SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Regulated Ineffectualness

People tend to have a trusting faith in government’s ability to solve problems. You think class sizes are too large? Pass a law capping enrolment! Kids aren’t learning to read and do math very well? Pass a law creating a literacy and numeracy secretariat that will enforce particular teaching methods! Kids are arriving at school woefully unprepared for the program? Pass a law bringing in more state-provided early education! On and on it goes.

And thus power is more and more centralized, and Ontario schools and school boards have less and less discretionary power, until now we have ended up with the situation described in this Globe and Mail article. The combination of capped class sizes with the requirement to offer full-day kindergarten has forced many schools to introduce kindergarten/grade 1 split classes. 

Of course, this may or may not be a bad idea - some schools can likely handle it beautifully and make it work well for kids, while others will have the opposite experience. The point is - circumstances vary from school to school, and the more you constrain individual schools, the less able they will be to offer their students a good education. 

It is well accepted in business circles today that successful managers try to push decision-making responsibility down to the lowest possible level, since it’s the people on the front line who know what’s working and what needs to be done to make it work better. The success of private schools is eloquent testimony to the wisdom of this approach.