Let’s fix our local schools, not flee them
School choice helps cause declining public schools, and that creates chumps who vote for Trumps, writes Heather Mallick.

Thestar.com
By HEATHER MALLICK
Dec. 11, 2016

Toronto schools should be good, well-maintained and local. At the moment they are in a kind of chaos, partly caused by the Toronto District School Board’s 1999 “optional attendance” policy that lets parents opt out of a local school and choose another anywhere in the city. Let the market decide.

Some schools are packed to the gills with students from elsewhere in Toronto. Others are set to close because parents perceived them as insufficient, pulled their kids out, and the school population withered.

Why not improve local schools instead of closing them?

The board has a $3.5-billion capital repair backlog and is finding the money via clumsy cost-cutting. And yes, the reluctance of Torontonians to pay the taxes needed for the good things they want is at the root of this.

Jason Kunin, a longtime teacher, recently wrote a fine column in the Star’s op-ed pages, referring to the right-wing Harris government thinking that led to this destruction. Parents have been offered that magical thing, choice.

But parents don’t really want more choice, they want nicer things, as in local schools so good that their children can get an excellent education and walk to school, forming a warm welcoming community where they make friendships for life.

And yes, I approve of streaming in high schools as long as it is sensible and fair. Not everyone is alike and needs the same teaching. There should be some exceptions for special education and perhaps alternative schools.

But everyone should share in the life of a school, just as everyone shares in the life of Toronto when they become adults.

As we’ve seen in the U.S., abandoned public education ceases to be a pillar of democracy. It no longer protects against the election of tyrants like Trump. A well-taught person will think logically, will not believe fake news and will understand the concept of the common good. He will not vote for the Trumps.

Americans trashed public education and look what they wrought. Under Trump, the school system will be privatized, although it has been argued that parents, schools, boards and states will fight back. Can anyone defeat Trump, though? I don’t know.

In England, Prime Minister Theresa May wants independent schools (fee-paying schools for the wealthy) to offer 10,000 free places a year to low-income students who would otherwise go to shabbier state schools. May has threatened the charitable status of fee-paying schools, and they have mysteriously turned helpful.

It’s all about class, the concept that bedevils Britain, or Little England, as it shall be after Brexit. Lynsey Hanley’s 2016 book, Respectable: The Experience of Class, is instructive about schooling being at the core of the class war.

Hanley was smart and worked hard in schools where the other students clung together, reinforcing stupidity and laziness — it was a requirement of their social class to do this — and she made it out, with pangs of regret.

In Britain, education is a stage where class gladiators fight it out. In the U.S., parents have power equivalent to their bank account. It’s all about money. So there are two nations that self-destructed this year.

But Canada didn’t elect a tyrant. Neither did Germany, with a sensible school system that offers vocational training. (U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden thinks Canada and Germany can lead the remaining international liberal order.) We believe in the public school system, and all the local Toronto battles are over how to make schools better, not unevenly bad and good.

I do see an effort by the Kellie Leitches and Brad Trosts of this world to stoke what they hope is an under-educated underclass and win the Conservative leadership, which they won’t. Their mangled semi-French in this week’s debate was risible. Most of the 14 candidates were incomprehensible in both languages. Did they not learn French in public school?

But Canada doesn’t feel rage, just a tremendous need for jobs. In Alberta especially, people are in pain. Chris Alexander, by urging Edmontonians to keep chanting “Lock her up,” was making them look like Trump dupes, and they’re not. They want work. They want good schools for their children.

Kunin’s right. The TDSB should change the rule, and make parents return to sending children to their local schools. The repair backlog should not have happened. Please raise my income taxes to pay for it.

For the next four years — maybe less, maybe more — I have a threat to wield. It’s orange, has a yellow bouffant, works part-time producing a reality show while presidenting, and is surrounded by generals. If you don’t do as I recommend, ill-educated Toronto might become the core of a new Trumpland.

I do hope you find this frightening. I shall mention it again.