Made-in-Ontario fix is in for N.S. education
With the elimination of school boards, Nova Scotia will become the most centralized school system in Canada
The Nova Scotia government isn’t behaving like it wants to rebuild good relations with Nova Scotia’s teachers.
The best way to start re-establishing lost trust is to give it them the straight goods, and Friday’s announcement of the new and mighty deputy minister of education fell short of that mark.
Maybe the province doesn’t think it relevant, but teachers will. Cathy Montreuil, who takes over the top job at education on March 1, and Avis Glaze, who drew the blueprint the government is using to restructure public education, were tight in Ontario.
The province obviously doesn’t think that relationship will be an advantage as Montreuil sets out to implement Glaze’s radical resection of school administration, or it would have touted the connection in its news release.
Cynics would say the province didn’t want Nova Scotians to know about the close tie between Glaze and Montreuil, who appear together – circa mid2000s – on a short list of six-figure earners working for the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board, in southern Ontario’s Peterborough area.
In 2006, for example, Montreuil was a principal working for that board and earning $116,500, while Glaze was the board’s director of education earning almost $260,000.
Ontario is said by some to have the best public schools in Canada, while others, notably the rightleaning Toronto Sun, rarely miss a chance to decry the steady erosion of academic achievement in the big central province that sucks up more than its fair share of Canada’s oxygen.
Critics point out that Ontarians, in increasing numbers, are sending their kids to independent schools and paying the full cost. Nearly 20,000 more students attend independent schools in Ontario today than in 2000, despite an overall decline in school age population of more than five per cent.
An analysis from the Fraser Institute, another right-of-right source, concludes that Ontario taxpayers are paying more but getting less from public education.
Poor student achievement among young Nova Scotians was the problem Avis Glaze said her report and recommendations were designed to fix. Whether her more drastic recommendations will do that is a matter of pure faith.
There is nothing about getting rid of school boards or removing principals and vice-principals from their union that instinctively supports better student achievement.
Her recommendation to establish a college to regulate and accredit Nova Scotian teachers by developing and enforcing professional standards is a direct lift from Ontario, the only province that has such a thing, although British Columbia tested the concept, found it wanting, and killed it off.
Recently, the Ontario Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) – Glaze recommended Nova Scotia get a similar beast - reported that only half of that province’s grade six students are meeting the provincial standard in math, and by grade nine just 44 per cent of kids meet provincial standards in applied math and literacy.
The Fraser report cites archaic regulations, misaligned objectives, a lack of responsiveness to parental demands, and centralized, prescriptive curriculum as “just a few of the many handcuffs holding back Ontario’s public-school systems.”
With the elimination of school boards, Nova Scotia will become the most centralized school system in Canada.
The point of the Fraser Institute study was to skewer the Ontario Liberal government for spending more in public education while producing inferior results.
Whatever your take on public school education in Ontario, it’s coming to Nova Scotia.
Avis Glaze delivered to the Nova Scotia government a carbon copy of Ontario’s school system, less the sectarian element – Ontario has Catholic school boards – but then she deployed the nuclear option against Nova Scotian boards, vaporizing them and eliminating any need to consider their nature.
It could well be that hiring a deputy minister to run a more potent and important education department than ever, who is a disciple of the Ontario model Glaze handed over, makes good sense. But the province rarely does anything that makes good sense without touting its own wisdom. So, it’s more than passing strange that it chose not to do so in this case.
Nova Scotia governments have a long and mostly disappointing history of paying big bucks for experts from anywhere but here. As soon as you hear a public entity say its search for new leadership will be national in scope, the unsaid meaning is “locals need not apply.”
Of course, that’s nothing new. Jesus himself was critical of the hometown crowd’s dismissal of its own prophets.
A few millennia later, we’ll have to wait and see if a made-in-Ontario response answers Nova Scotia’s vexing education questions.
“Nova Scotia governments have a long and mostly disappointing history of paying big bucks for experts from anywhere but here.”