Memo To Bonnie Crombie: How To Fight Educational Malaise

On Education, And How To Fight Back

(Evan here: One of the things I’m hoping to do more these days is have smart people with expertise write in these pages. This site has a readership I’m proud of, and one of the ways I want to serve my readers is by loaning these pages out every so often in service of good work. Today, I’m giving friend, political technologist, husband of an educator, and frequent Scrimshaw Show guest Nathaniel Arfin the stage, to lay out some ideas on how Bonnie Crombie and the OLP can fix Ontario’s Educational Malaise, especially as Education Minister #3 of the year is sworn in. Hope you enjoy.)

With reports of a general election in Ontario coming, there’s been a lot of talk about what the opposition should be doing A few weeks ago, Evan wrote an article about the “Message of the week”. In it, he touched on Education, offering 5 points for the OLP to hit on during their education tour.

So, how about an Education Week where Monday you announce a billion dollar school repairs fund at, Tuesday is a Respecting Teachers announcement where you promise not to unilaterally legislate wage levels, Wednesday you go to a community that needs a new school to highlight a promise to increase new school construction, and Thursday you announce the creation of your education expert commission?

This is a great list for a comms team to pack up and sell. It’s easy enough to action and doesn’t over-commit; although Crombie recently would only go so far as saying she wouldn’t use the NWS clause. Not a reach Bonnie.

The problem with this list is that, while it’s easy to sell the public, it does little to address the fundamental issues that we’re seeing in our schools. Education workers, in other words, will see right through it. Education is increasingly personal. Taking a glance at the curricula, you’ll notice something. Aside from how many of them have been rushed into implementation lately, you’ll notice that the actual expectations are vague, stuff like “is able to analyze text and determine tone from context” - that’s not verbatim, but close enough.

Teachers are expected to evaluate the needs of each student, and develop learning strategies alongside them. They’re expected to teach multiple strategies to find the right method to help each kid. And it’s the kind of work teachers absolutely love to do. But it’s also hardly the whole job. There’s the marking after school, the extracurriculars they're expected to take part in, and the aforementioned planning which they simply do not have time to do in their “prep” time (50% of which is usually lost to classroom duties).

These are the types of problems that teachers will remind us about when it comes to their regular collective bargaining. They’re time constraints and the types of stressors that come with high-stakes careers. These are the issues I want to be talking about. But I can’t. And it’s time for teachers to stop talking about this stuff in bargaining too. Because over the past 6 years, we have seen a concerted, specific attack on education. In order to fix it, we’re going to need to do more than bump salaries by 2% and add an extra prep every week.

To fix what’s ailing education, we’re going to need specific priorities, and we’re going to need to sell them. So here it is: How Bonnie Crombie and the OLP should fix education.

Repair the schools. Include Unions. Ontario’s school repair backlog is something like $18 Billion. We’re taking about the need to improve conditions to get them up to livable standards. Remediating asbestos; getting functional AC/HVAC (with proper filtration. I could write a whole paragraph about cleaning the air, but I’ll spare you), making sure that schools don’t have their roofs cave in.

And this is an easy one to sell. Bhutila Karpoche recently put her Wellies on and visited a school that was under water. Get in front of a school and show us what conditions are like.

Do you wanna know why LiUNA, and IBEW, and other unions supported Ford’s election? It’s not because they think he’s a Great Friend to Labour. It’s because they were promised work. Develop a strategy with labour to get more union jobs fixing, maintaining, and building our schools. Demonstrate that money going into education is still supportive of the builders. Maybe we could even get our kids out of those damned portables.

Prioritize Staffing for Special Needs. Doug Ford has been catastrophic here. One of the worst, most public early failures from this government was Lisa McLeod’s handling of the Autism file. It eventually got her ejected from caucus and she’s been languishing on the backbench and picking Twitter spats ever since. Doug and co. have tripled the Autism services waiting list to a staggering 60,000 children, and there are tens of thousands of kids being given over to Child Services for lack of available resources. Doug’s quip of “unfortunate” doesn’t quite scratch the surface of how abominable the government has acted towards children and families in need of support.

Education Support workers are facing the consequences of these decisions every single day. They have to work with children who can’t or will not get diagnosed, and offer them the support they’re allowed to offer, as accommodations and staffing are only made available based on DIAGNOSED NEEDS. So by underfunding on the diagnosis side, the government is also taking away the ability for educators to do their jobs and support kids.

Tack those conditions on to the union busting and rights suppression (Keeping Kids in School Act, Bill 28), barely survivable wages (avg wage is $24/hr), daily violence, and the gainful nature of their employment (EAs have their employment terminated over the summer), and its plainly obvious why 42% of schools reported DAILY shortstaffing of support workers in 2023-24.

The Ontario Liberals need to show that they are serious about addressing these problems. Having the proper supports, accommodations, and tools are necessary to make our classrooms into proper learning environments. Much more than average class size, adequate access to classroom supports is the major issue facing educators today.

It’s past time we recognize the importance of education support workers. To fix our schools we need to scale up wages and treat it as a career, not an 8-month recurring annual contract.

Our education system has a lot of work needed. Classrooms are in disarray, hiring is in shambles, and you’ll be damned if you can squeeze two pennies together in a school board to hire half a year of an OCT educator, but these investments need to happen. It’s pretty clear the Ontario government is also feeling the pressure, as we are on our third Education Minister of the year, after the first asked for a shuffle out and the second headed for the private sector. And with unions on-side, maybe the liberals can shift some of the money away from nonsense capital projects, and get labour on board.

And that’s where the teachers come in. Holy shit just talk to the teachers about what they need! Since Doug Ford took office, Stephen Lecce and Ministry of Education have implemented 12 new pieces of curricula, of the current 18. Every time they’ve made these changes it has happened without forewarning, and without considerate consultation with the educators.

The major, unilaterally implemented changes, like destreaming of high school programming, introduction of a modern literacy program, and others, are consistently panned by the unions and seen as an affront to the educators, not because they disagree with the content, but because the process was inconsiderate of existing practices and lived experiences.

Teachers and educators are professionals. They take their work seriously. A quick glance at any given teacher’s portfolio will likely show a handful of additional qualifications and certifications; hell, I know at least two teachers personally who have their Masters in Education. Their careers are built on continuous learning, feedback, and personal growth, just like any other professional. They deserve the respect and deference on decision making that their professionalism and experience commands. They are not babysitters.

Our education workers have demonstrated their ability to organize and turn up in numbers. They’ve shown us that they are willing to step up. If Crombie wants to win this election, she needs to show education workers that she will do the same. That will not come through promises of not using Section 33, or barely-modified stump speeches delivered at union AGMs. It will only happen through meaningful engagement, and a willingness to work alongside our educators to build back Ontario’s education system, and restore the prestige it deserves. Anything else, and we are condemning teachers, students, and all of us who need a functioning, world class education system to generations of pain.