TORONTO – If it is not working or not producing the desired results, change the approach or change the player(s) involved. It is much more difficult to “blow it up and start all over again”.
Premier Doug Ford, folksy style aside, seems seized of that leadership imperative. On reviewing the central points in his political experiences, one will be struck by the speed with which he releases the guillotine once he tires of counterproductive acts. He suffers fools – and foolishness – rather poorly.
One week into a new school year and he has become uneasy with evident dysfunctionalities of the Education system. He is uncomfortable with the “lack of results”, unhappy that parents are being excluded from decision making regarding their children’s welfare and downright angry with the “indoctrination” being conducted by superintendents and school boards.
Some heads will roll. And soon.
His government spends at least $28 billion a year, every year, on preschool, elementary and secondary school education for some 2,038,000 children under the age of eighteen (2023-24 projected estimates, Ministry of Education) through 72 school boards. Rhetorically, he asks, what have those boards produced?
The prima facie facts are not encouraging: (1) a bloated (in numbers and salaries) cadre of school superintendents focused more on Executive compensation than on student performance and achievement, (2) the virtual abandonment of a merit-based system for academic and career assessment, (3) aggression and violence in many schools as a common everyday occurrence, (4) erosion of parental rights in favour of outside lobby groups. The list goes on.
Now, Ontario’s Premier, who still has a keen populist sense, recognizes what the citizenry has regretted for months. Its education system has become the laughingstock of education world. “Kayla Lemieux”, of Halton, became an international sensation for manifesting her gender expression.
The school went under lockdown on twenty different occasions as SWAT teams converged because of bomb threats.
By their inaction, the brain dead at the board offices declared “her/his” human rights to be more important than those of the parents and their children. Last week, Lemieux revealed that “she” is in fact a “he”.
Not to be out-done, in early 2023, their “brainiac colleagues” in Renfrew suspended and caused the arrest of josh Alexander, a sixteen-year-old. His crime? He took the side of female students who demanded safe spaces for exclusively biological female gendered students. The lawsuits generated by this type of unexplainable behaviour by otherwise mature and “intellectually competent” adults in charge of local education must surely keep the cash registers of law firms ringing.
The cesspool in Toronto’s Catholic and Public district school boards has proven to be just as murky. In York, as elsewhere, the police are a semi-permanent fixture at Board meetings.
Is it any surprise that the parents of one in fifteen students have assumed the extra cost of enrolling their children in private/ independent schools? Premier Ford does not seem to have a problem “mixing with regular folks” – anywhere (see pics below).
They must be giving him an earful at the Kitchener area BBQ. Some of those people will already have begun to call for a forensic audit of Board finances. Some of the attendees at Gianfranco Cristiano’s BBQ on Sunday were doing just that. They must start telling him.
