Category Archives: Education Reform

BC Education Minister Misrepresents OECD position on Class Size [Updated]

This morning on CBC Vancouver’s Early Edition BC Education Minister Peter Fassbender misrepresented the position of Organization of Economic Cooperative and Development (OECD) regarding the impact of class size on educational achievement.

(It should be pointed out that focusing on educational achievement, as measured by standardized tests, such as OECD’s PISA test, is necessarily a very narrow conception.)

At one point in the interview Fassbender said he had seen research from the OECD and had discussions with representatives of the OCED and remarked:

“[OECD representatives] clearly have said that composition plays more of a role [than class size] and the quality of the teacher in classroom is much more important.”

Of course, we don’t know what studies he saw or who he talked to, but the implication that OECD data and recommendations dismiss the effects of class size on student achievement is at the very least problematic.

The OECD position is a more complex and Fassbender conveniently omits a key point OECD makes about teacher pay. Reporting on trends between 2000 and 2010, the OECD says there are two main reforms undertaken in OECD countries over the last decade:

reducing class size;
increasing teachers’ salaries.

The OECD reports that between 2000 and 2010, teachers’ salaries increased on average by about 14% at the lower secondary level, while estimated class sizes decreased on average by 7%.

The OECD describes what member nations are doing based upon analyses of data from the Pisa test, which it administers, this way:

in a period of economic crisis and tightened public budgets, while analyses of OECD data do not establish a significant relationship between spending per student and average learning outcomes across countries, Pisa data shows that high-performing education systems are commonly prioritising the quality of teachers over class size.

The OECD points to a number of countries (some with below average class sizes, e.g. Austria and Estonia; some with above average class sizes, e.g., Mexico and Turkey) where principals report that a shortage of qualified teachers hinders instruction. And OCED offers this rather obvious conclusion:

…reducing class size is not, on its own, a sufficient guarantee to improve the quality of education systems.

Lastly, Fassbender describes OECD as “the experts on international education.” OECD is certainly an influential organization, but is primarily a statistical agency that compares national policies and is committed to expansion of world trade. Fassbender’s description of OECD is again, an overstatement.

BC’s teacher surplus, is it more than a math problem?

In today’s issue of The Province, columnist Michael Smyth drops some startling numbers about teacher supply in British Columbia (“Let’s all do the math on BC’s teacher surplus”).

There’s no doubt it’s tough for new teachers to find full time positions in the province, it’s tough to even get regular work as a teacher-on-call (TOC) in some districts. I know this from personal experience as professor in UBC’s teacher education and because the guy who cuts my hair received his BEd from UBC four years ago.

Here are the numbers, according to Smyth:

number of people currently holding a valid BC teaching certificate: 69,400
number of full-time-equivalent teachers in the public school system: 30,101.

Of course, as Smyth points out, some of the folks in the first group are not in the public school classroom, but are employed educators, either as administrators in public schools or as teachers in independent schools, etc.

Anyway you cut it, there is a oversupply of credentialed teachers in relation to available jobs in BC. This is circumstance BC educators and teachers educators have been aware of for many years, even as provincial universities have continued to graduate about twice as many BEds per year as there are province-wide vacancies (about 1,800 teacher education grads per year for about 900 teaching vacancies per year). In 1999, there were 5,000 active TOCs and a British Columbia Teachers’ Federation survey indicated that on average TOCs work worked about 73 days per year (40% of the school year) and earned about $11,000.00 per year (20% of average teacher salary).

The Invisible Hand

Smyth brings up the teacher supply issue in the context of the latest round of labor tensions between the government and the BCTF, asking “when there’s a surplus of workers, why would any right-minded employer offer premium wages when they’re swamped with resumés and job applications?”

That’s a fair question, but then again, if we’re looking to the good old invisible hand of the market to provide us with some explanations, how does one explain the fact that BEd students keep flowing into teacher education programs when job prospects are so bleak?

One one hand we could argue that Adam Smith’s metaphor for a self-regulating marketplace is not all it’s crack up to be, but more important is the fact is that many people are highly motivated to become teachers. When I graduated with an education degree in 1978, the job market for teachers was similarly poor. I worked as a substitute teacher, went to grad school, and ultimately had to move hundreds of miles away from home for my first full time classroom position.

Symth says that it’s “insane” for BC universities to train teachers the province doesn’t need, but another way looking at what’s happening is that provincial universities are (and have been) merely responding to a market demand for teacher education programs. Remember, post-secondary education in BC has been subjected to a steady stream of neoliberal economic policies from the governing BC Liberals, which has marketized every area of the public sector.

Do we need to allow for more “self-regulating behaviour of the marketplace” or do we need a centralized “five year plan” for the teacher labour market? As usual that kind of dualist thinking doesn’t help much because reality is much more complex.

