Does Provincial Curriculum Policy Really Make a Difference?

And if it doesn't, why are we paying so much for it?

A few months back I wrote about some research I’d done trying to identify the official curricula used by Ontario public schools. My efforts proved to be unsuccessful when it came to Ontario’s Ministry of Education: they just weren’t in a mood to share. But I did find plenty of juicy (and disturbing) resources through websites associated with the Toronto District School Board.

As it turns out, after seeing this Free Press article, I rather suspect that there’s no reason to lose sleep over whatever the official policies might contain.

Let me explain.

Years ago I worked with a talented and experienced high school math teacher. We were once chatting about a recent major Ministry update to the provincial math curriculum and he clearly didn’t think highly of the bureaucrats responsible for it. He then described the compliance process:

“You download the curriculum documents from the Ministry website; fill out the pages that need information; upload the completed forms; neatly pile up the new textbooks on a desk at the back of the classroom; close the door…and teach whatever you want.”

I thought his judgment was worth trusting. And the good folk at The Free Press think that there are millions of teachers out there doing effectively the same thing. But we know a lot less about their judgment.

What we do know is that unofficial, unsanctioned, and frankly terrifying curriculum materials are being used in classrooms. Here’s how The Free Press put it:

“A 2017 RAND Corporation survey found that 99 percent of elementary teachers and 96 percent of secondary schools use “materials I developed and/or selected myself” in teaching English language arts. The numbers are virtually the same in math. But putting teachers in charge of creating their own lesson plans or scouring the internet for curriculum materials creates an irresistible opportunity for every imaginable interest group that perceives—not incorrectly—that overworked teachers and a captive young audience equal a rich target for selling products and pushing ideologies.”

The big players include TeachersPayTeachers, that attracts around 20 million visits each month and Education.com, that’s visited 9.9 million times per month. Education.com claims that 22.5 million of their members are teachers. The Free Press article also mentioned Share My Lesson, a project of the hyper-politicized American Federation of Teachers. Share My Lesson only manages to receive 80,000 monthly visits.

Whether the curriculum resources available through those sites are acceptable to parents or even safe is one interesting question. But that shouldn’t distract us from the fact that none of it has been vetted by policy officials. Whatever you think about the official standards, it’s impossible to know whether the stuff being downloaded is age-appropriate, curriculum-compliant, or even educational.

That’s the American experience. Can we know what’s going on here in Canada? Well according to SimilarWeb estimates, for every 100 visitors from the US, those sites attract between six and nine Canadians. That would translate to around 1.3 million visits from Canada each month. In other words, given population disparities, Canadian teachers are accessing US-based unofficial curriculum resources at only slightly lower rates than their American colleagues.

Which brings us to the next question: how much money are Canadian provincial governments and school boards spending on curriculum tools that few teachers will ever use?

Unfortunately, because of the way the various ministries of education across Canada structure their financial reports, it’s impossible to know how much was spent specifically on curriculum research and development. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other indicators.

The Province of Ontario’s Sunshine list discloses all public sector employees in Ontario earning more than $100,000 a year. I could, for instance, filter that list for just Toronto District School Board (TDSB) employees with the job descriptions “Curriculum Leader, Secondary” and “Assistant Curriculum Leader, Secondary”.

It’s a safe bet that curriculum research and development is a lot of what people with jobs in those two categories do. Adding up their total salaries could give us a sense of what the TDSB, at least, is spending on curriculum.

There were 38 secondary school curriculum leaders earning more than $100,000 a year on the list, and 808 assistant curriculum leaders. That comes to approximately eight leaders for each of the 110 secondary schools in the district. The total costs of their combined salaries? $88.7 million.

In addition, there are 137 employees of the Ministry of Education in the Sunshine list whose roles (like “Education Officer”) suggest a strong connection to policy and curriculum development. Their combined salaries come to $16.4 million.

Serious governments might want to review all this.