Education
Rethinking Public Education

From The Audit
Holding public officials and institutions accountable using data-driven investigative journalism
What should public education accomplish?
On any given school day some six million Canadians between the ages of 5-18 are “locked up” – often against their will – inside K-12 schools. Approximately 2.5 percent of Canada’s gross domestic product is spent on public education. And, using Ontario as an example, that’ll cost more than $30 billion annually, or around 16 percent of the province’s budget.
Society invests heavily in education, and yet no one seems completely satisfied with the results. When was the last time you met an adult of any political stripe who didn’t have an opinion about what’s wrong with schools these days?
This piece was inspired by a comment to my recent Ranking Public Education Efficiency By Province post. That’s where I presented evidence suggesting increased funding would probably not solve the deep, systemic problems casting gloomy shadows up and down the halls of our ministries of education.
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So is there a better way to do public education? I honestly don’t know. But I do know that it’s unlikely we’ll ever find out if we don’t go back to the very beginning as ask some basic questions. And I also know that I haven’t seen most of these particular questions asked anywhere else:
What should public education accomplish?
How do you plan a trip if you don’t know where you want to go?
We can probably agree that all children should learn the skills they’ll need to live productive and successful lives as adults. And there’s not a lot of controversy in saying that those skills should include competence in reading, writing, and basic mathematics.
We can probably also agree that students should graduate with a healthy civic identity which would include comfort with, and loyalty to our cultural and legal heritage. However, things will get prickly when we try to define exactly what we mean by “identity” and “cultural”. Not to mention “heritage”. How do we decide whose definitions win?
Some will argue that schools should teach only skills and leave values out of the curriculum altogether. In other words, education should be culturally neutral. The biggest problem with that is that teachers aren’t neutral. Having taught high school for 20 years myself, I can tell you that, by design or by accident, a teacher enters the classroom as a complete and unsegmented person. And even the drowsiest, most distracted student senses it.
Some go a step further and advocate for teaching children the “critical thinking skills” they’ll need to make their own value judgments. Well that’s fine if you’re providing only the relevant epistemological, semantic, cognitive, and heuristic tools. But if your “critical thinking” curriculum includes even one values-based answer (see above for “unsegmented teachers”) then, by definition, you’re a propagandist.
What, exactly, is wrong with what we’ve already got?
There’s a lot here about which I simply don’t have enough clarity:
- I’ve read that grade inflation is allowing students to graduate without having mastered the content to which their transcripts attest. But I haven’t been able to find hard data to assess the claims.
- I’ve heard that employers are unsatisfied with the skills and work ethic of the young graduates applying for jobs. But how many employers? And how unsatisfied are they?
- As a (former?) IT system administrator, I’m well aware that large-scale technology adoptions in education environments were, historically, often the product of vendor hype, unreasonable expectations, and precious little serious research. And they often led to outrageous unintended consequences. But I’m no longer sufficiently plugged in to that world to have a sense of whether, on aggregate, technology is helping or harming children (or simply draining budgets).
- I’ve heard that at least some school boards appear to be dominated by extreme politically-driven ideologies. But how many boards are impacted? And how often do those ideologies find their way into classrooms?
- I’ve seen evidence that Ministry-level policy research is relying on poor and debunked scholarship. But has it made a difference with anyone involved with actual classroom teaching? (And how do you measure “debunked”?)
Should control over education policy be centralized?
Curriculum policy in Canada is generally set at the provincial ministry level and politely ignored everywhere else. I’ve already written about that in these pages. But, as discussed earlier, K-12 policy development costs us hundreds of millions of dollars each year across the country.
I’m not sure it’s even possible to impose detailed policy and curriculum guidelines. As a wise man once told me, you can tell them exactly what you want them to say but, with an arched eyebrow or a subtle voice inflection, experienced teachers communicate whatever message they want.
Now, considering how the system is currently funded, it makes perfect sense that elected officials at the provincial level should determine education policy. What makes somewhat less sense is that the policy researchers they hire appear to invest a great deal of energy resisting government “interference” and also refuse to share their research with the public who paid for it.
But, in theory at least, is the current system ideal?
Let me take a step back. What exactly is an education expert whose opinions qualify as authoritative? The issue is complicated by the many popular pedagogical theories that have come and (in some cases) gone over the decades. Those include constructivism, behaviorism, social learning theory, cognitive load theory, multiple intelligences theory, experiential learning theory, connectivism, situated learning theory, Bloom’s taxonomy, and humanistic education.
