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Tories would halt full-day kindergarten, cut thousands of jobs

Hudak unveils new plan for Ontario school system

BY MATTHEW PEARSON, OTTAWA CITIZENJANUARY 27, 2013

Ontario Tory leader and education critic Lisa MacLeod have prepared a plan that would implement full-day kindergarten, increase class sizes, cut 10,000 support staff positions, introduce standardized testing for Grade 8 students to measure their scientific knowledge, and build new schools faster in burgeoning suburbs.

Photograph by: Pat McGrath, Ottawa Citizen

OTTAWA — Ontario’s Progressive Conservative party wants to halt the rollout of full-day kindergarten, increase class sizes, cut 10,000 support staff positions, introduce standardized testing for Grade 8 students to measure their scientific knowledge, and build new schools faster in burgeoning suburbs.

The ambitious plan for the province’s publicly-funded school system is laid out in a new white paper, which was released Thursday in Toronto by party leader Tim Hudak.

The 25-page Paths to Prosperity: Preparing Students for the Challenges of the 21st Century is the party’s boldest statement yet on public education, a file the Tories have largely shied away from since the disastrous 2007 provincial election, which former leader John Tory lost after suggesting he would extend public funding to Ontario’s faith-based schools.

“Education is the lynchpin of progress,” Hudak writes in his introduction to the new plan.

But the idea of saving millions by putting the brakes on full-day kindergarten — a popular initiative that is currently partway through a five-year rollout — already has the Tories on the defensive.

“The problem is we have no money,” PC education critic Lisa MacLeod told the Citizen in an interview.

“We won’t abandon it — those schools with it will continue to have it — but the full rollout won’t occur under our government until the merits of the program are there.”

That’s in stark contrast with the party’s position during the 2011 election campaign, when the party said in its platform that “it would be a mistake to disrupt its implementation” and pledged to make the program fully operational for all four- and five-year-olds by 2014, which is the current plan under the Liberals.

But MacLeod said Wednesday the Tories are simply taking the advice of the prominent economist hired by the Liberals after the election to propose cost-saving measures in the face of a multi-billion dollar deficit.

“It’s impossible to ignore Don Drummond’s recommendations,” she said, alluding to the 362 suggestions Drummond made to cut spending in the province.

The Tories won’t scrap the program altogether, but rather halt the final two years of implementation until the budget is balanced and they’ve had time to review its efficacy, which MacLeod said hasn’t been proven.

They would also alter who delivers the program, moving from the current standard of one teacher and one Early Childhood Educator for every 26 children to one teacher or one ECE for every 20 students, in order to redirect $200 million to other priorities.

“We’ll see where it’s working and where it’s not. Like any good program in government, you have to re-evaluate and I think that’s a responsible thing to do.”

Education Minister Laurel Broten and several contenders for the party’s leadership were quick to dismiss the Tory plan.

Broten says the tough choices the Liberals made to protect full-day kindergarten and small class sizes were in the best interest of Ontario students, even if the cost politically has been high.

“If parents look to the choices that we have made as a government, they know and understand that, just as they do in challenging fiscal times, whatever means they have they will prioritize their children, and we have done that,” Broten said.

Others argue the evidence that early learning programs like full-day kindergarten have a positive affect on a child’s social, emotional and cognitive development is unequivocal. They say halting it now would create mass confusion and inequity between schools that already have the program and schools that don’t.

“I wouldn’t touch that,” said Lorne Rachlis, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board’s former director of education.

People for Education’s Annie Kidder concurred, saying, “Once this train has left the station, I don’t think there’s a way of stopping it.”

Charles Pascal, the University of Toronto expert McGuinty hired to develop the program, says Hudak and the Tories are simply ignoring the volumes of current research that backs up the program.

“He wants to turn Ontario into an evidence-free zone,” Pascal said.

Kidder says she disagrees with certain aspects of the Tory plan, but applauded the party for drafting the paper, which she called detailed and thorough.

“It reads like a vision for education,” she said.

Recognizing that the current class-size cap is costly, Kidder said the evidence is mixed on whether slight increases have a detrimental affect on students.

Rachlis agreed, and added more discretion should be given to school principals to reasonably configure class sizes as needed — something the Tories are actually proposing to do.

But Kidder questioned how the Tories could possibly remove thousands of support staff from the school system without causing trouble.

“They’re the people who actually provide a variety of supports that make schools strong and kids succeed,” she said.

Parts of the report were previously announced this week, including proposed changes to a teacher’s job description and giving principals greater flexibility to reward teachers for before- and after-school involvement by offering them relief from supervision and other duties.

The plan also calls for paying teachers who do extracurriculars more money than those who do not and says principals and parent councils should find community volunteers to run clubs and coach sports teams if a teacher is not available.

Rachlis said he supports paying teachers for extracurriculars. “There should be some incentive other than just feeling good about it.”

While the Liberals are gathering this weekend in Toronto to choose a successor to Dalton McGuinty — the self-styled education premier whose once-cozy relationship with teachers’ unions has taken a nosedive in recent months — the Tories have been talking up the party’s plans for education all week.

