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speakup

By now Education Minister Kelly Lamrock should have learned a valuable political lesson. By this point, he should have discovered that you can mess with a lot of things and still survive to stand up in the Legislature another day.

By now he should have realized that you can mess with people’s roads, you can mess with people’s taxes, you can even mess with people’s jobs and still survive, but the thing that will bring them out fighting like cornered dogs, that one thing you cannot do is mess with people’s kids.

Lamrock should have learned that lesson by now, what with the near-constant cacophony of criticism and outrage that has accompanied the axing of the Early French Immersion program, but alas, he has not.

Lamrock has staunchly and rather smugly stood his ground during the last six weeks denying there is anything wrong with his plan to also axe the core French program in grades 1-4 and only allow children to get their first taste of French at age 10 when they have reached Grade 5.

He has refused to listen to the experts who tell him he's wrong, he's refused to admit that his Croll-Lee report might be based on fallacy, and now he's refused to grant the Ombudsman's request for at least a one-year delay on the implementation of his master plan.

But probably Lamrock's most bizarre act, at least lately, is his justification for denying the Ombudsman's request. Lamrock said, "The greatest risk of all is accepting a 50 per cent illiteracy rate in New Brunswick."

What exactly does a poor literacy rate have to do with axing Early French Immersion, particularly when FI students generally score higher on English exams than their counterparts in the core program?

Okay, we'll just go ahead and say what everyone knows and bureaucrats and politicians don't want to utter out loud: French immersion students are, generally speaking, more academically inclined than core students. They are higher achievers, for the most part, who can handle the added academic demands of learning a second language while learning the curriculum of each grade. That's not to say that all of the smart kids are in immersion and all of the less-smart kids are not, but in general terms, you'll not often find a lot of special needs or challenged students in the French immersion program. That's not a discriminatory or mean-spirited statement it's simply the way things are.

That leaves the masses, if you will, to take the core program. In the core program, you will find a rather diverse mix of ADHD kids, the learning disabled, the behaviourally-challenged, and the underachievers, together with the general population of regular students, who, for one reason or another, did not join the immersion crowd. They're all together in the same classroom, with one teacher who is forced to juggle more diagnoses, more challenges, and more individual educational plans than one human could ever expect to handle.

And what is one of the many, and we might add, predictable, outcomes among this mix of non-immersion students? It's no surprise to find there are literacy problems, and not necessarily because of whatever personal challenges some of them might face. It's just as likely because of the unreasonable load that is being placed on the teacher. Yet those are the literacy problems Lamrock says he wants to fix by axing early immersion.

So here's another lesson Lamrock hasn't learned the plan to take away French in the lower grades won't fix literacy issues. A chronically-underfunded, under-resourced system unprepared to cope with the demands of modern educational needs has gotten us in this mess, not a second language.

A better-funded system with the right tools might do the trick, but simply getting rid of French isn't going to fix anything, and in the meantime, it has seriously ticked off a large portion of the voting public who see the education minister as the man who is wrecking the futures of New Brunswick's children.

It's time for Lamrock to get his homework done.