FORD PROMISES GRIEVANCE-BASED EDUCATION POLICY
The Ontario Progressive Conservatives would bring back a 20-year-old health curriculum for elementary schools, police free speech on university campuses and somehow fix math instruction, Leader Doug Ford announced in one big go on Tuesday morning.
“I want an education system that respects parents and focuses on the fundamentals,” Ford said. “Unfortunately, under Kathleen Wynne, our schools have been turned into social laboratories and our kids into test subjects for whatever special interests and so-called experts that have captured Kathleen Wynne’s ear.”
Only on math does he sort of have a point. The rest is pandering and posturing to appease small parts of the Tory base.
Math first. Ford promises he’ll “get rid of Kathleen Wynne’s failed ideological ‘discovery math’ curriculum and instead focus on teaching kids the fundamentals of mathematics.” There’s firmer ground to stand on here. Ontario’s junior-grade mathematics scores have been poor for years — only about half of Grade 6 students meet the provincial standard, a weird dip between better performances for Grade 3s and Grade 9s.
“Discovery math” is based on the idea there’s no one right way to do even basic calculations. To add a couple of two-digit numbers, some people will have the answers memorized, some will write the problem out and work through a formal process of carrying ones and 10s, some will visualize number lines, some will do mental tricks with the columns. If you learned math the traditional way, you almost certainly picked up one of these methods and used it secretly, regardless of what you were being taught. Discovery math aims to teach these different approaches deliberately.
Some of them won’t work for some kids. Teachers might skip through the methods too quickly and not make sure that at least one of them has stuck. As a parent, I wonder why my elementary-age kids get so much reading homework and so little math. The province’s standardized test scores continue to tell us something ’s amiss and if you’re baffled by a sevenyear-old’s homework, it’s easy to conclude that we’re teaching gibberish.
The golden age of math instruction was ... when? When the Soviets got Sputnik into orbit in 1957 and the West freaked out that we weren’t producing enough engineers and physicists? When we became obsessed with Asian kids’ math skills in the 1980s? Ontario’s Grade 8s are second best in Canada on national math tests ( just behind Quebec) and Canada’s Grade 8s were eighth among dozens of countries in a monumental international comparison in 2015. Our Grade 4s weren’t as strong, but still had scores “significantly higher” than the average. Our math instruction needs improvement, not a total rebuild.
Then there’s the promise to repeal the health curriculum schools have been using since 2016 and reinstate one from 1998. There might be goodfaith objections to the current health curriculum. The ones you actually hear are that it teaches Grade 1s how to consent to sex and pushes Grade 3s toward sexchange surgery and tells Grade 7s that anal sex is fine. In reality, the curriculum teaches Grade 1s to respect it when someone says no, Grade 3s that you aren’t allowed to make fun of people and Grade 7s that you can get diseases from anal sex.
The curriculum uses plain language to address squirmy subjects, but it’s 244 pages of pretty traditional ideas: sex comes with physical and emotional risks; being cruel to people who are different from you is not OK; don’t text naked pictures of yourself; eat leafy greens; exercise. The idea that we would ditch it all based on lies is discouraging.
But Ford owes his leadership to socially conservative party activists. Their support is especially precarious since he ditched their charismatic spokeswoman Tanya Granic Allen as a candidate in Mississauga over the weekend partly because, Ford was surprised to learn, she’d said unkind things about homosexuals. So here we are.
Almost as bad is a pledge to tie university funding “to the willingness of university administrators to protect free speech for all students and faculty.”
You’d think professors were getting fired every other day. Ford offers two examples of violations: a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, Lindsay Shepherd, whose professor-boss reprimanded her clumsily for using a video of right-wing darling Jordan Peterson (a highly paid, tenured professor at the University of Toronto, Ontario’s pre-eminent university) in a tutorial; and a spat between a U of T student union and an anti-abortion group it refused to fund as a club.
A judge dismissed the group’s court challenge, specifically finding that the group’s freeexpression rights had not been violated, a detail included in the news story the Progressive Conservatives used to describe the conflict.
It’s become a hobby for rightwingers to pick fights with campus lefties, often in ways that don’t implicate the academic freedom universities must protect, and then complain that they aren’t adored. To have the government threaten research and teaching funding unless administrators insert themselves into things as trivial as student-union decisions would massively aggravate these fights, not settle them.
Education is the secondbiggest item in the provincial budget and it’s at least as delicate, complex and important as health. Education determines Ontario’s future. If you want decisions on how we do it based on grievances, some of them imaginary, here you go.