EDITORIAL: There’s no Ford war on educators
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If Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government is determined to demolish Ontario’s education system as the education unions insist, he continues to go about it in a strange way.
The tentative contract reached Sunday between Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce and 55,000 educational support workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, which averted a province-wide strike on Monday, is a case in point.
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Even CUPE’s head bargainer, Laura Walton, thanked Lecce for “opening up the piggy bank” to reach a settlement.
The Ford government settled for fiscal stability on salaries for three years, with workers receiving a 1% hike annually.
While it won a minor concession that workers must now provide a standardized medical form to access short-term disability payments — what’s astounding is that this wasn’t required previously — it backed off on demanding a decrease in sick days.
Combine that with the fact the Ford government’s new sex-ed curriculum for schools was introduced with almost no controversy — despite teacher unions and other Ford critics warning he was going to throw schools back into the Dark Ages
Add in that in the face of declining math scores in Grades 3 and 6 in standardized testing, the Ford government is introducing a sensible, credible teacher testing program that will require new (not existing) teachers to score 70% on a basic mathematics test (fractions, division, percentages, etc.).
There’s no limit to how many times new teachers can take the test — they will be charged a fee if they fail the first one — and the province is providing resources to upgrade teacher math skills where necessary.
Ford’s most controversial education initiative, to increase, over four years, average class sizes from 22 to 28 students in high school, and from 23.5 to 24.5 students in Grades 4 to 8, is necessary and justified.
Under the previous decade of Liberal government mismanagement, enrolment dropped by 110,000 students, or 5.2%, while the number of teachers increased by 14,000, or 12.5%.
That’s not financially sustainable and even here the government has earmarked $1.6 billion to boards so the system can be right-sized through attrition and retirements, rather than mass layoffs.
Clearly Ford doesn’t want a war with the province’s teachers.
Whether he’ll get one, is another issue.
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