Anti-closure backlash pending?

With this week's (neglected) trustee elections, I've been thinking about whether Ontario will see any sort of dramatic shift on school closures. Moira MacDonald pointed to it in her coverage of the races earlier this week, noting the Toronto District School Board's newer and reelected trustees have the drive to keep putting off the board's accommodation and capacity issues.
Following the candidates who were running in my district (meaning the one I voted in and would have been reporting on were I not on this fellowship), I didn't get the sense that the 'anti-closure' candidates won. They didn't in my ward-- the one public and one Catholic candidates running on more or less of an anti-closure platform weren't elected. Of three trustee spots, two went to longtime incumbents and one went to a newbie, who has never to my knowledge campaigned against school closures.
Within the City of London (same educational district as where I voted), all six incumbent public trustees were reelected on Monday, despite some bitter battles in some city neighbourhoods over the school closures there. Further, the board will look to strike more school-closure reviews within the city proper in this next term than it has in the last three years. In the Catholic board there are many new faces, but it's due to retirements not school-closure related issues.
I haven't looked into the Simcoe County boards, but trustees in the public board put off a heated decision on five high schools in the county's northwest for the new term of trustees and I'd be curious if this was any sort of a defining issue in the campaign.
A comment earlier this week pointed to a belief that school closures would just stop some time in the next year as the Liberal government doesn't want an election campaign while trustees are voting to close more schools. I don't buy it. Here's why:

• School-aged populations outside of the GTA continue to drop
• The government isn't about to do an about-face and start funding renovations and technology upgrates at schools with small populations
• I don't see the Liberals going easy on many boards (OK, perhaps a few) when it comes to budgets, and will force them to consolidate and then use 'savings' to cover FDK expenses.

As it was in the last term, I suspect many eyes will be trained on the Toronto boards. That's how it should be since the TDSB has largely avoided the world that every other Ontario board has been living in for the past term. Despite Monday's election or perhaps in spite of it, these issues are not going away.

Puzzled by TCDSB results

Given what the current term has produced, I was wholeheartedly surprised at the trustee results for the Toronto Catholic District School Board. Catholic voters in T.O. returned a surprisingly high number of incumbents to this board, neutered partway into this term when it refused to pass a balanced budget. That refusal spawned a series of conflict-of-interest court cases, which removed two trustees from office and embroiled at least one more trustee. One of the trustees, booted from office this summer by the court but allowed to keep her candidacy, was reelected to the board.
The T.O. media take? I thought the Toronto Sun's Moira MacDonald had the best take.

Toronto Catholic school board voters chose name recognition and old loyalties over a clean slate, returning six out of eight incumbents running for re-election at the scandal-plagued school board.
“It looks like the Catholic voters of Toronto are in a forgiving mood,” said Robert Dixon, a member of Catholics United for a Responsible Ballot.
The group had worked during the election campaign to get Catholics out to vote and deliver a clean slate at the board.
“As far as CURB is concerned, we’ll certainly be watching them and holding them to account.”
Six incumbents were returned: Angela Kennedy (Ward 11) who was dispatched from her seat by a judge in August in a conflict-of-interest case; Sal Piccininni (Ward 3) who had the highest expense spending of any trustee in a provincially ordered audit, Ann Andrachuk (Ward 2), John Del Grande (Ward 7), Barbara Poplawski (Ward 10) recently exonerated in a conflict-of-interest case, and Maria Rizzo (Ward 5). Apart from Rizzo — who faced a tough fight from Paul Oulahen — all won handily.
Two incumbents went down: Joseph Martino (Ward 1) and Catherine LeBlanc-Miller (Ward 9), the former board chairman who, while admitting she had not been blameless in the board’s problems, had also asked the provincial government and the police to get to the bottom of trustee expense misdeeds. 

The Globe and Mail and the Star also had their takes, but they were smaller in print and largely overshadowed by the municipal coverage. I liked the play, though well back into the paper, the Sun gave MacDonald-- but that's my bias that school board results should get almost-equivalent
play.

Did the election impact the schools' alliance?

OK. You can't take the newsroom out of the journalist even when you take the journalist out of the newsroom. First election campaign since becoming a journalist that I haven't covered, and sitting on the sidelines tonight was very different.
At this point in the night, I'm left wondering what will happen to those municipal politicos who so eagerly signed up for the Community Schools Alliance two summers ago.
Just out of curiosity, I went looking for results for the Alliance's executive committee.

