COMMITTEE OF SUPPLY

(Concurrent Sections)

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Mr. Deputy Chairperson (Ben Sveinson): Order, please. Will the Committee of Supply please come to order. This afternoon this section of the Committee of Supply, meeting in Room 255, will resume consideration of the Estimates of the Department of Education and Training. When the committee last sat it was considering 2.(b)(1) on page 35 of the Estimates book. I believe the minister still had some time remaining if she wishes to continue her answer.

Hon. Linda McIntosh (Minister of Education and Training): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to begin by tabling the Children and Youth Secretariat committee members, the ones from Education and Training. The members had asked if I could indicate who was working on the committee and how much time they had put in so far. This lists the committee members and the approximate time spent per month on the Child and Youth Secretariat. I have three copies to table as requested, and I believe we were just concluding some conversation on the Alexander Ross School and its renovation into the School for the Deaf.

The residence, as I indicated yesterday, is in the Alexander Ross facility, not in a separate building or in separate houses. The deaf community at first was uncertain as to whether they wanted a residence inside the school, outside the school, and in the end however, the parents of the children who are actually attending the school indicated a preference to have the residence in the school, and that, we felt, was the best group to listen to, the parent group. Therefore at this time they are renovating the school, and I have the blueprints of the floor plan for tabling if the committee members are interested. They might like to take a look at how it is being done. It also has a main floor plan there.

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The one thing the students particularly are excited about there, of course, is the science room. As well, of course, they have a lot of rooms there that were former music rooms or theatres, so they have stages at various levels where desks can be put, which is ideal for deaf students who use vision to read sign language and to compensate in a lot of ways for the lack of ability to hear. Those things do not show on the blueprint, I do not believe, but they are additional features of the school that make it particularly appealing for these particular students. I will leave it there if the member has any other questions.

Ms. Jean Friesen (Wolseley): I remember when I was talking to some of the parents about proposed renovations and the differences between the old school and the new school that one of the things that they had been very excited about--I believe some of them had seen the school in Newfoundland, a recently either constructed or recently renovated school. I wondered if the minister had had similar kinds of conversations with parents and whether we have some sense of how this new school, or newly renovated school compares with others across Canada.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I am really pleased about the way this particular project has gone. We got together a committee of the people directly affected, parents, et cetera, to talk about the implementation of the move from the current site to the new site. That committee has had approximately 21 meetings. I believe the last meeting--according to my staff--was just last night, so they have been regular and ongoing.

The parents are delighted with the layout. Staff have been to visit other schools of this nature in British Columbia, and all the indications that we receive from those who are knowledgable in this area is that Alexander Ross will, when it is completed, be the top state-of-the-art technologically advanced school in Canada, probably the one that will be looked at as standing out as the best of its kind, so we are really pleased. The British Columbia one is newer, but when the renovations are completed at Alexander Ross, it is believed that it will be more advanced and better even than the B.C. one, which is known to be a very good facility.

The implementation committee working on that relocation included not just Education and Training staff and staff from the School for the Deaf, but it also included students from the school, as well as members of the Winnipeg Community Centre of the Deaf, and the parent council at the School for the Deaf, as well as from the advisory board--the deaf advisory board, not just for schools, but for other facets of life for deaf people. So that, I feel, has been very good. I believe that answers your question.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, I have a number of questions about the prospective future of the school. At the moment, the minister said it houses about 85 students, and I am wondering if the capacity is larger than that, and if it is, is the minister intending on looking at some interprovincial agreements? Is there any possibility for that? Is that sort of considered in the general plans?

What kind of role is the school going to play in the deaf community, generally? Does the minister and the committees that she has been working with envisage a particular role for that school in that context?

Thirdly, the renovation, is that being done in stages so that, for example, when the students move in--I assume it is this coming fall--will there be continued renovations after that or do you think you will be able to get it ready, that all the renovations will be complete for September?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, the school has the capacity for about 120, so it has room for slightly less than half again what it currently has. We do not have a formal agreement with other provinces, although at the current time we do have some students from Saskatchewan and from native bands and so on who are not provincial Manitoba students who nonetheless attend this particular school. So there is nothing formal. It does not preclude the ability to have formality, and I have been in communication with the Minister of Education in Saskatchewan. I will be seeing the minister again soon, and while we have not talked about this specifically, we have talked about how we would like to start working together where we can where it makes sense. This could be one area. There have not been any discussions on it though.

You had also asked about the place and what did the deputy have with the school or what other function did the school fill. The School for the Deaf community plays much the same kind of role that a neighbourhood school might for a catchment area. It is a focal point of attention. I do not think there is--sort of like rules, I do not think there are rules for how the deaf community interacts at the school, but I think it is fair and accurate to say that they are there a lot. They have a great interest in the school. They see it as very important to the deaf culture, and they support it by their presence, by activities.

I know at the current site they will have teas and so on, fundraisers for various activities, and they are very much run and have involvement from the wider deaf community even though they may not have students in the school. In fact, that was something that took me initially a few weeks to really grasp when we started dealing with the transfer. Initially, a lot of the alumni really did not want to see the school moved, and they felt very concerned about it, whereas I had been focusing in on the parents who wanted the move. The alumni were very upset, and as I came to know the deaf community and the deaf culture, I understood that interrelation and that connection. The school is very important to them.

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I think they are all happy now. I just got a poster here that you can sort of see. It has got the deaf Children's Festival '96, and it is the Advisory Council on School Leadership, it is the parent council. But if you look at the bottom it says, many thanks to the donors of the Canadian Cultural Society of The Deaf for making this festival possible. So while it is the parent council and it is a school activity, they have got support from a lot of organizations but also from the Canadian Cultural Society of The Deaf. We have also got support from some government organizations here, but it is a great poster and a great festival. In case you are keen on it, we should hang it up someplace.

An Honourable Member: Put it on Hansard.

Mrs. McIntosh: It does not get printed till . . . .

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, I had another question. They were not all related, it is true, those three, but the other one was the staging of renovations, and is that going to be completed by September or will there be renovations continuing over the next couple of years?

I also wanted to follow up on my previous question, which was I was looking for how the renovations really are relating to the deaf community as a whole. For example, the multipurpose room, there are gymnasiums, things which may not have been available at the same level of technology, I suppose, and space in the past. I wondered how those kinds of plans had been meshed, and what role the general community had in putting those together.

Mrs. McIntosh: Sorry, I thought I had left something out before. Now I forgot what it was--Oh, yes, in stages. Our plans are to have the entire school done before the students move in, to the point that if the renovations are not complete by September 1, we will not move them in until they are. We do not want them in there with construction still going on because of the nature of the deaf students' needs, getting adjusted to a new place, and we want to make sure that all the technologies that are going to be built in there are in before the students are. Our expectation, as I said, is this fall; our hope is the beginning of September, and, barring any tremendously unforeseen circumstances, we should be able to be in there in the fall.

