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Education Action: Toronto's
Online Clearing House October 17, 2013 Somali Mothers Ask Us To Stand With Them More Cuts on the TDSB Horizon University Tuition Continues to Rise The Costs of Raising Children School Councils on the Decline Quality Education Alliances in Chicago and Wisconsin The Crisis in Trade Unionism Climate Change and the Renewal of the Public Sector The War on Wages and the Need for One Big Education Union Math that Works for All Kids Teaching about Labour in High School Challenging Class Bias Militarizing the State (and its Schools) The Struggle Against Unregulated Daycare The Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools |
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Dear Friends, However determined Dalton McGuinty may have been in promoting his claim to have been the province’s “education premier” – and however much that claim has been repeated in countless obituaries of his political life1 and supported by the current premier – it’s clear to anyone who has spent a moment inside Ontario’s schools that something is very wrong. This is especially true in poor, racialized and immigrant neighbourhoods, where the demoralization of students, teachers and parents can be seen at every turn. 1For some of the tone of these obituaries, we can do no better than the comments of Charles Pascal, a former Ontario deputy minister. “With Ontario education now leading the English-speaking world” he writes, “McGuinty has implemented more successful ideas and displayed more commitment to education than any premier since Bill Davis.” “McGuinty’s legacy,” he argues, “will become so embedded in what takes place in our classrooms it will hardly be noticed.” At the core of this legacy, it turns out, is “the subtle stuff” about “what they learn and how they learn what they learn.” It’s about “sustaining” and “renewing” “quality” and “excellence.” How is this quality and excellence to be measured? By the same standardized tests that tell us Finland and Singapore are leading the world – a standard he now hopes will have been “internalized” by the “teachers and other educational leaders in Ontario.” (See Charles Pascal, “McGuinty’s education legacy will endure,” Toronto Star, January 15, 2013, A15). In his final speech to the Liberal convention that elected his successor, McGuinty declared that “we’ve gone from struggling schools to the best schools in the English-speaking world.” (Richard J. Brennan, “McGuinty’s farewell: ‘The best job in the world,’ Toronto Star, January 26, 2013) Up to the end of his regime and beyond, the premier and his defenders have managed to sell his “legacy” as one of defending the public schools – at least in comparison to the destruction visited on them by former premier Mike Harris and his education minister, John Snobelen (who understood early in his ministry that a manufactured “crisis” was required if public education was to be properly savaged). Yet even the most superficial analysis of the province’s school system leads to the conclusion that after ten years of Liberal government Ontario schools are in much worse shape – and more oppressive of working-class students – than when Mike Harris and Co. were in charge. There is less money for basic funding and greater emphasis on privatization. There is less democracy, with Ministry of Education bureaucrats now reaching more deeply into the classroom and into local school administration at the same time as they are planning further school board amalgamations. Finally, and most crucially, there is far more emphasis on oppressive “human capital” production (particularly for poor, racialized and immigrant children) bringing with it an increased focus on a fragmented “expectations” curriculum, standardized testing, official profiling and social class- and racially-biased streaming. It is this “human capital” focus that has provided the main impetus for the last forty years of neo-liberal educational “reform.” For those running our school system making children “human capital” (docile/uncritical workers, citizens and consumers) is what the money and power in public education are primarily about, however much official rhetoric and false consciousness might blur this central aim. In different forms – reflecting the different needs of evolving capitalism in the province – such a focus has been central to Queen’s Park educational policy makers from the mid-19th century on. McGuinty’s contribution was to strengthen the current neo-liberal variety – and intensify a long history – of human capital production in Ontario schools. His limited progressive initiatives – smaller class sizes in the elementary grades (with ballooning sizes in later grades), labour peace with teachers and school board workers (now under direct assault, however our new premier spins it2) and a clumsy and inadequate beginning to an all-day kindergarten program – do not seriously mitigate his intensification of educational neo-liberalism. 2Currently most of the province’s school boards have resisted signing contracts that fit the most recent Ministry framework that awarded teachers somewhat more generous benefits than had previously been required. Clearly the Boards aren’t happy at having to further strip other sectors of the budget to meet these additional benefits. The question is: why did this oppressive reality stay so long under the political radar and why does it continue to stay there, even while our Liberal government’s progressive credentials in education appear to be slipping away? Why is it likely that Kathleen Wynne, the current premier of the province, will continue this neo-liberal legacy, even though her earlier record as a parent and trustee activist is one of clear opposition to its main policy directions? And why is it likely that a new NDP government would do little to resist what the Liberals would pass on them as the basis of a state school system? In many respects, it’s clear that answer has to be centred on the