May 3, 2021
Nancy Naylor, Deputy Minister, Ontario Ministry of Education
Dear Ms. Naylor,
Yes…another letter.
I just finished reading “‘Damage control’: Internal emails show how Ontario officials reacted when class sizes were criticized by teacher” by Rachel Mendleson and Andrew Bailey in the Toronto Star.
Wow. Just wow.
So much for educators and leaders who are aware of their own place in the world and who will bring a higher consciousness and personal commitment to the work they are doing. So much for a new style of leadership (Peel District School Board Review, February 28, 2020).
In case you haven’t read the Star article yet, last September, shortly before Ontario schools reopened, Kingston teacher James Griffith posted a photo of his packed high school classroom on Twitter.
“I managed to squeeze in 34 desks. There’s no distancing,” Griffith tweeted. “But (Premier Doug Ford and Education Minister Stephen Lecce) say we have the ‘best plan in the country’ and the ‘lowest class sizes’. Uh huh.”
Within hours, the tweet, which included the hashtag #FireLecce, came to the attention of your office, and your executive assistant, Vanessa Bennett, asked staff to contact the director of education of the local school board to find out more about Griffith’s claims. The ministry “wanted to get ahead of possible news coverage.”
“Apparently educator will be on media later today so we will need to hear back ASAP on this one,” Bennett wrote in an email obtained by the Star through freedom-of-information legislation.
Griffith, when shown, said the emails demonstrate that ministry officials “were trying to implement damage control.”
“It wasn’t, ‘Hey, we need to find solutions,’” he said. “It was, ‘How do we control the message.’ ”
Harvey Bischof, when shown, said it appears ministry officials “did not engage in a health and safety response.”
“They engaged in a pure political optics type of response,” he said. “The focus was entirely on, ‘How can we blunt the news of this one particular large class?’ instead of, ‘How can we reduce the number of students in classes like this all across the province?’”
Shortly after Griffith’s tweet, a "ministry official" sent a “media scan” to Lecce, summarizing and describing the “tone” of more than a dozen news broadcasts on radio and television related to the labour board challenge and the back-to-school plan. The list included a “negative” story about a petition for smaller class sizes that had attracted 300,000 signatures.
When your assistant flagged Griffith’s tweet to colleagues in the ministry, she acknowledged in her email, “We may start to see more of these.”
“We have the standard messaging that we’ve been using about adjustments to class size,” Bennett said, “but did you hear anything about this possibility when you met with the board?”
I’m also hearing, Ms. Naylor, that you may be the reason Minister Lecce changed the Education Act to allow for the hiring of directors of education who are not teachers qualified as supervisory officers. This, in case you aren't aware, played a large role in the Hofstatter hiring fiasco in the York Catholic District School Board.
School boards could already hire directors of education who were not teachers qualified as supervisory officers with approval from the Ministry, and school boards didn’t need to hire directors who are not teachers qualified as supervisory officers in order to eliminate systemic discrimination in education. School boards needed to remove school board trustees from hiring panels in order to eliminate systemic discrimination instead. So Minister Lecce is guilty of systemic discrimination (and you may be as well, depending upon your role in the situation).
Two prominent, stalwart Black community members resigned recently from the Toronto Catholic District School Board citing personal differences and the slow pace of efforts to combat anti-Black racism, affecting Black students and staff, among other matters.
Kirk Mark, a retiree of the Toronto Catholic, where he worked for almost 30 years, and a recipient of an African Canadian Achievement Award for Excellence in Education, and Ken Jeffers, a former manager of access and diversity at the City of Toronto, and this year’s recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award, at the recently-held BBPA Harry Jerome Awards, left their positions on the African Canadian Advisory Committee last month.
Mark says his resignation was triggered by the disrespectful way, in which he was addressed at a meeting in November 2020. He says he also felt that the current leadership of the equity department did not seem interested in seeking information, in order to make informed decisions, from those “who have been there, done that”.
“Forty years ago, approximately 40 percent of our children were failing in the system, 40 years later, 40-plus percent are failing in the system, which means the system has been negligent,” argues Jeffers, who has been involved in various sectors of the community, including education, for over 40 years.
I pointed out in my Application to the Tribunal that Minister Lecce is being negligent when it comes to eliminating systemic discrimination across the entire province. This is yet another piece of evidence to add to the already long list.
Yesterday, education experts Michael Fullan and Joanne Quinn published an excellent article called "Young People Have a Desire to Save Their World. How Can We Help?" {EducationWeek, May 2, 2021).
