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

AN EXTENSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I am not a Conservative, but already it is apparent that Kathleen Wynne, the new Liberal leader, is a disaster as premier.

She has exactly Dalton McGuinty’s smarmy instincts and political ethics.

One of the only worthwhile things done in his decade as the most irresponsible and inept premier in memory was his reminding the teachers of the fact that they are employees of the public at a time of fiscal difficulty.

This woman has wiped out the effort entirely.

And just look at her other acts over so brief a time as premier.

The investigation she launched into the cancer-drug scandal was genuinely McGuintyesque, a way to delay and put-off while appearing to do something. Any good private investigator could have got to the bottom of the matter in 3 days.

Her recent initiative on wind farms represents virtually no change from McGuinty’s high-handed ways. In Britain, for example, the government is giving local municipalities a veto over them.

Wynne has done nothing of substance about McGuinty’s several scandals of mismanagement.

No changes at e-Health beyond McGuinty’s last appointment resigning and getting a Golden Handshake for solving nothing at the troubled agency.

No changes in our forgotten air-ambulance scandal.

Her recent change in teacher education requirements are leftover initiatives of McGuinty.

The cutting of places in education colleges was something which should have been done years ago. It’s just basic housekeeping never kept up with, not reform.

The new two-year requirement for graduates is backward. Many other jurisdictions have realized that “teachers’ colleges” are ineffective. Putting well-educated and motivated young people – or indeed, not-so-young – into class rooms is what we need. Learn-by-doing under, say, two years of mentoring by experienced teachers is the reform we need.

Teachers’ colleges are staffed by teachers who dropped out of the classroom, who promote unscientific, and even plainly silly, theories about how things are done, and who use language which calls a spade a manually-operated excavating machine. Any intelligent young person will learn how their skills best serve teaching during a couple of years practicing, not the 80 days now proposed for teachers’ colleges and certainly not the present standard of 40 days.

Hasn’t our government learned anything about education? The previous director of TDSB was hired by people who clearly did not know what they were doing. He was likely awarded his doctorate by an education faculty who also did not know what it was doing.

Ontario schools are by no measure outstanding. Our public education is a leader in nothing. We don’t even compare to the world’s most successful systems. The computer hasn’t yet been integrated with many teachers unable to use them and our schools not supplying them to all students, a longstanding practice in a number of jurisdictions.

But this government can tell young people if they just spend more time in education faculties and waste more resources, adding costs and debt, they’ll be able to do a better job. Nonsense.

If “found money” – money supposedly suddenly discovered in declining enrollments – went anywhere, except applied to the deficit where it genuinely belonged, it should have gone towards obtaining computers for our students, but then we still have many teachers who cannot use a computer. Many jurisdictions put lap-tops into each student’s hands, but not Ontario, bastion of teachers’ union interests and second-rate education.

I’m going to vote Conservative for the first time in my life at the next provincial election, and I’m not even attracted to the leader, Mr. Hudak. A decade of McGuinty was enough, and Wynne shows every promise of being even worse.

 

 

 

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 RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Most teachers have never lived in the real world spending their entire lives from age 5 to retirement in a classroom. They are the most pampered whining class of people in our society.”

Well said, indeed.

A pointed truth.

It is time for an Ontario Premier to show enough courage to take the teachers’ union on.

The courage to take a strike would re-establish the proper relationship of government and government employees.

A strike would not only be extremely helpful in this way, it would not last very long.

When the teachers realized that their next vacation in the South of France or Cancun, Mexico, was imperiled, or payments on the two fully-equipped SUVs wouldn’t be met, the strike would end.

We have no better example of a huge ship without anyone at the helm than Ontario’s public schools.

McGuinty has done nothing but throw money at teachers to buy votes, giving them, last time round, a generous multi-year increase when most of society, the people who pay the wages, was being sent into an economic tailspin.

The arrogance of teacher-spokespeople is simply breathtaking. Here is a job in which the bulk of practitioners have a general BA – often with not-stellar academic performance – plus a pretty meaningless certificate from an anti-intellectual teachers’ college.

The truth is that – except for specialists in science, math, and languages – most teachers could be replaced almost instantly by people without the certificates, and if we included retired experts and highly-motivated people only, we would see a startling improvement in our kids’ schools.

In economics we would say that the next best opportunity for the bulk of them is as clerks and salespeople at wages a fraction of what they receive and with no gold-plated pension and no working effectively 8 months a year.

We need a sense of reality here, as society is facing great waves of turmoil and insecurity from the world economic situation.

And the harsh truth is Ontario schools on average are not terribly competitive in the world.