The Finland Option

I appreciate Symth’s suggestion that British Columbia “should do what Finland did: drastically reduce the number of available spaces in university education programs.”

About six years ago the Faculty of Education at UBC embarked on a remake of it’s teacher education program, using the title CREATE (Community to Reimagine Educational Alternatives for Teacher Education). The “new” teacher education program has been in place over year now, and while there have been changes within the program, its basic structure and length look quite familiar. There are topical cohort programs with specialized emphases (e.g., arts-based; problem-based learning; IB, etc.), various streams for practica, but it remains, for the most part, a one-size-fits all model (post-baccalaureate, 12 month BEd program, with a 2 year option for elementary teachers).

At the beginning of the UBC CREATE endeavour (circa 2006), the social studies education faculty proffered what amounted to a “Finland option,” which was motivated in significant ways by the oversupply of socials teachers (as well as the increased number of part-time sessional instructors in the program). In short, we outlined a program where preservice social studies teachers would earn a masters degree, emphasizing advanced coursework in history or geography along with education courses necessary for an initial teaching license (essentially what is known in the US as a Master of Arts in Teaching program). At the time we had five full time faculty members ready and willing to put together a world class program working in collaboration with other departments; the numbers of students in social studies education would have been drastically reduced, and standards increased. This proposal was apparently too creative and was given no serious consideration.

Other proposals that would have dramatically re-structured the UBC approach to teacher education, such as adopting a 4-year undergraduate teacher education program, were also rejected.

Curriculum change in universities is a deliberate process to say the least, but I think this case illustrates what happens when the bottom-line rules. To say that the UBC budget is opaque is an understatement. Whether we’re dealing with the “historical budgeting” approach of the past or the decentralized budgeting of the present, budget messages to faculty are always muddled, muddy, mystifying and obfuscated. UBC always facing cuts on the academic side.

But there’s more to the story. We can’t contemplate improving the quality teacher education programs without also considering the financial contexts internal and external to the university. When it comes to program form and content there are the sometimes competing interests of government regulation in teaching profession, views from the profession itself, and from scholars of teaching and teacher education. And to complicate matters university faculty have less and less control over the academic content of courses and programs, with the demise of shared governance and university administrators increasing desire to commodify learning (see UBC’s Policy 81, for example).

Ten years ago the UBC teacher education enrolment was in the 800 per year range. Last year there were 935 applicants to the program and 632 were admitted.

Does that mean we’re headed in the right direction?

Page 2 — The weird saga of how the BC Ministry of Education funded a teenager to study Finnish teacher education

Hello British Columbians, stand by for news!

As Paul Harvey used to say, now it’s time for “Page 2,” in the weird saga of the $16,000 sole-sourced “research” contract handed out by Rick Davis, the BC Ministry of Education’s “superintendent of achievement,” to a recent high school grad so she could travel to Finland to study teacher education, “from a student’s perspective.” But something tells me we’ll have to wait for the “rest of the story.”

If your memory needs some refreshing check out out the original Vancouver Sun story, Janet Steffenhagen’s blog post, and Where The Blog Has No Name posts (here and here) from when the story first broke.

A big shoutout to Jordan Bateman, the BC Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation who today put the story back into play along with 115 pages of documents the CTF received as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request in an attempt to get to the bottom of why BC Liberals would give two research contracts to Anjali Vyas, an 18 year-old with no qualifications as a researcher, to spend 10 months conducting a “study” of teacher education practices at the University of Victoria and the University of Helsinki (with a 3 day stop over in London for a little holiday).

In his post on the CTF blog today, Bateman adds the following elements to the story:

1. The origin stories don’t match. Anjali Vyas told the Sun that she was deejaying her friend’s wedding when she somehow met Davis and started talking education philosophy. “We instantly hit it off and he was so interested in my project,” Vyas said.

But the emails in our possession leave a different impression. On page 11, a document that appears to have been prepared by Davis claims, “Anjali came to the attention of Rick Davis… she was referred by her teacher to him with the expectation that Mr. Davis may be able to narrow in the central questions around teacher education.” This was reinforced in an email from Anjali to Rick (page 88): “[Anjali’s teacher] Gord mentioned he had talked to you, and that I should get in touch with you [in] regards to my research… I was hoping to meet with you sometime soon and further discuss how this research could benefit not only my own knowledge of educational systems, but more importantly, it could illuminate some new and innovative ideas the BC government could implement.”

2. Rick Davis seems very unhappy with bureaucracy. Normally, I’d agree with cutting red tape in government, but rules that prevent sole-sourced contracts to 18 year olds seem pretty wise to me. In one email to Anjali (p. 34), he writes: “Have not forgotten but waiting for a few things to land on the contract front. Will call soon. It is really difficult in government to do things out of the box – but fun!” In another email to Anjali (p. 43), he writes: “You are on new turf. Cool but a little scary but you have lots of us close at hand.” In that same email, he compares Anjali to a historic, young explorer in charge of his own ship: “That is your destiny.”