power and range of those who control the overall direction of our school system – in the end, the power and range of international capitalism, still centred, as Leo Panich and Sam Gindin argue persuasively, in the United States in both production and reproduction (including education).3 3See Leo Panich and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London: Verso, 2012). What is unusual about this situation is that our current Liberal government has yet to pay a serious political price for this demoralization, although that may now be changing with its new “austerity” initiatives in education, which have led into a broader assault on the province’s public services, in which teachers and education workers cannot be spared. In the real world of Canadian education politics, that seems like a very abstract and not very satisfying answer, though most of us know that what happens across the border will largely, in time, find its way into Canadian schools. Over the next year we hope to make this answer as accessible as we can, while at the same time hoping to bring into this analysis an effective – and life-giving – strategy of resistance, particularly in the realm of curriculum and testing. We are especially hoping that our teacher readers will help in this effort, and let us know how they are surviving the neo-liberal assault in their classrooms and the strategies they have devised to get around it and give their students something they can hold on to. Just how oppressive our school system continues to be for poor, racialized and immigrant students is reflected in the Open Letter below from Nasteeha Dirie and the Somali organization Women for Change. They ask us to stand with them in pressing the Toronto District School Board to start treating their children and their community (and other children and communities like theirs) with the respect and care they deserve. The passion and commitment to a just and loving school system you can hear in this letter is eloquently representative of the people they speak for. Alongside our critique of the broad “human capital” agenda of our schools, we will continue to update you on the relentless financial squeeze the province is placing on our educational system. In this issue, trustee Chris Glover opens up the prospect of even more provincial cutbacks for 2014-15, possibly adding another $30 million in cuts to the $200 million (and 2,000 staff) cut over the past four years. On the financial front, we’re also including “Degrees of Uncertainty: Navigating the Changing Terrain of University Finance” by Erika Shaker and David Macdonald with Nigel Wodrich from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Among other things, it shows that Ontario is the most expensive province in which to go to university with its “tuition and other compulsory fees climbing from $8,403 this fall to $9,517 in 2016–17.” Finally, in this context of government “austerity,” we are attaching the CCPA’s Kate McInturff’s “Leaving Children out in the Cold”, which takes on the Fraser Institute for low-balling the cost of raising children in Canada. There is a lot less writing (as we might expect) on the continued destruction of democracy in our schools than there is on the current financial squeeze. So, it’s important to take note of People for Education’s latest survey showing the decline in activism (even disappearance in some cases) of our school councils – an understandable pattern given their provincial restructuring, which discourages teacher participation, as well as vastly increased provincial control of local schools. What’s clear from the P4E survey (attached below), is that big issues like curriculum substance, streaming, standardized testing, and community involvement that so engaged school-community councils (with solid teacher participation) at the old Toronto Board are nowhere to be seen. Current councils are left with thoroughly depressing items like “communication” (mostly public relations for school admin) and fundraising. In wealthier, more powerful communities, school councils can sometimes come to life – particularly in supporting substantive classroom and extracurricular activities – but this kind of activism plays out locally with no Board-wide impact. What we need are councils that attract a high level of teacher participation, and that engage their parent communities in the big issues we all care about so as to move them forward politically. It would be good to start calling them “School–Community Councils” again. In opening up more key curriculum issues, we want to start with two documents from the U.S. – “The Schools Chicago’s Student Deserve” from the Chicago Teachers Union and “What We Believe All Wisconsin’s Children Deserve” from the Wisconsin Coalition for Children (an organization centrally supported by the state’s teacher unions). What makes these documents so valuable is that they not only offer a solid set of essential and immediately practical school reforms but that they are also strongly backed by teachers and their unions. They reflect what teachers in the U.S. are finally coming to understand (and most Canadian teacher unions have yet to grasp) after years of neo-liberal assault on their profession and their workplaces: If things are to get better, they have to build a solid alliance with their parent and communities and, equally important, that this alliance has to have “quality education” as its foundation. (The June 2013 issue of Monthly Review – Public School Teachers Fighting Back – makes this point with great clarity. The issue is free on the MR website (monthlyreview.org/browse-the-archives), though we encourage all our readers to subscribe to this fine magazine.) These American teachers are in worse shape than their Canadian counterparts – their contracts and their workplaces are more oppressive – but what's happening across the border is clearly making its way into the Canadian school system (and much of it is already here). If our teacher unions don’t build a strong “quality