From Hope to Harris: The Reshaping of Ontario's Schools
... In these studies, we spent time with each of the provincial organizations, conducting in-depth interviews with union staff, elected leadership, union-active teachers, and knowledgeable outsiders. We also analyzed provincial newspaper accounts of the unions and critically read other researchers' work on educational politics in which the provincial federation was a prominent player (e.g., for Ontario, Gidney, 1999; for Alberta, Kachur, 1999;for British Columbia, Poole, 2015). In the case of the Ontario Teachers' Federation, interactions and interviews were undertaken over a multi-year period to evaluate, over several years, an initiative intended to support school-centred educational change projects; for the Alberta Teachers' Association, case, up-close research was undertaken in relation to two different studies over a ten-year period that looked at teacher unions as learning organizations, and teacher union-governmental relations. ...
... Provincial educational system reorganizations caused concomitant changes in how the OTF and the affiliates each worked --with the amalgamation of many small school boards into fewer, larger boards in the 1960s and again in the 1990s, and episodic system changes from decentralized school board jurisdiction over many educational matters to centralized provincial control. Conflict between teachers' organizations and the provincial government has been a recurrent theme, with massive demonstrations of teachers in every decade since the 1970s, although there have also been periods of relative conciliation and calm (Gidney, 1999;Ontario Teachers' Federation, 1994). ...
... Relatively early in its tenure, in 1992, a left-leaning New Democratic Party government set a bold new direction in Ontario's education system by declaring a number of policy changes that placed decision making authority for program development in the hands of educators in schools and school boards. Among the new directions were the "destreaming" (de-tracking) of Grade 9, based on the premise that early adolescence was too early for youth and their families to choose an educational trajectory that would lock them into a university, (community) college or work future (see Oakes, 1985); cross-and inter-disciplinary approaches to curriculum delivery; and new, more "authentic" forms of assessment of student learning (Gidney, 1999). While the province did not cede its executive authority over educational policy, the OTF participated informally, through relatively frequent interactions, in providing policy input or critique; and through the conduit of the federations, teacher expertise was tapped, for example, for developing provincial curriculum policy. ...
This paper presents case studies of teacher union-government relationships in three Canadian provinces – British Columbia, Ontario, and Alberta – where teacher organizations have undertaken divergent strategic positions relative to educational reform. It identifies critical factors that may lead teacher unions to challenge government reforms, how and when a teacher organization might instead accommodate governmental reform, and under what circumstances union renewal drives an organization to establish reform strategies of its own. The paper demonstrates the results of these varied strategies and suggests that teacher unions’ stances, including when they are resistant, are rational and, arguably, necessary.
... By 1950 some progress had been made in the establishment of township school districts that absorbed numerous school sections (Boddington, 2010). However, the lasting financial effects of the Great Depression and World War II translated into a lack of funds for new school construction, year-round road maintenance or the procurement of school buses (Gidney, 1999). More prosperous economic times meant rural Canada underwent a profound reform beginning in the early 1950s through to the 1960s when one-room schoolhouses were closed (Boddington, 2010;Gidney, 1999). ...
... However, the lasting financial effects of the Great Depression and World War II translated into a lack of funds for new school construction, year-round road maintenance or the procurement of school buses (Gidney, 1999). More prosperous economic times meant rural Canada underwent a profound reform beginning in the early 1950s through to the 1960s when one-room schoolhouses were closed (Boddington, 2010;Gidney, 1999). Students from the countryside and rural hamlets were transported by bus to nearby villages to attend new consolidated central schools (Cork, 2003). ...
... However, success rates were dismal. Over half of all students dropped out by age 16 and only 13% completed their final year of high school (Gidney, 1999). According to educational progressives at the time, the problem was that the traditional curriculum was unappealing to all but a select few. ...
... While these changes helped to retain more students in school, they also produced sharp segregation between tracks that worked to replicate broader social hierarchies. For example, students in five-year Arts and Science programs were disproportionately from upper-income families, whereas students in four-year and two-year Business and Commerce, or Science, Technology and Trades programs were predominantly from low-income or immigrant families (Gidney, 1999). ...
While the inequitable academic impacts of curricular tracking are well understood, less attention has been paid to its social impacts. Utilizing focus groups and in-depth interviews with students and parents in a low-income neighbourhood in Toronto, Canada, this paper uses social identity theory to explore how tracking impacts the nature of relationships between students in different tracks. Findings include that tracking contributed to widening social divides between students, working to replicate and reinforce social stratification, with negative consequences falling most heavily on those assigned to lower tracks. Students formed friendships primarily with same-track peers, while negative stereotyping and bullying across tracks was common. Tracking also increased racial divisions, which led to geographic segregation and schools becoming a racially divided space.
... In the early 1990s, educational issues, such as Ontario's poor record on international assessments such as the PISA and TIMMS assessments, received extensive media coverage and the public became increasingly disgruntled with the education system. The government came under a lot of pressure to justify how they were preparing students for the rise of a knowledge-based economy (Gidney, 1999;Pinto, 2016). The government responded by investing in creating Ministry approved common curriculum outcomes (Grey, 2017) and EQAO standardized tests at various grades to ensure accountability to the public (EQAO, 2012). ...
... The need for large scale standardized testing for students in Ontario in the 1990s and now similarly the MPT for new teachers has been justified via constant reference to accountability logic and its associated mechanisms to mitigate the achievement gap that exists between different social groups (Basu, 2004;Eizadirad, 2019). Poor results on standardized tests are often blamed on a combination of teachers and their ineffective teaching methods and/or students and their lack of effort or incompetency rooted in deficit thinking (Gidney, 1999;Pinto, 2016). This market logic of seeking improvement through legislation of standardized tests simplifies and homogenizes the complexities involved in creating supportive and inclusive teaching and learning conditions where students, parents, teachers, and community members need to work collaboratively to identify local needs and construct a plan of action with intentionality to mitigate those needs with consideration for systemic barriers that impact each community and school uniquely (e.g. the intersection of racism and poverty, number of racialized students, English Language Learners, student in special education with an Individual Education Plan, etc.). ...
The focus of this article is on the introduction, justification, and enactment of the Mathematics Proficiency Test (MPT) by the provincial government in Ontario, Canada as a mandatory certification requirement for newly certified teachers. This article contextualizes the socio-political factors leading to the enactment of a MPT for newly certified teachers, developed and administered by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), which was ostensibly to mitigate the trend of declining math scores in elementary schools. It then shifts to examine the experiences of the first cohort of teacher candidates from a Canadian university who participated in writing the pilot MPT in February and March of 2020. Data was collected via survey responses administered through Qualtrics software. Survey invitations were sent to all teacher candidates who graduated in 2020 or 2021 with 50 of the 130 eligible teacher candidates responding. A thematic analysis of survey responses was conducted to discuss emerging findings about teacher candidates’ experiences before, the day of, and after writing the MPT as a case study. On December 17, 2021 the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled the MPT unconstitutional due to having an adverse impact on entry to
the teaching profession for racialized teacher candidates.
