Revolt, parents, and save our schools

The Ontario education system is in free fall. Learning outcomes have declined dramatically along with safety from abuse and violence

Abraham Lincoln famously said, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.” Truer words were never spoken.

The Ontario education system is in free fall. For the past 20 years, education policies infused by Marxist theories that had been incubating for decades in the universities, then floridly realized in practice, have resulted in tripartite failure: failure to provide effective pedagogy; failure to provide a psychologically safe environment for politically incorrect identity groups; and failure to protect both children and teachers from physical abuse. The situation is dire.

Ontario is home to more than two million school-aged kids, representing 40 per cent of Canada’s school-age population. On the evidence, they are not being well served pedagogically. Learning outcomes have declined dramatically since 2018 in math, science and reading. The culprit is a postmodern theory of “epistemic injustice” that calls for a “decolonization” of knowledge acquisition.

For example, woke math pedagogues decided it was more important to elevate the status of Indigenous “ways of knowing” as a means of combatting alleged white supremacy than it was to preserve the traditional, and effective, instructive teacher-student “settler” model. Their chosen vehicle is known as Discovery Math, which shuns traditional learning in favour of students inventing their own math solutions. It was bound to fail as a method, and did: Provincial standardized tests reveal that only half of sixth-grade students meet provincial math standards.

Last month, the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) distributed lots of awards, none of them honouring the teaching of objective content alone. Some awards recognized service to the union, but “roughly two-thirds” celebrated social-justice advocacy. Not by coincidence, no awards recognized improvement in learning outcomes.

Social-justice advocacy sounds benign, but generally isn’t, because the social-justice paradigm does not treat children as individuals. Rather, they are viewed as avatars for their identity group’s immutable innocence or guilt. It’s an open invitation to “other” allegedly guilty identity groups. A motion at ETFO’s August AGM, which passed with 71 per cent support, approved the development of teacher resources addressing alleged anti-Palestinian racism (defined by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association), which is inherently anti-Zionist. Small wonder many Jewish parents fear even more bullying of their children linked to anti-Israel and antisemitic political activism by teachers in the new school year than has already been documented.

Failure to protect children from psychological abuse is bad enough. But failure to protect both students and teachers from physically violent students is worse. In March 2023, investigative reporter Ari Blaff laid out the history and exposed the gravity of the system’s violence problem in a National Review article, “How ‘Progressive Discipline’ turned Ontario schools into a battleground.”

In 2000, Conservative premier Mike Harris passed the Safe Schools Act, which included a “zero-tolerance” policy toward violence. Suspensions and expulsions went up; bad behaviour — disproportionately attached to “racialized” students — went down. In 2007, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government introduced the “Progressive Discipline and School Safety Bill,” which took effect in 2008. Progressive Discipline “defanged” principals’ expulsion power, introducing discourse like “root causes,” “restorative justice,” “positive discipline” and “redirection” in approaching student behaviour. Actual “discipline,” featuring reward and punishment, was memory-holed.

In 2005, only seven per cent of Ontario teachers experienced physical abuse from students. By 2017 it was 54 per cent. A 2021 academic report describing school violence as an “epidemic” found that almost 90 per cent of Ontario educators reported experiencing some form of violence in 2018-19. Teachers aren’t allowed to physically restrain students assaulting peers, they can only use their bodies “as a shield.” Blaff found in interviews that teachers co-operated with the policy despite their frustration because they feared dissidence might entail negative career consequences.

The one school board “holdover from a saner time” was the School Resource Officer (SRO) program, where law-enforcement officers were stationed at dozens of schools across Toronto. Their presence was a check on serious violence. A strong majority of surveyed students, parents and staff members were grateful to have law enforcement on site. The police did more than hang out. They counselled at-risk students and provided strong, positive role models for fatherless young males. But many Black and Indigenous students said they were “uncomfortable or very uncomfortable interacting” with them. So the Toronto District School Board, considering the issue entirely through an “equity lens” rather than the demonstrated merits of the program, dismantled it in 2017.

Needless to say, erasure of that thin blue line unleashed further violence. There have been three school shooting deaths in Toronto since the shutdown of the SRO program. Previously, there had been one, in 2007.

What is the solution? Answering that question is the easy part: End the monopoly over public education and “defang” the bias-riddled unions. Give parents “school choice.” Fund the child, not the bureaucrats. Let a thousand schooling options bloom. How is it to be done? That’s the hard part. Vote in a party whose platform features those policies. But no party leader will take such a political risk unless polls indicate education reform is an existential issue for a critical mass of Ontarians. What’s needed, in other words, is a Parent Revolution.