Public attitudes toward education in Ontario 1980: Third OISE survey

Abstract

This third OISE Survey finds that the Ontario education system appears to have reached a turning point. Most evidently—in response to declining enrollments, a fiscal crisis, and even more fundamental factors such as growing drop-out and youth unemployment rates—major educational policy initiatives are now underway to reorganize a number of the main components of this system. The downward trend in the Ontario public’s overall satisfaction with education appears to have stabilized for the moment. Such stabilization does not appear to be the result of any public perception of improving quality of educational services, but may rather be a consequence of Ontarians having become more attentive to educational problems and more generally conscious of the difficulty of educators doing any better under existing resource and organizational constraints. The survey looks at: the public’s overall assessment of education, the relation of education to other public priorities, funding priorities within education, curricular goals, equal educational opportunities, school organization, schooling and work, and the politics of education.