Archive for the ‘Education Delivery System’ Category
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With PSE funding, Ontario treads water…at the bottom of the ocean
Friday, June 15th, 2012
June 14, 2012
For 2010-11, per student funding was 34 per cent lower than in the rest of Canada, the same gap as 2009-10. Ontario remains dead last in terms of public operating funding per student… The latest provincial budget promises to maintain support for enrolment increases through a separate funding envelope, even as it calls for funding reductions in other areas. But without increases to base operating funding, the net effect – especially after adjusting for inflation – will be to reduce the level of per student funding further.
Tags: budget, standard of living, youth
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Politicians, not Catholics, deserve Ontario’s wrath for funding religious schools
Sunday, June 3rd, 2012
May. 30 2012
to tell Catholics they can have their own schools but not their own beliefs surely defeats whatever purpose these schools are still supposed to serve. That leaves – should leave – two choices. One would be to let Catholics run their publicly funded schools according to their value system. The other would be for government finally to accept that, sometimes, progress involves a few headaches, and start treating Catholics the same as everyone else – free to practice their faith as they see fit, including with religious schools, but not on the public dime.
Tags: budget, ideology, rights, youth
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An online opportunity for Canadian universities
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
May. 22, 2012
Computers can’t lead intense small-group discussions, give rigorous feedback on essays or help students think through intellectual puzzles. Canadian universities need to make clear that new technology can’t produce well-educated undergraduates on the cheap, because the most important elements of a university education depend on unchanging principles and strong relationships between professors and students. But… what’s possible in higher education is changing rapidly.
Tags: globalization
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Universities have been taken over by administrators
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
May 15, 2012
Today, there is a fundamental conflict between academics and administrators. Teaching, research and scholarship have as their overriding purpose making public new ways of thinking or recovering forgotten old ways. Professors are as competitive as anyone else, and they enjoy making discoveries and introducing superior insights. They see the university as a means to that end. Administrators see university as an end in itself and teaching and research are just the means. They think that the curriculum, for instance, should reflect what students, their parents, or maybe government bureaucrats want.
Tags: budget, ideology
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It’s time to unify our schools
Sunday, May 13th, 2012
May 11, 2012
By maintaining separate schools, we perpetuate social and religious division while undermining religious equality and our collective sense of equal citizenship… With a unified school system we could cut the bureaucratic costs in half saving millions… Our separate school system is severely anachronistic and is no longer sound policy in the context of an increasingly diverse and pluralistic Ontario. It’s time we unify the school systems in the interests of equality, civic solidarity, cost savings and basic fairness.
Tags: budget, ideology, rights, standard of living, tax
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On student-to-faculty rations, Ontario goes from worst to even worse
Friday, April 27th, 2012
April 26, 2012
Since the mid-1990s, Ontario has had the worst student-to-faculty ratio in Canada. While the number of students per full-time faculty member in other provinces hovered around 20-1, the Ontario ratio rose from 22-1 in the fall of 2000 to 27-1 by 2005-06 as the “double cohort” entered the university system… Even if universities hired as many full-time faculty as they planned in their Multi-Year Accountability Agreements (and the evidence to date suggests they have not), the ratio is now approaching 28 students for each full-time faculty member… to preserve the quality of higher education in Ontario, we need to hire new full-time faculty – and we need to start doing it now.
Tags: budget, ideology, standard of living, youth
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Students should pay for the entire cost of education — later
Saturday, April 21st, 2012
Apr 20, 2012
… it’s cash flow that’s the issue, not the amount. So: What if, instead of paying tuition now, students could pay it later? That is, what if they were staked all or most of the money up front, and repaid it over the course of their working life? Only what if, instead of repaying principal plus interest in fixed amounts, as with conventional loans, they paid a share of their earnings? As they earned more, they’d pay more; as they earned less, they’d pay less. The model is not new. It’s sometimes called an income contingent loan, or a graduate tax. But in reality, it’s not a loan or a tax. It’s an investment.
Tags: budget, ideology, standard of living, youth
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Calling a cut an ‘increase’
Friday, April 6th, 2012
April 5, 2012
Per student funding has in fact been in decline since the financial crisis hit in 2008-09. The budget does nothing to help. By 2014-15, OCUFA projects that public operating funding for universities will drop by 16 per cent. This is a huge loss in revenue that, if left unfilled, will damage the quality of higher education in Ontario. History tells us that institutions will attempt to fill the gap with higher tuition fees, continuing the unsustainable shift of costs onto students.
Tags: budget, standard of living, youth
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It still comes down to fixing the reserves
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
Mar. 14, 2012
Systems and structures are fine and necessary, as is proper funding. But… results from formal education have more to do with parental attitudes, cultural assumptions about the importance of education and community norms than anything else. Which means that aboriginal education can’t be divorced from its core contextual problem – the reserves themselves that the panel correctly notes display socio-economic and health inequities, poverty, suicides, youth incarceration and abuse, high teen pregnancy rates, lower life expectancy and chronic disease.
Tags: budget, Indigenous, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Education Delivery System, Equality Delivery System | No Comments »
Putting the ‘system’ in education for on-reserve students
Monday, February 27th, 2012
Feb. 27, 2012
… reserve schools have two major tasks – to teach traditional culture and the core competencies of reading, writing, science and mathematics necessary for success in the mainstream economy. With honourable exceptions, on-reserve schools are failing at both tasks… “The education ‘system’ for first nations students on reserve is a far cry from any system that other Canadians would recognize in terms of … degree of input, accountability, and democratic governance most Canadians take for granted.”
Tags: budget, Indigenous, standard of living, youth
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