Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government has discovered the enemy and it is discovery math.

The latest math scores are in, and they show a continuing province-wide decline. Which is all the evidence Doug Ford’s Tories need to complete their political and pedagogical calculations:

Out with the new math. In with the old arithmetic.

To be sure, “back to basics” has a reassuring ring to it. But before we embrace the past as a panacea, let’s look at the evidence cited by the premier’s new education minister, Stephen Lecce.

Insisting that “data is informing my decisions,” Lecce cited an array of “proof points,” “metrics” and ‘benchmarks” Wednesday for figuring out what ails Ontario’s schools. Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) test results show less than half of Grade 6 students (48 per cent) met the provincial standard last year, a one percentage point drop from the average over the past three years, with similarly discouraging declines in other grades.

That’s nothing to celebrate, and may be reason to recalibrate, but is it proof of Lecce’s unwavering hypothesis? The Tories keep trying to link declining scores to discovery math, which they blame on an ideological fixation best fixed by going back to basics.

“There is absolute causation,” argued Lecce, who has taken to appearing at news conferences behind a podium sign proclaiming himself “For the Students” — a variation, lest you forget, of Ford’s inimitable “For the People” slogan.

Lecce blamed “blind adherence to a form of teaching” imposed by the last Liberal government. But his jump from correlation to causation is nothing if not a logical leap.

Discovery math is better known by teachers as inquiry-based math because it teaches students critical thinking to find a solution to a problem, rather than simple computations. The thinking was that rote learning wouldn’t take students far in a world of computers and artificial intelligence, where calculations are done at warp speed; applied problem-solving is where humans will still come in handy.

How did discovery math measure up? In 2010-11, the EQAO recorded a Grade 6 score of 58 per cent; the next year it was still 58 per cent, before declining a point in 2012-13.

If discovery math was so deleterious back then, why wasn’t there a dramatic drop in those three years? And if it’s so bad now, why has it declined so slowly — hovering at 50 per cent in 2015-16, holding steady for the next year, before inching down again over the past two years?

Before we ascertain whether discovery math is part of the problem, ceteris paribus — all other things being equal — we need to rule out other factors definitively dumbing down math scores such as, say, smartphones and video games that distract students and detract from homework.

Like Lecce, the premier hates so-called discovery math: “Kids used to learn math by doing things like memorizing a multiplication table and it worked,” he said last year.

In its collective wisdom, the government’s education brain trust has jumped on the back-to-basics bandwagon as a solution in search of a problem. Memorizing multiplication tables may be important, but when did applied problem-solving become irrelevant?

Why be so binary about both facets of math when students benefit from both?

Now, the Tories are demanding that teachers be taught a lesson. Henceforth, new teachers will have to pass a basic math test before getting their certificate — which seems fair enough, though fairness dictates that the premier and his cabinet take the same test, given their uneven performance in the last provincial budget.

As part of that budgeting exercise, the government announced significant reductions in teachers. You don’t have to be a math whiz to know the cutbacks will raise the student-teacher ratio at the very time our education minister believes we have a crisis in our schools.

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Ford’s Tories are boosting average class sizes from 22 to 28 students over the next four years, provoking disquiet among teachers and students alike. Facing a backlash, Lecce is now trying to have it both ways, arguing that the reductions will come through attrition and are being phased in imperceptibly.

Attrition may be more humane than firing teachers, but it is small comfort for parents who will see their students stuck in bigger classes regardless. Phasing it in only prolongs the inevitable.

Enamoured by the ideology of pedagogy, Ford’s Tories have completed their partisan calculus: They will keep lamenting lower math scores while demonizing discovery math; they will start testing teachers while getting rid of more teaching positions.

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