3. Rick Davis funnels the money to the Saanich school district and has them contract Anjali Vyas (pp. 54, 57 and 115). Further, he has the Teacher Regulation Branch pay for her airfare to Finland (pp. 50 and 89).

4. When confusion arises that somehow the University of Victoria is sanctioning the Vyas project, UVic makes it clear they are not. “This project is not certified by the UVic Research Ethics Board,” wrote Eugenie Lam of UVic (p. 23). “We ask that on the consent form you remove the reference to the UVic Office of Research Services because the UVic Research Ethics Board has no oversight on this project.”

5. Claims that Anjali Vyas had a special connection to the University of Helsinki appear to be rubbish. Anjali told the Sun she was “obsessed” with the work of University of Helsinki professor Pasi Sahlberg, including his book Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland?. Amusingly, Rick Davis gave her that book (p. 96).

Okay, so I understand that for Rick Davis, $16,000.00 for a little trip to Europe is really a drop in the bucket, in 2011 he racked up $77,657.00 in travel, more than any other BC government employee.

But, what about this important “research” project. Based on the emails from Vyas to Davis and other folks in the Ministry, the Finns were as incredulous as the rest of us about this scheme:

Can you believe it? The Finns think someone conducting research on teacher education ought to have some credentials, perhaps even a graduate degree. The Finns were “dubious” of a teenage researcher funded by the BC government to study professional education of teachers, eh? But hey, I guess that’s the way Rick Davis and the BC Ministry of Education rolls when it comes to conducting research. I can almost hear Davis now …

“Credentials? Who needs credentials, we do whatever we the heck we please. Ethics Board clearance for BC government research? That’s just a bunch of red tape and we’re trying to reduce the size of government. By the way, has anyone see my Aeroplan card, I had it right here just here a minute ago when I was checking the latest travel expense standings.”

I haven’t seen Vylas’s final report (the contract stated it was due September 20, 2013), but here is the interview protocol that she planned to use in her study in Finland:

What can we say about these questions? Well, they’re of the sort one might expect from an inquisitive person with an interest in education, and no knowledge of professional or scholarly literature. Completely unnecummbered by the history, theory, research or practice of teaching and teacher education. I’m sure Vylas (and Davis) might learn something from this endeavour, but there’s no other way to describe this scenario than as colossal waste of taxpayer’s money and, as I’ve pointed out before, an insult to the communities of education practitioners, researchers, and serious policymakers.

With no travel budget, but connection to the internet, here’s a short list of things I’ve found that Finland does when it comes to teaching and teacher education:

Higher education is completely free.
There are high standards for entry into teacher education programs and admissions are highly selective (about 10% of applicants are accepted).
Teacher education programs are typically 5 years long and include study of the liberal arts, teaching subject speciality, theory and practice of teaching, including teaching students with disabilities.
There are no “alternative” routes to teaching (no shortcuts, that means no Teach for Finland, no online degrees, no one without pedagogical training is allowed to teach).
Finnish teachers and principals have autonomy to make educational decisions. The national curriculum is a guideline not a road map. Finnish teachers are not mere conduits for the transfer of information and skills dictated from the government.
National student assessment is based upon a sampling model (not every student is tested) and there are no consequences from these assessments for students, teachers, principals, or schools.
There is no standardized testing. And, no “value-added” models of teacher evaluation.
Finnish schools have small class sizes.
Finnish teachers and principals belong to unions.
As a result of the above, teaching is highly respected profession in Finland.

As Pasi Sahlberg writes in his book Finnish Lessons, Finnish schools promote the wellbeing of their students in a model that reflects many of the primary elements of John Dewey’s progressive approach to learning and teaching.

My suggestion to Davis, Education Minister Peter Fassbender, and Premier Christy Clark is, if you’re serious about looking to Finland for ideas on education then stop the ongoing, obsessive attacks on the British Columbia Teachers Federation and start doing what is necessary to bring each of the above elements to reality in BC.

Here’s a short video on Finland’s formula for educational success:

Social Justice in Education: Diversity, Equity, Citizenship

Washington State Kappan: Winter 2015 Call For Manuscripts

Due September 15, 2014

Social Justice in Education: Diversity, Equity, Citizenship

Social justice in education remains crucial to American society and the development of diverse and well-educated citizenry. From issues such as civics and immigrant youth to equity and the transition from high school to college, what it means to support and advocate for social justice in classrooms, schools, communities, and the policy arena is much more than adding statements of tolerance to inherently inequitable systems and structures.

