Category: Perspectives Blog

Perspectives Blog

Private Schools Don’t Need Public Funding

Perspectives is an opportunity for Fellows and others to share their ideas in short, accessible essays. IPE/BC Fellows hold a range of views and interests relative to public education.

Private Schools Don’t Need Public Funding

by Joel French

Private schools do not need public funding. That could easily have been the title of the Fraser Institute’s recent report on private schools across Canada.

The data throughout the report certainly supports that conclusion, though of course it is never stated. Instead, the report, titled A Diverse Landscape: Independent Schools in Canada, reads like a marketing piece for private schools and is focused on dispelling a straw man argument that private schools are only for the “urban elite.” The report finds that nearly half of private schools are religious in nature and that many others are “specialty schools” with a particular curriculum focus, such as arts or athletics.

The data in the report paints a clear picture: public funding for private schools is completely unnecessary.

Looking beyond this main focus, the report contains interesting information related to the public funding of private schools. It points out that only five of Canada’s 10 provinces provide any funding for private schools: British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec. Alberta funds its private schools at a higher rate than any other province at 70 per cent, while British Columbia has the highest percentage of private schools receiving public funding at 87.9 per cent.

The fact that only five provinces fund private schools allows us to analyze the impact that public funding has on those schools’ student enrollment, as well as the correlation between public funding and the number of private schools in each province. The data in the report paints a clear picture: public funding for private schools is completely unnecessary. The level of public funding allocated to private schools has no direct correlation with student enrollment in private schools nor in the number of private schools in operation.

The release of the Fraser Institute’s report was accompanied by three province-specific statements for British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario. The three provinces offer very different levels of public funding, so they provide a good sample to analyze the effect of public funding on private schools. British Columbia funds the majority of its private schools at a level of 50 per cent, while Alberta funds most of its private schools at 70 per cent, and Ontario provides no funding for its private schools.

The Fraser Institute has claimed that private schools save public money. This claim relies on the assumption that if public funding were to be removed from private schools, students from those schools would flock to the public system where their education would cost the public even more money. The problem is that their own data tells a different story.

Of the three provinces, the one giving the most public funding to private schools has the lowest private school enrollment. Alberta’s rate of student enrollment in private schools is 4.4 per cent, while British Columbia’s is 11.6 per cent, and Ontario’s is 5.6 per cent. So although British Columbia provides public funding at a rate 20 per cent below that of Alberta, its enrollment in private schools is more than double. And although Ontario provides no public funding at all to private schools, they have a higher enrollment rate than their Alberta counterparts. Clearly, the number of students attending private schools does not depend on the rate of public funding and can even be higher without public funding.

The number of private schools in the three provinces tells a similar story. Alberta has one private school for roughly every 28,000 residents, whereas both British Columbia and Ontario have one for every 14,000 residents. So the province funding private schools at the highest rate (Alberta) has half the number of schools per capita of the other two provinces. Less or no public funding evidently does not lead to fewer private schools.

If the biggest benefit to the public of having private schools is to save the public money, then the data in the Fraser Institute report points in an obvious direction. Instead of Alberta funding its private schools at a rate of 70 per cent, it could drop its funding to the British Columbia level of 50 per cent and save even more money. Or better yet, it could eliminate public funding for private schools altogether like Ontario, where there are more private schools per capita and a higher student enrollment rate.

The NDP government in Alberta has yet to follow through on three of the education-related promises in its election platform. It pledged to reduce class sizes and increase supports for children with complex needs, reduce mandatory school fees for things like lunch supervision and bussing, and fund a school lunch program for elementary students. The platform pegged the total cost of those three promises at $140 million per year, and the plan was to begin that funding in 2015. Last year, Alberta gave more than $200 million in public funding to private schools.