McGuinty’s past giveaways have achieved not much beyond enriching and indulging the teachers.

All the tests by which we supposedly measure improvements are poorly conceived and in the control of teachers to tweak and adjust and mark.

They are not objective, and they are completely unsatisfactory measures of performance.

The very measure of the teachers’ poor attitudes is precisely this almost insignificant sacrifice McGuinty is asking. It does barely begins to change the many things needing change, yet they whine and reject like the worst students in their classes.
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“Wow, continue to be astounded by the depth of teacher hatred in the general population.

“To be fair, teachers are very well compensated for their work, not sure they are over compensated, though.

“Summers off? Well, maybe they should be in PD training or refresher courses for 4 or 5 weeks in July or August.

“Pensions? Yes, but they do contribute about 10% of their pay to their pension, or, looking at it another way, they pay half their pension contributions. Their pensions are not paid by the government, but through the pension board, which invests their money. Done a pretty good job of investing so far, it looks like.

“Teachers’ unions? The Charter guarantees freedom of association. it is right under the Charter to form a federation and have that body negotiate on their behalf. It’s all legal.

“So, it’s a good job, if you like doing it.

“Don’t know anybody in it for the money, though.”

Hatred of teachers?

That is simply wrong.

Rather, it is hatred of abuse and arrogance and hypocrisy and the fact that teachers do not clearly perceive those demonstrated qualities are major parts of the problem.

To assume that it is hatred of teachers reveals the same warped perspective that generates this entire issue.

Refresher courses in what?

The courses now offered by their administration for advancing them on the pay-scale are appalling in their content. They run from childish to anti-intellectual with surprisingly little hard new information and demand for learning, and the reason for that is simple: they would be flunking hundreds of teachers regularly otherwise and still sending them back to their jobs – an impossible bind.

They pay half their pensions? That’s not an accurate way to measure it, but even if it were, what a deal, double your money, guaranteed. Try getting that deal anywhere.

Teachers’ unions are indeed the exercise of a right, but all rights can be abused and have limits, even freedom of speech.

The key point you ignore is that the teachers’ union, rather than genuinely trying to improve education and conditions, consistently works to extract more money by the threat over all parents’ heads of striking. And while they work to fleece the public, they use weasel words which fool absolutely no one but themselves. They also consistently defend the indefensible, poor and even ignorant teachers.

That last line of yours is very telling.

You either do not know anything about the people with whom you work or your head is in cloudcuckooland.

It is easy to spot teachers whose only drive is their own career and pay advancement. Loads of them.

And when your next best employment is a store clerk – true, I’m sorry, for many of them – the money counts hugely.

They, and you, only pretend it doesn’t.
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“Think about teachers the next time your child is in a play at school, taking part in a Christmas concert, going on a special field trip, being part of a sports team, being a member of a school band or participating in a talent night. I am not looking for accolades but the harsh words and misleading comments are hurtful. I think you should all homeschool your children since we as teachers are all so stupid and wouldn’t be able to get a job in the real world.”

Sorry, but that is a perfect example of the special pleading that make so many despair at teachers’ lack of understanding on these issues.

If you do those things, it is only what parents expect in return for your handsome remuneration.

You don’t seem aware at all that anyone who takes pride in their work anywhere does equivalent things.

It actually is a bit stunning that you don’t realize that your preconceptions and special pleadings are strong evidence of the cloudcuckooland that so many teachers reside in.

The hard truth is many, many teachers never do more than they absolutely have to. I’ve seen them, and I’ve heard their smirky remarks.

They are ready to go home at 3 PM, and they do. You can see them by the score doing so.

You say you are not looking for accolades, but the drift of your comment is precisely to seek accolades, not just for yourself but all teachers.

But all teachers do not deserve accolades any more than all auto mechanics or all cooks. Many just barely function in their jobs, others are getting away with murder, and the public is well aware of those things, yet we have to read the special pleadings and the whining about the least change in work conditions.

If you had any exposure to the lower middle-management world of private industry, you’d know that overtime and evening or weekend work are completely the norm.

Expected by management, but earning no special remuneration or, often, no special praise.

And the salary and benefits of an Ontario elementary teacher, one up in the pay scale, are quite comparable to that hardworking class in private industry (In excess of $80,000 per year plus immensely rich benefits).

And people in private industry start with two weeks of vacation, maybe building up to 3 or 4 after some years.

And if they regularly took another 20 or so days off as sick days (sick days whose cost is literally double given the need for substitutes) – as many Ontario teachers do – their careers would likely come to an end.

