The Honourable Doug Ford
Premier of the Province of Ontario
Legislative Building
Queen’s Park
Toronto ON M7A 1A1
May 31, 2019
Dear Mr. Ford,
I am writing in response to your request for feedback regarding your proposed changes to class sizes, as detailed in your “Class Size Consultation Guide” (March, 2019).
To begin, I thank you for providing the information in this guide and for inviting feedback from those you refer to alternately as “stakeholders” and “partners.” I wonder, however, exactly how you define these terms, and what they say about your priorities in this process. Who are your “stakeholders”? Who stands to benefit from the decisions outlined in this document? Whose opinions hold the most weight? Similarly, who are your “partners”? With whom are you demonstrating a cooperative stance in this discussion? We will return to these questions throughout my response to the Consultation Guide, as they are crucial to identifying the intentions underlying this policy.
I turn next to the four laudable goals outlined on the second page of your document.
Without a doubt, our priority in any education-related matter is “the success and well-being of every child,” which you identify as “Student Achievement.” I wonder, however, if you have considered all aspects of a student’s growth and development in your decision-making. Students are more than their test scores. They are living, thinking, feeling individuals, with diverse and complex needs.
I also question whether your “front-line staff” actually feel “protected,” as promised in your second goal. When teachers who retire are not replaced, the teachers who remain take on their responsibilities, with fewer resources and inadequate support. This is not a protective stance. When thousands of teaching positions are eliminated, and thousands of teachers are therefore unable to secure employment, “front-line staff” do not feel that they or their profession are under protection. Have you met a single education worker who actually feels that you are protecting their interests through this policy?
“Fiscal responsibility” is, in fact, the goal that is driving all others in this conversation. No one will argue that government funds should be managed “effectively” and “efficiently.” Whether or not this document actually reflects those ideals remains to be seen. Is withdrawing basic services really an effective way of maintaining the quality of a learning environment (because that’s what a school is, Mr. Ford. It is not a business.)? Is stripping essential services really efficient, when others are duplicated unnecessarily? If you looking solely at the bottom line, I challenge you to look into the cost of running parallel school systems, both of which are required to invest heavily in standardized testing that “front-line staff” has opposed from the start. Eliminate EQAO and merge our publicly funded systems, and you will find the efficiencies you seek.
Finally, I ask how we are to believe that you are engaging in “evidence-based decision making” when you publish a document without citations or references of any kind. I question whether your “inter-jurisdictional scans,” also uncited, are at all relevant, when they are not correlated in any way with student achievement. I question the soundness of a policy that is more concerned with following trends than with modeling best practices.
Bearing in mind the dubious sincerity of your “four key goals,” we turn to the consultation questions regarding the plan for Grades 1-8.
You ask what “opportunities” the proposed changes offer. It seems to me that our youngest students are being offered nothing beyond the status quo, and our older students are being offered a reduction in funding. You claim this loss is minimal; but even a “modest” increase in class sizes is a significant loss for students. You speak of fairness and flexibility, but reducing the quality of education for everyone is not a step towards “fairness.” Denying school boards the power to make decisions on behalf of their students is not a step towards “flexibility.” There are no opportunities for growth here: only regression. Who is it that truly benefits from these “opportunities?” Certainly not the children. They, and those who seek their best, are clearly not the valued stakeholders here, even to a “modest” degree.
Moving on to the consultation questions for Grades 9-12, the discrepancies between your stated goals and the “opportunities” they offer are even more telling.
Denying students personal contact with caring educators, and forcing them to compete with 34 other neglected learners for the limited attention of a faceless persona on the other side of a computer screen, is not an improvement to educational programming. Certainly, offer e-learning as an option for those who have the means and inclination to access device-based instruction; but do not force it on students and call it “flexibility.”
Similarly, do not cut specialized courses that require a low student/teacher ratio and call it “opportunity.” Do not offer vague references to other unnamed jurisdictions and call it “empirical research.” Do not offer up uncited figures about one isolated province, and then fail to take into account that province’s “significantly lower class size requirements for groups of students with different characteristics and need” (Appendix A), thereby skewing your own statistics.
