JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

The recent record of teachers’ high absenteeism, including many 3-day weekends, demonstrates serious irresponsibility.

The generous terms of their employment – high salaries, big pensions, generous benefits, 6-hour days, and 8-month years – aren’t enough for them.

And when a teacher is absent for no good reason, the public is required to pay two salaries each day.

During labor negotiations we always hear the teachers’ special-interest plea about kids’ education needs, but teachers behaving this way really care about kids, don’t they? Or for that matter, care about anyone else?

Of course, the real problem is, and always has been, that teachers pretty much answer to no one once they are hired into a school.

And the problem is made worse by the fact that the entire system – from principals and superintendents to directors – is run by teachers, actually teachers who’ve left the class room and don’t want to teach any more.

And what is the genuine competence of the average teacher with his or her general BA and a few months at an academically-meaningless teachers’ college? Not much.

If the public doesn’t demand more for public education, we’ll never get it. Remember – setting aside former-Premier McGuinty’s years of empty rhetoric – Ontario in no way stands out in the world of education.

And now we have another premier, a former teacher as it happens, who will give and give and demand nothing in return – a formula for labor peace and political advantage but having nothing to do with genuine education.

We need an entirely new way of hiring and training teachers if we are to have reform.

Any motivated university graduate with an academic major or at least two minors or any motivated middle-aged professional should be able to spend two years in the class room as a substitute under supervision.

Eliminate the academically-meaningless teachers’ colleges.

And forget the overblown and inaccurate notion of teaching as a profession.

It is not, it is an avocation, an art, a skill, and sadly not enough of our current teachers, despite the formal qualification of teachers’ college, possess it.

And you must have something you know thoroughly – music, math, English – in order to teach effectively, which is not the case for so many general BAs. Indeed teachers’ colleges promote the fatuous notion of teachers as some kind of vaguely-defined facilitators who needn’t be expert in the subjects they teach.

Making teachers’ college a 2-year proposition – as our McGuintyesque Premier Wynne has done – is a guaranteed waste of resources and no route to improving education.

And we badly need real management of our schools – people who understand the effective management of human and physical resources – not the money-wasting system of boards and principles we have now.
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From a reader:
“Those who can, TEACH. Those who can’t, CRITICIZE. (I’m neither a teacher nor a critic of teachers.)”

You’ve got the quote wrong, and your error is revealing.

Shaw said:

“Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”

A criticism of teachers from a wry, inveterate critic.

A world without serious critics would be an impoverished one indeed.

Some of the greats included Shaw, Voltaire, Johnson, Orwell, and Swift.

People like this writer want the same tired band to march in the same tired parade, playing the same tired tunes.

So, according to this writer, we don’t want critics, but hacks like the last director of TDSB are okay? He managed to weasel through a system which has no effective protections and no competent management. Indeed that fact is the most important lesson that should have been learned by those shameful events.

The “managers” at TDSB clearly never checked into his background. I am aware that he was a failure in Hamilton and, most importantly, a very big and wasteful spender, but none of Toronto’s “experts” were aware of the facts nor did they recognize serial plagiarism when they saw it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

Government pretty much is incapable of correcting the serious problems of our public schools.

Only a dedicated, tough, and highly intelligent premier – an Obama type – could make anything real happen, and I sure do not see any prospect of such a politician coming to power.

The right wing tried reform and utterly failed: Mike Harris and the boys made a series of totally ineffectual changes, including that bad joke we call the literacy test, something McGuinty has kept only because it is a useful political tool manufacturing statistics that seem to show progress.

McGuinty has done nothing but literally throw money at the teachers’ union to buy peace for his government while we pay the bills. He has asked and received nothing in return, and he is too weak a character to demand anything real.

The teachers’ union is responsible for the extremely high cost of running our schools, costs which mean there are few resources for improved facilities and expanded services.

Just one tiny example of many I could cite: substitute teachers in Ontario are paid the same rates as regular teachers, a totally excessive and unnecessary cost. Further our teachers in many places are entitled to nearly a month of sick days – this on a 9-month work year – and it is a common attitude to routinely take them, leaving taxpayers paying two salaries for one poorly-taught classroom.

Even McGuinty’s weak minister has commented on the huge costs of sick days in Ontario.

The only way to improve public schools is to make teachers accountable. Accountability is a basic principle we accept in almost all our institutions except public education.

We have some wonderful, dedicated teachers, but we have a great many poor, unmotivated, even unintelligent ones, and the entire structure of administration in education, from vice-principals to superintendents, pretty well comes from these ranks.

Most have never had serious management experience, and most have no concept of accountability. That is why we have a mess.

The kindergarten/day care proposal is a sound one – the first meaningful thing McGuinty has come up with for education, but it won’t happen. The teachers’ union is already attacking it, and if it gets its way, the program will be costly and ineffectual.