They won’t get your pension either.

Your last thought is both ridiculous and offensive.

People should teach their own kids just because they have criticisms of how things are in the schools and how teachers present themselves in public?

It’s a childish and petulant statement.

And, sorry, but just plain ignorant.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY LYSIANE GAGNON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Our new culture of compulsive communication”

I like the expression even though it is highly inaccurate.

Tweeting is not our culture.

It represents the habit of a portion of our population, and I’m not sure that it qualifies even as a “culture” for them.

Likely they represent the same portion that has always had a compulsive problem with communication.

Young folks used to talk for hours on land-line phones, generally about nothing of any import.

The expression “verbal diarrhea” is quite old: I remember it in a university psychology course in the early 1960s.

Sadly, too many of our columnists and radio hosts suffer with a form of the same complaint: they write about trivia and passing fads and elevate them into the substance of “culture.”

Apart from Ms. Gagnon and, of course, Margaret Wente, much of our new Radio One CBC is of just this nature.
_______________________________________________

“My younger colleagues used Wikipedia as a source for everything, were unwilling to spend time reading the texts or accessing the libraries, and I spent hours editing our written projects. The ability to write a concise, grammatically correct sentence (let alone a paragraph) seemed to be beyond the other contributors…”

I recognize the problem the writer describes, but it, in fact, has little or nothing to do with technology.

The truth is that technology is, in general, not yet in our schools, at least in any meaningful way.

We are badly behind by world standards.

It is simply amazing how many teachers do not know how to use a computer or know about good data sources on the Internet.

The problem you describe has several actual causes.

First, social promotion now sees people quickly rising to the levels of incompetence in schools.

High school grades have become a poor indicator of ability or performance.

Second, our colleges and universities are taking in students who simply should not even be in those institutions.

The institutions do this for purely monetary purposes, as when Ontario’s schools of education graduate 12,000 each year and only 7,000 get jobs (I even doubt that number).

Teachers at all levels are frequently lazy and indifferent. That’s the main explanation for “group work” despite all the blather about team work.

They only have to mark a third or quarter of the number of projects.

What you find often in assigned groups is one or two who work conscientiously and the others “ride their coat tails.”

So far as the ability to write, no demands are made by many teachers in Ontario.

The so-called literacy test is a pathetic little game, and the game allows teachers to avoid being tougher in classes about writing skills, as they once were.

Many teachers’ ability even to explain to students principles of research – such as confirming a source with another source – are often non-existent, as you see with Wikipedia (a good source but one that requires other source confirmation).

Many of our current teachers are themselves the products of this poor system, and they enter the system only to further degrade it.

It’s a sad situation, and we are wasting huge costs to no advance of education.

Your comment also confuses – as does the columnist’s piece – what really is technology.

Yes, Tweeting involves the use of a technology, but then so does answering the telephone or the doorbell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

I support the idea.

However, the main problem with bullying has always been teachers and administrators who do not pay attention to what’s happening under their noses and are reluctant to step in when they do see something.

Schools are communities, and the authorities of the communities are the adults. Children look to them for safety, but in so many cases today they look in vain.

The anti-bully programs with slogans and videos and t-shirts we have today are little more than a way for administrators to cover their behinds. Window dressing.

Maybe the legislation will change the situation somewhat.

Of course, there are more than a few teachers who themselves are bullies, but you just try getting anything done about them. Impossible.

I do hope the generally spineless McGuinty sticks to this, but in view of past efforts, I’m not hopeful.

We had zero-tolerance on violence – a good thing for the safety of the entire school community – but as soon as one ethnic group found its students in trouble more than others, the policy was dropped like a hot potato.

Yelling prejudice about stats is a pretty sad way to destroy a good policy.
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“Bullies learn from their closest role models – their parents.”

I don’t think that is accurate.

First, every serious study ever done shows clearly children’s closest role models are their playmates and peers.

Parents, despite their many hopes and pretensions, have remarkably little influence outside of supplying the necessities of life and a relatively safe place.

I’m sure the parents play a role, but I’m convinced that role is largely through genetic endowment.

Time after time, we find the parents, or at least one parent, of bullies are themselves bullies.

That fact has a lot to do with the school authorities being so reluctant and irresponsible in taking a bully child on: the results will be a confrontation with bully parents, and in our education system today, parents who make lots of noise are paid attention to.

We must remember that all the principals and superintendents and others administering public education are themselves teachers – many of them teachers who just wanted to get out of the classroom and all of them people who never rocked the boat.

It is a perfectly closed system, guaranteed to produce the results we see.

