2011‑2022, and is preserved here for archival purposes.
Brett Fawcett argues Alberta charter schools should be free to operate on religious grounds to meet the just vision of Canada’s founding constitutional vision.
What does a just education look like?
We talk a lot about what it means to provide a quality education to our children, but perhaps we’ve forgotten that you can’t have a good education without it also being a just education. In virt...
The latest call to defund Ontario’s Catholic schools both rewrites Canadian history and goes counter to international schooling norms, Cardus Education Program Director David Hunt argues.
In terms of cultural insensitivity, the latest call for ending Ontario’s Catholic school funding wins the shamrock, coming...
As parents send their kids back to school plagued by the new peril of COVID-19, Joe Woodard argues the real classroom risk remains an outmoded pedagogical revolution that turned education against its true nature.
At the risk of sounding melodramatic: a revolutionary elite seized public education in the 1970s. I saw it during my time at the University of Alberta. It was not a “conspiracy.” It was an ideology – “politics masquerading as science” – the prosely...
When the Ontario government made the call to shut down school buildings, John Knox Christian School's leadership team jumped into action. In the second of a series on independent education, Peter Stockland reports on how the school got back on track so quickly.
George Petrusma knows exactly where he was at 4:03 p.m. on Thursday March 12, and the decision facing him, staff and students at John Knox Christian School in Oakville, Ontario.
“I was having a conversation with all our staff who were in the buildin...
Ontario’s independent schools outperformed their government counterparts during COVID-19. Peter Stockland reports on policy recommendations from Cardus Education’s David Hunt to strengthen Ontario's education for all students.
In a policy brief submitted to the Ontario government today, Cardus Director of Education David Hunt says the COVID-19 crisis has exposed “the cracks”...
Convivium’s Peter Stockland checks out the innovative independent school in rural Eastern Ontario that was denied a chance to pay top dollar for an empty public school building.
Pictured: goats Coco and Jujube with students Annie and Sylas. Photo by Peter Stockland.
The Christian independent school that ignited controversy in Eastern Ontario last month is so rural that its students raise goats on the ...
Father Raymond de Souza wonders what spirit moves the public board of education in Brockville, Ontario to block an empty building’s sale to a private religious group.
Who does the government compete with? Is a public school a sacred building? A recent surplus building sale raises those questions.
In Brockville, the local public school board has a sold an elementary school in Wolford that it had closed in 2018. The...
Separate school systems across Canada aren’t relics from a long-ago time of French-English tensions. They’re the result of moral genius in Constitution making, argues Convivium contributor Brett Fawcett.
As Canadians, we don’t appreciate the moral genius of our Constitution enough.
This is obvious every time there is an attack on Catholic separate schools and school boards in Canada. The arguments have the grating predictability of rusty clockwork: f...
Attacking faith-based institutions for upholding codes of conduct ignores the Charter, violates the spirit of pluralism, and risks undermining religious freedom, argues lawyer Barry Bussey.
CBC News “Go Public” ran a story recently about the “dark secret” of religious schools. Initially, the story got a lot of attention, but was then swept away as the SNC-Lavalin scandal took on new life with Minister Jane Philpott’s resignation from the feder...
Convivium contributor Lloyd Mackey talks to Cardus’ Beth Green about “exciting” educational data she’ll release Wednesday at Surrey B.C.’s Pacific Academy.
Tomorrow’s release of Cardus data on outcomes for B.C.’s public and independent schools will also showcase the “exciting example” of innovative schools policy on the West Coast, says the leader of the study.
Beth Green, program director for Cardus Ed...
Who’s blazing a trail on school funding in Canada? Turns out it’s Saskatchewan. And as Cardus senior fellow Dr. Deani Van Pelt tells Convivium publisher Peter Stockland, two new education research papers hold some fascinating findings for Canadians interested in public education.
Peter Stockland: You’ve just published two new research papers dealing with independent schooling. Let’s start by talking about the one that focuses on a change Saskatchewan made about seven years ago to introduce a new category of independ...
