To the editor:
I am responding to the story, headlined Provincial exams phasing out, in the Nov. 11 Cariboo Connector.
British Columbia's decision to jettison provincial exams is a bad idea.
The move is sending students backwards, not forward as School District 27 assistant superintendent Harj Manhas noted.
What sets our students above other provinces and many American states’ educational systems is all graduating students had to be proficient in the basics, which provided employers with known criteria for hiring.
Now, you will find no agreed-upon criteria for any grade. Some English teachers will emphasize Shakespeare, while another will teach grammar and another will concentrate on short story writing with no educator following a curriculum because of the individual lesson plans.
It will also require students seeking higher education to write university entrance exams similar to American Scholastic Assessment Tests (SATs) which students begin taking in Grade 11, take classes to master and universities use as entry qualifications.
Were parents or employers consulted in the decision making process or did the ministry make a unilateral decision, as has been their track record?
Remember dual entry kindergarten that was tried and rejected in the United States 50 years ago and attempted here to parents' dismay?
Individual lesson plans are wonderful theoretically. In reality, however, they are dysfunctional because students are not failed at the end of the year when they do not complete their lesson plan, so the educational deficit is cancelled leaving the following year's teacher to scramble to try and include the deficit in the new year's individual lesson plan.
Cancelling senior exams had to the brainchild of the same Victoria "thinkers" who trashed phonics and handwriting in elementary school, and replaced them with "holistic reading," which failed miserably and left children to enter their high school years with a reading and writing deficit.
If parents don't speak up now, they will be rubber stamping the ministry's ignorance and hobbling their children’s futures.
Jonathan McCormick
Lone Butte
