Well I might expect that the public schools in Toronto Mississauga, Markham and many other centres would love to exclude all of their ESL students before the testing is done as well but apparently they are part of the literacy crisis in Ontario unlike the kids in private schools who are just an embarrassment to private education.

Public education would also like to exclude ll of its low SES schools as well since they don’t have a match in the private system. Oh will you look at that the public system is excellent all of a sudden.

Sauce for the goose…...

Forgotten again, perhaps purposely, is parental satisfaction when choosing private education for their children.

From H. Walberg’s 2007 book,  “School Choice: The Findings”:

“Parental satisfaction is an important measure of the success of schools. Parents have the right and duty to oversee their childrens’ education, have the strongest incentives to do it well, and have shown the ability to choose it wisely.  Largely aligned with parents’ views, students say they prefer the greater academic challenges and accountability from their schools. The public increasingly wants parents to be able to choose the schools their children attend, whether public or private.  And when allowed to choose charter, voucher, or independent or sectarian private schools, parents are more satisfied. Also indicative of discontent with schools is the estimated one million U.S. children being homeschooled.

“On these points public educators’ views differ generally and sharply from those of their parent, student, and citizen clients. They generally maintain that their curriculum offerings are sufficiently rigorous, and they adamantly oppose school choice. Their long standing views appear to explain the continuation of poor results even with substantially rising expenditures. Such prevailing views may continue to prevent effective, efficient reforms, from improving results in the public sector.

Walberg is published by the CATO Institute a radical outfit dedicated to the total privatization of public education in the USA. I for one am shocked I tell you shocked.

Alberta has a parental satisfaction annual questionnaire for all their school boards,reported annually to the Ministry.

Alberta seems more supportive to parents all around.I find the Ministry watches the school board`s results and has awards for the ones that have high success in the provincial tests.They also can write for grants and get the money they need to purchase programs and trainings for their teachers.
In Ontario ,the school boards are warned against buying programmes like mine-they want to train the teachers.
I virtually have most boards saying-we make our own -and of course they are forced to pay for the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat`s workshops and trainings.
A monopoly.

Also,as one Superintendent from a Catholic board said and a Psychologist from a public board-“Ontario is still a bastion of whole language”.
They`re frustrated too.

terrific post Malkin. Puts a lie to Mr. Little’s spin in the best way possible - using facts.

SQE trumps once again.

you have no reason to be pretend to be “shocked” Doug. You know well what this forum and SQE were all about when you decided to spend an amazing amount of time here.

What’s shocking is that these good folks still put up with your nonsense that gets in the way of the kind of discussion most here would like but get derailed from because we pander to you. I think it’s your purposeful plot to never allow the choice discussion to take place.

Here’s a little something from the Globe and Mail today
that may interest both the tolerant and intolerant here.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/quebec/quebec-jesuit-school-wins-right-to-teach-ethics-from-religious-perspective/article1612455/

Good for Jean Charest. About time these folks were told to put some tolerance in their curriculum. Teaching that one religion is superior to another is hateful and intolerant.

This kind of religious teaching reminds me of Iran.

Is the Fraser Institute about to throw its troops under the bus.

In a piece for the National Post today, a series of very right wing commentators have reversed the entire conservative critique in Canada. The old “Canada has a crappy system” has been totally replaced by “Canada hs an excellent school system mainly due to its private and ctholic schools.“

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/What+Canada+teach+about+education/3226361/story.html

I’m sure Malkin, Doretta, Nancy, Jo Anne, and many others will be forced to do back flips to catch up with the party line. I’m going to love watching this one. For decades now, the FI, CDH SQE etc have been saying Canada has a bad school system because it refuses to use SQE endorsed pedagogical methods such as phonemic awareness, Direct Instruction and basic math.

The denial had to come to an end at some point because the international data from OECD, PISA, TIMSS etc just kept saying, anyone with this line is either seriously misinformed or lying because Canada is a world leader in education.

