Ontario Introduces Legislation to Take Greater Control over Education

But academic excellence and safe schools have taken the back seat to “equity” in the Peel District School Board under Ministry of Education supervision

Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce speaks at a press conference at Queen's Park in Toronto on Tuesday, March 3, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn

By Igor Stravinsky (an anonymous Canadian high school teacher)

Preamble

According to media reports, Ontario Minister of Education Steven Lecce has introduced legislation to take more direct control over the Ontario education system. This may be welcome news to those exasperated with the recent ideological takeover of the schools and the resulting plummet in academic standards and breakdown in discipline which has led to spiraling school violence. But the available evidence does not support much optimism about the direction Lecce’s micromanagement will take the system.

The Ministry of Education (MOE) under Lecce had been directing the Peel District School Board for almost three years until very recently, and it simply stood by as community activists essentially took over the board. Critical Theory, which rejects individual agency and holds that society is composed of a hierarchy of identity-based groups, has been firmly entrenched and the senior administration has been obsessed with race-based academic and disciplinary outcomes to the exclusion of the pursuit of overall academic excellence and safe schools. Substantial resources are being expended on the promotion of gender ideology (which conflates biological sex with gender identity) resulting in mass confusion among parents and youth alike, and has done nothing to promote mutual respect and tolerance of a wide range of identities and worldviews. 

The new legislation

According to media reports, “The Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act, if passed, would allow the province to set priorities on student achievement and require school boards to implement and report on those priorities with multi-year Board Improvement Plans.” This sounds good on paper, but what will these priorities be, exactly? What Lecce has done in the PDSB should give us an idea.

Under Lecce, the priority in the PDSB has been to improve the achievement, relative to other racial groups, of students who identify as black, and to reduce the amount of discipline handed out to black kids (regardless of their behaviors). At the PDSB there are a number of  “multi-year Board Improvement Plans” in place toward these aims. None of these state the expectation that overall academic achievement will rise as a result of this single-minded focus on race. 

Lecce is reported to have said the legislation prioritizes a “back-to-basics” approach that ensures students have the foundational skills in reading, writing and math that they need to succeed in any career”. Sounds nice, but what he has been doing in the last three years while in full control of the PDSB has been the exact opposite. He has stood by silently as the pillars of academic success- participation, punctuality, time management, respect, effort, merit, and the pursuit of objectively verifiable truth and knowledge have all been denigrated and abandoned as “colonialism” or examples of “whiteness” or “white supremacy”, much to the frustration of most educators. 

Also: “Boards will also face stricter requirements to report on their spending…” That is rich! The PDSB, under Lecce’s control, has spent millions on hush money- severance pay or paid leaves to bridge to retirement to get rid of any administrators who refused to capitulate to the community activists’ demands to bow to Critical Theory. When will the taxpayers of Peel find out how much has been spent on these firings without cause? Even as I write this, one of the Board’s Associate Directors, Poleen Grewal, is on a personal leave and collected nearly $200 000 last year. It would be fair to ask why she is still there, collecting money for doing nothing. 

“The bill would allow the government to establish standardized training for trustees…[to ensure] they have the skills and competencies to deliver on provincial priorities." Trustees are elected officers. The electorate confirms their competence when they vote them into office. What training did Lecce ever get to run the public education system, especially considering he attended a private school and never taught a class in his life? And if the trustees are there simply to rubber-stamp provincial priorities, then why do we need them? Let’s end the costly charade and get rid of them.

Lecce’s reported comment that the MOE takeover at the PDSB was the result of  trustees who “were more interested in personal beefs than putting kids first” is completely disingenuous to say the least. He knows very well that community activists disrupted the board to the point where it became dysfunctional. Some of the senior administration at the time pushed back against the activists' demands to entrench Critical Theory as the operating principle of the board, while others, the opportunists,  supported it and have been richly rewarded. 

For their part, Ford and Lecce made a purely political calculation, seeing the near-ubiquitous rise of Critical Theory in Canadian institutions, they decided they had best back the activists. They ordered a review which predictably reached the foregone conclusion that the lower academic outcomes of black students (as a group) were entirely the result of racism in the education system. That brought us to where we are today. Given all that, I’d say odds are not too good we will go “back to basics” under this government. 

Conclusion

With this new legislation, the government will take more direct control over the education system in Ontario. One might hope that they would use these new powers they are granting themselves wisely to bring back high academic standards and safe schools, but there is unfortunately little room for optimism that this will be the outcome, based on the catastrophic failure they have overseen in the PDSB. It is far more likely that they will use these powers to continue to pander to whomever it is politically expedient.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Parents Voice Concern over Lifted PDSB Supervision

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