Taking the public out
of public schooling
Charles Ungerleider,
Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[Permission granted
to reproduce if authorship is acknowledged]
We see daily the frontal assault on public institutions in
the United States by its commander in chief. Castigating the judiciary,
eliminating regulations for the protection of the environment, and demeaning
anyone whose views are different from his are so quotidian that there is no
time to appraise the impact. It is tempting to see them as random acts of a
rogue politician, but they are not. They are part of a strategy to destabilize,
and sow distrust in, democratic institutions.
The assault on democratic institutions did not originate
with the current president of the United States. It has a long, meandering
history of smaller skirmishes that were less apparent because they were
regional in their focus. They are well documented in several books, but most notably
in Nancy MacLean’s Democracy
in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America.
Friends who have read the book argue that Canada is
different. Canada’s reliance on peace, order and good government makes us
different from the US where “liberty” is one of the elements in the trinity life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Liberty and libertarianism are simply
not themes in Canadian politics – well, not very much anyway.
Gone, but not forgotten is Maxime
Bernier who deliberately gave the impression that Canada is beset by mass
immigration and who thinks the jury is out about climate change. His policy
prescriptions were abolishing foreign aid; lowering personal taxes; experimenting
with private delivery of health care; and privatizing Canada Post, among
others.
Bernier is gone for now, but these ideas, and ones like
them, are a central part of an effort to severely restrict what governments do
for citizens in the belief that market forces allow citizens to look after
themselves. Dr. MacLean documents the
efforts of the libertarians to give prominence to their ideas and to use those
ideas to reduce or eliminate the legislative and regulatory functions of
government to permit the private sector to take over public goods for private
benefit.
Let me bring the argument to the institution I know best -
public schools, the institution most central to the preservation of democracy.
Almost 20 years ago I argued that we were failing
our children and grandchildren by ignoring the factors eroding public
schools: using public funds for the support of private schools; creating social
divisions among families by offering them the opportunity to choose the schools
their children attend and segregating them from the children of families who
are different; promoting charter schools; allowing for-profit enterprises to
provide food services in schools; and diminishing the common experience that
schools once provided and their part in transmitting values. If anything, these
factors are more prominent today that they were 20 years ago.
A seemingly small change to Alberta’s Education Act makes a
symbolic difference that, in the long term, will have a major impact. Alberta’s
Education Act was recently amended to eliminate
the word public in public school board. The justification for
the change is that it permits all school jurisdictions, now called divisions,
to determine, among other thing, the electoral boundaries for the division and
the areas from which trustees are elected.
Eliminating the public in public education blurs the lines
between public schools, charter schools, and private schools. The change
creates the impression that all schools are simply equivalent choices. But they
are not. Private schools have great latitude in the students they will admit
and retain; public schools accept all students and have relatively well-defined
grounds for expelling students. Charter schools may establish the conditions
under which teachers teach and students learn - conditions that in public
schools are regulated by provincial statute, school board policy, and
collective agreements.
As I said before, the elimination of the word “public” in
Alberta’s public schools may seem minor, but, in the long run, it will have
significant consequences.