Math and Reading Scores Are Declining in BC. Why?

[Editor’s note: This is second in a series examining challenges in public education including funding woes, behavioural problems, misogyny in schools, and students’ use of AI. We zeroed in on these issues after having conversations with educators, academics and parents and consulting B.C.’s Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services’ “Report on the Budget 2026 Consultation” and the BC Teachers’ Federation’s 2024-25 membership survey.]

Last month the BC NDP government made good on an old pledge to support kids with learning disabilities by introducing mandatory literacy screening of all kindergarten students.

“This brief assessment will help identify students who may be experiencing reading difficulties so that they can get extra help and support as soon as possible,” said Education Minister Lisa Beare during a Sept. 12 press conference.

“Without those solid foundational skills, we end up with kids that have gaps, and if they have gaps, it's really hard to acquire new knowledge because it does all build on each other,” she added.

The assessment, a test of phonics awareness that asks kids to break down words into sounds, will be used by classroom teachers to help identify students who need additional help with reading or referrals to specialists like school psychologists. Educational psychologists will still be responsible for diagnosing students' learning disabilities.

The province is also working on developing and implementing its own, made-in-B.C. literacy screening tool with education experts and teachers over the coming years.

Mandatory literacy screening, which will extend to students in grades 1 to 3 next year, is part of the Budget 2024 pledge of $30 million over three years to support students with learning disabilities.

Unlike their peers with autism, for example, students diagnosed with learning disabilities such as dyslexia and dyscalculia do not trigger additional support funding from the provincial government.

Declining literacy rates aren’t a new issue for B.C. — or Canada. Standardized test results have been on a downward swing countrywide for over 20 years.

The same is true for numeracy — basically, math competency, or the numerical equivalent of literacy.

Whether these declining standardized test scores are a concern, though, depends on who you ask.

For the BC Teachers’ Federation, more useful information comes out of the non-standardized assessments teachers design and use for their classes.

“We do a lot of assessments that support our teaching, that are really useful in the classroom,” said Carole Gordon, president of the BC Teachers’ Federation.

The teachers’ union supports mandatory literacy screening, Gordon added, but said it will be useful only if it comes with more classroom and district-wide support such as education assistants, resource teachers who support students with disabilities, school psychologists and other specialists.

The decline in reading, writing and math skills is demonstrated through the Programme for International Student Assessment, often referred to by its acronym PISA, taken every four years by Grade 10 students around the world.

Standardized tests, in particular B.C.’s Grade 4 and Grade 7 Foundation Skills Assessments, are controversial in B.C. (See the sidebar for more on that topic.)

But their results, along with the Grade 10 numeracy and literacy graduation assessments and the Grade 12 literacy graduation assessment, tell a more nuanced story about literacy and numeracy rates than PISA does.

Like other education outcomes in B.C., the provincial standardized test results are broken down into student categories, including those who identify as Indigenous and those with diagnosed disabilities and diverse abilities, an umbrella group that includes neurodiversities such as autism, learning issues like dyslexia, behavioural issues and mental illness, and physical and developmental disabilities.

Due to a number of factors, including a lack of in-school support for students with additional needs, and racism and ongoing colonization both in and out of schools, the assessment results for Indigenous students and that umbrella group are often lower than for their peers.

While this series will report on supports for students with disabilities and diverse abilities, as well as educational outcomes for Indigenous students and decolonizing the education system, this article will focus on the public school student body’s literacy and numeracy outcomes as a whole, as demonstrated by standardized test results.

Numeracy

Twenty-two years ago, 15-year-olds in British Columbia placed fourth in an international ranking of their math knowledge and skills compared with their peers. Canada as a whole came in 10th place.

But by 2012 and again in 2022, three years after B.C.’s high school curriculum was updated, B.C.’s students were in 10th place — though still scoring at or above the national Canadian average.

B.C.’s Grade 10 students have been participating in the PISA, run by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, since it began in 2000.

The standardized test, written every three years until 2025 when it adopted a four-year cycle, assesses students’ knowledge of and skills in math, science and reading.

Every PISA round focuses mainly on one subject, with a minor focus on the other two subjects. Math was the main subject in 2003, 2012 and 2022.

The number of participating countries has grown with each test, with 81 countries participating in the 2022 test. For some of those countries, including Canada, the results are broken down into regions like provinces and even some major metropolitan areas.

While B.C. hasn’t recently scored as highly as it has in the past, students who take the test are holding their own against a growing international representation of their fellow 15-year-olds.

B.C.’s ranking against other countries is not the aspect that concerns Anna Stokke, a math professor at the University of Winnipeg, the most, however.

She’s looking at the fine print of the 2022 Canadian PISA report that shows that interprovincially, B.C. students are falling behind some of their provincial peers.

PISA results rank students on levels 1 through 6 of math proficiency, with 1 being the least and 6 being the most proficient.