As Sensoy and DiAngelo assert, “Social justice education is not about serving the interests of political correctness. Every single measure of disparity in education is tied to group position — target vs. dominant. Special education and discipline referrals; math, science, and reading literacies; graduation and dropout/push-out rates; test scores, all of what is known as ‘the achievement gap’ are tied to race, class, and gender. This disparity is real. And to ameliorate such disparities and offer meaningful leadership in school contexts at all levels, we must attend to the real, to the concrete and active dimensions — not simply the slogans — of social justice” (2009, p. 348-350).

We invite articles that serve as a catalyst for exploring the real, concrete, active dimensions of social justice from a variety of perspectives. Those interested in submitting a manuscript may want to consider the following questions:

In what ways are districts and schools working to support diverse student populations to gain access to programs and to succeed academically?
How might issues of social justice be meaningfully integrated with university teacher education programs?
What are examples of how social justice education is being implemented through instruction at the classroom level?
·In what ways are ESDs facilitating or supporting social justice initiatives, such as civics education and community-based learning, statewide?
What connections can be made between current high-stakes assessment policies and social justice initiatives?
What does social justice mean to students, parents, or school communities?

We are calling for theoretical/research articles, teacher-focused articles, and professional materials or book reviews on topics related to this theme. For additional information: https://journals.lib.washington.edu/index.php/wsk/announcement
For manuscript submission author guidelines: https://journals.lib.washington.edu/index.php/wsk/about/submissions – authorGuidelines
For past issues of Washington State Kappan, please go to: http://www.pdkwa.org/
If you have questions, please contact Antony Smith, editor: ansmith@uwb.edu

Teach for India (Canada, America, …) and marketizing public education

“Hallelujah The Saviors are Here”
Rachel Smith (2012)

[We] only see them for two years,
because we are a stepping stone to their prep schools,
where they can share their experience about the inner city blues.
All their stories start out with, ‘Oh, in the ghetto…’
As their colleagues prepare to hear about
the students on an educational death roll.
It is time we rebuked these self-proclaimed saviors
and put our faith in the true educators,
the ones that expect master’s degrees and double majors
and not just the ones trying to do the black community a couple of favors.

Vivek Vellanki, who works with the Regional Resource Centre for Elementary Education at University of Delhi and is a former Teach for India Fellow, has written a very intriguing analysis of TFI/Teach for All, published in the journal Contemporary Education Dialogue:

Vellanki, V. (2014). Teach for India and education reforms: Some preliminary reflections. Contemporary Education Dialogues, 11(1), 137-147.DOI: 10.1177/0973184913509759

An excerpt of Rachel Smith’s powerful poem opens the article and this gives you a sense of where Vellanki is headed with this analysis, which focuses on two issues.

First, he examines “the teacher preparation programme adopted by TFI, highlighting the influence of the Western counterparts and the disjuncture that this creates with local contexts, policy initiatives and curricular frameworks.” You won’t be surprised to find the program is judged inadequate. And, in terms of the fledging Teach for Canada, which apparently is now focusing on First Nations education and schools in the northern territories (as opposed to TFA’s focus on urban schools in the USA), Vellanki’s critique of TFI’s colonialist approach is crucially important and applies, albeit in differing ways to Teach for America, as Rachel Smith makes clear, and for Teach for Canada.

[Heather McGregor has made similar points about Teach for Canada: “What does History have to do with ‘Teach For Canada’? Sustainable Improvement in Rural and Northern Teaching”. See additional analyses of Teacher for Canada by Tobey Steeves at Remapping Education.]

Secondly, Vellanki unravels the advocacy networks within which these programs (TFI/TFA) locate themselves, and examines at the education reform agenda they are pursuing, both locally and globally, which are, if you know anything about TFA, based upon neoliberal capitalist tenets (e.g., so-called public private partnership models aimed at privatizing public education or at least extracting private profits from funding for public education).

Vellanki’s network analysis illustrates how TFI/TFA develops policy clout. And as he notes “TFA and some of its alumni have been linked to the spread of the charter school movement, test-based teacher evaluation, privatisation and the insidious laying off of veteran teachers.”

Figure 1. Summary of Networks Linking TFI and Other Organisations

Vellanki’s work on the TFI/TFA network is illuminating and echoes similar analyses of corporate and philanthropic connections that are shaping education reform in North America (see, for example, the work of Kenneth Saltman).

Education for Revolution special issue of Works & Days + Cultural Logic launched

Education for Revolution a special issue collaboration of the journals Works & Days and Cultural Logic has just been launched.

Check out the great cover image (Monument to Joe Louis in Detroit) and the equally great stuff on the inside. Hard copies of the issue available from worksanddays.net and Cultural Logic will be publishing and expanded online version of the issue in the coming months.

