Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

21 comment(s)

To The Editor:

Education Minister Mr. Kelly Lamrock, please consider a few counterpoints to your harmful decision to scrap the early French immersion system in New Brunswick as outlined in your March 25 letter titled "Response to the report of the commission on French second language programmes."

Granted our school system is last in the country. We are also one of the poorest provinces. These are correlated. If you look to the "best" results provinces, they still have an early French immersion program.

I've read the Croll-Lee report (the official basis for this harmful decision). It is filled with anecdotal statements about the sketchy curriculum, resource limitations and also the lack of properly skilled French immersion teachers.

Where will you get the French teachers for this new program? The same problem is faced now.

Don't condemn the early French immersion program because of a resource problem you'll still face with a new system.

The streaming argument is used again and again, I suspect it is being very strongly pushed by the English system teachers who have been losing their market share over the years. Mr. Lamrock, the 2005 figures for Grade 2 show 23.6 per cent "exceptional" kids in Core and 4.6 per cent "exceptional" kids in French immersion. A combined class would still contain 18.5 per cent "exceptional" kids. Now for an average class size, your proposed system would reduce the "exceptional" number from about five kids down to four kids. If you consider no change in the number of classes, you'll have to hire more special needs people because every class will have about four "exceptional" kids.

How much of a change in the learning environment will occur with the loss of one "exceptional" student per class?

Finally, I can see absolutely no financial rational for this. The Croll-Lee report uses average costs per student and then extrapolates a savings. But Mr. Lamrock, most of these costs are fixed.

Are we going to reduce the number of teachers needed, books, school buses, administrative allocations? Are French immersion teachers more expensive? Because you'll still need these types of skills for your new program.

I suspect French immersion class material may be differentially more expensive than the English system's, but I doubt that it is much overall. You'll still hopefully use some French material in the proposed system.

Mr. Lamrock, if New Brunswick is going to have any kind of a future given the current economics and demographics, we need a system that does not use "dilution is the solution" as its philosophy. We cannot have a one-size-fits-all for our kids' education. We cannot have a single system that is geared only towards the average kid, a system geared for a lower common denominator.

I believe that the early French immersion system is serving a greater purpose across this country. It does not only produce exceptional French speakers (you've only tested a portion of the ones who make it through the school's roadblocks. . . early French immersion produces a latent ability, and that ability is easily recalled with practice and it is mainly practice that is missing in the later years for both those who finish and those who don't), it produces a high quality stream of future leaders and academic achievers.

New Brunswick, of all provinces, needs this system to stay and be fortified, not destroyed.

Good luck to you sir.

Jeffrey Hicks,

Maple Green

(Via e-mail)