The Fraser Institute’s report, true to its purpose, paints a rosy picture of private schools in Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario. In fact, its press releases for each province are nearly identical, with an equal amount of praise doled out to each province. Compare them yourself: Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario

Which leads to the question: if the private school situations in these three provinces are to be lauded in such a carbon-copy manner, why should public money be given to private schools at all?

Note: This piece was previously published in Ricochet July 19, 2016.

Joel French is Executive Director of Public Interest Alberta.

Perspectives Blog

Education Technology: The Trojan Horse of Privatization

Perspectives is an opportunity for Fellows and others to share their ideas in short, accessible essays. IPE/BC Fellows hold a range of views and interests relative to public education.

Education Technology: The Trojan Horse of Privatization

by Larry Kuehn

Technology entrepreneurs favorite words are “break,” “disruptive innovation” and “creative destruction.” Uber replaces taxis; Spotify breaks owning music collections; and, Amazon creatively destroys personal shopping for groceries, as it already has for everything from books to appliances to almost every commodity.

The Holy Grail of education technology entrepreneurs is to be the Uber of education… to become the platform that disrupts traditional face-to-face education and replaces it with technology dominated learning. Since this search for the singular platform is being carried out in capitalist economies, profit is the major end. It is not seeking solutions to inequalities exacerbated by the domination of monopoles in day-to-day, technology-driven living.

Education technology has developed in ways that reinforce individualization within a competitive environment, responding to and reinforcing neo-liberal patterns, creating the neo-liberal person. Widespread adoption of education built on this kind of individualization produces a form of privatization within the public education system, one that is based on preparing students for employment in a technological, corporate-dominated system, rather than preparing them for citizenship as a collective responsibility.

This presents challenges for critical educators who recognize that ignoring technology is not an option, but who want to find or create space for alternative approaches that support social justice and pursue pedagogy based on critical and social constructivist approaches.

Developing critical alternatives requires first an analysis of the approaches currently being taken by education technology entrepreneurs, then seeking spaces within these technologies that can be used to promote social goals, not just private, individual gain.  The current education technology landscape employs four dominant strategies: digital content, learning management systems, education apps, and universal platforms.

Digital content  

Historically, print technology has dominated in providing content in schools, but the challenge now is what will replace the physical, hard-copy textbook in this new digital era.

The textbook industry has been going through consolidation, leaving two major textbook publishers—the British transnational Pearson PLC and the American McGraw-Hill. Pearson has adopted a strategy of offering content digitally on a global basis as a way of surviving in the new context.  However, it has not been entirely successful. The corporation has been losing money to such an extent that it has sold off other forms of publishing–the Economist magazine, and its book publishing arm Penguin Random House, as well as software for English Language Learning sold to a Chinese company.

One potential challenge to the corporate publisher model is open publishing. Groups of authors join together to develop online resources for classroom use.  They may be offered at a small cost (teacherspayteachers.com) or made available under a Creative Commons license for anyone to use in teaching.  A major part of the cost of the print textbook is marketing and distribution. Digital distribution reduces costs and allows for cooperative forms of competition with the traditional textbook publishers. Open education resource distribution could disrupt the textbook market.

Learning Management Systems (LMS)

Learning Management Systems are online versions of the structure of face to face classroom. They have content; they have areas for discussion, both with a teacher and with other students; they include the ability to give tests to the student; and they provide the capacity to report student progress, both grades and other data.  LMS’s are used extensively in online learning, but also in face-to-face classrooms, particularly in “blended learning,” a combination of in person and online learning.

As in other areas of technology, many systems were developed, but only a few businesses survive as smaller ones are bought out and consolidated into fewer, near monopoly corporations. The major LMSs still standing are Blackboard and Canvas, as well as Desire2Learn, a Canadian LMS with a narrower market reach. One free to use open source system is Moodle, which has a large user-base.

Pearson sold its LMS, saying that they only work effectively on desktop or laptop computers, not on smart phones. The future market, they say, is in smartphones as billions of people have access, but many fewer have desktops or laptops. Pearson says, apps with a specific purpose will dominate.

