By Silla Tauler
Until the recent cabinet shuffle, Ontario’s former Minister of Education Stephen Lecce spent several weeks reminding people of the Ford government’s plan to rein in the “excesses” of teachers and school boards, as part of the Tories’ quest to divide parents from educators and “return education to the basics.”
Among these announcements is an expansion of existing policies around cell phone usage, making something that already existed, but was not enforced, mandatory in every school board. They also include changes to graduation requirements for the Ontario Secondary School Diploma – making tech courses mandatory even in the absence of enough qualified tech teachers, and requiring students to pass a financial literacy unit as part of their Grade 10 math course even though this is not subject matter currently covered by Ontario’s Grade 10 math curriculum – and revitalizing long dormant fields of study in Ontario secondary schools, such as home economics.
The government loves to use this tactic to bash education workers and simultaneously hide its own mismanagement of the education portfolio in recent years.
The announced “cell phone ban” is an expansion of existing policy that now requires school boards to adopt policies which were previously voluntary. Under the old regime, Ontario school boards had the authority to enact policies that would limit student access to their own personal devices at teachers’ discretion, like during instructional time when the teacher wished to allow their students to use their cell phones to accomplish an assigned task.
Many school boards did not choose this approach to manage student access, instead leaving the management of student attention and related disciplinary matters at the discretion of school administration and teachers. For example, if cell phone use was a problem the principal could use their discretion to ask the student to leave it with the office during the school day.
A consequence of this lack of consistency is a lack of enforcement, which the government argues has caused teachers to be left engaging students consumed by their phones. The Tories also say that this exposure to the internet is a factor in numerous mental health effects that are detrimental to student welfare at school.
However, despite this stated intention to improve consistency, support student learning and limit the harm caused to young peoples’ mental health as a result of cell phone use, the announcement came as a political expedient to usurp the news cycle about how the Tories have been chronically underfunding public education.
The cell phone ban was announced on April 28 and dominated the news and bumped statements from the Ontario Secondary School Federation (OSSTF) and other education unions highlighting that the announced budget was another cut in per-student funding that has only worsened since the Tories took office in 2018.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says that by 2022, the per-student funding that Ontario provides to school boards as part of their overall funding formula for schools had already declined by $800 per year. In the most recent budget that amount of per-student funding has decreased by $1500 per year, a rate that has nearly doubled in two years.
The OSSTF announcement was made immediately after the budget was announced on March 26. The CCPA had conducted their analysis and published it in The Monitor on May 3, less than a week after the government’s announced cell phone ban that was sweeping through mainstream news outlets.
The reduction in per-student funding has serious implications for public school operations. Not only does it mean a reduction in specialty programming like the arts, physical education and enrichment programs, but it also creates dangerous conditions with inadequate support staff allocations or in which the schools can no longer find qualified teachers to lead classrooms.
What is the government hiding this time with its numerous announcements of reforms that are all set to come into effect in September?
Teachers were recently awarded an arbitration settlement for their central contracts, which resulted in salary settlements of nearly triple the government’s offer of 1.25 percent annual increases for four years. It is politically inconvenient for a government which prides itself on keeping the public service in check to concede on wage increases like these (insufficient as they are, relative to inflation) for one of the province’s largest budget line items.
The narrative fed through the mainstream media is that these costs are a contradiction between staff and student needs, because staffing costs (we are told) somehow cause reductions in student support.
In reality, though, education workers are the foundation of the supports that students receive in schools. It is the strangulating effects of the funding formula that leads to fewer support workers, limited resources for extracurriculars, larger class sizes, teacher shortages and a reduction in specialty programming that students need to access the increasingly demanding entry requirements for the labour market created under monopoly capitalism and neoliberalism.
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