THIS IS AN EDITED EXCERPT FROM MY MASTERS THESIS PUBLISHED IN 2006. THIS WAS PART OF AN EDUCATION FORUM IN 2009 OR 2010. [Inside the article, I capitalized important points (like the list of actions used to privatize public ed worldwide) so you can skip the rest if you want. These are all being tried here.] I include this excerpt here because it gives context to how and why we are where we are - the globalization and corporate control of the world economy and the deliberate privatization and control of public education to make it serve the needs of a free market economy - in other words to supply our children as labour widgets designed to serve the needs of corporations: I am going to focus on public education in the context of our current political realities, both global and local. Public education is one of the pillars of a strong democracy and one that our earliest Canadian policy makers saw as being important. Public education gives equity of access to education for all people, not just for the rich and those who can afford to pay fees, but education for all people. It speaks to the heart of who we are as Canadians; a people who believe in equality and freedom, who support public education and public health, public services and public resources. When I think of Canadian leaders I am proud of, it is Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau and Nellie McLung that spring to mind. It will never be Christy Clark, Gordon Campbell or Stephen Harper. It is time to reclaim our country from the greed of corporations and governments who serve the corporate world instead of serving the people they are elected to serve. You will have heard one Education Minister after another crying “highest funding ever!” Let us take a moment to debunk the spin. According to research done by the Saanich School Board, the nominal increase in education funding is not even close to covering mandated education programs and services. New costs to school districts exceeded provincial block funding by 157 million dollars in 2009 – 2010 and this is after adjusting for any savings from declining enrollment. On top of this, the government continues to download costs onto school boards. Carbon offsets, MSP premiums, BC Hydro rate increases, teacher pensions cost increase, CUPE Trades Adjustment – all of these are government bills that are being passed to school boards to pay. New mandates such as early learning that are not fully funded, cutting the Annual Facilities Grant and then only restoring half of it, changing funding in the middle of a budget year; the government does what it wants when it wants with the result being a destabilization of our public education system. No wonder school districts across the province are being forced to make massive cuts in the face of huge deficits. In the end, it is the children in our classrooms that pay for the fiscal irresponsibility of the BC Liberal government. (From my perspective as a school trustee in SD61- Victoria) Saanich School District also looked at funding as a percentage of the provincial budget. In 1991-92 26.4% of the provincial budget went to education. By 2001-02, it was down to 19.6% and this year it is 15.3 % of the provincial budget. Highest funding ever? I don’t think so. Put this in context with the fact that since 2005 – 06, independent school funding has increased by 34% while funding for public schools has only increased by 13%. One has to ask, is there an agenda here? My answer to that would be yes. It is global and we only have to look at Australia, the UK, parts of Europe and the US to see how the privatization agenda has unfolded in other countries. It follows a pattern and make no mistake, the same pressures are operating here. John Smyth in his book, Critical politics of teachers’ work: an australian perspective (2001) describes the effects of economic restructuring on education reform in the western world. He states that globalization is having an impact on governments and on the social structures and programs those governments are responsible for administering and preserving. Public education is one of the institutions being changed by the pressure of the economic and political forces of globalization. As governments around the world become more enmeshed with corporations, increasing pressure is put on them to privatize public institutions, weaken environmental laws and regulations, and diminish social programs to meet the bottom line of market driven economies. Education principles and values are often compromised. The interests of corporations, their commercial issues become more important in curriculum design and resource allocation than the human needs and interests of our students. Up until the early 1970’s, the western world operated under a capitalist economic system known as Fordist capitalism. Fordist capitalism is partly characterized by an approach to the marketplace where demand is created for efficiently produced products that are utilitarian in nature and standardized (Lyotard, 1984). After the economic recession of 1973, the structure of world economies changed. The economic shift was “from standardization, uniformity and universalism to fragmentation, diversity and difference” (Croft and Beresford in Smyth, 2001, p. 35). This shift and the resulting economic restructuring had a direct effect on education. The Post-Fordist economy is shaped by instantaneous communication and rapidly developing technology. In the words of Smyth, capital can be moved around the world with the click of a mouse so as to take advantage of local circumstances such as cheap labour. Because of this, the economies of the western world have to compete against cheap labour in the Pacific Rim, Mexico and South America. Countries such as Canada, Australia, the UK, Western Europe, and the United States have all felt a negative economic impact because of this competition. Smyth (2001) states that western governments use the argument that the decline in competitiveness of western economies made it necessary to have more control over the education system