Once primarily a tradition of older students helping young students having academic difficulties, tutoring has exploded into a billion dollar profession in Canada. Estimates show a third of Canadian parents will turn to tutoring for their children. In cross-country conversation with educational experts, Convivium's Peter Stockland explores how the change might alter our very concept of schooling.
Three years ago, educational consultant Paul Bennett began investigating for a media outlet what academic researchers had been intrigued by for at least a decade: the growth in private tutoring of Canada’s school-age students.
Bennett discovered in t...
Educational experts Derek J. Allison, Beth Green, and Deani Neven Van Pelt argue Toronto’s extension of its publicly funded breakfast program to independent schools is a great start to overcoming that misconception that their students are all kids with silver spoons in their mouths.
The Toronto Board of Health recently voted to extend student nutrition programs to qualified independent schools. Should Toronto City Hall accept the board recommendation, 300 independent schools would potentially gain access to a publicly funded breakfast ...
Cardus Senior Fellow Deani Van Pelt, and Cardus Education Program Director Beth Green, contend that proponents of misperceptions about home schooling should read up on the ample evidence of its benefits.
Back-to-school means different things for Canada’s five million school-age children. For an increasing share of students in almost every province, it means something other than attending a neighbourhood public school. Homeschooling, while still small in ove...
Analyzing data from the Cardus Education Survey, program director Beth Green fills Convivium readers in on the “distinct, positive advantages” of religious schools in Quebec. Find the link to the original research in the article.
Analyzing data from the Cardus Education Survey, program director Beth Green fills Convivium readers in on the “distinct, positive advantages” of religious schools in Quebec. The full report is available here...
Dear Mr. Quinn, My name is Brian Harskamp and I am one of the kids who benefited from the annual $358 million “subsidy” for private schools you mentioned in your recent Globe and Mail ...
It’s a paradox of politics when one of Canada’s self-identified progressive governments risks a major regressive step in preparing our children for the future. Nor is the conundrum of Alberta’s NDP government debating dismantling its highly innovative choic...
Parents and children should be at the heart of education, not teachers or cumbersome regulation. National School Choice Week, spearheaded by our neighbour to the south, offers a chance to highlight examples of school diversity already on offer in Canada’s provinces and to renew the call for a national conversation on parental choice.
Written by Beth Green (Cardus Program Director, Education), and Ben Woodfinden.
Parents and children should be at the heart of education, not teachers or cumbersome regulation. Na...
Even when closing schools seems an economic no-brainer, communities should fight back.
Counting All the Costs of School Closures By Milton Friesen
In a letter to the Ministry of Education in February of this year, Toronto Mayor John Tory waded into the current debate over what to do with underutilized school b...
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Canada declared the government of Quebec had breached the religious freedom of Loyola High School, a private Jesuit institution in Montreal. Paul Donovan, who led the seven-year legal battle as Loyola's principal and who became its president in April, spoke with Convivium publisher Peter Stockland about the implications of the decision for Canada's faith in common life..
CONVIVIUM: I wanted to ask you a first question from your perspective, not as the former principal and now new president of Loyola High School, but as a citizen who's just gone through a very arduous, seven-year legal process. You took on t...
StatsCan released a report on Tuesday which says that the reason for the higher performance overall of private school studen...
In Ontario, the education debate has been crippled by certain assumptions that might be toppled by a closer examination of the issues at hand. These assumptions were brought to mind by the ...
Here’s what has to happen:
The government and the BC Teachers Federation (union) are at an impasse, accord...
Democratic principles demand that Ontario’s private schools be welcomed into a respectful partnership with public education, Derek Allison writes in a research paper of Cardus
What is Ontario going to do about its private schools? The need for a serious policy review has been growing since June 1984 when then-premier William Davis rose in the legislature to announce funding for the province's Roman Catholic high schools, which, f...