Special Feature: Hon. Minister Kathleen Wynne
Interview by: Leah Espineda and Dessy Pavlova
Toronto has been a lucky city for the last 25 years and it’s about time we acknowledge the people who make it exemplary.
The Honorable Kathleen Wynne is a prime example of an accomplished person. Education is her passion and her position as the Minister of Education truly befits her. Before being promoted to Minister of Education, she was a school trustee and led a dedicated career of service to the youth. Now she’s had the opportunity to enhance that career and make changes in our school and political systems, both in her roles as the Education Minister and Member of Provincial Parliament representing the Don Valley West region for the Liberal Party. As a high profile political and public figure having served in the government for many years, her goals, accomplishments and involvement in various programs are publicized through the Ministry of Education’s website at: www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/general/biography/edu_minister.html and www.kathleenwynne.com. ’GTA This Month’ is truly grateful for this rare opportunity to interview the honorable Minister at her constituency office at Don Valley West.
GTA: If your government is against the idea of afro centric schooling by the Toronto Public School Board, what other strategies would you suggest instead?
Min. Wynne: What we believe is that there need to be strategies in place to help all students who are struggling, which is why we have put student success teachers into all of our secondary schools. We’ve put new programs in place to help students who weren’t able to complete their credit to recover that credit through credit recovery programs. We have more coop programs and opportunities for dual credit. Dual credit is when a student can study at high school and college at the same time. These are all strategies to help kids who aren’t necessarily going to graduate from high school to help them stay in school and graduate. As well, we have put about 9,000 more teachers in the school system and there are more teachers now than when we came into office. Many of those are teachers in elementary schools to make primary class sizes smaller. Nearly 90% of kindergartens to grade 3 classes are now 20 students or fewer. That means those little kids will have the opportunity to have more contact with their teachers and they will do better because they’ve have had more attention early on. In terms of particular groups, we’ve got special programs and resources for teachers to deal with those kids, for example boys who don’t do as well as girls in literacy in school. We have an aboriginal education framework and there are particular programs and language programs for aboriginal kids. We are working with the aboriginal community to refine that and we have actually put money in the funding formula for aboriginal education. We do recognize that there are certain groups who need support and students with special needs do need support, so I believe in those kinds of targeted resources. The Toronto District School Board is developing an afro centric curriculum and I think that’s a good way to go because that kind of curriculum could be used anywhere and doesn’t have to be in a particular school. So those are the kinds of strategies that we support.
GTA: We are aware that there are existing alternative schools that are privately funded. If the government will fund the Afro-centric schools, would this not pose a potential problem, as it could be a precedent for other alternative schools to also ask for government funding?
Min.Wynne: Let me just be clear with the terms so we understand what they are. Alternative schools as we talk about them are schools that are developed by the school boards. They are funded out of the school board’s regular budget. There’s money that flows to school boards because of the number of students they have and that money can be used in alternative schools. Private schools are something separate. Private schools are called private schools or independent schools. We don’t fund private schools. We don’t fund independent schools and the only way in which we fund alternative schools is that we fund students and we fund programs. School boards can organize those students and those programs the way they choose. So we are not funding explicitly the afro-centric school. The Toronto District School Board has the right to set up alternative schools under the education act, and there are a couple of dozens, if not more alternative schools already in the Toronto District School Board. There are other alternative programs in other parts of the province and those are funded as every other school is funded. We are not giving any additional funding for the afro-centric school so I don’t see it as a precedent. It’s not the same thing at all as funding private schools and the other reality is that the education act does not allow schools based on faith to be set up as alternative schools within the system. That’s the law.
GTA: What can be done to ensure that the recent incident such as the hate crime against the black York University students does not become a recurring event?
Min.Wynne: I think what we have to do is to be much more vigilant and intentional about teaching our children, our staff, and our parent community about anti-racism, inequity issues, and anti-sexism. I think there’s a whole range of equity education that needs to happen and that’s something that we have begun. We have given schools money for anti-bullying programs and conflict resolution programs and as part of that work, there is anti racism education that happens. We’ve given school boards resources for character education and part of that is getting along with people and understanding the values that we all share no matter what our background is. I think there is more work to be done on equity and that is work that we have been working on for a number of months. I will be talking more about that in the future.
GTA: What campus safety and security initiatives is the ministry doing to assist educational institutions to improve safety and security systems and ensure that students, faculty and staff will have a safe and secure school environment?