so that “schools and teachers could be made to do their economic work of skills formation” (p. 45). Education and the work of teachers were to be “reformed” to better do their “economic work of skills formation” for the new world economies (p. 45). As Smyth (2001) says, the wrong questions are being asked: “In reality, what we have is not a crisis of competence as being alleged of our schools and teachers, but rather a deep-seated crisis of confidence going to the very heart of the system of Western capitalism. Trying to kick schools and teachers into shape is not going to come to grips with the fundamental structural inequalities and injustices that are at the root of our economic demise” (p.46). The problem is with the economic structures of Post-Fordist capitalism. This is a much more convoluted and difficult thing to analyze and change than the education system and it requires the asking of complex and difficult questions that do not have simple answers. Instead of doing this analysis, western governments are promoting the school as the agency through which to restore economic productivity and competitive advantage (Apple in Smyth, 2001). (Ball in Apple, 2004, p. 20). The ability of democratically elected governments to make decisions about how their countries are run is shifting. Control of the economy of a country no longer rests solely with the policies and regulations that country puts in place. Smyth (2001) says that transnational corporations operate globally and carry such economic power that they are not answerable to governments but only to their head offices in the major cities of the world. AS WESTERN COUNTRIES LIKE CANADA COMPETE ON THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE, THE DEMAND FOR EDUCATIONAL REFORM TO MAKE POSSIBLE THE PROVISION OF HUMAN CAPITAL THAT CAN BE SHAPED TO MEET MARKET DEMANDS INCREASES (Smyth, 2001, p. 28). We are competing against countries where labour is cheap and protection of workers is almost non-existent. Such writers as Smyth (2001) believe that, as globalization has made it possible for corporations to move capital quickly so as to take advantage of cheap labour and other favourable circumstances, western countries have had to become more competitive. Instead of looking toward economic structures and systems for answers, western governments have focused on reforming public education so as to increase economic competitiveness and productivity. These are the economic imperatives that have been driving educational reform internationally. Education Reform and its Impact on Teacher Professional Autonomy and Student Learning EDUCATIONAL REFORM IS FOLLOWING A COMMON PATTERN FROM COUNTRY TO COUNTRY AND PRODUCES SYSTEMS THAT LOOK REMARKABLY ALIKE (Smyth, 2001). SMITH LISTS THESE CHARACTERISTICS OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM: ➢ Intensifying the testing and measurement of educational “outcomes” through national and statewide [provincial] testing; ➢ Focusing on demonstrable, observable, and performance aspects of teachers work; ➢ Requiring teachers to be increasingly specific about what it is they do; ➢ Defining competence in teaching according to static invariant standards derived largely from business and industry; ➢ Rewarding teachers with merit pay based on how well their students perform on standardized tests. ➢ Using accountability contracts (IN BC THEY ARE CALLED ACHIEVEMENT CONTRACTS) to control more tightly what occurs in the classroom with the underlying agenda being to make us more economically competitive internationally. ➢ Ranking and rating schools and teachers based on results from standardized tests. ➢ Marginalizing teachers by labeling them as being self-interested (GREEDY) while at the same time empowering the “consumers” (parents and employers) of the service (education). ➢ Treating teachers as if they cannot be trusted to teach without constant surveillance through the use of performance indicators (p. 28-9). Kohn (1999), in his book the schools our children deserve: moving beyond traditional classrooms and ‘tougher standards’ asks what happens to students who can’t measure up to the “tougher standards” present in the drive to apply a marketplace paradigm to education. He says, “those standards are essentially used as selection devices to privilege some over others” (p.102). Apple (2004) agrees and examines the “interrelations among class, gender, and race in the context of economic restructuring and educational reform in the United States, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. He says that this “radical social and educational change” represents a profound shift to the right. In the US, this is translating into a mythology of “a nation that is a haven for white Christian traditions and values” under siege and losing “an imagined past” that was full of security, tradition and discipline (Apple 2004). The racist and classist nature of this ideology is clear and from it comes educational reform characterized by the free market structures of accountability, nationally standardized curriculum, tighter control of teachers and students, ranking of schools, and merit pay. Apple writes that the “contradictory discourse of competition, markets and choice on one hand and accountability, performance objectives, standards, national testing and national curriculum on the other hand” reinforce each other and strengthen the conservative viewpoint in educational policy. “. . . these reforms have also not been notable for their grounding in research findings.” Apple calls these reforms radical and states that they “have now redefined the terrain of the debate in all things educational” (Apple, 2004, p. 17). Kohn (1999) writes that there are two ways to bring about change in schools: the support model and the demand model. In the support model teachers, administrators, parents, and the community at large work together to assist students in taking active responsibility for their own learning. Students are engaged in constructing meaning and their curiosity is being stimulated. In the demand