public education

Moving beyond resistance to 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.

Moving beyond resistance to privatization

June 28, 2022

by Andrée Gacoin

What is the commercial mindset in public education? How do you see the commercial mindset in your school or district? What does privatization look like in your classroom? What does it mean to work together to resist the privatization of public education?

These are questions that 15 teachers, as well as invited guests from the Institute for Public Education, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, BC Ed Access, and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, engaged with as part of a day long think tank organised by the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) . The “Think Tank” is a methodology used by the BCTF as a form of activist research. Following Jones (2018), activist research is a “framework for conducting collaborative research that makes explicit challenges to power through transformative action” (p. 27). As such, the event aimed to create an interactive research space enabling dialogue and connection between teachers, academic or community stakeholders, and the union.

Resist…reclaim and rebuild

The Think Tank was structured to first identify key facets of privatization in British Columbia and then facilitate the development of strategies for action and resistance. The day’s conversations were interpreted in a visual mural, created by Sam Bradd of Drawing Change (see https://drawingchange.com/), a network of graphic recorders who listen, synthesize, and visually represent dialogue in real time.

The theoretical framing of the day was provided by Dr. Sam E. Abrams (2018), Director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University.

Dr. Abrams offers a way to analyse how the “commercial mindset” underpins the privatization of education and allows private interests to drive the direction of public education. For Abrams, this mindset has four key dimensions. Firstly, the libertarian critique is premised on the need for small government and doing the “minimum” within public services. Secondly, the drive towards commercial profit allows business models to be introduced into the provision of public education services. Thirdly, a sense of crisis creates the need for solutions to “fix” public education. Finally, public services are mired in a bureaucratic pathology which opens the way for external “solutions” by private “experts.”

Through discussion, the participants in the Think Tank took the mindset offered by Dr. Abrams into the lived realities of lived realities of privatization within public education. Their insights are organized around the key facets of the commercial mindset, while recognizing that they are continually overlapping and building on one another.

As highlighted in this IPE Occasional Paper, participants in the Think Tank theorized and developed, from the perspectives of BC teachers, strategies not only to resist privatization, but also reclaim and rebuild public education.

Changing the narrative

As schools look toward post-pandemic recovery, teacher unions and researchers are at a crucial junction in the defense of public education. Schools are key public spaces of collective learning and community care for children and youth. Privatization, in contrast, privileges individual and financial interests and undermines education as a public good.

Privatisation discourses position teachers as passive providers educational services. The BCTF Think Tank on Privatization provided a space for teachers to speak back to that assumption, weaving together a theoretical understanding of privatisation with their lived realities in classrooms and schools. This allowed space for concrete, teacher-led recommendations and actions for political organising and advocacy.

More broadly, the interactive research space created through the Think Tank offers a unique model for how academic and union researchers can work collaboratively. Unions, and the teachers they represent, are often framed as “sources” of data. For instance, the BCTF is frequently approached to circulate surveys created by external researchers, or to help recruit teachers as participants for interviews or focus groups. The Think Tank as a form of activist research foregrounds the voices and experiences of teachers and facilitates a shift from research on teachers to research with teachers, working together to fight for education as an equitably delivered public good.

Dr. Andrée Gacoin is the Director of the Information, Research and International Solidarity Division at the BC Teachers’ Federation and an IPE/BC Fellow. Her research focuses on developing a unique, in-depth and contextualized exploration of education in BC from the perspective of teachers. Andrée is particularly interested in using research as advocacy to uphold and strengthen an inclusive public education system.

Perspectives Blog

Revisiting the Charter for Public Education: A powerful process and a deep commitment.

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.

Revisiting the Charter for Public Education: A powerful process and a deep commitment.

by David Chudnovsky

An extraordinary document was published in British Columbia in 2003. The Charter for Public Education was a visionary statement of principle, belief, and commitment about what public education could and should be in our province. But where did it come from? How was it written? What did it say and who decided what it said? It is an instructive story.

In 2002 British Columbia income taxes were cut by 25% resulting in deep cuts to education and other public services. Two notorious new laws (found unconstitutional 14 years later by the Supreme Court of Canada) threw out collective agreement clauses protecting class sizes and guaranteeing services to students with special needs and made it illegal to negotiate such provisions in contracts between teachers and their employers.