The multimedia area is going to have two huge televisions, the great big ones--I am not sure of the measurements there--but for Internet access for students and other members of the deaf community as well. That room will also be used for meetings of various sorts. The deaf community will sometimes book rooms for meetings in the current school. We expect that they will continue to do that in the new one, and we are planning, as we plan the school, that there will be those places in the school available. The deaf community will also be having access to the conference room and the gymnasium and the playground and the shop area. So those are some of the opportunities for the students and those with whom they spend a lot of time and those other people who are deaf who are no longer students.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, in the Estimates themselves there is a small--there is a $3,000 drop in Other Expenditures, but other than that it is more or less the same in staff years and Other Expenditures as it was last year. So I am assuming, and this is just for the record, that the renovations and all the technical expansion is in Government Services rather than under Education.

Mrs. McIntosh: That is correct, Mr. Chairman.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, I wanted to ask about New Directions and the deaf school. Could the minister give us some overall perspective on how the New Directions curriculum, and in particular the examinations are being applied at the deaf school?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I am informed that adaptations for deaf students can be made, as can adaptations for the visually impaired or blind. They would obviously have to have, in certain subjects, some adaptations made.

Ms. Friesen: I assume that applies to similarly abled children in the broader public school system as well. Could the minister indicate what kinds of adaptations are available in the New

Directions examinations that we have had so far?

Mrs. McIntosh: The adaptations for the deaf or hard of hearing, the deaf students, are minimal really. They would require, maybe in some instances, sign language interpreters for some of the discussions, depending upon with whom it is they are having discussions.

The blind students would require a larger adaptation in that there would be Braille or large-print material. We know that already in some of the schools there are students who are blind who use the--looks like a video screen--I forget what you call it, but it is a giant magnifying glass and the text is just rolled through it. They can take ordinary books. I do not know if the member has seen wonderful pieces of equipment that are now available. The one I am referring to looks like a small television screen and an ordinary book can be placed under it. It acts as a giant magnifying glass and throws up huge print on the television screen, and the student then is able to read normal books that do not have large print, and they are really quite interesting--so Braille or large-print, or that type of machine that I talked about. Sometimes they will need someone to actually read material to them and sometimes they might need more time.

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Deaf students might be some who, in certain instances, might require more time if it takes longer to communicate a message than it might through normal channels. So we have those kinds of accommodations.

Currently we have a curriculum development committee that is looking at these issues of adaptations for people whose bodies do not work the way most of ours do, and they are looking at all manner of disabilities or adaptations that might be required. A lot of the things that might need to be done might not require any special equipment, or even any expert who might know sign language, but rather just some common-sense applications, or some common-sense flexibility in bending some of the guidelines to fit.

In terms of the deaf students, the underlying principles of deaf education that are used in conjunction with New Directions is that there are about four or five of them. One is that all students from kindergarten to high school be exposed to both ASL and English, so that is one underlying principle. The most appropriate language at the School for the Deaf is deemed to be ASL, and that is used as the mode of communication in all classes and school activities. They use ASL for communication, and then it becomes a comprehensive visual language within a social context. We also have augmentative communication and technology systems, and those can be used by people who are having difficulty using ASL. ASL itself is used to facilitate the learning of English, so ASL is the first language, so to speak.

Students are given the option to develop speech--and many can speak--or speech reading or listening skills through individual sessions or in group sessions in order to develop a maximum communication competency and those last three words are, I think, very important for deaf students. Again, we have computers and multimedia technology. Those components will, in some cases, allow for the adoption of new curriculum development and the incorporation of the American Sign Language into the Manitoba curriculum, which is currently taught.

I will maybe stop there in case I am off target.

Ms. Friesen: I would like to pursue some other questions on the adaptations of exams and outcomes to differently abled children elsewhere when we get to assessment, or maybe I can just ask some other questions on this line.

One of the keys is outcomes. One of the keys to that is parents understanding the outcomes. How are those communicated to parents of deaf children? I guess the first thing is have there in, in fact, been children from this school or deaf children in the system generally who have taken the exams so far? I got the sense from when the minister was speaking that this is how it would happen. I am just wondering if it has happened.

Mrs. McIntosh: The deaf students are writing the exam this year, but they will be writing it in June because they did not have a January exam. So it is still this year, but it is still a will-be, because they will be writing it in June, along with some of the other schools that have semester systems and write in June.

This year, in Grade 12, there is only one Grade 12 student eligible, only one in Grade 12 who will be writing the exam, but that individual will indeed be writing the exam. From Grade 7 to Senior 4, Grades 7 to 12, there are six reporting periods to students. It is a little higher than in the other schools in Manitoba, but because of the nature of the students, the reporting periods are more in number.

The parents are actively involved, not just because they receive more reports, but they have a very active and involved parent advisory council at the School for the Deaf . They are very active in the school and they have a lot of input. They have a lot of ongoing communication with the people who run the school, the principal, the teachers. It is unusually close, and I think, again, it is perhaps because of the nature of the students and the bonding that takes place with people of like circumstances.

Ms. Friesen: I was also asking about outcomes and how they are communicated to parents. The minister says they meet frequently, but I wondered if there had been translation of those, if that was required for some deaf parents. How is that communicated?

Mrs. McIntosh: The written reports, the six reporting periods that are there for Grades 7 to 12, are written, but there are also verbal parent-teacher interviews, and many times that people get together during the course of the year. There are always interpreter services there whenever they are requested. There is an interpreter service that is available for the deaf community. At the School for the Deaf, the interpreter is considered a natural part of the schooling. It is part of the milieu of the school that interpreters are there to liaise between those who speak ASL and those who do not. That little piece of information that the member may be interested in is that 85 percent of the parents at that school, 85 percent of the deaf children are hearing parents, and many of them proficient in ASL, of course, because they learn with their children and they are bilingual, but still the referral service is there.

I know, any time I have been there there has always been an interpreter always there. Even though the principal himself is bilingual, speaks ASL, even still, when I would go to the school there would be an interpreter there just in case we needed them.

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I have just been handed a note and I am really pleased to indicate this. It is a little note from the current principal who says, because our current principal obviously is a hearing principal and we have been wanting to have a deaf principal and we have gone one more than that--he has here in his little writing--and we are proud to announce the hiring of Norma Jean Taylor, who starts August 1, first female deaf principal in Canada.

So I thank you for the note, and I thank you for all the work that you have done in being principal at the school. Mr. Miller has had a wonderful, wonderful way at the school and has filled in for us all these years and I know that he has won the hearts and minds of the people there, and I know that they are going to miss him, but I know at the same time they might be thrilled to have a principal who is also deaf. That was important to them. So that is news for me, too. So thank you.

