As New Brunswick prepares to overhaul the way it teaches French to anglophone students, a government MLA is saying the new program should be delayed.
Andrea Anderson-Mason told officials from the Department of Education that she fears the Innovative Immersion Program could undermine a new literacy initiative that has shown promising early results.
“I applaud the objective,” Anderson-Mason said during a meeting of the legislature’s public accounts committee.
“I am concerned about the timing and I am concerned about the possibility for success. I am incredibly concerned about the timing and how much more teachers can handle.”
The new program will replace French immersion for incoming anglophone students as of this fall. Next school year all English prime students in kindergarten and Grade 1 will spend half their days in English and the other half learning French. The goal is to have all students in the anglophone system graduating with at least a conversational level of French.
Anderson-Mason says she’s concerned that the new program will hamper teachers’ ability to teach early literacy skills, which have been declining in the province for about a decade.
A recent report from the province’s child and youth advocate Kelly Lamrock outlined the declines in the province’s literacy rates, which were at an 18-year low in 2021-2022. That year about 60 per cent of Grade 4 anglophone students were meeting grade-level expectations. In 2010, the province’s high-water mark for childhood literacy, 85 per cent of second-graders in the anglophone system and 77 per cent in the francophone system were meeting standards.
Promising results from new literacy program
But a new literacy curriculum is showing promising results. By September, all teachers in the anglophone system will be trained on the new “building blocks” curriculum, which has already been piloted in a handful of priority schools in Saint John.
Officials from the Department of Education say the curriculum led to increased literacy rates across three grade levels over the course of a year. Just two per cent of kindergarten students were meeting expectations at the beginning of the school year, which jumped to 64 per cent by the end. At the Grade 1 and Grade 2 levels, achievement rates jumped from 22 and nine per cent, respectively, to 97 and 90 per cent over the school year.
Anderson-Mason told reporters that she wants to see the province give the new literacy program time to work before moving forward with the Innovative Immersion Program.
“I think we need time to put this program in place, have teachers comfortable and see the success before we put another program on top of them that might actually interrupt it,” she said.
Anderson-Mason told the committee about a conversation she had with one kindergarten teacher about the new program. The teacher said that next year the two kindergarten classes in her school will trade between a French and an English teacher. One class will have English in the morning and French in the afternoon, with the other receiving the opposite.
The teacher raised concerns over what impact that will have on the class receiving English instruction in the afternoon.
“She said, Andrea, all kindergarten teachers know that in the afternoon we’re trying to keep the kids awake. If you want a kindergarten child to learn something we save it for the morning for when they’re they’re brightest, they’re most alert,” Anderson-Mason said.
“I have grave concerns that if we’re going to be flipping the days what children will be losing out on.”
According to deputy education minister John McLaughlin, a delay in the rollout of the program is possible. He told the public accounts committee that the department is using the ongoing consultation period to feel out if the September 2023 timeline is feasible.
“Our team believes it’s feasible,” he said. “But we also have to make sure that our schools and our teachers feel it’s reasonable and our parents feel it’s reasonable.”
McLaughlin also suggested that the current proposal for the program is just that, a proposal, and could see changes before being introduced.
“Consultation ends on Feb. 3 and then there would be a decision made on whether to proceed on this model or something different,” he said.
“I want to be clear: This is a proposal.”
That language differs somewhat from that used by Premier Blaine Higgs and Education Minister Bill Hogan.
Higgs has been clear that he wants the program in place by September 2023, which led to a dispute with and the resignation of former education minister Dominic Cardy. The Education Department’s initial timeline for the program was September 2024. But Higgs wanted that moved up by a year to put some distance between implementation and the next scheduled election in fall 2024.
“We all know in an election year, if you think you’re going to implement something significant, it’s not going to happen. It just won’t happen,” Higgs told reporters on Oct. 14, 2022.
“We’ve had this on the docket for three or four years now, so how do we do this and have a year before an election?”
Asked if she believed the premier and education minister were open to pushing back the timeline for the new program, Anderson-Mason said she hopes they consider the concerns that teachers and parents are raising during consultations.
“I think that’s our job, that’s certainly my job as an MLA, to listen to constituents, to listen to stakeholders,” she said.
“And I think that if anybody knows what should be happening in our classrooms, it’s the educators.”