Rich and I want to thank David B. Downing and his staff at Works & Days for the fabulous work they did on this issue, which is the second collaboration between the two journals. Read Downing’s foreword to the issue here.

Works & Days + Cultural Logic
Special Issue: Education for Revolution
E. Wayne Ross & Rich Gibson (Editors)
Table of Contents

Barbarism Rising: Detroit, Michigan, and the International War of the Rich on the Poor
Rich Gibson, San Diego State University

Resisting Neoliberal Education Reform: Insurrectionist Pedagogies and the Pursuit of Dangerous Citizenship
E. Wayne Ross, University of British Columbia
Kevin D. Vinson, University of The West Indies

Reimaging Solidarity: Hip-Hop as Revolutionary Pedagogy
Julie Gorlewski, State University of New York, New Paltz
Brad Porfilio, Lewis University

Learning to be Fast Capitalists on a Flat World
Timothy Patrick Shannon, The Ohio State University
Patrick Shannon, Penn State University

Contesting Production: Youth Participatory Action Research in the Struggle to Produce Knowledge
Brian Lozenski, Zachary A. Casey, Shannon K. McManimon, University of Minnesota

Schooling for Capitalism or Education for Twenty-First Century Socialism?
Mike Cole, University of East London

Class Consciousness and Teacher Education: The Socialist Challenge and The Historical Context
Curry Stephenson Malott, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

The Pedagogy of Excess
Deborah P. Kelsh, The College of Saint Rose

Undermining Capitalist Pedagogy: Takiji Kobayashi’s Tōseikatsusha and the Ideology of the World Literature Paradigm
John Maerhofer, Roger Williams University

Marxist Sociology of Education and the Problem of Naturalism: An Historical Sketch
Grant Banfield, Flinders University of South Australia

The Illegitimacy of Student Debt
David Blacker, University of Delaware

Hacking Away at the Corporate Octopus
Alan J. Singer, Hofstra University

A Tale of Two Cities ¬– and States
Richard Brosio, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

SDS, The 1960s, and Education for Revolution
Alan J. Spector, Purdue University, Calumet

New York City Council votes to replace high-stakes tests with multiple measures

Press Contact: Jane Hirschmann, 917 679 8343
HISTORIC VOTE BY CITY COUNCIL ON HIGH-STAKES TESTING

The New York City Council passed today Resolution 1394. This is historic because it is the first time that a legislative body has sent a clear directive to the DOE, NYSED and Governor that high stakes standardized tests must be replaced by multiple measures. As heard in testimony endorsing the Resolution, “Learning is complex, assessment should be too. A one-size fits all approach to learning and testing fails children, teachers and families. And, as we have seen, the so-called testing reform approach used by Bloomberg/Klein for the last 12 years resulted in many negative unintended consequences and failed to deliver quality education.

Resolution 1394 was modelled on a national piece of legislation that has been endorsed by many Boards of Education across the country, and more than 500 organizations. In Texas alone more than 80% of the school boards endorsed a similar position. “The New York City resolution is an important step in the growing, grassroots-powered national movement seeking to replace testing overkill with better, educationally sound forms of assessment. Across the U.S. parents, students, teachers, community leaders and, increasingly, local elected officials, are saying ‘Enough is enough!’ to politically mandated standardized exam misuse and overuse, said Robert Schaeffer, Public Education Director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest)

“Our New York City electeds have taken the lead by passing Resolution 1394, ” said Evelyn Cruz of Time Out >From Testing. “The City Council is sending a loud and clear message that we have had enough of this testing mania which drives curriculum. When these tests have such high stakes attached to them —graduation, promotion, school grade, teacher evaluations, school closings and even principal bonuses—there is no question that teachers will teach to the test. This is not a 21st Century education. We want more for our children.”

“All of us think our children should be challenged by difficult tasks in school and that the performance of teachers in the classroom should be judged by the highest standards, but there is no scientific validity whatsoever to the use of high stakes tests as the primary instrument for evaluating children and teachers. We cannot kid ourselves that just because high-stakes testing has become predominant in our schools, it is moral or even rational,” said Jeff Nichols of Change the Stakes.

” This action by the City Council is of central importance to all those who care about public education. Since NYC has been seen as the leader of the so called “reform” movement, the fact that our City Council took action will be regarded nationally as a critical moment—turning around a 12 year failed experiment, said Dani Gonzalez, Co-chair of Time Out From Testing.

[Note: the National Resolution Against High-Stakes Testing is on the web at http://fairtest.org/national-resolution-highstakes-testing – get your school board or other organization to endorse it!]

