After results released yesterday showed that Manitoba students had the lowest test scores in the country, provincial education minister Kelvin Goertzen weighed in.
Goertzen said that the results of the PISA assessment are not acceptable, adding that results like these are the reason that the province launched a K-12 education review.
“Clearly, Manitobans in general, and educators in particular, are concerned about our education outcomes, and that is why we called the K-12 commission because we knew that these results have been sliding for more than a decade,” said Goertzen. “Hopefully we’ll get good recommendations that’ll put us on the path to improve results because that’s what all of us want.”
Goertzen says that even though there has been some backlash towards the K-12 commission, the PISA results shouldn’t be a condemnation of the review; it should be viewed as a justification.
When the minister was asked about whether poverty played into the results, he said that poverty can't be blamed as the only reason.
“If I was to look back to before the tests started to slide, just on a comparative basis, so if I’d go back before the mid-2000s or even the late 1990s, we would have done better in the PISA scores, but my guess is poverty was an issue then too,” said Goertzen. “It’s not necessarily the only cause because there have been times in the past where scores were much better, and yet we still struggled with the issues of poverty. It doesn’t mean it’s not a factor, but it’s clearly not the only factor.”
Goertzen is hoping that the K-12 commission discovers the root of the problem, and presents a solution going forward.
