Surpassing Shanghai: Ontario’s Hard-Won Harmony

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate, January 13, 2012 at 11:00 am

Of all the countries we've looked at in this series, Canada is the one with the greatest number of parallels to the United States. Geographically large, broken into provinces, and more demographically diverse than, say, Japan or Finland, Canada has nonetheless been much more of an educational up-and-comer than we have, gradually moving up in international rankings while we stagnate or slide.

Surpassing Shanghai looks at recent successful reforms in Ontario, an interesting case study for how to make reform work below the national level. The reforms in question started in 2003 with a change in provincial government. The Liberal Party took over from a teacher-bashing Conservative administration that had created a deeply polarized education policy landscape.

The new premier, Dalton McGuinty, promised to make education the top priority of his administration. He appointed an education minister who had built strong relationships with educators and families across the province and took several steps to heal the relationship between the teachers' union and the provincial government.

It is worth quoting at some length from the book:

The underlying assumption of Ontario's leaders seems to be that teachers are professionals who are trying to do the right thing and that performance problems are much more likely to be a product of lack of knowledge than lack of motivation. Consequently, teachers seem to own more responsibility for performance than is often the case in countries with a more punitive approach to external accountability.

After building broad consensus around reform and securing buy-in from the key stakeholders (including teachers), the McGuinty administration focused on two specific priorities: improving the high school graduation rate and increasing literacy and numeracy at the elementary school level. Both indicators have seen significant growth since the beginning of reform efforts, and they have done so in part because of the amount of power given to local communities and educators.

Finally, it should be noted that this regional success has taken place in the absence of a significant national education policy. It's worth considering whether or not Minnesota should opt out of the various federal initiatives that clutter our educational discourse so that we can focus on making Minnesota schools work for Minnesotans. If specific and inclusive reform can work at the regional level just north of the border, we should be able to make it work here.

[This is the fifth post in a series on the findings of Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World's Leading Systems.]

Posted in Education | Related Topics: K-12 education  Education Administration  Teachers