Call for Manuscripts: The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education

Critical Education
Call for Manuscripts:
The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education

Series Editors:
Derek R. Ford, Syracuse University
Brad Porfilio, Lewis University
Rebecca A. Goldstein, Montclair State University

As the neoliberal agenda for public education in North America intensifies, educational literature has increasingly turned its attention toward understanding the logics and processes of neoliberal privatization. Additionally, attention has been paid as to how educators resist these processes and practices, both in the classroom and beyond. This special issue seeks to deepen our understanding of the neoliberal privatization of education by extending critical examinations to an underrepresented field of cultural production: that of mainstream media reporting on education and the neoliberal privatization of education, which many believe represents a new round of primitive accumulation. By examining and analyzing the mainstream media’s relationship to the processes in which neoliberal education ideologies are constructed, reflected, and reified, articles in this issue will explicate the various ways in which the mainstream media has helped facilitate and legitimate neoliberalism as a universal logic in reforming education, both locally and globally. Articles will also speak to how critical educations have guided students in K-20 schools to understand the mainstream media’s relationship to supporting the neoliberal takeover of schools.

We welcome conceptual, empirical, theoretical, pedagogical and narrative articles that approach this topic from a variety of perspectives and frameworks. Articles included in the special issue may ask and examine questions such as, but not limited to: How has media coverage of teachers’ unions and teachers’ strikes reinforced and/or advanced privatization? What shift has taken place in terms of who is positioned in the media as educational “experts”? What are the differences between the way that various major news networks, newspapers, and news magazines talk about educational privatization? How are Teach For America and Teach For All being propelled by media coverage? What are the variations in media coverage of the neoliberal agenda for education? What are the alternatives and prospects for challenges to the mainstream media? How has ALEC impacted school reform policies and practices on the state level and to what extent has the media covered it? How have critical educators positioned their students to understand the mainstream media’s role in supporting the corporate agenda for schooling?

Manuscripts due: May 1, 2014

For details on manuscript submission see: CE Information for Authors

BC Education Plan Linked to Private Corporations

BC Education Plan Linked to Private Corporations
Partnership between education ministry and not-for-profit with billionaire partners raises concerns.

By Katie Hyslop, 5 Oct 2012, TheTyee.ca

The government is proud of using citizen engagement and best practices to decide what and how to teach children in the BC Education Plan. But it’s also engaging at least one not-for-profit organization whose partners include technology corporations and private foundations that favour private market solutions to issues in the public education system.

British Columbia is one of 12 “jurisdictions” of the Global Education Leaders’ Program (GELP), a not-for-profit social enterprise organization based in the United Kingdom that according to its website is “committed to using the power of innovation to solve social challenges.”

“GELP’s ability to bring people together to think collectively and intensively about important issues around transformation is the key,” Rod Allen, B.C.’s superintendent of student achievement, says in a video posted on GELP’s website last month.

“It will be interesting for people to learn from us and we learn from them, but it’s what happens when you’re in the room together actively discussing and thinking about those issues that, to me, is the real magic.”

Run by the Innovation Unit, another not-for-profit social enterprise organization, GELP’s partners include technology corporations Cisco Systems Inc. and Promethean, and private foundations The Ellen Koshland Family Fund and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the latter of which openly supports the growth of charter schools in the U.S.

The relationship between the province’s Ministry of Education and GELP concerns Tara Ehrcke, president of the Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association, a local of the BC Teachers’ Federation (BCTF).

The government presented the BC Education Plan as a solution to the needs of B.C. students, but the partnership with GELP leads her to believe the plan is actually suited to the needs of technology corporations.

“I think [the Ed Plan’s] goals are related to allowing companies to have a piece of the [Kindergarten to Grade 12] market,” she said.

When GELP met government

The BC Education Plan, launched last October, promises improved access to digital technology for students at school and at home, and includes a partnership with telecommunications corporation Telus to connect all schools to the Internet.

The plan’s online presence is designed around the idea of a continuous discussion with the public about what it would like to see in the future for education in B.C., but the ministry hopes to have a new BC Education Program by 2014.

A key part of the plan is personalized learning, also referred to as 21st century learning. According to the plan’s website, this include identifying what makes an educated citizen and how the K-12 system can achieve that, a focus on the “core competencies, skills, and knowledge that students need to succeed in the 21st century,” and flexibility regarding whether a student learns in the classroom or through online learning.

In comparison, GELP has similar goals. The organization’s main objectives include advocating for 21st century learning and what it calls Education 3.0, a set of ideas outlined through a series of white papers co-written by software corporation Cisco Systems.

Elements of Education 3.0 include a focus on “holistic change” to the school system, “collaborative learning technologies,” and “a transfer of ownership from teachers to learners.”

According to a GELP case study on the BC Education Plan, the Ministry of Education was introduced to GELP when ministry officials met the organization’s co-founder Valerie Hannon at the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement conference held in Vancouver in 2009.

