Ontarians don’t want Ford’s school changes

There are two disturbing things about previously secret reports that emerged this week at an Ontario Labour Relations Board hearing into allegations by the English Catholic Teachers union that the government engaged in bad-faith bargaining.

The first is that the reports, which summarize more than 7,000 public submissions received during last year’s education consultations, were secret.

The government spent close to a million dollars. Then-Education Minister Lisa Thompson boasted the consultations were the largest ever in Ontario, and promised the results would inform policy.

And yet the government repeatedly refused to release the reports. Why would the government want to cover up the findings of its own consultations?

Now we know. The largest public consultations in Ontario history show that parents, students and education experts are universally opposed to larger classes and mandatory e-learning, two pillars of the government’s education reform agenda.

In part, the reports say: “larger class sizes negatively impact student learning (and) will reduce the quality of education ... Larger class sizes will result in less individual time between teachers and students.” And: respondents “do not support mandatory elearning.” They say teens “are not disciplined/motivated enough to succeed in online learning.”

And yet the government isn’t bending. Why? We know Ontarians don’t want these things. So are they strictly to save money, a conscious decision to harm families and kids by sacrificing educational quality?

Or are they steps on the road to Americanizing Ontario public education with school vouchers and charter schools that reward the rich and punish everyone else? Can the government, for once, be honest about its agenda?