As a non-denominational, apolitical, school I have written to John Tory asking him to explain his party’s $400m proposal for faith based schools.

If there are fifty thousand kids affected by the Conservatives policy, there are another two, three or four times that number with one form or another of social or learning difficulty who continue to wait on a list while their development stands still. If nothing else, funding should be allocated where it is most needed.

Star Academy was founded over ten years ago for the very reason that too many children were divided, streamed and accordingly labeled, unfairly, by their test results. The resultant lack of confidence, low self-esteem and poor social skills had an impact on their desire to learn that many never recovered from. It doesn’t have to be that way. If funding followed the child, we would eradicate the dogma that prevents the public system utilizing private expertise and our kids would benefit.

We have had hundreds of students through Star Academy, from different faiths and with different abilities – I can’t think of one who didn’t leave us better off than they arrived. That’s what education should be about. Not every child will run for Premier, but they should all start out with an equal chance. That they don’t is not all down to poor teaching – there are many talented and dedicated teachers within the public system – it’s much more to do with a one-size-fits-all structure. To succeed you need to conform. If you don’t, a vortex awaits.

Star Academy is an independent school – primarily because we couldn’t do what needed to be done from within the public system – but we will never compromise principle for our own gain. Can Mr Tory can say the same thing?’

Belinda Bernardo

An article that ran last month in The Guardian newspaper struck me.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_clarke/2007/07/the_case_against_summer.html

It argues for a longer school year. We do too. In fact, we already operate one. We do so for the sustained development of our students. Research has long shown that shorter terms punctuated by short breaks are preferable to long terms and a long summer break. (The article also refers to socio-economic position to further the point, from our experience we do not feel this holds true at all.) It just makes sense. How many of us could leave work for two or three months and pick up where we left off on the first day back? Not me.

The Star Academy students who attend our July programme have consistently proved our theory. They perform better as a result of being challenged, albeit in a more relaxed environment, when school starts back at the beginning of September. That’s not rhetoric nor anecdotal, it is fact.

That more and more research supports this is validation of what we do, but more importantly it should pressure legislators to look more closely at the current provision. If knowledge is King, can we afford to be penniless?

Belinda Bernardo

http://www.jhu.edu/teachbaltimore/resourcesresearch/research.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2170230/nav/fix/

WHY SEVEN WRONGS DON’T MAKE A RIGHT
A liberal society casts religion as a private matter rather than a public one
CLIFFORD ORWIN 8:01 AM EDT

Politics doesn’t just make strange bedfellows; it drives obvious ones apart. So I’ll be sleeping alone tonight, estranged from Ontario Conservative leader John Tory, whom I admire, and the Canadian Jewish community, to which I belong. They both think that liberal democratic principles permit or even require the public funding of religious education. They’re dead wrong. Public funding of Catholic education has been an albatross around our collective neck dating from the terms of Confederation. Some provinces provide some funding to schools of other denominations; others, like Ontario, do not. Since Catholic schools receive full funding and others partial funding or none, provinces discriminate in favour of Catholics and against parents of other faiths.

This situation is clearly unfair. The question is what to do about it. Withdraw funding from Catholic schools? Extend that same funding to other religious schools? Grin and bear the status quo, flawed as it is? Preferring the first, I’ll settle for the third. The second is a very bad idea.

The Fathers of Confederation had to guarantee public funding of Catholic education in 1867 because otherwise there would have been no deal. Similarly (you’ll choke on this but please hear me out), the American Founders had to compromise with the existence of slavery in the Constitution of 1787 because otherwise there’d have been no deal there either. As even the slaveholders grasped (this was the age of Enlightenment, after all), slavery was a gross injustice, a terrible evil, and incompatible with the principles on which the new republic was founded. (Famously, Thomas Jefferson trembled when he reflected that God was just.) So they inserted an article forbidding the importation of slaves after 1807, hoping thereby to set the peculiar institution on the path of extinction.

