Randall Denley: Legal challenge may finally bring change to Ontario's irrational education system

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The architecture of Ontario’s public education system is a wonder to behold. The province has four types of publicly funded school boards, but only one is accessible to anyone — and all of them are straying from their core mandate.

Ontario has a Catholic school system, but it’s not just for Catholics. School boards looking for more students and the grants they bring can and do accept non-Catholics. French school boards accept large numbers of people not legally entitled to French education, for the same reasons.

One might think the primary job of the English public school boards would to offer instruction in English, since that is the mother tongue of nearly 70 per cent of the Ontario population. Instead, English instruction is falling into disfavour. In Ottawa, more than half the elementary students in the public school board are enrolled in French immersion.

This unusual system is built on a foundation of constitutional deals and charter rights, but similar arrangements have already been overturned in Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, and are being challenged in Saskatchewan.

The problem is that 45 per cent of students in Ontario’s French-language schools don’t have French as their first language

Now the Ontario system is facing legal action, too, and it is coming from a surprising direction. Basile Dorion, a former school trustee, is challenging the constitutionality of the admissions approach of French-language school boards. The problem is that 45 per cent of students in Ontario’s French-language schools don’t have French as their first language. Some parents say it waters down the French milieu, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising if they are right.

Francophone children and those with at least one parent schooled in French are entitled to French schooling, where numbers warrant — and the numbers are small. Only about 108,000 students are in the French system, compared to nearly two million in the English language boards. In an effort to boost enrolment, some school boards have adopted a policy of admitting students who aren’t native French speakers, but would like to learn the language. That’s French immersion, not French schooling.

If Dorion’s court challenge succeeds, it could collapse Ontario’s educational house of cards. A decision that boards have to stick only to those they were created to serve would have major implications for the Catholic system, too. A Catholic board’s effort to take over public board students is at the heart of the legal dispute in Saskatchewan.

This would pose an interesting dilemma for the Ontario government. As irrational as Ontario’s school system is, politicians of all parties realize it is suicide to change it. When the PC government proposed much smaller changes to the array of francophone services last year, it faced a firestorm. Even that would look like a tiny spark compared to the reaction from the parents of more than 600,000 Catholic students.

There are reasons to support Ontario’s educational status quo. It does allow parents a degree of choice, and that’s a good thing. Advocates of a single system claim it would save billions of dollars, but that seems unlikely because the big cost of any system is putting teachers in front of students, and there wouldn’t be fewer students. A single system would have the advantage of fewer underutilized schools, less busing and fewer administrators.

Ontario’s education structure is the result of government policies in the 1980s and 1990s that made good on constitutional and charter promises. Those policies delivered equal funding for all types of school boards, but there have been unintended consequences.

Student enrolment has been static for years. That’s why Catholic and French boards that want to grow are reaching beyond their natural mandates to draw students from the English public system. That system itself has fallen in love with teaching students in French, making it difficult for Ontario children of the majority language group to find schooling in their own language.

The special protection for Catholic and French students becomes more outmoded every year as the province’s demographics change through immigration. The deal to provide education in English and French made sense when almost everyone spoke one of those two languages. Now, nearly 28 per cent of Ontarians have some a different mother tongue. There are more Chinese-language speakers than there are francophones. As well, paying the full cost of education for Catholics but nothing for other religious groups is fundamentally unfair.

Ontario’s education system is designed to deal with the grievances of the 19^th century, not the realities of the 21^st. The last time Ontario took a big look at education was a 1995 royal commission. After nearly a quarter of a century of change, a review is overdue.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa political commentator and former Ontario PC candidate. Learn about his new book Spiked at randalldenley.com. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com