Ms. Friesen: It does sound good news, and I think we wish both parties well in the future. What I was trying to get at with the outcomes and interpretation question was not so much reporting to parents but outcomes in the formal sense that it is used in New Directions, that is, the establishing of expectations, that the communication of that to parents would seem to be crucial to the whole purpose of New Directions. So I am wondering how it is done in this particular case.

Mrs. McIntosh: Staff is busy doing an inward dialogue here, but while they are doing that I would just like to indicate, having thanked Mr. Miller for his work as principal of the deaf school, that is not his main role. Howard Miller is the provincial Co-ordinator for Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and when I say he has filled in as principal, in terms of other duties as assigned, that was quite a big one that he took on for the last three years. So of course he is still with us as co-ordinator, but we are very grateful for the work he did in those years.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, informing the parents as to outcomes will be done essentially the same way as it is for any other school or any other group of students. The only difference would be in the adaptations that are made, for example, when you maybe, as many schools do, have the parents in to explain the Grade 3 maths outcomes. In this setting you would have available an interpreter for those parents who are also deaf, although most of the parents do hear. The corollary, of course, of 85 percent being hearing parents is that 15 percent are not. Some of the teachers are also proficient in sign and so on, but you would have interpreters there for those kinds of meetings to explain them, and the written material would be sent home as it would normally, because that does not require any particular kind of adaptation. So that would be about the only modification that would need to be made.

Ms. Friesen: The unusual situation in this school is that it is the government in a sense who are the trustees; there is no separate set of trustees. When we were talking about outcomes before, we talked about one of the things that actually concerns me, that there may be some disparities in the way in which school boards have dealt with the issue of outcomes. The minister mentioned St. James has sent it home. We do not know whether every school board did, whether there was the same kind of interpretation, so I am wondering what the government itself did as trustees in this case. Was it dealt with? I mean the minister essentially said things went home in writing, there were discussions with parents at regular meetings. Was there a general policy on that? Is that how we should be expecting in fact people across the province to deal with it?

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Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, in our dealings as a board of trustees, and I had not really thought of that--I am still a trustee, hey, I had not even thought of it that way--but it is a good analogy, because that is really what we are. In our dealings we, with the Manitoba School for the Deaf, send things to parents constantly. We sort of do a paper blizzard in terms of the amount of material that is sent home, and that very close working relationship, I indicated before, between the staff and the parents is wonderful. I wish we could have it in all our schools. We do have it in some; unfortunately, not in all.

The member raised an interesting point, and it is something I would like to respond to, when she asked about how things go in all schools. With our advisory committee on the implementation of educational change, for which I wish we had a different name, they indicated this concern and problem about communications, that some people were getting some information, others were not and so on. So we have come up with a protocol for communications that at least from the department will emanate. If we had a concern, we would send things to a parent council; the superintendent would say, I did not get it. I would get people phoning asking me questions. I do not know what they are talking about. Or we would send it to the superintendent, and the parent council would say: the superintendent never sent us the stuff; he always leaves us out, or she always leaves us out.

So we came up with a protocol then where everything goes out, if we can do it, simultaneously. So, if something is of interest to parents, boards and schools or of use to them all, we send it out, hoping, by the time of our mailing, that it will be received simultaneously by all. But I understand there are some places where something, if it goes to the superintendent, is still not getting through to the parent councils.

The letter that the member for Radisson (Ms. Cerilli) was reading the other day about phys ed, we had sent out the material on that, and apparently there are some schools in one division that have not had it forwarded to them. So we still have some work to do on our protocols, but that one there was because the division itself has not forwarded it. I think these protocols have to be understood by all.

One of the first schools to set up an Advisory Council for School Leadership was the Manitoba School for the Deaf, and that I found interesting. The nature of their involvement and the impact of their decision making on the school, I believe, have really made that school a better place and more suited to what the students actually want and what the parents want for them. All the information is sent out to parents. All the information from that school is sent to parents, and any information that is circulating is included on the agenda for the ACSL. Frequently, the director or the assistant deputy minister is available to present information when it is necessary. They have staff meetings regularly, and the staff regularly attend the parent council meetings to become knowledgeable about new requirements in New Directions. That kind of model would be wonderful to have in every school, from my perspective.

The deputy has just pointed out that, just to give you an example of the impact of the involvement with the Advisory Council for School Leadership that was set up at the Manitoba School for the Deaf, five representatives from that are on the committee that is overseeing the renovations for Alexander Ross. So they have major input on the renovation plans, and nobody feels threatened by that. Everybody gets along well in that setting, so I think it is a model for how the province should behave.

We can give guidelines to schools, and we are encouraging the establishment of that kind of parent council, but at the same time it has to be a decision of the parents, the community, if they want it. Some do not. We cannot force them and would not force them. We might wish it would be different, but we lay out the opportunity and make the opportunity known, and then it is up to them.

Ms. Friesen: The simultaneous protocol, I do not know what term to use for it, but obviously is something that I think would serve many areas of education well, because there are clearly different divisional practices and people feeling rightly or wrongly that they have been cut out of the loop.

There is also the final link. I do not know if you might call it the missing link, but it is getting it from the child to the parent. I used to liken my own son's school bags at the end of the week--it was like an archaeological investigation, you know, you go down through the layers, but that is the final link.

Mrs. McIntosh: I think that is a really good point. I swear I am still finding notes from my son's jeans and he is 28, so it has been a long time. I think the older they get, they either a) get distracted, b) do not care, or c) figure this is something they really do not want to take home to mom and dad, but I think a lot of it is that it is not of high priority to them, they forget, they tuck it in their pockets and forget about it. The younger children are wonderful about carefully carrying the message home and not getting it dirty and making sure mommy sees it, or daddy, but I do not know if staff has any advice for me on this one. If every home eventually has a home computer, and the costs of e-mail and all those things come down, we can just sit in the office and punch it into every household, and it would be there. Maybe that will come someday.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: 2.(b)(1) Salaries and Employee Benefits $2,633,700--pass; 2.(b)(2) Other Expenditures $331,900--pass.

2.(c)(1) Assessment and Evaluation, (1)Salaries and Employee Benefits $1,700, 900. The honourable member for Wolseley.

Ms. Friesen: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To begin on the first section of that, the Salaries and Employee Benefits, there is an increase from Estimates of last year, an increase in staff years and an increase also in dollars. Could the minister give us an explanation of those increases?

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Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, that line is an increase of 6.26. It is 4.26 professionals and two administrative positions. These positions were there for the piloting of the standards testing.

Ms. Friesen: I wanted to ask if these are term positions or are these regular positions or contract. How do they show up on this line?