• Southwest Middlesex Mayor Doug Reycraft was acclaimed.
• Niagara-on-the-Lake Lord Mayor Gary Burroughs ran for Niagara Region council and won.
• Niagara-on-the-Lake Coun. Jim Collard kept his seat.
• Malahide Mayor John R. Wilson lost.
• No idea if Hastings Highlands Mayor Ron Emond ran, was elected or not (nothing election related online at township website)
• Cobalt Coun. Doug Shearer did not run again.
• Greenstone Mayor Michael Power did not run again.
• Springwater Mayor Tony Guergis lost.
• Guelph/Eramosa Mayor Chris White kept his seat.
• Burlington Mayor Cam Jackson lost.

Only four (perhaps five) of the current Alliance executive members, if they can be called current, were reelected Monday night for the pending municipal term. While I seriously doubt school closures played any part in municipal council elections, does it throw a knife into the back of what's been a pretty tepid Alliance lately?
Reycraft was happier than heck in September as Middlesex signed an agreement with the Thames Valley DSB stating the board would basically do what it did the last time (sort of) and also follow provincial guidelines. See a post about that here. But the website, while updated since my last visit several months ago to include a map (outdated) of municipalities and the September agreement stuff, still has precious little info.
I highly suspect that given the agreement Reycraft now has and those who won't be around come the end of November that the Alliance will slowly wither. That is, as I've already predicted, until the next school-closure review decision by trustees goes against what Reycraft and like-minded munipols want and then they'll be back on the warpath.

History battles

Though my last fellowship update really centred on the "Issues in numeracy and literacy," I didn't want to take away from the fun I've been having in my other course, "Battles over history education."
It's a master's level seminar with only four people (myself included). This past week (Oct. 19) was probably some of our best discussion this term. Our readings, heavy on the Peter Seixas, concentrated on how to bridge the gap between the changes that have happened in the study of history -- I kept calling them "academic historians" -- and those who first teach history to us as students. We've been reading a lot about the history wars in Canada and elsewhere, where on one side you have those who argue for teaching history as part of a national narrative, a set of dates, places, people and events from the past that help define a collective identity. On the other, those who hold the historical process as what should be emphasized-- the ability to research and study primary and secondary source documents, analyse them and then draw conclusions from that analysis that are supported by your evidence. For example, as this class is the class I'm auditing where I have to "complete all the course requirements," on Oct. 12 I led a good portion of the evening's seminar and then had to write an eight-page paper (yikes, it's been a while since I did that) that analysed and critiqued the night's readings. Why, I'm currently stalling on reading this week's assigned readings as I type this post on the very debate.
It's largely a debate that seems to have taken place among Master's and Ph.D's in history, with little input from the very people who are tasked with first teaching history to students. It's an interesting paradox (if that's the best term), where academics complain about the quality of students and how those students have been taught, but don't -- on a large enough scale -- really contribute much towards improving the very instruction they lament. If history teachers in public and secondary schools are the ones that build the foundation upon which we find ensuing generations of historians, then why are they, in many cases, being left out of this discussion? Are they? I've had the privilege of meeting some top-rate high school history teachers, but I don't know if many of them would tackle this sort of existential debate over how they inspire learning about history and historical thinking in their students. This is where our last discussion went as each of us wondered where the emphasis should be placed to improve historical knowledge and thinking.
I must admit, as I have to the instructor, the readings in this course are sometimes, um, dense (poorly written?) -- ex:

Ironically, less than twenty-five years ago, the historian Pierre Nora asserted that the function of the science of history -- and therefore of the historian -- was not to collect memories but to protect people against them through the application of 'instructive reason,' that is, through the analytical and critical activity of the historian, debunker of myth and of all other obstacles to our proper understanding of reality. (Laville, Christian (2004) "Historical consciousness and historical education: What to expect from the first for the second," in Seixas, ed. Theorizing Historical Consciousness, University of Toronto Press, p. 172)

They make my brain hurt. But every week I leave the seminar with my brain abuzz, oft-neglected neurons firing away with the week's discussions. Then I realize-- this is what I came here for. This is the stimulation those neurons don't often get in the day-to-day rhythms of my work. This is what makes it worth it all.

Think of the neglected, the forgotten

As I type this there remains about 80 minutes until the polls close across the province for municipal and school board elections. We've been inundated in the past week (or perhaps just myself) with the pros and cons of electing certain people as mayor (of Toronto) or not.
Forgotten, relegated to maybe a few articles since the close of nominations on Sept. 10 are the votes for trustee. I think, with some wide gaps in my media monitoring this past month, I read maybe a handful of articles on trustee races in Toronto-- with a good half of them written by the Toronto Sun's Moira MacDonald. I know the Star and Globe have touched on local trustees, and through news alerts from my own chain I see that trustees have gotten fairly decent coverage (meaning they got any at all).
Education is the second-largest provincial budget item after health care. While how much of that money is spent is dictated at Queen's Park, your local trustee(s) can still make or break the culture within your local public schools in how they administer those dollars. Dollars that make up between an tenth and a third (depending on where you live in Ontario) of the same bill you pay when you fork over your property taxes for municipal services.
And I won't accept continued moaning over Bill 177 -- given the legacy of 1996's Bill 160 and other related legislation at the time and other bills passed by the Liberals, school boards are now governed like businesses. Where the elected members of the board set policy and pass budgets, leaving the implementation of that policy and budget to the one person who trustees directly hire and supervise (the director of education). This can still be an accountable system for trustees who are able to understand it and work within this structure.
So, I hope we get the school boards we want for the next four years. I certainly put enough thought into my vote (back home in Ingersoll) when I cast it late last week.

