Bluewater update No. 16

Another update, yet again beaten to the punch by the folks over at MendEd-- some of whom are apparently signatories to the letter sent to Premier Dalton McGuinty calling for a commission of inquiry into the Bluewater District School Board. A draft of the letter, without signatories, is posted at MendEd. It was also written up in the Sun Times. From the draft letter written by Peter Ferguson (the same person who filed the plagiarism complaint against superintendents and called in the OPP.

This past spring, when the public’s fury with the board’s conduct coalesced, your Minister of Education did not establish an arm’s-length inquiry into both sides of the problem. Instead she sent a technician to aid the board, saying repeatedly that she would vigorously support the board, and the board only.
This technician refused to speak with anyone who was not a member of the board, the administration or some like institutional organization. He refused to speak with the public or any citizen. Public concerns were systematically scorned.

From the article:

Nine people signed a letter to McGuinty in mid-December saying an inquiry into the board's activities is necessary and that he had until Jan. 8 to take action.
The nine include Lesa McDougal, the founder of the Bluewater Citizens for Education, and John Fearnall, the founder of MendEd:Mending Education, local action groups, and Deborah Whipple of Aurora, the chairwoman of the Parents of Gifted Advocacy Network.

The article quotes Ferguson but neglects to mention he's appears to be the principal author of the letter requesting the inquiry.
This leaves me wondering whether Ferguson read the report received by trustees in November. I wonder-- is that the very same "technician" referred to in the letter who was involved in this report? The report that spoke to families who've left the board's schools? That surveyed members of the public? That held public meetings where, as best as I can tell from this post, any member of the public was able to speak?
What are these people still seeking an inquiry into?
Further, in their nine demands -- to be responded to by Friday -- they ask for "redress where damage has been done," and that a "proper" complaints procedure be established for the future.
Yes, the BDSB trustees haven't (at least not as I can tell through the media) indicated how they will implement the recommendations of the November report. They should be held accountable to implementing -- or at least beginning the process -- those recommendations.
What good, other than ego, would an inquiry do? Particularly when we're 10 months away from an election? If Ferguson and his supporters truly don't want "trustees to waste further effort on a venture for which they are simply not ethically competent," well, put more of your money where your mouth is. Nominations for Bluewater District School Board trustee opened Monday.
If you can get the support to get elected, then you can implement all the changes you want, bring "redress" to the afflicted and move on.

The forgotten filers

Jan. 4 was the first day in Ontario that one could file his/her nomination papers and run for trustee within a publicly funded school board. The nomination period closes at 2 p.m. on Sept. 10 and voting day across the province for civic politicians and school board trustees is set for Oct. 25.
While there was a plethora of coverage across Ontario on the early birds filing for municipal office, there was scant if any on those who might be filing for trustee. No big surprise, even though some of these trustees oversee budgets that are larger than any of the municipalities within their district. For example, the public school board I cover, with a annual budget of over $700 million easily outweighs any local council I cover-- the County of Oxford would have the largest budget in my coverage area and it sits at approx $150 million. I don't know the City of London's total budget (including all federal and provincial transfers, not just the taxpayer levy) but if it's over $700 million it's not by much. Yes, yes... I am well aware trustees don't have all the supposed flexibility that councils do in determining budgets, but it's still one of the things they are responsible for and held to account over.
With the changes in Bill 177 and the pending provincial-interest regulations, those elected in this vote will be a cohort of trustees that have a lot of work ahead of them in terms of governing directors of education and board staff members through the process of planning, setting and being held accountable for all sorts of targets. Will the passage of the bill weed out trustees?
In many districts, this year's election is also the first opportunity for those communities still angry about school-closure decisions to enforce a consequence on trustees-- particularly in cases where the trustee(s) elected from the area supported a controversial closure. Will there be a slate of anti-closure trustees elected across the province? This vote will come in the middle of reviews at a number of boards and could -- might -- change the direction / flavour / outcome of those reviews. I've already noticed one trustee who's started abstaining from any vote relating to an accommodation review. The same trustee who, in the first round of reviews before her board, voted in favour of some closures (urban and rural) and voted against others (rural). I was struck with interest by her sudden decision to abstain from a series of votes relating to two reviews in December 2009.
Further, in those boards that seem to have courted controversy this past term -- ie: Bluewater, Toronto District Catholic -- which incumbents will run again and who will rise above the fray to challenge them?
Coverage can be key in trustee elections since very rarely to never are opportunities created for public all-candidate trustee debates. Outside of any promotion / advertising / campaigning a particular candidate might decide to take on, media often offer the only wide-scale, accessible platform for voters to get to know their candidates. We can also seriously impact outcomes-- the first trustee vote I covered saw an opportunity to call a candidate on a statement he made regarding his attendance at board meetings. On election night, he subsequently commented on the impact of newspaper headlines on his loss. In the 2006 vote, the London Free Press did some routine background checking on a Catholic school board trustee candidate and uncovered a less-than-glamorous past that led to that candidate's loss.
The election will add some additional, er, spice, to the coming 10 months of K-12 education in this province. I look forward to it.

