TORONTO\u2014Ontario\u2019s Progressive Conservatives went on the attack Wednesday, accusing the Liberal government of making a mess of the education system, spending billions more dollars only to see test scores fall.<\/p>\n
Grade 8 math test results have fallen 16 points since the Liberals came to power over 10 years ago, even though the province spends $8.5 billion more each year on a system that has 250,000 fewer students, said PC education critic Rob Leone.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re spending more, serving fewer and our results are even worse than they were in 2003,\u201d Leone told reporters. \u201cWhere has the money gone?\u201d<\/p>\n
Education Minister Liz Sandals said \u201ca lot of the expense is related to full-day kindergarten, and I make no apologies for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The extra funding also went to create new high school specialist programs and to put mental health experts in every school board, added Sandals.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve introduced a lot of things that weren\u2019t there before, and we have raised the high school graduation rate from 68 per cent at the end of the Tories by 15 percentage points to 83 per cent,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The decline on the international math test results that Leone pointed to works out to a little over a two per cent drop, said Sandals.<\/p>\n
\u201cSixteen points sounds way scarier, but if you apply the multiplication table you find it\u2019s only about two per cent,\u201d she said. \u201cWe slipped a little bit and need to do better. No one\u2019s arguing with that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sandals urged Leone to \u201cstop bashing public education,\u201d and said 71 per cent of Ontario students now meet the provincial standard, a grade of A or B, up from 50 per cent 10 years ago.<\/p>\n
The Tories want to offer extra pay to good math teachers and put supervising extracurricular activities in teachers\u2019 job descriptions to make it mandatory.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to encourage people who are experts to teach rather than go on to other professions, so we want to create incentives and differential pay structures,\u201d said Leone. \u201cCan we provide extra financial incentives for good math teachers to go to underperforming schools?\u201d<\/p>\n
Sandals said the government doesn\u2019t like the idea of offering certain teachers incentive pay.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea that somehow the person who raised the scores the most is the person who\u2019s necessarily been the most effective teacher is just not true,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The education minister also said she has no intention of forcing teachers to supervise extracurricular activities, which she said the previous Conservative government tried to do under former premier Mike Harris.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey started off with the same statements as Mr. Leone, and it sounds good in terms of getting votes, but when the actually tried to do it what we had was eight years of total chaos,\u201d said Sandals.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was so awful. It was not a good atmosphere for students or for our employees and I\u2019m not going back there because it didn\u2019t work then and it won\u2019t work now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Leone said the Tories want to focus on student success while the Liberals and New Democrats fight to see who can cozy up closest to the powerful teachers\u2019 unions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Liberals like to talk about labour peace as if that is more important than the success of our students,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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