Nearly 80 per cent of Canadian and B.C. students scored at Level 2 or higher, above the international average of 69 per cent. Level 2 is considered the baseline numeracy required for full participation in society.

However, the average test score for the province has declined over time, from 522 in 2012 to 496 in the 2022 test, similar to drops in the national and international average test scores for most countries participating in PISA.

A 20-point score drop “in PISA is roughly equivalent to one year of schooling,” Stokke said.

As well, the proportion of students achieving the highest levels of numeracy has declined in B.C. and Canada as a whole since 2012.

The province should be taking these results seriously, Stokke said.

“Having your population be numerate and actually have strong math skills is important not just for the individuals,” she said. “It’s also important for your economy. You want to make sure that you’re graduating students that can enter professions like engineering and technology.”

Made in BC numeracy assessments

B.C.’s curriculum changed for kindergarten to Grade 9 in September 2016, which is where we will begin looking at annual Foundation Skills Assessment results to ensure an accurate comparison.

Results are divided into three categories: not meeting expectations, meeting expectations and exceeding expectations.

From 2016-17 to 2023-24, nearly two-thirds of Grade 4 students were meeting numeracy expectations. Students who didn’t meet expectations ranged from one-quarter to one-third of participants.

Results were less rosy for the Grade 7 assessment. The pre-pandemic years saw over half of students meeting numeracy expectations, with those who didn’t hovering around one-third.

But by 2021-22 onward, roughly 40 per cent of students were not meeting numeracy expectations.

The issue is not that students aren’t learning the basics of math, says Melanie Raymond, a registered school psychologist and senior lecturer at the University of Northern British Columbia. “It’s a lack of practice.”

“It's getting the opportunity to master them,” she said, adding that people who are fluent in numeracy not only know their basic numbers but can visualize them as both their symbol and how many items — say, apples in a basket — would represent that number.

Stokke agreed, adding there is not enough emphasis on memorizing math skills in B.C.’s curriculum, especially in the elementary school years.

For example, the Grade 5 math curriculum expects students to know how to multiply and divide up to three figures and be able to recall “multiplication facts” by the end of the year.

But the curriculum also says memorizing these multiplication facts is not necessary, which is a problem for Stokke.

“The notes clarify that [recall] means pictorial representations, games, skip counting, etc. That is well behind other countries around the world,” she said.

“Most jurisdictions have a requirement to know math facts to automaticity by Grade 3 or 4.”

Cynthia Nicol, a professor in the school of pedagogy and education at the University of British Columbia who specializes in mathematics, views the PISA and Foundation Skills Assessment numeracy results differently.

“I don't think they're really anything to be too concerned about,” she said, noting that although Foundation Skills Assessment numeracy scores have fluctuated over the last decade, the majority of students are still meeting expectations.

“There's always things that we can do better and that we can do differently, and I think we still need to be thinking about that, but I don't see that now we need to revamp the whole system,” she said about standardized assessment results overall.

“We're still producing some of the top scores in the world.”

Like B.C. report cards, B.C.’s standardized Grade 10 and Grade 12 graduation assessment results are categorized into “emerging” for students beginning to grasp numeracy and literacy theory and skills, “developing” for students with a partial understanding, “proficient” for those who fully understand, and “extending” for any students who excel beyond that.

For the Grade 10 numeracy graduation assessment, the results from the 2017-18 to the 2020-21 school year found the majority of students demonstrated developing and proficient understanding of numeracy theories and skills.

Nevertheless, the scores give Nicol pause.

“It's not that they're dropping. They just consistently seem a little bit low,” she said, adding that COVID doesn’t explain results before 2020-21. “And I don't have a reason for why.”

Estimates for the rate of dyscalculia, the learning disability that affects numeracy skills including counting, memorization of math facts and associating number symbols with an amount of physical objects, runs anywhere from three per cent to 10 per cent of the population.

Literacy

Reading, one important aspect of literacy, was the main PISA subject in the 2000, 2009 and 2018 tests, and the results follow a similar declining pattern to math for B.C.’s average scores.

In 2000, B.C. came in third out of 31 participating countries. By 2009, compared with the averages of 65 countries, B.C. was eighth. By 2018, B.C. had dropped to 11th place.

As with the math PISA tests, the number of participating countries grew every year, and results could be divided into and compared against provinces and cities.

We can’t compare the 2018 PISA results to the Grade 10 and Grade 12 literacy graduation assessments, as the latter were implemented in 2019-20 and 2021-22, respectively.

However the five years of Grade 10 assessment results available are consistent, with around 80 per cent of students in the proficient and developing categories.

The three years of Grade 12 literacy exam results available are also mostly static, with about 60 per cent of students proficient and nearly 20 per cent each developing or extending.

But again the Foundation Skills Assessment literacy results are another story.

Until 2022, when a single literacy category was introduced, the Foundation Skills Assessment results were divided into separate reading and writing categories.

