Who took citizenship out of the curriculum?

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

About a year ago I moved. In preparation for the move, I tried to sort through the accumulated material in my office only to discover that I am a hoarder. Who knew?

I discovered that I had more old textbooks than some libraries. Among them was James McCaig’s
Studies in Citizenship (1925), a book approved for student use in British Columbia according to the 1926-27 BC Programme of Studies. It turns out you can find the book and the programme of study on the internet!

McCaig’s text is divided into three parts: “The Social Life of the Community,” “The Economic Life of the Community,” and “The Rights and Duties of Citizens. The first describes the contributions of family, school, church, and government to citizenship. The second gives quite a cogent and balanced account of economics and its impact on the community. The last section has three parts: what government owes to the citizen,” “what the citizen owes to government,” and “what the citizen owes himself.”

The text is – aside from the references to “our Anglo-Saxon forefathers,” “our Dominion,” and the use of the male pronoun – quite a comprehensive account of citizenship. According to the BC Programme of Studies, “Studies in Citizenship” was intended for students in Grade VIII. In as much as many students did not transition to secondary education in the 1920s, the text was an excellent primer for someone leaving school.

The mission of BC’s schools was then and until recently to equip students with the knowledge they need to take a full and active part in the economy and society and to understand their rights and obligations as citizens.

With this in mind, I was curious to see how ‘citizenship’ and ‘democracy’ were addressed in BC’s ‘new’ curriculum. The BC Ministry of Education has made this quite easy to do – a benefit to parents and teachers alike – using the search curriculum tool. The tool allows those who are interested to search the components of the curriculum (Big Ideas, Content, and Curricular Competency) by subjects (science, social studies, mathematics, etc.) and by grade level (K-12).

I selected all grades, subjects, and curriculum categories (Big Ideas, Content, and Curricula Competency) and searched for the term citizenship. I was surprised that there were few references to the term and the most frequent among those references was to digital citizenship (taking personal responsibility and behaving ethically and cautiously when using technology).

I repeated the search substituting democracy for citizenship. Nil, nothing, zilch – not a single reference to the concept. I tried again with democratic. Two references. Both were associated with Political Studies 12, a course taken by very few students.

Rights occurs more frequently than the democracy and citizenship. A big idea from student in kindergarten is that “rights, roles, and responsibilities shape our identity and help us build healthy relationships with others.” In Grade 1, the big idea is “our rights, roles, and responsibilities are important for building strong communities.” At the Grade 2 level the big idea is “individuals have rights and responsibilities as global citizens.” Global citizens? Really? If citizenship defines the relationship between a political state and its citizens, what is global citizenship? I do not enjoy the same rights or have the same responsibilities in France or Poland as I do in Canada.

Until recently, a significant gap in education has been the attention devoted to the indigenous inhabitants of Canada. I repeated my search using the term indigenous. There were more associations with that term than with citizenship, democracy, or rights. Indigenous people are conspicuously absent in McCaig’s treatment of citizenship in 1925.

When I mentioned this to a close friend, he asked, “how are students expected to learn about the rights denied to Indigenous people by successive governments, the broken promises and neglect at the hands of settler (Canadian) governments, and the aspiration of First Nations to have government to government relations with Canada and the provinces if students do not understand the concepts of democracy, citizenship, and rights?”

“They can’t,” I replied, “because someone took citizenship out of the curriculum along with democracy and rights.”

The omission of citizenship education is not an oversight. The ‘new’ BC curriculum reflects an atomistic view of individualistic learning. The primary responsibility of schools today is to cultivate the personal capital of the learner. The impetus for learning is the individual's goals and passions rather than any collective purpose. The collective enters the framework only if the individual learner expresses an interest in others. This explains why rights appear, but responsibilities do not.

A curriculum which intends to cultivate community and individuals cognizant of their and others' places in the community must provide a common experience and require that learners engage others, including people who do not share their passions or their values. The curriculum, like our society, must require the individual to consider and negotiate the tensions between self and others, between public and private spheres, and between conflicting ideas and values.