Mrs. McIntosh: They are permanent staff years and they could be filled by people on secondment or by people full time permanently in the position.

Ms. Friesen: Could the minister tell us how many of these are filled at the moment and is there an organizational chart or something that would be easily tabled which would show us how this section works?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I do have something I could table and the ADM has been kind enough to put little pink checkmarks where the vacant positions are. Those positions are being prepared for bulletining now and they should be bulletined for hiring in about six to eight weeks. We hope to be able to fill those new positions, and the secondments for this particular one are also--competition is used even for the filling of secondments unless it is a very unique or outstanding individual. So I will table this. I just have the one copy but it probably will do.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, could I also ask about money in the second part? I know we pass them separately, but eventually we will pass them all together, but just while we are on the money and the positions.

Under Other Expenditures, there is a considerable increase again here from$606,000 to $971,000, and there is a footnote saying, “Provision for Piloting of Standard Tests under the Education Renewal Initiatives.” Could the minister explain or could she give us a breakdown of that $971,000? Some is presumably--it looks here as though there is $43,000 for Capital; $104,000 for Other Operating. Are there other professional fees and contracts that relate to this No.1 footnote, the Education Renewal Initiatives?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, under Transportation, this includes travel for consultants. Approximately two-thirds of it covers the travel of technical and advisory committee members. There is an increase of $7l,l00. It covers additional travel costs for the standards testing committees and the examination markers for the Senior 4 examinations and the standards tests.

Communications includes telephone, courier and postage costs for the Assessment and Evaluation office. A large portion of dollars are utilized for the postage of examinations and reports to school divisions. There is a decrease there of $300 due to telephone and long-distance savings.

Rental/Maintenance, there is a decrease of $25,l00 there. That is for space-lease cost, that decrease. Space-lease costs account for about $51,000 there. It also includes costs for rental and maintenance of equipment used within the Assessment and Evaluation branch.

Professional Fees includes the payment for contract writers, for assessment designers, report writers and fee-for-service costs for technical and advisory committee members. There is an increase there of $167,000 or $167,200 and that is for additional committee members, markers and contract writers.

It also, under Other, includes the purchase of office supplies, photocopying costs, printing costs of exams and assessment reports, and an increase of $80,200 for the provision of standards tests and the Senior 4 examinations.

The Other Operating includes accommodations and meals for consultants in a travel status, with a large portion for the many committee members who come in from the more distant parts of the province. There is an increase there of $43,500 due to the increased number of committee members for the standards testing and the addition of markers for the Senior 4 examinations and the standards tests.

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The Capital includes costs associated with the purchase of new hardware and software for staff within the Assessment and Evaluation office. There is an increase of $28,000 in technology requirements for new administrative and professional staff who will be developing and administering standards tests, and those are basically the details surrounding those particular items.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, I have a couple of requests coming out of that. They do not necessarily all require comment at this point, but I would like to know something about the hardware, software that is being purchased for the Assessment branch.

Secondly, I would like to know what portion of that--I believe it was, I am not sure, either a $40,000 or a $60,000 increase--was for the markers of the English language exam? Maybe I should just put it more simply, what amount did the minister allocate to the markers of that English language exam, I guess by semester really? Well, maybe I would look for some advice from the minister, that is actually going to be doubled or are there fewer people writing in June than there were in January?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, about two-thirds wrote in January and the remaining one-third will be writing in June, so the costs will be different proportionately.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, I am looking for the cost in January, and then I will be able to extrapolate, more or less, approximately what the cost in June would be.

I am also interested in obtaining a list of the contract writers with the particular subject areas.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, staff are just searching for the names, but while they are doing that I will indicate that the total cost for the English language arts exam including stipends, development, everything, was $740,000.

The questions she asked about the hardware and software, they are--one PC for the new staff members, like, one each--WordPerfect, communication software, spreadsheets and databases. If she can wait just a moment, we will have the rest of the information.

Just an indication. Most of the work is done by committee so there would be, sort of like joint ventures, but all we have here today--we will get the rest tomorrow, but I will give you what we have today. An individual who did some contracting for us, a Mr. John Ilavsky, spelled I-l-a-v-s-k-y, who prepared a document for teachers and administrators regarding reporting policies and practices on student progress and achievement from kindergarten through to Senior 4, was paid $4,900 for that. He is a retired school superintendent.

I do not have the names, but I do know from staff that there were two other people who did graph work and translation and then others who did computer programming to input data. As I say, we do not have those names here today but we can provide them tomorrow.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, what I had assumed when the minister said contract writers, were the people who were writing curriculum. So I get the sense from the examples given that that is not exactly what these people are doing. These are essentially technical reports in the area of assessment requested by the government.

(Mr. Peter Dyck, Acting Chairperson, in the Chair)

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, the testing development is done by a committee of teachers, so there is not a contract person there. When we get to 16.2 (b), there will be more detail about how the curriculum is designed, but, basically, there is a committee of educators who will design a curriculum and set down the parameters. The curriculum then will be written by a writer and that is sometimes contracted out, about half of the time contracted out.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, the minister suggested earlier--I cannot remember if it was in her opening remarks or not--that she had a new method of selecting teachers for committees of the department.

Could the minister tell us how the teachers were selected for the testing development committee?

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Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I indicated that test development is generally done by a committee of teachers and that our secondments are now open to competition, so to speak, for want of a better way to explain it. The way it works is this: We will send a letter of invitation to all school superintendents. The school superintendents will nominate the teacher who they think is the right teacher, or they may send in a couple of names. It does not have to be just one. But we will write to all superintendents and say we are going to be doing some development in this and this area; could you nominate a person or some people from your division that you think would be best. So they will then send in the names and, if they send in a couple from every division, you have about 100 names to choose from. They are then selected against certain criteria.

One, of course, that will be fundamentally important would be the background in the subject, the years of teaching and the expertise in the subject. The question being asked is, maybe not on paper but in our minds, is this a master teacher in this discipline? Then they will also check against urban/rural/north in terms of area, male/female or cultural background that might be deemed to be applicable for whatever it is they are doing, and they need to have an aboriginal representative for each committee. So then they have the committee. The committee then guides the design, the technical preparation, the test items for development and participates in the piloting process. That is it in a nutshell.

Ms. Friesen: When the minister says, participates in the piloting process, is part of that piloting process a formal evaluation at the end of the pilot, and is that a written evaluation that is available publicly?

Mrs. McIntosh: There is a report--“report” is not maybe the right word, but there is an evaluation that will come from the school to the team. It is an internal evaluation because the material coming from the school is sent back under confidential conditions, basically surrounding the security of the exam because, if they make specific recommendations such as change the theme from this to this, then it sort of breaks the integrity of the security. The evaluation that comes back does not come back sort of like to this arena, where you and I might be, or into the House. It comes back for internal use by the team that is working on the development and the evaluation.

