The Ford government has made a mess of the TDSB class-size cap
Kids, be nice to your teachers
Doug Ford’s government is doubling down on its decision to scrap a class-size cap in Toronto schools, potentially forcing elementary teachers to deal with more than 32 kids per class.
Last March, the Toronto District School Board passed a policy limiting the size of Grade 4 to 8 classrooms across the board. This was back when the TDSB had any real power, which changed dramatically two months later, when the provincial government stepped in, sidelined the board’s elected trustees and appointed a new supervisor, Rohit Gupta, to call the shots.
Related: Clayton La Touche has been removed from his role as the TDSB’s director of education
Then, in December, right before the holidays, Gupta overturned the TDSB’s decision, removing the 32-kid cap with no explanation. Parents were predictably peeved and sent the province a flood of emails demanding answers.
A month later, they received one. In a series of email responses reported by Toronto Today, Gupta wrote, “The TDSB was one of the only school boards in Ontario (perhaps the only) to impose a class cap of its own for grades 4 to 8–leaving the TDSB outside of central agreements and Ministry guidelines.”
“By making this slight adjustment,” he wrote, “We will still be within class caps established by the Ministry of Education and followed by other school boards and invest [sic] back into the classroom.” Gupta went on to pledge “targeted classroom supports” to help kids with math and literacy.
The cap Gupta mentions in his email is the provincial one, which says that every board, including the TDSB, must not have an average classroom size of more than 24.5 students across all their Grade 4 to 8 classrooms. That’s a lot lower than the 32-kid cap the TDSB had put in place, but the details are key here. Averages can be deceiving: a school with a few tiny classrooms—special ed classes, say—could also have several huge ones and still average out to below 24.5 students per class.
The TDSB’s per-classroom cap was designed to prevent this: regardless of the average number, it ensured that no individual classroom would ever exceed 32 kids. Without it, the overall numbers could check out even if some classrooms balloon in size. Not a great look for a government promising to help kids with math.
Perhaps it’s too much to ask for a large centralized bureaucracy like the province to keep tabs on each individual classroom. Stuff like that is better left to local communities, which—and we’re just spitballing here—could direct their concerns to dedicated elected representatives, who might even gather as some kind of board to make decisions. Decisions for schools in the district of Toronto. A Toronto District School Board, if you will. Someone should tell the province to give that idea a shot.
Anthony Milton is a freelance journalist based in Toronto specializing in long-form magazine writing. He previously worked as an assistant editor at Toronto Life, where he launched the Front Row newsletter. He regularly contributes all sorts of stories to the magazine, including deep dives on sports, business and housing as well as short-form commentary on our ever-changing city, from its obsession with cherry blossoms to its maddening NIMBYism. His work has also appeared in Maclean’s, Ricochet, TVO, the Trillium and more.
