Opinion: A cautionary tale from Ontario

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on March 10, 2020.

jappel@medicinehatnews.com@MHNJeremyAppel

Last week, the Ontario government caved on a couple of its major demands in its ongoing labour dispute with the province’s teachers, which could be a foretelling of developments to come in the near future here in Alberta.

Ontario’s four teachers’ unions representing elementary, high school, Catholic and francophone schools, have been on rotating strikes since late-2019.

While the government is attempting to frame the debate in terms of compensation, the battle is over something with far more profound implications for how teachers do their work – increasing class sizes while mandating online learning, which in practice means more students will be on their own.

The Ontario government originally aimed for schools to increase their average class sizes to 28 students from 22, a target they have now decreased to 23.

It also wanted to force students into e-learning programs to get them away from their increasingly-overcrowded classrooms. Now they will be able to opt out.

Having had its election in 2018, Ontario is a year ahead of Alberta in its experiment with hard-right slash-and-burn economics that seeks to put a price tag on everything. So we can expect Premier Jason Kenney and Education Minister Adriana LaGrange to escalate their full-scale assault on public education in the very near future.

The underpinnings are already in place.

The first sign was the government’s K-12 curriculum advisory panel. When this government establishes a panel, you can rest assured its mind is already made up.

It bears repeating that this education panel includes zero active K-12 teachers. It does, however, include Miles Smit, co-founder of the for-profit e-learning outfit the Petrarch Institute, which boasts on its website of the virtues of homeschooling.

The government is cutting publicly-funded e-learning in the shape of the Alberta Distance Learning Centre intended for adult students to complete their education, in addition to students in remote areas.

This will leave schools increasingly dependent on for-profit providers, such as the Petrarch Institute, to fill gaps in the public education system that shouldn’t be there to begin with, and make some people a lot of money in the process.

This is the privatization playbook – weaken public systems to the point of ineffectiveness and then bring the private sector in to fix the problem you’ve created.

Look for the upcoming School Choice Act to redirect resources from public and separate to private and charter schools, as well as homeschooling – a surefire bonanza for Mr. Smit.

As for class sizes, there’s no escaping the reality that they’re going to get bigger. Just like in Ontario, it’s a question of how much bigger.

The education ministry claims it froze the K-12 budget for the 2019-2020 school year. This, as readers of this paper will know, is not true.

Documents obtained by the Alberta Teachers’ Association through a freedom of information request reveal that all but four school board took a hit in that budget, with the total damage equalling $136 million.

To put it in perspective, that’s more than four energy war rooms.

So, at a time when enrolment is increasing, the government is removing funds from the public system while denying they’re doing anything of that sort.

To this day, the government refuses to acknowledge any shortfall, placing the blame squarely on the school boards, who are earnestly trying to do all they can with less resources.

Had it remained flat, increasing enrolment could only mean larger class sizes, so the outright cut imposed last year simply exacerbates this and a minor increase in the 2020-21 budget, which is still a cut compared to 2018-19, isn’t going to change that.

But the strikes in Ontario show the limits to what governments can get away with, at least when we’re dealing with our children’s future as embodied in the public education system.

The reason the Ontario government backed down from their demands is that public opinion in the province was against replacing teachers with computers. It turns out most people, regardless of whom they voted for, value a strong public education system.

The Alberta government would be wise to heed caution.

(Jeremy Appel is a News reporter. You can contact him by email at jappel@medicinehatnews.com)