So while expectations of parents are important, expectations of the very teachers who are in the schoolyards, halls, gyms, and classrooms have to become a whole lot higher with regard to tolerating abuse.

Holding parents legally responsible is just passing the buck, and almost certainly leads to further abuse at home by bully parents – not a solution helpful to society.

We must provide mechanisms to support, and indeed demand, the removal of genuine bullies from the regular schools. I say genuine bullies because just about all children sometimes tease or call names, something which must be corrected by authorities but equally something that does not identify a genuine bully.

A real bully is someone who enjoys inflicting discomfort on others – doing so is a basic part of his or her personality. It likely is a mild form of sadism or psychopathy, or, in some cases, not so mild.

When such people are identified, they really need to be removed from the general school population, and we must provide special, tougher disciplined schools suitable for them.

None of this removes the basic responsibility from teachers and administrators. They must correct all the children just indulging in the taunts and teasing most children engage in at some stage, and they must identify the genuine hard cases which need to be removed from the general population.

Anything less solves nothing. McGuinty’s ridiculous 1-800 number to report bullying is a costly administrative nightmare, useful to no one. It is just a way to cover his behind. If the authorities inside a school are already ignoring their responsibilities, what is the use of a report form from an anonymous telephone call center in Bangalore India, or indeed anywhere else?

Absolutely nothing. It’s just busy-work to defuse a problem.

So unless you are prepared to support genuine reform, holding school authorities responsible for what happens under their noses and giving them the authority to act, this problem will continue forever, only becoming larger with a growing population.
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“I am a teacher and unfortunately, many of the teachers that I have worked with throughout my career have been bullies. We need to address bullying from the very top down–including administration, as many of them are bullies, too…”

Indeed.

We’ve all known them, bully teachers, but what is anyone to do about them?

A teacher pretty well has to be caught stealing or committing sexual abuse to be dismissed.

I can still remember the names of a couple of genuine bully teachers more than fifty years after experiencing them – a good measure of their bad effect.

Virtually all other inappropriate behavior, as well as downright incompetence, is tolerated and protected in our public schools much as pedophile priests have been protected by the Catholic Church for ages.

The teachers’ union protects the day-to-day creeps who do not reach such excesses as theft and sexual abuse, but still make many children miserable through their careers and teach them little worth teaching.

This issue of bullying is very interesting, opening as it does, the whole set of issues confronting public education.

Serious reform is one of our greatest needs in society.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Merit pay for teachers is a totally unworkable idea, and it is that for many reasons.

If you genuinely embrace the concept of merit pay – that is, better-than-average pay for excellent performance – you must, for logical and economic consistency, also embrace less-than-average pay for under-performing teachers.

Only in that way is there a genuine incentive for improved performance at all levels, and only in that way is there a genuine appraisal of performance at all levels.

Yet that part of the merit-pay idea is never discussed: we hear only about extra pay for superior performance. In effect, such a one-sided system would be bribery for favored teachers.

Extra pay for supposedly superior teachers is guaranteed under current arrangements to be nothing but a giveaway of billions to no genuine effect.

And try selling the idea of full-range merit pay to the teachers’ union, the same organization which works day and night protecting the jobs of incompetent teachers almost the way the Catholic Church has protected its abusive priests.

And which of our generally spineless politicians would show the courage and tenacity for a fight with that monopoly organization? Imagine Dalton McGuinty standing up the teachers, a man who has done nothing but shovel money at them to keep his political peace?

And what is average performance? The way our public education is organized, it would be impossible to establish because teachers, once they are hired permanently, are never assessed. There are no meaningful measurements or standards.

You cannot use only student performance because some teachers are assigned to schools where families are successful and expect performance, providing encouragement and resources, while some teachers are assigned to schools where families are broken or unsuccessful, sometimes barely feeding their children and having no high expectations.

You cannot use the official curriculum as a standard against which to measure because it is pretty much a poor pile of generalities and frantic efforts to appear comprehensive rather than a specific set of measurable requirements.

Further, there is no qualified, experienced body of people to do the assessing. Once Ontario did have such people, but the concept of regular assessment died decades ago.

Moreover, our entire public education system is essentially run by teachers – perhaps its greatest source of weakness. Principals are generally just teachers who wanted out of the classroom. Superintendents and directors are just teachers again who’ve piled up lots of puff education courses – and truly there are few other kind at our colleges of education where academic standards are low.

There is no perspective in any of these officials beyond a kind of generalized public-school teacher perspective, and that gets us nowhere.

