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It’s Not A Secret
In Sunday’s Toronto Sun, Lorrie Goldstein has written a great column, Secret to Their Success, about how private schools can help troubled black youth in Toronto. He wrote about how Crawford Academy has had a very good success rate with their students, of which 70 to 80 per cent are black and the rest are mostly from other visible minorities. He writes:
“To be sure, it’s unfair to compare Crawford to public schools because, unlike them, Crawford can pick and choose its students. But Crawford’s success indicates why former Ontario Conservative leader John Tory’s proposal to publicly fund faith-based schools had merit, even if it ended his political career and cost the Tories the 2007 election. At the time, Premier Dalton McGuinty - who, ironically, sent his own children to Catholic schools - charged faith-based schools “segregate” and “sequester” young people and threaten “social cohesion.“ Nonsense. Crawford’s students aren’t ‘segregated’ or ‘sequestered’, they’re ‘succeeding’, and because they’re succeeding, they will become fully integrated members of our society. It’s black kids living in troubled neighbourhoods who drop out of public school at the first opportunity to become gang members, drug dealers and baby mothers, who end up “segregated” and “sequestered” from society.“
I first met the fine staff at Crawford when SQE sponsored the visit of Dr. Howard Fuller back in 2009. Dr. Fuller spoke to Crawford parents one January evening. Lest you think that parents at Crawford are rich, élitest snobs, nothing could be further from the truth. Goldstein reports that 30 per cent of Crawford’s students come from single-parent families. As many other parents at private schools do, these parents make huge financial sacrifices to make sure their children get an excellent education in a safe, caring, but disciplined environment.
I recently had a chat with Crawford’s high school principal and we talked about the poverty factor in education outcomes. He agreed with me that poverty should not be used as an excuse. The cure for poverty is education.
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On a related note, I’d like to think the expansion of alternative schools in Toronto such as the Africentric school, same-sex schools, and a choir school had its incubation way back when SQE arranged a meeting between the TDSB Trustees and Angus McBeath, the former director of education of Edmonton Public Schools.
To readers who are new to the Edmonton model of public choice, McBeath was responsible for running public education as though they weren’t a monopoly. Boundaries were eliminated, parents were given a passport to any school, schools directly got 90% of all education funding, principals were directly accountable to the director for acheivement and finances, and many alternative schools were offered, including religious schools.
The Toronto leg of McBeath’s speaking tour was sponsored by SQE, but the main North American tour was co-ordinated by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies. AIMS is celebrating their 15th anniversary with a dinner in Moncton, NB next month. The keynote speaker for that event is Jeb Bush, the former governnor of Florida who is also related to a couple of presidents. Jeb Bush was instrumental in establishing school choice programs and other education accountability measures in the state of Florida.
Doug, now where has it been written, that the ministry, the board and the teachers’ colleges have looked at all the studies and evidence and simply concluded that they are correct on the issues?
Show me and others where this has been concluded without a doubt. It sounds to me, what Joanne has written, what are they afraid of? You are more afraid of what she has written, and what she has written in the past, and what she will write in the future. What lies behind your lies, the real truth is the public education system, is so very behind the times. Much like the public education system, and the aversion to private tutoring, and their claims that it harms the child’s education. Oh, yes I have been busy how the advocates of the public education system, mainly union driven, are based on the fact, that the child that improves by the use of a private tutor, will harm the teacher’s ability to teach the rest of the children, to the same level as the tutored child. Or the opposite happens, where the teacher chooses to teach only part of the curriculum, forcing the other children to go to tutor to be taught the rest. Another pack of lies, and illogical to say the least.
What you are afraid of, the knowledge of the research to reach all parents’ ears, and than some not all in the public education system, would look pretty foolish defending policies, based on a half-baked philosophy, where the only evidence that is being used are on the subjective measurements, that is highly influenced by the individual’s interpretation of the words and data.