Education
Too many bad ideas imposed on classroom teachers
From the Fraser Institute
The Waterloo Region District School Board recently announced it would remove garbage bins from classrooms, before suddenly reversing itself.
Strange as it sounds, the school board planned to replace classroom waste bins with larger bins in common areas outside of classrooms, ostensibly to reduce the amount of waste produced by schools. Apparently, the facilities superintendent and senior facilities manager (the people behind this idea) think garbage magically appears when garbage bins are in classrooms and disappears once you get rid of these bins.
Of course, reality is quite different. Students still must dispose of dirty Kleenex tissues, empty pens and used candy wrappers. The aborted plan gave students a ready-made excuse for extra hallway trips. To prevent this from happening, teachers would have to provide makeshift garbage bins of their own.
This is a prime example of administrators trying to impose impractical directives on teachers for the sake of virtue signalling. No doubt Waterloo school board officials wanted to be recognized as environmental leaders. Getting rid of garbage bins in classrooms is an easy and effortless way to look like you’re doing something good for the environment.
Indeed, teachers typically bear the brunt of bad ideas imposed on them from above. As another example, British Columbia K-9 teachers must now issue report cards with confusing descriptors such as “emerging” and “extending” rather than more easily understood letter grades such as A, B and C. A recent survey revealed that most parents find the new B.C. report cards hard to understand. While most had no trouble interpreting letter grades such as A, less than one-third could correctly identify what “emerging” and “extending” mean about a student’s progress.
While the B.C. Ministry of Education claims these new report cards are built on the expertise of classroom teachers, its own surveys found that 77 per cent of teachers were unhappy with the grading overhaul. Of course, their feedback was ignored by education bureaucrats, which means teachers must implement something most disagree with, and then bear the brunt of parental frustration.
And one can never forget the nonsensical “no-zero” policies imposed on teachers in every province, which prohibit teachers from giving a mark of zero when students fail to hand in assignments or docking marks for late assignments. The reasoning behind no-zero policies is that zeroes have too negative an impact on student grades.
Fortunately, no-zero policies have become less popular in Canadian schools, particularly after Edmonton physics teacher Lynden Dorval was fired for refusing to comply with his principal’s no-zeroes edict. Not only did the public overwhelmingly support Dorval at the time, but the Alberta Court of Appeal upheld an arbitrator’s ruling that Dorval’s firing was unjust. In the end, taxpayers were on the hook for paying Dorval two years of salary, along with topping up his pension. But this doesn’t mean no-zero policies have disappeared entirely. Plenty of assessment gurus hired by school boards still push them on gullible administrators and unsuspecting teachers.
Finally, there are the never-ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training sessions—possibly the worst fads ever imposed on Canadian teachers. In an obvious desire to justify their jobs, DEI consultants provide many hours of professional development to hapless teachers who have no choice but to attend.
When teachers push back, as Toronto principal Richard Bilkszto did during a DEI session a couple years ago, they’re subjected to harassment and derision. In this case, the social impact on Bilkszto was so negative he eventually and tragically took his own life.
The Bilkszto case had a chilling effect—teachers should go along with whatever they’re told to do by their employer, even when a directive doesn’t make sense. This is not healthy for any profession, and it certainly doesn’t benefit students.
Classroom teachers have far too many bad ideas imposed on them. Instead of making teachers implement useless fads, we should just let them teach. That is, after all, why they became teachers in the first place.
Author:
From the Fraser Institute
Odds are, you can’t tell whether this sentence was written by AI. Schools across Canada face the same problem. And happily, some are finding simple solutions.
Manitoba’s Division Scolaire Franco-Manitobaine recently issued new guidelines for teachers, to only assign optional homework and reading in grades Kindergarten to six, and limit homework in grades seven to 12. The reason? The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT make it very difficult for teachers, juggling a heavy workload, to discern genuine student work from AI-generated text. In fact, according to Division superintendent Alain Laberge, “Most of the [after-school assignment] submissions, we find, are coming from AI, to be quite honest.”
This problem isn’t limited to Manitoba, of course.
Two provincial doors down, in Alberta, new data analysis revealed that high school report card grades are rising while scores on provincewide assessments are not—particularly since 2022, the year ChatGPT was released. Report cards account for take-home work, while standardized tests are written in person, in the presence of teaching staff.
Specifically, from 2016 to 2019, the average standardized test score in Alberta across a range of subjects was 64 while the report card grade was 73.3—or 9.3 percentage points higher). From 2022 and 2024, the gap increased to 12.5 percentage points. (Data for 2020 and 2021 are unavailable due to COVID school closures.)
In lieu of take-home work, the Division Scolaire Franco-Manitobaine recommends nightly reading for students, which is a great idea. Having students read nightly doesn’t cost schools a dime but it’s strongly associated with improving academic outcomes.
