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BY ANGELA MACLEOD AND JASON CLEMENS

Special to the Sun

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Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives recently released their education platform, which shows they have opted for the status quo in Kindergarten to Grade 12 education.

This is unfortunate because the province’s education system is in dire need of reform.

In fact, Patrick Brown’s PC platform contains almost no substantive reforms aimed at improving an antiquated and increasingly inefficient system.

For example, the first education promise in the PC platform is a moratorium on school closures.

This comes at a time when public school enrollment declined 5.4% between 2005-06 and 2014-15, the most recent year of available data.

There are 115,308 fewer K-12 public school students but the PCs are committing to no school closures.

Rather than think innovatively about the role of charter or independent schools to mitigate potential school closures, particularly in rural areas, the PCs simply made a blanket commitment that will not improve education nor free up resources currently used by under-populated public schools.