Anti-school rhetoric means cut in funding

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/06/2023 (1044 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When a seasoned politician like Candice Bergen declares to a young PC partisan pre-election audience that today’s young people are disengaged, apathetic and brainwashed by schools, it cannot be seen as some harmless misinterpretation of intentions. It’s more likely setting the stage for future action.

Given the latest forays in school funding by our provincial government, there is cause for alarm. After years of underfunding and promises of a more equitable fiscal arrangement, all it could come up with was a formula to cut money to public schools even more, while partnering for services with private corporations like Enriched Academy.

This rhetoric is part of a pattern which began in the U.S. in the ’80s and spread to Canada in the ’90s. It began with trumped-up misinformation about how badly schools are doing their jobs, followed by ever-increasing attempts to discredit and defund public education.

In my 50 years of studying education finance and my 30 years of teaching about it at the university level, I have witnessed major shifts in the civic responsibility felt by governments to educate all young people. I have seen greater citizen reluctance, fuelled by negative government rhetoric, to support their public schools through taxation. And a shift from education being seen as a public good to one seen as private privilege.

Manitoba’s 1990s Blueprint for Success echoed the 1983 U.S. “A Nation at Risk” declaring a crisis in education, beginning a major refrain that continues to this day. It reads like this: our schools are failing placing our economy in peril; achievement levels and standards are falling; (public servants) trustees, school leaders and teachers are to blame — governments must step in to run schools like businesses. The answers lie in cutting costs, increasing competition, and promoting privatization, none of these supported in any way by realities.

Extreme utilitarians find this rationale useful to support tax cuts for their supporters and friends, claiming doing so results in greater efficiencies, accountability, and increased entrepreneurship. Manipulating the narrative is useful to ensure their ongoing advantages, and they find unlikely allies in extreme libertarians who uncritically worship at the altar of “freedom of choice.” Neither of these arguments, given the circumstances of most people, hold water, or serve public purposes very well. In fact, the assumptions upon which they rest fly directly in the face of creating human solidarity as citizenship, societal advancement, and equal opportunity.

Not unsurprisingly, funding education for equality of opportunity seems to have disappeared from the education finance lexicon, being replaced by funding for adequacy, implying that is what is required for fiscal fairness. Nothing could be further from the rhetoric of the middle of the last century when public education was seen as “levelling” the economic playing field, and governments assumed the greater part of funding to ensure the greatest possible equity across the province.

According to renowned French economist Thomas Piketty (2020), in Capital and Ideology, “modern inequality is said to be just because it is the result of a freely chosen process in which everyone enjoys equal access to the market and to property and automatically benefits from the wealth accumulated by the wealthiest individuals, who are also the most enterprising, deserving and useful.” While familiar, regarding our politics and the distribution of wealth and power, it nevertheless is more ideology than reality, and makes a mockery of claims for equality of opportunity.

Piketty points out, if the wealthy get tax breaks on capital and property, the shortfall must be made up by the less wealthy or not at all, further exacerbating inequality because there exists no equality of choice. The evidence to support the ideology of the wealthy being the most entrepreneurial or useful simply does not exist.

The biggest issue is the matter of who deserves what. Does being born into property and wealth mean that those children deserve more because they are non-Indigenous, non-immigrants, not people of colour or born to professionals rather than labourers?

Piketty also has suggestions for committing to educational equality — an education system open to all, recognizing the dependency of a strong economy on a healthy democracy; a progressive taxation system which recognizes that capital and property mean a greater ability to pay; plus, a financial credit for each child equal to what the wealthy spend on their children’s education, including postsecondary education. The latter would result in not one formula but at least three — urban, rural and northern.

Certainly ideas worth pondering!

John R. Wiens is dean emeritus at the faculty of education, University of Manitoba.