The efficiency of the school is (for me) utterly beside the point. For example, let us suppose that in Country X there is a public and Scientology school and that the Scientology only school is outperforming the public school (the Scientology school is open to everybody as it is payed through taxes, but students must attend Scientology sermons and lectures). Would that still be an argument for retaining the Scientology only school.

Of course not; rather than use a slightly stronger performance to justify an unfair division of tax dollars, the point would be to find what makes one school system produce better results then the other and incooperate it into a unified school system.

For me the bottom line is this: I am currently paying for a Catholic school system which my children can never attend; not because the local Catholic school would not accept them, but because it would force them to go to Chapel and take Bible study classes. That for me is unacceptable from as secular and public school system, just as much as a Scientology or Muslic public school system would be unacceptable to most Canadians.

The choice is simple: either form a unified school system with, bearing all the problems and challenges from the change or open up the public funding to all faiths (yes, even to Scientology, as the government has no right to say which faith is worthy of public funding) with all the problems and challenges from the change.

If the Public schools aren’t performing, how are they going to perform when their numbers are further diminished by ever more separate systems? The answer is to fix the public school system and repeal the constitutional provision on the CDSBs, not to have seven tiny schools in the same neighbourhood, none of whom can afford any sort of extracurriculars or depth of courses.

I think it is worth asking why there is a half-point average variance between the two. Guessing, with no data to back it up, I’d hazard that it is because there are fewer ESL students in Toronto’s catholic schools. Why? Because most aren’t Catholic. If so, separate schools (slightly) over perform not because they are inherently more efficient, but because they have very different demographics. Obviously, if my assumption is wrong, feel free to correct me with data.

But some other important questions: Can we control these results for income? What about boards outside of Ontario?

None of this explains why, demographics aside, catholic schools do moderately better on this measure than secular ones. I suspect that it has less to do with anything inherent to the catholicness of the school, and more to do with the ability to attract different teachers or structural decisions that the separate board may have made some time ago.

It’s also a really good argument for integrating the two systems: If one is more efficient, wouldn’t you want to bring those educational efficiencies with it to the merged board?

The sheer number of parents willing to remove their children from the “public” system and spend a great deal of money on the hundreds of private or faith-based schools should be a strong indication to all that the public system, as it currently is structured, is failing a large portion of the population. Further concentration but removing funding to the Catholic Boards will only exacerbate the situation. It isn’t that the public system is bad, it is just that it does not provide a large segment of the population with the style of education they want for their children; what is worse, they have shown no interest in doing so. Faith based schools exist now – the question is, do we create a structure whereby they can be welcomed into the “public” sphere, where ciriculum and standards are monitored and maintained or do we further isolate these schools and communities so that the children are left out of the main stream – that is a recipe for disaster down the road – an open, diverse, dynamic education system has more than one or two streams – it has a multitude of views, styles and opinions, each one learning and gaining from the other. Inclusion of these schools can only broaden and strenghten our system and should be viewed as an opportunity to grow, not as a threat to withdraw from.

@Ron

What is it that faith schools can provide that the public school system cannot (thereby, in your words, failing a large part of the population)?

The discrepancy between faith and public schools is the major crux of your argument and I find it strange that you didn’t specify what public schools were missing.

Catholic schools have better test results because they have fewer ESL students and fewer learning disabled students. Parents of kids who need the most ed. supports are steered towards the real public schools by Catholic school principals who say there are more supports in the public system. Just another reason to have one system that will accommodate the needs of kids of all faiths in integrated schools. We should never encourage segegation by publicly funding any services that discriminate on prohibited human rights grounds, including religion, ethnicity, gender…

Our Catholic (anglophone) school board here in Calgary is also proud of the fact it outperforms the public board (note that we also have publicly funded francophone catholic and francophone public boards in the city, which is a bit ludicrous) on provincial exams and other performance indicators. However, I think such claims are likely to be at least somewhat flawed due to socioeconomic factors. The percent of ESL students was mentioned above, but the bottom line is that the public system HAS to accept any student (handicapped, learning disability, criminal tendencies) whereas the catholic board can discriminate considerably more. Since there are fewer catholic schools, spaced further apart, you will also get a much stronger effect of weak students/ disadvantaged families just choosing whichever school is closest to them – usually a public one.

I don’t know why the different provinces evolved in different directions on this issue – certainly Manitoba and NS , where I grew up, did not have publicly funded Catholic schools. In Alberta, the catholics seem to see it as a constitutional right, but I am not knowledgeable enough to know on what basis that claim is made. Certainly the division of our proposed unified Francophone board along religious lines was based largely on the argument that
there was no reason why linguistic rights should take precence over religious rights.