Ms. Friesen: How many test development committees are there at the moment?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, there are six in total right now.

Ms. Friesen: There is, obviously, one for the English exams. What are the other ones in process?

Mrs. McIntosh: They are Senior 4 math, both the 40-G and the 40-S, Senior 4 ELA, Grade 3 math and the two subcommittees to do the French, the same exam but in the other language.

Ms. Friesen: The minister and I have differences, I think, about probably the level of examination and the nature of exams. But putting that aside, one of the things that I think is really important--whether in fact you have examinations in this matter or not--is the outcomes. It is one of the things that I have been stressing as I go along, because I think that clear expectations for parents, clear communication of a range of expectations within certain years and grade levels and that kind of thing are very helpful whatever the final issue is. So the communication--particularly for the kind of program that New Directions is, obviously, outcomes clearly establish well translated, well understood by parents, teachers and students, certainly at many levels--is very important. So it is this communication of outcomes that concerns me.

(Mr. Deputy Chairperson in the Chair)

How were the outcomes--in the sense of expectations--communicated for the Grade 12 exams and does the minister see any changes for this coming June?

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Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, the curriculum contains statements of outcomes, and those are sent out one year in advance. The outcomes, as I indicate, are contained in the curriculum, and they are available in the guides that we send to divisions for the divisions' use.

There was an interesting comment made by the deputy as I was being given this information, and that is that the Manitoba Textbook Bureau indicated a rush super-large request for the curriculum guidelines that have been in place since 1987 the minute this was announced. I think that is interesting because it indicates when people say, well, the teachers will teach to the test, it indicates that they ran out and decided they had better start teaching to the curriculum, if they had not been already, or at least refresh their knowledge of the curriculum. To me, that indicates how important it is to know that they are going to be assessed, that it does, I think, encourage the curriculum being taught.

Can we take a break?

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Is it the will of the committee to take a 10-minute break? We will resume at 25 minutes to.

The committee recessed at 4:22 p.m.

________

After Recess

The committee resumed at 4:34 p.m.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Order, please.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, the minister had been talking about the rush on curriculum at the Textbook branch, and the assumption is, and that is what I wanted to follow up on, that this was all from teachers. Is it possible that parents and parent councils or other groups were part of that rush to purchase curriculum? What I am after overall is the communication of the outcomes and the standards.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, the rush on the Textbook Bureau was from teachers and schools. Now the curriculum does have in it the guide that the department has provided on outcomes and so on. We encourage, and without monitoring, hope that schools did inform parents of these outcomes in a variety of ways.

I have indicated, as the member referenced in her earlier comments, one division where I know for sure it was sent out, and we understand that the message was put out to parents, if not in that exact same fashion, in very similar fashions in many of the divisions. I cannot say all because I do not think it was all and I do not know. We have not surveyed all, but the message did go out in written form to the public in areas of the province, and our encouragement and expectation would be that it has gone out through other vehicles in local catchment areas.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, I think the member for Crescentwood (Mr. Sale) walked off with my math curriculum, which is unfortunate because I was going to read from it.

One of my concerns in that curriculum is, and the outcomes are there, but they are not user friendly to put it mildly. Now presumably St. James School Division, I think the minister said, they did it in a newsletter so they would have translated. They would have put this into plain English and into language that new parents, and obviously at the Grade 3 level many are new parents, can understand. That is what I am looking for is some consistency in that overall. Some school divisions have done that; some have not. Some have done it in parent meetings where some parents have been and others have not, so even within divisions there may not have been that consistency.

Again, whatever we think about the place of exams, it seems to me that this is an important element of education and I would be looking for some sense in the evaluation of the exams that that could be looked at, that could be part of the evaluation, and that perhaps over the next few years in all the areas of curriculum those can be.

The ones I am thinking of--I have looked at some from the Protestant school board in Quebec, or I think what used to be the Protestant school but I think they have changed it now--where they have done a number of popular versions, I guess, of the new curriculum. There are in some of the European countries, and the United Kingdom is the one I am familiar with, there are popular books essentially which have been written on the new national curriculum aimed at parents, at parent councils, which provide the opportunity for discussion around certain areas and sort of lead people through those kinds of discussions so that they can look at them both individually and collectively and share ideas with other parents. It seems to me that that would be really important. Again, leaving aside the question of exams, that would be really important for parents in Manitoba to have access to. So I would be looking for the department in the future to be making that kind of popular consumption, popular understanding more widely known.

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I think even beyond parents, too, it has an importance because the whole standing of the public schools, I think, depends upon all of the community understanding, the standards that are there, the different grade levels in particular subjects, the wide variety of the curriculum, the kind of things that the minister refers to as--I have forgotten the term that is used informally--the skill building across the curriculum, for example, in technology. One of the things I think we have to communicate to people generally in Manitoba is how that is being done, what students can accomplish at certain levels. As I say, the minister is also adding on to that exams. I think there are many other ways of communicating it, but I think we would probably agree that that is an area of important communication, so I will be looking for plans as we look at these Estimates for that broader communication of those goals and outcomes.

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, the parent reports, I think, come in here as significant in terms of these kinds of communications, and the parent report for math will be user friendly. It is being designed and developed for parents, to be put in language that would be meaningful for them. That is due out in September '96, so it is just a matter of some months away, and, as each new curriculum is developed, we will be providing parents with information about curriculum outcomes.

We do believe that all partners can play a part, and I can raise this issue with the advisory committee to see if they have any additional thoughts or input on it because, again, it is part of that whole communication agenda that we talked about earlier, how do we make sure that those who require information receive it? That has a couple of components. We talked earlier about the communication protocol and how important it was, once information was developed, to have it get to the right people in a timely fashion. The other part of that, of course, is to determine what is the information that needs to go out, and I think the member has raised a very legitimate point that I think we are aware of and have addressed in some ways but could probably do more to ensure that there are not groups of people out there wondering what is going on.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, another possibility might be also to look at the public libraries as depositories for examinations as well as for the curriculums, curriculum guides, outcomes, those kinds of things. I was in the new Vancouver library recently, which is unbelievable. I mean, it is fantastic. If you get a chance to go, this is what they have done as their centennial or 125th, I think, project for the city of Vancouver. One of the areas that they have is devoted to the curriculum in schools. You can actually go to the shelves. You can pick off any curriculum guide. They have their version of skills and outcomes. You can pick out the exams. I actually sat down and read all the Grade 12 exams for last year in British Columbia, and I was not the only person in that section of the library either reading them. So it seems to me that that was a very popular, easily accomplished depository that would get material around the province and puts it into the hands of, not only parents but the general community as well.