But MacLeod, the MPP for Nepean-Carleton, said the Tory white paper wasn’t designed just to fix for the current crisis but rather to transform the system as a whole.

She said she has worked closely on the file with Randall Denley, the former Citizen columnist who is running for the Tories in Ottawa West-Nepean, and John Shea, a public school trustee from Orléans, and added the paper was compiled after six months of consultations with parents, students and education stakeholders provincewide.

“A lot of people are going to like what we have to say,” MacLeod said.

“Some people may not, but at the end of the day, we are now the only political party in the entire province of Ontario talking about a way forward in education.”

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RETHINK HOW WE BARGAIN WITH TEACHERS

5 Dec 2012 Ottawa Citizen

Rethink how we bargain with teachers

Lorne Rachlis is former director of education at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.

Why do we have schools? It’s not a hard question. Surely it is to educate our children so they can become confident, fully functioning members of society. In order to achieve that, we want teachers from prekindergarten through Grade 12 who are compassionate, caring, knowledgeable people who genuinely like children.

Part of that education is learning how to be team players and team leaders, learning how to learn, learning how to research and form opinions, and learning how to question. They learn these things through the curriculum but also by participating in sports and drama and bands and choirs and other clubs. Our children grow up so quickly and the world is so complicated. We want them to graduate from our public school system well prepared for what they do next.

The public elementary and secondary teacher unions don’t seem to agree with me on why we have schools. When extracurricular activities are deemed by teachers and their unions to be voluntary activities which can be readily withdrawn as a warning shot across the bow to their employers and parents, when marking report cards, attending department and school meetings, leading field trips, meeting with parents, and attending professional development sessions are deemed by teachers and their unions as outside of their job description so they can stop them at any time — it seems to me they believe schools exist to provide their members with the best salaries and working conditions they can negotiate, whether or not it disrupts their students’ education and parents’ lives.

Teaching is a stressful profession requiring, among other things, knowledge of curriculum content, evaluation skills, patience, time and people management skills, understanding of the learning process, and the ability to individualize instruction in a classroom with children of different backgrounds and abilities. In recompense, Ontario teachers have been very well treated under the Liberal government. Classroom teachers receive automatic pay increases for the first 10 years of their employment. Cost of living increases are added on top of that. Classroom teachers with 10 years under their belt and no other responsibilities earn upwards of $100,000. There are 194 teaching days in the year, so there are 171 days that teachers are not required to be at work, including March Break, Christmas Break, July, and August. According to the Education Act, teachers are required to be on duty 15 minutes before and after the instructional day, which itself is five hours long. A high school teacher is assigned three classes to teach each semester, and a school day has four classes scheduled. Actual teaching time then is just under four hours. So the current dispute cannot be about the money or the hours of teaching time, can it?

I cannot argue with the claim that teachers’ collective bargaining rights as currently constituted are being abridged. What I do argue with is the position that these rights are inalienable. If teaching our children is important (and teachers are well rewarded for doing so), then I maintain that teachers should not be allowed to withdraw services. Teachers in other jurisdictions, Manitoba for example, do not have the right to strike, but there is an arbitration process in place that has been working well for years.

The provincial government mandates the curriculum, limits class sizes, and sets student achievement targets. Since school boards lost their right to levy local taxes, it is the provincial government that sets the local tax rate, collects the money raised from the municipalities, and hands it back to the school boards through a complicated formula system. And although current legislation requires each school board to negotiate with its union locals, the provincial government has for several rounds of bargaining set the financial parameters for settlements and has rejected local settlements that do not comply with the rules it has set. This convoluted bargaining system has evolved over the past decade. It is a patchwork of solutions that invites school disruption and leaves school boards helpless in the crossfire between powerful provincial teacher unions and the provincial government.

Let’s remember why we have schools: to educate our children in a caring learning environment. It is time to rethink and redesign what is now a dysfunctional bargaining system.

Letter to Editor published in Globe and Mail Saturday August 25, 2012

A pair of letters in the Aug. 23 edition caught my eye. The high-school teacher wrote that he has two post-graduate degrees and doesn't get paid a cent for either of them - I doubt if either of them has any direct impact on his students. He says he does not get paid for supervising sports teams and clubs - everyone knows how important these are to students; extracurricular leadership should be both a criterion for hiring and a part of every high-school teacher's work load. And he refers to unpaid summers - regular contract teachers who earn upwards of $90,000 should consider two months away from work as vacation, not unpaid time.

Trustee Howard Goodman is right, though. Proposed legislation regarding how teachers are evaluated and how supply teachers are assigned seriously reduces school boards' ability to manage their systems.

Lorne Rachlis
Former Director of Education, Ottawa-Carleton District School Board

CBC Ottawa Morning interview 7:20 am 10 July 2012

http://www.cbc.ca/ottawamorning/2012/07/10/shaking-up-the-school-board/

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