Almost immediately, class sizes got bigger, specialist teachers disappeared, students with special needs suffered, schools were closed. Teachers, parents, students, and the wider community reacted swiftly and robustly. The government, though, had a 77-2 majority in the legislature and would not budge.

While the reasonable and necessary political fight-back continued – for more than a decade – some felt an additional strategy would be helpful. The idea of an independent commission which would travel the province, hear from, and speak with British Columbians about what they wanted their public education system to be and then report back in the form of a Charter was proposed.

The BCTF, after a discussion and debate that was not without controversy, decided to fund the initiative. Many teachers were not convinced that their resources should be used in this way. Why, they asked, should teachers pay for a commission would be independent of the Federation? Still, the project was eventually enthusiastically approved.

BCTF set several criteria for selection of the Charter panel of five. One was to be a teacher. The others could not have any connection to the BCTF, had to represent the diversity of the community, be credible as individuals, and be supporters of the public education system. But the attitude of panel members to any particular issue or controversy was not asked, nor was it known.

While the BCTF funded the project, the Charter panel operated completely independently and the BCTF was to see the Charter – the result of the panel’s work – at the same time as it was released to the public.

The panel consisted of:

The Reverend Margaret Marquardt (Chair) – an Anglican Minister
Dr. John C. Moss – a retired School Superintendent
George Watts – an Indigenous Leader, Nuu-Chah-Nulth
Kathy Whittam – parent of a student with diverse needs
David Chudnovsky – a teacher and former President of the BCTF

The Charter panel held hearings in 42 communities across the province. Large cities like Vancouver, Victoria. Kelowna and Prince George; smaller urban centres like Campbell River, Cranbrook, Fort St. John, and Chilliwack; very small communities like Port McNeil, McBride, Masset, Princeton and Sparwood.

In all, the panel received more than 620 submissions from students, teachers, teacher organizations, principals and vice-principals, school district staff and superintendents, school trustees and their provincial organization, parents and parent organizations, seniors, business people, First Nations organizations, municipal organizations, college and university students and faculty, community health nurses, early childhood educators, and others.

Because of the very painful political context, the panel heard many criticisms of then current government policies. But that was not the mandate of the Charter process. Rather, the panel determined to draw out the principles behind the pain. They decided to pose a number of questions to the participants in every hearing:

What is an educated person?
Which of the characteristics of an educated person are developed through the public schools?
What is an educated community?

This proved to be a very useful strategy.

Still, often a participant expressed their anger, frustration, or bitterness about conditions in a school or school district. The panel reminded the presenter of the mandate of the Charter and asked them to restate their concerns by expressing a positive principle rather than stating a criticism. Significantly, time and again participants said that the hearings were energizing to the people who attended. They reported how helpful and inspiring it was to be in a room with others who cared about public education, talking about what really mattered, about principles, about values and ethics.

The result was the Charter for Public Education which today hangs on the wall in hundreds of schools across BC. It can be found here:

https://instituteforpubliceducation.org/projects/charterforpubliceducation/

Every concept and principle outlined in the Charter came from the 620 submissions. The panel were careful, as they wrote at the time, to ensure that the Charter and the analysis in the report were, “…. true and accurate reflections of what was heard in the presentations across the province.”

The Charter now resides with the Institute for Public Education BC. We at IPE believe that it is a good time to look again at the Charter for Public Education. Already we have several ways we think the Charter could be improved.

The Charter should deal more explicitly with equity.
There needs to be more content regarding Indigenous students and their education – possibly with references to UNDRIP.
Support for students with special needs isn’t emphasized nearly enough in the Charter.
Though the panel called for an implementation plan for the principles of the Charter that work was never done.

Of course, we cannot simply “fix” the Charter to suit our preferences. The current version is based on what hundreds of British Columbians said they wanted. We can’t alter or reject that important reality. So, we’re left with a challenge: How can we use the Charter for Public Education today? Is it still a useful document? If it needs to be updated, how could and should that be done?

We invite you to help us confront those challenges. Let us know what you think.

David Chudnovsky is a member of the IPE/BC Board of Directors and one of the co-authors of the Charter for Public Education Report. A retired teacher, former MLA and Past-President of the BCTF, David continues to be very actively engaged in support of quality, inclusive public education.