education” alliance with their parents and their communities, we can be guaranteed the kind of assault our American friends are now experiencing in their public schools. This means struggling for the real thing – a curriculum of genuine quality, real substance, embodying honest human purposes. It means a lot more than taking on standardized testing as too many of our progressive teacher leaders seem to think. Of course, these tests should be fought, but the much more important enemy here is Outcomes Based Education (or the Expectations Curriculum here in Ontario) – a curriculum that empties out and fragments consciousness (especially working-class consciousness) while stripping all children from their place in the human story. A strong alternative curriculum must be put forward first. Once that is in place, better evaluation procedures will naturally emerge and can be defended. For much of the public, starting with a focus on getting rid of (or randomizing) standardized tests just seems self-serving for teachers. And however helpful abandoning these tests might be, so long as OBE is framing what’s taught, some version of these tests will always end up as the policing mechanism. Framing what it means for teacher unions to take on the issue of “quality education” with their parent communities is the larger question of “social justice unionism.” As part of this discussion, we are attaching two very valuable approaches to this subject. The first is by Sam Gindin in an article entitled “The Crisis in Trade Unionism.” Here he makes the argument that unions have to move beyond limited protection of their memberships, rethink the larger potential of the public sector and “build the entire working-class as a social force.” The second approach (closely linked to Gindin’s) is by Naomi Klein in her presentation to the founding convention of Unifor – a new mega-union bringing together the Canadian Autoworkers and the Canadian Energy and Paper Workers Union, and incorporating a very serious commitment to social justice unionism. Her key point is that climate change now so seriously threatens the survival of the world that “our future depends on our ability to do what we have so long been told we can no longer do: act collectively. And who better than unions to carry that message? The renewal of the public sphere will create millions of new, high-paying union jobs -- jobs in fields that don't hasten the warming of the planet.” And who better among our unions to carry this message, we want to add, than our teacher and education worker unions. Klein’s point is backed up below by John Bellamy Foster’s “The Fossil Fuels War” in the September 2013 issue of Monthly Review. (Once again, we urge our readers to subscribe.) This is also a moment to remind ourselves that teachers and education workers are under continuing government assault on all fronts, making social justice unionism especially difficult. With this in mind, we’re attaching two pieces from Doug Little’s always useful blog – www.thelittleeducationreport.com . The first looks at the current war on wages (for all workers including teachers and education workers), while the second emphasizes how much we need one big education union here in Ontario. The issue of a good math curriculum comes up again and again in public discussions of “quality education.” It’s here before us once more, and it’s time that progressive forces in Ontario education got their act together on this subject. The press has lately been full of reports on the most recent decline in the province’s EQAO math scores, this being the fifth year that students have “lost ground” in the subject. There is, as we would expect, the usual hand-wringing from the editorial boards of Toronto’s papers, focused more than usually this time on the lack of math and science backgrounds among elementary teachers – a situation that needs improvement but is not central to the problem. There’s also comment touching, not unreasonably, on what appears to be a far too unstructured provincial mathematics curriculum. There’s nothing being said, however, on what’s wrong with standardized-tested evaluation, except by the province’s elementary teachers, who limit themselves to reminding us that these tests are just “snapshots” of particular moments in a child’s academic life. Of course, they are. But they are also deeply mindless snapshots, not a bit helpful in moving a child forward in mathematics or any other subject. Perhaps more disturbing in this public discussion is that there is no mention of the extraordinary work of our own John Mighton, one of this country’s foremost mathematicians and playwrights and whose JUMP organization (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) is centred right here in Toronto. He provides the model of a genuinely successful math program, especially for children resistant to math. It’s a model widely acclaimed internationally, with solid research now behind it. It’s a model that deserves strong public review. The strength of Mighton’s program lies not only in developing a systematic approach to teaching math, incorporating as he says “lots of practice, giving students immediate feedback, teaching general math problem-solving strategies, and helping students discover new concepts by breaking down problems into small, manageable steps,” but also in making it truly engaging for students and teachers and incorporating the conviction that all students (not just those from better-off families) are capable of doing well in math. Attached is a recent article by Mighton in Scientific American, which introduces you to his program and provides links to math lesson plans for Grades 1-8. Increasingly serious critics of our school system are calling for a much more developed social justice curriculum and they are starting to be heard. As things now stand in Ontario, however, provincial legislation insists that such programs have to stay on the margins of the official curriculum; they don’t fit the fragmented bits and pieces