Time for an "Educational" shift in both management and training in Ontario Schools

With York Catholic becoming the eighth school board to be placed under provincial supervision, we are now in a situation where over one-third of all students in Ontario are attending schools under direct provincial control. From Conservative take-over of Ontario Schools, Toronto Star, March 14, 2026,By Sachin Maharaj Contributor Sachin Maharaj is an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy and program evaluation at the University of Ottawa

ü Never mind that many of the appointed ‘supervisors’ are Conservative party ‘loyalists,’ many of whom are raking in some $350,000 for their new appointments.

ü Never mind that the ‘Charter School movement’ in the United States is a camouflage for both gutting the public school system

ü Never mind that the Charter School movement’ is another step in the ‘philosophical’ and ‘ideological’ take over by the conservative ‘right’

ü Never mind that, the perhaps even blatant overspending by Ontario trustees for luxury retreats for board members, is a public headline that meagrely provides a ‘public opinion cover’ for Calandra’s heavy-boot strategy to take complete control of the Ontario public school system

ü Never mind that, for the vast majority of the Ontario public, schools are a low priority, unless and until some special interest group finds a deaf-ear among both politicians and civil servants for their ‘cause’…e,g, autism, in which case, protest marches, placards and radio and television interview abound

ü Never mind that education in Ontario has been a matter of the reduction of dollars and student numbers (ratios in classrooms) for decades, as attested by then NDP Leader Stephen Lewis to a professional development day lecture back in the late 1960’s in North Bay

ü Never mind that school philosophy, educational philosophy, and educational foundations are subjects so esoteric as to be outside the interest and purview of most elected politicians both at the school board level and for the Ontario Provincial Legislature

ü Never mind that ‘test score’ on behavioural-based performance are deployed as indicative of ‘school’ and ‘student’ and thereby ‘teacher success’….another seductive ruse in the education debate

ü Never mind that, when asked how to enhance public education for high school boys, a senior administrator in a mid-sized southern Ontario city dismissed the issue with the comment, “Oh, we just need to put more computers in the classes and the boys will be fine!”

ü Never mind that the drop-out rate among boys is a matter for parents, teachers, board members and provincial legislators

ü Never mind that the STEM curriculum, geared as it is to the ‘learn-to-earn’ employment goals, and sacrifices the critical thought emphasis on human problems like history, culture, and civil responsibility

ü Never mind that parents, for the last two decades at least, have faced a growing number of profoundly invasive distractors for children and adolescents, including social media, formerly illicit drugs, intense competition for post-secondary admissions and a general ennui and desperation within the Ontario culture

ü Never mind that psychological and emotional issues have grown both in frequency and in intensity among Ontario adolescents, many of whom live in conditions in which formal and uninterrupted study is fraught with challenges

ü Never mind that violence in both language and in behaviour has become increasingly both vitriolic and ubiquitous in Ontario culture, as well as Canadian and North American culture

ü Never mind that new technologies have flooded the market, and the time zones of millions of children and adolescents

ü Never mind that increasingly men and women, as well as children and adolescents are anxious, concerned and even depressed about the prospects of a future of military incursions, Artificial Intelligence incursions into the lives of ordinary families

ü Never mind that the ‘parenting’ challenges faced by today’s parents in Ontario are far more complicated and challenging than any that were faced by the members of school boards and provincial legislators, who have neither studied nor apparently care about how, in their professional roles, they might be some support for those parents

ü Teachers, too, have never been either formally trained, nor mentored in how to meet the challenges of both psychic and emotional turbulence which they encounter in their classes daily

ü Similarly, administrators, including principals and vice-principals have had, at best, minimal, superficial and reductionistic formal and/or informal instruction and orientation to help them prepare for their psychic, emotional, and even economic and poverty conditions which their students bring into the class, all of them inhibiting, if not preventing, real learning.