model, those “outside and above the classroom” decide what is to be taught and how it is to be taught. This is delivered in achievement lists and standardized testing imposed on students and teachers through use of the constructs of the corporate world: performance, accountability, and incentives. Children are even describes as “workers” who have an obligation to do a better job. Schools represent an “investment” and must become more “competitive,” the idea being that test scores in the United States ought to surpass those in other countries. Education is described as though it were a hybrid of an assembly line and a sports match” (Kohn 1999, p. 93). According to Kohn, this demand model, using structures of the corporate world, results in standardization of curriculum, high-stakes testing, and the use of rewards and punishments (accountability contracts) to control teachers and through them, students. He says that this approach overlooks “an enormous body of research” indicating that these educational policies do not deliver results in the states that are using them or internationally in countries such as the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Schooling becomes less like educating students and more like training them. Teachers become more like technicians delivering a tightly scripted program designed to produce a standardized product. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international study that measures the abilities of fifteen year-olds from fifty-seven different countries on a three-year cycle. Reading was the domain in the year 2000, mathematics in 2003, and science will be the domain in the spring of 2006. Canadian students have about a 30-point advantage over US students in their reading performance, according to the results from 2000. This is a statistical advantage of nearly one full year of schooling at the age of fifteen (Government of Canada, 2004). Findings from the study have some interesting trends that tend to support Smyth and Apple’s claim that socio-economic factors play a role in the delivery of education. The study identified a large contextual effect associated with the socio-economic status of the school that was stronger in the US than in Canada. Students in high SES schools have higher academic achievement than students in low SES schools. Segregation of students along SES lines in many cases has to do with catchment areas that are economically homogeneous. Also, in some school districts, public funding for schools with selective admission criteria marginalizes low SES students even more. This includes schools with language immersion programs and parental choice programs (Government of Canada, 2004). In BC, parental choice programs include Magnet Schools such as hockey schools and fine arts schools. The study comments “tackling segregation stemming from such policies is difficult because the middle class has a vested interest in maintaining such alternatives. Other factors identified as influencing reading achievement are the percentage of teachers with a major in language arts, teacher autonomy, students’ use of school resources, teacher-student relations, disciplinary climate in the classroom and formal assessment. Formal assessment does not mean standardized testing. High SES schools tend to have better resources and more positive school climates (Government of Canada, 2004). Smyth (2001) describes what “whole school change committed to a wider social agenda” would need to have as principles: ➢ Resist the conversion of fundamental moral and political questions, into technical and administrative problems to be solved; ➢ Listen to teachers voices more and publicly defend them against the demands to follow the model of industry; ➢ Work in ways that not only acknowledge but publicly celebrate teachers’ theories of what works and why; ➢ Acknowledge that teaching is an intellectual struggle to make meaning of what teachers know and what they are learning each day and put to rest the notion that teaching is a technical exercise; ➢ Construct a curriculum around the ‘lived experience’ of children and teachers, rather than around national policies designed to support international economic competitiveness; ➢ Create a climate of critical analysis within schools where teachers can call into question the basic assumptions around teaching and learning – and change them, if needed; ➢ Make education be about a collaboration between students and teachers in exploring the ‘big questions’ that fire the imagination and lead to deeper understanding (p. 218-219) Eisner (1998), in discussing educational reform in the US, states that the “DOMINANT IMAGE OF SCHOOLING IN AMERICA HAS BEEN THE FACTORY AND THE DOMINANT IMAGE OF TEACHING . . . THE ASSEMBLY LINE” (p. 356). He raises the issue of the language used in discussions of educational reform, the “industrial metaphors”, shaping the “aims of the enterprise” (p. 357). Eisner says that as language changes, the meaning of the discussion changes. He gives the example of a curriculum specialist being renamed and becoming a business manager and education being changed from a process to a commodity. Current educational reform primarily uses a free market approach to introduce standardization of curriculum, high-stakes testing, achievement contracts and a high level of control of teachers and of students. There is a social cost as well as an educational cost to this approach (Apple 2004, Kohn 1999, Smyth 2001). The academic results this system is expected to deliver are not achievable using these policies. There is a high level of teacher disillusionment, stress, and burnout and it creates students who are disenfranchised by the school system. If we are to be successful in providing equal access to quality education for all students, we need create a different vision of educational reform, one that includes the voices of teachers and students and respects the professional nature of teaching.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 18:39:35 +0000
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