On being watched

I received a most intriguing e-mail a few days ago, as I was returning from holidays and getting prepped for a weekend shift at the newspaper. It comes from the University of Toronto / Ontario Studies in Education's Research Supporting Practice in Education department, which has setup a 'Facts in Education' project.
From the e-mail and web page:

Facts in Education aims to correct significant factual errors about education that appear in various news media sources across Canada, and to create wide awareness of the correct information. We are a non-partisan effort and are not affiliated with any particular position, opinion or organization.  We respect the right of any commentator to hold their own views and opinions.  We will not be taking issue with the expression of opinion.  Rather we are solely concerned with stories that are inconsistent with the available evidence and are therefore misleading to those who read, see or hear them.  For example, we sometimes see stories contending that nobody fails in schools any more.  This is completely inconsistent with the evidence, which clearly shows that a large number of students fail courses and fail to graduate in a timely way. 

...

These distinguished panellists will be working with our team in order to ensure that our response to factual errors contains the actual facts in education as supported by empirical evidence.  We will be distributing our response to the original media source of the story as well as to various other media outlets, and to educational stakeholders in Ontario.

The purpose of this project is not to critique any journalist or news outlet, but simply to ensure that people are aware of the real Facts in Education, facts which are backed by substantial research.  In this respect, we invite you to contact us if you have any questions or comments or if there is something we can do to support your coverage of educational issues in Canada.

The project's participants are a who's who of education in this country (or at least this province), with the RSPE headed by two-time Ontario deputy minister of education Ben Levin, who also held numerous high-level positions in Manitoba prior to coming to Ontario. Others involved include Avis Glaze, Charles Pascal, a few current and former ministry people and other OISE folks.

The project also has a blog, which I'll be putting up on the blogroll as soon as this is posted. So far, it has one post on an erroneous charter-school reference in a Winnipeg Free Press article from last month.

Kudos to those involved in this project, and I'll say in complete and utter self-interest I hope my reporting never makes the list.


Addendum
Moira MacDonald wrote about this Wednesday-- we were on the same wave length for the most part.

Holiday hiatus

This blog is on hiatus until at least Jan. 4, 2010.
Please take some time to enjoy and celebrate Christmas (if you celebrate— if not, well, enjoy the time off work and celebrate the season) and have a wonderful new year.

Reporting on report cards

So Tuesday we were bombarded by a smorgasbord of reportage on report cards.
As best as I can tell from my siftings, the Globe and Mail kicked things off on Tuesday, even including a link to the Ministry of Education memo that hasn't been posted elsewhere in its usual locations. While dialoguing with Kelly Pedro in London, she mentioned she had touched on report-card reform at the end of November— however I did note in a Dec. 23 tweet she was working on report cards again.
Throughout the day Tuesday I noticed report cards as the topic of an Ontario Today phone-in on CBC Radio One as well as a number of localized stories from various sister papers— St. Catharines' stands out most prominently.
It got to the point — and showed the power of certain media outlets — that Minister Kathleen Wynne issued a special statement on the matter Tuesday afternoon. From the statement:

The fall Progress Report Card will facilitate better communication among parents, teachers and students by assessing students early in the school year in a new format. It will evaluate students in the same areas as the report card but instead of assigning a grade or mark, it will indicate how a student is progressing — very well, well or with difficulty.

