Mr. Dalton McGuinty

Good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you for being here. Your presence here tells me much about your commitment to education.

Thank you for being teachers.

Three of my sisters are teachers.

Two of my in-laws are teachers.

My father was a university professor but he much preferred being called “teacher”.

Most importantly, my wife is a teacher.

Story…”are you the one?”

I consider it an honour to address teachers here at the 19th Conference of Commonwealth Education.

It has been said that teachers affect eternity.

You never know where your influence will end.

Each of us can remember teachers who helped us grow into the people we are today.

And without knowing it, we pass those lessons along to others, including our children.
And most often, what we remember about our favourite teachers is not so much what they taught us but how they taught us…

With love, understanding and a sincere desire to help us become the best we could be.

Show me a successful person and I will show you all those committed teachers on whose shoulders that person stands.

Teachers, of course, work in our schools.

In his book, “In Praise of Education” John Goodlad describes schools as …

…"The foundation of our freedom, the guarantee of our future, the cause of our prosperity and power, the bastion of our security, the bright and shining beacon..the source of our enlightenment ."

This is a tall order for our schools. We expect so much of them.

We invest them with so much of our hope for a bright future for our kids, our communities and our countries.

And the people in our society who shoulder the greatest weight of our hopes and aspirations are our teachers.

That’s why we need to support you, encourage you, and urge you on in your work.

I want to share with you just a little of the remarkable Ontario education story.

I served as Premier of Ontario from 2003 to 2013.

Here’s a quick primer on my home province. We are Canada’s biggest province with 14 million people.

Roughly speaking, we have 5,000 schools, 120,000 teachers and two million students from junior kindergarten to grade 12.

Our student population is very diverse with 24% from immigrant families many of whom have to learn English.

Working together with our teachers, here are some of the results we have achieved:

Our literacy and numeracy scores, as measured by the independent “Education Quality and Accountability Office”, improved from 54% to 72%.

Our high school graduation rates improved from 68% to 84%.

The gap in student achievement between non-English speaking children and others dropped from 23% to 4%.

This meant our plan to help our immigrant students grow stronger was working.

When we began our strategy to improve results in our 4,000 elementary schools, close to 800 were low performing schools eligible for our school turn-around program.

Today, only 63 schools still qualify for that program.

So, that’s what we achieved. Now, how did we get there?

Here are 3 lessons I learned along the way.

Lesson one: Partner with your teachers.

Nothing was more important to me as Premier than education.

And I desperately wanted to make changes in our schools. But I also accepted my reality.

We in government don’t deliver education. We don’t work in our schools. We don’t teach. Teachers do.

I understood that if we were to make any progress, we could only do it in partnership with our teachers.

And I understood they would only get on board if I respected their professional judgment and they believed my reforms were in the best interest of their students.

We didn’t always agree. And that is only natural.

But I tried to live up to some of the most important political advice I ever received.

It was from my mother on my wedding day. She said “whatever happens, keep talking”.

So we kept talking. And along the way we kept teaching each other and learning from each other.

Lesson two: An unwavering government commitment to reform is essential

The drive to make progress in our schools must be a genuine government priority backed by resources and an intelligent plan.

Teachers, principals, parents, students and the broader public will not be fooled.

They all know the difference between smoke and mirrors and the real thing.

Everyone needs to know the government is serious.

If the government’s commitment lacks integrity, it will never inspire the hard work needed to implement reforms and improve education.

Here are a few things I did.

Every two months, I convened my “Premier’s Education Results Team.”

This group included my minister of education, our deputy minister, my expert external advisor, and a few others.

My team reported to me on the progress we were making, or lack thereof, and how we might accelerate our progress.

These meetings concluded with me, personally, giving direction on how our government should keep moving forward.

Word of the meeting got out.

I encouraged that.

I wanted all our partners to know that education was not just a government priority — it was my personal priority.

I also visited schools and met with all my education partners regularly.

In short, I believe the leader of the government needs regular contact with principals, teachers, parents, students and other education partners.

This keeps us in the know.

It energizes us.

It proves our personal commitment.

It dispels cynicism and inspires others to get on board.

Lesson three: Building capacity is essential.

The government can’t just issue orders demanding change in our schools.

The right people need to be empowered in the right way so that, together, you will achieve success.

In Ontario, our strategies for school reform focused on raising the bar and closing the gaps in achievement for kids that were underperforming or at a disadvantage.