“The research is quite clear that about three to five per cent of the population will continue to struggle to read in spite of really good instruction,” said Raymond.

“If we look at [Foundation Skills Assessment] results over the last decade or so, pick years before COVID even, you can see that there's a gap. It is much greater than five per cent; it's about 20 to 25 per cent of the general population.”

Which is similar to the estimate that up to 20 per cent of the general population has dyslexia.

Emily Villavicencio, a primary grade teacher in a French immersion school in B.C.’s Lower Mainland, said she has noticed her students’ oral and written literacy skills slip over the past 15 years.

While COVID certainly had an impact on all students’ learning, she said an increase in solo screen use by everyone, including young kids, and a decrease in group social gatherings have affected kids’ literacy skills.

“We don’t have time or energy to just have those regular conversations about ‘How was your day?’ and including kids in banking, groceries and in the kitchen,” she said. These conversations, she added, help develop language, vocabulary and school readiness skills.

“I think the way childhood is happening now in society at large is not as conducive to that natural process.”

She added that a lack of in-class support for kids with behavioural issues disrupts learning for everyone.

What’s the fix?

One recent change will make some difference in both numeracy and literacy skills: where previously the Foundation Skills Assessment was written in the spring, this year the tests will be written in October, with results available in January.

Kindergarten to Grade 7 teachers “who have maybe the same group of students throughout the year are now able to take those results and think about how they can apply any changes they might need to do in their classrooms,” said UBC’s Nicol.

Guofang Li, a UBC education professor and the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in transnational and global perspectives of language and literacy education of children and youth, would like to see literacy screening extend beyond the early years.

“We need more comprehensive tools,” Li said, adding that digital literacy is an important skill for kids to have, too.

Diagnostic tools don't replace teachers’ in-class instruction and ongoing assessments of their students, which help teachers tailor their lessons and instructions to their students’ needs, she added.

Teachers themselves need a suite of instruction methods for teaching children how to read and write, Li said, pointing to a 2024 Ontario survey that found recent teacher education program graduates could answer only 60 per cent of questions about phonics and just 35 per cent about morphology, the understanding and recognition of root words, prefixes and suffixes.

“You also need to have that meta knowledge to be able to teach it,” Li said.

All the assessments in the world won’t help if teachers can’t use the results to cater instruction to their students’ literacy needs, she added.

In 2015 and again in 2021 the BC Teachers’ Council, which sets provincial standards for both teacher education programs and teacher graduates in the province, surveyed new teachers about their classroom experience.

In both surveys teachers responded that their education programs did not prepare them to teach students how to read, write or do math.

The Tyee asked the Ministry of Education whether further changes were coming to teacher education programs or to how numeracy and literacy skills build on themselves from grade to grade in the provincial curriculum.

In an emailed statement to The Tyee, a ministry spokesperson noted their office continues to communicate with university education deans and the BC Teachers’ Council over what teachers are learning in university, but the standards are set by the council.

As for how children are taught literacy in the classroom, the emailed statement added they released B.C. Learning Pathways literacy and numeracy teaching resources at the end of June that show educators what proficiency in each subject looks like at grade level and tools to help students get there.

“The ministry will also be working in partnership with school districts through a K-12 Literacy Supports Community of Practice that will be established this fall,” the ministry’s emailed statement read.

When she worked as a school psychologist, Raymond was often asked to assess students for learning disabilities who turned out to just be missing basic foundational skills in their learning.

“They haven't actually been taught the skills that they need to be able to lift those words off the page,” she said.

Raymond would like to see teacher education programs and the B.C. curriculum include explicit instruction in the alphabetic code, which means both a focus on phonics and morphology in the early years.

“We teach them the basic code in kindergarten, and then we have them actually working into more advanced code. And not just reading it. They're reading and writing it. All of this is done in tandem,” she said.

This does get some pushback from the BC Teachers’ Federation, which maintains teachers are highly educated professionals who require autonomy in their approaches to teaching students.

“Professional autonomy is not absolute; you have some responsibilities,” Gordon, president of the teachers’ union, said. “But it also has to match your teacher style, and there’s a variety of ways. There’s never one way to do things.”

Stokke would like to see provinces, including B.C., adopt programs like Jump Math, which scaffolds math lessons in a way that helps students build on their skills gradually.

“Math is really hierarchical,” she said, comparing the subject to a ladder. “In order to learn something on the math ladder, if you’re missing a rung earlier on, it’s impossible to get caught up.”

Nicol is not convinced we need to change how we teach math in B.C., especially if it involves moving away from inquiry and focusing solely on basic skills. But both Stokke and Nicol agree numeracy and math skills improve with practice.

“The [current] curriculum is helping students think about what it is that they know they can do and what they need to do to revise that,” Nicol said.

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Keep an eye out for the next piece in our series, an interview with educator and author Kelly Gallagher-Mackay, publishing soon, which will detail her solutions for the existential issues our series is focused on.