Teacher Concerns Expose System Weakness

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

 [permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 

On Thursday, September 17^th, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) sought the assistance of the Labour Relations Board of British Columbia (LRBBC). The BCTF wanted the LRBBC’s help “in addressing the serious and growing concerns that teachers have about the working and learning conditions in the public education system during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Central to the BCTF’s argument is the fragmented application of provincial guidelines by school boards in the province.

The BCTF asserts that its application falls within the LRBBC’s mandate under section 88 of the Labour Relations Code. That section reads:

If a difference arises during the term of a collective agreement, and in the board's opinion delay has occurred in settling it or it is a source of industrial unrest between the parties, the board may, on application by either party to the difference, or on its own motion,

(a) inquire into the difference and make recommendations for settlement, and

(b) if the difference is arbitrable, order that it be immediately submitted to a specified stage or step in the grievance procedure under the collective agreement or, whether or not the difference is arbitrable, request the minister to appoint a special officer. (Labour Relations Code [RSBC 1996] Chapter 244

I am not a lawyer with expertise in labour relations. I do not know how the LRBBC will respond, but I hope that the genuine concerns of teachers about their health and safety are addressed by the time you read this blog post.

Regardless of the outcome, the dispute itself exposes a serious weakness in what we informally describe as British Columbia’s education “system.” I place quotation marks around the word system because the issue raises an important question that all systems must face: How much and what kind of authority and responsibility should be delegated from the main body (in this case the provincial ministry of education) to regional entities (in this case school boards) and still remain a system?

The BCTF’s petition to the LRBBC argues that the provincial health and safety guidelines have been interpreted and applied inconsistently across the province, and those inconsistencies put some of their members at greater risk than others without adequate reason or justification.

A word sometimes used to describe the relationship between the Ministry of Education and school boards is co-governance. It is a relationship described in a 2018 memorandum of understanding between the British Columbia Ministry of Education and the British Columbia School Trustees Association which uses co-governance in the following manner:

The Province recognizes that BCSTA, as the representative voice for its members and Board of Education, is a key partner in developing and maintaining an effective education system, and further recognizes the legislated co-governance role of Boards of Education to determine local education priorities.

Notwithstanding the language of co-governance, the British North America Act (1867) gave the provinces the sole authority for making laws about education. The provinces, in turn, created strong centralized departments of education to oversee school boards, themselves creations of the provincial governments.

Asserting the co-governance role of boards of education and encouraging or allowing boards to determine how a provincial guideline is implemented introduces the potential for misalignment between local application and the intended purpose of the guideline. The implication of guidelines is that they are recommendations about best or preferred practice. As is asserted by the BCTF, co-governance has compromised the implementation of the guidelines by allowing boards to exercise their delegated authority.

To delegate authority and responsibility to a subordinate unit, one must have confidence that the unit has the capacity to exercise the delegated authority and responsibility. Co-governance gives both the Ministry of Education and local school boards a shield that either can wield depending upon the situation at hand. The assumption of co-governance is also based on the notion that local authorities will know how best to apply X (whatever X might be) because they are more closely attuned to local conditions.

When school boards seek greater discretion in the allocation of funds provided by the Ministry of Education, they assert that claim of knowing local conditions best.  But, when school boards say they do not have enough resources for X (whatever X might be), the Ministry of Education says that the formula it uses for allocation funding is a distribution mechanism, not a spending mechanism. The Ministry will remind boards that they have the discretion for using the resources they receive.

Co-governance is a convenient shield, but poor policy. It is a poor policy, in part, because it is predicated on the assumption that there is sufficient capacity in all the units to which discretion has been delegated.

There are sixty school boards in British Columbia to which considerable authority and responsibility have been delegated. Previous governments have already made the judgment that in matters of teacher bargaining, individual school boards have, at best, limited capacity. Therefore, government established the British Columbia Public School Employers’ Association (BCPSEA) to bargain collectively with the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation.