of the Ministry’s formal “Expectations.” Their production, however, is nevertheless essential if we are to have a concrete sense of what a social justice initiative at the core of our curriculum might look like, as well as keeping this subject alive on the margins. Below we offer two program proposals that open up key social justice discussions with our students. The first is a substantial and wide-ranging set of lesson plans from the Ontario Federation of Labour called “Learning Labour: Ideas for Secondary Schools.” This is a very thoughtful and concrete production of classroom programs, which deal with the larger issues and history of Labour in this province. The programs can be inserted within a broad range of school subjects and are linked with a large number of labour sources of information and analysis. The second set of program proposals comes from OISE’s Terezia Zoric (assisted by a large number of knowledgeable and engaged contributors), published by CWET and the TDSB. Zoric provides an extraordinarily valuable and far-reaching approach to the broader issue of “Challenging Class Bias” for Grades 5-12. Both documents are essential reading for teachers with social justice programs on their minds. It is also important to remember that school curriculum involves a broad territory, including what is sometimes called “the hidden curriculum,” which covers children’s experience of all the social relations of schooling. Increasingly, especially for working-class and racialized children, this is an experience of multi-dimensional violence. In the attached article “Violence, USA” by education analyst Henry Giroux, he makes the argument that as the “realms of war and civil life have collapsed,” we have watched a growing privatization and militarization of our social relations and public services. Giroux is writing of the U.S. – a more violent society than Canada – but reading his description of life there, it becomes clear just how much of this American violence is now Canadian and how much of it is now part of education in the “priority neighbourhoods” of cities like Toronto. Consider these lines: “Many public schools are being militarized to resemble prisons instead of being safe places that would enable students to learn how to be critical and engaged citizens. Rather than being treated with dignity and respect, students are increasingly treated as if they were criminals, given that they are repeatedly “photographed, fingerprinted, scanned, x-rayed, sniffed and snooped on.” The space of the school resembles a high-security prison with its metal detectors at the school entrances, drug-sniffing dogs in school corridors, and surveillance cameras in the hallways and classrooms. Student behaviors that were once considered child play are now elevated to the status of a crime. Young people who violate dress codes, engage in food fights, hug each other, doodle, and shoot spit wads are no longer reprimanded by the classroom teacher or principal; instead their behavior is criminalized.” That’s getting pretty close to the reality of our “priority neighbourhood” schools, isn’t it? Finally, on this issue of what’s happening to the curriculum our children experience every day in school, it’s worth your while to take a look at a recent People for Education Report – see below – on the decline of music education and the arts generally, especially in poor neighbourhoods. This decline is one more feature of the broader neo-liberal assault on our public schools. We will also continue to report on the politics of education policy reform here in Ontario. In this issue, Martha Friendly takes on the issue of unregulated daycare from the perspective of transforming the province’s “unplanned, market-based child care situation—to bring in a real publicly-managed, publicly-funded child care system so that eventually parents won’t need to find their child care on the internet or a supermarket bulletin board.” And Anne Borden, from the Campaign for Commercial-Free schools provides an update to the organization’s work and encourages all parents at the TDSB to join up and make their voices heard on this subject. Just a reminder: Back issues of Education Action: Toronto’s Clearing House can be found on our website: www.educationactiontoronto.com. And, if you know anyone or any group who might be interested in receiving articles like these, please send us along their emails. In solidarity, George Martell, David Clandfield, Faduma Mohamed, Dudley Paul Education Action: Toronto Editorial Board |
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Stand With Us and Our Children at the Toronto District School Board An open letter from Nasteeha Dirie and the Somali Women for Change The purpose of writing this article is to share with you the story of five hundred Somali-Canadian parents who have children in Toronto District School Board schools and have been struggling with this institution for a very long time. The majority of these parents are women and they have been given no help at all. Mothers are the backbone of the Somali family here in Canada. They are the ones who look after their children’s schooling and discipline, on top of everything else. Most of these mothers came from a war-torn country, and as so often happens in times of war, the victims were women and children who faced unspeakable horrors that have yet to be addressed or dealt with. Their two greatest hopes for settling in this country were to find safety and to provide a brighter future for their children through education. Those small glimmers of hope are slowly diminishing. The fact is the education crisis facing Somali-Canadian students has been known to the TDSB for more than a decade. Their own data shows time and again that these students are disproportionately identified as having Special Education Needs, and many of them attend below-standard schools. Most disturbing is the high dropout rate of Somali high school youth, as well as the violence among our boys that has been on the rise for years.
