According to a recent analysis by the Fraser Institute, Ontario's finances are in a much worse state than California's. Even though California's economy is almost three times bigger than Ontario's, the province's total debt is almost two-thirds larger.
For the sake of future generations, we need to take immediate and forceful action to deal with Ontario's massive deficit. And of course, to cut the deficit we will need to cut government waste, and that includes cutting the wasteful practices so prevalent in our education system. The Drummond Report, for instance, recommended cancelling all-day kindergarten and removing caps on class sizes.
These are good ideas, but there are other areas where we can cut costs and at the same time improve student learning. For instance, there is a whole alphabet soup of agencies and offices that we would be better off without. Here are a few examples.
Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat (LNS)
This secretariat is supposed to help schools teach students better, but the secretariat's activities are ideologically biased towards inferior methods and thus they actually depress student achievement.
Ontario College of Teachers (OCT)
This organization is supposed to protect the public from bad teachers, but it has been captured by the teachers' unions and thus serves to protect bad teachers from the public.
Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO)
This is the province's testing agency, but its tests are prohibitively expensive and provide meagre information of questionable validity. Existing standardized tests yield far more comprehensive and valid information in a timely fashion at a fraction of the cost.
Ontario Curriculum Centre (OCC)
This centre controls which textbooks can be used in Ontario classrooms. Its ideological bias means that the most effective textbooks, for example phonetic readers and sequential mathematics texts, are banned.
The government might also consider abolishing Ontario's 72 school boards. With a total administrative cost in the neighbourhood of $650 million annually, they accomplish almost nothing. School boards are an expensive anachronism dating from before the information age. Most of the limited functions that school boards are still carrying out (successive governments have gradually stripped them of their duties) can readily be shifted to individual schools, leaving the province with the responsibility of funding, goal setting, regulation, and evaluation. Such a transfer of responsibility for hiring and remunerating staff, by the way, would remove the need for province-wide bargaining with the teachers' unions.
Another option is to reduce the expense of Ontario's 13 faculties of education. When the Ontario College of Teachers surveyed its members about the most important sources of their teaching skills, courses at their faculty of education ranked dead last, after such things as common sense and what they learned from their parents and family (Table 4.1). If the government were to authorize alternative teacher training, including private institutions, it would not only save money but also open up the possibility that better teacher training would become available to prospective teachers.
There's one more significant measure that would at the same time save money, increase parental satisfaction, and improve student achievement. This measure is tuition tax credits or school vouchers for private schools.
At present, the Ontario government spends more than $12,000 per student on primary and elementary education. If the government were to offer a tuition tax credit/school voucher of $6,000 to private school students, every time a student transferred out of the public school system to a private school -- the government would save $6,000. Of course, the government would lose money on the approximately 125,000 students who are already attending a private school, but the break-even point would be reached when a total of 250,000 students enrolled in private schools -- something that would probably happen by the second year of the program at the latest -- and after that the tuition tax credits/school vouchers would save money, lots of money. For example, if 300,000 Ontario students enrolled in private schools, the government would save $450,000,000 every year.
And, in a win-win scenario, the students who had transferred to private schools would be generally better off. As well, the threat of an exodus of students from publicly-funded schools would galvanize those schools into improving their service. It's high time the public school monopoly was exposed to the healthy effects of competition.
Ontario is going to have to take drastic action lest it go the way of Greece. The Mike Harris financial retrenching is going to seem like a light summer breeze in comparison to the winter gale that is coming our way.
The challenge is to implement cuts that will harm services the least. Fortunately, the education portfolio offers several ways to effect huge savings -- while at the same time improving student achievement.
For Long-term solution goverment need:
1. Ban teachers union from public school
2. Cancel tenure
3. Set teachers salaries to normal level (50K max after 8 years)
4. Introduce teachers reexamination every 2 years.
5. Cancel goverment pensions.
6. Teachers will work during summer (as all other Canadians) .
Children come first!
Goal less to teachers more to students.
As for EQAO, Malkin Dare is in complete agreement with the teachers' unions in wanting it abolished. They also claim it is a huge financial waste, and tried to point this out to (former) education minister Broten.
Similarly, teachers and their unions have never seen the use or the point of the Ontario College of Teachers, and her claim of it being currently controlled by the unions is baffling. That she didn't know it was funded by teacher fees makes me question the thoroughness of her research and the merits of her claims.
