When those who toil within that deep maw of mediocrity known as the public school system want to show they "get it" -- that is, that they have heard and understood the frustrations of parents with a system that does not teach their children well -- they often present such commonplaces of education reform as standards or testing as something new and strange, as if to suggest their own belated embrace of these ideas made them pioneers.

"We call this model," they will say, in the tone of a physicist who has discovered a new sub-atomic particle, "outcomes-based education." The notion that there is something cutting-edge in first, having some idea of what you want to teach, and second, finding out whether you have taught it, should tell you all you need to know about the present state of our schools.

But for a generation of educators, for whom teaching was a "process" best left undisturbed either by predetermined expectations or verifiable results, it is indeed a new world they have entered, to which they are, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, struggling to adapt. You have to give them points for trying.

But then you come to Ontario's teachers' unions, even now preparing to plunge the province's school system into an illegal strike. Over the last several years, the unions have opposed virtually every reform, from governments of every political stripe, without the slightest nod in the direction of modernity. A college of teachers, to set and enforce standards of professionalism? No way. A common curriculum, with detailed benchmarks setting out what students are expected to know by the time they have completed each grade? Not on your life. Standardized testing, to measure students' progress against these benchmarks? Forget about it. Nothing is to be allowed to reduce teachers' perks, or to expose incompetent teachers to scrutiny.

So long as these and other issues were left to be negotiated between the teachers and the patsies that peopled the province's local school boards, the results were pretty much what you might expect: more spending, higher taxes, but no appreciable improvement in performance. Ontario spends more on education than almost any other province: $644 more, per student, than the average for the other nine provinces. It has the lowest ratio of students to teachers of any province. To pay for this, from 1985 to 1995, Ontario school property taxes rose by more than 80 per cent, after inflation -- five times as fast as the growth in enrollments.

Yet on those rare occasions when Ontario's students are permitted to be tested against students from elsewhere, they consistently turn in below- average scores. Results from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, for example, which tested 500,000 seventh- and eighth-grade students in 45 countries, show Ontario lagging well behind B.C. and Alberta -- not to mention schoolkids from other countries. Overall, Canada placed between 17th and 19th on the test -- though here again, we spend more per capita on primary and secondary education than any other country on earth.

Plainly, more dollars do not equal better schools, How to explain Ontario's appalling performance, then? One reason, quite simply, is that Ontario's kids don't spend as much time learning as other schoolchildren: just 185 days a year, according to the recent report of the province's Education Improvement Commission, versus 222 days in a country like South Korea, which tests near the top of the charts. Nor, as it happens, do Ontario's teachers spend as much time teaching, particularly in the secondary schools. The average high-school teacher in Ontario spends just 3.7 hours a day in the classroom. Compare that to Alberta or B.C., where 4.5 hours is the norm.

It is for these reasons that the government brought in Bill 160, the subject of the current dispute. In sum, the bill wrests the power to run the schools away from the school boards and the teachers, and vests it in the provincial government. Along with bringing the education portion of the property tax under provincial control, the bill would allow the province to decide such regulatory matters as the amount of "preparation time" -- which is to say, time spent not teaching -- teachers are paid for, the number of students per class, or whether people without teaching certificates should be allowed to perform some duties, like guidance counselling or coaching football.

They are modest reforms, which if too limited in scope, at least point in the right direction. As their critics complain, they centralize control of the school system in government hands -- not nearly as good as parental control, but better by far than the status quo: a system run by and for the teachers.