The case study outlines stages of the BC Education Plan that are already underway, including redesigning curriculum, allowing school boards to set school calendars, and emphasizing school choice for parents. It notes the ministry has developed a team of 20 experts in order to deliver the plan, chosen by school superintendents, principals and vice-principals.

Future steps for the plan include a focus on reading — which the ministry announced earlier this year with the hiring of Superintendent of Reading Maureen Dockendorf — re-examining assessment, and a “decategorization of special needs education,” after which student achievement superintendent Allen is quoted as saying “no labels and no medical model. In a 21st century personalised [sic] world, I’ll tell you what a special education looks like if you can tell me what a ‘normal’ education is.”

BC Teachers’ Federation president Susan Lambert has concerns about the changes to special needs education, particularly since class size and composition, and the environment children live in at home, aren’t addressed in the BC Education Plan.

“We know that those are the two key factors around teaching and learning that build success; the BC Education Plan is completely devoid of any kind of conversation or addressing of those factors,” she told The Tyee.

“There’s this sense now that if you can just teach children correctly, if we can find a best practice that will allow every child to learn and grow, then we’ll be fine, we won’t have to put in special services for children with special needs, we won’t have to reduce class sizes so that children get more one on one attention. It’s duplicitous, because in fact it is designed simply to reduce the need for funding a high quality system, and that will be at the expense of every child.”

The Tyee contacted the Ministry of Education with questions about its relationship with GELP. A spokesperson told The Tyee the ministry consulted with several groups about the plan.

“The ministry staff talked to educators and other organizations in Alberta, Ontario, Finland, among other jurisdictions, and that was part of the research into the Ed Plan. The discussions and research into the Ed Plan began before the ministry engaged with GELP,” he said, although he could not confirm when that was.

Both Ontario and Finland are listed as GELP jurisdictions on GELP’s website, which outlines how much help they provide: “Each jurisdiction team is supported through six-monthly collaborative events, extended workshops, on-site and remote consultancy support, cross-country working groups and webinars. At the biannual Global Events, the whole GELP community meets in one of the participating countries to share leading-edge thinking and ideas. Teams work together to solve mutual challenges and offer critical support to one another.”

In a follow-up email, the ministry spokesperson told The Tyee although the BC Education Plan was officially launched last year, government has been looking at education reform for the last 10 years.

“There isn’t one moment in time when the research began, or research started with one specific organization – this has been an ongoing process. The ministry is always reviewing new and exemplary practices in B.C. and other jurisdictions across Canada and around the world that support students,” reads the email.

Value from every dollar

Innovation Unit, GELP’s parent organization, says in their mission statement they “have a strong track record of supporting leaders and organisations [sic] delivering public services to see and do things differently. They come to us with a problem and we empower them to achieve radically different solutions that offer better outcomes for lower costs.”

The Tyee couldn’t find a reference on the GELP website to the necessity of lowering the costs of education.

In an email to The Tyee, co-founder Hannon confirmed that working with finite resources is GELP’s specialty.

“Resources available to education are not infinite. Rightly and reasonably, the need and demand from education increases. Therefore we need to get the most value out of each $ spent,” Hannon writes, adding, “our sponsors have never attempted to exercise any ‘editorial control.'”

Ehrcke, who wrote a blog post on the ministry’s association with GELP, says Hannon’s focus on saving money jibes with the B.C. government’s history of closing down 176 schools in the last 11 years, citing a lack of funding.

She’s concerned that an organization with private corporations for partners doesn’t have the best solutions for a public education system in mind.

“It’s not surprising if your perspective is profitability for Cisco Systems or whoever, that your point of view would be ‘how do we expand into those markets?'” she says.

“I see public education as something that ought to be provided publicly with public funding and publicly managed, upholding principles of equity, and the private sector really shouldn’t have a part in that.”

GELP’s partners aren’t the only corporations the Ministry of Education has been linked to recently. Donald Gutstein, a School of Communications professor at Simon Fraser University, produced a research paper for the BCTF in June examining the BC Education Plan and speculating as to how the corporate aspirations of Pearson Education, a global education supplies and technology corporation, could fit with the ministry’s plans for education reform.

Pearson purchased the Ontario company The Administrative Assistants Ltd., which produced the software for BCeSIS, the troubled Ministry of Education database, in 2010.

One of the links Gutstein points out between the BC Ed plan and Pearson’s mandate is one that GELP shares: a focus on personalized or 21st century education. It’s a framework both Lambert and Ehrcke find misleading.

“It’s packaged under the guise of a love affair of technology and this criticism of the current system of not keeping up with the pace of change, which is so untrue,” Lambert told The Tyee.

