Ontario plans to tie high school attendance to grades and mandate final exams. It's getting mixed reactions

apace leaping from and lockup up his motorised scooter, Toronto score 12 educatee Bilal Rahimi rushed into school during the Monday lunch hour, having missed his morning periods due to caring for an ailing uncle.

"Attendance is pretty important. If you're not attending school, then you don't know the stuff. You don't know the material to pass the tests," the 18-year-old noted, saying he's open about absences with teachers, connects with friends to find out what he's missed and works hard to ensure he's caught up.

Yet high schoolers with inconsistent attendance like Rahimi may soon face academic consequences, as Doug Ford's Conservative government proposes new Ontario legislation that would count attendance and class participation into students' final marks and mandate final exams.

These measures within the new legislation — tabled on Monday, encompassing sweeping changes to school board governance — have drawn mixed reaction from students, parents and education experts.

Education Minister Paul Calandra attributes these measures to "classroom management" talks he's had with educators.

"Honestly, it is an idea that came exclusively from my engagement with teachers. It wasn't on my radar at all," he told reporters Tuesday at Queen's Park.

Why Ontario is changing high school attendance, exams rules

Calandra says he sees the attendance requirement — which would count for 15 per cent of final marks for Grade 9 and Grade 10, dropping to 10 per cent in the senior years — as a way to address rising rates of chronic absenteeism.

Meanwhile, the government's point in bringing back mandated final exams is to better prepare students for post-secondary studies and give "greater clarity" on how a students' final marks are calculated, according to a government statement.

Chronic absenteeism — when a student misses 10 per cent or more of the school year — has become a significant issue since the pandemic, according to educational consultant Paul Bennett.

He says he sees many families today less devoted to attendance, for instance pulling kids out for vacations when school's in session.

"There's a new cohort of students who have come out of the pandemic who don't feel required to go," explained Bennett, the Nova Scotia-based director and lead researcher of Schoolhouse Institute, an independent consulting practice.

"It's a legacy of the pandemic, which doubled the regularized and normalized student absenteeism," he said.

"Chronic absenteeism became the norm, not an exception, as a result of this."

"Some people can skip a lot, but they will still write the tests, exams and have like a good average ... And be the best students in the class," said Aglasha Favorova, a Grade 12 student in Toronto.

Students react to Ontario's planned attendance changes

Most of her peers already show up for class, so Grade 11 student Sofiia Pidlisna questioned whether the measure would even encourage those who don't.

"Most of the people who skip ... They don't really actually care about their mark," Pidlisna said.

Attendance is an important indicator of student engagement in learning and a great predictor of their futures, so putting it in focus is good, says education policy expert Kelly Gallagher-Mackay.

Yet, the associate professor of law and society at Wilfrid Laurier University says, tying attendance to marks "is not at all consistent with the evidence on what works ... And seems to me very likely to worsen achievement gaps."

Counting attendance typically means students already attending are rewarded with "bonus" marks, while peers with spotty attendance — often struggling with some issue, Gallagher-Mackay pointed out — get penalized and fall further behind.

Gallagher-Mackay said she would prefer to see evidence-based strategies to boost attendance, for example reaching out and providing support to struggling students and families or encouraging classroom practices that emphasizes strong attendance, which she notes tend to require investment.

"Those kinds of cultural processes have a huge success rate. Punishment doesn't," she said.

Educators would also rather see absenteeism addressed through increased resources, so students want to attend class, said Martha Hradowy, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation.

"Right now, we're seeing rising student needs alongside fewer supports, and that's the real problem the government should be addressing," Hradowy told The Canadian Press.

"If the goal is better attendance, then the focus needs to be on smaller class sizes, more mental health resources and supports in schools, not new grading rules," she said.

Ontario plans sweeping changes to how school boards are run

In the midst of COVID-19, many schools across the country dropped final exams, given the unprecedented school disruptions and poor mental health students faced due to online learning and condensed schedules.

They weren't always reintroduced — some schools continued assessing students by other means, for instance smaller-scale testing throughout the term, across multiple assignments, or through a major final project.

Writing a paper, creating an app or making a podcast are examples of different ways to assess, says Toronto parent Jennifer Engels, who has children in both elementary and high school. She says she worries high schoolers already struggling with learning will face even more challenges with mandated final exams.

Parent reacts to Ontario's planned mandatory exams changes

"What about kids who don't perform well in exams?" Engels said on Monday, noting for instance that some students with special learning needs must be evaluated in a different way.

"If kids are actually being evaluated only on exams, I think that's really potentially very unfair," she said.

Tests and exams are typically stressful for students because they judge what young people know at one single moment in time, said Gallagher-Mackay, the Laurier professor.

She believes exams are valuable used alongside other ways of assessing students, but "to double down on testing as some kind of measure of success is very backward-looking."

In the coming weeks, Gallagher-Mackay wants to see more clarity and tangible details from Ontario's education ministry about how it proposes to implement the proposed new legislation.

"I feel like both of these measures are symbolic, relatively cheap ways of saying, 'we care about these problems' without actually doing things that are going to address the problems," she said.

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