Occasional Paper Series

Occassional Paper #8 November 2022

Choice- The Formula for Inequality

Where choice is prioritized, public schools are less and less places where children from all walks of life can learn and grow across socioeconomic, cultural, and religious differences. Schools become places of homogeneity. Schools are no longer seen as places or opportunities to overcome social differences, but through choice, are now ways to replicate and reinforce social inequities. This kind of segregation does not support social democracy at large. And unfortunately, all this choice is happening using public funds.

Occasional Paper #7 October 2022

When the BC government refused education for Japanese Canadian children, Hideko Hyodo and the community created an alternative

When Japanese Canadians were interned during World War II, their children were excluded from B.C. public schools. The interned communities created alternative schools with volunteer teachers trained in summer programs and led by Hideko Hyodo, the only Japanese Canadian teacher in B.C. public schools at the time. She was later awarded the Order of Canada in recognition of her role and the work of these teachers.

Occassional Paper #6 June 2022

Beyond Resistance to Privatization: Rebuilding and Reclaiming Public Education

“As schools look toward post-pandemic recovery, teacher unions and researchers are at a crucial junction in the defense
of public education. Schools are key public spaces of collective learning and community care for children and youth. Privatization, in contrast, privileges individual and financial interests and undermines education as a public good.”

IPE/BC Fellow and BCTF Director of Information, Research and International Solidarity, Andrée Gacoin, reports on a think tank that focused on privatization in public education and concluded that, beyond building awareness, what is needed is a clear articulation of what public education is for and why it is important.

Occassional Paper #5 June 2022

COLA-lite: Ready’s Inflation Adjustment for Sea-to-Sky Bus Drivers

BC’s public sector unions are currently locked in negotiations with the province over new collective agreements covering much of BC’s public sector. A key area of contention across several tables – in health care, education, and the provincial public service – is the rising level of price inflation overtaking the provincial economy. Researcher and IPE/BC Board member John Malcolmson reports on the impact of inflation and the need to adequately address the compensation of public sector workers.

Occasional Paper #4 April 2022

Inflation, Bargaining and the Threat to Labour Peace in the Schools

Contract negotiations for public school teachers and support staff are underway with the backdrop of years of mandate-restricted bargaining and a current period of mounting inflation. What has been the impact of these restrictions on the salaries and wages of those working in BC’s public schools and on the dollars dedicated to public education in BC? Why has BC’s spending on education as a percentage of GDP slid from 2.8% in 2001 to 1.7% in 2021? Researcher and IPE/BC Board member, John Malcolmson, throughly examines these very timely questions in Occassional Paper #4.

This paper as orginally published on April 21, 2022 and was updated on September 10, 2022.

Occasional Paper #3 August 2021

COVID Crisis Impacting Board of Education Budgets

This paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Board of Education budgets in BC, specifically detailing the loss of revenue from the international student fees. Implemented by the previous Liberal government and continued by the NDP, the practice of recruiting fee-paying international students to BC’s K-12 public schools to address funding gaps has been adopted by many school boards despite the dangers of relying on unstable funding. Researcher and IPE/BC Director John Malcolmson has examined the 2021/22 school district budgets, adopted by boards in June, and analyzed the significant impact of the loss of this revenue, overall and on a district-by-district basis.

Occasional Paper #2 February 2020

Education Funding Models in Canada: Patterns of Similarity and Details of Difference

This technical report summarizes how education funding is structured and distributed in each of the Canadian provinces. Political and social factors influencing public education and how it is funded include neo-liberal ideology, competition with other public services, and the impact of public school advocates. Education is the responsibility of provinces in Canada and the details of how funding is distributed vary according to province. However, there are some common questions and increasingly common patterns in the funding models. Equity is a central intention built into Canadian funding models, although the approaches are subject to contestation. Funding decisions have been increasingly centralized in provincial governments and away from school boards, with boards being eliminated in some provinces. Property taxes are becoming a decreasing source of funding, with provincial revenue from other taxation making up a greater proportion.

Occasional Paper #1 June 2018

The Many Faces of Privatization

Public funding for private schools may be the most obvious way public education in British Columbia is being privatized, but there are other less obvious privatizing strategies at work. This is a working paper for an IPE/BC workshop that offers analysis of 1) the common narratives that legitimize and promote privatization thus drawing the public into a manufactured consent of privatization and 2) specific contexts in which this privatization in manifest, such as personalized learning (especially with technology), choice programs, school fees and fund raising, business principles of school administration, corporate sponsorships, fee paying international student enrollment, and publicly funded private schools.