... This had important consequences for school budgets, as falling enrolments meant less provincial funding for schools. Because Ontario funded two school board types in this era, public schools and 'separate' or Catholic schools, these funding issues exacerbated the competitive dynamic that existed between the two systems (Gidney 1999). Additionally, the international economic crisis of 1973-74 created political space in Ontario (as elsewhere) for a new common sense to emerge about government overspending. ...
... Additionally, the international economic crisis of 1973-74 created political space in Ontario (as elsewhere) for a new common sense to emerge about government overspending. As the Ministry and school boards were pressured to change their policies to respond to an increasingly diverse Ontario, they felt pressure from another direction to trim budgets and stick to the basics (see Gidney 1999). The stage was thus set for heritage-language programmes to emerge as a necessary corrective to the Anglo-conformity of Ontario's schools and to come under attack as a waste of precious public dollars (see Bale in press). ...
Building on the recent studies revealing that official bilingualism policies in Canada are often used to reinforce a specific racial and linguistic order, this paper addresses the impact of these federal-level policies on education policies at the provincial level. From the policy genealogy perspective, we examine Ontario’s Heritage Languages Program (HLP), a highly contentious provincial policy that is still in place today. By analysing the discourses circulating in public and within the Ontario Ministry of Education around a proposed bill in the legislature to bolster heritage-language instruction and a subsequent Ministry initiative, we argue that official bilingualism and policies of multiculturalism functioned as discursive vehicles for resisting an enhanced HLP and to heritage-language education per se in politically more tolerable ways. The first part of the paper describes the research design, and introduces the historical context which produced the HLP and the early conflicts over it. The second part discusses three specific findings: (1) a discussion of the Proposal and its relationship to Bill 80; and (2) the discourses present in the general public; and (3) the discourses present in Ministry-internal deliberations of the HLP in Ontario.
... This dramatic reduction led to increased tensions between the government, teachers, and the teacher unions, as the reduction in government spending caused the elimination of various social programs and laying off of teachers and support in Ontario where education as a whole was drastically changed due to major cuts in funding. Two of the major changes that occurred under the Harris government, which have long-lasting effects until today, were the introduction of Bill 104 titled the Fewer School Boards Act¸ which "reduced the number of school board from 129 to 72 with a corresponding decrease in the number of school trustees from 1900 to 700" (SATTLER, p. 11-12;GIDNEY, 1999), and more controversially the introduction of Bill 160 titled the Education Quality Improvement Act that "centralized financial control at the provincial level by removing education funding from the residential property tax eliminating school boards' local taxing power" (SATTLER, p 11). These changes provided the niche for the implementation of an accountability system centred on outcomes-based results supplemented with the use of fear tactics by the government which made it illegal for school boards to operate on a deficit and obligating school boards to publish annual reports on their finances disclosing their spending (SATTLER, p. 12;GIDNEY, 1999). ...
... Two of the major changes that occurred under the Harris government, which have long-lasting effects until today, were the introduction of Bill 104 titled the Fewer School Boards Act¸ which "reduced the number of school board from 129 to 72 with a corresponding decrease in the number of school trustees from 1900 to 700" (SATTLER, p. 11-12;GIDNEY, 1999), and more controversially the introduction of Bill 160 titled the Education Quality Improvement Act that "centralized financial control at the provincial level by removing education funding from the residential property tax eliminating school boards' local taxing power" (SATTLER, p 11). These changes provided the niche for the implementation of an accountability system centred on outcomes-based results supplemented with the use of fear tactics by the government which made it illegal for school boards to operate on a deficit and obligating school boards to publish annual reports on their finances disclosing their spending (SATTLER, p. 12;GIDNEY, 1999). ...
This paper examines Ontario, Canada and Chile test-based systems of accountability and compares the concerted actions taken by both nations to achieve quality of education. Central to the paper are a reflection on and an analysis of who are the final beneficiaries of these test-based systems of accountability and how specific social groups, primarily racialized and gendered students, are marginalized and oppressed through colorblind and neutral neoliberal policies that perpetuate and further intensify educational inequities under the mantle of "efficiency" and "accountability". The paper seeks to envision new and alternative possibilities that work towards denaturalizing global trends in education that are presented as scientific truths while suggesting recommendations that can enable envisioning and implementing an education system centered, guided, and accounted for by the needs of students and their surrounding local communities.
... In the Ontario context, Carpenter et al. (2012; see also Pinto, 2012) have documented longitudinal effects on teachers and schools in Ontario after the Mike Harris Liberals "Common Sense Revolution" in the 1990's. Gidney (1999) described the fast-paced education reforms during this time as "chaotic" and "remarkable in scope," with many changes happening at once (p. 234). ...
... Planning for Success Brighter Futures (2005) were the two main education policies created by the John Hamm Progressive Conservatives in the early 2000's, the first of which, presented a "basics first" approach to education, with a simplified approach to educational success through "good reading, writing, and math skills" (p. iii), not unlike the hyper-focus on math and reading as basics in Ontario's "Common Sense Revolution" during the 1990's (Gidney, 1999). Leaning away from the more holistic approach to education in the 1990's through Restructuring (1994), the Hamm plan focused on higher achievement in math and reading skills through provincial, national, and international testing. ...
Recent scholarship on the impact of neoliberalism in education centers on the creation of policies, curricula, and programming, positioning education as a system that produces marketable, entrepreneurially-minded, global workers (DeLissovoy, 2015; Peters, 2017). What is less known are the ways in which economic principles and mechanisms work in school systems, and how these changes affect teachers and social studies disciplines. Through a critical discourse analysis of policy and other official education documents, interviews, and focus groups with experienced administrators and social studies teachers in the province of Nova Scotia, Canada, I argue that changes in education policy between 1994-2016 have altered the purpose of public education, entangling schooling with economic and accountability goals of the province. The purpose of this qualitative study is threefold: first, using Foucault’s (2008), and later Stephen Ball’s (2013a) theorization, I investigate the extent to which neoliberal governmentality shaped education policy changes in Nova Scotia between 1994-2016. Second, I examine how these changes implicate educators in practice, including the ways teachers perceive changes to their jobs over the last decade. Lastly, I explore the state of high school social studies in Nova Scotia as a site to test the micro-effects of neoliberalism and governmentality in changing policies and practices in education. I conclude that neoliberal governmentality has emerged in distinct patterns in Nova Scotia, which articulate with specific policy technologies and practices in education. Such patterns include the strategic use of economic and educational crises to forward neoliberal policy reform, the expansion of governmental mechanisms to track student and teacher performance, and the dis-articulation of social studies disciplines from the education system.