Much of the focus of these strategies was on professional development.

We weren’t prescriptive.

We didn’t tell teachers what to do.

We provided the training opportunities, created the networks to share knowledge, and provided the materials, but we trusted in the professional judgment and knowledge of teachers.

We started by creating our “Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat. “

It was a new arm of the government dedicated to achievement in reading, writing and mathematics through better teaching.

Our Secretariat began its work by offering literacy and numeracy training to our teachers during the summer.

Over 25,000 teachers took advantage of this voluntary training.

Then we offered extra training to teachers who wanted to serve as coaches in their schools, so they could help other teachers.

Then we stepped that up…
we developed a mentoring program to ensure our new teachers were paired up with experienced teachers.

Let me just touch on a few more capacity building strategies briefly:

• Planning for improvement: every school district and school in Ontario had to develop a plan that would lead to improvement in their unique circumstances.

The government collected data and measured whether we were making progress.

We shared this data with our schools and our teachers and they used it to inform their teaching strategies.
 

• Leadership: we knew that we had to focus on building leadership at the board and school level to drive the change.

So – we built leadership networks and provided new training to our principals.

• Closing gaps: As much as we wanted every student in every school to improve, we also knew we had to focus in on groups that were underachieving generally or in a specific area, identify why, and develop targeted approaches to close those gaps.

In Ontario, we developed special strategies and supports to help Aboriginal students, students in special education, boys with their reading, and students with English as a second language.

We also created the Ontario Focused intervention program (OFIP).

We freed up principals and teachers in underperforming schools to visit other schools with the same challenges but far better outcomes.

What we found was that it was often a culture of “low expectations” that was holding them back.

By allowing these teachers and principals from low performing schools the opportunity to see an alternative, and then develop their own plan to implement reform, they “owned” the plan and were invested in its success.

The number of schools that qualified for this program originally was 800.

Now it’s 63.

Despite the many approaches we implemented to improve graduation rates, one of the most successful was the most simple.

Teachers asked high school students who were not showing up or who had dropped out to come back to school.

And it worked.

Students were motivated by the fact that someone at school cared about them!

More than half returned and finished school.

We also did a lot to help our first year high school students succeed.

We learned that if a grade 9 student fails just one course, there is a 30% chance he will drop out of high school.

• Materials: Finally, we made sure our teachers were well equipped with the right materials.

We produced a variety of materials to support teaching and good pedagogy and share best practices.

We made sure these materials were fully accessible in print or online.

Because of the partnership we struck with our teachers and their hard work, Ontario schools have made tremendous progress.

One of the most pleasant surprises I encountered along the way was that pretty well everything we wanted our teachers to do by way of best teaching practices, some of them were already doing.

I learned teachers are remarkably innovative. But they were doing all this in relative isolation, inside their own classroom.

Our job in government was not so much to invent best practices--these were already happening--but to create more ways and opportunities for teachers to share their best teaching practices.

Here’s one more thing I did which was very important to me.

I created the Premier’s awards for Teaching Excellence.

I wanted to recognize and celebrate the great work Ontario teachers were doing.

I also wanted to send a strong signal to all Ontarians that we should all value our teachers and the important work they do.

There are no Premier’s Awards for any other profession. Teachers are special. They are the foundation for all the successes we build for ourselves in life.

Despite these successes, I would be the first to say it’s not over.

There’s much more to do.

This is another reality of education reform. You are never done.

You are never done learning and improving.

Sometimes the best lessons come from the students themselves.

I am reminded of the story of the little girl who was drawing a picture in class.

Her teacher looked over her shoulder and asked: “What’s that?”

The child said: “It’s a picture of God.”

Her teacher said, good naturedly:

“Well, that’s impossible, dear. Because you see, no one knows what God looks like.”

The girl said: “Well … they will in a minute”.

As we look ahead in Ontario, now that we have made real progress in numeracy and literacy and graduation rates, we know that’s just the beginning.

The World Economic Forum recently defined a much broader set of objectives for our students.

Foundational Literacies (like literacy, numeracy, ICT, etc. )

Competencies (like critical thinking / problem solving, creativity, communication and collaboration) and

Character Qualities (like curiosity, initiative, persistence/grit, adaptability, leadership, social and cultural awareness.)

I think this is a pretty good roadmap for the future of education for all of us.

Thank you for your attention and thank you for your good work as teachers.