Education Monopoly...

In his comments to Harris, Fp leader Robert Metz supported the PCs' Blueprint For Change as excellent suggestions "for within an educational monopoly run by government," but emphasized that the only long-term solution to Ontario's education crisis was to privatize the school system and to allow consumer choice in education. Metz reminded Harris that no matter how good certain changes may sound to improve government-run education, the Ontario government is broke and cannot possibly offer the kind of quality education that students, parents, and taxpayers expect.

• Establishment of minimum standards for every grade level which are comparable to those of the most advanced industrialized countries for maths, language and sciences. The proposed benchmarks are not acceptable standards since they simply entrench the existing level of mediocre achievement in our schools.

• Objective evaluation of the proficiency attained by students at each grade through testing which is uniform and calibrated across the system.

• Elementary school students should not become victims of a rigid teaching ideology. If students are not reaching curriculum objectives under the child-centered learning and whole language concepts - even with 'special needs' assistance - they should be exposed to teaching techniques which have a long and proven record of success around the world (such as teacher-directed education, phonics, etc.), before the system brands these students as 'learning disabled.'

Comparative results of educational achievement in mathematics and science consistently place Canada and Ontario at the lower end of the scale. The following charts and comments were provided by the Organization For Quality Education (OQE), which can be contacted at the address listed at the end of the charts.

These tests were given in 1991 to students in Ontario schools which were randomly selected for participation.

Canada did not do at all well, even though stronger countries such as Germany and Japan did not participate.

It is also important to know that for the 13 year old student IAEP test, most of the questions were from material in Ontario Gr.4 and Gr.5 textbooks. That is for students 9 and 10 years old. Earlier results showed that while Korea was marginally ahead of Ontario on simple questions, Korean students were five times better than Ontario students with the hardest level questions.

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Page last updated on April 28, 2002