JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Chris Spence has always been pretty much an empty public relations machine.

His record in his previous job showed no worthy academic achievement.

He actually established a reputation for running around the city, with a photographer constantly in tow, doing photo-ops with big grins and arms around groups of boys.

Those were his only grins because he also had a reputation of avoiding eye contact with staff, displaying a contact-avoidance type of personality.

There was also talk about his quiet spending of rather large amounts for projects which appeared of little educational value.

So it was surprising at first when Toronto hired him.

But then the Toronto Board has a national reputation for being dysfunctional, so, on second thought, the appointment seemed somehow fitting.

Of course, he was appointed as a symbol for black children failing in the school system, but symbols do not change serious situations like that.

Hard work and intelligence and management skills are what is called for, but the School Board deals only in appearances and slogans and politics, never in the roll-up-your-sleeves kind of work for change of any kind.

Now we have the clearest possible case of plagiarism screaming at us.

The plagiarism is especially embarrassing because it was so completely avoidable.

I’m confident there are staff at the Board who can write, or at least research and sketch out, speeches and pop essays, a common practice in all large organizations.

But Mr. Spence insisted on doing things himself for a forum almost guaranteed to reveal his plagiarism.

What can you say?

And a campaign against plagiarism, rightly, has become a major one in our schools.

I cannot see how the TDSB, if it has any integrity remaining, can fail to ask for his resignation.

After all, if being a football-player director is about symbolism for some students, what are we to say of a public-plagiarist director as a symbol for all students?

And, as I write this, I hear on CBC Radio that researchers now scouring his past writings have said there are indications of other plagiarism.

In the end, the most important lesson in this is how totally inept our school boards are in having charge of children’s education. They are a force only for mediocrity and should be abolished.

[Note: Chris Spence resigned later the same day.]

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Portables are not an answer, especially for young children in kindergarten.

What is well known in public education circles is that Toronto has long held on to an inordinate number of tiny, poor-quality neighborhood schools.

What a well-functioning Board would do is to build a series of larger, well-equipped schools and close all of the tiny ones.

The underlying economies have changed hugely from 80 years ago, but Toronto’s pathetic Board doesn’t seem to understand.

For the most part today, when you want hardware, you go to a big box store loaded with everything you can imagine, not a narrow little place that likely won’t have what you need half the time.

And the economic forces are no different for schools.

An old neighborhood school of maybe 200 students can only offer a mediocre education today, the costs per capita being too great to be able to offer a rich program.

In a larger school, serving a larger area, you can have music, art, a library, and some specialist teachers in subjects like math.

Right now, TDSB is offering an utterly inferior education to many young people, one not competitive with world standards, owing just to this economy of scale factor, not to mention poor standards and unprepared teachers.

If there were any management at TDSB, I wouldn’t have to point this obvious fact out.

But there isn’t any: just a not-especially-bright ex-football player, a bunch of timid ex-teacher superintendents, and a political Board whose only aim is getting re-elected and making no waves.

Our kids are being robbed in the elementary grades especially when all the foundations are laid for future success.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

What do you expect when you hire an ex-football player to run a school board?

The Director had a record of absolutely no genuine achievement at the Hamilton Board from which he was hired.

In addition, he has always been a rather pathetic publicity hound, running around to schools and meetings with a cameraman in tow to record all the put-on smiles.

He was also known as a guy who couldn’t look you directly in the eye.

His international travel was self-promoting and costly, some of it done quite surreptitiously, serving again no purpose but his own advancement.

The Toronto Board was long dysfunctional when they took him on, hoping against hope to get some results with disadvantaged kids or at least to gain a long breathing space as people patiently wait for something new or good to happen at the Board.

But that hope is delusional.

Starting an Afro-centric high school with six students?

Hiring your close relative as a school principal?

Failing to deal with any of the problems which are endemic to this Board?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

It is indeed a stupid idea.

The fact is that it has already been tried in other places. It simply does not work.

In Chicago, most of the poorly performing schools in black neighborhoods were years ago renamed into various academies.

Sometimes one academy changes into another academy when the poor performance catches up with them.

Toronto’s new Director of education, Chris Spence, spent his last several years in Hamilton as Director. The sum total of his real achievements is zero.

Everywhere the man ever went, a retinue of cameras followed him to produce shots like the one you have leading this story.

When the cameras were turned off, so was the Director, typically rushing out to the next place.

Football players with education degrees just won’t do it. Indeed, it is time to get genuine management and analytical ability heading our schools. Education degrees are just academic fluff.

You’ll only get the best ideas in education from the best people, something our public schools fail to understand.

And that goes for the quality of teachers too. There are far too many who should never have been given a classroom. Get some people with real skills in computers and science and music in the classrooms, even if they do not have education degrees.

A name change, a photo op, and some rah-rah change nothing.

_______________________

The grand thing about schemes like Chris Spence’s is that by the time everyone discovers what a waste of time and money it has all been, he’ll be off somewhere on a gold-plated pension.

Truly, a professional mediocre bureaucrat’s dream, and it’s the kind of thing that keeps getting repeated over and over again in public education, which I am sad to say sometimes resembles a giant Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme rather than a serious institution.

A new fad every decade at least. All of them flops. New silly lingo. New pretensions. New nonsense.

Meanwhile, absolutely nothing real is done about the quality of kids’ education.

Truly nothing.

And nothing will until the management of education is taken out of the hands of teachers and ex-teachers with fluff education degrees and fluff ideas.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Sorry, but this is a hopeless, go-nowhere idea.

First, Chris Spence, who is a very pleasant man but a truly ineffectual executive, displayed his obsession with boys’ performance – there’s no other word for it than an obsession – for all his years in Hamilton, where his genuine academic achievements were almost non-existent.

Second, every failed school in Chicago – where I grew up and attended a variety of terrible and excellent schools depending on the neighborhood we lived in – was long ago renamed an “academy.” It’s a meaningless gesture, and the schools that were failing are still failing.

Third, this amounts to a back-door approach to the even more meaningless afro-centric school idea. To a great extent, the boys with which this is a concern – that is those dropping out in large numbers – are black Canadians. Something more than a form of segregation is required.

The real problems of these boys could be handled in the existing system, were the School Board to show any genuine thinking or imagination.

Serious research shows that putting failing boys on a treadmill for a vigorous effort in the morning yields maybe three hours of much improved docility and learning. Hyper-active black American boys who could not read actually were able to learn to read doing this.

Something along these lines is one of the real solutions to the problems of failing boys.

Another approach to the same problem would be a soccer league that would see boys spending a little time every morning in a demanding practice.

These approaches must of course also be combined with efficient teaching, using only teachers who have some insight into these problems. A good many of our existing teachers simply would not qualify.