For its part, the BCTF would prefer local bargaining precisely because of differences in capacity among boards. Prior to provincial bargaining, the BCTF exploited differences among boards to its advantage. The BCTF centrally managed the bargaining between BCTF locals and local school boards. It strategically selected school boards that it knew were more favorably disposed to its arguments or that lacked the capacity to resist its arguments. By establishing local agreements favourable to its interests with such boards, the BCTF successfully used those agreements as a baseline for its negotiation with other boards.

With respect to the health and safety issues about which the BCTF is now concerned, it seeks a provincial solution to the local differences. I am sympathetic to the concerns expressed by the BCTF about the health and safety of its members, and hope they are resolved quickly.

My sentiments extend beyond the immediate problem to the larger issue of delegated authority. I see the issue in the larger context of the question I raised earlier: How much and what kind of authority and responsibility should be delegated from a provincial ministry of education to school boards?

Is the capacity among all school boards sufficient to ensure that they can exercise the authority and responsibility delegated to them?

Reducing the COVID-19 Achievement Gap

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 

As children and young adults return to school, parents and teachers watch with trepidation. Hoping for the best, most school boards are preparing for the worst (a return to online instruction for everyone). Many school boards have encouraged parents to choose between face-to-face and online instruction and many are offering hybrid models that combine face-to-face and online instruction in interesting ways.

There are conflicting estimates of how much learning loss occurred last Spring when most instruction occurred online. Some of the learning loss occurred because there was little instruction since many teachers concentrated on ensuring the emotional and physical safety of the students for whom they were responsible. Some of the loss occurred because, despite the instruction that occurred, students had fewer opportunities for teacher guidance in using what they were learning.

No one denies that learning loss has been significant and, now that schooling has resumed, teachers are working assiduously to address the loss. The students for whom lost learning time has been most detrimental include students for whom English is a second language, special needs learners, and low-income students.  

Medical health officers showed foresight in the Spring when they signaled that, if schools resumed in September, conditions would be different. Only a minority of students have a schedule that permits five days of uninterrupted school attendance in a classroom with all their peers. The school experience is much more fragmented and is likely to be interrupted again depending upon health conditions.

The lost learning time and the potentially fragmented conditions pose a significant challenge for teachers. But the accumulated evidence in education indicates there are several things that teachers can do that will make their work more manageable and the overall student experience more successful.

1. Avoid the temptation to assign project work. Project work requires students to work on their own over a long period of time. This requires significant motivation and self-discipline. Few parents have the time or capacity for monitoring project work.
2. Assess what students know and can do that is foundational to continued success in the subject. Ensure that students have the entry-level knowledge to proceed with the instructional material intended for students at that level.
3. Arrange instruction in small, discrete units that can be assessed for mastery. It is harder to spot the specific challenges that students are having if their performance is not assessed until the conclusion of a long instructional episode. This is true whether we are talking about a single, lengthy instructional episode or a collection of instructional episodes that have been grouped into a unit. Waiting until the end to assess makes it harder for both the teacher and students because there are more things to look for. When instruction is organized into smaller chunks, each with its own brief assessment, it is easier to spot the challenges and the students who face them.
4. Break the work into smaller bits - each with its own, focused assessment – making the teacher’s job less challenging. Focused classroom assessments are easier to construct, are easier to evaluate, and are helpful in getting a student or group of students back on track. Knowing that I have not succeeded on a specific dimension of the work and that the teacher will help me master what I have not yet learned is more encouraging than being told that I did not master the material in a larger body of work. The latter is often overwhelming.
5. Encourage and provide feedback. Feedback is important for continued success (for both the students and the teacher). From the teacher’s point of view, knowing what students know and can do helps them to plan the next steps. Knowing that students are performing in accordance with expectations for students at that grade level is reinforcing to the teacher. From the students’ point of view, knowing what one knows and can do reinforces a success ethic.
6. Provide feedback and re-instruction to individual students if only one or two students are having difficulty. When more than one or two are unable to demonstrate mastery, re-teaching the entire class is called for. When there is a growing number of students with insufficient knowledge to proceed to the next lesson or unit, the teachers job becomes much more difficult because the gaps between students grow. Large gaps, and the more of them there are compound the complexity of the teacher’s work, making a difficult job almost impossible.