According to a Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) analysis of 174,000 student scores across 32 countries, the connection between daily reading and literacy was “moderately strong and meaningful,” and reading engagement affects reading achievement more than the socioeconomic status, gender or family structure of students.
All of this points to an undeniable shift in education—that is, teachers are losing a once-valuable tool (homework) and shifting more work back into the classroom. And while new technologies will continue to change the education landscape in heretofore unknown ways, one time-tested winning strategy is to go back to basics.
And some of “the basics” have slipped rapidly away. Some college students in elite universities arrive on campus never having read an entire book. Many university professors bemoan the newfound inability of students to write essays or deconstruct basic story components. Canada’s average PISA scores—a test of 15-year-olds in math, reading and science—have plummeted. In math, student test scores have dropped 35 points—the PISA equivalent of nearly two years of lost learning—in the last two decades. In reading, students have fallen about one year behind while science scores dropped moderately.
The decline in Canadian student achievement predates the widespread access of generative AI, but AI complicates the problem. Again, the solution needn’t be costly or complicated. There’s a reason why many tech CEOs famously send their children to screen-free schools. If technology is too tempting, in or outside of class, students should write with a pencil and paper. If ChatGPT is too hard to detect (and we know it is, because even AI often can’t accurately detect AI), in-class essays and assignments make sense.
And crucially, standardized tests provide the most reliable equitable measure of student progress, and if properly monitored, they’re AI-proof. Yet standardized testing is on the wane in Canada, thanks to long-standing attacks from teacher unions and other opponents, and despite broad support from parents. Now more than ever, parents and educators require reliable data to access the ability of students. Standardized testing varies widely among the provinces, but parents in every province should demand a strong standardized testing regime.
AI may be here to stay and it may play a large role in the future of education. But if schools deprive students of the ability to read books, structure clear sentences, correspond organically with other humans and complete their own work, they will do students no favours. The best way to ensure kids are “future ready”—to borrow a phrase oft-used to justify seesawing educational tech trends—is to school them in the basics.
Paige MacPherson
Senior Fellow, Education Policy, Fraser Institute
IMPACT-se just released their Review of the 2025-2026 Palestinian Authority School Curriculum (Grades 1-12). They reviewed 290 text books and 71 teacher guides (both printed and digital) currently in use by schools charged with educating Palestinian children. The results were unambiguous:
“The review finds that the 2025–2026 Palestinian Authority curriculum continues to systematically violate UNESCO principles and educational standards. Published in September 2025, the curriculum incites antisemitism and violence, promotes jihad and martyrdom, glorifies terrorism, rejects peacemaking and the two-state solution, and erases Israel from maps. It has not been substantively modified since the 2020–2021 school year, maintaining the same ideological framework first established in the 2016 reform cycle.”
In other words, the glorification of violence and deep racial hatred is, by design, woven into the fabric of every topic and virtually every lesson Palestinian children are taught.
The offensive examples were hardly rare exceptions throughout those 361 books. There were, for example:
- 50 examples (taking up a full 70 pages in the report) depicting Israelis or Jews as demonic or motiveless aggressors
- 47 examples of erasure of Israel from maps and language (declaring Palestine “from river to sea”)
- 56 examples of the encouragement of martyrdom and violent jihad
- 12 examples of the overt politicization of science and math
In addition, since 2016, 29 references to peace agreements, Israel, and Jews were removed from PA curriculum texts.
Overall, around 60 percent of the report’s examples come from material aimed at grades 9-11. Nevertheless, 17 examples of indoctrination (around 4 percent of the total) came from grades 1-4.
But what does all that have to do with Canada? Well, Canada has been a steady and reliable funder for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), and the World Bank’s provision of educational services to Palestinians.
So what? Don’t all Western nations provide the same support? Not exactly.
- A May 2025 resolution adopted by the European Parliament demanded that EU financial assistance be made conditional on removal of hate material, and urged full compliance with standards of peace and tolerance for education.
- The U.K. has, in past years, cut or reduced its funding to UNRWA over concerns about incitement in educational textbooks.
- The U.S. hasn’t provided any support for UNRWA since the Biden administration paused funding in January, 2024.
- It seems that both Sweden and the Netherlands have either cut or are phasing out their UNRWA funding.
But in May 2024, Canada committed to $65 million in new funding – which follows a brief and meaningless “pause” in UNRWA funding (where no scheduled payments were actually interrupted). That brings the funding total since 2016 to $259 million. And there’s no public record of any of that money being conditional on changes to educational textbooks.
The Global Affairs Canada officials who make these spending decisions are the ones responsible for applying official government policy. And the message driving that policy is pretty clear (pro forma “antisemitism is not who we are” press releases notwithstanding). The Government of Canada is absolutely down with pouring millions into the promotion of race-driven violence.
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