Abolish the Ontario College of Teachers

Bring regulation of educators back to the ministry of education

The Ontario public school network is a systemically polluted ecosystem. This isn’t my opinion. The evidence is in, and it stinks to high heaven.

A recent survey on antisemitism in three Ontario school boards, submitted by then federal envoy for combatting antisemitism Deborah Lyons tallied 781 antisemitic incidents in Ontario K-12 schools, most of which occurred in metropolitan Toronto. Many involved Nazi tropes (“Heil Hitler,” “Hitler was right”). One in six were teacher-initiated or involved school-sponsored activities.

In a particularly chilling Oct 2024 incident, an Ottawa six-year-old was told by her teacher that, since one of her parents is Jewish, she is only “half human.” In Nazi Germany, treatment of such children “vacillated between persecution, semi-toleration, and racial reclassification.” Sound familiar?

Once, such an overtly antisemitic teacher would have immediately had her licence suspended by the Minister of Education. But in 1997, the Ministry of Education ceded its responsibility to licence, govern, discipline teachers and accredit faculties of education — the “direct regulation model” which is accountable to voters — to a new entity it created, the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT). Increasingly, the OCT acts as though it is accountable to nobody.

The OCT and the institutional satellites in its gravitational field — teacher federations, school boards, education faculties such as the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) — are dominated by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), divisive Marxist ideologies that assign arbitrary collective guilt or innocence according to one’s alleged identity-conferred power and privilege. Jews are invariably ranked as powerful and privileged.

The OCT institutionalizes CRT and DEI vocabulary and worldview into teacher conduct requirements. Obsessed with Palestinianism, their professional development programs often focus heavily on the “decolonization” rubric that casts powerful Israel as the world’s most malignant oppressor, Palestinians as the world’s most oppressed people, and Hamas as a noble resistance movement.

As fig leaves, school boards appoint a Jewish “equity officer” to receive complaints about antisemitism in schools. But such officers only have the power to “educate” offenders, not punish them, so in fact have no power at all. Indeed, the Lyons report notes there were only 14 disciplinary decisions regarding antisemitism in over 20 years. In the “half-human” case, illuminating OCT’s values, the child was assigned to another classroom, and the offending teacher remains in her post.

There is great hutzpah in OCT’s flagrant disregard for the rights of this child, supposedly under its protection. But cockiness is a feature, not a bug, in this wealthy community. The Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO), Ontario’s largest teachers’ union, representing 83,000 members, has a war chest of $300 million, $180 million of which is marked for defence. For context, ETFO’s compeer, the U.S. National Educational Association (NEA), representing 2.8 million members, has an endowment of $428 million.

One of the report’s recommendations calls for a judicial inquiry into whether Jewish educators are receiving equal representation from their unions. (Anecdotally, the answer is emphatically “No.”) But, while antisemitism in classrooms and school activities was the driving force for the report, its principal thrust is to serve as an ambitious blueprint for the Ontario government to follow in restoring a sick public school system to health.

The report identifies the system’s present toxins as: ideological capture, declining test scores, record levels of school violence, unions overstepping their roles by providing courses that should be the remit of education faculties, politicized school boards, and professional development programs that cede content control to anti-Israel interest groups.

From OCT’s point of view, they are combatting alleged anti-Palestinian racism. APR is a term that was invented and defined by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, and then accepted by OCT. The definition identifies disagreement with Palestinian “narratives” as a form of hate speech. Under such a rubric, no defence of Zionism or expression of attachment to Israel by any student or teacher is admissible. This is antisemitism. When parents complain, though, codes of conduct are “weaponized” against them, according to the report.

Tamara Gottlieb, JEFA’s co-founder, was a consultant to the OCT for 21 years. She knows this territory and its history intimately and, as became clear in an interview with her, her standpoint is firm: “The experiment of OCT self-regulation with regard to teacher licensing must come to an end.”

Premier Doug Ford has voiced displeasure with TDSB’s unethical activism in such instances as the Grassy Narrows fiasco last September. But the time for merely indignant words is past. This crisis cries out for action. Of all the JEFA report’s core recommendations, first and foremost is the restoration of accountability to the public: “Return to a direct regulatory model whereby the Ministry (of Education) directly licences teachers and engages in investigatory and disciplinary matters.”

Editor’s note: School equity officers are hired by Ontario school boards. An earlier version of this column misstated how they were hired.