September 29, 2009 (Catholic education, Catholic schools)

And he spoke to them at length in parables, saying

“A sower went out to sow.

And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and birds came and ate it up.

Some fell on rocky ground, where it had a little soil.

It sprang up at once because the soil was not deep,

and when the sun rose it was scorched,

and it withered for lack of roots.

Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it.

But some seed fell on rich soil,

and produced fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.

Whoever has ears should hear.” (Matthew, 13 – v3-9)

On September 15^th, Education Minister for Ontario, the Honourable Kathleen Wynne, said during her introductory remarks on second reading of Bill 177 (Student Achievement and School Board Governance Act, 2009) she “would make student achievement the number one priority for all school boards.”

She also said she is introducing the Bill “in support of them (trustees) in their important roles.”

It is really difficult to argue with such lofty sounding goals, but I want to attempt to demonstrate that these two foundational claims are compatible neither with the principles of a Catholic education nor with the reason why most trustees of either a secular or religious nature are motivated to assume the role.

Motivational theory describes two types, extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation itself comes in two guises either as a carrot or a stick. When school boards were very small or just small, few carrots existed but as boards became larger after 1969, trustees found ways to increase the carrots through higher salaries and more extensive conferences.  The government had few sticks, other than a clause in the Municipal Act to punish or take over a board when it deliberately under-levied the mill rate thereby creating a deficit.

Mike Harris brought all that crashing down in 1997, when his government took over the levying of education taxes provincially, and then legislated that trustees had to balance the budget with the money the government provided or it would and could and did take them over, a practice the Liberals have continued.  At the same time it limited the size of the carrot for all trustees to $5000.00 and through cubby-holing every component of the budget made it very difficult for trustees to travel very far or frequently.

What the Liberals under McGuinty and Wynne are now proposing to do with Bill 177, however, is increase the number of sticks. Financial mismanagement, defined as a deficit budget, will not be the only criterion. In the future if a board’s achievement scores do not rise fast enough or in enough schools, the government can step in. Similarly, if a board’s retention rate or graduation rates do not meet the government’s predetermined standard, it will be able to step in. Or as the Toronto Catholic example has illustrated, where trustee behaviour becomes dysfunctional it will step in. (It should be noted that financial mismanagement provided the initial reason but that was effectively set straight months ago and behaviour has been the reason for keeping the board from its proper authority for some time now.)

I would ask the minister to reflect hard on why she and many of her fellow MPP’s became school trustees. I think the responses would cite such intrinsic motivations as creative fulfillment, belief in the project of public education, a feeling of community obligation or an opportunity to enhance one’s reputation in the community.

It is very hard to argue that Bill 177 does not threaten to change the 170-year balance between the extrinsic and intrinsic motivators by increasing the former over the latter. It is for this reason that I find it very difficult to square Wynne’s Legislature comment “I personally and our government generally has a great deal of respect for Ontario’s trustees…” with the content of Bill 177.

But it really is the parable of “The Sower went out to sow” which for Catholic trustees, and I suspect for the majority of public school trustees as well, holds the real key to why they find this Bill so obnoxious. It is simply the contention that somehow they are responsible for the achievement levels of the youth under their governance.

The sower in the parable is Jesus as the son of God spreading the message of His Father and as the parable makes very clear, it doesn’t exactly take everywhere for a lot of reasons.

In education you could say the teachers and trustees have a similar relationship. Whereas teachers try to spread the message of learning, trustees, like the Father, prepare the garden of education in which our children and youth, our seeds, will grow.

The ‘garden of education’ is not prepared by trustees alone. Parents as the first educators of their children have already prepared the ground within which their children’s early intellectual growth has occurred and will continue to occur as they proceed through school.

It seems to me that only in a society as wealthy and confident and overly concerned with success as defined by economic growth alone as ours currently is, would we have the temerity to think we can actually compel our children to reach a state-imposed definition of “achievement” as defined by any type of achievement test.

The Minister in her address more than once says her government is “actually playing catch-up in terms of what other jurisdictions have done.” But as my mother was wont to say, “Just because someone else has jumped off the cliff, does that mean you have to, too.” What others do is no justification if it was wrong-headed in the first place.

According to an editorial in Commonweal, August 14, 2009 Pope Benedict XVI in his new encyclical Caritas in veritate (or ‘Charity and Truth’) writes a lot about both subsidiarity and solidarity, and he writes about them together.  Subsidiarity, which might be considered as decentralization, alone leads to “social privatism”, while solidarity alone leads to “paternalist social assistance.” It is in the balance of these two poles that “charity in truth” is found according to Benedict XVI.  It is also where “good government” finds its virtue.

Within the realm of the polis as it applies to both the secular and religious schools systems of Ontario, Bill 177 threatens to lead to a level of centralised paternalism which has never existed in the 170-year history of public education in Ontario.

Within the Catholic school system it additionally puts into jeopardy its unique mandate to share the faith, or to extend the garden metaphor, to prepare the ground with different ingredients. Already, there is strong anecdotal evidence that Ontario’s testing regime is crowding out or leaching away the evangelisation component of Catholic schools. Bill 177, when fully implemented, will only exacerbate this problem.

Making student achievement the number one priority for all school boards, and supporting school trustees in their role make for good political rhetoric.  However as this commentary has attempted to demonstrate they do not make “good government,” one founded in both “Charity and Truth.”  It is a message consistent with Matthew, 13 – verse 9, “Whoever has ears should hear.”

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