I have not seen one single thought-through plan that abolishes Catholic schools, which accommodates 1/3 of Ontario’s students (and as noted above, perform better than the public schools). I’m talking about specifics, not merely the theory of what abolishing them means and why, but rather, the actual mechanics of moving 1/3 of the students, teachers, trustees, etc to another system. The only party that supports this approach is the Greens, and they haven’t outlined a detailed plan (I know most of people who are arguing here are NDP supporters — why isn’t the NDP advocating for a single school system?) I look forward to seeing such a detailed plan.

My argument against reform isn’t on theoretical grounds. My problem is that these reforms are symbolic, administrative judggling, that do nothing to improve education in Ontario. Some here have argued that merging is necessary because of declining enrollment and funding shortages. I agree that fixing these problems would indeed be about improving education.

But those problems aren’t because we have separate school boards. Funding shortages is actually the easier of the two problems to deal with. Funding shortage aren’t because there are too many school boards. Shortages are because the Harris government reversed the funding of education and social services — uploading education to the province (thus making funding more dependent on the provincial government) and downloading social services to the municipalities. It was a terrible mistake. The Liberals have not yet reversed that mistake because they’ve: a) spent their money making the re-investments in core public programs that were not made under Harris, and b) they wanted to eliminate the $5b deficit. Should they have also reversed municipal downloading? Yes. Was it feasible given a) and b) above? I don’t think so. But, that’s what one of the major issues of the upcoming campaign will be — who is best placed to reverse downloading and fix the funding formula? So let’s fix the root problem.

The second problem — declining enrollment — is going to be a problem in some communities regardless of whether there are separate schools or not (but where it makes sense to merge boards in these declining regions, I think it should be a decision made by the school boards, parents, teachers, etc within those communities. We should not have a one-size-fits-all policy dictated by Queen’s Park that forces school boards to merge).

Declining enrollment is the result of demographic and economic shifts that are fundamentally geographic (people having fewer kids, an aging population, and most importantly the post-globalization trend towards urban agglomeration — i.e. younger people moving to the GTA and other urban centres). To the extent that this trend can be mitigated (and it can only be to some extent), it will be through regional economic development to create and sustain jobs outside of urban agglomerations. We’re seeing the reverse problem in the GTA — class sizes getting bigger because of rapid population growth. And I’ve discussed these problems — regional disparities — on this blog many times.

But these issues cannot be laid at the doorstep of separate schools. Let’s fix the root problems before we dismantle what is a fundamentally good education system.

Greg,

Your comment about Catholic schools outperforming public schools by definition implies that being “Catholic” means better education. It is possible that there are fewer Catholic students in poorer areas, or that students enrolled in Catholic schools have parents that are more involved in their education. It could also be that the Catholic board is managing their resources better. But if they are, it’s not because they are Catholic, it is because the Toronto board is more efficient and has better staff. Merging the school boards will not change this. What we should do is examine the reasons for the disparity and see if we can apply what the Catholic board is doing to the public board.

I would also question whether or not this theory applies outside of Toronto. While Toronto is an important place, it is still less than a quarter of Ontario’s population.

Tim — no, being Catholic does not mean better education; that’s purely your personal opinion, which I do not share. This post was in response to a reader who asked for proof to my claim elsewhere that, on average, separate schools out-perform public schools. And they do (in Toronto; as I noted, I will try to look at the rest of the province but as you can imagine there are a lot of schools!). You can rationalize that slight advantage however you want, but if your primary concern is the quality of education in Ontario, it is a pretty strange to want to close down the better-performing schools.

And that’s the crux of the matter. The drive to abolish separate schools isn’t driven by what makes education better, it’s driven by ideology and symbolism. If the whole problem is that separate schools can discriminate up to high school level, then let’s deal with that by attaching conditions on those public funds (“thou shall not discriminate if thou wants public funding”). What I object to is the simplistic notion that you can just snap your fingers and wish away 1/3 of the education system by fiat without consulting with the people who will be most effected, and thinking that there would be no serious consequences of doing so.

“I’m talking about specifics, not merely the theory of what abolishing [Catholic schools] means and why, but rather, the actual mechanics of moving 1/3 of the students, teachers, trustees, etc to another system.”

Since your argument against the PC plan is based on a theory that accuses it of standing on the wrong principles and claims it would ruin the actual mechanics of a system that already performs fairly well, then it seems fair that other posters be able to argue for a single public system on “theoretical grounds,” too, before providing a detailed plan. I did this in a previous post that was up for a moment, but it appears to have been taken down. Fortunately, others have continued to raise the reasons why we ought to change the system.

