Covid Journal, August 20, 2020
Cutting Through the Gordian Knot of Ontario’s Education System
After being given a scant 5 DAYS to decide on our child’s future after 5 months of waiting, primarily because it’s ‘summer break’ and teachers and administrators don’t get paid over the summer … even though they do (*teachers get paid 12 months of the year, but the amount is based on ‘teaching’ 10 months of the year).
We’ve decided we’ve had enough.
We’re going to sit on the sidelines.
Online it is.
We’ve all read the papers, so you all know the main headlines, but here are a few details about some local issues that I’ve got with the boards, the Minister and the unions.
In short: they’re the trifecta of alienating parents and students.
For starters, we got a ‘survey’ request from our local board to confirm if we were going to send our kid back to a petri dish mess of anarchy that will have very little do with actual education because everyone will be running around barking orders at our kids like the most absurd authoritarians having a field day with the most compliant victims.
To repeat, our answer was online only.
What stunned me is that the survey is compiled by an international company called Qualtrics. It’s a subsidiary of SAP.
Why the f&ck does our opting out of fall classes need a high-end consulting company to collect, corral and collate the data associated with our child and our choice. It felt like doing a f&cking survey from the Catholics about abortion on the way out of a clinic.
As we ‘completed’ the survey, we didn’t get a confirmation, link or any other information that would support our decision. It felt like a casual little f&ck you to our decision from the board.
The troubling part of all of this is that we don’t have an effective and accessible consolidated online resource for ALL courses and classes available to citizens of Ontario (or abroad). It’s hodgepodge.
This is mostly because the unions are blocking efforts to move education online, but also because no one can agree on how to teach math or English in an online format. I’ve indicated before that Udemy, Coursera, Masterclass, dozens of others INCLUDING Ontario’s own TVO can organize classes, but somehow our educational infrastructure doesn’t know how to educate … online.
Another concern about ‘deregistering’ our student is that this seems to translate to bailing out on our local school board. Ultimately, I can appreciate that our choice might result in them losing our ‘head count’ for funding. I have no proof of this yet, but I’m sure Ford and Lecce will use this as a way to f&ck school boards over and cut their funding. And they won’t give more to the ones that receive students who register for their classes remotely.
Then there are the pods, homeschooling and all kinds of ‘other’ options growing in popularity – all at the last minute – that are psuedo-substitutes for good old learning by rote in a classroom.
While this is all hitting the fan, Stephen Lecce has been busy carving out deals for bailouts to companies like WalMart.
$500 million of taxpayer money going to an international conglomerate that is famous for f&cking over employees and given them the absolute bare minimum for pay and benefits.
Thanks but no thanks.
It’s really, REALLY hard not to feel like the powers that be are working against us and our public education system.
I truly feel that people like Ford and Lecce are trying to discourage us all to a point where we BEG them to terminate everything and anything associated with public schools and education.
The people of Ontario are paying $30 billion per year on public education from K-12 and we want it.
We just want all of the arsewipes at the top who are treating our kids like poker chips to get the f&ck out of the way so that teachers can do their jobs.