Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
We are wired to be resistant – and even blind – to ideas and policies advanced by people whose values and beliefs differ from our own. Our desire to maintain connection to those who share our values disposes us to resist the ideas of those whose values differ. We have strong attachments to our own ideas and values that make it difficult to evaluate policies and claims that others make – especially if their values are different.
We resist change. Confirmation bias, selective perception, and cognitive dissonance are among the mechanisms at work. It takes effort to overcome these mechanisms and biases. I think it is worth making the effort.
What brings this to mind is the recent passage of The Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act, 2023 (Bill 98) in Ontario. The proclaimed legislation has provisions that purport to enhance education in that province.
The bill encompasses five key areas that would be supported by future regulatory and education policy reforms. The bill aims to increase accountability and transparency in Ontario's education sector by aligning provincial priorities and expectations with district and classroom-level implementation. Boards of education throughout Ontario will be required to fulfill government-established goals for student achievement and improve transparency and accountability regarding board performance and funding. It sounds like the provincial regulation in British Columbia under the banner of the Framework for Enhanced Student Learning.
The second key element in the bill attempts to address effective governance by introducing standardized processes and expectations for trustees, Directors (Superintendents) of Education, and supervisory officers in school districts. This element seems designed to ensure equitable and unbiased trustee conduct across all boards and to equip trustees and Directors of Education with the necessary competencies to effectively address the government's student achievement objectives.
In a third section, the Act seeks to optimize the use of the capital assets of school boards to expedite the construction of schools and enhance school capacity. This entails leveraging surplus property for public education and other provincial priorities, addressing accommodation needs in areas experiencing high growth, streamlining school planning and design processes, and promoting more efficient approvals procedures.
A fourth dimension of the bill is aimed at fortifying teacher preparation and oversight by ensuring that preparation addresses the current demands of classrooms. This dimension also addresses student safety by establishing fair and effective disciplinary processes for teachers and registered early childhood educators.
The aims of the fifth major element in the bill is less evident to me. It appears to want to foster greater uniformity in approaches to student learning and provide resources for parents to engage with their child's education.
Like most
jurisdictions the Education Act in
Ontario empowers the Minister to make such regulations as are necessary for the
administration of schools and school boards. While new legislation was probably
not necessary, it seems that the Ontario Minister of Education is using the Bill to signal increased accountability. According to the Minister:
These new measures will focus on getting back to the basics of education: strengthening reading, writing and math, and other STEM disciplines.
We are following through on our commitment to parents through new measures that will better refocus school boards on academic achievement and the development of life and job skills.
These reforms include the new authority for our government to set binding priorities on school boards that focus on boosting student achievement focused on reading, writing and math.
Given evidence of a steady decline in reading and mathematics performance in most provincial and national jurisdictions, I suspect that few would argue that increasing achievement in foundational areas is unnecessary. The devil, as the saying goes, is in the details. What, at first, seems promising in the Ontario Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act can wind up producing undesirable outcomes or unforeseen problems. The regulations that the bill enables will deserve scrutiny and the implementation careful evaluation.