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Ontario students’ standardized math test results are appalling and they should be unacceptable to the government, to teachers, to parents and especially to students, who are not mastering basic skills they will need to succeed in life.

The latest numbers from the Education Quality and Accountability Office show that achievement continues to decline. The long-standing provincial goal is to have 75 per cent of students achieve the equivalent of a B on the tests. In Grade 3, only 58 per cent met that target, a drop of four percentage points from the average of the previous three years. It’s worse in Grade 6, where only 48 per cent met the standard. In secondary school, 84 per cent of the students who take the Grade 9 academic course succeeded, but their peers who are streamed into applied math have a dismal result, with only 44 per cent achieving the goal.

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This is not the kind of problem that any provincial government can afford to ignore. The former Liberal government got that, belatedly, but only after arguing rather illogically that the poor test results were neither the result of curriculum weakness nor ineffective teaching. Finally, they put more time and money into teaching math and then-premier Kathleen Wynne admitted that the curriculum had “challenges.”