... To support these efforts, they state that the Assembly for Catholic Bishops of Ontario (ACBO) created the Institute for Catholic Education (ICE) in the late 1980s to support resource and curriculum development. The program used to teach the topics under the Family Life Education curriculum is Fully Alive which is used in Ontario English Catholic elementary schools from grades one to eight.RobertGidney (1999) expands on this history of Catholic schools in Ontario by discussing the Charter protections that the system is offered even though education is under provincial jurisdiction: "though they are relatively few, there are some things a province cannot do. The Canadian Charter for Rights and Freedoms contains protections relating to education for individuals and minority groups which cannot be abridged by any provincial government.funding ...
This paper explores the sex and gender content of the Ontario Catholic School’s Family Life Education curriculum and the Fully Alive program, taking these materials up as an archive. The goal of this archival review was to explore the sexual health content in Fully Alive and how it aligns or differs from the best practices outlined in the Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education while analyzing this material with an eye to potential implications of the curriculum on the sexual health outcomes of junior and intermediate students attending Ontario Catholic schools. A literature review was undertaken to explore the conceptualization of problem spaces, previous studies of sexual health education, a historical background of the Ontario Catholic school system and its use of Fully Alive, and the differences between comprehensive versus abstinence-based sexual health education with research into the effectiveness of each program.
Through this work, it is argued that as Fully Alive does not provide a comprehensive approach to sexual health education, students are not able to make informed decisions regarding their sexual health and wellness. Considering Fully Alive’s cis- and heteronormative approaches to these topics, students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, two-spirit, nonbinary, asexual, and other emerging identities (LGBTQI2SNA+), through their omission in the program, may not be receiving adequate information to support their needs, and thus are at a heightened risk of negative outcomes related to their sexual health. The findings are discussed through three of the nine core principles found in the Guidelines that ask whether the curriculum is accurate and based in evidence, if it is inclusive of existing and emerging sexual and gender identities, and if it has a balance between positive aspects of sexuality and risks that could result in negative outcomes.
Keywords: Ontario, Sexual Health Education, Catholicism, Fully Alive, Archive
... As such, neoliberalism as an ideology has been adopted to promote deregulated, globalized frameworks in education that have wholeheartedly captured the fantasies and every aspect of institutional lives (Birch, 2017;Braedley & Luxton, 2010;Connell & Dados, 2014). Since 1990, educational policymakers and university administrators have typically toed the lines of corporate business models and the banking model of education through internationalization, standardization or educationalization, and measured assessments (Freire, 2000;Gidney, 1999;Love, 2008) to promote institutional success. This unwholesome process of entrepreneurial narratives (Birch, 2017;Zuidhof, 2014) is subversively misinterpreted in academia; and as a result, it has distorted the true face of teaching and learning as institution adopts inadvertently an increasing number of commercial textbooks and educational resources from several corporate publishing houses. ...
There is a limited number of existing literature exploring the nuanced relationship between online learning, academic performance and mental health among Chinese students in the COVID-19 epoch (Chi X, Liang K, Chen S, Huang Q, Huang L, Yu Q, Jiao C, Guo T, Stubbs B, Hossain M, Yeung A, Kong Z, Zou L Int J Clin Health Psychol 21:100218, 2020). The limited amount of available research prompts the development of this chapter, where the author systematically reviews, evaluates and summarises relevant studies, for the purpose of presenting a broad understanding of how the digitalisation of learning approaches is associated with Chinese students’ academic and psychological performance. As per the framework of this systematic review, existing literature focusing on (1) digital learning, (2) academic performance and (3) mental health in Chinese contexts during the outbreak of the pandemic is exclusively examined. Since 30 January 2020, China has been one of the first countries to apply school closures and massification of digital learning (Ma Z, Idris S, Zhang Y, Zewen L, Wali A, Ji Y, Pan Q, Baloch Z, BMC Pediatrics 21:1–8, 2021). Thus, understanding if the digital pedagogies result in positive outputs regarding Chinese students’ development would be conducive to shedding light on whether a similar digitalisation process in academic settings should be delivered in contexts beyond China. In this chapter, the author explores available Chinese literature that assesses the nuanced relationship between digital learning, academic performance and mental health during the pandemic. He analyses how Chinese students undertaking e-learning are, positively and negatively, impacted by digital, non-face-to-face education. In addition, the author suggests interventions on how the design and delivery of digital education can be modified or improved, and how social support can be better arranged, in order to optimise Chinese students’ academic and psychological development.
... The Ontario Progressive Conservative government began implementing a number of its post-election CSR promises aimed at reducing public spending and streamlining government programs and services. In the education sector, a cut of $400 million was announced, user fees were introduced for junior kindergarten, and legislation was passed empowering school boards to accommodate budget reductions through local negotiation of cost-cutting provisions with teachers (Gidney 1999). As Graham and Phillips surmise: ...
This paper will examine the seminal events leading up to passage of the Fewer School Boards Act (Bill104), and its impact on the newly created Toronto District School Board (TDSB). While the focus of thispaper will be on Bill 104, it is important to note that significant structural changes needed to occur inToronto and its neighbouring municipalities before Bill 104 could take effect. To facilitate thesechanges, the Ontario government introduced and passed Bill 148 An Act to Establish a New City ofToronto. Bill 148 amalgamated the City of Toronto with the surrounding cities of East York, Etobicoke,North York, Scarborough, and York to create the "New" City of Toronto with a combined population of2.5 million citizens. Passage of Bill 148 cleared a path for the Ontario government to then pursuepassage of Bill 104. Passage of the Fewer School Boards Act amalgamated Toronto’s Public SchoolBoard with its five neighbouring cities but it also terminated the Metropolitan Toronto Public SchoolBoard. Where 74 trustees had represented citizens in Metropolitan Toronto, the newly elected 22-member TDSB became responsible for over 300,000 students, 21,000 employees, and almost 600schools. Each trustee represents a ward containing nearly 100,000 residents (Bedard and Lawton2000). While this study will focus on Toronto, both Bills 148 and 104 were part of a larger agenda bythe Ontario Progressive Conservative government to restructure a number of Ontario sectors, witheducation being the most predominant. As Leithwood, Fullan, and Watson note, the latter half of the1990s in Ontario can be viewed as "the most tumultuous in the province’s history" (2003, 1).
... In the 1990s, Ontario saw sweeping neoliberal educational reforms under Conservative Premier Mike Harris. Changes included the creation of the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) to administer and manage standardized testing; a new centralized approach to funding public education; funding reductions; and a new process for collective bargaining that separated contract negotiations between teachers and administrators (Anderson & Jaafar, 2003;Basu, 2004;Gidney, 1999). Scholars have researched and documented the impacts of these reforms, which include an increased burden on families to fundraise (Winton, 2018(Winton, , 2019, the erosion of equity in programming (Bedard & Lawion, 2008;Parekh et al., 2011), increased managerialism in education (Miller, 2007), and the corrosion of professional autonomy (Bocking, 2020). ...
