Political decisions create educational chaos

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/12/2020 (1942 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE American political system is in complete disarray — the executive branch, the current White House, eschews civility and truth and promotes wild conspiracy theories; the legislative branch, Congress (House of Representatives and Senate), is in intractable partisan deadlock; and the judicial branch, the court system, is no longer seen as impartial. Indeed, it would be fair to say that the U.S. Constitution itself is under attack.

Setting aside strident partisanship, religious fundamentalism, anti-government militias, and/or racial bigotry as contributing factors for the current mess, what we are witnessing today is the failure of a democracy to continuously renew its civic ethos, spirit and capability. And that failure can be attributed to a systematic dismantling of the public school system over the last 40 years in America.

What’s frightening for me is that Manitoba has been on a similar path since the 1990s.

The demise of the school system is not so much due to neglect as it is a consequence of deliberate, conscious choices to transform it, over time, by altering the very purposes of education under “manufactured” claims. Encouraged by the 1983 report “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform,” issued by the U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education, a major review of education undertaken by a majority of non-educators — lawmakers — over almost four decades has reformed both schools and education.

According to the report, America was losing its competitive edge in the global marketplace, the cause being failing schools. Evidence of failing schools was poor international test performance of U.S. students. While the causal connection between economic indicators and test scores is a stretch at best, it was made worse because neither claim was true.

America was better off economically than most other countries and test scores were going up over time, not down. But, like here, the myths live on, continuing to wreak havoc in what was once one of the best systems of education in the world.

The overriding remedy was to make education a private, as opposed to public, good. This took several forms — the first being schools of choice, in the form of vouchers and home schooling, followed by charter schools and for-profit schools. Vouchers allowed parents to take their education tax dollars and apply them to whatever school they chose; home schooling allowed people to avoid schools altogether. Charter schools were separate schools created by groups of people using public funds — they could choose who their children went to school with, and which children they could avoid.

Finally, for-profit schools were set up by multi-year business contracts between large corporations and school districts, using all tax dollars which would normally have flowed to the districts in exchange for providing education (and offering guarantees for increased test scores). The claim was that competition would make public schools better and more efficient.

Competition for education did not work. Choice of schools meant that many parents opted out of their neighbourhood schools for a variety of reasons, ranging from religious and racial segregation to socio-economic separation, the result being that public money was diverted away from public schools and children no longer had to learn to live with their neighbours.

Corporations walked away from their contracts with millions of public dollars, finding it impossible to meet the commitments they had made at the outset to raise test scores. The public good, reconceptualized as private choice, simply did not live up to its promises and did not cost less, but it did cost thousands of children a good education provided by qualified people.

In addition, curricular changes sought to transform the very purposes of education, from preparation for civic life to training for jobs and the marketplace. Science, technology and mathematics, perceived to be tickets to higher-paying jobs and economic progress, were favoured at the expense of the arts and humanities.

What resulted is that more and more children — those who did not excel at the hard sciences — were simply denied the same recognition and acknowledgment that their different abilities deserved. Education for democratic participation across differences fell by the wayside.

Manitoba governments since the early ’90s, regardless of political stripe, have accepted this schooling path, one that does not require children to encounter and accommodate others who are not like them — and we could easily find ourselves in the same place as our southern neighbours.

Hopefully, Manitoba’s long-awaited K-12 Education Review report will interrupt this trajectory for the sake of our children, our public schools and our democracy and not take us further down this road to political disaster.

John R. Wiens is dean emeritus at the faculty of education, University of Manitoba. A lifelong educator, he has served as a teacher, counsellor, work education co-ordinator, principal, school superintendent and university professor.