Teachers who read this blog before it was posted say that this advice (which is based on the accumulated evidence about teaching and learning) applies to in-class instruction as much as it does to on-line instruction. And it does.

Donald Trump is the by-product of a failing education system

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

 [permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Public schools in the United States have been blamed for many things from “losing the space race” when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite on October 4, 1957 to the economic plunge in 2008. In the first case, public schools allegedly failed to prepare students with the foundation in science and mathematics that American needed to compete in the space race. In the latter, American students did not have the financial literacy that would have prevented the financial melt down from the sub-prime mortgage scandal.

And now, here I go blaming American schools for Donald Trump. I’m not saying that they  bear the entire responsibility for Trump, but they bear some.

One major factor contributing to the acceptance of Trump by a near majority of the electorate is segregation. The separation of Black students from their non-Black peers contributed to the social divisions we see today.

Segregation in the US based on religion is less well-known than its ugly cousin: segregation by skin color. But religious segregation in education actually preceded segregation by the color of one’s skin because if you were Black, you were usually denied the opportunity to attend school at all.

The argument for local school board “democracy” practiced from the earliest days of publicly supported education was not about democracy at all. It was about religious segregation. Local school boards were established at a time when Catholics and Protestants were deeply fearful that, if one or the other gained control of the local school, it would be to the detriment of the group that was not in control because at that time school curricula were imbued with religion. The solution was the creation of small, local school boards largely separated by religion.

Segregation by religion and skin color help to fuel social divisions today, though they are often cloaked in the garb of public and private school choice, programs of choice, specialized schools, and other variations fabricated to prevent contact with people who are, or appear to be, different from us

American schools are divided culturally and ideologically. Editions of the same textbooks convey different interpretations of events depending upon where one lives and the schools one attends. Contrary to the spirit and intention of cultivating a scientific point of view and intellectual tools to distinguish fact from fantasy, science teaching in some places in the US treats people’s belief in biblical ‘creation’ as if it were a factual account of the origins of the universe. I take no issue with your belief in the spirit of Santa Claus, but if you want to claim that Santa descends your chimney on Christmas Eve, I’m going to suggest we camp out in your living room in front of the fireplace to see what happens (and eat the cookies that await him).

The cultural divide in the US is also a class divide fueled by the growing wealth gap that is reflected in the wide discrepancies in educational funding and opportunities. The vision of a common curriculum, the unifying and equalizing missions of American public schooling promulgated by Horace Mann, was never achieved. Today, America’s common core standards are voluntarily adopted by states that jealously guard their autonomy. Funding public schools through taxation at the local level has created and maintains unequal school jurisdictions – even in neighboring communities. The inequalities are there by design and baked into the system.

America has always placed the individual above the group, paying lip service to civic virtue and solidarity while worshiping liberty above all else. Baked into American culture, individualism is reflected in, and perpetuated by, the school system. It is difficult to socialize the next generation to the shared values of the society when there are few shared values taught in schools.

The election of Donald Trump is simply the logical consequence of the failure of American public education.

I would like to think Canadian society is immune to the forces that enabled the election of a Donald Trump. But it is not.

Canadian society may not be as fragmented as the society south of our border. But the conditions for coming unglued are evident: regional alienation, Quebec nationalism, and ethnocentrism pull Canadians apart from one another, while economic globalization and fragmented media weaken our bonds with one another.

