Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
In his Globe and Mail opinion piece, Paul W. Bennet tries to make the
case that “Canada’s bureaucratic school system needs a top-to-bottom overhaul.”
His argument for giving greater responsibility to local schools seems
superficially attractive if one ignores that the inadequate school system response
to the COVID-19 pandemic was a product of doing exactly what Bennet recommends:
devolving the responsibility for responding to the pandemic to local school
boards.
Bennet claims that “the centralized and over-bureaucratic
school system proved to be vulnerable and ill-equipped to respond to the
massive pandemic disruption.” I, on the other hand, argue that the ill-equipped
response to the pandemic was a result of the improper delegation of
responsibility from provincial ministries of education to school boards, most of which lack the
capacity to respond to the demands of providing online learning that they faced
in the spring and continue to face in the fall In turn, many boards delegated
responsibility to individual schools.
Rather than exercise their ability to coordinate the educational
response to the pandemic, provincial governments promulgated guidelines for
local school boards to apply as local conditions warranted. As circumstances
have shown, neither school boards, nor the schools to which they in turn
delegated discretion, had the capacity to exercise that delegated authority
because they lacked expertise, resources, and, of course, experience.
I agree with Paul Bennett’s
assessment of the inadequate response to the pandemic, but not his analysis of
its origins. There is no evidence that, in vesting control in local schools and
communities, schooling would be better – and plenty historical evidence that it
would not.
Delegating authority from provincial to local authorities is a convenient reflex for many provincial authorities. Such delegation provides political cover when things go awry as they often do when the course is uncharted, and even when they do not.
Long before Confederation, Egerton Ryerson, the Methodist
minister who vigorously advocated for free, universal schooling, expressed his
reservations about local school authorities and argued for a strong central educational
authority vested in the hands of government. Ryerson’s concern about the
capacity of school boards to govern in the public interest was justified. Provincial
ministries of education often found it necessary to dismiss local boards and
replace them with an appointed trustee when the boards were unable or unwilling
to govern in the interest of the citizens they are supposed to serve.
Local control of education has a superficial appeal to those
unfamiliar with its history. 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. Religious segregation sounded more benign when
it was dressed up in the cloak of local democracy.
Bennet opportunistically uses the admittedly inadequate
educational response to the COVID pandemic to attack the education system,
implying that the quality of public education is poor because of the way the
system is organized. Though it has its
shortcomings, Canadian public education is – relative to other nations – a high
performer when it comes to reading, mathematics and science - the domains for
which there are international comparisons.
The shortcomings of the Canadian education system are not
ones that would improve by dismantling the system and “reinventing it from the
schools up” by giving more responsibility to “those closest to students.” Such
a change would erode one of the system’s strengths, namely that the very small
differences between schools do not appreciably affect student achievement.
Canadian public education does not need institutional
disaggregation. It needs greater institutional coordination in things such as
online learning. Given the comparatively small curricular differences among the
provinces and territories, cooperation among ministries of education should be
able to produce much higher quality courseware than any that a single province
could produce on its own, and at a lower cost. If anything, reform of Canadian
public education should involve more, not less, cooperation and coordination.