Vancouver independent school aims to rectify that The biggest challenge facing Canada right now is not inflation or spendthrift governments, serious though those are. It is not even climate change and environmental issues. What is holding Canada and many other countries back right now is a stifling lack of appropriately trained human resources. Lack of…
The province needs to begin ensuring students are graduating ready for citizenship and the workforce It’s everyone’s favourite time of year in Alberta: not only was there a recent provincial budget, but we’re also just three months out from the spring election. So naturally, keyboards are clacking away in corporate boardrooms and C-suites across the…
Ford should follow BC’s example if the union continues to refuse to accept a reasonable offer Ontario taxpayers need to know some important numbers as CUPE squares off with the government over wages. Their province is facing a fiscal reckoning. Their province is $469 billion in debt. Their province is the most-indebted sub-national government in…
School trustees must approve budgets, hire key personnel, determine policy priorities, and ensure proper transportation for students
Manitoba trustee elections take place later this month. While some candidates have already been acclaimed, voters in other parts of the province have quite a few candidates to choose from. We should not take this election for granted. At this time last year, it looked like there wouldn’t be any trustee elections at all. However,…
Tying funding to parental choices generates strong incentives for schools to provide higher-quality customization
When Canadian schools suffer from poor track records and students fall behind, provincial governments always favour the same response: throw more money at the problem. New crises prompt political actors to request further rounds of new investments, reinvestments, refinancing, and improved financing — the slogans change, but the strategy is always to try to secure…
Students learn best when immersed in a content-rich learning environment that builds up their background knowledge
Instead of making students memorize a bunch of useless facts, we need to help them think like scientists and historians. Does this make sense to you? It probably does if you’re a curriculum consultant or an education professor. After all, that’s what’s being pushed in faculties of education. The problem is that this approach is…
The primary job of the principal is to improve the results of a single school, not a district
Nearly two years ago, Quebec’s ministry of education reorganized the management of the province’s elementary and secondary schools to enable each school’s principal, staff, and parents to take over the operation of the school. The external political school board no longer exists. In a sense, the Quebec system now looks very much like the management…
Should in-person learning be an essential service? Can parents and guardians be included in decisions?
Sometimes it takes a crisis to make things clear. Consider the last two years of rolling pandemic school closures. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Ontario’s government education systems largely failed to serve more than two million students well. Calls for wholesale reform to Ontario education have begun and include revamping all kindergarten-to-Grade-12 curricula and a…
Ontario's single public school system will never adequately meet the needs of all of its families
Recent controversy over the provincial government’s provision of rapid tests to independent (private) schools but not public schools stems from the fact that independent schools in Ontario exist in a policy no-man’s-land. If education policy throughout the pandemic has proved anything, it’s that the provincial government doesn’t have the framework to make adequate provisions for…
The public system, on the other hand, failed in its response to Covid-19
As Ontario’s public schools struggle to accommodate students in a new school year amid what could be a fourth wave of COVID-19, what can the provincial government learn from the last 17 months? For starters, the government needs to accept that huge, industrial-scale schools (typical in the public system) are pretty weak at responding to…