In this article, we combine theories of teacher leadership, policy leadership, street-level leadership, and policy enactment to inform our novel conceptualization of teachers’ policy leadership. We draw on data collected through a series of 3 focus group interviews with 31 secondary school teachers in Ontario between July 2020 and February 2021 to show how the dynamism of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic impacted this aspect of their work. Specifically, our findings show the influence of administrative support and the shifting external, situated, and spatial contexts on teachers’ policy leadership. The findings also highlight the role of refusal and creative reinterpretation of educators who prioritized student well-being during the pandemic as schooling transitioned from more flexible emergency remote learning to a less flexible “business as usual” approach.
... The current policy on inclusion, the Realizing the Promise of Diversity: Ontario's Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy (Ministry of Education, 2009) document, engages in a cursory look at the implications of race in the classroom in favour of common liberal tropes such as "diversity." In some ways, this might appear to be a compromise between the NDP's staunch support of anti-racism policies in the 1990s (Gidney, 1999) and the neoconservative and racialized White supremacist views of the succeeding Harris government (Pinto, 2012), reflecting a more palatable political rhetoric that appeases everyone. However, such "middle grounding" locates discussions of race in an unproductive (superficially multicultural) site that elides critical discussions of dominance. ...
Literature on teacher education and encounters with race highlight some of the difficulties that teacher candidates face when they confront their own racialized subjectivities. However, many of these projects focus exclusively on Whiteness studies, explicating how White teacher candidates come to witness their own racialized Whiteness in relation to their epistemological understandings of the world. In this paper, I diverge from this pattern of thought, exploring a subset of the tenets of critical race theory, that of silences and exclusions, pervading my own teaching in a primary/junior social studies methods class and exploring how these structured my lessons. Specifically, I look at how counternarratives, critiques against liberalism, and multiculturalism and encounters with racialized and colonial supremacy were involved in my pedagogical strategies. I conclude by suggesting that although these methods may seem daunting for the primary/junior classroom, they can provide valuable insights for teacher candidate orientations to their own pedagogies. Keywords: social studies pedagogy; anti-racism in practice
... On the other hand, there is a lack of consensus on the overall purposes of schools and the means by which these purposes should be attained (Westbury, 2008). Schools in Ontario, as elsewhere, have been and are subject to repeated controversy about whether and how they are adequately preparing students for participation in society as adults (Gidney, 1999;Manzer, 1994). Such controversies are periodically and tentatively resolved through the formation of broad public consensus on the purposes of schooling (Luke, 2013;Manzer, 1994). ...
State-mandated curriculum policy documents have an important political function. Governments use them to make ideological statements about the role of schools and how the next generation of citizens are to be shaped. Beginning from this premise, we use a frame analysis methodology to examine how citizenship in the Province of Ontario, Canada is framed in four consecutive versions of the curriculum policy documents that prescribe citizenship education for secondary schools. Our analysis spans 20 years, during which two political parties – one conservative, the other liberal – held power. Our inductive analysis is presented using a typology of citizenship with five dimensions: political, public, cultural, juridical, and economic. We illustrate consistency across the decades, including a preoccupation with: 1) external and internal threats to the stability and unity of Canada (political); 2) fostering nationalistic identification (political); 3) developing transferrable skills for the globalized economy (economic); 4) establishing a pre-set role for the individual citizen, characterized by legal and ethical obligations (juridical). We reveal a gradual de-emphasis of opportunities for citizens to actively participate in reshaping their communities and society (public, cultural). This shift in the political and ideological meaning of citizenship conceives citizens as isolated individuals in a reified state and society.
... Leading up to the 1990s, the province of Ontario had "no history of large-scale assessment and none with high-stakes for students, schools, and districts" (Volante, 2007, p. 2). The education system became under scrutiny by taxpayers, media outlets, policy-makers, and parents in the early 1990s being blamed as ineffective due to the compounding provincial government debt and the rising unemployment rate (Gidney, 1999). As Kempf (2016) points out, this mounting government pressure was "part of a larger push for accountability with taxpayer dollars on the one hand, and the call to for schools to get back to basics on the other" (p. ...
All students in publicly funded schools in Grades 3, 6, 9, and 10 are annually tested in numeracy and literacy in Ontario, Canada by Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO). Data was collected via audio and video recording of semi-structured interviews with 8 families, as case studies, examining subjective experiences of racialized Grade 3 children, parents, and educators with the Grade 3EQAO standardized test preparation and administration. Deconstructing the racialized experience with standardized testing and reflecting on the emerging themes, a theoretical argument is presented identifying external assessment as stereotyping. It is argued that the implementation of standardized testing for accountability purposes beginning in 1996 and as a means of producing data to close the achievement gap has failed, and instead contributed to reproducing a racial and socially stratified Canadian society privileging white identities and those from higher socio-economic status.
... Leading up to the 1990s, the province of Ontario had "no history of large-scale assessment and none with high-stakes for students, schools, and districts" (Volante, 2007, p. 2). The education system became under scrutiny by taxpayers, media outlets, policy-makers, and parents in the early 1990s being blamed as ineffective due to the compounding provincial government debt and the rising unemployment rate (Gidney, 1999). As Kempf (2016) points out, this mounting government pressure was "part of a larger push for accountability with taxpayer dollars on the one hand, and the call to for schools to get back to basics on the other" (p. ...
Although theoretically standardized tests are supposed to help identify inequities in the education system and areas for improvement at the school and school board district levels, this chapter argues that in practice since its introduction and implementation starting in the mid-1990s as an accountability tool, it has not led to closing the achievement gap along the lines of race and class. Experiences of various racialized Grade 3 children, parents, and educators interviewed are discussed and conclusions are drawn that indicate there are more negative long-term effects associated with writing EQAO standardized tests opposing the dominant narrative disseminated by EQAO. The long-term negative effects associated with preparing and writing standardized tests are identified under the umbrella term invisible scars and traumatizing effects of standardized testing.
... Whereas the Radwanski Report recommended a common curriculum, the 1995 Report of a Royal Commission on Learning (RCL) recommended de-streaming from grades 1 to 9 (ages 6-15) and specialization in grades 10 to 12 (ages 16-18). Other RCL recommendations included providing a course stream designed for university preparation and the other, of equal quality, emphasizing applications and connections outside the classroom (Gidney, 1999). ...
This chapter traces the development of vocational education in Canadian secondary schools from the late 1800s to the present. At the turn of the twentieth century, concerns about meeting the needs of an industrializing economy gave rise to technical and vocational education programs that were recognized to be class‐specific and class‐defining. At the turn of the twenty‐first century, the shift from manufacturing to services and the perceived emergence of a “knowledge‐based economy” led to calls for a new vocationalism and a unified curriculum that would break down the dichotomy between academic and vocational learning. This shift was reflected in some changes in school programming, although the vestiges of old vocational divisions persist. I argue that future approaches would benefit from a more expansive view of vocationalism, more regulation of workplace learning, and more articulation across secondary and postsecondary education programs.
