Education

What is the true cost of sending a child to an Ontario independent school? Cardus surveyed 21 independent school principals in Ontario to help answer that question, providing a fuller picture of this often misunderstood school sector.

How can Christian schools thrive in a time when pandemic and polarization are causing school leaders and teachers to burn out? Jonathan Eckert, a Cardus Senior Fellow and education professor at Baylor University, suggests collective leadership offers a model that can sustainably bring out the best in any school's teaching team.

The research in this book traces the stories of 11 Christian schools and networks that have adopted completely new mindsets to keep their schools sustainable.

Ontario is seeing explosive growth in independent schools. The number of independent schools has grown by 52% since 2013-14. These schools now educate more than 154,000 students. Naturally Diverse categorizes these schools to better understand which needs and communities they serve. 

Challenges to Christian school sustainability have been well-documented in recent years—from historical declines in enrollment, to limited reach across diverse populations, to lack of programmatic and structural innovation, to personnel shortages and increasing educator burnout.

The Cardus Education Survey provides nationally representative snapshots of the life trajectories of secondary-school graduates from government schools, Catholic independent schools, Protestant independent schools, and non-religious independent schools in the US, Canada, and Australia.

Prolonged school closures has sparked debate about the intention, necessity, and efficacy of halting in-person education as an effective policy tool.

Are students in public schools receiving the necessary formation that will support their participation in a society that is becoming increasingly diverse in religious expression? Instructing the next generations not in a religion but about religion should be a key element of Canadian education.

This paper traces this conversation from its Greco-Roman and early Christian roots to the present—looking at how the Christian notion has shifted our conception of excellence in important ways, but how we have perhaps lost a fully rounded vision of it in our late modern world.

In this report we describe the first study that has assessed the value of a religious “good fit” in education. Using US data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), the study estimated a religious match effect, which is the difference in standardized test scores for students paired to schools of their same religion, after controlling for other variables.

This study presents the hypothetical economic costs of funding Ontario’s independent schools, if the province were to fully fund the sector or apply any of the existing partial-funding models in Canada.

This report explores how learning continued in Ontario’s independent schools during the continuous and disruptive school closures of the 2020–21 school year. It also investigates the financial, promotional, and business impact of these disruptions.

The heart of democratic education lies in preparing the next generation to join the community of citizens. Indeed, state-funded public education developed out of the imperative to inculcate the civic knowledge, skills, and attachment necessary for democratic governance.

But what is the role of independent schools in the process of civic formation and social cohesion? Do they help or hinder the development of democratic citizenship? What oversight should governments exercise over them? And should governments fund such schools as part of public education writ large?

Imagine Canada like a car: we’ve just had the rare experience of smashing our economy, culture, and society into a brick wall at high speed—whether through the disease itself or our response to it. And like crash-test engineers, we now have to perform the analysis.

What did we learn? How did we fare? What performed better than expected, and what worse? And, most importantly, where do we go from here?

The social, emotional, academic, and economic implications of the global COVID-19 pandemic will be studied for years to come. This paper reports how these schools pivoted from offering face-to-face education to remote learning from March to June 2020. 

Dr. Beth Green delivered the following remarks on October 6, 2017 at the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning’s conference “Christian Teaching and Learning: Pathways and Possibilities,” at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The text has been lightly adapted to appear in print.

Mild reforms were recently introduced to Alberta’s charter-school policy, but a most unaccommodating prohibition remains: Charter schools cannot be religious.

This paper is the final edition of a three-part, pan-Canadian series investigating the perceptions of independent-school parents. Using the same research question and methodology as the British Columbia (BC) and Ontario versions, this paper examines the findings in Alberta.

Click here to read a one-page summary of this report.

To check out the British Columbia findings, click here.

To check out the Ontario findings, click here.

Embracing Innovation and Diversity in Ontario K–12 Education

A Case Study of Pacific Academy

A Case Study of Our Lady of Lourdes Elementary School

A Case Study of Woodland Christian High School

The Catholic tradition views the school as working alongside the church to help parents educate their children. While parents are the primary providers of their children’s religious and moral formation, they do not undertake this significant work alone (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2006). Among the most important responsibilities of educators at a Catholic school, then, is sustaining the relationship between the school and the community of faith to which it belongs.

Technology has become an inescapable part of nearly every North American child’s daily experience. Nevertheless, the increasing importance of technology has made it imperative that future citizens learn to engage constructively with the digital infrastructure undergirding their world.

Leaders who serve schools and their communities with humility, love of neighbour, and Christ-like character ultimately work to advance the common good.