Barely half of Grade 6 students in Ottawa meet Ontario math standard
While reading and writing scores are higher in both public and Catholic boards, math scores lag
Only slightly more than half of Grade 6 students in Ottawa's two English school boards met the provincial standard during math testing in the last school year.
When the province-wide results for English were released by the Education Quality and Accountability Office in August, they showed Grade 6 math scores in English-language boards have declined eight percentage points over the last five years, even though the percentage of students meeting the standard in reading and writing had improved by six percentage points.
Local results released Wednesday show students here scored only slightly better than the provincial trend.
In the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, 53 per cent of its 5,000 Grade 6 students last school year met or exceeded the provincial standard. Among its Grade 3 students, 62 per cent met the standard.
In the Ottawa Catholic Board, 54 per cent of its 2,670 students tested met the standard, compared with 70 per cent of its Grade 3 students.
By contrast, 84 per cent of the same Grade 6 students in the Catholic board met the standard on their reading and writing tests during the 2015-16 school year, while their peers in the public board had similar results.
French-language boards show dramatically different results
Meanwhile, Ottawa's French-language boards have no such struggles with their Grade 6 math results.
At a news conference at Ottawa's Horizon-Jeunesse French Catholic elementary school Thursday, Ontario's premier didn't explain directly the dramatic discrepancy between the English- and French-language boards.
Instead, Kathleen Wynne said her government's plan to boost math scores has similarities with strategies that seem to be working for French-language boards.
The director of the French-Catholic Centre-Est board, for instance, described how teachers and principals work as teams, consult with experts, and use data to regularly monitor whether some students need extra help.
"I hope we'll start to see those results in the other school boards, in the other schools, as we start to take on those practices," said Wynne.
Ontario focusing on boosting math scores
That government strategy involves funding up to three so-called "math leaders" in all elementary schools, a professional development day for teachers dedicated to math, and making sure that each student across the province receives 60 minutes of math instruction per day in grades one through eight.
"I see the numbers and I see that we have work to do, not only as district but as a province," said Dorothy Baker, superintendent of curriculum services for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.
"So I'm pleased to see the renewed math strategy and the focus on this."
Baker said Ottawa-Carleton schools already had that hour of instruction, but she thinks the extra, more co-ordinated focus on math will help students.
Another change in the public board this year is that math is being taught in English in all grades, where some students in the younger grades used to learn it in French.