Between Caring and Counting: Teachers Take on Education Reform.

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

The late 1990s saw Ontario quickly revolutionize its education system all in the name of common sense. According to Kerr, the Progressive Conservative government was able to move so far so fast because it used as its blueprint the 1994 report of the Ontario Royal Commission on Learning, commissioned by their predecessors in government, the NDP. Still, revolution was in the air and Ontario was not alone among Canadian provinces in attempting to respond to the emergent international political economy of globalization as governments the world over tried to cut costs and privatize services. In Ontario, among dozens of other changes, the government collapsed the number of school boards, slashed the number and pay rates of trustees, eliminated grade 13, and completely overhauled the curriculum.

Meanwhile, Kerr and four colleagues at Forest Hill Collegiate, thinly disguised in the book as Beaconsfield Collegiate, experienced first-hand the impact that the changes had on the children they taught and cared about. Sadly, in planning its changes, the government was uninterested in hearing from teachers who had to live with the consequences. So, like other teachers, they joined the work slowdowns and strikes that were characteristic of this unsettling period.

In the end however, the pen is mightier than the picket line, and so everyone should be thankful that Kerr dropped out of the classroom for a period to do some graduate work at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), of which this book is a by-product. Using a research methodology known as institutional ethnography, Kerr takes her own experiences and those of her four colleagues and combines these insights with the stream of government documents to produce a book that deserves to be widely read. True, while some of the text reflects its academic origins, and while not all readers will relate to Kerr’s feminist perspective, she succeeds in articulating what many teachers felt about the Harris/Eves “reforms” and in explaining why they came about. The book ends with a call to all teachers to practice a critical pedagogy and to foster participatory democracy in their everyday relations.