News

IPE/BC Submission for BC’S 2021 Budget Consultation

IPE/BC has submitted its recommendations to BC’s Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services for the upcoming year’s budget. Our submission reflects IPE/BC’s basic values and focuses on the following:

Recognizing that public education is in the public interest and a critical element of our democratic society.
Focusing funding initiatives to support the most vulnerable students.
Avoiding a return to austerity to be able to recover from the damage of previous austerity measures.
Defunding private/independent schools.
Planning to incorporate remedies for the climate crisis in all areas of public education.

You can read the submission here.

We welcome feedback in our efforts to support public education in BC.

Perspectives Blog

Public School Programs of Choice: Private School in the Public System?

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.

Public School Programs of Choice: Private school in the public system?

by Tara Ehrcke

The 21st century has, so far, seen the great up-ending of one of the most fundamental tenets of public education—that all children, regardless of background or socio-economic status, should be able to reach the same educational end goal. This concept of equality of outcome was intricately tied to the notion that society provided, or should provide, for social mobility. One could improve one’s station in life because public institutions, such as public education, were grounded in what we would now more commonly refer to as equity. The system, rather than doling out resources equally to all children, would rather apportion them so as to ensure that those starting with a disadvantage had the opportunity to catch up.

The neoliberal turn of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has instead brought us back to the more basic and enduring features of capitalism. Institutions, rather than mitigating inequalities, are instead exacerbating them. Within schooling, this obviously takes shape clearly in the private versus public provision of schooling. But, even within the public school system, a great many features serve to further stratify children according to race, class and gender. We see aspects of private schools directly within public schools.

One such feature is school choice. “Choice” takes place in a variety of ways: the open catchment areas; allowing and increasing public funding of private schools; allowing school fees; and promoting niche schools and academies. With only limited opposition (from parents, teachers and school trustees) “choice” policies have changed the nature of BC’s public school system. The impact of these changes is that we are moving from a more comprehensive, equitable, neighbourhood and community oriented, publicly administered school system, towards a semiprivate, stratified and segregated system in which precious limited resources are increasingly allocated to a privileged minority.

Parents can be easily swayed by these calls: How could school choice be a bad thing? How is wanting the best for my child making things worse for public education?

Teachers, administrators and school board trustees can similarly be entranced by school choice initiatives. They see opportunities to offer new and alternative programs that otherwise wouldn’t be supported. Or more likely, they see their existing programs cut and school choice policies the only method to try and maintain them. With fee structures, they see the chance to have properly funded programs. With dwindling support and resources from the basic Ministry budgets, these policies can appear to be the only way to keep such programs running.

But sometimes what seems or even is best for one child or one group of children is not best for all children. And what appears to be saving an individual program is in fact fundamentally changing the nature of the school system.

School choice exists in British Columbia in a variety of forms. All catchment boundaries are now open, or semi-open, allowing parents to register in a school outside their catchment area. French immersion, perhaps the longest running, largest, and most entrenched program of choice, is now commonly known as “the private system within public schools.” Immersion programs are notoriously unfriendly towards struggling learners. Children with challenges typically cannot receive special education services in French, and are often advised to switch back into the English stream.

Yet another form of school choice is the Academy, or niche program. There are sports academies, and arts academies, but also academic academies such as International Baccalaureate programs, honours programs, and challenge programs. These specialty programs often have competitive enrolment processes, and often require the payment of school fees (typically $2000 – $5000, but as much as $17,000/year). Thus, they are available only to a small subset of students.

Data from the Vancouver School Board verifies the low number of students with an IEP, who are English Language Learners, or who are Aboriginal within the Vancouver Board school choice programs.

Source: VSB, Freedom of Information request number 201425

Research on school choice programs generally finds that access to choices varies in relation to socioeconomic status, and that choice tends to have the effect of stratifying along socioeconomic lines. Parents who have more social capital will exercise their rights to choose. They are the ones able to pay additional fees, drive across town, or wait in overnight lineups. Often, they are simply the parents who know about the choices and the ways to access them.

