Typical ugly education politics in Ontario
EVERYONE HAS OPINIONS ON EDUCATION. — KELLY MCPARLAND
You can tell life is getting closer to something resembling normal in Canada’s most populous province, because a new school year is approaching and ugly politics is breaking out all around.
Before the trees can change colour, the weather turns chill and sweaters come out of drawers, bickering and arguing about kids and schools is mandatory in Ontario.
Education Minister Stephen Lecce officially signalled the opening of this year’s battlefront when he released a much-awaited 26-page document outlining the government’s official plan for the POST-COVID-19 reopening, not that anyone is absolutely certain the pandemic is well and truly in retreat. So ingrained is the compulsion to attack within the province’s media that some news articles went straight into questioning the plan before even revealing its details. Teachers were said to have “lots of questions.” The government was condemned as “reckless” for planning to open in September just weeks after being denounced for refusing to reopen in June. The leader of the official opposition was so keen to get in a few quick insults she found herself agreeing with Premier Doug Ford and had to retreat to her corner for a rapid change of position.
What Lecce revealed was a program to make this school year as close to normal as Ford’s Progressive Conservatives could make it. Everyone up to grade 12 would have to wear masks indoors, but otherwise a general outbreak of ordinariness was scheduled. Students could join the glee club, the theatre group or “high-contact indoor sports” without excessive isolation efforts. They can sit next to whomever they want at lunch, though with some distancing involved. Classes will take place five days a week, classroom sizes won’t change and recess will be pretty much as it used to be.
Lecce pledged even more money for ventilation equipment — the total tab is now up to $600 million — and a raft of mundane safety measures would be enforced. Staff and visitors would have to be masked, arrival and departure plans would be mandated to get kids in and out safely, students who hadn’t figured out how properly to wash their hands would be shown how, and “respiratory etiquette” would be explained, presumably meaning not sneezing in anyone’s face.
Of course, Lecce would have to be the world’s greatest naif if he imagined he was going to be allowed to unveil a 26-page document without being subject to a barrage of second-guessing. Everyone has opinions on education, especially people who finished their formal education years ago. NDP Leader Andrea Horwath charged right in, assailing Liberal leader Steven Del Duca for advocating for mandatory vaccinations for front-line workers in health and education.
“Unlike Del Duca, I don’t take lightly people’s charter rights,” Horwath huffed and puffed in a CBC interview, as if demanding teachers and nurses get both their jabs was the first step on the road to tyranny.
Unfortunately, it was quickly pointed out that this was bad thinking (“idiocy” one of her fellow Ndpers called it). Worse yet, it put Horwath in the same camp as Ford, who is opposed to mandatory jabs or proof-of-documentation requirements. Quick as a wink Horwath switched her beliefs, confessing the next day that she “made a mistake ... This unprecedented time requires unprecedented actions.”
The NDP leader would have been safer if she’d just helped herself to a few of the other failings critics of the plan were quick to discover. A professor from Windsor wondered why space had been given to provisions for at-home alternatives for snow days, on the apparent basis that doing nothing on snow days is every Canadian’s birthright. There was much rumination on cohorting and inter-cohort relationships, with President Sam Hammond of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario coming down firmly on real cohorting over wishy-washy cohorting, such as keeping kids in groups that “genuinely limits interaction.”
Hammond, a veteran of education attack politics, issued a statement that managed to assail the Ford government for its “reckless disregard for the seriousness of this pandemic” while simultaneously bashing the abundance of caution that had led it to keep kids out of the classroom longer than other provinces. Perhaps more pertinently, numerous onlookers noted that while the document was advertised as “comprehensive,” it lacked specific instructions on what to do should an actual COVID outbreak occur. Guidance on that fairly important question was said to be “forthcoming.”
The miracle of education is that while the bickering and backbiting go on, students still somehow manage to enter at one end and come out at the other with a fairly worthwhile body of learning. The education industry seems to operate at two levels: one consists of a non-stop struggle for power among an array of boards, bodies and institutions intent on emerging as the strongest voice with the most determined opinions and a will to foist them on everyone else involved, no matter what chaos or disruption may ensue. At the other teachers turn up, students sit at their desks, lessons are learned and everyone survives.
It’s likely the kids who turn up in September will be OK in the end. But don’t expect the adults who run the show to quit trying to make it tougher.
I DON’T TAKE LIGHTLY PEOPLE’S CHARTER RIGHTS.