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School Boards Anticipating Funding Shortfall in Spring 2014 Chris Glover School has just started. For the past month Trustees have helped parents and students with bussing issues, class placements, and special needs services. Now, they’re beginning to roll up their sleeves and figure out how they are going to balance their budgets for the next school year. The TDSB, for example, is anticipating a $30 million shortfall (approx 1%) shortfall for the coming school year. A 1% shortfall wouldn’t be such a problem if the board hadn’t already faced funding shortfalls totalling $200 million over the past four years, which have meant cutting over 2,000 staff who served existing programs. The other worry for TDSB trustees, is that the province tends to make funding changes that cause the anticipated shortfall to grow during the school year. So the anticipated $30 million shortfall for next year could easily hit $50 million when the provincial government releases its budget in March 2014.
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Degrees of Uncertainty: Navigating the Changing Terrain of University Finance Erika Shaker and David Macdonald with Nigel Wodrich Some provincial governments are taking notice of and responding to growing public concern over student debt loads, economic and employ¬ment uncertainty, and the long-term ramifications being felt by students and their families. These responses have not resulted in across-the-board fee reductions; prov¬incial governments have largely preferred to go the route of directed assistance measures, either before (two-tiered fee structures or nearly-universal target¬ed grants or bursaries) or after-the-fact (tax credits, debt caps and loans forgiveness) directed at in-province students as part of a retention strategy, and to mitigate the poor optics of kids being priced out of their local universities. While this does impact in-province affordability, it undermines any com¬mitment to universality because it creates a situation where the only students who leave the province to pursue a degree are the ones who can afford to.
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Leaving Children out in the Cold
Kate McInturff Apparently people get all subjective when they talk about children. Thank goodness we have economists. Not those crazy “social welfare” people who are “lobbying the state for more resources for families with children.” Real economists. With real facts. Economists like Christopher Sarlo, from the Fraser Institute, who published a real report (The Cost of Raising Children) on the real cost of raising children in Canada. So let’s talk economics shall we? Let’s talk cost. Let’s talk cash changing hands. Because the primary critique that this report makes of other (higher) estimates of the cost of raising children is that these other reports measure how much parents SPEND, not the absolute COST of meeting a child’s essential needs. The report’s point is that, as parents, we spend money on all kinds of things that aren’t really needed (bigger houses, expensive vacations to Disneyworld). Fair enough. So what are the basic needs of a child and what is the market value of the goods and services required to meet those needs?
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Re-thinking School Councils People for Education Annual Report 2013 This year marks the fifth anniversary of the school council survey. When we look at the data collected over the past five years, what stands out is the remarkable consistency in many of the findings. School councils appear to have defined a clear role for themselves—communication with the broader parent community—even though that role is not explicitly mentioned in Regulation 612,1 the regulation governing school councils. The results also show that school councils continue to struggle with the same challenges year over year. Once again this year, the most frequent comments were about getting more parents involved, particularly at the high school level. Several mentioned that school council participation is decreasing, and for the first time, there were comments from principals saying that they were filling out the survey because there was no active school council. Also for the first time this year, we had many comments that the chair is new to the position and is struggling to learn the ropes.
