The OCDSB Secondary School Review Needs A Rethink

We need a game changer, but the current set of recommendations for the OCDSB Secondary School Program Framework do not begin to accomplish it. The review is essentially a repeat of what the Board did in 2000-2001 with its New Vision for Secondary Schools. Little changed as a result of it, and little is likely to change as a result of the current review. For confirmation that school authorities are consistently missing the mark with their reform efforts, consider how the Hall-Dennis report described the state of public education back in 1968. For decades stretching to more than a half century, public education has failed to make reforms that make a true difference. 

The real issues the OCDSB needs to address have been well articulated. Will Richardson provides an excellent summary of some in his article titled 9 Elephants in the (Class)Room That Should “Unsettle” Us. Peter Gray’s article titled The Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders deals with others, and OPERI references many others. 

The OCDSB has produced a document called Unleashing Potential, Harnessing Possibilities in which it repeats the forward-looking views of people like Ken Robinson and Daniel Pink, but it seems to have no idea how to respond to them. Compared to Robinson’s call for a paradigm shift, and Pink’s call for greater autonomy the proposed recommendations, look like nothing more than rearranging the furniture on the Titanic. Even the simple recommendation by Robinson that we must “get rid of the bells” appears to not even be under investigation.

John Dewey defined open-mindedness as the “active desire to listen to more sides than one, to give heed to the facts from whatever source they come; to give full attention to alternative possibilities, and to recognize the possibility of error even in the beliefs that are dearest to us.” (Quoted from Ailsa Watkinson’s book titled Education, Student Rights and the Charter.) There are people in the OCDSB community (students, parents, teachers and administrators) who have the open-mindedness and imaginations to create real solutions to nagging old problems. These innovators need to be given genuine opportunities to explore the range of possibilities for systemic change that will put public education on solid ground. 

In his book Drive, Daniel Pink said, “Perhaps it’s time to toss the very word ‘management’ onto the linguistic ash heap alongside ‘icebox’ and ‘horseless carriage.’ This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.” It requires a starting point for an orderly transition, and a good place to begin is to allow small groups of innovative mainstream students and teachers the opportunity to experience self-directed learning, free of the bells where everyone involved is a teacher and a learner. These people will spark the imaginations of others and gradually the paradigm shift Ken Robinson envisions will occur.