Oh, boys

It's our time to lead, a redesigned Globe and Mail has been telling us since Oct. 1, laying out eight themes where it's arguing Canada needs to be a leader. Week three's theme? Boys. Specifically, how Canada is failing its boys. Though the series is only two days in, I have some thoughts.
First, anyone writing, knowing, etc. about education and children's issues knows this concern isn't new. It's been around for years now, to the point there's a smorgasbord of data to validate how boys are doing less well in school and in life in their earliest years. I'm not trying to suggest the Globe is late to the party on this point, as even it admits this concern has some history to it.
The Time to Lead series appears to be fashioned on the newspaper (as an institution, not the tactile paper itself) as an active member of society, as an advocate pushing for improvement in the causes it chooses to support. This is also nothing new as a journalistic concept, but the Globe holds a prominence among the groups of Canadian society who are actually poised in positions to effect change. For a paper that claims to set the political agenda (I don't doubt this on certain levels), the Time to Lead series is a bold move. Will people (the Globe's people, really) care about these eight themes?
To bring it back to boys, will we care enough when shown the data? By pointing fingers to the five top reasons the Globe says boys are falling behind? By the live chats (some of which I wish I was able to sit in on in what's shaping up to be a busy week) with the lead reporter and various others?
It's drawn me in at any rate, to the point I'll be reading the rest of the week to see where the Globe takes this topic.

ETFO platform ready

The Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario has released a 28-page document, it's platform for the 2011 provincial election that lies at our feet-- once the current municipal election is complete next Monday.
Here's its summary of recommendations:

• Establish a two-year moratorium on EQAO testing to allow for public consultations on the uses, value, and impact of the current provincial testing regime.
• Consider adopting a random sample model to measure the appropriateness of the curriculum and the effectiveness of teaching strategies.
• Place more emphasis on the role of ongoing teacher assessment of student progress.
• Establish more balance between literacy and numeracy and other subjects including science, social studies, the arts, and physical and health education.
• Increase the elementary foundation grant (EFG) to provide all elementary schools with specialist teachers in the arts, and health and physical education.
• Increase the EFG to provide all grade 7 and 8 students with access to design and technology programs.
• Increase the EFG to provide at least one qualified teacher-librarian per elementary school.
• Increase the EFG to provide at least one qualified guidance counsellor per elementary school.
• Reduce the number of prescribed student outcomes and identify, instead, a set of core learning goals.
• Provide all elementary classrooms with resources that support hands-on, experiential learning.
• Extend the benefits of smaller classes to grades 4 to 8.
• Reduce the average class size of the full-day early learning kindergarten program to align with other primary grades.
• Establish a process to better track class size and maintain class size targets throughout the school year.
• Base the special education grants on the educational needs of students.
• Increase the funding allocation for educational assistants, counsellors, and child and youth workers.
• Revise the English as a second language (ESL) grants to more accurately reflect the number of students who don’t speak English when they enrol at school.
• Revise the ESL grants to increase the capacity of schools to extend ESL programs to students who need the support beyond four years.
• Provide classroom resources to support the Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy.
• Provide professional learning that addresses discrimination and oppression of marginalized students.
• Provide specific compensatory grants for schools in disadvantaged communities to support additional learning materials, field trips, and in-school arts programs.
• Reaffirm the provincial plan to reduce child and family poverty by 25 percent by 2013.
• Mandate school boards to provide child care services before and after school and during school breaks.
• Where space is available, use schools to establish community hubs.

It's an interesting list -- many of the items could be reduced to asking for more money for programs or positions that ultimately benefit ETFO members. There's nothing innately wrong with that since ETFO is ETFO so it can advocate for its members. Readers here will already know I'm not often convinced by student-first veneers painted on federation tactics as really, a union's first job is to advocate for its memebrs, the people who after all pay the bills. There are some good suggestion in there however, which shouldn't just be dismissed because the federation is the one suggesting them.
With party platforms still a few months away at best -- I wouldn't expect the first one to come out until the spring of 2011, so we can spend the summer getting tired of them -- I'm curious to see what the reaction to this document is. Will it land with a thud that no one hears? Should it?
ETFO also appears to be first out of the gate on this-- a quick scan of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation and the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association shows no similar document.