Unlike Quebec, which offers additional support to students with “special education needs” or those living in “economically disadvantaged areas,” you are intentionally cutting funding for specialized programs, removing child protection safeguards, and denying struggling parents a minimum basic income. You are deliberately generating obstacles for our most vulnerable learners, and calling it “sound policy” and a commitment to “student achievement.” Again, who are the stakeholders here? Who benefits from this understanding of “fiscal responsibility”?
The “class size caps” in local collective agreements are designed to protect student well-being. Of course they present a “barrier” to the implementation of your draconian policies – as well they should! Do not vilify the negotiators who advocate for the best interests of the “front-line workers” you claim to protect, and then call them “partners.” Do not claim to be “pleased to meet with education sector labour partners” (8) and then refuse to consider their rightly acknowledged “expertise, experience, and ideas” (2).
It is clear from these observations that three of your four goals have been blatantly disregarded in the preparation of this document. There is nothing in this proposal that can claim to improve student achievement. In no sense do education workers feel that their interests are protected by these measures. Nor does this document make reference to a single piece of credible evidence. These pretended goals are nothing but a smokescreen for the one object that is driving everything else in this policy: namely, financial gain in other sectors, which you present under the guise of “fiscal responsibility.”
Let’s have a look, then, at the figures upon which you base your claims.
Your “financial summary” table outlines a savings of 0.2% in elementary and 0.1% in secondary for the year 2019-20. How is it that the savings from the “modest” changes in elementary education are double the savings in secondary education, which is supposedly bearing the brunt of these cuts? Your table indicates a savings of 0.5% in elementary and 0.6% in secondary in 2020-2021. If your projected savings are expected to more than double in elementary, and to increase sixfold in secondary, in the course of just one year, you can imagine how keenly and swiftly these losses will be felt by students and those who work with them.
In addition, there are other costs that you have failed to take into account. You speak of financial impact; but have you considered human impact? Are you aware of the documented social outcomes associated with increasing class sizes? Among them, you may consider an increase in disciplinary issues, a deterioration of school climate, reduced student and parent engagement, decreased motivation, increased anxiety, higher drop-out rates, lower probability of undertaking post-secondary studies, and, in the long term, an increase in unemployment and a corresponding reliance on social services. You may also anticipate lower staff morale, increased sick days, higher staff turnover rates, and rising unemployment rates, necessitating increased expenditures for occasional teachers, teacher retention, teacher training, and employment insurance.
How can you hope to maintain stable, healthy, growing communities in these conditions? How can you think that reducing the quality of public education is going to make us a more insightful, civilized, productive society? And how can you believe that you are initiating this decline with the consent of those you call your partners?
Thousands of educators rallied outside Queen’s Park on April 6, 2019, and your response was that you would not be “distracted” from making the proposed changes. Clearly, you do not consider the people on your front lawn to be your partners, nor are you interested in engaging in reasonable dialogue.
And so I ask again: who are your stakeholders? Whose interests should be first and foremost in any discussion about the future of public education? The students. The students are the ones most affected by your proposal. They are the ones who stand to gain or lose the most in this conversation. But where is their voice? Ten-year-old children can neither support nor denounce you with their votes. They cannot organize rallies or contact their MPPs. They do not hold your “consultation guide” in their hands. You have not asked for their input; they rely on us, their caregivers, to speak for them. And when we do so, we are labeled a distraction.
Likewise, our secondary students cannot (yet) dethrone you with their votes. But they do have voices, and they are calling your bluff. Thousands of them took to the streets on April 4 to express their concerns, and they were dismissed as “pawns” manipulated by “union thugs.” Do you honestly believe that our young people have no capacity for independent thought? Do you think they lack the “resilience” to defend their own interests?
You are silencing your most important stakeholders – the very ones who stand to lose the most as a result of your “modernizations.” You are blatantly disregarding the concerned citizens who speak on behalf of the most vulnerable members of our society. Your public approval rates are plummeting. And yet you press on, claiming to value the feedback of your constituents.
This is a democracy, not a corporation – and your “stakeholders” have spoken. We demand answers. We demand a true dialogue that goes beyond dismissive rhetoric. We demand your ear, and in turn, your sincere consideration. We, your consultants, demand the protection of our children, our educators, and our most valued public institutions. And we will not be silenced.
With thanks for your consideration of these thoughts, and in anticipation of your timely response, I remain
Sincerely yours,
Natasha Regehr
cc: EDULABFINANCE@ontario.ca
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