Mrs. McIntosh: We have not been doing that, and it sounds like a good idea. It is something that I think we will take a look at. Right now we are still developing curriculum and so on, but the merit I think and the concept the member raises in her observations of how it is working I think has a lot of potential to help students prepare themselves for exams by reviewing old or recent ones that are written. Plus I think it would also help to make the process as transparent as could be, that people would be able to sit down and explore on their own without any kind of intervention and come to conclusions about what they are reading.

It is open. I like the openness of it. We are looking at the electronic medium so that access to some of these things could be electronic, but not quite the way the member has expressed it. As I say, it has not been something that we have looked at, but staff too is indicating it sounds like an intriguing idea. So it is maybe something we will put on our to-explore list for future consideration. Thank you.

Ms. Friesen: Two of the other ways that I have seen of communicating educational programs that struck me as very useful; one is the Saskatchewan indicators program, the Saskatchewan indicators reporting, which I would like to come to, actually when we get to Schools Information System. It is perhaps more appropriate there. British Columbia as well, when they began to move to the discussion of outcomes, one of the things they did was to publish a wall chart, I think it was, something that could simply be put up in the entry of every school or again indeed in the public library.

So there are relatively simple and cheap ways of exposing the general public to what is happening in the public schools. That is the context in which I am looking at it, building up that confidence in the public schools.

Quebec I know--and the reason that I saw the Quebec ones was in fact they were published in the newspaper and formed the basis of some letters to the editor back and forth for a few weeks. So there was that sense of public debate, but everybody was actually reading from the same book essentially. That seemed to me quite helpful.

I wanted to look at the English language exam that we have just had. There were some concerns about it, and I wonder what the minister's response has been to those concerns or what the thoughts of the department have been.

Speaking as the MLA that represents Gordon Bell School, one of the concerns there has been the applicability of the English language examinations to students whose English is relatively recent. One of the arguments that I heard was that it really takes six to eight years after a student has mastered the basics of English, enough to carry on a conversation and to be integrated into a regular classroom, that really you have to allow almost a decade, a six to eight year period until the colloquialisms were there, the fluency, the ease of expression could approach those of students whose first language is English or French.

Gordon Bell, like a number of other schools in the inner city, has a high proportion of students who are relatively recent newcomers. They expressed I think their concerns about this exam. The concerns are at a number of levels. One of course is the amount of weighting that will come onto the exam in the future. These are often students who are very able. I have been to their graduations every year and the marks that they have in the math exams and the science fairs and those kinds of things are just utterly amazing. Both they and some of their teachers are very concerned about the impact that the 50 percent English mark will have on them in their ability to be competitive in university entrance exams and college scholarships and those kinds of things. So that is one level of concern. Maybe I should stop there. The others dealt with the actual process of this particular exam.

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Mrs. McIntosh: Just to indicate two things, one, just straight, factual type stuff, and the other, a little philosophical commentary. I should indicate, in terms of fairness and equity, the test was designed to be written by all Senior 4 English language arts students in the province, and all students have an opportunity then to demonstrate their knowledge and skill on a common measure. The exam was structured so that all students, whether English as a Second Language, native, multicultural or from single-parent families, whatever their disadvantage in terms of the language might be, could read and respond. The readings were selected so that weaker students could participate. Strong students were able to demonstrate strengths in their responses to writing tasks and to reading questions. There are students who are in English as a Second Language; they were not compelled to write the exam. Only students who had maybe completed their English as a Second Language, if that was a problem, and were in the regular classroom wrote the exam.

*

Now, I know what the member is saying. She indicated it takes about eight years to really get up to the comfort level but, nonetheless, the students who had gone through their English as a Second Language were put in the regular classroom and were working with those students. The passages were selected with a wide range of difficulty so that all students could write and students did have access to dictionaries and grammar guides throughout the process writing.

Having said that, those being points that indicate that people who really are not English speaking yet really could not write the exam and that we anticipated a wide range of abilities and therefore had a wide range of accommodations, we nonetheless know that there would be people who would be bright, who would be proficient in many areas, except at this point not yet that proficient in their English, although they might be someday further down the road as they stayed longer in an English-speaking society.

There are two things that you could do now to the little philosophy bit, two things that one could do as a decision maker. One would be to measure accurately; one would be just to close your eyes and not take into account any of those external factors and just say, how well is this student doing, just measure it in the same way that you measure how tall this student is or how fast this student can run? Just do the measurement, put it down as a fact of measurement.

The other route to go would be to, I am not saying, distort the measure, but, to--[interjection]--weight it in some way--thank you, that was the word I was looking for--would be to weight it in some way so that you would not disadvantage that student for circumstances that may not be in that student's control.

The government has taken the position that they want the accurate snapshot unweighted, in its pure form, so to speak. In that way, then, they will know the true level of proficiency as opposed to a weighted one, and they will have a better photograph of the picture of the province at any point in history.

Now, having said that, that is one of the reasons that the exams at Senior 4 are not going to be counting for more than 50 percent, but the theory is that we would rather move the students up to the standard than adjust the standard for the student. Sometimes that might mean it would take a little longer to reach the standard, but when the student then says to someone, I have my Grade 12 English language arts, those who become familiar with our system once it is up and running will know exactly what that standard is and it will be constant and measurable.

There has been debate back and forth about those two philosophies, which are different from each other, and both have points about them that are meritorious. We have chosen the one that I have described as being the better of the two, and I think the Blueprint and the Foundation for Excellence, and all of those things, New Directions probably spell out some of the rationale for that decision. We do, though, try to accommodate those who are really struggling with the language by not insisting they write the exams. If they are proficient verbally and they can read and write, yes, they would be expected to write it. They would have access to dictionaries, access to research material, those kinds of aids and guidances but other than that, they would be writing the same exam, marked the same way.

Ms. Friesen: There is a difference of philosophy here and I do not think we need to get into that argument. What I would flag for the minister is, it really is a serious concern in schools like Gordon Bell, and there are other ones obviously in the rest of the city that are in that same position with a substantial number of students in that situation who, over the years, we know will reach that kind of proficiency but in the meantime may be denied access to the scholarships, and really these are scholarship students and to whom post-secondary education may not be available without a scholarship.

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What I wanted to ask the minister was, is this something that can be included in the evaluation? Is it possible in the way the results are coming to you and the consultations that you are doing with schools, perhaps, afterwards that this can be an issue that can be raised? How has this affected these kinds of students? Is there some material that we should be gathering over a longer period that would give us some indication two or three years down the line whether, in fact, this exam has proved a barrier or has not proved a barrier to those kinds of students?

Mrs. McIntosh: Undoubtedly those types of questions being raised here, for example, by the member, or she indicates some people at Gordon Bell or wherever the people would have that kind of question raised, we too then would be asking that question of ourselves in an evaluative process. There would be any number of things we would be looking to see as the examinations continue.

