Dateline: East Hampton, NY

At last - a news item that couldn’t have been found in an Ontario newspaper! Among the usual reports of class trips, fundraising endeavors, sports teams, and so on, appears the following item. “Toni Ann Schmitt was a guest speaker at a PTA meeting held in the school library. Ms Schmitt is the program facilitator for Success for All, the reading program that the school has used for the past decade. She spoke about the program’s principles of prevention, early intervention, and relentlessness.” Success for All is a highly-scripted systematic phonics reading program that is one of a handful of reading programs with a strong research base. To the best of our knowledge, Success for All is not used in any Canadian publicly-funded school.

A full-page ad in the New York Times honours Peter Grauer, Chairman of Bloomberg, for supporting the Inner-City Scholarship Fund which guarantees inner-city students “a first-rate education by attending a Catholic school of their choice”. In the US, unlike in Ontario, the Catholic schools are private schools and provide a much superior service to that of Ontario’s publicly-funded Catholic schools; for example, New York Catholic schools have a 98% graduation rate, and 96% of their students attend post-secondary institutions. Canadians, too, can make it possible for a disadvantaged child to get a life-changing education - by supporting the Children First Scholarship Fund. 

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