But if a detailed plan of a good single public education system is to be outlined without knowing the ideas that guide its design, it seems the only way to proceed is to just presume the ideas behind it are good and sound (or why bother with the plan, right?). From this point on, opponents can only say a single system “sounds like a good idea but won’t work.” To convince such skeptics, “we” (this can’t include me) have to show how the alternative system will work before it’s even created. Unfortunately, there are problems with this approach right from the start. First of all, it stifles spontaneity and contingency that is necessary in creating new things that, strictly speaking, cannot be fully known before they’re realized (building social systems is more of an art than a science, otherwise humans would be robots). Secondly, it relegates the debate from a democratic one to de facto elitism that’s limited to highly skilled and specialized technocrats (the Robert McNamara’s of the world). Architects conveniently qualify.

I’m no technocrat, so I can’t win this debate, much less participate in it. But I do know there is empirical evidence of single public systems that can be built from separate systems and work well. Manitoba, Quebec and Newfoundland have done it. I’d suspect a plan for Ontario could be inspired by these precedents which by no means form an exhaustive list of plans that work. Of course, Ontario’s plan cannot just be a carbon copy of these models; it would require openness to spontaneity and contingency so that adjustments could be made to account for regional variations and unforeseen variables along the way.

I hope some technocrats conjure up detailed plans for a system that matches the principles of human rights and quality education most people have been advocating, especially since the current system obviously isn’t living up to the standards of many Ontarians. I don’t care which person or party does this, so long as the people who come up with such a plan make sure it’s rooted in the right principles. But I dare not speak of principles again in case I offend the prerogative of technocrats to have a monopoly on political decision-making.

Simon — you approach this issue with all the seriousness of recent philosophy undergrad (I wonder why that is?). If you want to debate the virtues of Kant, Hegel, or Nietszche, I’m more than happy to oblige (but of course, I’m just a simply country boy, a mere technocrat no less, certainly not so sophisticated as a someone so learned as yourself). But in this realm (where real lives and not merely vacuous prose are at stake), I suspect you’re going to have to do better than reciting Phil 101 and “spontaneity/contingency” to convince the people of Ontario that we should dismantle the education system.

simon – i’ve search the spam queue and did not see another reply from you to this post, only one from the redux post.

Greg -

I don’t think the data comparing average public and seperate school test scores is at issue. What is being questioned is what that data can tell us. You imply that it tells us that Seperate schools are on average “better performing.” Actually, it really doesn’t tell us anything at all about the schools. It only tells us the STUDENTS in those schools are (marginally, on average) better performing. The natural question that follows is why students perform better in Seperate schools, with the quality of the institution itself being only one of many possibitilies. Other posters have offered interesting possibilities such as socio-economic difference, ESL enrollment, and ability to discriminate as reasons. The data you’ve provided is silent on all of this, and stands as an interesting correlation void of any context.

Tim — I’m sure we can all make up whatever rationale we want to justify why separate schools perform better. We can question the standard scores themselves. I don’t deny there might be structural differences.

But keep in mind that I published this data as a response to a comment that asked for information so he could verify my claim that separate schools, on average, out-perform public ones. That claim was in the context of a larger discussion about withdrawing funding from 1/3 of Ontario’s public schools (i.e. the separate schools). My point was, why penalize schools that are performing well? From my perspective, the impetus to withdraw funding from 1/3 of Ontario’s public schools is not about improving the quality of education.

The only argument forwarded so far that remotes touches on improving actual performance is the argument that declining enrollment and under-funding make merging boards more “efficient” (i.e. the theory that there will be administrative cost savings so more money can be spent in the classroom). I don’t buy the “efficiency” argument.

But if separate and public boards want to merge, I’m all for it. I think separate schools are becoming more like public schools every year. I’ve discussed declining enrollment elsewhere. But let’s be clear — we know why some boards are under-funded — it’s because Harris uploaded funding to the province, making them entirely dependent on the province’s funding formula, which we all agreed needs to be fixed (but more importantly, we need to fix municipal downloading).

So it’s important to see these numbers in the context of the broader debate.

If you feel so strongly about withdrawing funding from separate schools, I would really encourage everyone here to vote for the Green Party on October 10th. The Greens are the only party willing to do so. I would love to see the Green Party make a break-through in this election, so that we have more legitimate political choices.

I actually don’t disagree with what you are saying – Greg – in that I don’t believe withdrawing funding from the Seperate schools makes any practical sense at all. Having publically funded Roman Catholic schools is a throwback and isn’t really consistent with where we have moved as a country and a province over recent decades; changing it now, however, is not politically or logistically feasible. There are also bigger fish to fry in debating public policy in education like the funding formula, the role of school boards, the curriculum etc.

My argument was with your contention that the 1/3 of schools in the seperate system are “better performing” and the implication that these are somehow better administered schools with better teachers or better curriculae. That simply does not follow from the data you provided for all the reasons already discussed, and in itself isn’t an argument for keeping the Seperate schools. That was my point.