... The impact of the funding changes varied across boards, but urban boards and their schools, especially those in the TDSB, were particularly hard hit (MacKenzie, 2015(MacKenzie, , 2017. Many parents and educators across the province claimed the funding changes left their schools drastically underfunded and placed new demands on parents to fundraise (Coyle, 2001;Gidney, 1999). Although adjustments have been made to the formula used to determine funding over the past two decades, some observers (e.g., Mackenzie, 2015Mackenzie, , 2017; Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, 2017) argue there are ongoing problems with the funding formula that leave some aspects of public education inadequately funded. ...
In this article, I report findings from an investigation into the politics and coordination of school fundraising in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Theoretically grounded in institutional ethnography and critical policy analysis, the study began from the standpoint of parents asked to give money to their children’s school(s). I show how provincial and TDSB funding, parent involvement, fundraising, and school council policies organize parents’ experience of school fundraising. I also explore how participating in fundraising enables parents to meet neoliberal expectations of a “good parent” and how through their efforts to secure advantages for their children, fundraising parents are accomplices in the privatization of public education. I conclude by discussing possibilities for intervention into the social organization of school fundraising in TDSB schools.
... This meant that Catholics in Ontario had a right to be educated in Catholic public schools. This does not mean, however, that both the public and Catholic education systems have been treated equally; rather, there is a long history of struggle for equal funding and resources (for more on this, see Gidney, 1999). The Catholic education system in Ontario (known as either "the separate system" or "the Catholic system") serves approximately 600,000 students in 37 separate school districts, and is publicly funded from kindergarten through high school. ...
... In this environment, policies are used as a means of control at the expense of teacher autonomy (Mujis & Harris, 2003). One only has to look at the history of educational decision making in Ontario (Anderson & Ben Jaffar, 2003;Gidney, 1999) to see that much of the educational reform of the past two-decades has continually focused on centralization and an increased role for school boards and Ministries. Consequently, rather than fostering a culture of learning and leadership, these structures promote a culture of compliance, painting a portrait of the professional teacher as one who meets organizational goals, works efficiently to meet "one size fits all" benchmarks of student achievement, and documents this process for the accountability of the system (Sachs, 2003). ...
... One of four teacher federations in Ontario, The Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (ETFO) was created in 1998 by the amalgamation of two of Ontario's first teacher organizations-the Federation of Women Teachers' Association of Ontario (FWTAO) and the Ontario Public School Teachers' Federation (OPSTF) (Richter, 2006). Since that time ETFO has become both a political juggernaut and staunch advocate for teacher rights, perhaps as a result of being born into existence during the reign of Conservative Premier Mike Harris and his political agenda, the "Common Sense Revolution" (Gidney, 1999). More specifically, beginning in 1995, Harris made sweeping changes to education that centralized control over curriculum, student assessment, teacher evaluation and certification, and educational finance (MacLellan, 2009). ...
This paper draws on data collected as part of a study of the discourses of teacher professionalism amongst union active teachers in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Ontario. Interviews revealed a triad of influences on the professionalism discourses of participants: engagement in teacher associations, the larger policy environment, and teacher agency. The manner in which this triad played out in each case, however, was unique to the particular political and organizational contexts framing the spaces in which such discourses were created. Using cross-case analysis, this paper specifically highlights the complex and contextualized nature of teachers' conceptions of professionalism, paying particular attention to the nuanced enabling and limiting conditions identified between the cases. Cet article s'appuie sur des données recueillies dans le contexte d'une étude portant sur le discours concernant le professionnalisme des enseignants actifs dans leur syndicat et vivant dans les provinces canadiennes de l'Alberta et de l'Ontario. Les entrevues ont révélé une triade d'influences sur ce discours chez les participants : l'implication dans des associations d'enseignants, le contexte politique général et l'agentivité des enseignants. L'interaction de ces composantes s'est déroulée d'une façon distincte selon le contexte politique et organisationnel du milieu dans lequel le discours a été créé. S'appuyant sur une analyse transversale, cet article souligne la nature complexe et contextualisée des conceptions qu'ont les enseignants du professionnalisme, et se penche particulièrement sur les conditions nuancées, favorables ou restrictives, qui ont été identifiées dans chaque cas. Discursive perspectives emphasize the social nature of meaning-making and highlight the importance of power in shaping not only what people say, but also what people do. Discourse does not occur within a vacuum; rather it takes shape within a highly politicized arena of socialization where language plays a significant role in the maintenance of particular power structures and the cultures that support them (Hilferty, 2004). As Hilferty (2004) contends, then, discourses "are not therefore limited to spoken language, but also arise from institutional practices and inherent power relations" (p. 62). Thus, discourse is more than a description or even an explanation of meaning; discourse contributes to the creation of a particular reality (Thomas, 2005). In this vein, discourses of teacher professionalism serve to "shape the way teachers think, talk, and act in relation to themselves as teachers individually and collectively" (Sachs, 2003, p. 122), eventually influencing the blueprint of what it means to be a professional teacher. 268
... For our purposes, it is not necessary to narrate a history of the Ontario's educational reform movement or the province's human geography. An excellent account of such details can be found in Gidney (1999 The current provincial government credited assessment reform as one of the reasons Ontario was recognized as one of the most improved school systems in the world (Mourshed, Chijioke and Barber, 2010;Fullan, 2012;. Still, it was acknowledged that an improved and unified assessment policy was required to further improve the student learning experience in Ontario. ...
This thesis explored teacher professional judgement as applied to the final report card process of Ontario Secondary School courses in Business, Humanities, and Social Science. A constructivist grounded theory approach was used. Twenty-four active teachers from various schools participated in semi-structured interviews and follow-up questions. How the respondents understood the use of professional judgement when determining percentage grades was analyzed. The study found that the participants personalized procedures, either independently or at the direction of the local administration, when interpreting policy into practice. These practices, although done with good intentions, were at odds with reliable and valid assessment. This phenomenon was termed Heuristic Assessment. Ontario’s revised assessment and evaluation policy Growing Success (Ontario, 2010a) placed emphasis on informed professional judgement. Although a definition was provided, how the concept works in practice was open to interpretation. Therefore, schools can apply professional judgement in numerous ways and still be in line with provincial policy if what is taught and evaluated correspond with curriculum documents. However, this study found that Ministry instructions are challenging to implement. There are tensions between how the local administration view policy, participant understanding of these guidelines, and the realities of the classroom. Furthermore, school culture consists of both shared, or public, and shadowed, or private practices. Shared and shadowed practices sometimes go with, and sometimes against, provincial policy. Consequently, participants engaged in Heuristic Assessment: they used their professional judgement to adhere to local policy in appearance, while finding ways to evaluate final report cards on their own terms. This study makes several contributions to the field of knowledge. First, we see the concept of professional judgement in Ontario evaluation practices not as an idealized definition but as teacher-created construct. Second, there was clear evidence that the province still has work to do in order to have better consistency in assessment of learning practices. Understanding gained by the research established proposals on how to further improve reporting of student learning in Ontario and other educational systems. For example, there are easier ways for teachers to explain the meaning of grades to students, parents, guardians, and other stakeholders. If professional judgement is vital to evaluation practices, then the concept should be reified to assist teachers with the assessment process. There is also a methodological contribution, as the study provided an example of how to blend the constructivist grounded theory of Kathy Charmaz with the situational analysis of Adele Clarke to educational evaluation research.