The first line in the article is: “If the pandemic has revealed anything, it is the absence of leadership.”
Fullan and Quinn also wrote that the present education system “does not operate as a force for equity and equality.”
They believe we need to create a “new learning system” that is based on “four interrelated foundational pillars: well-being and learning, social intelligence, monetary investment, and a well-run system.”
“When people complain about bad leadership, they are usually talking about corrupt and/or incompetent leaders…Good old-fashioned competence to get things done seems to have gone out the window. The solution must include establishing well-run systems devoted to the first three drivers of mission learning,” Fullan and Quinn wrote.
"The most powerful potential forces for transformation are inversely related to the hierarchy. That is, the main energies for radical change seem to reside at the bottom: students, teachers, principals, and parents. Coming in second is the middle (school boards, communities, nonprofit agencies, businesses). A distant last is the policy level, where we find a dearth of ideas.”
Fullan and Quinn argue that we need a policy breakthrough and a “few system leaders who are willing to step forward..."
They also wrote, "In this respect, ‘new leadership’ consists of partnerships and co-determination across the levels. People at all levels must be cultivated and seen as ‘experts’ and ‘apprentice’ because both their ideas and ownership are essential for success.”
That’s why people like me keep writing to you, and that's why it's wise for leaders like you to listen.
Fullan and Quinn also wrote "A new conception of leadership is emerging from the pandemic. We would call this the democratization of leadership in which participation, voice, inclusion, innovation, and influence is on the rise. It will require coordination, and something even tougher—integration—leaders at different levels who can forge unity of purpose around the new agenda. Equity of participation and greater equality of outcomes are core to this mission serving simultaneously social justice and societal prosperity—a win-win proposition."
"...when the conditions are right, namely a weak and ineffective status quo combined with desirable alternative solutions such as the four foundational pillars, deep change can happen in relatively short periods—a few years, not a few decades. We need leadership at all levels, including the top, to make this happen."
When you add to this the fact that we need educators and leaders who are aware of their own place in the world and who will bring a higher consciousness and personal commitment to the work they are doing, like the Peel Reviewers wrote, we will have "a new purpose and a new public education system as an instrument of societal transformation," just as Fullan and Quinn wrote.
Are you this type of leader, Ms. Naylor?
Will you help establish a well-run system devoted to the first three drivers of mission learning: well-being and learning, social intelligence, and monetary investment to help create a new purpose and a new public education system as an instrument of societal transformation?
Or are you, and your team, going to continue to defend Minister Lecce, the ineffective learning system, and the ineffective status quo?
Yours truly,
Debbie L. Kasman
M. Ed, Policy Studies, OISE/University of Toronto
Education Re-imagined
Analyst & Researcher, Author & Speaker
[Editor’s note: On May 5, 2021 Patrick Case, Chief Equity Officer and Assistant Deputy Minister at Ontario’s Ministry of Education reached out for a telephone conversation. He was hopeful some big changes would be announced in the next few months.
On September 7, 2021 the Ministry of Education announced it was seeking input from the public on how to strengthen accountability for school board trustees.
On June 8, 2023, the Provincial government passed Bill 98, Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act, outlining major education policy reforms including the following:
School board trustees and senior education officials, including superintendents and directors of education, are now required to undergo provincially mandated training to make sure they have the skills and competencies to deliver on the government’s priorities.
Performance assessments for directors of education will be standardized and there will be a new “impartial integrity commissioner-led process” for Code of Conduct complaints about school board trustees.
This means school boards are now required to refer alleged breaches to an integrity commissioner for determination, and the Minister of Education will create a roster of integrity commissioners for that purpose, set out a more detailed process for determination, expand the sanctions available, and set out an appeal process.
This will give authority for the Minister to issue guidelines describing knowledge and practices that a person conducting a performance review must look for in conducting performance appraisals, and subject to certain limits, allow a board to take into consideration additional factors in conducting these performance appraisals, such as parental input.
This means the Minister of Education can now intervene in the performance assessment of local directors of education and the conduct of school board trustees.
These changes will also allow the minister to establish policies and guidelines respecting student mental health and communications with parents.
BUT THEY AREN’T ENOUGH.
You can read more about Bill 98 and changes the government is making around when a school board may or must sell, lease or otherwise dispose of a school site, which is sort of “buried” in the Bill here.
On June 16, 2023, six business days later, Nancy Naylor retired, eight days before the school year was over.
There was no public announcement about Ms. Naylor’s “sudden” retirement.]