Birds, bees and a snitch
Premier Doug Ford came out swinging on sex education this week, saying he won’t tolerate anybody using students as political pawns.
What that actually means is that he won’t tolerate anyone else doing what he’s been doing for months, and is currently ratcheting up yet another level.
How else to explain his government’s decision to launch an online portal for parents “to report any concerns” about what teachers are teaching in classrooms? The government may be calling this a “dedicated submission platform,” but critics have more clearly summed it up for what it really is: a “snitch line.”
The form is anonymous, so it’s certainly not for parents wanting to fix something going on in their kid’s classroom. That’s still best handled with an escalating series of calls that start with the teacher and principal and move up to the school trustee and Ontario College of Teachers, if necessary.
This new system seems designed to get the feedback Ford wants to hear.
The form presumes parents have “concerns about the current curriculum,” and it was announced in a news release Wednesday that came with a stark warning from the premier. “Make no mistake, if we find somebody failing to do their job, we will act.”
That’s clearly a warning to teachers — along with their union representatives and school boards — who had indicated that they wanted to continue to teach the 2015 sex education curriculum instead of following the government’s directive to go back to the one first introduced in 1998.
But the Ford government has made such a mess of this file, simultaneously trying to sound reasonably in touch with reality and yet not breaking faith with social conservatives that even teachers wanting to follow the rules could easily find themselves on the wrong side of the ever-shifting sands of what’s in and what’s out of sex education in Ontario.
And even now, Ford is still trying to have it both ways. The government’s latest short-term solution is to have students in Grades 1 to 8 go back to the old curriculum, while high school students will get to keep the more modern curriculum introduced by the Liberal government.
It’s not a great solution. All students should get the benefit of the modern curriculum, which covers important issues such as cyberbullying, same-sex marriage and gender identity. But, as of Wednesday anyway, it does provide a clearer answer than the government had delivered before about what will happen when students return to school in September.
Unfortunately, Ford’s government didn’t stop there. Earlier this summer, he promised “the largest consultation ever in Ontario’s history” to develop a new sex education curriculum.
And now, he’s expanded that consultation to include numerous other hot-button issues in education: the math curriculum, standardized testing and cell phones in classrooms.
To set up a consultation essentially to hear from a faction of parents who want less detailed sex education in schools and expand it to include a series of other education issues is madness.
And just in case the snitch line and the largest consultation ever still isn’t enough to make parents feel included in the decisions the government intends to make, the education minister announced that she was striking a committee to create a “Parents’ Bill of Rights.”
We know students don’t vote and their parents do, but schools are really supposed to be about what’s good for all students — not just groups of disgruntled parents. This is the worst way possible way to handle the education file.
Sam Hammond, the head of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, has argued that Ford is “manufacturing a crisis” in education.
He’s right. Ford is also setting the province up for years of battles with teachers.
And we only need to look back to the Mike Harris years to know how bad that will wind up being not just for teachers but students, parents and, ultimately, the government itself.