Ontario’s independent financial watchdog agrees with Premier Doug Ford’s government on one contentious point of its move to increase class sizes: current teachers won’t lose their jobs over it.

The government’s plan “can be achieved without teacher layoffs,” the Financial Accountability Office stated in a report last week.

That bit of information led Education Minister Stephen Lecce to claim that all is well and good in Ontario.

The “report affirms our plan to ensure students are set up for success for the jobs of the future,” he said.

Actually, no. It does nothing of the sort.

The fact that thousands of teachers won’t be handed pink slips, but will disappear from schools through attrition, and many more thousands simply won’t be hired in the first place doesn’t make this a successful education policy.

The school system is not for teachers; it’s for students. The minister might try remembering that.

The FAO report says there will be 10,000 fewer teachers over the next five years as a result of the government’s decision to increase class sizes. High school classes will rise to an average of 28 students from 22.

In year one, when the government is still providing significant extra funding to prevent mass layoffs and system chaos, there’s already a ton of problems.

Award-winning music programs have been cut. The physics and calculus classes required for university aren’t available in some high schools this year. And two of the province’s largest school boards have had to reduce classes in the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and math — the very subjects those “jobs of the future” Lecce referred to require.

And 10,000 fewer teachers doesn’t just mean fewer (and larger) classes. It also means fewer coaches for sports teams and fewer people to run everything from school clubs to the yearbook.

The government’s education cuts mean all students, whether they’re struggling, gifted or somewhere in between, will get less than they should from a public education that is supposed to be top notch.

That’s the price that comes with the $900 million the report says the government will save per year once its class size increases are fully implemented.

And while Ford and his ministers like to say they are investing more than ever in education, the report shows they’re being far from honest with Ontarians.

The government’s funding plans are “well below core education cost drivers,” the report states. They don’t keep up with inflation, let alone student population growth. So the funding situation for schools is set to get worse, not better.

There is no way that tightened school budgets are going to improve student outcomes. There’s also no evidence that bigger class sizes and forcing high school students to take four online courses will improve student outcomes, and quite a bit of evidence to suggest it won’t.

All of which makes the education minister’s statements that the government is “investing more than ever in student success” to ensure a “rewarding academic experience” patently absurd.

Lecce is on much safer ground when he says “our government’s plan is working.”

That’s because the Ford government’s education changes were never about making education better. They were designed to fix a provincial budget problem largely of Ford’s own making.

It’s increasingly clear that these dramatic class size increases and other changes were made without thinking through what cutting this many teachers from the system would do to students.

The provincial government should rethink this plan.

These aren’t Ford’s famed efficiencies; these are cuts to education.

And it’s students who will pay the price.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2019/09/30/fords-failing-formula-fewer-teachers-worse-schools.html