintendent that a Supreme Court ruling gave teachers the right to withhold tests from parents and so she would not release the test.
The assistant superintendent is apparently now requesting a copy of the Supreme Court ruling to review the "wording" for himself.
How a math department's response to a parent requesting his son's Grade 9 math test ends up being refused based on a supposed Supreme Court ruling must be the silliest thing that I've ever heard - this teaching environment is in no way "student-centred" education.
Our district administration is clearly not in charge, and the situation can only be described as the fox running the henhouse.
And what are our three "teacher" trustees doing while this is going on?
Certainly not ensuring that our students learn math basics. And certainly not dealing with the appalling situation in our high school math department, as how likely is it that Michael Ewen, David Phelan and Jonina Campbell, as cardcarrying BCTF members, would go up against their own union to fix this mess?
Much easier to avoid the problem and fill their days opposing a new Pattullo Bridge.
Ron Unger is a New Westminster resident.
