Solidarity key to protecting public education

Hundreds of parents, teachers and students will be protesting education cuts in BC on Sunday. Families Against Cuts to Education is hosting the protests in five BC communities after yet another round of budget cuts for school boards and increased costs surreptitiously delivered through increases to BC Hydro rates and Medical Services Premiums. This, when BC already provides $1000 less per student than the Canadian average for per pupil funding.

The parent initiated rallies are inspiring to see after so many years in which government has fostered divisions between parents and teachers. There is no question that if we are to push back and actually make improvements in our schools, we will need the solidarity of parents and teachers together. This has been undermined due to the "blame the teacher" narrative propagated by government and some sections of the media. But ironically, the latest education legislation of the BC Liberals targets three different sections of the education community. Bill 11 attacks student privacy rights, the independence of locally elected school boards, and the autonomy of teachers to identify and organize their professional development. Combined with a budget that required $29 million in "administrative" cuts - what Christy Clark called "low hanging fruit" - the stage is set for a united response against both the legislation and the budget cuts.

Interestingly, the three components of Bill 11 each, in their own way, demonstrate a different arm of the neoliberal monster.

The changes to student privacy comes in the wake of a fundamental shift in the treatment of student data in the province. The failure of the notorious BCeSIS - the first attempt at a province wide student data collection system - led only to an even larger and more pervasive system, about to be implemented this fall. MyEducationBC will centrally store student data and will collect significantly more information than previous student information systems. The shift to a centralized system, while not explicitly mandates, has been in practice when the BC government refused to accept an alternative proposed and developed by the Saanich school board. Thus every district in BC will be contributing to the "big data" collection of student information. MyEducationBC has more data fields, will be on more computers in more Districts, and will potentially allow massive student data collection by the government. Like other government data collection systems, it is unclear what this information will be used for. As critics point out, these systems violate the basic tenets of privacy protection - collect only what you need, identify your uses prior to collecting data, allow access only in proportion to a genuine need to have access. Student records are thus potentially becoming part of the mass surveillance structure of the 21st century. Bill 11 sets up the legal framework to enable it.

The second component of the Bill involves new mechanisms for government to directly interfere and control the actions of school boards. It is a direct attack on local democracy and is designed to instill caution in Trustees. While the government has always had the ability to remove an elected board (and indeed did so recently in Cowichan), the new powers permit them to mandate specific actions (selling school lands?) or to require a "special advisor" to interfere with and report on the functioning of the board.

This attack on local democracy is not surprising. Boards have become more and more vocal about the impacts of underfunding on the operations of schools. The Cowichan board had the courage to submit a deficit budget that demonstrated the actual needs of students. A number of boards have tacitly endorsed the BC Teacher Federation campaign to ask parents to opt out of the annual standardized tests (FSA) by sending information to parents and accepting without questions their opt out requests. When local democratic structures are actually used to push back on corporate education reform policies, the neoliberal BC Liberals feel the need to shut it down.

The final section of the Bill impacts the ability of teachers to choose and determine how and what type of professional development they engage in. New rules will require specific activities that have been approved by the Ministry. This feature of the Bill is one more in a string of policies that seek to narrow what teachers teach and how they teach it. Christy Clark has long advocated a streamed, vocational style of school system where the primary focus is basic literacy for those who struggle, vocational training for the mass of students in industry specific areas, and access to a university stream for the privileged few. The Ministry has already mandated that one professional development day per year focus on trades training. No doubt there will be a distinctive slant to the type of professional development deemed "acceptable" under the new legislation. As Sheldon Wolin describes: "Privatisation of education signifies not an abstract transfer of public to private but a takeover of the means to reshape the minds of coming generations". Teacher professional development is one small piece of the process of shaping coming generations.

Neither the recent budget cuts nor the new legislation come in a vacuum. BC's education system is being massively reformed. There have been more than a dozen Bills over the last decade that have fundamentally shifted how schools operate. We will need to see beyond the lack of funds and to the more fundamental questions being raised by these changes. Bill 11 is one more in a long line of legislative changes that seek to privatize not only the sources of revenue for schools, but the ways in which schools run and the type of schooling they do. It is one more in a long line of structural changes that undermine public control of schools, the role of public schools in providing equitable access to education, and indeed the very content of schooling. This is all the more reason we need parents and teachers and students and citizens out in the streets demanding change.

Standardized testing: a pillar of privatization

It's FSA season again. Every year in British Columbia, every student in grades 4 and 7 has their regular classroom schedule put on hold for two weeks while they complete the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) -- a collection of standardized tests mandated by the provincial government.

Every student, parent, teacher and citizen should oppose these tests. There is a litany of reasons for this, but top among them is the role standardized tests play in the very destruction of public education itself -- by privatizing a public service. Masquerading as a test for system quality, they are in fact an instrument of system change, and not change for the better. 

The origin and rationale for standardized testing dates back to the cold war. As early as the 1960s, the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP), funded with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, was promoting the use of standardized exams for comparison of states and districts. The so--called "need" for testing was ramped up in the infamous report A Nation at Risk, published by the U.S. government during the Reagan administration in 1983. The report insisted that America's schools had to do better to fend off the Soviet threat.

As an international phenomenon, testing was promulgated by the OECD in the 1990s. It developed the Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, as a way to measure member states and compare their education systems. Since this time, member states of the OECD have been only too happy to comply. State-wide testing was mandated federally in the US through the notorious No Child Left Behind act. BC has the FSAs. Ontario the EQAO. 

