WHAT DO YOU MEAN THROWING MONEY AT OUR SCHOOLS WON'T FIX THEM?

Luisa D'Amato's column in today's Waterloo Region Record is titled "Throwing money at schools won't fix our math problems". Surely Luisa is wrong about that. Afterall we've had problems with our educational system for decades and we've kept right on throwing money at them much to the glee of administraters, teachers and their unions. How could such smart people (by their own admission) possibly be wrong? Surely Luisa you aren't subtly suggesting that they've always been looking out for number one, have you?

Luisa's Opinion piece is in response to today's front page story by her colleague Jeff Outhit titled "EQAO results show students lagging". Jeff's article indicates that our local Separate School Board (Catholic) is keeping up with Ontario averages in reading, writing and mathmatics. Our public Board however not so much. The Waterloo Regional District School Board just can't seem to get their wee heads around the problem.

According to Luisa the math curriculum is the problem. The educrats at our School Board like to use big words and pretend they are so much smarter than everyone else. Turns out they're more like the dumb kid in class bragging about sports and or his first car. In other words big on puffery and really slow on results. Basic math skills such as multiplication and division don't seem to be well entrenched with incoming first year students. Apparently the kids were never taught them satisfactorily in the elementary grades and those deficiencies just carried on right through high school into university.

Luisa D'Amato feels that our education officials need to admit that they were wrong and fix things. Good luck Luisa with any of the big shots at the WRDSB admitting any such thing. Or maybe the really bad ones I knew twenty years ago have retired and moved on. I wonder if they promoted their subordinates based on educational merit or on the same basis that they themselves were promoted ie. circle the wagons, don't rock the boat, remember your priorities namely teachers, unions, administraters, parents and students dead last.