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It’s a proposal that in the world of hard-nosed negotiating seems pretty reasonable. The Ford government offered to meet the union representing public high school teachers halfway on the issue of class size.

The response from the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation was to walk out, end talks with a conciliator and move towards starting a strike on or close to Remembrance Day.

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“The proposal that we received this morning is, in fact, worse than the Ford government’s original plan,” said OSSTF President Harvey Bischof.

Funny, I thought the proposal from Premier Doug Ford’s PC government to increase the average class size from 22 to 28 was the end of public education! Teachers and their supporters have said that if the increase goes forward, schools would be gutted.

So how can scaling that back be such a bad thing?

Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced on Thursday — as the Ford cabinet was meeting — that the government had offered to scale back the class size increase to an average of 25 students.