BC's province wide standardized exam system has been in use since 1974, but it has changed over time. The first testing program, administered in grades 4, 8 and 12, was called the Provincial Learning Assessment Program (PLAP), and was a replacement of IQ tests. The results of the PLAP were not published but rather used internally for curriculum review and to manage the school system. But in 1984 the BC government decided to publish the results of Grade 12 provincial exams and by 1998 the Fraser Institute published its first ranking of BC schools. In 2002 the BC Liberals abolished the school accreditation system altogether and now relies on Accountability Contracts from each school district to ensure school quality. These documents, produced by school boards, in turn rely heavily on FSA test scores and are of dubious quality. All FSA results are now routinely made available by government on their web site and the Fraser Institute publishes rankings annually. Media outlets gleefully report on the best and worst schools.

Thus the FSAs, like standardized testing in many jurisdictions, has morphed in the last half century from a mechanism designed to internally review the quality of an individual education system, to a comparison tool to rank schools and districts.

The changes that took place are not accidental. They are part and parcel of the usual fare of neo-liberalism: deregulation, defunding, market based provision of services, and privatization.
How does this work? In today's BC school system, a parent can pick up the Fraser Institute rankings and use them to choose a school. Because we no longer have closed school boundaries based on neighbourhoods, they can register their child in the school of their choice. As their child progresses, they have access to a litany of special programs, such as Sports Academies and International Baccalaureate, many of which provide enhanced services through additional fees. Of course it is some parents choosing to do this -- typically immigrant families and low income families simply send their children to the neighbourhood school. Many districts are therefore experiencing a form of "white flight" out of inner city schools.

If you were Milton Friedman, one of the intellectual architects of neo-liberal policy, you would look at this happily as a variant of what he called school vouchers. Acknowledging that even in the free-est of markets, the state has a role to play to ensure basic literacy levels, he advocated that all parents receive a voucher for their state education allowance with the ability to use it at the school of their choice. Now admittedly in Friedman's world, these schools would be privately administered, but the mechanism for parent choice (testing and ranking), the market of schools, and the additional resources provided through school fees all mimic the Friedman model. The virtual school voucher is the provincial funding that follows a child to attend the school of their choice. 

The US has taken the testing craze a few more steps. Not only do they have an insane battery of tests (at least two every year from grades 3 - 8), but they have attached high stakes to these tests so that every aspect of the school system becomes "accountable" to a test score. If a school does badly, close it. If a teacher doesn't improve student test scores, fire the teacher. If universities graduate new teachers whose students do badly, shut down the teacher preparation school. 

Unfortunately, the test scores mostly reflect one thing -- the socioeconomic status of the student writing the test. The inevitable result, therefore, is that it is poor (and disproportionately black) students who are losing their teachers and losing their schools. It is no accident that the first jurisdiction to have no public schools remaining at all is New Orleans.

We can learn from our neighbours to the south, where a growing anti-test movement is sweeping the country. We have the opportunity to scrap the testing and ranking before it completely takes over our public school system. If you are a parent, please withdraw your student from the FSA. If you are a teacher, please work with your colleagues to encourage parents and others to refuse to take the tests. If you are anyone else, work with teachers and parents to end the testing mania and advocate for a school system administered by and for the public.

This article has also appeared on my rabble.ca blog

Will School Board budget woes lead to more inequity and privatization?

The news from the province for School Boards in BC was another disappointment. A "no increase" budget combined with inflation, rising pension costs, PST conversions costs and ten years of chronic under-funding means another round of cuts, layoffs, school closures and reduced services.

Not surprisingly, amid these budget woes, some turn to the private or "choice" options. Parents turn to private schools who can offer class sizes of 10 - 20 while public schools are double this number. Or if they can't afford it, but they can drive across town and pay student fees, they look for the "programs of choice" that segregate the more affluent public school families into particular schools and particular programs. This week's Fraser Institute rankings showed pretty clearly the growing socio-economic divisions in BC schools. Unsurprisingly, private schools topped the lists, where classes are small and resources are high. Next came the schools of choice and schools in wealthier Districts and neighborhoods. Last on the list are the "inner city schools" - where poverty is often at crisis levels. Rather than being the great equalizer, schools in a world of parent "choice" serve to further stratify and segregate students. Growing inequality just keeps growing.

Just as disturbing is the trend towards privatization by some in the education community. More and more school districts are looking towards fees, fundraising, fee-based international student programs and even public/private partnerships as a way to make up for woefully inadequate public funds.

One example is found in a public survey put together by the Maple Ridge school District (https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/201314BudgetSurvey). In it they ask if there is community support for the following:

• Increase or introduce fees for optional programs (e.g. academies, band, bussing)
• Promote public private partnerships 
• Should the school district pursue public - private partnership opportunities in any of the following areas? Advertising, playgrounds, sponsorships, naming of facilities 

Or, they ask, should they increase class sizes, reduce special education teachers/assistants, or close schools.

What a false dichotomy! It is unfortunate that Maple Ridge has even posed these questions. The clear answer is to re-invest in public education through adequate public funding. The way there is through advocacy and communities and elected officials working together to pressure the provincial government to do so. If Maple Ridge and every other District facing funding shortfalls had joined with Cowichan to submit a deficit budget based on the genuine needs of the school district, perhaps the education budget today would look different.

Chronic under-funding is not just about money. The current Liberal government has pursued this manufactured "crisis" to lend legitimacy to private options. But this path has only one end - quality schooling for the few, and ghetto-ized schools for the many. Rather than follow this dead end, I hope Trustees and others in the education world will take the opportunity of the coming provincial election and the coming District budget cycle to stand up and speak up for public education.