Education Apps

Thousands of apps for education have already been created. Development costs are often covered by venture capitalists. They invest in app development with the hope that future profits will provide a return on investment when it captures a significant number of users. In many cases, the return is the sale of information about the teachers and students using the app. It is the users themselves who are the source of profits when their data is sold.

An example of one of these apps is FreshGrade, an e-portfolio system developed and widely used in British Columbia. The student and teacher upload work being done by the student, particularly photos, videos and audio. The parent has access to the e-portfolio of their child. The claim is these portfolio systems engage parents by giving more access to what their child is doing in school.

Special purpose apps have been a hot item in the education technology area, with education app venture capital investments of more than $4 billion in 2015.

Universal platforms: Google Suite, Microsoft Office 365 Education and Facebook

The behemoths of technology don’t require any venture capital because they have huge research budgets to spend on projects without announcing them to anyone until they are ready.

“Universal platforms” are a base on which many different elements can built. They do not intend to develop content, expecting others will do that. The platform brings both creators and users of content together into the same environment. Companies prosper when their platform is the go-to place for any online activity. Education is attractive because it’s a mass of folks, more than 30 million teachers and hundreds of millions of students globally, and Google, Microsoft and Facebook all have global reach.

This description of Google’s G Suite makes clear the comprehensive make up of the platform that is on offer:

G Suite is a package of cloud-based services that can provide your company or school with a whole new way to work together online—not just using email and chat, but over video conferences, social media, real-time document collaborations, and more….You and your team can begin using Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and other core G Suite services, as well as additional services like Google+, Hangouts, Blogger and more.

Google’s strategy for attracting teachers is to use a friend and collaborator approach. It offers training to selected teachers who then encourage colleagues and their districts to adopt G Suite. These teachers offer (often free) workshops for teachers, encouraging the expanded use of G Suite. Google offers the same tools to businesses, making a link for students to use the Google tools when they enter employment.

Google presented itself as an education platform before Microsoft moved in to compete. Microsoft’s focus on cloud-based services is part of its strategy for competing to be the platform for education services. Microsoft has announced that teachers and students can use “Office 365 Education” for free. It offers a free online course introducing teachers to Microsoft education services. Preparing students as workers is made clear when its sales pitch to teachers says, it “allows students to create products as if they were already in the workforce.”

Understanding corporate influence on education through education technology

A New York Times report captured the nature of the edtech Trojan Horse of public education:

The involvement by some of the wealthiest and most influential titans of the 21st century amounts to a singular experiment in education, with millions of students serving as de facto beta testers for their ideas. Some tech leaders believe that applying an engineering mind-set can improve just about any system, and that their business acumen qualifies them to rethink American education.   (“The Silicon Valley Billionaires Remaking America’s Schools by Natasha Singer,” NYT, June 6, 2017)

Historically, the state has had the primary role in defining the purpose and content of education. Edtech corporations are now pushing the state aside, bringing corporate purposes directly into the classroom, an often invisible shift in power. The aim of these technological forms of privatization is not to create private schools. Rather, they seek profits by integrating into public education. Those seeking to create dominant platforms take the longer view on profits and hope to train students to continue to use their platform when they move into life and work after school.

Much of the attention to technology in schools is about the tools. It is essential to pay attention to who really benefits from the use of the tools, not just how to use them.

Note: An earlier version of this blog post appeared in Intercambio magazine.

Larry Kuehn is an IPE/BC Fellow, IPE/BC director and Director of Research & Technology for the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation. 

Perspectives Blog

Small Class Size Matters: Why the SCC Decision Won’t Go Far Enough

Perspectives is an opportunity for Fellows and others to share their ideas in short, accessible essays. IPE/BC Fellows hold a range of views and interests relative to public education.

