Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to
reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
Last week, a teacher turned broadcaster asked me if I would
reflect on Failing
Our Kids: How we Are Ruining Our Public Schools, a book I wrote in 2003. He
was interested in the extent to which my appraisal had changed in the
intervening years.
Most of what I wrote in 2003 is unfortunately applicable in
2020. COVID-19 has acted like the steroids that some body builders use, helping
to define and magnify the themes and tendencies.
It would be an understatement to say that COVID-19 has sparked
public – and especially parental – anxieties about public schooling. The media
tap the vein of anxiety swollen by COVID and social media, far more powerful
today than in 2003, have amplified those anxieties and injected significant
misinformation.
Some elected representatives have traditionally manipulated public
anxieties about education for political and ideological advantage. Some have
misrepresented the data about the successes of public schooling as well as its
shortcomings. During COVID-19, most have sought to deflect parental anxieties
about the response to the pandemic to local boards of education.
A lack of provincially coordinated responses to COVID and
the deflection of attention to local school boards have played into the hands
of those politicians eager to abandon public schooling in favour of a
market-driven private system. They would thus rid the public purse of the
burden of preparing the next generation of Canadians. But even where there is
no such political agenda, lack of coordination and deflection of responsibility
will encourage some to abandon public schools.
Teacher unions have often exploited parental anxiety to improve
their working conditions and membership by overdramatizing the impact to
changes in education. Though the concerns of teacher unions about the welfare
of their members is genuine, their public expression of those concerns is
likely a contributing factor to parental anxiety about, and some flight from,
public schools.
Canadian parents fuel anxiety about public schooling, their
own and the anxieties of other parents. They hold competing and sometimes
incompatible ideas and demands about public schools. This is particularly
evident during COVID-19. Some parents demand that schools operate as they did
prior to COVID, but with precautions to minimize the pandemic’s impact. Others
demand online instruction of the same quality as can be achieved face-to-face. Others
seek a blended approach, but one that is easily coordinated with parental
responsibilities.
In the meantime, public schools are struggling to respond to
the extraordinary demands that COVID-19 has imposed. The response has been uneven
and imperfect. That should surprise no one. When we describe something like
COVID-19 as novel and unprecedented, we must temper our expectations. That is not to say that we should have no
expectations, but the expectations we hold should be reasonable. So, what is
reasonable?
Schools and school boards vary significantly in their
capacity. They would benefit from greater coordination from provincial
ministries of education. This will require more than the production of
guidelines. Online learning is in most jurisdictions in a sorry state, but
provincial – if not pan-Canadian – coordination and cooperation would improve its
quality dramatically. Regulations about the uniform and open reporting of COVID
cases by school would likely provide some comfort to the anxieties of parents.
Teacher unions and parents should try to look beyond the
horizon of their own interests to work for the common good. One cannot address
an extraordinary event by maintaining past practices. There will inevitably be
some dislocation for everyone.
Employers and unions will need to modify, albeit
temporarily, existing contracts to allow for different staff deployment. I am
not suggesting abandonment of the existing contracts but some time-limited
accommodations.
By way of illustration, it seems unreasonable to me to
expect that teachers who are largely unfamiliar with online learning should be
assigned those responsibilities. Those teachers who are conversant and
comfortable with the kind of performance online learning demands should
undertake the responsibility for developing units, lessons, and modules. The
development of the material should be coordinated by the teacher specialists
most familiar with the contents of the provincial curriculum. The material
should be able to be accessed by classroom teachers from a provincial
repository to fit their own timetables. They should be able to create a
schedule for the students for whom they are responsible and complement the pre-recorded
on-line modules with opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning
and receive assistance in the form of small group, and individual, tutorials.
As I hope I have made clear, there are places where I think things
need to be better coordinated. However, I think it is important for everyone to
cut everyone else some slack at this difficult time.