Funding the Whore of Babylon

Some people are not going to like me for this one, but… well, what else is new?

There was an article in the online edition of the Globe and Mail that caught my eye. It hit home for many reasons, some of them personal. Apparently, many schoolteachers are lying about their faith in order to get coveted teaching positions in the Catholic school board.

It strikes a personal chord with me because I was for a very short while employed by the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA), the union which represents the province’s Catholic schoolteachers. I didn’t have to pass any religious tests there, but it was kind of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” environment. I still feel dirty remembering my time there.

Incidentally, I worked in OECTA’s government relations department, so I gained some valuable insight into how lobbying works. The Catholic school lobby in Ontario is well-funded and has the ears of literally every sitting Ontario MPP, regardless of party. Here’s an anecdote: one of these political parties (alright, it was the NDP) was having a contest to choose a new party leader. One of the candidates made the mistake of musing aloud about revisiting the issue of separate school funding. Perhaps he thought it would make a great wedge issue for his campaign. In any case, he brought down upon himself the full wrath of the Catholic lobby, including the organization for which I worked. The poor fellow quickly backtracked, and the idea has never again been uttered aloud in the province’s halls of power.

Leaving my personal experiences aside, there is so much wrong with this state of affairs, that I don’t know where to begin deconstructing it. First, a little background: if you happen not to be from Ontario, this province is unusual in Canada in having a publicly-funded Catholic school system, a fact that will probably cause you to scratch your head in wonderment and disbelief, and rightly so. There is some complicated legal history behind this arrangement, but I cannot think of any still-relevant facts that could morally justify it.

The Catholic lobby, the Catholic teachers’ union, and the gutless politicians in their pockets repeat endlessly that separate school funding (a euphemism, since no other religious or cultural group is allowed a taste of this particular plum) is “constitutionally protected”. However, there are at least three replies to this canard. First, the province itself does not have a written constitution such as the separate US states have, at least not in the sense of a written legal instrument that cannot effectively be repealed by regular procedural means. So if there’s a constitutional guarantee, it is not a provincially-based one.

Second, according to my non-specialist reading of s.93 of the Constitution Act (also known as the British North America Act) of 1867, the right of Catholic schools to exist is granted, but it says nothing about the public funding of those schools. The latter is simply not in the text. I suppose some clever judges have read it into the Act, but they could not have read it from the Act.

Third, other provinces have scrapped their separate school funding systems, examples being Quebec, Newfoundland, and Manitoba. Interestingly, Manitoba did it unilaterally, without jumping through the hoops of constitutional amendment. They simply went ahead, and Parliament failed to challenge it ― as is its prerogative. The legal background to separate school funding is too convoluted to present here in any detail. However, for a good overview, I encourage interested readers to peruse the website run by the group “Education Equality in Ontario”. Incidentally, this was one of several information sources run by concerned citizens that I was tasked with monitoring during my time at OECTA. Sadly, the site seems to have become moribund.

Simply stated, it is high time we weaned the Catholic Church from the public teat. If they wish to have their own education system, let them fund it from the heaps of treasure they’ve mercilessly piled up from the sweat, blood, and bones of generations of labouring poor.

(As an aside, given the persistent stream of ugly little revelations in the news, we might like to think twice before letting the Catholic Church anywhere near children. Kind of like shutting up the fox in the henhouse, no?)

However, there is more wrong with this story than just the public funding issue, which to me is enraging enough. It also begs the following question: why are our teaching colleges (also publicly-subsidized) producing so many more teachers than the education system can consume? This certainly does not seem like an efficient expenditure of funds. It was gratifying at least to read in the article that the province is planning to eliminate about a thousand places in teaching colleges. My mind boggles at that number: Ontario is turning out a thousand surplus teachers each year!

There is, however, a simple explanation for so many people wishing to attend teaching colleges: many people want to be teachers, and with good reason. Getting a full time teaching position has become a winning lottery ticket. The positions are few, but if you get one, you’re set for life. The salaries are absurd, the pensions and benefits are generous, and the fact is, the job is really not that difficult if you happen to have the knack for it (which too many working teachers do not). Sure, I personally know teachers who have tried to convince me that the work they do is much harder and more important than anyone else’s work, but I remain unconvinced. Sure, teachers are necessary (so are garbage collectors) and teaching has its quantum of stress, but what job doesn’t? One thing most jobs don’t have is a quarter of every year off, paid. I believe there are two prominent causes for this over-remuneration of teachers.

First, they are over-professionalized. There was a time when anyone with half a brain and a vocational calling could teach. Now it seems that the brain part is optional while much more is required in terms of education. Brains and education do not always – or even usually – go together. Is more professionalization a good thing here? Well, to use the Scriptural expression, “Ye shall know it by its fruits.” Despite the increased time and money it now takes to produce a “qualified” teacher, the resulting quality of education of their students continues to be dismal, to put it mildly. I know, because as a university instructor, I had to deal with the end results of the primary and secondary education systems, and it wasn’t pretty. It seems to me that, educationally-speaking, less is more here.

Second, along with over-professionalization, there is the problem of over-unionization. We constantly hear the refrain that there are too many students per teacher, that class sizes are too large. And yet at the same time, we have too many qualified teachers without positions. If there was some way we could hold the line on wages, or reduce them, I’m sure that many of those unemployed teachers would be more than happy to take one of the positions that could be created as a result. Doubtless, there are many who actually do see teaching as a calling and are not just in it for the money. As a matter of fact, reducing wages might even improve the overall quality of the profession, by weeding out those who are just in it for the money. Of course, the teachers’ unions will not have any talk of reducing wages.

One question remains unanswered: If both the Catholic and the regular public systems are funded from the same public source, why is it that the former is hiring while the latter is not? Well, first of all, the article does not necessarily say this is the case. But it does seem to be implied. If it is, I suspect this is because the Catholic system effectively has an additional source of funding that the public system does not (i.e. the Church). Anecdotally, I’ve known several parents who are not Catholic but who have enrolled their children in Catholic schools because of the perception that the quality of education is better. I admit I don’t know if or why this is the case. I don’t have children, and I have no first-hand experience of Catholic schools. I do know that as a teenager, if you wanted to be on the swimming team, you had to go to the local Catholic high school and use their pool. Our public high school didn’t have such frills, although we did have three times the number of students.

It is a strange irony, is it not? A situation is developing in which Catholic schools (styled "separate" schools in our political jargon) are increasingly staffed by teachers pretending to be Catholic, who are teaching students pretending to be Catholic.

There are too few teaching positions to go around. This is caused by the combination of over-professionalization and over-unionization. This, together with an archaic and unjust funding system has resulted in a sad state of affairs in which people are forced to lie about their religious faith (reminiscent of the bad old days of the Test Acts) in order to gain employment in their chosen field ― and to send their children to decent schools.

Please do not accuse me of being anti-teacher. I’m not. I blame the system and its perverse incentives more than I blame teachers. Thus, I’d like to end this post by dedicating it to those very good teachers I’ve had, the ones who have really made a difference in my life. I would especially like to thank Mr. Csoli, my fifth grade teacher, Miss McBride, my high school Latin teacher, and Mr. Dearing, my high school Economics teacher.