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The Schools Chicago Students Deserve Chicago Teachers Union Every student in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) deserves to have the same quality education as the children of the wealthy. This can happen, but only if decision-makers commit to providing research-based education that is fully-funded and staffed in an equitable fashion throughout the city.CPS students have suffered from years of experimentation: schools have been closed, turned around, consolidated, broken into small schools and put back together again. Curricula have been unified, redesigned, and reformed. CPS has continuously modified procedures for attendance, lesson planning, Individual Education Plans (IEPs), testing, and grading, causing hours of extra work for teachers with no discernible benefit to students. Economically disadvantaged African American and Latino students have suffered disproportionately from this experimentation. Our children deserve better! Our students deserve smaller class sizes, a robust, well-rounded curriculum, and in-school services that address their social, emotional, intellectual and health needs. All students deserve culturally-sensitive, non-biased, and equitable education, especially students with IEPs, emergent bilingual students, and early childhood students. They deserve professional teachers who are treated as such, fully resourced school buildings, and a school system that partners with parents.
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What We Believe All Wisconsin’s Children Deserve Wisconsin Coalition for Children The Wisconsin Coalition for Children is a network of organizations that represents a variety of people throughout the state. We are parents and grandparents, educators and school board members, members of religious organizations and civicgroups, retired people and students. We believe that education is a public responsibility and that a strong public education system is the foundation of both our democracy and an economy that works well for all. We also believe our state has a responsibility to provide resources necessary to ensure that every child is given the opportunity to learn in school and succeed in life.
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Beyond the Economic Crisis: The Crisis In Trade Unionism Sam Gindin There was a time when that narrow solidarity of unions didn't hinder unions all that much; they made gains and those gains even spread to other workers and the community. But that era is over. The notion that workers can survive and defend past achievements, let alone make new gains, through just looking after their own with no larger understanding of the common attacks all workers face and their mutual dependence on the rest of the working-class, is now daily exposed. Absent a class perspective unions can today neither defend their members nor come to grips with how to renew themselves. Organizing In the Time of Crisis Let's start with organizing. Only a broader sense of building the class will lead to the commitment of resources and energy to unionize in the present hostile climate. Moreover, making breakthroughs in the new sectors where the majority of workers are now employed is unlikely to occur without cooperation across unions. The present competition for union dues dollars blocks such cooperation and ends up undermining each union. It too can only come from recognizing that the issue isn't the growth of any particular institution – Canadian Auto Workers, United Steel Workers, Canadian Union of Public Employees or Ontario Public Service Employees Union – but rather that of building the entire working-class as a social force. And it is only when we start with a class perspective that other creative approaches, like bringing individual workers into a union culture whether or not they have a bargaining unit, are placed on the agenda and might have a chance to succeed.
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Why unions need to join the climate fight Naomi Klein … I want to offer you what I believe to be the most powerful counter-narrative to that brutal logic that we have ever had. Here it is: our current economic model is not only waging war on workers, on communities, on public services and social safety nets. It's waging war on the life support systems of the planet itself. The conditions for life on earth. Climate change. It's not an "issue" for you to add to the list of things to worry about it. It is a civilizational wake up call. A powerful message -- spoken in the language of fires, floods, storms and droughts -- telling us that we need an entirely new economic model, one based on justice and sustainability. It's telling us that when you take you must also give, that there are limits past which we cannot push, that our future health lies not in digging ever deeper holes but in digging deeper inside ourselves -- to understand how all our fates are interconnected. Oh, and one last thing. We need to make this transition, like, yesterday. Because our emissions are going in exactly the wrong direction and there's very little time left. … The case I want to make to you is that climate change -- when its full economic and moral implications are understood -- is the most powerful weapon progressives have ever had in the fight for equality and social justice.
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The Fossil Fuels War John Bellamy Foster The “bottom line” in an accounting ledger is one of capitalism’s most enduring metaphors. We are now facing an ecological bottom line—a planetary carbon budget together with planetary boundaries in general—that represents a more fundamental accounting. Without a thoroughgoing transformation of production and consumption, and also social consciousness and cultural forms, the world economy will continue to emit carbon dioxide on a business-as-usual basis, pushing us all the way to the redline of 2°C and beyond—to a world in which climate change is increasingly beyond our control. In Hansen’s words: “It is not an exaggeration to suggest, based on [the] best available scientific evidence, that burning all fossil fuels could result in the planet being not only ice-free but human-free.” Under these conditions what is needed is a decades-long ecological revolution, in which an emergent humanity will once again, as it has innumerable times before, reinvent itself , transforming its existing relations of production and the entire realm of social existence, in order to generate a restored metabolism with nature and a whole new world of substantive equality as the key to sustainable human development. This is the peculiar “challenge and burden of our historical time.”
