Posted by Geoffrey Clarfield.
Barbara Kay is one hundred per cent correct!. Read her article here in the National Post
Bring regulation of educators back to the ministry of education
The Ontario public school network is a systemically polluted ecosystem. This isn’t my opinion. The evidence is in, and it stinks to high heaven.
A recent survey on antisemitism in three Ontario school boards, submitted by then federal envoy for combatting antisemitism Deborah Lyons tallied 781 antisemitic incidents in Ontario K-12 schools, most of which occurred in metropolitan Toronto. Many involved Nazi tropes (“Heil Hitler,” “Hitler was right”). One in six were teacher-initiated or involved school-sponsored activities.
In a particularly chilling Oct 2024 incident, an Ottawa six-year-old was told by her teacher that, since one of her parents is Jewish, she is only “half human.” In Nazi Germany, treatment of such children “vacillated between persecution, semi-toleration, and racial reclassification.” Sound familiar?
Once, such an overtly antisemitic teacher would have immediately had her licence suspended by the Minister of Education. But in 1997, the Ministry of Education ceded its responsibility to licence, govern, discipline teachers and accredit faculties of education — the “direct regulation model” which is accountable to voters — to a new entity it created, the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT). Increasingly, the OCT acts as though it is accountable to nobody.
As fig leaves, school boards appoint a Jewish “equity officer” to receive complaints about antisemitism in schools. But such officers only have the power to “educate” offenders, not punish them, so in fact have no power at all. Indeed, the Lyons report notes there were only 14 disciplinary decisions regarding antisemitism in over 20 years. In the “half-human” case, illuminating OCT’s values, the child was assigned to another classroom, and the offending teacher remains in her post.
Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom, the OCT’s indifference to rampant antisemitism in both elementary and high schools sparked the creation of Jewish Educators and Families Association of Canada (JEFA). Earlier this month JEFA released the report of a 21-month investigation, “End the Crisis in Education: A Plan for equal rights and real learning.”
One of the report’s recommendations calls for a judicial inquiry into whether Jewish educators are receiving equal representation from their unions. (Anecdotally, the answer is emphatically “No.”) But, while antisemitism in classrooms and school activities was the driving force for the report, its principal thrust is to serve as an ambitious blueprint for the Ontario government to follow in restoring a sick public school system to health.
Tamara Gottlieb, JEFA’s co-founder, was a consultant to the OCT for 21 years. She knows this territory and its history intimately and, as became clear in an interview with her, her standpoint is firm: “The experiment of OCT self-regulation with regard to teacher licensing must come to an end.”