ü Never mind that education in some Scandanavian Schools is the topmost priority for their national governments, in the believe that the foundations laid are critical for the future health of their nations, as well as for their individual citizens

ü Never mind that there has been barely a whisper of protest, complaint and uprising about the Ford government’s arrogant, blatant, and unjustified take-over of the local boards, as a reductionistic way both of ‘gaining control over curriculum’ and also of their absolute control of the fiscal-administrative side of school operations.

ü Never mind that rather than ‘taking over’ the school boards, and giving the public the image of ‘confidence’ in their schools budget, without any mention of curricular and classroom needs, the provincial government has opportunities never before available to enter into a joint program of mutual, intensive, complex and empathic education themselves, with teachers, administrators, department supervisors and even legislators with a formal and informal set of goals and objectives that would equip all levels of educational professionals, not only for the enrichment of the Ontario public school systems, but also for the enrichment of the manner in which boards of public trustees in hospitals, schools, and social service agencies could and would be better prepared and supported in the performance of their responsibilities.

Life-long learning is not merely a slogan for the community college marketing departments; life-long learning, given both the pace and the complexity of social change, is a new, and inescapable requirement for all men and women serving in both elected and appointed positions within the public trust. And that includes the teaching and administration personnel whose basic training in their subject field may or may not have equipped them for the challenges they face every day.

I recall a practicing psychiatrist in 2000 telling me that when he began his practice some thirty years prior, he knew most of the psychic issues and their treatment modalities. Thirty years later, he confessed that he had become increasingly unfamiliar with both the pharmaceutical interventions and the illnesses themselves. We all know about police officers having to respond professionally, to domestic disputes and violence for which they have had little if any training or experience. While school turbulence reaches the public consciousness if and when a warning about a potential shooting or knife incident reaches the press, the current of psychic and emotional turbulence that throbs up and down the corridors of public schools, in and out of classrooms and washrooms, in gymnasia, and on playing fields touches every single person in this province directly or indirectly.

This is not merely a problem or issue that can or will be confined within the ‘bureaucratic’ files and mind-set of the legislators, nor of the board officials, many of whom are aspiring municipal politicians, nor even to the ‘case study notes of the social workers assigned to the schools themselves.

This is not merely an education problem, nor merely a health-care problem, nor merely a public safety problem, nor merely a preparation for employment problem. And however we prefer to conceive and to perceive and to diagnose and to remediate, or even to address the school ‘take-over’ politics, we must agree that an opportunity to provide both deep and lasting enrichment for the schools in the short run, and for the political life of the town, city and province in the longer term, and for the stability and security and safety and confidence of the society generally, we need to acknowledge, not so much a failing as an opportunity.

The opportunity, (from the deepest challenges) is right before our eyes: education contains both the seeds and the flowers of its own rejuvenation. Tis piece is not arguing for an ideological, nor a philosophic tilting in favour or opposed to ‘right-wing’ politics, nor to or opposed to a ‘left-wing’ agenda. It is attempting to acknowledge, what this scribe would consider to be a minimal benchmark for me, in my mid-eighties (of course I would not even give it a second thought!) to even consider returning to the public classrooms of Ontario, without first engaging in a deeply researched and professionally prescribed and even more professionally offered curriculum of extension learning, no matter how long I were to consider remaining in the most important profession in any nation.

Just because everyone board member, or board aspirant, and every legislator and every principal and vice-principal and every teacher has had the experience of some form of formal education, and therefore risks thinking and perceiving that ‘they know all they need to know’ about education in order to make decisions appropriate for learning in the second quarter of the 21^st century, such a perception and conception is delusional.

It needs to be countered by extensive, exhaustive and comprehensive commitment to learning about such things as ‘how do I learn best?” and “how and why am I curious?” and how might such questions become a central focus on the education of the children of this province for the rest of this century and even beyond.

Kids and their needs, aspirations, expectations, dreams and their fears and anxieties are what we must be both thinking about and wrestling with….not budgets, and building contracts (as in Parry Sound) and executive retreats. Losing sight of what is most important is only possible when the wrong questions are permitted to dominate the conversation, as they are and will continue to, without a substantive, tectonic shift in public attitudes, perceptions, and even demands.