Comment
Blow it up
Tear it down and start again. The public education system is broken. It is unresponsive to the needs of our community, it disavows merit in the seminal duty of educating the next generation, and is unaccountable to students, parents and taxpayers.
No amount of tweaking or adjustments will make it right again. Parents have no levers to shape the morale, the curriculum, the function or even the existence of our schools. Meanwhile, teachers’ unions are locked in a perpetual war with government— each side cynically claiming the best interest of the children. And then there are the Catholic and public schools competing for scant resources and dwindling enrolment in rural communities— each compromising the viability of the other.
It is time for a commission or some other council of wise persons to figure out a better way to educate our children in Ontario. This public institution needs to be taken apart and rebuilt from the ground up—if it is to be saved at all.
Every morning at CML Snider, a JK to Gr. 8 school in Wellington, kids are no longer allowed to play in the schoolyard before the bell rings. When they arrive before 9:20 a.m., children as young as five are required to stand in an orderly line, outside their assigned door. One lone supervisor. It turns out, it is difficult to keep six- and seven-year- old kids in a line for 15 minutes. So, the school arranges a series of orange cones to establish a demarcation line in order to corral the kids. Compliance is maintained by warnings of repercussions should any be tempted to venture off to play.
Neither teachers nor education assistants want to do yard duty. So the school capitulates. As it has done in hundreds of small ways over the past few decades. Compounding this bizarre circumstance, parent volunteers are not permitted to help out—they are not allowed to fill in where the staff has vacated. Our kids must thus queue up like proper little widgets arranged in tidy rows, as they gaze wistfully at the freshly fallen snow on the schoolyard.
One more: On any given Friday, dozens of supply teachers file into classrooms in schools across the province. Filling in. Ever since the provincial government took away bankable sick days, teachers are sick a lot more. On Fridays. This adds tremendous cost to the system and is unquestionably disruptive to classwork. Yet it is meant to demonstrate to us all that when the government seeks to trim costs, unions are agile enough to outflank their opponents in this never-ending warfare.
These are but a couple of the grotesque lesions that point to rot in the corpse. The biggest failing, however, is the utter lack of accountability. Parents have no means to guide, direct or change the course of our schools in our community. The state governs the finances and the curriculum and it negotiates the wages and working conditions of everyone who works in our schools. Long ago, school boards and trustees were drained of any meaningful authority or purpose. Communities have become bystanders in what is perhaps the most important institution in our neighbourhoods, towns, and villages.
Meanwhile, the government seems to think it can tweak its way to a more sustainable public education system. Minister Stephen Lecce has proposed slightly larger class sizes and mandatory online courses. Both measures are meant only to reduce costs in the forms of teacher salaries, but will do nothing to improve the education of our children. More likely, these measures will leave vulnerable children behind.
Worse, the Ford government and every other provincial government in recent decades lack the backbone to enact fundamental reforms that might actually improve public education in Ontario. Specifically, they are terrified of the political blowback that is sure to erupt when such long-overdue changes are proposed.
I believe we need choice in public education. We need competition. I want the best teachers to rise to the top—to be compensated better than the worst. I want the custodian who cares passionately about the building they maintain and the children who pass through its halls, to be rewarded accordingly. I want good schools to succeed and bad ones to be weeded out.
Mostly, I want public education to refocus on the best outcomes for our children. That can’t happen when the two key players—the union and the government— remain forever locked in a zero-sum game designed only to extract more from the other. A paradigm in which success means doing less for more.
I don’t believe that either side is a credible proponent of public education in Ontario. Each is driven by narrow interests that have nothing at all to do with ensuring our kids benefit from a safe, nurturing and stimulating learning experience. To do so, meaningful levers must be restored to parents and the community. Benchmarks must be set. And proper accountability restored.
Technocratic adjustments won’t get us there. We need a fundamental overhaul to public education. We are wasting time and energy on useless remedies and self-serving union responses. We are failing our children.
Let’s start again, at the beginning.
The most ridiculous article I’ve read. You cant “create” facts. I would be very interested in knowing where you mined the fact that teachers and EAs “dont want to do yard duty”. Your a fool and prove it with every issue of your newspaper. Hire a journalist, you need one desperately.
Ron – the education system didn’t do you much good. It would be correct to write “You are” or “You’re” but not “Your”.
Good article Rick.