... The public consultations brought new perspectives to the forefront. According to Gidney (1999), "The recommendations of the Hope Report were broad-ranging and on some issues quite radical" (p. 23). ...
While teacher education has changed dramatically over the years, educators, policy-makers and the general public are largely unaware of the history of teacher preparation in the province. This history, beginning in the 19th century, tells the story of increasing professionalism over the years as Ontario adapted its system to meet a rising demand for elementary and secondary education. It is a story of authority over education, as teacher training under provincial direction became teacher education in universities, and as accreditation shifted to the Ontario College of Teachers. It is a story of reform, and the limits of reform, in the preparation of teachers for a diverse and changing world. By better understanding the history of teacher preparation in the past, we may gain insight into the present situation and imagine a better future for teacher education in Ontario.
... While the general public perception of education is positive throughout Canada, the status of teachers varies by province. In Ontario, for example, the provincial government in power from 1995-2003 gave negative portrayals of the public education system and its teaching staff; this government ran advertisements that described teachers as overpaid and underworked (Gidney, 1999). ...
This paper uses publicly available reviews and documentary sources to review secondary schooling in Canada and six other countries in terms of its organization, curriculum, accountability systems, organization of teaching and leadership, and overall spending. The purpose is to consider what can be learned about high school education policy and practice from looking at countries with high secondary school graduation rates. Conclusions include: each system is an ‘ecology’, and plucking particular elements from one system for use in another is rarely an advisable strategy; secondary school systems are similar in many respects but also vary in some important ways; equity is an important issue in all countries yet most still have large inequities based on social background; a central challenge in all systems is how to combine secondary education leading to post-secondary studies and to work, and; there are grounds for optimism in that some systems have produced dramatic improvements in outcomes in relatively short periods of time.
Cet article fait l’étude du débat sur les enjeux religieux de la gestion scolaire au sein du milieu associatif franco-ontarien. Ce débat montre la persistance, du moins dans certains milieux, du rôle structurant du référent religieux dans l’institutionnalisation de la francophonie ontarienne après le désengagement public de l’Église et les bouleversements idéologiques de la Révolution tranquille. Ce phénomène a été largement négligé par l’historiographie. Dans les années 1980, l’espace public de la collectivité franco-ontarienne est de plus en plus caractérisé par un pluralisme idéologique, culturel et religieux qui ne conduit pas, néanmoins, à évacuer le catholicisme de la conscience identitaire d’une partie substantielle de la population francophone de la province. Dans ses revendications pour obtenir le contrôle de ses institutions scolaires, le réseau associatif réclame ainsi un double réseau de conseils scolaires de langue française, catholiques et publics, à la grandeur de la province, qu’il obtient finalement en 1998.
I would like to hold off on writing abstract until requested revisions are made and if article is accepted. But here is an overview for reviewer and editors:In what follows, I provide narrative snapshots of some historical and contemporary works produced by curriculum scholars working at Canadian universities over the last decade. To readers and fellow colleagues who are associated (or not) with our larger Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies community, I apologize in advance for the many oversights, misinterpretations, and/or exclusions of your works. Like Chambers (2003), regionalism informs my understanding of the vast and rich intellectual and topographic characteristics of our field. Part of my methodological strategy for the initial research that informs this essay is to limit my references to articles published in curriculum studies journals between 2000 and 2013 by scholars who worked and/or are working at Canadian universities. From there, I selected key texts others or myself have used to teach an introductory course to Canadian curriculum studies either at the University of Ottawa and/or elsewhere. Therefore the narratives I selected are situated, and thus, partial—as if they could ever be otherwise. At the very least, this bibliography of Canadian curriculum studies might provide a future passageway for readers to revisit, add to, challenge, deconstruct, and play with the composition of our intellectual history anew as another documentary synoptic experimentation. I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. The first section provides an overview of the key texts I engage with graduate students to support them toward becoming more familiar with the historical contexts of our field of study. The second section examines different institutional structures through which curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. The last section discusses the differing contemporary “curricular schools of thought” I take up within graduate courses to develop and support what I continue to call A Canadian Curriculum Theory Project.
This qualitative case study explored commercial textbooks and their effects on university professors. The study’s aim was to investigate the perspectives of university professors’ use of pre-designed, pre-selected teaching materials such as textbooks, workbooks, teaching manuals, and courseware for a teacher education program at one mid-sized comprehensive Canadian university. The researcher investigated the pedagogical experiences of nine university professors recruited through the Dean’s Office in the faculty of education via random sampling. The study findings discovered that textbooks are ambivalently optimized as participants seemed to have fluctuating values for using them as pedagogical tools; on the one hand they supported textbooks, while at the same time they experienced cognitive dissonance as they questioned the content of the textbooks. This study revealed the paradox of commercial textbooks whereby governmentality and performativity in pedagogy in general and educator agency in particular imposed by neoliberal institutions can limit the scope of teaching in higher education institutions. Furthermore, commercial textbook selection and use often face time limitations as one-size-fits-all primers, and comes at the cost of creativity, research, knowledge deconstruction, and knowledge creation. Similarly, the findings suggest that pedagogy is a complex phenomenon that requires pedagogical orientations by selecting online education resources so as to deconstruct subtle sites through academic collaboration, reciprocity, and avoidance of corporatized pedagogical tools in the process of knowledge creation and its deconstruction.KeywordsCommercial textbooksOpen educational resourcesOERsUniversity professorsDefenestrating
This article foregrounds a Black feminist analysis of a bereaved Caribbean-Canadian mother, Cecile Case Holder, whose 24-year-old son, Andre Burnett, was murdered in Toronto on 10 September 2005. The article reframes her grief through the lens of maternal sufferation to explore a distinctly Jamaican reality in a transnational context. Burnett was one of 52 people who died by gun violence in what became known as “The Year of the Gun.” In an extensive interview with Holder about the life and death of her youngest child, Toronto Star reporter Jim Rankin addresses the forms of structural violence that contributed to the conditions that led to Burnett’s demise. Reading her narrative from a Black feminist perspective, the author explores the politics of Holder’s mothering practices to keep her children safe. Her narrative is located in the scholarship on Black motherhood in the African diaspora, focused on the exigencies of the afterlife of slavery. Cecile Holder’s reality is particular to her circumstances. Yet, her experience as a Black Jamaican mother in the Canadian racial state provides a snapshot of the quotidian navigations that frame women’s parenting practices at the nexus of structural violence and the demands of the global economy unique to African-Caribbean women.
