POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JIM STAFFORD, UNION ECONOMIST, IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
“As our school is a prized asset in our neighbourhood, so is public education in general a gift to our whole society.”
Some gift, an almost broken system that no one can reform.
Conservatives in Ontario tried and failed, making many foolish blunders. Liberals have changed nothing of substance and now do nothing but throw money at the teachers to keep peace.
The really good teachers are such motivated individuals they survive despite the many barriers against them.
Our schools in general our behind the times in almost every respect.
Neighborhood schools themselves are largely obsolete, representing as they do a step up from the rural one-room schoolhouse of a century ago with the emergence of city neighborhoods.
If we are to offer all the courses and enrichments children should have, we need the equivalent of big-box stores in our schools, and the costs are prohibitive to do this in every neighbourhood. Teachers’ salaries and benefits alone make it so.
If you want a specialty item today, you go to a big-box store with the selection, not a corner store in the neighbourhood. That is just a fact of today’s world. And our population’s embrace of the car and suburbanization and urban sprawl only greatly increase the pressures in this direction. If you want music, art, libraries, and qualified teachers in subject areas, a neighbourhood school is not the way to go.
A major fraction of our teachers cannot even use a computer, let alone teach a child about computers.
Teachers at the elementary level often are assigned to subjects for which they have absolutely no competence, and the elementary level is the foundation for all that follows.
The curriculum - confused, bloated, and unfocused on important things - is the classic result of bureaucratic compromises, resembling the work of Soviet apparatchiks.
Teachers cling to the notion of being professionals, but if you examine what they study in their year of teacher education, it is half mumbo-jumbo and pseudo-science.
Teachers are not judged according to merit, just appointed for lifetime sinecures. They are allowed to pretty much govern themselves out of politicians’ fears of strikes. Bad teachers are almost never eliminated, even though everyone knows there are many of them.
Principals and many administrative officials are just former teachers who worked their way up in a pretty slack system. It is actually fairly rare to find a principal who is impressive and decisive.
We play games with stats, as with the silly literacy test. The test has no objectivity, and both its writing and marking may easily be adjusted – and are – to suit a changed political situation.
The current government of Ontario, for example, claims credit for improvements from such meaningless scores, but they have changed nothing of substance, except pay and extra benefits.
I think the perfect symbol of our public schools is the school library. Where it hasn’t become a thing of the past, it has become a nasty little corner of the school. The teachers’ union controls this in part through the fact that so-called teacher-librarians run them. They are mostly not even competent as librarians, and if we cared we see the libraries staffed by good library technicians who know something about books. The teacher-librarians mostly spend little time in the library, too, since they are valued by principals as fillers they can stuff into any classroom missing a teacher.
At the same time, vast new resources from the province are squandered on stuff like graded literacy series – these are quickie, over-priced paperbacks churned out by publishers to make a quick buck - and “literacy closets.” Our libraries, if we are going to have them, should have lots of good books and plenty of computers plus staff qualified for using them.
Intellectual rubbish like the literacy series are a response to one of the many fads that sweep through the teachers’ union and the school bureaucracy. How better to encourage literacy than with the vast richness of our actual English literature and things like book clubs, rather than the dreary rubbish of literacy quickie books?
Our schools, too, are not providing for the needs of many students. We do have a certain percent of people with limited natural capacities, but saying so is anathema in the teaching establishment. These people need schools and classes that teach them useful skills, taught by people who have the skills.
The resources thrown at the system actually are being thrown at a union everyone is afraid to take on. They have hours and benefits like no one else. Their pension fund is so fat they own the telephone company and, yes, the newspaper you are reading, a ridiculous and a waste of precious resources.
“That children from all classes and backgrounds attend the same building, get to know each other and learn from the same teachers is nothing short of a miracle.”
Now that is largely a good thing. If you could fix everything else, they might even get some valuable education too.