Unions attempting to run policy in disguise of getting more $$ on top of average $93,000 salaries is just disgusting. Time to break the Unions so our youth can be educated by the Ministry, Trustees, and parent input.
Who wrote this stupid article? Cml is a great school and has a great culture and staff and administration and parent support. Oh and a track basketball courts and play structures. You will be hard pressed to find a better school and town then Wellington . Unbelievable!!!
Few problems with this blanket article. Schools that rise to the top of the testing tend to have parents that make higher income. Why is this important not that they are smarter or less caring that other parents. They tend to have money to put their kids in for profit tutoring classes and do. It also doens’t take into account with bigger classes how many special needs students will be in each class. Things are different now in the class room than they were years ago. But the complaints are still the same students aren’t preforming up to a level they want. Yes the government controls how and what is taught it always has. The teachers don’t choose what they teach. We have seen for profit schools in recent years giving students marks they haven’t earned because they paid for it. So money talks and kids get the grades they go on to top Uni’s then fail, wash out or teachers are bullied into changing marks. Giving more money for people to allow them to send their kids to schools of their choice will not ensure they are well educated either. They tried this in the USA funding tied to test scores guess what they taught the kids just what was on the test ended all the other stuff like holiday themes – no Halloween, no Christmas, if it wasn’t on the state test it wasn’t part of the teachable method. There are good and bad teachers but that happens every where, and to assume that for profit schools would get rid of those types of teachers is foolish. If we tie funding to how well kids do we will end up with another problem teachers will only worry about the students that are not up to standard the rest will be on their own, it will be in the teachers best interest to do so. There employment will depend on getting those students to pass the tests. You going to be ok with that?
Big Teachers Unions think they can set policy. That is the problem. This Union needs to be dealt with as they have no regard for the taxpayers.
His specialty seems to be fiction or comedy- I’m not sure which at the moment!
Start again? Like the good old days with an unlimited number of children in a classroom. I, personally, was one of 55 students in my grade nine class. Fifty-five students! Should we go back a bit further than that? How about to the 1950s, when I was an elementary school student, class sizes were around the forty to fifty plus mark in most public schools. We didn’t have enough text books for each student, so we spent a lot of time doubled up, or waiting our turn at the text book. Not far enough? How about we back this system up to a place in time when one room schools were the order of the day in rural Ontario. And, believe it or not, I was a student in such as system – albeit for only one year. Six grades, one teacher, seventy five students, thirty desks, a twenty-by-twenty building without a washroom and with a class set of text books which numbered twenty-five for each subject. No, we don’t need to start over, Rick, we need to move forward. We deserve a Premier and Education Minister who are deeply concerned about the future of our students and are willing to sit down with the experts and professionals in the field of education and listen to the people who know what’s going on. We need to recognize the importance of teachers, and all other educational professionals, who are there for their students. We need to stop questioning the fact that teachers, and other education professionals, know what’s going on in classrooms and what needs to be done. Sure I’m a little bit biased. LOML was a teacher for thirty-five years, not once did he take advantage of his sick leave….NOT ONCE. He like many of his local, and provincial, colleagues were/are honest, hardworking professionals who were there for their students. LOML worked hard. He loved his job. He was a wonderful teacher. He’s not an exception. He was/is one of many, many people who dedicate their lives to the education of our children when he could have made far more money in outside of the profession. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
It is kind of funny when people who have no experience working in the education sector pretend to be experts in solutions to education. It is kind of like a professional journalist telling a surgeon how to do their job, it is fundamentally ridiculous. Rick, stick to what you are good at….what every that is.
That would be a good argument if experts were perfecting education like surgeons are perfecting ever-more-complex surgery. If we had some measure of success that told us clearly that the education system was improving under expert guidance. Then it would be silly to expect some layman to wander in and tell the experts what to do.
But as it stands, how has teaching on the whole improved over the past few decades? Do students learn more? Do they learn faster? Do schools make better use of resources? Are schools more safe? More humane? Are they better at preparing students for adult life and for the workforce? The answer to most of these questions is “no”, with a few contested “maybe”s.
And yet, every few years curricula are upended, new methods are brought in, consultants are paid, training is doled out, battles are waged between unions and the province, with both sides claiming to act in students’ best interest. But outcomes scarcely seem to change.
If a system is in perpetual crisis, if results seem to be independent of the inputs and the techniques used, if there is scant evidence that the latest gizmos and methodologies perform better than anything else, then surely it is worth asking whether any of this actually works for the people it’s supposed to serve.