Real education reform long overdue in Ontario

The Ontario Progressive Conservatives’ recently-released election platform shows they’ve opted for the status quo in kindergarten-to-Grade-12 education. That’s unfortunate, because the province’s education system is in dire need of reform.

The platform contains almost no substantive proposals to improve an antiquated and increasingly inefficient system.

For instance, the first education promise in the PC platform is a moratorium on school closures. But public school enrolment in Ontario declined 5.4 per cent between 2005-06 and 2014-15, the most recent year of available data. There are 115,308 fewer public school students but the PCs are committing to no school closures.

Rather than offer innovative ideas about the role of charter or independent schools to mitigate potential school closures, particularly in rural areas, the PCs simply make a blanket commitment that won’t improve education nor free up resources used by underpopulated public schools.

Buried in the fine print of the platform are statistics that should deeply concern parents. According to a recent study cited by the PCs, 80 per cent of all Grade 6 teachers in the province didn’t take a single math class in university. Although the PCs have identified this as a serious concern, their solution is underwhelming — one professional development day per year to update teacher math skills. With half of the province’s Grade 6 students failing to meet the standard for mathematics, a single day per year is barely a Band-Aid solution.

The PCs had an opportunity to truly set a new course for education in Ontario, but instead chose to deliver more of the same.