Bill 35 an over-reach by province

Opinion

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This article was published 25/04/2023 (893 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Identifying a threat or imminent danger is something that brings the collective concern of citizens together, especially when the target of this threat is our children. The government’s proposed Bill 35 seeks to address this threat (Transparency or Target Practice, April 15, 2023) in its attempt to address the misconduct of teachers.

It has garnered support from the NDP and moderate criticism from the Manitoba Teachers’ Society, who currently oversees disciplinary procedures. In reviewing the proposed bill, it’s important to be reminded that the “thing” isn’t really the “thing” — meaning the thing that gets all the attention regarding education reforms, is not really the thing we should be paying attention to.

In the case of education reform in Manitoba, the thing is not the recently introduced public-private partnerships to build schools, nor is it the education property tax rebate, nor is it the government’s budget increase to private schools.

Although these are all important political moves that we must be aware of, they are in fact symptoms of the actual “thing” we really need to pay attention to.

That thing is the purposeful and systematic undermining of the public education system and the concomitant attempts to privatize education. These well-documented education reforms are creeping across the nation and generally follow the same playbook: create a crisis (often caused by defunding itself), identify the bad guy and/or systemic “efficiencies,” then enlisting the public’s fear or outrage to propose a solution — often the opportunity for privatization.

In this case, the crisis is the safety of children, the bad guy is teachers, and the fix is the proposed bill that plays on our shared concern for children’s safety, and which aims to address teacher professional misconduct. But the thing we need to pay attention to is the over-reach of the bill in its intention to also include teacher competency.

The teacher competency movement — although may sound like a common-sense idea — has been permeating educational systems around the globe and is recognized as an effort to deprofessionalize the work of teachers.

As Gert Biesta, renowned international researcher has explained, the language of competencies requires generating extensive lists that attempt to identify what makes a teacher competent. Such a list of disjointed tasks (although some may be important) is inevitably inadequate at capturing the complexity of teaching and fails to account for the professional judgments that teachers are required to make, including decisions about which curricular components, pedagogical approaches, and assessment strategies to use.

Competencies cannot make finite the infinite number of ethical responses required by teachers; what to do with the child who harms/is harmed, is confused, frightened, angry, struggling, excelling, passionate or defiant — and different children, contexts and circumstances may require different responses. Competency might describe the “what” of teaching, but teaching and ethical engagements with students requires professional judgment, how to respond, to whom, when, and how? These questions are rarely answered by a list of “whats.”

Here is where we get to the crux of the thing: the bill, capitalizing on the public’s fear of threat to our children, has over-reached to include teacher competency in an effort to deprofessionalize teaching. Competency constructs teaching as an instrumentalist activity that can be broken down into discrete tasks. In understanding good teaching only by competency measures, teaching becomes reduced to something that can be performed by not-teachers, those who can be paid less, educated less, and not have a teachers’ union. This means that when the next crisis arrives and the teacher blaming begins, the proposed solution offered can be the less expensive and more “efficient” and competent facilitators.

The question for the public is: is a competent teacher good enough for our children? Or do students deserve well-educated professionals — those who understand how to engage with the complexities of teaching, encounter each student ethically, and who are expected to enlist their professional judgment?

Melanie Janzen is an associate professor in the faculty of education at the University of Manitoba. Rafael Iwamoto Tosi is a postdoctoral fellow at the faculty of education at the University of Manitoba.