The comment on the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat being "ideologically biased towards inferior methods" need some support. Where is the evidence? Upon what are you basing this strident assertion? I'm not claiming you are wrong, I'm just saying that until you provide some sort of quantifiable proof, this is merely an unsubstantiated opinion.
Another private school teacher destroyed every single bright child he had in his class and got away with it for years. Private schools are the place where parents with money put their children in the hope of having the child's problem sorted out. Private school is where money is spent on making children run faster and wear cute uniforms. For fifty thousand a year you can have a private school. Of course for thodse who want to but lack the fifty thousand the tax funded public system has to do. Anytime the blog writer wants to get what private schools give children just ask the the taxpayer to pony up fifty thousand and pay the teachers a lot less there by guaranteeing low quality teachers.
But this article is saved by the (unintentional) humour. You have to love someone spouting rhetoric from the Fraser institute accuse the OCC of having an 'ideological bias'. They make sure that grade three science textbooks reflect grade three curriculum - what's ideological about that?
Society for Quality Education is a charitable non-profit organization whose mission is to provide the facts arising from research about quality education to policy makers, legislators, educators and the public. It maintain a particular focus on the positive consequences of the introduction of market-like forces in education including charter schools, parental choice, education tax credits, and vouchers. See for example their informal summary of School Choice in Canada and their General Information page with links to a wide variety of pages such as School Choice Mythbusters and Tax Credit Mythbusters.
Because we all are just dying to have a US quality Libertarian education system in Canada.
I do applaud her effort, though. After all, it is with ideas like these that those who do not really understand the implications of such propositions actually end up buying into right wing idiotic principals.
Orwell said in 1984, "the world view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on those who were incapable of understanding it".
Translation: larger class sizes for already over-worked teachers, phasing out unions, abolish school boards with means overworked principals and money not being saved but really just reallocated elsewhere, and more unfounded philosophies.
This organization is supposed to protect the public from bad teachers, but it has been captured by the teachers' unions and thus serves to protect bad teachers from the public."
Where is your proof of this accusation?
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2011/10/02/sexting_cuddling_with_student_a_teenage_girl_did_not_cost_teacher_his_job.html
But the flaw in your logic is that absorbing these kids into the public system doesn't really save any money, it just moves it around a bit. They would still be the responsibility of the provincial government, funded at near identical levels.
system doesn't really save any money, it just moves it around a bit."
Not true, because not all of these kids will go to public school, they will continue in catholic school at the expense of the church and their parents. Remember, it was only in the late 80s that the government started funding catholic high schools, yet these schools existed before that point and students attended.
And the fact of the matter is that catholic schools actually cost the government more than public schools, because school funding is determined by taxes and where you allocate your tax money (public or catholic) - this provides the same amount of money for each student , regardless of school board - but when the catholic board comes up short and can't afford to operate, the province steps in and provides them more money and this happens every single year. at to that the fact that more money is spent on review the curriculum of catholic schools to ensure that they are meeting government requirements regarding subjects, sex education and not discriminating against gay and lesbian students.
It's drastically more expensive for the province to pay for one student to got to catholic school and to operate one catholic school, than the equivalent public school.
If the OCT is indeed working at cross purposes to the public interest, then the government should negotiate with both the OCT and the unions to set a new code of professional standards and conduct, and to find ways to weed out imcompetents or spongers.
If the OCT were to be abolished, what then? Would it be up to each individual school to determine what makes a qualified teacher, and up to individual colleges and universities to determine what course of studies qualifies a student to get a teaching certificate? Without a body to set and enforce standards, schools would be flying blind when they hired teachers, and without set standards how does one fire a teacher who isn't measuring up, if there's nothing to measure by, except the opinion of who, exactly?
If the government takes this advice it's a good thing Harper is building more prisons. They'll be needed.
But, oops, it costs a wee bit more than $12,000/year per prisoner...perhaps it might be worthwhile to invest in giving all children the best chance possible, and also helping families?
However, as far as I know the Ontario College of Teachers is funded mostly by teacher fees (and by advertising, go figure) and I don't see any government funding in their financial statement so removing it will not save taxpayers any money directly. Teacher would likely agree with you that it should be removed because it is largely a waste of money from their perspective.
In terms of "bad" teachers, the College disciplines teachers for breach of conduct. Teaching quality is monitored by local school board officials (principals and vice principals) and that has been a moving target (subjectivity, definition of a good teacher, etc.) Anyway the College doesn't help at all.