Ontario’s new education minister must control civil servants and school boards

If you’re old enough, you might remember the British political sitcom Yes Minister where hapless British cabinet minister Jim Hacker could never get anything done because of opposition from civil servants in his department.

The civil servants didn’t oppose Hacker to his face but rather made it look like they were following Hacker’s orders while ensuring they never got implemented. Their passive-aggressive approach foiled Hacker again and again.

While Yes Minister was satire, much of it is like real life. Nowhere is this plainer than in Ontario’s education department. When Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives took office in 2018, they had their work cut out for them., faced with civil servants and school boards that had grown accustomed to getting their way.

The first education minister was Lisa Thompson, but she lasted only one year. After promising to replace the previous government’s controversial sex-education curriculum, Thompson flip-flopped and kept the earlier curriculum in place. Many parents were not impressed.

Perhaps Thompson’s biggest mistake was her announcement that all high school students had to take at least four online courses to graduate. Thompson could never produce a shred of evidence to justify the supposed educational benefits of this proposal. At every step along the way, Thompson was left to flounder by officials in her own department. It’s almost like she was set up to fail.

Mercifully, Ford shuffled Thompson out of the education portfolio and appointed Stephen Lecce. Unfortunately, Lecce didn’t fare much better, and he was just as bad at explaining the supposed merits of online learning. It took months before Lecce agreed to make the online courses optional rather than mandatory.

To his credit, Lecce said he wanted schools to take a back-to-basics approach. But bureaucrats in his department had different ideas. When Lecce introduced a new math curriculum, he appeared as surprised as everyone else when its preamble contained several paragraphs claiming that traditional math was inherently racist. Lecce had the offending paragraphs removed, but the damage was already done.

Obviously, the education minister cannot be expected to be familiar with the details in every curriculum guide. But he certainly should have read through this one before releasing it, particularly since this curriculum was supposed to mark a significant change in direction.

Even worse was how school board officials openly defied Lecce’s directives. For example, the Halton District School Board allowed an Oakville high school teacher to wear giant prosthetic breasts to school. Even though Lecce said this was inappropriate work attire and ordered the school board to intervene, board officials ignored his wishes and defended the right of teachers to dress however they want.

In another incident, several large school boards cancelled classes on April 8 because of a solar eclipse. Once again, Lecce expressed disapproval, but the boards went ahead with their closures anyway. The Waterloo Region District School Board, for example, did so with only a few days’ notice, a decision Lecce called “indefensible.” But Lecce’s words fell on deaf ears.

At the beginning of June, Ford replaced Lecce with Todd Smith. However, on Aug. 16, after only 10 weeks on the job, Smith quit his cabinet position, which led Ford to appoint Jill Dunlop as his fourth education minister.

For Dunlop to do better than her predecessors, she must take charge of her department immediately. Given the ongoing increase in public-sector employment in Ontario (from 18.2 per cent of the total workforce in 2007 to 19.6 per cent in 2022), Dunlop should look for ways to streamline her department and ensure that her directives are being implemented.

On a similar note, Dunlop should insist that school boards focus on teaching facts rather than promoting woke ideology. Not only would the vast majority of parents support a back-to-basics approach, it would also be good for student learning.

As the new schoolyear draws near, if Premier Ford is serious about improving Ontario’s education system, his new education minister must take charge. The last thing Ontario needs is yet another Yes Minister embarrassment.