Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

Lord Acton,  in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887

I started off my day today reading about the testimony of Jody Wilson Raybould to the Justice Committee and John Ibbitson’s response in the Globe and Mail        “Trudeau has lost the moral mandate to govern“. It was quite the day yesterday. Not only did we have the stunning testimony of the former Justice Minister, the House Oversight Committee in the United States grilled Michael Cohen, the former Trump fixer, for over nine hours. I watched lots of this testimony, it was incredible. While I didn’t see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s questioning, I saw a clip of her quizzing Cohen later in the day. If you haven’t seen it you should take a look here

If you contrast this with the performance of her Republican colleagues, you can get a good example of power corrupting absolutely. Like their Liberal Party cousins here in Canada, they are displaying blind loyalty to a leader and a party that has lost the right to govern due to their abuse of power.

I think we need more oversight committees and more politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jodi Wilson Raybould. Speaking truth to power is a very rare commodity these days.

There are more examples of the corrupting influence of power closer to home. Our premier Doug Ford has been in the news twice this week. First, it was reported that lobbyists, companies and industry groups are feeling pressure to attend a $1,250-a-person fundraiser in order to maintain access to Ford’s government “Doug Ford defends fundraising dinner amid cash-for-access criticisms“.

Then there is the $50,000 bill for Doug Ford’s new van with leather-covered swivel chairs. Very nice, but is this something he really needs to be premier of the province? This is yet another interesting article to read – all published this week! Here it is “Doug Ford’s van customization has $50K price tag, documents show”.

Power corrupts absolutely. Is there an educational context? I think there is. As a society, we are just not interested in making the investments necessary to ensure a safe system that is flexible enough to cater to all children. There is no reason at all that in a wealthy society like our own we can’t create a system that caters to the needs of all children. The fact that we have daily incidents of violence, especially in our elementary schools is an indication that we are not willing to make the hard choices that would allow for a more humane system.

Instead, we get the shoddy of implementation of cure-all philosophies like self-regulation. We get well-meaning educators who claim that if we just trained really hard, there would be no violence in our schools because everyone would be ‘regulated’ somehow. While this is an interesting idea, school boards will never be able to make this happen. Their implementation has been way too ham-handed.

The senior administrators who have played out this cure-all are happy with this self-regulation movement. They want violence in the schools to be the educator’s problem. Advocating for a whole-scale change to the education system to put all children first is not part of their game plan. It doesn’t have to be. Like all those in positions of absolute power, there is no real incentive to solve, or even look into the problems of school violence.

Education commentators are no better. Because they are linked to the current ideas on self-regulation they seem to be unable to think outside the education box. The response seems to be that this is the best we can do or that this is ‘part of the solution’. What if we put the child, every child, including the autistic child first? Why are we instead contemplating a system that stops intensive treatment at a very early age then putting everything on the backs of the school system? We are inviting more violence. Is self-regulation really going to be our best tool, or are we just blurring the issue and blunting the debate about what is really needed.

One school board – Halton District has reversed this trend by speaking some truth to power. This week (again – a big week!) they published a letter to Education Minister Lisa Thompson and Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod. In the letter, the school board indicated that a lack of communication about government funding has made it challenging to ensure that these students have the resources they need.

Without the current government funding, many of these families will be unable to continue therapy at current levels. For example, some students may drop from 25+ hours of therapy per week to two hours per week under the new program. Presumably, students will spend some, if not all, of the rest of this time within publicly funded schools…

Halton school board ‘gravely concerned’ about Ontario autism program changes

I would be surprised to hear that many other school boards are planning to write similar letters and I am sure none of the Catholic boards will do so.

Power corrupts at all levels. When it comes to senior management in school boards, there is little connection to the classroom and to the current debate on violence in the classroom. While protesting against a cut in funding for treatment programs for autistic children is a necessary step, senior officials need to question why we have the problem of rising violence in our schools. The symptom is the violence, the problem is that we are doing an inadequate job at serving our most needy children.

If they cannot address the problem they should get out of the way and let others try. That will never happen. They have the power and authority and power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.