Those who might look at this as a victory for teachers and their federations should perhaps take a step back and reevaluate.
The change eliminates a grading system, be it letters or percentages, from the fall report card. It doesn't eliminate the actual report. Parents should still receiving something, in writing, from their child's teacher with commentary on the child's progress to-date in the class. While I've never written a classroom report card, I've completed a number of written evaluations over years (Johnny is a great floater... he needs to remember to keep his belly up and his head back when on his back, and so on) and have always found the ones requiring original thought to be more time consuming and hence more meaningful than a system of plugging in grades and choosing from a range of pre-selected commentary. Good teachers should always be able to, virtually on the spot, provide an up-to-date verbal progress report on their student, and be able to back their statement up with written notes from evaluations.
This reportage and reaction also shows, I believe, the ever-present range of parental involvement. For those parents who monitor the children's work at school, keep up-to-date with what's being assigned, attend parent-teacher or meet-the-teacher events at the school, etc., a fall progress report — with or without grades — won't tell them much they weren't already aware of. It's the detached parents, the ones that sit back and react to the news their children are struggling in school, who will see a change.
But even then, this doesn't strike me as something that earth-shattering. That parent can still read the progress report, get angry and take away the Nintendo (I guess a Wii now, as opposed to the predecessor Commodore 64 in my day) until the next report card.

Year in review

I did this on my other blog already, but wanted to put a little more time and thought into the one here, looking at the year and trying to pick out the significant issues that touched on K-12 education in Ontario. It's been an interesting year and one where, looking back, I'm happy to have started and kept up with blogging about. This venue has given me so many opportunities to delve into issues, some provincial in scope, some very local, that I never would have learned about or written about within the bounds of the job I'm paid to do within my newsroom.
So, here are a few significant events from the past year that stand out, in no particular order.

• Settling the latest round of four-year collective agreements with all employee groups. This year marked the first time all school-board employees settled agreements with their employers and brought their contracts into the same four-year cycle. It was a hugely instructive experience showing which unions could work within the provincial discussion table format and achieve success for their membership, and the few who dug in their heels and may some day feel the wrath of their members when they realize they've fallen behind their peers.
• Reports, reports, reports. There were a few that will forever change the face of education in this province -- some are broken out into individual items below -- and there are some still underway (curriculum, municipal partnership, education funding formula review) that are due in 2010-11.
• "Planning and possibilities: The report of the declining enrolment working group," lays out recommendations and a vision for how the province should both encourage the modernization of its schools while respecting a need for local decision-making within the acknowledgment the status quo cannot continue. The draft shared-use policy circulated this summer was in partial response to one of the first things Education Minister Kathleen Wynne said she would take on from this report.
• "Our best future: Early learning in Ontario," affectionately called simply the 'Pascal report.' This report, and the ensuing implementation of its recommendations -- starting with full-day kindergarten -- will reshape how the government delivers education and a myriad of other supports to families with young children in this province. Its ripple-effect will, whether you support the program or not, be felt for a long, long time. If I were to rank this list, this report and the ensuing developments would be at or very near the top.
  
• Bill 177: The Student Achievement and School Board Governance Act, passed and given royal assent in December of this year. The bill, combined with the regulations from 2006's Bill 78, is going to change how K-12 education is governed in Ontario, particularly for those trustees and boards who've not yet adapted to realize their role is one of corporate governance, not middling and meddling with individual issues. A hastily circulated and drafted set of provincial-interest regulations caused a kerfuffle in the summer, however the minister continues to say these regulations will be passed, but in a more consultative fashion. 
• The formation of the Community Schools Alliance, earlier this summer, provided an outlet for disillusioned, angry, mostly rural municipalities to vent over the school-closure process in place at school boards and the province's own guidelines. The group made headlines as it asked Minister of Education Kathleen Wynne to impose a 'smart' moratorium on school closures where the local municipality and community disputed the closure. She rightfully rejected the request. A subsequent letter-writing campaign seems to have fallen flat and I'm personally still waiting for the alliance to post a list of its member municipalities.
• ARCs, ARCs, ARCs: Dozens of these school-closure reviews -- the first round for many boards since new guidelines were adopted in 2006, the second for others -- completed their work this past calendar year, foisting recommendations on trustees across Ontario. Some of these committees came up with truly unique and inspired recommendations for the future of schooling in their communities. Too many dug in their heels and adopted a status-quo attitude or a belief everything that's open should stay open forever, just the way it is today or modernized. Revised guidelines were released in June, which many boards have now adopted as they launch the next round of reviews.
• Oliver Carroll, the Toronto District Catholic School Board trustees ousted after a successful court challenge under the provincial conflict of interest legislation. Ripple effects are still being felt across every other school board, as well as within the TDCSB with two more trustees now under the spotlight.
  