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New Techniques Make Math Fun for All John Mighton I believe that a root cause of many children's troubles in math, as well as in other subjects, is the belief in natural academic hierarchies. As early as kindergarten, children start to compare themselves with their peers and to identify some as talented or “smart” in various subjects. A child who decides that she is not talented will often stop paying attention or making an effort to do well. This problem will likely compound itself more quickly in math than in other subjects because when you miss a step in math it is usually impossible to understand what comes next. The more a child fails, the more her negative view of her abilities is reinforced and the less efficiently the child learns. This belief in hierarchies causes greater differences between children in their success in math than do actual ability gaps. The fact that good instruction can dismantle hierarchies in math means that a child's current level of achievement need not dictate her long-term success in math.
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Teachers, Education Workers and the “War on Wages” Doug Little McGuinty and Duncan clearly drank the austerity-attack the public sector Kool Aid and in the process destroyed their own careers and legacy. The Liberals have been saved only by Kathleen Wynn’s concerns that this direction is destroying the party combined with Tim Hudak and the PCs full throated cries that they have no such reservations and would go to right wing policies that even caused Mike Harris to hesitate. Tom Walkom is the only mainstream journalist in the country that really grips the problem and picks up on the teacher piece. Tom realizes that the attack on teachers and education worker’s wages today puts pressure on steelworker’s wages before the week is out. The union solidarity plea that ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ is as true today as it was when it was written.
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Is it Time for One Big Union in Ontario Education? Doug Little When one scans their eyes across teacher and education unions in Canada, single unions for teachers at least, is the norm. BCTF, ATF, STF, MTS, .... and so on but then one hits Ontario and is met with an alphabet soup designed from the outset to weaken teachers’ unions and cast then into endless internecine warfare. Most teachers’ unions were formed in the early 1920’s. In the 1940’s, teachers’ unions, alongside the entire labour movement, were growing and strengthening at a very rapid rate. To top it off, the relationship between the CCF (forerunner of the NDP) and the teachers’ unions was becoming very tight. The CCF topped the opinion polls in 1943 and formed the official opposition in 1945 in Ontario. In 1942 a Tory leader who needed a seat in parliament, Arthur Meighen ran in a by-election in South York (similar to York South-Weston today) and lost to CCF-OSSTF English teacher Joe Noseworthy.
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Challenging Class Bias Terezia Zoric Taboos about class and the myth of a classless society: Many of us have learned early in life not to disclose the facts or details of our class identities. This silence powerfully maintains the invisibility of class. Not talking about class supports the dominant mythology that we live in a classless society, or at least one in which class does not matter very much because we are all able to move up in class if we work hard enough. The work ethic and the myth of a substantial class mobility: Canadians tend to assume that any person can earn enough income to own his or her own home and provide comfortably for his or her own family if he or she is smart enough or works hard enough. The fact that most of us can point to at least one example where someone has jumped classes reinforces the myth of class mobility and the assumption that those who don’t move up the class ladder lack a strong work ethic. While it is true that there is some class fluidity in Canada, the reality is that class is much less fluid than most people think. Many studies have linked the post-secondary enrolments and economic status of subjects very strongly to their parents’ education and occupations. One study showed that one’s father’s occupation is the best predictor of one’s own income level—more important than intelligence, level of education, or years in thework force. Over the past 15 years, Canadian government policies have rewarded asset holders at the expense of income earners, making it more difficult than ever for working people to move up the economic ladder.
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Learning Labour: Ideas for Secondary Schools Ontario Federation of Labour Although secondary school is often viewed as preparation for the world of work, the current curriculum allows few opportunities for students to examine the workplace critically. This guide provides an opportunity for teachers to deliver lessons that allow students to question existing workplace practices and formulate their own ideas surrounding work. Through an understanding of the history of workplace struggle, the role that unions have played in changing the workplace, and the rights and responsibilities granted to workers by law, students are given the tools to challenge undesirable workplace practices. This resource guide was designed primarily to act as a supplement for teaching Career Studies and Cooperative education. However, many of the lessons can be adapted to match the curriculum for other subjects. For example, labour history lessons could be used in the History, Economics, and Business Studies classroom. The lessons on workers’ rights could be used in a Law classroom. The unit on globalization could introduce labour’s perspective on the topic into a Geography class. Even the English classroom could benefit from some of the lessons on labour history when studying depression era novels like the Grapes of Wrath. A Music or Society class could analyze union songs.