Small Class Size Matters: Why the SCC Decision Won’t Go Far Enough

by Sandra Mathison

Ask any parent if they want their child in a classroom with 15 students or 30 students and the answer is obvious. Ask any teacher if they would prefer to teach a class of 15-20 students or one with 35 students and again the answer is obvious. The obvious answers are not reflected in class sizes in British Columbia’s schools.

With the Supreme Court of Canada decision will come restoration of class size and composition for BC schools. That means restoring class size to 2001 levels: 20 for Kindergarten, 22 for Grades 1–3, and in most districts 30 for Grades 4–12. Rolling back class size is a good thing, but even this much needed remedy will not go far enough in taking full advantage of the benefits of small class size.

What we know is that smaller classes lead to positive student outcomes. And this is so because students are more engaged, spend more time on educational tasks, and gives teachers the opportunity to tailor instruction to the needs and abilities of students.

Students in small classes are more engaged in what they are learning, have greater opportunities to express themselves and to participate. (See, for example, here.) And, as a result, student peers tend to trust each other and to be less disruptive. (See here.)

The benefits are not only apparent in academic indicators like test scores and grades, but also longer term educational and life outcomes like high school completion, less juvenile criminal behaviour, and increased post-secondary enrollment.

This is common sense, but the research bears this out as well. One of the best designed studies to inform our understanding of class size is Tennessee’s STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) study, and from this study we have learned much about the benefits of small classes. (The previous link summarizes the STAR study, but see also, Mosteller, Frederick (1995). The Tennessee study of class size in the early school grades. The Future of Children, 5(2), 113-127.)

“The smaller classes performed substantially better by the end of second grade in test scores, grades, and fewer disciplinary referrals. The gains lasted. The students that had been assigned to smaller classes were more likely to graduate in four years, more likely to go to college, and more likely to get a degree in a STEM field. The positive effect was twice as large for poor and minority students, and thus narrowed the achievement gap.”

This research suggests we should work toward small classrooms and give teachers the opportunity to provide instruction tailored to students’ needs, to give consistent and individual feedback, and to use class time for educational goals rather than on discipline.

Not only do we know that small class sizes are beneficial, we also know that is especially so for early grades and for students who come to school with disadvantages, such as poverty, limited English proficiency, and minority status.

Small class size benefits teachers as well by improving working conditions, increasing job satisfaction, and retention.

How small is small though? The research evidence suggests that any reduction in class size will likely have some positive effect, but that optimally small classes sizes are between 15 and 20 students. (Small classes in the STAR study were between 13 and 17 students.) For BC schools to take advantage of the benefits of small class size this means much further reductions are needed, indeed class size for all students ought to be at least at the level set for BC Kindergarten classes in 2001… 20 students!

This will be a struggle for BC schools already having difficulty finding enough teachers and classroom space to operate at the 2001 class size limits. The process of recovering the status quo of 16 years ago will take some time, but everything we know about quality education tells us this is not the place to stop. More resources for both infrastructure and personnel is necessary. Make no mistake that reducing class size is an expensive educational reform, but research suggests this will be money well spent.

Sandra Mathison is a Professor of Education at the University of British Columbia and Executive Director of IPE/BC.

 

Perspectives Blog

Change Comes to BC Schools… It’s Just a Beginning

There is no doubt the Supreme Court of Canada decision to uphold the BCTF appeal against the former provincial government’s legislation means, among many other things, a dramatic improvement in educational services and opportunities available to British Columbia children and families.

There will be thousands of additional teachers in BC classrooms this September. So, tens of thousands of children will get additional one to one help. Students’ individual learning styles, strengths, and weaknesses will be easier to spot. Assessment will be more straightforward. Teachers will be better able to diagnose the specific needs of individual students and develop programs, materials and processes that fit those needs. Classroom discussions can be deeper, richer and include the active participation of more children.

Like parents, students, teachers and other educational workers, IPE/BC welcomes these real and important improvements. Still, there are at least three important things to remember as we watch this new era of increased resources roll out.

