Fundamental Incompetence

All those boos this summer have gotten to Doug Ford. His government has gone back to the drawing board and is revamping its funding strategy for autistic children. And yesterday Ford's new education minister, Stephen Lecce, announced that plans to increase class sizes and to lay off teachers would not be implemented this year. The result -- two week's before the beginning of school -- is chaos. Rob Benzie and Rob Ferguson report that:

Ontario’s education system has been plunged into “chaos and confusion” days before school resumes after Premier Doug Ford’s government tried to go back to the drawing board on increasing class sizes to save $250 million in the coming year.

Education Minister Stephen Lecce said Thursday he’s “open” to suggestions from school boards and teachers’ unions to stop average class sizes from rising to 28 students over the next four years — from 22 in the last school year — insisting they will only increase marginally next month in Grades 4 and above.

“We should not be dogmatic about this,” Lecce told reporters in Scarborough, calling for “innovative ideas” as the government negotiates new contracts with teacher unions to replace ones that expire at the end of August.

In the wake of Lecce's announcement, there is plenty of fury:

Education unions and school boards were left scratching their heads, given that teachers have already been laid off and course offerings pared for the coming school year after the changes were announced in March and confirmed when the province released the school funding formula last spring.

“This is the basis on which school boards have been planning for this year, resulting in courses and programs being cancelled, supports being lost, and teachers’ and education workers’ jobs being eliminated,” said Liz Stuart, president of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association.

“If the government was planning a different course of action, they could have told Ontarians about it months ago. Instead, they have been content to allow chaos and confusion to unfold.”

This chaos rhymes with Doug Ford's decision to cut the size of Toronto City Council -- in the middle of a municipal election:

A York board teacher, who contacted the Star and asked to remain anonymous, questioned how the Progressive Conservative government now expects school systems to meet the averages.

“Assuming the boards did their hiring and scheduling based on a higher (average class size) number, how in the world are they going to get it down to 22.5 in 12 days? It would take new hiring, and it would take a very significant rescheduling of courses. It’s impossible to imagine this getting done before Labour Day,” the high school teacher wrote in an email.

“But let’s say they could do it. A percentage of teachers will be told on day one that they have a different set of courses. How are they going to create all-new course plans then?”

“The Ford government is framing this as a ‘good news’ announcement, but this does nothing to mitigate the damage that will be wrought by the removal of a full quarter of Ontario’s high school teachers from the system,” said Harvey Bischof.

The Fordians know how to use blistering rhetoric. But look behind the rhetoric. What you see is fundamental incompetence.