Adam Riggio: Doug Ford’s American Model to Destroy Public Education
Credit: (Toronto Star/Google Images)
Written By: Adam Riggio
The Doug Ford government’s proposals for the future of Ontario’s schools are destructive, profiteering schemes whose purpose is to enrich the elite owners of foreign companies. Their ultimate effects on the people of Ontario is to destroy our workforce with a model for secondary education that has ruinously low standards. Doug Ford’s plan for Ontario’s students is to profit from making them stupid.
What Is Virtual Education?
This Fall, the Ford government will have integrated online or virtual courses, which students would take from home, into Ontario’s high school curriculums. These courses wouldn’t even be administered by local school boards, but directly from a central location for all of Ontario.
Taken out of the hands of the actual education professionals that the province already employs through our school boards, virtual courses will be delivered by American corporations that specialize in online learning. Several American states, particularly Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, South Carolina, and Michigan, have massively replaced high school classes in physical buildings with online courses that students do at home.
Such private online education companies are constant subjects of investigation after investigation into misconduct and poor standards. Yet both Republican and Democratic politicians in the United States continue to give them more and more power over high school education.
The corporate-controlled virtualization of high school education in the United States has proceeded as a cost-cutting measure. Fewer high school classrooms to maintain and fewer teachers to pay means large savings to give more corporate tax cuts. School closures occur consistently in rural and poor urban neighbourhoods, meaning that already-disadvantaged communities are saddled with inadequate education.
Making Millions from Ruining Our Education Standards
How do I know virtual education is so terrible? The proof comes from those American states, where high school courses have been delivered online for nearly a decade now. Just three years after Pennsylvania massively overhauled the school system in rural districts and poor Philadelphia neighbourhoods with online instruction, entire cohorts of these students failed standard state aptitude tests at rates as high as literally 100%.
One. Hundred. Percent. Failure. Similar performance has been seen over the last decade in the US states where online high school is common. This will be Ontario’s future if Doug Ford has his way.
Even the conservative Brookings Institute think tank acknowledges that cyber education results in worse educations for students, and that the students who must contend with such an inferior education are often marginalized from poverty, discrimination, and systematic racism. Where the system has been tried in Canada, such as in British Columbia, the quality of education outcomes has, as one would expect, plummeted.
Public school administrators and teachers understand how awful online courses are to instruct teenagers. But even if you believe that the Ford government is suffering a true fiscal shortfall, you would be wrong that virtualization for some students results in better care for the others.
In heavily virtualized districts, physical schools have closed, ranks of teachers have been decimated, and maintenance on the schools that remain has practically ended. In Philadelphia, thousands of students lucky enough to escape the miserable quality of online education instead suffer through classes held in buildings made of un-insulated metal. Their schools are nowhere near cold, sweltering in summer and beyond freezing in winter.
This Is the Future of Education Under Doug Ford
Strikes will continue this week at schools across Ontario. As the Ontarian people’s teachers protest to protect this province’s children from the greed of our government’s leaders (and their corrupt corporate partners), join them at their picket lines. Bring them coffee, snacks, hugs, and support. You will be out on the lines for the same reason they are.
For our children.
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