First, for 15 years increased funding that should have been there wasn’t.  So incremental improvements didn’t happen as they should have. Quite the opposite. Year after year, cuts made teachers’, principals’, and school boards’ jobs much harder. So when all at once a decade and a half of disruption is partly remediated, it’s not all going to be smooth sailing. There will inevitably be glitches, tensions and frustrations. It will be tempting for some, and ideologically convenient for others, to put the blame for bumps in the road on the province’s teachers and their insistence on achieving justice under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, responsibility will properly lie with the government that promulgated the offending legislation in the first place and then fought tooth and nail for fifteen years to defend it.

Second, while reports from most School Boards around the province indicate the Court’s ruling is being implemented quite smoothly, we are hearing from some Boards and schools that there are some inequities and uncertainties about staffing and resource allocation.  The Ministry, the Boards and the BCTF should see to it that every child gets the support required by the letter and the spirit of the SCC decision.

Third, the previous provincial government failed to provide funding for deferred maintenance, seismic upgrades, and new school construction. This meant districts were forced to close schools, mitigate space shortages with portables, and address only the most egregious maintenance issues. While new teachers can be brought in relatively quickly, it will take time and resources for districts to rebuild their space capacity and upgrade facilities to adequate seismic and instructional standards.

Though it is perhaps difficult to remember, the situation in BC schools in January 2002 (when the infamous laws were passed) wasn’t close to perfection. Resources and funding were sadly lacking in many important areas. Simply bringing the situation back to where it was fifteen years ago, while a significant achievement and well worth celebrating, is just the beginning.

Perspectives Blog

How GERM is Infecting BC Public Education

IPE/BC Fellows hold a range of views and interests relative to public education. Perspectives is an opportunity for Fellows to share their ideas in short, accessible essays.

How GERM is Infecting BC Public Education

By E. Wayne Ross

The Institute for Public Education BC is committed to public education for the good of all children, families and communities and this is reflected in its tag line, “public education is a public interest.”

This proposition may seem obviously true, but it’s not.

Public education in British Columbia, across Canada, and globally faces serious challenges when it comes to serving the common good. Over the last half century, the dominant world view has privileged the individual over the well-being of the general public.

This view and the policies that flow from it are referred to as “neoliberalism.” Governments across the political spectrum, both the politically conservative and liberal, share belief in the major tenets of neoliberalism, including fiscal austerity, privatization of public goods and services, government deregulation, and free trade.

In education, neoliberalism is manifest in what Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg has dubbed the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), which:

  • prioritizes and imposes a business model on public education;
  • increases competition among students, teachers and schools (test-based accountability; performance-related rewards; league-tables; attacks on teacher unions);
  • supports an audit and accountability culture that takes education out the hands of teachers, students, and the public;
  • commodifies education via “school choice,” which positions students and parents as consumers in an education marketplace;
  • promotes the privatization and marketization of public schools (education becomes a service sector open to trade and investors; off-shore schools; and selling seats in schools and universities on the international market);
  • sees public education as an opportunity to maximize human capital (i.e., a narrowly educated workforce) as opposed to maximizing the common good and social cohesion.

These reforms are backed by many governments as well as The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Despite rhetoric linking GERM to benefits for all within the vast constituency of public education, the fact is that those who regulate both knowledge and the economy work for their own political and economic agendas, acting as though the public extended no farther than their privately secured office buildings and comfortably gated communities.

GERM in British Columbia

GERM has infected public education in British Columbia and the symptoms are obvious.