Ehrcke says she isn’t against change in education, and acknowledges that all school boards will purchase computers. But she challenges the assumption that digital gadgets are necessary for learning, and believes the $346,326.66 her district spent on Apple products could have been better spent.

“From an educational point of view, you think about learning first, and then you think about what are the tools that we need to create the best learning environment. You don’t start with the tool and build your curriculum around it,” she says.

BCTF not consulted

Superintendent Allen says in the video on GELP’s website the partnership with GELP isn’t about answers to the ministry’s problems, but rather the correct framing of the questions.

“One of the things that we like about GELP is that it’s more about the questions than about the answers, because we’re just trying to refine the questions. Once you get to answers, it feels like then the inquiry stops,” he says.

“So we want increasingly interesting and engaging questions that lead us deeper and deeper into the work.”

Lambert is upset, however, that GELP was consulted on education reform when, after two years of asking to be part of a revisioning of education in B.C., the BCTF was only asked to consult with government earlier this year after the BC Education Plan was announced.

“We were asked by the [then] minister [George Abbott] during job action,” she told The Tyee.

“We declined during job action. We were at such huge odds at the bargaining table: we weren’t able to negotiate class size and composition, we weren’t able to bargain adequate salaries that would attract the brightest and best into teaching, we weren’t able to bargain prep time, so we couldn’t then go in with the minister and chat about education reform.

“It was hypocritical of them, I think, to ask us in after the development of the vision, even though they knew we had been demanding, asking, pleading to get in on the ground floor, they shut us out.”

Katie Hyslop reports on education and youth issues for The Tyee. Follow her on Twitter @kehyslop.

Teach for America and the Future of Education in the US

Critical Education
Special Series
“Teach for America and the Future of Education in the US”

Founded in 1990 by Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp, Teach for America (TFA) has grown from a tiny organization with limited impact to what some supporters call the most significant force in educational reform today. Indeed the organization has recently been embraced by both the president of the National Educational Association and U.S. Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan as a force for tremendous good.

Critics argue otherwise, pointing to data that is mixed at best while questioning the almost $500 million annual operating budget of the non-profit, a significant portion of which comes from U.S. taxpayers. In light of questionable results and practices (such as using non-certified TFA recruits to work with special education students in direct violation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) organizations are working to end TFA’s “highly qualified teacher” provision in 2013, an effort TFA is aggressively trying to thwart.

In an effort to provide assistance to those organizations working to maintain the integrity of the teaching profession, Critical Education is publishing a series of articles on TFA’s practices, procedures, outcomes, and impacts.

Articles in the series will be published across three issues of the journal:

“Problematizing Teach for America” (October, 2013)
“Life as a Corps Member” (November, 2013)
“Altering TFA’s Trajectory” (December 2013)

Guest Editors of the special series are Philip E. Kovacs, (University of Alabama, Huntsville) and Kathleen deMarrais, (The University of Georgia).

1. Problematizing Teach for America
Bringing Teach for America into the Forefront of Teacher Education: Philanthropy Meets Spin
Kathleen P. deMarrais, The University of Georgia
Julianne Wenner, University of Connecticut
Jamie B. Lewis, Georgia Gwinnett College

Teach for America and the Dangers of Deficit Thinking
Ashlee Anderson, University of Tennessee

Teach For America and the Political Spectacle of Recruiting the “Best and the Brightest”
Kara M. Kavanagh, Georgia State University
Alyssa Hadley Dunn, Georgia State University

An Analysis of Teach for America’s Research Page
Philip E. Kovacs, University of Alabama, Huntsville
Erica Slate-Young, University of Alabama, Huntsville

2. Life as A Corps Member
From the Trenches: A Teach For America Corps Member’s Perspective
T. Jameson Brewer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Are Teach For America Corps Members Highly Qualified to Teach English Learners?: An Analysis of Teacher Preparation for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Populations
Megan Hopkins, Northwestern University
Amy J. Heineke, Loyola University Chicago

Infinite Jurisdiction: Managing Student Achievement In and Out of School
Katherine Crawford-Garrett, University of New Mexico

Personal Responsibility: The Effects of Becoming a Teach For America Teacher
Patricia Maloney, Texas Tech University

3. Altering TFA’s Trajectory
“I want to do Teach For America, not become a teacher.”
Mark Stern, Colgate University
D. Kay Johnston, Colgate University

An Issue of Equity: Assessing the Cultural Knowledge of Preservice Teachers in Teach for America
Eric Ruiz Bybee, The University of Texas at Austin

The Outsized Effects of Equating Teaching with Leadership: Implications of Teach for America’s Vision for Engaging Teachers in Reform
Laura Gutmann, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Refashioning the Master’s Tools: Imagining a Teach for America that Really is for America
Erinn Brooks, North Carolina State University
Kathleen Greene, Beloit College