By Silla Tauler
As students headed back to school in September, mainstream media outlets echoed with reports about low literacy rates and “new approaches” to reading in several provinces. But no province appears ready to tackle the root of the problem – chronic underfunding of public schools.
In February 2022, the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) published a report titled Right to Read: Public inquiry into human rights issues facing students with reading disabilities. The impetus for this inquiry arose from the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2012 decision in Moore v. British Columbia (Education), in which the court ruled unanimously that all provinces had a legal obligation to provide funding for special education interventions to support students with disabilities learn to read.
The premise is simple, and a longstanding principle of socialist education reform: that literacy is a foundational skill for full political participation in society. The OHRC report clarifies that the burden rests with public school systems to provide supports to all students, regardless of disability, with foundational instruction in reading and writing. It notes that “Many students are not learning this foundational skill, with devastating consequences. Students who do not develop strong early reading skills struggle in school and later life. This negatively affects the student, their family and broader society.”
This call to action from the OHRC, based on findings which indicate that Ontario schools are not actively or effectively teaching all students how to read, is alarming. It seems counterintuitive that such an obvious gap would persist in Canada in the twenty-first century.
The problem lies partially in particular education reform efforts. These include the abandonment of rote learning methods like phonics and their replacement with laissez-faire approaches to reading education such as whole-word and sight word instruction; curriculum reform to restrict foundational literacy instruction to an earlier period of every child’s development, with the consequence that if students do not benefit from reading instruction when it is taught they may never get remedial reading instruction when they are ready; a commitment to social promotion within elementary education; and an overreliance on technical interventions such as speech-to-text and text-to-speech software, which can obscure underlying literacy concerns.
Notably, the material base of these education reforms is to reduce the relatively high costs and labour intensity of classroom instruction, which is precisely what many students require to meet their learning needs.
This publication has frequently discussed how the public education system across the country is starting to buckle under the strain of chronic underfunding. Often, this is reflected in reductions in staff who would have traditionally provided intensive reading instruction to students in need – child and youth workers, educational assistants, dedicated reading specialist teachers, etc.
Ontario provides a good example. Since 2018, the provincial government has cut approximately $1500 per student in annual funding, adjusted for inflation. The average high school enrolment across all four of Ontario’s publicly funded school systems for 2023-2024 was around 750 students. Simple arithmetic suggests that a typical, neighbourhood high school has seen a reduction of $1,125,000 per year over the past six years. According to the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the median salary for education workers (excluding teachers) is around $39,000 per year. Assuming that the cost of staffing a full-time position is approximately double the cost of the wages – to account for benefits, pension contributions, etc. – this means that the typical neighbourhood high school has likely had to cut the equivalent of around fifteen full-time support staff.
The reality of most schools is that the reductions are usually a combination of cuts to both support staff and teachers, leading to increasing class sizes and compounded with increased class complexity, all without adequate support to meet the needs of students in the classroom.
In response to these shortages, many school boards adopt a laissez-faire approach which involves the bureaucratic papering over of the problem – creating half-day seminars for teachers without specialized preparation to teach fundamental reading skills and having them miraculously become reading specialists by the end of the day. This reflects a push towards literacy which emerged in previous decades as a means of improving literacy test scores, even as school budgets continued to be tightened.
School systems are now aware that the problem is more profound than students lacking the skills to critically engage with developmentally appropriate or subject-specific material, or that they lack the transferable skills to make appropriate inferences when faced with novel information. In fact, the problem is more fundamental than these skills, which can often be added into normal instruction without much intervention.
Increasingly students are entering high schools, years behind their age-cohort level in basic reading and writing skills. As schools fall into disrepair, as education reforms make teaching more complex, and as student supports are restricted to only those in the most extreme need at schools, governments are failing to meet their basic obligations to our collective future.
Of course, the blame will be heaped on teachers and the public will be reminded that teachers should be encouraged to “return-to-basics” or, in an openly misogynistic attack on a sector largely dominated by women, to return to knitting and stay out of politics.
Working people cannot allow provincial governments to abandon their obligation to provide for the students in their care, while heaping scorn and extra work on education workers who continue to do their best.
We need to push governments to guarantee the right to an education – including the right to read – for all students, and to ensure adequate funding for a universal, accessible public school system which can achieve this.
[Photo: Saskatchewan Teachers Federation]
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