Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star

The Ford government’s onslaught against reason and science continues. Removing the cap on class sizes in JK/SK and the Primary grades (1,2,3) demonstrates an antiquated, conservative ideological view regarding the workings of classes of this age. Doug Ford views teaching young children as women’s work and a simple task of supervision and control with a few learning outcomes. Nothing could be further from the truth.  This is the view of most people in the general public, politicians and even educators themselves) hold in our a top down patriarchal system of teaching and its value and impact. They are entirely wrong.

It is exactly the reverse. Teachers of primary children are the most skilled and least respected professionals in the province due to the age of the children they teach. Our hierarchy of respect that places university professors at the top of the value ladder and ECE teachers (daycare) at the bottom of the social scale is a throwback that should be abandoned and replaced with a balanced valuing of primary and ECE teachers on an equal level with secondary and college and university professors. The education system itself gives virtually no professional respect and responsibility surrounding decision-making to elementary school teachers. This would be unheard of in the university system. Our respect should be based not on the complexity of the knowledge that is imparted but on the complexity of the responsibility that the teacher holds. Kindergarten teachers have full parental and professional responsibility for the children they teach, whereas as children age, they take on more responsibility for their own learning until in university they are mature adults. Teaching is a gender-based profession.

The relief that most parents evoke when their children go back to school is demonstrative of the level of complexity and care that is required to teach and socialize a single child let alone a single family’s children. Teachers instruct ten to fifteen families children simultaneously in a cramped classroom every day for five hours a day, five days a week for ten months of the school year.  It is gruelling work. No other profession does this.

In fact the scientific knowledge base establishes that learning in the Primary grades is crucial to future success as an adult. The child/student you have in Grade 3 is generally the adult you will see later in life – for better or worse. Many studies have shown that smaller class sizes in these divisions result in better long-term learning and fewer problems later in the students school life. Packing children into a classroom like sardines hearkens back to the “factory-schooling” model of education that existed in the early 20th century where male students were warehoused until they met minimum graduation standards.  It also ignores the learning styles and needs of the students who are active, participatory learners. Kindergarten classes often seem chaotic but they are carefully controlled and planned chaos organized by the teacher around specific play-based learning outcomes while at a particular centre. Sand centres, reading centres, block centres and listening centres all serve a specific purpose in allowing students to engage with the material that is there while socializing in an appropriate way with other children.  We continue to underestimate the value of this in the short term or particularly the long term.

Kindergarten classrooms are busy places. Even with two adults in the room it with 30 children is a challenge for the adults to constantly monitor every child every minute of the day. There is a significant safety concern alone here. Even at the current numbers two adults cannot meet the needs of every student – not even close. Kindergarten classes should be slashed to a hard maximum of 20 students with two adults to create positive momentum for children. Adding even more students to this mix will only accomplish warehousing of children and definitely degrade the short-term and particularly long-term abilities of these students. While this may be convenient for parents it is a disaster for their children. Anyone wo has been in a kindergarten class when it is operating knows that there is barely a place to step without care or a second to spare. The physical size of kindergarten classes prevails against this direction.

This is what happens when you let people who know nothing about education or as in the  case of parents thing they know everything about education run education. They run it into the ground. We cannot continue to run education on a four-year political cycle. We continue to undervalue ECE, JK/SK and Primary teachers who remain primarily women while they are doing the most important work in education. We have been doing this for a century. We need educational reform not educational regression. Increasing class sizes or privatizing education is penny wise and pound foolish.