However I don’t believe that any single one of those – or even a combination – has ever achieved any kind of lasting consensus as they they cycle in and out of popularity. Nor can it be claimed that the policies set by whoever the credentialed experts happen to be have led to consistently satisfying results.
That is certainly not to suggest that the experts’ guidance hasn’t delivered successes over the years, or that they don’t bring value to the table. But, after more than a century’s worth of experiments with centralized educational control, it might be time to try something else.
Are all teenagers best served by mandatory enrollment?
When we acknowledge that no two children have identical needs and potential, it means that we have to be ready to treat them differently. And that’ll involve more than sending some kids to room 310 for their 10:30 class and others to room 315 across the hall. Isn’t it reasonable to wonder whether some teenagers can learn more and transition faster to responsible adult life outside educational frameworks?
Perhaps some truancy and child labour laws need updating.
Do vested interests stand in the way of positive change?
I honestly don’t know enough to have solid opinions on these questions, but they must be asked:
- Are teachers colleges politicized?
- Do the incentives driving powerful teachers unions conflict with students’ needs?
- Are sharply competing visions within ministries of education paralyzing the system (and wasting resources)?
- Should parent-advocates be allowed to interfere with educational professionals doing their work?
- Can every ministry job category still justify its costs – in both budget and institutional friction?
The inexorable inertia of incumbency is also a key player in this story.
What could replace the current model?
Some of the conflicts describe above come down to opposing worldviews. Are you a top-down governance type in whose eyes only “the authorities” have the knowledge and power to manage the lives of their subjects? Or do you see government as the servant of the people, existing only to fill in for the individual when faced with tasks requiring collective action? The worldview checkbox you tick will probably influence the kinds of alternatives you find yourself visualizing.
However, preconceptions shouldn’t be our only consideration. If there’s anything practical you could take away from this post, it’s that we need more serious research. Sure, I know there are good people out there thinking deeply about education policy. I’m far from the first person asking some of those questions.
But I haven’t yet come across any holistic discussion that starts from first principles and, in those terms, seeks to understand exactly what we’ve got and what we’re missing. And it’s only with that knowledge could we hope to build something genuinely new.
Happy 2024-2025 school year!
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Alberta
Alberta poll shows strong resistance to pornographic material in school libraries

From LifeSiteNews
A government survey revealed strong public support, particularly among parents, for restricting or banning sexually explicit books.
Albertans are largely opposed to their children viewing pornography in school libraries, according to government polling.
In a June 20 press release, the Government of Alberta announced that their public engagement survey, launched after the discovery of sexually explicit books in school libraries, found that Albertans strongly support removing or limiting such content.
“Parents, educators and Albertans in general want action to ensure children don’t have access to age-inappropriate materials in school libraries,” Demetrios Nicolaides, Minister of Education and Childcare, said.
“We will use this valuable input to guide the creation of a province-wide standard to ensure the policy reflects the priorities and values of Albertans,” he continued.
READ: Support for traditional family values surges in Alberta
The survey, conducted between May 28 to June 6, received nearly 80,000 responses, revealing a widespread interest in the issue.
While 61 percent of respondents said that they had never previously been concerned about children viewing sexually explicit content in libraries, most were opposed to young children viewing it. 34 percent said children should never be able to access sexually explicit content in school libraries, while 23 percent believed it should be restricted to those aged 15 and up.
Similarly, 44 percent of parents of school-aged children were supportive of government regulations to control content in school libraries. Additionally, 62 percent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that “parents and guardians should play a role in reporting or challenging the availability of materials with sexually explicit content in school libraries.”
READ: Alberta Conservatives seeking to ban sexually graphic books from school libraries
The polling results come after the Conservative Alberta government under Premier Danielle Smith announced that they are going ahead with plans to eventually ban books with sexually explicit as well as pornographic material, many of which contain LGBT and even pedophilic content, from all school libraries, on May 27.
At the time, Nicolaides revealed that it was “extremely concerning” to discover that sexually explicit books were available in school libraries.
The books in question, found at multiple school locations, are Gender Queer, a graphic novel by Maia Kobabe; Flamer, a graphic novel by Mike Curato; Blankets, a graphic novel by Craig Thompson; and Fun Home, a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel.
