The Winners Again - Teacher's Unions

We can't afford all-day JK/SK

By JOHN SNOBELEN

The former NDP government of Bob Rae left some stuff behind at Queen's Park after it was defeated in the 1995 provincial election.

When I entered the minister's office at the Ministry of Education, I found some pilot projects.

I also found a massive debt and a record deficit. Interesting ideas, and no money to pay for them.

One of those interesting ideas was a pilot project for full-day junior kindergarten (JK). I cancelled it immediately.

It seemed to me that the proposed pilot missed the mark on several counts.

First, it did not use early childhood educators (ECE), the people who are specifically trained in dealing with very young children.

Second, it did nothing to address the needs of real, working parents.

Moms and dads need seamless daycare that operates at least 10 hours a day, five days a week, all year. Real parents have real jobs. A program that runs from 9 to 3, 160 days a year, is not "full day" daycare for most people.

Third, the pilot program was short on measuring results.

This was in the dark days before province-wide testing and the Education Quality and Accountability Office. It didn't seem useful to me to initiate another education reform that had no baseline and no way to measure success.

But the biggest reason for cancelling the program was simple. We had no money.

We were struggling to rein in spending in the harsh reality of a debt that was increasing at the rate of a million bucks an hour. We asked everyone in the public sector to do their part and cut costs. Increasing spending on a full-day JK program would have sent all the wrong signals.

It seemed to me then, as it does now, that announcing a program without providing funding is equivalent to a lie.

Spending borrowed money with no plan for repayment on an education program, is akin to sending our children a bill for their education. It just doesn't seem right.

But that was then, this is now.

Fifteen years later, the province is facing a deficit twice as large as the previous record set by the Rae government. Big spending, big taxing governments seem to be able to set those sorts of records.

How to pay it back? Well, in the face of a $24.7-billion deficit, Premier Dalton McGuinty announced -- well, er, um ... actually, he announced that he was going to think about it.

This week he announced a new $1.5-billion initiative; a new, full-day JK/senior kindergarten program.

Let me be clear. I take no exception to McGuinty supporting full-day kindergarten. It will surprise no one that McGuinty is an advocate of early childhood education. So am I.

McGuinty initiated the Charles Pascal Report, an intensive review of the full-day options. The report made several controversial and important recommendations. It deserved a full public debate.

But the premier didn't seek broad public comment on the report. Mom and dad didn't have a chance to say what full-day kindergarten meant to them. The qualifications of certified teachers and ECE instructors didn't get a full public airing.

Instead, McGuinty chose to strike a backroom deal with the teachers' union. It isn't the first time the premier has put the wants of the teachers' union ahead of the needs of parents, students and taxpayers. The result of this most recent surrender will be bigger classes, slower implementation and much greater cost.

The bottom line is in the absence of a credible deficit elimination strategy, McGuinty's announcement had the hollow ring of an empty promise. I guess we'll just send the bill to the kids.