One assumes that the whole idea of merit pay is to increase the effectiveness of our schools. The only way to do that is to compete with world standards of performance, and we don’t do that with our present system. It will take far more than merit pay.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

The shameful thing truly is that a study is needed to tell us this obvious truth.

The money and time spent on the study itself are reflections of the poor state of our public education.

Math, perhaps more so than any other subject, builds the next row of bricks on that previously laid.

I tutored kids in math, and I learned a good deal about the state of math education in Ontario.

It is terrible.

There is a ridiculously complex curriculum written in education jargon that many a math major would not understand.

The subject areas jump around far too much, proving in effect a large series of short stories rather than a novel with a good plot.

And the teachers use this stupid curriculum, their fear of not covering it all, to avoid doing what really needs doing.

I encountered a number of children in grade five who did not know their times tables, a topic that was part of grade two or three when I was young.

Those not knowing them – because the teachers do not take the considerable effort required to effectively teach them – are of course still passed.

So we end up with the most absurd situations – deliberately created – of children being introduced to things like elementary probability, which is work with fractions, when they do not know the times tables or division facts needed to work with fractions. Or try division problems with double-digit divisors without knowing the times tables.

Any reasonably bright person observing such nonsense knows we are in trouble and knows the education establishment in Ontario has failed our kids.

Good work, Dalton, handing them gobs of money and getting nothing in return but ease in your election.
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“…teach kids math using real life examples when young, cutting up pizza, dividing oranges, slicing cake…”

A totally inadequate and trivial notion, useful at the baby level, something already done by good teachers.

When it comes to multiplying or adding fractions, this notion is completely useless. Or try using wedges to teach double-digit division. Basic algebra? Solid geometry?

Not all math operations can be given easy-see demonstrations, yet they must be learned for the power of what they do.

But they can be taught by patient, methodical teachers, teachers who themselves understand what it is they are doing – something far too often not the case in our elementary schools.

Fundamental ideas like place value and what moving a decimal point left or right does must be absorbed thoroughly.

The real problem is the average poor quality of grade-school teachers and their often lack of any special knowledge. We have gym teachers teaching math sometimes or “teacher-librarians” expert at nothing handling various classes.

And, of course, going beneath that layer of the problem, we come to the fundamental one: a teachers’ union which often defends and effectively promotes incompetence.

Those people form the talent pool out of which virtually all the education officials up to the minister come from. The blind leading the blind.

We’ll only improve things by efforts like changing the way teachers are trained and taking recognized experts from outside of the public education establishment – as university professors recognized for their skill and expertise – to write curricula. All performance testing should also be handled this way.
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“I think the best way to improve education is to abolish faculties of education, thereby eliminating the affectations and pretensions that go with the limp masters and doctorates in the “discipline”. Most of what passes for higher education here is not worthy of the name, and, merely debases the coinage, as evidenced by the shoddy research that only occasionally appears before the public.”

Absolutely, spot on.

The best example of this I can think of is the new Director of Toronto Public Schools, a football player with a meaningless doctorate in education. Every time he opens his mouth, it is either to reveal how little he knows or to do a photo-op.

Hire people who know math to teach math, and just so every other fundamental subject.

We have a huge reservoir of talent out there in our retired professors, scientists, technicians of every kind, government specialists, astute businessmen.

Hire them on at least a part time basis with no need for vacuous degrees in education. Throw in local artists and musicians to enrich the schools.

Get rid of the deadwood, people who know nothing and have no enthusiasm.

We could improve our schools dramatically in a couple of years.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

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

The Lego matter is of virtually no consequence. Indeed, I know from my experience with young kids that Lego used for robots are a good learning, and artistic, material.

Where our government can’t say no, and on matters of severe consequence, is to the teachers’ union.

Going into a recession, Dalton the Magnificent gave the teachers a multi-year contract unlike what you’d find in any other business.

And for that small fortune in increases, he got nothing of meaning for education. Nothing.

And it’s not as though we don’t have needs.

Look at the staffing of the School Board in Toronto if you want to see fortunes squandered.

A Director who was a proven flop in Hamilton, yet pulls in a huge salary and benefits, coming up with trivial ideas instead of real management.

A Board so stuffed with political correctness that it can’t balance its own budgets.

Superintendents who are mostly flannel-mouthed former principals.

Flocks of “consultants” – teachers tired of the classroom and looking for a break – click-clacking around with notebook computers drawing down handsome salaries for sheer appearances.

And a herd of teachers who cannot even manage to teach the kids such basics as reading and the times-tables, yet insist on being called professionals.

We are talking billions here, not a few million.