Min. Wynne: The starting point for us is that our schools must be inclusive. It must be safe for our children and for our staff and there are things we need to do to ensure that. When we first came into office, we required schools to do safety audits. As a result of those safety audits, there were cameras put in many schools where it was difficult for the person sitting in the office to see the entrance or see certain hallways. Not all schools have security cameras because not all schools are designed for security cameras to be helpful because if there’s more than one entrance and the school determines that they could not lock down all the other doors except for one, then the security camera isn’t as useful. But where it was possible, security cameras were put in place. Beyond that, we have developed resources for conflict resolution and anti-bullying. The thing about safety is that there’s physical safety but there is also emotional, social, and psychological safety. This is making sure that our teachers, lunch room supervisors, and caretakers all understand what bullying is and how it works. They need to know how to help kids interact with each other as this is a really important part in making a safe school. Those programs and resources that have been put in place are some aspects of making our school safer. The other thing we’ve done is we have put more than 9,000 teachers into our schools and every time you put a trained, caring adult into a school you make that school safer because there are more adults paying attention to the kids. We have put funding for around 6,000 support workers like education assistants, social workers, and psychologists, all of those people who are not necessarily classroom teachers but are other adults in the schools. That’s over the last four years. We know that there is more to be done, but that is a very big start. We are changing the Act, Bill 212, an Act that will change, and has changed, the law around safe schools. We’re now requiring boards of education to provide programs for students who have been suspended for more than five days or have been expelled so that those kids who come back to school will develop some skills and be able to take part in the life of schools. As part of the changes to the Safe Schools Act, we’ve given boards more resources for hiring more child and youth workers, social workers, and psychologists because those are the people who can help make the school safe. So we’ve actually done a lot and we know there’s still more to be done.
GTA: Reducing class sizes have been a long term promise from the Liberals. Will there be continued work towards ensuring that students do receive the attention they need in a manageable class setting?
Min. Wynne: Well, we’ve actually delivered on that promise. We said that we were going to reduce 90% of kindergarten to grade 3 classes to 20 students or fewer and we are at 88.4%, so we’re almost there. Nearly 100% of the kindergarten to grade 3 classes is 23 students or fewer. So they’re all down. The average number was up in the 30s when we came into office and those are all down to 23 or fewer, or 20 or fewer. Will we continue to support those class sizes in the kindergarten to grade 3? Absolutely! The money and the teachers that we put in will stay in the system. Are we going to cap class size in the older grades? No, we’re not going to do that. We will do some class size reductions but what we need to do in those upper years, from grade 4 and up, is we need to continue to invest in programs and teachers to deliver other kinds of enrichment. Class size reduction is particularly useful in the early years. As they get older, there are other things that kids need. For example, they need hands-on experience; they need the opportunity for outdoor education. Those kinds of things, like arts and music. So we’re going to focus on getting those resources in the upper grades.
GTA: We understand that the ideal public education system would be one that is well-funded, with well-trained professionals, ideal class sizes, higher test scores, higher graduation rates, safer schools, and no children are left without an education. Can you say that our public education system is an ideal system? If not, what is the one thing or things that are preventing us from achieving this ideal system?
Min. Wynne: That’s my vision. Yes, but is it perfect? Probably not. Is it very, very good? Yes! It is a very, very good public education system. We just recently had some test results from international tests in science and math. Our students performed in the top 5 countries. Not the top 5 percent, but among the top 5 countries. We have a very strong publicly-funded education system and it’s not just strong in neighborhoods that are wealthy. It’s strong everywhere. I was in Moosonee last weekend, the far north of Ontario and many of the same resources that we find in an affluent neighborhood in the south, we can also find in a community in the north. It doesn’t matter where you go in Ontario, there are very good publicly-funded schools, with teachers having the same training as teachers in Moosonee, teachers in Ottawa, or teachers in Windsor. They all have to go to Teachers College and they all have to be qualified to the Ontario College of Teachers, so we have a very have a high standard of education. If you’re asking if there is more to be done in order to reach that ideal? Absolutely! We have just put a vision paper on our website that you can download and it lays out our vision of what we want publicly-funded education to be over the next four years. We focus on the test scores, getting those test scores up, and continuing to do that. The test scores are just part of the story. The real story is, we want kids to be able to do math, we want them to be able to read and write and talk articulately because that will allow them to go on and fulfill their dreams. The test scores are not the end in themselves. The test scores are just an indicator of how kids are doing. So we are going to continue to try to get those test scores up because we want kids to be able to read very well and we want them to be able to do their academic studies. We are going to continue to work with kids who are not succeeding and them because it’s all very well for us to raise the bar and raise the test scores and have a group of kids who are doing well to do better and better, but we want the kids who aren’t doing well to come up, so it’s that ‘closing the gap’ as well. That’s the second focus. The third focus is all those supporting priorities. When I talked about arts education and outdoor education and making sure that parents are engaged, making sure that our principals have the support that they need, making sure that our buildings are well-maintained – all of those things mean that public confidence will be in place. If public confidence is in place, then the school system can continue to improve because people support it. So those are our three core priorities and if you look at the vision paper it lays out exactly what we believe in.
(The vision paper is at: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/document/energize/energize.pdf)
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