Am I really claiming that the funding of Catholic schools in Canada is an evil comparable to slavery? Of course not. But it is an evil parallel to it. In both cases a liberal society was compelled to make its peace with an illiberal practice as the price of its coming into being. Which means that just as Americans eventually abolished slavery, so, too, Canadians should end public funding of Catholic education. Will we? Probably not. The injustice isn’t glaring enough, the obstacles daunting. Politicians won’t address the issue; it would be suicidal.

So we will have to live with this inequity, while remaining conscious of it as such. (It was wrong for an Ontario Conservative government to expand funding for Catholic education, as one did not long ago.) The last thing Ontarians should do is to aggravate the offence under the pretense of redressing it by extending funding to other religious schools as well.

Seven wrongs don’t make a right. (So far, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Copts, and Protestants have indicated their intention of applying for the funding that Mr. Tory has promised if elected.) Don’t get me wrong. Jewish education is a good thing – especially for Jews. That’s why we Jews should pay for it. Religious independence is a fundamental virtue of a free society. You stand on your own two feet (or kneel on your own two knees) before God, not with your hand in the public till. It’s a truism that religion in the United States, long inured to self-reliance, is more robust than religion in
other Western nations – including Canada.

Liberal society is by definition of no religion. It casts religion as a private matter rather than a public one. While recognizing it as salutary, it doesn’t privilege it among practices that are salutary. It shouldn’t offer any benefits to religious organizations that are not available to non-religious ones as well. It should treat religious schools as it does other private schools, granting them the benefits available to all non-profit organizations. A voucher system promoting parental choice in education would be a policy worth considering (not that we collectivist Canadians will consider it.) But that wouldn’t be a policy that privileged religious education.

We hear that public funding for religious education would entail higher levels of accountability and more rigorous requirements of tolerance. Fine, but the provinces already possess the means to insist on these. They accredit private education, which should suffice to hold it to whatever standard. Religious Canadians, be careful what you wish for. When parents foot the bill for schools, they will demand excellence. Where others are footing it, they won’t. Mediocrity will prevail, in religious education as elsewhere. Many of my students at the University of Toronto are graduates of the
Ontario Catholic public school system, and what they know about Catholicism could join that fabled legion of angels in fitting on the head of a pin.

Clifford Orwin is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
© Copyright 2007 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
globeandmail.com and The Globe and Mail are divisions of CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc.

What is the purpose of a report card? I always believed it was to provide parents with information they can use to help measure, and contribute to, their child’s development?

A standardized report card is an oxymoron! If nothing else it should summarize work carried out and detail the child’s achievements across the whole curriculum. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the pressure on Public school teachers – I was in the system for many years – but communication between school and parents is absolutely crucial to the development of a child. A report ‘card’ (it’s actually a veritable tome for us!) is a vital part of that communication process. To reduce it to a series of templates and standard comments is to abdicate school responsibility and further cloud the waters of a parent’s role in their child’s education.

Frankly, it is worryingly difficult for the public system to educate an individual. Budget and headcount won’t allow it – despite the best efforts of many fantastically talented teachers. They need to get hundreds of thousands of kids ‘processed’ and out the other end with a minimum of fuss. I understand that imperative.

But the devil really is in the detail. Sure, it sounds fine, ‘…reduce teacher hours preparing report cards… free up time to prepare lessons… to actually teach…’. However, if we accept the premise that parents should be actively involved in children’s education then how much can we really expect if the one formal piece of written communication is interchangeable with a classmate or ten?

No class, public or private, has every child at the same place at the same time – in any subject. That’s why Star Academy agrees an individual learning programme with every parent, with agreed individual objectives and measurable progress reports against these objectives.

But then, we have a maximum student/teacher ratio of 10:1. The average class size in the Ontario system is 28!

The school itself is also graduating – into its next decade. With your support through Alan Murtagh, we have maintained our philosophy but put together a new “mature” image as we enter the next chapter of our development. Please join us to celebrate this launch on Friday June 15th at either 3 or 5 p.m.