Every week on the main page I manage to find another diary on the "War on Teachers", or against education, or kids. I hope to tell you that there is always hope for public education no matter what the raving lunatic says on top of a pedestal.
The province of Ontario has been given a proven track record of some of the greatest public education in the world. I say Ontario because education is the jurisdiction of the provinces much more than the federal government (No Child Left Behind would never happen up here).
I'll give you a report on why Ontario has done so well, but I'll first tell my story in high school. I went to a very tech oriented high school which seemed like a good fit for someone of my generation. I did find myself with an affinity for computer science and I typed out javascript codes as if it was my birth language.
But I found myself drawn to the stage. Despite my enrollment in a school with a garage and two woodworking rooms I gravitated to performance art. Creating good theatre is what I love doing and if I never got the strong encouragement from my small but dedicated drama department I wouldn't be at one of the best theatre departments in Canada.
The Program for International Student Assessment agrees that my province has a good system. They singled Ontario as one of the best along with Shanghai, Poland, Germany, Brazil, and Finland. This was their reasoning:
[Ontario's] response to weak performance has consistently been intervention and support, not blame and punishment. They succeeded to dramatically reduce the number of low-performing schools, not by threatening to close them, but by flooding schools with technical assistance and support.”
It never hurts to ask your neighbours how they get their gardens to look so nice every summer. Consider this your new talking point against those who are anti-education.