Our public schools exhibit many of the same characteristics as those in the US, with some exceptions. In many places, schools are segregated by religion and Canadian schools are becoming more socially segregated. Boutique programs and private schools, personalized curricula, and ideologically-oriented curricula are increasingly common. Many secondary schools are streamed. Students from impoverished backgrounds, student of colour and Indigenous students are typically over-represented in the less challenging stream. Notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary, there is not much critical thinking or civic education. Canadian schools do not suffer the same economic inequalities as those in the US, but many provinces subsidize private schools furthering their advantage.

The value of choice and personalization has eroded the concept of the common school. Rather than create more diverse school communities by drawing from larger and more diverse population, schools are becoming places where like-mined people congregate. The benefits of choice accrue to those who can afford to take their kids across town or pay the fees that accompany specially-focussed programs.

Are Canadian schools doing all that they can to reduce the likelihood of electing a demagogue who can capitalize on the divisions within society? When I am feeling pessimistic, I say, “I don’t think so.” When I am feeling optimistic I say, “we need to try harder.”

Some might say the divisions in American education simply reflect a fractured society. If so, what do the increasingly fractured Canadian schools reveal about our society?

Do I overstate the importance of public schooling to Canadian social cohesion?

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

A few readers of my previous blog have wondered if I have overstated the importance of public schools to Canadian social cohesion. I do not think I have. Here is why.

People learn who they are, to whom they are related, and the power they have from the institutions, symbols, and myths they are told. Families, of course, are the first and influential context for such learning. Peers are influential, increasingly so as youngsters grow older.

Families interpret the world for the young, communicating the possibilities open to them and the limits on those possibilities. Families tell the young what they can and cannot do based upon their experience. Most parents encourage their children to aspire beyond the limits the parents faced and want their children to have the advantages the parents did not have. “You can be anything you set your mind on” is a common message to our children.

Families are tribal. They also draw the lines between family members and those outside the family. Tribalism, defence of the extended family, is a genetically programmed response designed for its protection. For most of human history, the tribal mechanism ensured survival in socially hostile environments. But tribalism has its downside, too. In a socially diverse society, the admonishment “Don’t play with kids like that” and the injunction to “Stick with your own kind” establish the basis for discrimination and racism.

Religion, media, and politics are essential parts of society, but they too are tribal. They divide us along philosophical lines. The optimist in me would like to believe that although we may differ philosophically, those differences are equivalent pathways in the pursuit of common human needs and in accordance with similar ethical principles. Increasingly hostile expressions of difference in recent years has made me more pessimistic.

I would like to think that most of us want Canada to be a more socially cohesive and egalitarian society. We want our children to have a sense of who they are as Canadians based upon shared values and want them to live in a society where the similarities among us outweigh the differences, but one in which the differences are respected.

Those aspirations cannot be realized without an institution dedicated to helping us to transcend our tribalism to work together. The only institution I know that has the promise of doing that is the public school.  You will no doubt have noticed that I used the word promise. While I think public schools do help us transcend our tribalism, they are imperfect – so the promise is unfulfilled.

When I think about the history of Canadian public schooling, I see improvement. The overt appeals to xenophobia that were once common (“our Anglo-Saxon heritage”) and the open denigration of Indigenous peoples – are diminished. Diminished, but not extinguished. Vestiges of privilege and discrimination are baked into the institution. Canada and its institutions are still settler-dominated.

I am cautiously optimistic that the vestiges of privilege and discrimination can be eliminated. I am not naïve, however. Eliminating them will require significant, conscious, and persistent effort. Because most of our children are congregated in schools at a time in their lives that tribalism is not so firmly ‘baked in’, I think that public schooling is the only institution capable of communicating the values I hope that we share.

Schools address the same tension between individual rights and the needs of the collective that are present in the larger society. The tension is evident in the relationship between ‘personalized learning’ that tries to ensure common outcomes, between competitive and cooperative learning models, and in the attempt to ensure excellence and equity. We cannot and should not sidestep these tensions but work to prevent one set of values from eclipsing the other.

If public schools cannot help to create a socially cohesive society, who or what can?