Education in Ontario—it’s time for bold changes

When treating sick patients, should doctors take bold action, or should they take a wait and see approach?

The answer is: it depends.

If the illness is minor, then prescribing chicken soup and bedrest makes sense. However, if the patient has a rapidly growing cancerous tumor, more drastic action such as surgery is probably required.

Premier Doug Ford is dealing with a sick patient—Ontario’s education system. Declining math and literacy test scores, bloated school board bureaucracies, woke ideology being taught in many classrooms, and ongoing school-based violence are but a few of the symptoms.

Given these serious problems in Ontario schools, it’s disappointing that Ford’s government has chosen to tinker around the edges rather than take bold action. No matter what the crisis is, the Ontario government has failed to take the necessary steps to address them.

For example, it’s unacceptable when school boards allow activist teachers to push woke ideology on their students. In a particularly egregious case, last month several schools in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) took their students, some as young as eight-years-old, on a field trip where the students were encouraged to recite anti-Israel slogans such as “From Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime.”

To her credit, shortly after this incident hit the media, new Education Minister Jill Dunlop ordered an investigation into TDSB’s field trip policy. Parents were hopeful that was a sign that the minister would root out this problem and ensure that this never happens again.

Unfortunately, rather than appoint a true outsider to conduct the investigation, Dunlop picked Patrick Case, the ultimate insider, who served as an assistant deputy minister in the Ministry of Education, and more specifically was responsible for the ministry’s equity secretariat. There’s nothing in his background suggesting he will take a broad independent view of how to reform the province’s ailing education system.

If Minister Dunlop was serious about making sure that the TDSB never allows such disgraceful behaviour on a field trip again, she would have appointed a fully independent person to conduct this investigation. By choosing Case, Dunlop made it easy for the insular ministry and school board officials to close ranks and protect their own once again.

Things will never change in Ontario’s public education system unless the provincial government takes decisive action. For example, instead of letting school boards get away with expanding their bloated bureaucracies and ignoring clear directives from her department, the education minister should dissolve these boards. No students or parents will miss the bevy of superintendents, equity directors, learning coaches and cultural advisors. In fact, eliminating all these bureaucrats would allow for more education dollars to flow to the classrooms where they’re best used for students.

Nor will taxpayers need to hear about school board administrators blowing $38,000 on a three-day professional development retreat in Toronto or about school trustees spending $45,000 on a trip to Italy and then purchasing $100,000 of artwork while there.

Abolishing school boards should also be coupled with an announcement that parents will be given school choice comparable to that enjoyed by parents in Quebec and western Canada. If parents can transfer their children to any independent school of their choice with at least some provincial funding following them, they will be empowered to do what’s in their best interests.

In addition, the Ford government must take bold action to improve the quality of instruction in classrooms. Revamping curriculum guides to ensure they are clear and content-rich would be a vast improvement over the confusing and incoherent curriculum guides teachers must use currently.

Setting clearer standards and measuring results regularly with provincial standardized tests is also an important accountability mechanism—both for the province and for parents and their children. The province must know how schools are doing so it can target supports to underperforming schools while parents need this information so they can make an informed decision about where to send their children.

It's often said that insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results. When it comes to education, the Ford government has done the same thing repeatedly for far too long. It’s time for something different.