  • School closures – In the past 15 years, over 200 public schools have been closed in BC.
  • Government destruction of agreed upon guidelines on class size and composition, which have had deleterious effects on learning and teaching conditions.
  • Reduction in the number of teachers, teacher-librarians, and classroom aides. Educators in BC are responsible for more children on average, than educators in the rest of Canada, a gap that is widening.
  • Selling school and universities seats on international market has become a major source of income growth for schools and universities in BC.
  • Off-shore schools – BC public school districts have been encouraged to create private business companies that are owned by school boards and operate to sell education overseas.
  • An estimated $5 billion in deferred maintenance for school buildings.
  • School rankings that oversimplify the characteristics of good schools; commodify education; and rely primarily on standardized test scores, which advantage schools with students from wealthy families.
  • Commercialization – Corporate incursion into schools that encourages competition; injects corporate advertising, exploiting underfunded schools.
  • Expansion of private tutoring companies, many of which are owned by international corporations.
  • British Columbia now spends $1000 less per student than the Canadian national average.
  • Reduction in government spending on public education. In 2001, the BC government put 20% of its total spending into education, now it spends just 11.8% of its budget on education.
  • Reliance on parent fund-raising via Parent Advisory Committees; it is estimated that parents now spend $132 million yearly in subsidies to public education.

Examining BC education funding trends, we can see how neoliberal education policies shift social costs on to individuals. These same trends can be found in other public services such as the health care and transportation.

At the same time, the BC government gives public money to subsidize private schools, many of which serve the rich and charge thousands of dollars in tuition.

Public Funding of Private Education is Undemocratic

Public funding for private schools is at odds with creating a more equitable, just, and democratic society.

It is a policy that almost always privileges families with more disposable income over the less wealthy and poor, and often privileges religious education over secular education. Moreover, public funding of private schools supports a two-tiered system of education that allows some schools to cherry-pick who attends, and undermines the concepts of the public good and community in favour of individual gain.

Public-school budget cuts result in closed libraries, reduced special-education services and increased class size, while private schools are publicly subsidized to provide the advantaged with more benefits. These advantages include smaller class sizes allowing teachers to be more responsive to student needs, to customize learning activities, and to provide private-school students with enriched curricula in art, sports and music programs.

For the first hundred years of British Columbia history there was no public funding of private or religious schools. The Social Credit government introduced public funding of private education in 1977 and only then did private school enrolment begin to increase, taking a larger share of the provincial education budget.

Under the BC Liberals, British Columbians have been subjected to a steady stream of ideologically driven public-policy decisions that shift responsibility for providing and financing public services from the public to the private domain. As with other public assets, their aim is to privatize the commonwealth of the province.

Public funding of private schools is a form of privatization consistent with fundamental ideological positions of the BC Liberals in particular and neoliberalism in general. Privatizing public enterprises, goods and services is usually done in the name of increased efficiency, but mainly has the effect of concentrating wealth in fewer hands (the gap between the wealthiest and the majority of BC families has grown dramatically over the past 30 years) and making the public pay more for its needs (see, for example, BC Ferries).

Not unlike academy schools in England or charter schools in the US, public funding of private schools in BC is privatization through the back door.

Elite private schools are subsidized by the public, while public schools are told to look to the market — recruiting tuition-paying international students, setting up school-district business companies, or opening their doors to corporate programs — or to parent-fundraising, to solve a budget crisis imposed by government’s distorted priorities.

The fundamental idea of public funding for private schools is based on the false premise that private schools do a better job. In reality, public-school students outperform private school students. A 2012 study of first-year physics students at the University of BC found that those who had graduated from public schools in Metro Vancouver outperformed their private-school peers. This finding is reiterated in a study just published by the University of Chicago Press, which concludes public schools achieve mathematics results the same as or better than private schools with demographically similar students. In 2006, the Educational Testing Service reached similar conclusions, finding that US public-school students outpaced private-school students in both reading and math.

Private-school enrolment is soaring because it is encouraged by public policies that divert public money to support private interests and by ideologies that promote individualism and private gain over community and shared interests.

It is time for education policy in BC that recognizes public education is a public interest.

E. Wayne Ross is a Professor of education at the University of British Columbia and an IPE/BC Board Member and Fellow.