The establishment of the Commission on Private Schools in Ontario in 1984 renewed long-standing debate over public funding of the Canadian province’s public schools. Engaging Maarten Hajer’s discourse coalition approach and argumentative discourse analysis, we demonstrate how actors with disparate – sometimes even competing – goals and values nevertheless formed coalitions to advocate for (or against) the policy. We also show that the debate at this time was about much more than school funding; it reflected foundational disputes over the appropriate role of government in relation to minoritized groups in Canada. In the struggle to define the meaning of a policy to fund private schools with public money, both coalitions mobilised arguments informed by discourses of Equality and Multiculturalism. However, each coalition ascribed different meanings to these discourses. That is, actors on both sides argued their policy solution promoted equality and supported multiculturalism based on different ideological understandings of these values.
This article seeks to explain both convergence and divergence in Ontario teacher union electoral strategy. After coalescing around a strategy of anti-Progressive Conservative (PC) strategic voting beginning with the 1999 provincial election, Ontario's major teachers' unions developed an electoral alliance with the McGuinty Liberals designed to advance teacher union priorities and mitigate the possibility of a return to power for the PCs. The authors use campaign finance and interview data to demonstrate that this ad hoc partnership was strengthened over the course of several election campaigns before the Liberal government's decision to legislate restrictions on teacher union collective bargaining rights in 2012 led to unprecedented tension in the union-party partnership. The authors adapt the concept of union-party loyalty dilemmas to explain why individual teachers' unions responded differently to the Liberal government's efforts to impose austerity measures in the education sector.
The story of School SecBon #11 (S.S. #11) stood as a sharp reminder of racial injustice and the black experience in Canada. Located in Essex County, Ontario, the separate school maintained a predominately black student attendance until 1965, when parents and school board members negotiated its eventual closure. As the location of the last racially segregated school in Ontario, Canada, S.S. #11 remained one of the many institutional forms of racial segregation in Canada. This paper endeavors to prove that national policies surrounding multiculturalism and human rights did not eradicate local practices of racial prejudice and discrimination. More importantly, I will argue two main points, first, that African Canadian action in Colchester stood as a microcosm of black activism throughout Canada. The second part of this paper will focus on S.S. #11's black teachers who advocated equal education while holding paradoxical positions of compliance and resistance within the Colchester community. In advancing a case study on Colchester Township, this paper proposes to examine fragmented province-wide educational standards and problematic race relations in Colchester as indicative of lived experiences in various Canadian communities. Ultimately, this research will speak about subtle nuances in the Canadian educational system that tended to remove blacks as Canadian citizens and active historical agents.
The 100th anniversary of the first article (published in 1921) examining student success and the high school to university transition in chemistry provides an excellent opportunity to consider what has – and has not – changed in chemistry education. This review details the development and findings of chemistry education research specifically as it relates to student learning and success over this extended time period. After considering the changing educational context and definition of success, this research will be described under three main themes: different ways of knowing (learning objectives and outcomes), thinking (scientific reasoning and problem solving), and learning (preferences and approaches to studying). A key finding is that while our understanding of effective teaching and learning has advanced significantly since the early 1900s, so too have the curriculum expectations and cognitive demands placed upon students increased significantly. Thus despite the many advances and innovations in chemistry education, an achievement gap persists between high school and post-secondary education for many students to this day. A comprehensive picture of the factors influencing student success developed from the research literature not only helps understand this disconnect; it also provides an opportunity to reflect on lessons learned for teaching, learning, and directions for future research.
While there is a widespread consensus that students’ pathways towards postsecondary education are influenced early in life, there is little research on the elementary school factors that shape them. Identifying educational ‘risk factors’ directs attention to barriers that may warrant scrutiny or action under human rights legislation. New findings from a unique, longitudinal data set collected and developed by the Toronto District School Board highlights key factors, established in elementary school, as to how many students do not enter into post-secondary studies in Ontario. The majority of students suspended at any time, students in self-contained special education programs, and/or students who missed more than 10% of classes in grade 4 do not go on to PSE. These organizational factors are more predictive of students’ acceptance to PSE than individualized measures of preschool readiness, academic achievement in grade 3, race or parental education. These structural ‘risks’ are strongly correlated with of race and disability. In light of research that identifies promising, evidence-based practices available to reduce these risks, breaking down these barriers should be a priority from the perspective of improving PSE access and overcoming what may well amount to systemic discrimination.
This paper examines the intersection of heritage-language education advocacy with anti-racist activism in the 1970s and 1980s in Toronto. The province of Ontario initiated the Heritage Languages Program in 1977. By focusing on discontinuities in the policy’s implementation, the paper identifies multiple strategies that Black anti-racist activists used to expand the understanding of heritage language to be more inclusive of all forms of racial and linguistic difference. Although anti-racist activists may not have succeeded, we argue here, recovering their arguments can – and should – inform current efforts to deepen linguistically- and culturally-sustaining programs in Ontario schools. The first part of the paper describes the historical context in which heritage language became a social problem recognizable to Canadian society. It is in this context that the Heritage Languages Program emerged as a policy solution to the perceived problem of racial and linguistic difference in Ontario. The second part reports our analysis of the intersection between public deliberation over the HLP and advocacy against anti-Black racism in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Racial equity in Canadian education remains elusive. Despite Canada’s status as a multicultural nation, many minority students continue to be marginalised. In this article, we compare equity-related education policy in two Canadian provinces – Ontario and British Columbia – to ascertain how race and racialized students are understood in official documents. After reviewing provincial policy contexts from the early 1990s onward, we discuss the results of a content analysis of provincial education policy documents using Critical Policy Analysis and Critical Race Theory. We argue that the treatment of race and equity in these documents demonstrates ‘symbolic anti-racism,’ rather than substantive anti-racism, in three key ways: 1) the lack of robust education policy related to racial equity; 2) the construction of racism as an individual characteristic rather than a structural problem in the education system; and 3) the near-absence of race-related data collection. Policy recommendations follow based on these findings.
This chapter provides a historical analysis of how the need for Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) standardized testing was justified socio-politically and how it was implemented and legitimized as part of an accountability discourse starting in the 1990s. Prior to the 1990s, the province of Ontario had no history of large-scale assessments. Schools were blamed for not preparing students adequately for the emergence of a knowledge-based economy. This placed pressure on government officials and politicians to seek educational reforms to restore public confidence in the education system. Various educational reforms implemented from the mid-1990s up until now are discussed, arguing that there is a common thread that all political parties view education through an economic market-driven lens. Consequences of having a market-driven model of education be normalized are discussed.
