Growing class size so unfathomable, it’s like new math
Here’s some good news you might have missed:
High school class sizes are getting bigger. And better.
Possibly you’d already heard the big news that average classes will jump up to 28 students in the upper years (on average, meaning that many classes will head toward 40 to accommodate smaller specialized classes, which might also be sacrificed).
Perhaps you just didn’t realize this had been officially reclassified as good news, not bad.
According to Ontario’s Government for the People, when class sizes swell by more than 27 per cent, that’s just swell. And when face-to-face teaching is replaced by faceless e-learning — with one supersized online lesson made mandatory in every year of high school (unlike in other jurisdictions) — that’s progress.
Never mind the media’s relentless negativity that portrays the loss of thousands of teaching positions as somehow bad news. Forget the arched eyebrows from your neighbour down the street, whose kids will get less face time with teachers.
After all, what do parents know? Never mind all that sloganeering from Premier Doug Ford last year that parents know best about sex education — he never asked them whether size mattered, so let it go.
In any case, what can teachers teach Tories about education? Ignore those education unions indulging in so-called scaremongering, no one asked them anyway (even if they are supposedly partners in pedagogy).
Perhaps it’s counterintuitive, or just plain cognitive dissonance, but here’s the new Progressive Conservative math:
“By increasing class sizes in high school, we’re preparing them for the reality of postsecondary as well as the world of work,” Education Minister Lisa Thompson explained cheerfully on CBC’s Metro Morning the other day. Hunh! Why, host Matt Galloway persisted politely, is it better to boost class sizes?
“When students are currently preparing to go off to postsecondary education, we’re hearing from professors and employers alike that they’re lacking coping skills and they’re lacking resiliency,” she countered breezily. Hmmm. We cut not in the name of efficiency, but resiliency. Or, to paraphrase that hackneyed Vietnam-era cliché about destroying a village to save it, we must dilute the classroom experience so that we might strengthen it.
Luckily my teenagers were already out the door before they could hear the early morning musings of the person responsible for the principles and principals in our school system. It spared them the indignity of hearing the ho- nourable minister spouting pure horse manure.
Years ago, when the previously plain-spoken Thompson managed the Ontario Dairy Goat Cooperative from her rural riding of Huron-Bruce, she would have scoffed at a Toronto-based politician passing off such verbiage as so much detritus. But our mighty minister of education has undergone her own re-education since taking power, packed off to media training boot camp to learn the fine art of doublespeak, smiling cheerfully while passing off goat droppings as chèvre. The old Thompson would have confessed, straight up, that the cash-strapped Progressive Conservative government has resolved to reduce teaching positions, replacing them with online learning and saving money by shortchanging students. The new Thompson, under the tutelage of her populist premier, has forgotten how to fess up.
What is she up to, exactly? Listen to her talking up the downsizing of education:
“Today, Ontario’s Government for the People announced its plan to modernize learning,” her latest news release trumpets.
“Not one teacher — not one — will lose their job because of our class-size strategy,” she added.
Yet thousands of teaching positions are being phased out in high schools across the province, without any public discussion or parental consultation. No matter, the Tories insist, because not a single teacher will lose their job.
Thanks to the magic of attrition without contrition, teaching positions will be reduced as teachers retire, never to be replaced. Never mind the impact on high school students crammed into increasingly crowded classes for years to come. No matter how much the minister embraces back-to-basics math, and the demise of “discovery math” (which taught children real-world problem-solving skills), it still doesn’t add up. But the Tories have done their political calcu- lations and fiscal computations.
This PC government insists it is “investing” in education while increasing class sizes. It is banning mobile phones while making e-learning mandatory. The Tories are “protecting” teachers’ jobs while reducing teachers’ positions.
This isn’t just back-to-basics, it is back to the 1990s, when the Mike Harris Tories took on teachers unions.
Make no mistake, Ford’s Tories are setting the stage for another confrontation — or “disruption,” in today’s terminology.
It will rattle the education system for years to come — not just from cuts in funding, but wounds from all the fighting. Beware the blowback.
An elitist educator might caution the PCs that those who ignore the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. But times have changed for present-day populists.
Today’s Tories want to relive the lessons of history, convinced they’ll rewrite them.