Monday, February 25, 2013

Our Education System is on a Cumulative Sick Leave!






Unfortunately, serious problems continue to exist within the taxpayer-funded educational system throughout Ontario and indeed Canada. 


It is not solely caused by monetary factors but also includes the irresponsibility of union leaders and members within the teaching profession, colleges and parents.



I would venture to guess that 49% of teachers throughout Ontario are very dedicated and devoted to teaching students as opposed to engaging in union activities that directly affect the learning abilities and education of students.



However, 23.3% of today's youth between the ages of 15 to 24 are neither in education nor employment. Ontario’s high school graduation rate, as per Stat Canada, is 75.5% and compared to the national average of 74.8% as of 2010.


Bad news even without taking into account that the liberal government reduced the curriculum standards from 5 years to just 4 years.

What this all means in economic reality terms is that in Ontario 492,000 thousand students between the ages of 15 to 24 annually enter society WITHOUT having obtained or completed basic high school education.  

Across Canada, this number is in excess of 1.2 MILLION students that enter society and the community without the basic skills of a high school education.

For 75 years society has known that individuals who fail to obtain a high school degree are more than twice as likely to fall into decades of welfare and poverty.

The poverty rates throughout North America, unfortunately, are highest among Blacks, be they African American or African Canadian, aboriginals, Hispanics, Immigrants having English as a Second Language and Students in rural communities.    
 
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD) calculations tell us that $49 dollars and $65 dollars respectively represent the average per-hour cost for primary and secondary teachers. 

In Canada, our taxpayer-funded cost for elementary teachers is $68 dollars per hour and secondary teachers come in at $74 dollars per hour! Something has to change that can drastically reduce these costs and reverse the trend of our youth dropping out of our schools.

A school voucher or a tuition tax credit of $5,000 to $8,000 based on a family’s combined gross incomes of say less than $60,000 would more easily assist parents and their children in choosing to transfer out of the public system into a private school.

This is not a novel idea as it has already been proposed by Malkin Dare, President of, the Society for Quality Education along with some other effective and meaningful educational and cost-saving measures that would greatly reduce the present overall cost for ever-increasing education budgets.

Education has strayed from the teaching or learning of science, math, biology, physics, Canadian history and languages, reading and writing to teaching and learning the rights of unions, forcing homosexual activist clubs and gay-straight alliances into our school systems.      

A failed unionized professional system that annually leaves behind nearly half a MILLION Ontario students and in excess of 1.2 MILLION Canadian students!  

A profession-based system that continues to increase poverty, welfare and jobless numbers and concerns itself with non-education curriculum issues of salary increases, benefits, sick days, pensions and gay and lesbian rights.




http://www.globaltoronto.com/ontario+high+school+grad+rate+at+82/6442596853/story.html






3 comments:

  1. Peter - the voucher system is a cop-out. It is basically abandoning universal public education. We dilute our public education system by advancing this type of proposal (funding separate denominational education is a similar elitist and discriminatory cop-out). I agree that we must get public education costs under control - at the present time, we are getting very limited benefit for a significant investment. The "labour sink" we call the teachers' unions provides absolutely no leadership in educational excellence and economy. Instead, our children are politicized to think that supporting teacher's greed and self-interested demands has something to do with democratic rights. My family had the good fortune to experience a public education system where teachers' labour relations were not even mentioned over a three year period (Texas) - we experienced dedicated, wonderful teachers who committed to curricular and extra curricular programs that were second to none. Returning to the morass in Ontario is a disgrace!

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  2. I couldn't agree more. Did you send this to me as a result of the Media Release (http://libertarian.on.ca/news/education-smarter-inspiring) from the Ontario Libertarian Party? We have been advocating for an end to the government monopoly on education for years.

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  3. The whole school system from the teacher's unions to the unions who do the maintenance for the TDSB is monopoly priced. Vouchers look like a good solution. Monopolies are by definition inefficient. Many teachers do not actually teach, but have administrative duties. Sometimes we have to live with monopolies (army and police), but not in our schools. Never mind that many parents do not agree with some of the subjects or content of some of the subjects that are taught. Set the academic standards and let the parents decide where to send their children.

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Thanks for your thoughts, comments and opinions, will be in touch. Peter Clarke