This special issue of the International Journal of Education Policy & Leadership (IJEPL), Research in the Canadian Context, marks a significant milestone for the journal. Throughout our twelve-year history, we have sought to publish the best research in leadership, policy, and research use, allowing authors to decide the topics by dint of their research. While this model still serves as the foundation for IJEPL content, we decided to give researchers a chance to engage in deeper conversations by introducing special issues. In our first special issue, researchers discuss their work within the scope of education policy, leadership, and research use within the Canadian context. While many aspects of leadership, teaching, and learning can be seen as similar across contexts, there are also issues of particular concern within national, regional, provincial, or local spheres, particularly when looking at policy and system changes. The researchers featured in this issue provide an important look into education in Canada.PolicyIn the policy realm, Sue Winton and Lauren Jervis examine a 22-year campaign to change special education assessment policy in Ontario, examining how discourses dominant in the province enabled the government to leave the issue unresolved for decades. Issues of access and equity play out within a neoliberal context focused on individualism, meritocracy, and the reduced funding of public services. While Winton and Jervis highlight the tension between policy goals and ideological contexts, Jean-Vianney Auclair considers the place of policy dialogues within governmental frames, and the challenge of engaging in broadly applicable work within vertically structured governmental agencies. One often-touted way to move beyondResearch useWithin the scope of research use, Sarah L. Patten examines how socioeconomic status (SES) is defined and measured in Canada, the challenges in defining SES, and potential solutions specific to the Canadian context. In looking at knowledge mobilization, Joelle Rodway considers how formal coaches and informal social networks nserve to connect research, policy, and practice in Ontario’s Child and Youth Mental Health program.LeadershipTurning to leadership, contributing researchers explored the challenges involved in staff development, administrator preparation, and student outcomes. Keith Walker and Benjamin Kutsyuruba explore how educational administrators can support early career teachers to increase retention, and the somewhat haphazard policies and supports in place across Canada to bring administrators and new teachers together. Gregory Rodney MacKinnon, David Young, Sophie Paish, and Sue LeBel look at how one program in Nova Scotia conceptualizes professional growth, instructional leadership, and administrative effectiveness and the emerging needs of administrators to respond to issues of poverty, socioemotional health, and mental health, while also building community. This complex environment may mean expanding leadership preparation to include a broader consideration of well-being and community. Finally, Victoria Handford and Kenneth Leithwood look at the role school leaders play in improving student achievement in British Columbia, and the school district characteristics associated with improving student achievement.Taken together, the research in this special issue touches on many of the challenges in policy development, application, and leadership practice, and the myriad ways that research can be used to address these challenges. We hope you enjoy this first special issue of IJEPL!
This article discusses findings from a study of a 22-year campaign to change special education assessment policy in Ontario by the advocacy organization People for Education (P4E) and explains how dominant discourses enabled the government to leave the issue unresolved. Based on a rhetorical analysis of 58 documents, the article identifies strategies used by P4E to persuade Ontario’s government and citizens to view students’ uneven access to educational assessments as a problem. Further, since this problem differently impacts children by class and geographical location, it perpetuates inequities. Despite using strategies deemed effective in other change efforts, arguments mobilized by P4E have not been persuasive in a neoliberal context that champions responsibilized individualism, meritocracy, human capital development, and reduced funding of public services.
British Columbia (BC) charted its own course in 1949 when it passed legislation permitting Indigenous children to be schooled in provincial public schools. That is, BC's law predated federal legislation allowing integrated schooling by two years. This paper examines how and why BC followed its own policy path with respect to the schooling of Indian children in the years immediately following World War II. It illustrates three key forces propelling BC's integration agenda: policy actors, ideas, and institutional structures. Indigenous and non-Indigenous policy actors were shaped by the discourse of ethical liberalism, an ideology that dominated BC's educational landscape during the first half of the twentieth century. Key policy actors succeeded in implementing integrated schooling in advance of federal legislation due, in part, to Canada's political institutions, which have facilitated regional autonomy in matters such as education. This study highlights the importance of telling regional histories in addition to those of the nation-state.
This paper examines competing values evident in research about language education. The paper begins by focusing on the explicit juxtaposition in language education research between viewing language as a resource and language as a right. This part of the paper is historical in that it traces the emergence of resource-oriented discourses to the demise of broad civil rights movements in North America in the late 1970s/early 1980s. The paper then turns to more recent critiques of language rights within language education research. These critiques are rooted in post-structural approaches to understanding language that, in general, reject rights as tied to a modernist past. Part of the complication in identifying the values within this research is that its authors explicitly frame their research in social-justice terms. The paper does not seek to question these authors’ intentions, but rather to get beyond claims to social justice to clarify for what purposes and on whose behalf we conduct language education research.
This chapter explores intersectionalities and the systematic oppression of Black youth viewed through a critical anti-racist framework. Herbert focuses on how the spatiality of race and class influences the education curriculum offered to youth in high priority neighbourhoods in Toronto. The main discussion centres on the effect of racialized streaming and negative perceptions of Black youth, which results in further marginalization as exemplified by the forty-percent dropout rate, and the continued cycle of poverty experienced by these youth.
This article investigates the evolving conceptions of national identity in Canada and Australia through an analysis of officially sanctioned history textbooks in Ontario, Canada and Victoria, Australia. From the 1930s until the 1950s, Britain and the British Empire served a pivotal role in history textbooks and curricula in both territories. Textbooks generally held that British and imperial history were crucial to the Canadian and Australian national identity. Following the Second World War, textbooks in both Ontario and Victoria began to recognize Britain’s loss of power, and how this changed Australian and Canadian participation in the British Empire/Commonwealth. But rather than advocate for a complete withdrawal from engagement with Britain, authors emphasized the continuing importance of the example of the British Empire and Commonwealth to world affairs. In fact, participation in the Commonwealth was often described as of even more importance as the Dominions could take a more prominent place in imperial affairs. By the 1960s, however, textbook authors in Ontario and Victoria began to change their narratives, de-emphasizing the importance of the British Empire to the Canadian and Australian identity. Crucially, by the late 1960s the new narratives Ontarians and Victorians constructed claimed that the British Empire and national identity were no longer significantly linked. An investigation into these narratives of history will provide a unique window into officially acceptable views on imperialism before and during the era of decolonization.
Resumo
This article traces the history of teacher education in Canada from the seventeenth century to the present by focusing on teacher education in the English-language dominant province of Ontario and the French-language dominant province of Québec. Because of the decentralized nature of education in Canada, it is at the provincial, not at the national level, where policies and practices for teacher education are developed and delivered. Like the history of Canada itself, the history of teacher education is marked by conflicts of gender, religion, power, class, race, language and ethnicity as teacher education struggled to claim a space itself in the academy and exercise its authority within the ivory tower. The article considers how the historical struggles and successes can both inform and cause us to critically reflect our current practice.
This paper examines assessment policies for K-12 education in Ontario, Canada. We begin with a discussion of Ontario’s education system, and then turn our focus to Ontario’s K-12 assessment policies serving multiple purposes for accountability and classroom learning. We first examine the Educational Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), which is responsible for Ontario’s province-wide literacy and numeracy assessments by focusing on the nature of its educational stakes, its implications for Ontario’s diverse student populations and its alignment with Ontario’s curriculum. We then turn to Ontario’s policies geared towards classroom-based, teacher-led assessments, such as the Growing Success initiative and the Steps to English Proficiency assessment framework. Together, these policies coexist and function like a double-edged sword for teachers because of conflicting expectations and roles. We conclude with some suggestions for further enhancing Ontario’s assessment policies through the integration of technology and building of teachers’ assessment competencies.
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