• The Bluewater District School Board: It deserves its own mention here, because if boards haven't been paying attention to this group of trustees this past year, it's at their own peril. The BDSB saw resignations, public complaints and the appointment of Mr. Fix-its in an attempt to quell concerns surrounding improper decision making -- some of which still haven't been resolved.
• Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Niagara District Secondary School. For a decision made in June 2008, its impact stretched into the fall of 2009 as a result of the vote taken over a year earlier. Enrolment remains stubbornly below the arbitrary 350-student level the school was to reach by Oct. 31 to remain open. The fight continues for those unwilling to let this one go, which includes a council determined to use any measure, no matter how legitimate, to cause the school board difficulty.

 As the year has gone on, this has become a place for a handful of people to regularly post their thoughts on my thoughts, and I thank you for dipping your toes into my sandbox and contributing to the discussion. I've received numerous e-mails, some of which have been exciting. Several posts have elicited e-mails with more information that may pop out in future posts as I read, digest and analyze the info. To give an idea of what's bringing people here, I also include my top-10 posts since I started tracking them in April-May. There are a few caveats by definition here as these are the specific URLs that have drawn traffic-- the bulk of you reading this are just reading it on the front page, were I can't track which post necessarily brought you here.

1. Bill 177 
2. EQAO and conflicts 
3. NOTL shenanigans (later updated)
4. The board, the OMB, the town... and the lawsuit? 
5. ETFO and EQAO 
6. The Community Schools Alliance 
7. Refocusing the sunshine 
8. Toronto ARC coverage ramps up 
9. Toronto ARCs it up, finally 
10. TorSun backs TDSB ARCs 

 As I write this, the blog has attracted over 6,000 visits -- which includes over 2,500 unique visitors -- and over 10,000 page views since I started publishing in March. It's on the radar for those who are interested in education in Ontario, be they trustees, parents, Ministry of Education folk or other journalists. Far better than I ever could have anticipated, so thanks.

Asked and answered

Moira Macdonald asks in today's Toronto Sun whether or not retired teachers are hogging supply teaching jobs. Um, yes. Definitely. Most definitely. I have noted (but not really written) for some time that retirees coming back as occasional teachers is the biggest double-dip scam within the public service that I'm aware of. I can't think of another job paid from the public purse where retirees are treated so well.
As she points out, retired teachers (any certified teachers, regardless of what position they held at retirement) can return to work for up to 95 days without any penalty to their pension.
Not to mention, as Macdonald also notes, current OT contracts have gotten richer and richer over the past two cycles, to the point that you're paid a grid salary virtually from the first day of any supply placement. A few contracts ago, the grid rate only applied on OT placements once they hit a certain number of days. These were put in place so that new teachers could start accumulating seniority during their time in the OT gulag as they waited for a permanent contract— prior contracts would have many of these new teachers working very short-term placements for months and months and months and not gaining any seniority.
I still joke with a former Thames Valley staffer who retired as executive superintendent, was called to be acting director of education and then called upon again to be a superintendent of schools within the past three years. Every time I see him at a board function I ask if he's been pulled in from retirement again— but the point goes to the fact he can be pulled in without any pension penalty within the threshold.
All that said, a local contact within the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation explained to me earlier this year that the number of these double-dippers should start dropping soon. The 95-day penalty free ride is only for the first three years of retirement, after which the number of penalty free days drops to 20. The retirement hump — the milk and honey years for new teachers when full-time permanent contract positions were in abundance due to all the boomers who'd reached their 85 factor and were retiring — has passed in both elementary and secondary. For every year that goes by the number of teachers who are at 20 days will increase. More retirees with fewer penalty free days should make a difference in the number of days that become available as a result. Many of these provisions were brought in anticipation of this retirement hump, in that briefest of times when there may have been a teachers' shortage in this province.
Enforcement of the threshold is key, as Macdonald points out. Some boards are better than others, and some boards are not only acutely aware of the issue but also report monthly on the size of their supply lists and the percentage of each list that is made up of retirees.