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Violence, USA Henry Giroux It is necessary to recognize that acts of extreme violence and cruelty do not represent merely an odd or marginal and private retreat into barbarism. On the contrary, warlike values and the social mindset they legitimate have become the primary currency of a market-driven culture that takes as its model a Darwinian shark tank in which only the strongest survive. In a neoliberal order in which vengeance and revenge seem to be the most cherished values in a “social order organized around the brute necessity of survival,” violence becomes both a legitimate mediating force and one of the few remaining sources of pleasure. At work in the new hyper-social Darwinism is a view of the Other as the enemy, an all-too-quick willingness in the name of war to embrace the dehumanization of the Other, and an all-too-easy acceptance of violence, however extreme, as routine and normalized. As many theorists have observed, the production of extreme violence in its various incarnations is now a source of profit for Hollywood moguls, mainstream news, popular culture, the corporate-controlled entertainment industry, and a major market for the defense industries. This pedagogy of brutalizing hardness and dehumanization is also produced and circulated in schools, boot camps, prisons, and a host of other sites that now trade in violence and punishment for commercial purposes, or for the purpose of containing populations that are viewed as synonymous with public disorder. The mall, juvenile detention facilities, many public housing projects, privately owned apartment buildings, and gated communities all embody a model of a dysfunctional sociality and have come to resemble proto-military spaces in which the culture of violence and punishment becomes the primary order of politics, fodder for entertainment, and an organizing principle for society. All of these spaces and institutions, from malls to housing projects to schools, are beginning to resemble war zones that impose needless frameworks of punishment. This is evident not only in New York City’s infamous stop-and-frisk policy, but also in shopping malls that now impose weekend teen curfews, hire more security guards, employ high-tech surveillance tools, and closely police the behavior of young people. Similarly, housing projects have become militarized security zones meting out harsh punishments for drug offenders and serve as battlegrounds for the police and young people.
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The Arts in Ontario Schools People for Education Rich curriculum, variable delivery Ontario has detailed and compulsory curriculum for visual arts, drama, dance and music in elementary school, but not all teachers are equally comfortable teaching every aspect of the curriculum. For example, the music curriculum requires that teachers teach students musical notation and how to compose music. Only a minority of schools has a specialist music teacher, and most of them are part-time. In 2013, in elementary schools:
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Child Care at the Margins Martha Friendly The last year or two has seen a surfeit of media stories across Canada about unregulated (or unlicensed) child care —that is, no public oversight at all—in which children died, were injured, or otherwise put at risk. Ontario has a long history of reportage of these incidents. These have usually begun with a flurry of media activity followed by an inquiry or inquest (less often a trial) but by-and-large, by the time these are concluded, media and public interest has pretty much faded away—until the next tragedy. Successive inquiries and inquests going back to the 1980s4 in Ontario have issued recommendations about strengthening public oversight or improving access to regulated child care but the responses of the provincial government officials who are responsible have been tepid at best. For example, the Toronto Star reported that—in response to the 2011 death of two-year-old Duy-An Nguyen—the minister responsible (at the time) asserted that “the onus of ensuring good practices are in place belongs to the parents”. 4See http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/episodes/2013/02/inquest-recommendations.html
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Protecting Kids from Commercial Advertising
in TDSB Schools
Anne Borden The Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools (CCFS) continues to advocate for better control of advertising in Toronto public schools. In the summer, the AFAC Committee of the TDSB reviewed and debated a new policy to guide corporate advertising in schools. It decided to delay a decision and formed a Trustee Seminar (of interested Trustees) to do research and consult with staff on the issue. We are hoping for a decision this Fall. Throughout the period of June to the present, CCFS has been consulting with the TDSB, with the view that better oversight is needed and advertising should have more clear and stronger limits to protect kids. Two of our members were on the policy review committee that has made recommendations. We are in regular contact with Trustees and staff about the policy, and will continue to be actively involved before it is voted on.
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