Cohn: Ford’s curriculum of distraction,
While Ontario students were on summer break, our premier couldn’t catch a break.
Booed at public events, battered in public opinion polls, Doug Ford’s failing grades left him flailing. Fearful of teacher walkouts in September, mindful of student walkouts last semester, the premier spent his vacation doing his political homework.
Today he is turning the page — by changing the channel. With students going back to school, he is going back in time with back-to-basics.
The premier is rebranding — by banning cellphones, banishing discovery math and abandoning an anti-sex-ed crusade he couldn’t sustain. Embarrassed by his shameless sex-ed cock-up and awkward climbdown, Ford is distracting people with mobile phones and dividing us over multiplication tables.
If the government’s latest attempt to silence cellphones sounds familiar, that’s because recycling old promises is what all governments do in a jam. With great fanfare, the Progressive Conservatives announced last March — you can look it up — that phones were out, only to reannounce it last week.
It proved to be a popular talking point. More to the point, however, school boards in Toronto and New York tried banning phones a decade ago, only to back off because today’s pocket phones are like yesterday’s pocket calculators.
Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Unsurprisingly, a phone ban remains the political gift that the Tories keep on re-gifting all these years later.
A day before the recycled cellphone ban, Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced a revived crusade against “discovery math.” With a straight face and furrowed brow, Lecce blamed the previous Liberal government for foisting newfangled math problem-solving upon us at the expense of old-style multiplication tables.
“What we know for sure is that under the former Liberal government, the plan wasn’t serving students, it wasn’t working and young kids today are paying the price for a blind adherence to a form of teaching,” the minister opined, citing the latest scores as proof of “absolute causation.”
Might there be a different motivation for Lecce’s sudden inspiration, related less to any evidence than Ford’s stated preference? Last year, the premier telegraphed his own distaste for discovery math, noting with great certainty that “kids used to learn math by doing things like memorizing a multiplication table and it worked.”
Yes, Ontario’s annual Education Quality and Accountability Office math scores continue their slow decline. But discovery math is a bogeyman and straw man, a phantom that is never cited in the provincial curriculum.
It is a political slogan, not a pedagogical term. In the real world of classrooms, teachers talk about “inquiry-based learning,” whereby students try to apply abstract computational techniques to real-world problem-solving.
Ford and Lecce insist on crediting the Liberals for this controversial innovation, perhaps not realizing it was first embraced by a previous PC government under thenpremier Ernie Eves, who took office in 2002. Facing a decline in math scores that began when his fellow Tories returned to power in the late 1990s, Eves convened a panel of experts that called for an “early math strategy” focused on “meaningful problem solving.”
In the aftermath, math scores started to go back up, then resumed their decline again over the last decade. But as the EQAO reminds us — and Lecce pointedly forgets — the latest data shows today’s students are doing better than ever on the fundamentals; where they fumble is in applying those skills to problem-solving.
All of which suggests the Tories have it backwards on back-to-basics: Students don’t need more fundamentals, they need more critical thinking to apply their skills to the world outside the classroom.
Why the ongoing obsession with going back in time on math and mobile phones? It’s a timely distraction for the Tories after they quietly walked back their attacks on a modernized sex education curriculum.
Remember Ford’s impassioned promise to take the filth out of sex education, when he hobnobbed with the homophobes his own party had repudiated in the recent past? “The days of Liberal ideology indoctrinating our kids, they’re done,” Ford huffed last year.
It turns out that the sex-ed update he vilified on the campaign trail isn’t so vile after all. After summarily suspending it — and reverting to a two-decade-old curriculum last year — the Tories have quietly reinstituted it virtually in its entirety, with a few virtuous tweaks on timing and wording.
For all their earnest talk of relying on “evidence,” the Tories have fetishized “parental consultations” — father knows best — as their primary proof point. Mindful of parents who detested an updated sexed curriculum, Ford pandered to their protests; sensitive to parents who hate seeing their kids abuse mobiles at home, the Tories will make teachers lay down the law at school; sensing an opportunity to divide and conquer on multiplication tables, the premier demonizes discovery math.
Back-to-basics appeals to the base. Sex-ed sells. So does banning cells.
Such are the priorities for our public school system, thanks to the triumvirate of Tories heading up our educational brain trust: a premier who dropped out of college; a minister who graduated from a private high school; and his parliamentary assistant (MPP Sam Oosterhoff ) who was home-schooled and has yet to graduate from university.
Welcome back, class.