Trying to Judo the same results, these right wing “researchers” and I use the term loosely, have decided that they can no longer claim that Canada has a weak system when it is one of the world’s strongest systems. Now they claim that it is strong due to private schools in BC, Charter schools in Alberta and Catholic schools in Ontario. Other provinces except Quebec are totally insignificant in size.

Of course this is also a joke. The private schools population in BC and the Charter school population in Alberta are too small to have any effect even as “competition”. The Catholic school system in Ontario is huge, roughly 1/3 of the system but show results better than private schools but not in any significant way.

Canada has a much better school system for a few reasons as the OECD points out. #1 is that povety is Canada, although too high, is radically mitigated by our socialist programs so our poor still do badly but nearly so badly as the Americans who have “written off” their poor black and hispanic kids as a cheap internal work force.

Within schools Canada balances its spending much better. Jonathan Kozal’s book Savage Inequalities outlines the fact that America spends far too much on students who don’t need it in the suburbs and far too little on inner city ghetto schools.

In Canada, the right wing education lobby has a few component parts.

The Generals

These are the privatizers. They may be politically, economically or religiously motivated. The Fraser Institute and CD Howe re at the core here and Malkin is well connected at this juncture.

Like conservatives everywhere, some are politically motivated. They just believe all of that Ayn Rand nonsense. Some are economically motivated in that they believe they can cash in on privatization. Some are motivated by religion and believe the secular Godless system undermines their beliefs.

The Troops

The troops are a mixed group. First are the parents of less than successful students, often SE kids who believe the system is responsible for their child’s lack of success. The second are actually educators who support pedagogicl methods that are out of favour with the hegemonic forces in education. Some are politically conservative “nostalgists”. They remind me of the angry old man on Saturday Night Live. “Why in my day we screwed the desks to the floor in straight rows and we beat kids with a strap and we made kids stand in the corner or we put a dunce cap on kids and we loved it.“

The troops have been thrown under the bus by the generals because they have changed the political line. Better run to the barn and see what is written there now. Winston Smith will be rewriting the history pretty soon. Try to catch up to the new line.

Just tuned into this page and the last poster sounds postitively apoplectic. 

I read the article in the National Post and
wonder if I read the right one.  From what I read, the authors say that we should have more vouchers like BC, more competion through funding religious schools, more funding of private schools like Quebec,  and that more spending doesn’t lead to improvement.

I also checked the Fraser Institute’s website and from what I can tell their motto is still “A free and prosperous world through choice, markets, and responsibility.“

So your doomsday scenario may be a little premature no?

The entire point is that the general view here is that Canada has a weak education system and needs pedagogical change driven by privatization to improve.

These OTHER right wingers quote the same sources I have quoted ad nausium to show that in fact, Canada has an excellent education system by international standards.

Their reasons are off the wall but they use the accepted international scores to show that Jo-Anne and Nancy and Chuck and John L and Wayne, are all totally OB with their endless attempts to try to pull Canada down.

As might have been anticipated but, of course was not anticipated because the hidden hand of the market sorts out all things.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/39186.html

no. The “entire point” of the NP article is that choice and support for that choice is what makes us different and therefore on the move. 

There’s nothing at all in this column that spins Doug’s way.

What I see is Doug spinning hard to discredit the choice factor while boosting his own agenda and his little website as well as lacking on comprehension.

No threat whatsoever from the enlightened and supporters of choice.

Chuck I’m sure you can read. The basic thrust of the SQE position and its supporters is that the Canadian system is rotten. This is constsntly reenforced by Joanne Bev Nancy Sheep Wayne and many others. The article says that people with this line are WRONG. Of course they attempt to claim it is due to choice that Canada has one of the worlds finest systems but we need to start where they are. Our math problem begins like this;

GIVEN Canada has one of the worlds handful of outstanding systems, why is it so. The OECD itself says it is due to much smaller income gaps in Canada than USA and countries with small gaps generally do better. You need to reevaluate your position that Canada has a rotten system when the whole world says this is a lie.