One thing that I know we want to check is if the universities are noticing any difference in the students coming in after--this would not be a question we could ask right away, of course, because it will take a few years to be able to get a picture. The universities have made quite a point of complaining about the inconsistency in the ability of students coming in to university to use the English language. I think I indicated before in earlier conversations some of the suggestions that they have explored, I do not know if they have explored them formally but certainly informally, and I believe formally as well, about entrance exams or common first year which is one I believe they are looking at pretty seriously.

When they start saying, well, maybe we need entrance exams to the university, by and large, they are trying to address the fact that someone from school A sends in their record, and it says they have 86 in English language arts; someone from school B sends in and says they have 72 in English language arts. Yet the 72 percent person is actually better skilled in English language arts than the one in the 80s, and it is because, to date, in Grade 12, there has not been an English language arts exam for 25 years; their school has had exams.

Some places have division-wide exams, but they are testing them on slightly different things. They mark against slightly different criteria; they do not have a set standard that anybody understands. If they have written the same exam, sent to a central marker, marked the same way, then the university, being just one of many places that might need to make comparisons, can compare apples with apples.

We feel, as well, that it will be an encouragement for the curriculum to be more influential in the classroom and that, therefore, the skills coming out at the end--more consistent. I believe that this will be an asset for students, and, again, we do a lot of dialogue on that. Certainly, all of the criticisms and critiques that are being put forward to government as we go through the process are ones that will be looked at if for no other reason than we will be wanting to answer the critics and say we did take a look at the concern that was expressed, and we find that our expectations were correct. That would be what we were hoping to see, and, if we are wrong, then the examination will have proven to be very important to have done.

I really do not think, regarding scholarships and ability to get a scholarship to go to university, that our examinations will allow the rewarding of true scholarships for those superior students who have reached an achievement level and a high standard. Right now, sometimes the high school marks that one gets are used by post-secondary institutions to award scholarships, and the standard of the marks may not be always comparable or give a true comparison.

Just by way of interest, the Aboriginal Advisory Committee which has been giving advice to government indicated to the government that they did not want different standards for aboriginal students, and the reason they gave for that is that they were concerned that their children would become increasingly marginalized because they feel that is what has marginalized their children over the years to now. They feel that their children have become marginalized and that the sort of patronizing treatment that they have received with all good intentions over time has not been to the advantage of the children,.

This sort of attitude we have taken, which I hope as a people we are overcoming, where we had this noblesse oblige kind of attitude towards our aboriginal people where we were sort of the great white father sent to look after the helpless native people. I recall reading--and the member may have seen it; being a historian, she has probably got a familiarity with it. I read this little document, which I have got in my desk drawer, and it was written at the time Manitoba came into Confederation. It is done in the old script and the old language, and it refers to the aboriginal people as uncivilized and ignorant. I forget the other words, but it was definitely not complimentary. It was inherent in the way they described the native people as this paternal, we have to be here to look after these people.

Anyhow that is what the Aboriginal Advisory Committee said they do not want to happen anymore. Please do not marginalize us. If you are setting a standard, we can meet the standard. Raise us up to it. Let us work up to it, even if it takes us more time. Do not lower the standard for us because then you make us lesser in the long run.

I like that thinking, and it presents a huge challenge, though. That kind of thinking is a challenge to the student; it is a challenge to the teacher, to the school system, to the ministry, because it is not easily done. Just today apparently a parent called the department wanting a letter from us here in the department stating that her son's marks on the Senior 4 exams would not--the school would not supply the letter because there was no provincial requirement to report separately and he needed the marks for his application to an eastern university, a U.S. university, hmm. I think that demonstrates the value of the provincial program of testing, that he needed that mark to show, and I think that kind of thing will be useful for students to have, particularly if it is a known standard and a measurable outcome that has meaning in comparisons of the apple-to-apple variety.

Are you signalling me my time is up? Okay, I will stop there then.

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Ms. Friesen: The parents, I think, that I was trying to represent are ones who are new immigrants, of course, for whom so much hope is vested in their children. So the exam, the weighting, the future weighting of this exam is causing considerable concern and a feeling that these are children who will make it, who are bright and hardworking, and yet there is a stumbling block been placed in their way at a particular age which has made it more difficult for them. So it was not--there are obviously many aboriginal students at Gordon Bell as well, but I think, more widely speaking across Winnipeg No. 1, that that is the expression of concern I have heard.

The minister's reference to the 19th Century perspectives of an aboriginal people is actually not so far off the mark for the present day in the context of the Indian Act. The Indian Act actually makes all Indians wards of the state. They are all in theory, in principle, in law essentially--

An Honourable Member: Children.

Ms. Friesen: Yes, children in legal terms, and that Indian Act is still with us, a very current legacy of those kinds of attitudes.

I wanted to ask about the English language process. The minister made reference to having an aboriginal person on every committee of teachers who develop the tests. I am not sure if I understood that correctly but that was what I understood. One of the comments that I had--I think it was also raised in the Free Press--was the nature of the selection of materials for that exam. There was in particular a very surprising--it surprised me when I read it--article by David Suzuki which had some references to aboriginal people which were very much of a 19th Century context. I was surprised Suzuki had written that. Others were I think surprised that that had been selected.

So I wondered--I am sure it was raised with the minister; I think it was raised publicly as well--if there had been any response or any reflection from the department on this. Again, in the same context, there were some people who were concerned about gender balance in the selections. There were very few women writers who were used and had that been something that the department had looked at and again the minister said when she selected teachers for these committees, gender balance or gender was certainly an issue that was considered.

So has this really made its way through to the committee or was the committee aware of what it was doing? Does it believe that there can be improvements? Has the government reflected upon those kinds of comments?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, two points. I just asked staff and to my pleasure in their preparedness they have the exam here and they will bring forward the Suzuki article. I do not know if you have read it yourself or if you were referencing what the Free Press had indicated or not, but we will table it as soon as he pulls it out.

Just regarding the immigrant parents, because I do understand what the member is saying of the pride they have and the hope they have when they come to this country. I really think that the immigrant children of today will succeed just as the immigrant children of yesterday did because (a) they work hard, (b) they have hope, and (c) they have enormous will and drive for a better future than the one they might have faced in the place from which they came. I really think that the curricula and assessment and testing gives extra incentive and drive. If you hear people talk about the things they experienced when they came into the country, how hard they had to work and the hurdles they had to overcome to be proficient and at the top, you will see some of the strongest, the most capable people who have learned not only how to reach for something but to have to reach harder and higher and farther than most. The net result of it is when they reach their goal, they reach it with far more sense of purpose, intensity and pride than those of us who are able to drift through and have things come easily. I think they become stronger for it, but that is just a comment. I do not disagree with her about people coming with hope and wanting and seeking success.