David Clinton
Why Are Ontario’s Public Schools So Violent?

David Clinton
Ontario’s Auditor General just released a performance audit on the Toronto District School Board. I’m sure it’ll surprise exactly no one that “financial and capital resources are not consistently allocated in the most cost-effective or efficient way” or that “The effective management of operations was not always being measured and assessed for internal decision-making”.
And there was plenty of institutional chaos:
“Between 2017/18 and 2022/23…about 38% of TDSB schools did not report conducting the minimum number of fire drills required by the Ontario Fire Code annually, and about 31% of TDSB schools did not report conducting the minimum number of lockdown drills required by TDSB policy annually. The TDSB does not have an effective process to ensure the required number of drills are performed by each school, each year, or that they are performed in accordance with TDSB policy when performed.”
What else would you expect from a massive government bureaucracy that employs 40,000 people, spends $3.6 billion annually and – based on many of the highlighted items on their website – is laser-focused on pretty much anything besides education?
What you might not have seen coming was that around half of the report centered on in-school violence. To be sure, we’re told that there were only 407 violent events reported to the board during the 2022/2023 school year – which is a rate of around 17 events for every 10,000 students. 17:10,000 doesn’t exactly sound like an environment that’s spiraling out of control.
There was a caveat:
“Due to input errors by principals, the TDSB underreported the number of violent incidents that occurred between 2017/18 to 2021/22 to the Ministry by about 9%.”
Ok. But we’re still nowhere near Mad Max levels of violence. So what’s attracting so much of the auditor’s attention? Perhaps it’s got something to do with a couple of recent surveys whose results don’t quite match the board’s own records. Here’s how the audit describes the first of those:
“The 2022/23 TDSB Student and Parent Census was responded to by over 138,000 students, parents, guardians and caregivers. It showed that 23% of students in Grades 4 to 12 that responded to the survey said they were physically bullied (e.g., grabbed, shoved, punched, kicked, tripped, spat at), and about 71% stated they were verbally bullied (e.g., sworn at, threatened, insulted, teased, put down, called names, made fun of). Further, about 14% of student respondents indicated they had been cyberbullied. TDSB’s central tracking of all bullying incidents is much lower than this, suggesting that they are not centrally capturing a large number of bullying incidents that are occurring.”
“23% of students in Grades 4 to 12 that responded to the survey said they were physically bullied”. That’s not a great fit with that 17:10,000 ratio, even if you add the 9 percent of underreported incidents. And bear in mind that these students and their families were willing to discuss their experiences in a survey run by the school board itself, so it’s not like they’re hard to find.
But that’s not the worst of it. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO) ran their own survey in 2023. They wanted to hear about their members’ experiences with workplace violence. Here, quoting from the audit report, is what TDSB respondents told them:
- 42% had experienced physical force against themselves in 2022/23;
- 18% had experienced more than 10 of these physical force incidents in 2022/23;
- 81% indicated the number of violent incidents increased since they started working;
- about 77% responded that violence was a growing problem at their school;
- about 29% indicated they had suffered a physical injury;
- 57% had suffered a psychological injury/illness (such as mental stress, psychological or emotional harm) as a result of workplace violence against them; and
- about 85% indicated that violence at their school made teaching and working with students more difficult.
29 percent of teachers suffered a physical injury due to workplace violence. That’s elementary school teachers we’re talking about.
For perspective, even accounting for the 9 percent underreporting, the TDSB was aware of events impacting less than a quarter of a percentage point of their students (and apparently didn’t report any violence against teachers). But by their own accounts, 23 percent of all students and 42 percent of elementary teachers have suffered attacks. Are board officials willfully ignoring this stuff?
And if only there was some way to address violence and other criminal activities on school property. Perhaps – and I’m just spitballing here – there could even be people working in schools whose job it would be to (what’s the word I’m looking for?) police crime.
On a completely unrelated note, back in November, 2017, the Toronto District School Board voted 18-3 to permanently end their School Resource Officer (SRO) program. Since then, police officers have been unwelcome on board property.
To be sure, the TDSB has “accepted” all 18 of the report’s recommendations. But talk is cheap. Who’s to say that commitment won’t play out the same way we’ve seen with their fire drill compliance.
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