When these parents access special schools and programs, they are choosing a demographic that matches their own, and thereby reducing the diversity of the schools and programs they have left.

Even the rather conservative Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) acknowledges what the research shows:

“School choice advocates often argue that the introduction of market mechanisms in education allows equal access to high quality schooling for all. Expanding school choice opportunities, it is said, would allow all students – including disadvantaged ones and the ones attending low performing schools – to opt for higher quality schools, as the introduction of choice in education can foster efficiency, spur innovation and raise quality overall. However, evidence does not support these perceptions, as choice and associated market mechanisms can enhance segregation. … Although parents may be concerned about equity and integration and may support their neighbourhood school, they seek at the same time the “best” education for their children… Parents with a better off background tend to avoid schools with a significant number of disadvantaged students and research suggests that parents prefer schools with populations ethnically similar to their own family… All these elements contribute to socioeconomic segregation between schools.”

A genuinely public school system includes equal opportunity for all members of the public. Schooling must be common, collective and universal; equity must be a guiding principle.

To restore equity in public schools, we should focus on these goals:

Advocate for fully funded comprehensive neighbourhood schools with a full range of programming at every school, available to every child
Eliminate school choice policies including open catchments, niche schools/programs, program fees, and streaming
Eliminate all private funding: subsidies to private schools, fundraising, corporate and other private donations, and school and program fees

A longer version of this article published in Our Schools, Our Selves is available here.

Tara Ehrcke is a high school math teacher in Victoria and Past President of the Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association.

Events

THINK TANK: Privatization and Public Education

On December 7th, IPE/BC (with the support of Your Education Matters) held a Think Tank to discuss the wide range of issues around privatization in public education in British Columbia. IPE/BC Fellows, teachers, researchers, and community leaders came together to consider what issues to address and how strategically to do so. Joel French, Executive Director of Public Interest Alberta, started the conversation with a keynote address, Anti-private and Pro-public Advocacy in K-12 education: Lessons from Alberta.

IPE/BC will be considering the many ideas generating in moving forward with its strategic goal of supporting the public in public education.

Charter for Public Education

Decolonizing the Charter for Public Education

As stated in the post below, the Charter for Public Education was developed in 2003 through an extensive community consultation. The IPE/BC Board of Directors believes that the Charter has great potential as a lens for examining the values and commitments in place in each BC public school and is dedicated to a project that will provide tools to support school communities in using it.

The extensive Charter for Public Education report and the Charter itself were written by a dedicated panel of five who travelled the province in 2003 to hear from students, teachers, parents, administrators, trustees and community members about their perspectives on public education. There was tremendous engagement in the process and, at the end, the panelists drafted a thorough report on what they had heard in communities around BC and designed a charter reflecting the values, commitments and expectations expressed.

In crafting the Charter, the panelists used a quotation that they believed captured the importance of public education. However, the quotation is by Egerton Ryerson, who we now know was a key influence in the design of the “Indian Residential School” system and in the creation of separate schools for Black students. The remaining four panelists (sadly, panelist George Watts passed away in 2005), agreed that the quotations should be removed, and IPE/BC moved ahead to do so. The Charter poster that you see with this post reflects this important change. The Board of Directors of IPE/BC is further committed to a process of meaningful examination of its work with a decolonizing lens.

The Development of the Charter for Public Education

In 2003, British Columbians expressed their hopes and dreams to a panel travelling the province working to develop a framework for future decisions about public education. The panel members heard passionate dialogue about education from thousands of people in 42 communities around the province and received 620 written submissions. The full report from these consultations provided the basis for development of the Charter.

Although the Charter was an initiative of the BCTF, the panel represented a range of community interests. An Anglican priest, Rev. Margaret Marquardt, chaired the Charter panel. The other members were: Dr. John Moss, a former superintendent of schools; Kathy Whittam, a step-parent of a student with special needs; George Watts, former president of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council; and David Chudnovsky, past-president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation.

The result was The Charter for Public Education, published in 2003, as a starting point for dialogue and change in public education.

These questions were posed at each hearing:

What is an educated person; what are their characteristics?
Which of these characteristics are developed through the public schools?
What is an educated community?
What are the principles of public education?

The Charter was an inspiration for educators and communities beyond the borders of B.C., as well as a touch point for ongoing efforts to strengthen public education in B.C. Its principles have stood up well over time.