The articles in the test package--the main question she was asking--were screened for bias. The Suzuki article was combatting, not supporting stereotyping, but because it is written at a higher skill level, I guess, than just the straightforward, some people may have misunderstood the point of the article. I am just going to read: The materials selected have to be free of bias, inclusive of native and minority groups, avoid stereotyping and reflect a wide range of reading difficulty. Materials for the examinations were carefully selected to reflect a balance between literary and transactional text, familiar and sight text, and male and female voice.

We will keep trying to be vigilant about bias, as well as other factors in the testing materials and in the construction, the design and the content of the test. The article to which we were referring is an article that is called The Right Stuff. It is by David Suzuki. The member is correct in her understanding of David Suzuki; he is very much not a person who would write this.

What he is saying in his article is that as the writer visited a northern town to judge a science fair--and he describes the town, a tough town with a transient population, et cetera--and he drops into a bar. A man in the bar comes over and starts to talk to him about the students in the high school. David Suzuki was going to speak at the high school. The man says to him, I hear you are going to talk to the students in the high school tomorrow. Now I am quoting from the article: When I affirmed it, he shocked me by adding, they will kill you. I am the science teacher there and I can tell you that all they think about is sex, drugs and cars. They will tear you apart.

I am still quoting from the article: Well, he really scared me. I immediately formed images of a blackboard jungle filled with switchblades and drug-crazed hoods. The next day when I walked into that auditorium, it was with great trepidation. There were 400 teenagers in the gym, about a third of them Indians. They looked pretty normal to me, but I had been warned and I knew that they were just biding their time by turning into raving animals.

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He goes on in that vein, and at the end of the article he ends up indicating that students will remember the things they learn in school. The implication there is those hidden messages are going to be remembered as well.

He does say that he knew they were just biding their time by turning into raving animals, but what he was really doing in his writing was referring back to the message that had been given to him, and implying and telling how you, by accepting messages without doing your own research, can often be conned or tricked into believing those things. He has his tongue in his cheek very obviously. But that type of thing--and it is an interesting article to have in a test--because satirical writing often does require a higher level of interpretation in the reading, and that is one thing that can be noted in the marking. Who picks that out quickly and easily? Who notices that it is satire? Who interprets it literally? I think that is one of the reasons teachers kind of had fun with the marking of it. It was looking for those kinds of subtleties throughout it, but we are conscious, we do not want anybody to feel reading it, interpreting it the wrong way and feeling badly about it. That is not an intended outcome. So we will be very diligent in going through these things to ensure that nobody goes home feeling that they have been made a lesser person in some way, if even just for a little bit of time.

Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, continuing on a number of process issues, I do not know how our time will go, but if I could draw them to the minister's attention and then maybe we will perhaps conclude it next time. I wanted to make sure that there was indeed an aboriginal teacher on this test development committee. That was No. 1.

Number two was the process of collecting information on the results of the test. I was looking for some commitment to the fact that ESL--not ESL, but the students with that middling capability in English, that that can be addressed. I am not sure I got the answer that information is being collected in such a way that that can be addressed over a three- or four-year period. So it is the nature of the evaluation, how you are talking to schools, how the overall evaluation of the exam is considered. That is No. 2.

Number three deals with process during the exam. It took a long time. It took a number of days. That was the purpose of the exam. It was to develop, to examine, those kinds of issues of editing, self-editing, correction, development of themes. The amount of time it took was of concern to some schools so, again, I am looking for some reflection from the minister on how that is going to be evaluated. Is there any possibility that the time might be shortened, it might be compressed in different ways over perhaps the next two years of examinations? Is that being taken into consideration in evaluation?

Am I up to No. 4 now? I am not sure. My fourth one dealt with the time in between that students had for group discussion, I think was of a concern. The groups were often groups which had not met before--not often, in some cases, the groups were groups which had not met before. They were given a relatively short space of time to develop a leader, a group dynamic, as well as reach some general discussion and conclusion. I think there were concerns expressed about that. Has that been evaluated? What kind of changes are possible as a result of that? Has that particular portion of the exam been examined to see what it contributes to the overall generalizations, and are there possibilities of adjustments in that?

I think people were concerned that you put students together who have never really talked to each other and within a very short space of time, they have to come to conclusions, they have to choose a leader. You know, at the age of 17 or 18 those are not things that come quickly. Often in some cases, there will be; some cases, there will not be. It might in fact be an issue of the homogeneity, homogeneous population in the school. It might be an issue of how small or large the school is. A small school they might know each other better. They may be more prepared to trust quickly than in a larger school where they do not have that.

A further question was, again, the gaps between the exams where students were supposed to consult their work, possibly even get together in groups--I think this was over a weekend--my sense of listening to both parents and teachers and some students on this is that there were considerable differences in the way different schools and different communities approach this. In some schools and communities, children essentially worked on their own, possibly with a parent, possibly without. In some schools I think students sort of put in long hours. Some schools, I heard, were on the Internet and dealing with distant relatives in other parts of the country who were doing doctorates in English and that kind, drawing on a wide variety of sources.

In itself there is nothing wrong with that, and one would want to encourage students to develop all kinds of means of improving their work. But, when it becomes an examination, when students are marked and they may not have equal access to the Internet, they may not have equal access to a group of parents or to a group of parents with similar expertise, it seems to me that inequities are being introduced into the process. So I am looking, in this case, for evaluation of that. Has the minister been made aware of those kinds of things, and is there a process for evaluation?

Finally--I do not know what I am up to, five or six--the minister in the House and in a number of conversations has said that the marking of the exam was regarded with great enthusiasm by the teachers who did it. I am sure that is true. Any collective professional endeavour like--

Mrs. McIntosh: Could you back up and say that last sentence again? I missed it, sorry.

Ms. Friesen: All right. The minister in the House and in various conversations has spoken of the enthusiasm that teachers have expressed in marking these exams, and my sense is that any collective endeavour like that where they are discussing work is professional development. Again, our differences, I think, would come over the weighting of this and over the location of it and all those sorts of things, but the actual professional development involved in the collective marking of students' work, the discussion of student work, I think, is important. The minister did at one point, I think, offer to facilitate my meeting with some of these teachers in a response in the House, and I would like to take her up on that. I would like to talk to some of the teachers who had marked that exam.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: The time is 5:30 p.m. Do you have a very short comment or do you want to finish it tomorrow?

Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, what I will indicate is that we have been noting down the questions and I notice we are out of time. We will come back tomorrow, I guess, and we will bring in the answers and we will start off by giving them to her.

Mr. Deputy Chairperson: The hour being 5:30 p.m., the committee will recess until 9 a.m. tomorrow (Friday).