In 1992, the United States and Canada expanded the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) of 1988 to include Mexico within the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
On the national scene, Liberal Jean Chrétien became prime minister in 1993, replacing Progressive Conservative Kim Campbell, who had briefly succeeded Brian Mulroney. In the 1993 election, the federal Progressive Conservative Party was virtually wiped out, a loss widely attributed to the Mulroney government's decision to sign the FTA and to its failure—in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords—to resolve outstanding constitutional issues.
In Alberta, the decade began with the surprise resignation of Premier Don Getty in 1992. Getty was succeeded by former Calgary mayor and provincial environment minister Ralph Klein, whom the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party chose as leader in December 1992. In the provincial election that took place the next year, the Progressive Conservatives managed to remain in power by distancing themselves from the shortcomings of the Getty regime. The stage was set for what was to become known as the Klein Revolution (Lisac 1995).
In the early 1990s, Albertans were preoccupied, as they had been at the end of the previous decade, with the debt and the deficit. The province continued to experience fiscal constraint. Many Albertans were convinced that the time had come for severe fiscal reforms. Others believed the crisis, though real, was exaggerated (Cooper and Neu 1995). Alberta was still without a provincial sales tax. Some questioned the government's claim that the deficit was the result of social spending. Taft (1996) contended that Alberta's financial problems were attributable, at least in part, to such other causes as overly generous government subsidies to failing corporations.
Even more significant than the cutbacks was the altered political atmosphere, a change that Jeffrey (1999) described as a "hard right turn." Alberta's new political stance embodied the pro-business ideology promulgated by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the previous decade. In the early 1990s, the Alberta government was influenced by the writing of Americans Osborne and Gaebler (1993) and New Zealander Douglas (1993).
The operative assumption of the new ideology was that anything public institutions could do, private enterprise could do more efficiently and more effectively. Proponents of this view were convinced that government should be reshaped according to business models and that changes should be made quickly before effective political opposition could arise. Reinventing government along entrepreneurial lines became the order of the day. Business values and economic productivity outweighed other considerations.
In the name of fiscal restraint and accountability, the government embarked on severe cutbacks in public expenditure. The public service was vilified as ineffective bureaucracy and subjected to job cuts. The speed of change, which accelerated as the decade unfolded, was dazzling and at times bewildering. One of the most significant developments was the introduction of new public management, a trend in public policy that combined both fiscal conservatism and market liberalism (Evans 1997, 4–5).
Like municipalities and social services, public education in Alberta during the 1990s underwent drastic cuts and significant restructuring. Nationally and provincially, Klein emerged as an acknowledged leader in deficit and debt fighting, receiving awards and acclaim from right-wing think tanks and business elites for his efforts at balancing the provincial budget (Evans 1997).
The province's political shift, the severity of the fiscal measures, and the breadth and speed of policy changes all combined to create a drastically different atmosphere for public education than the one that had prevailed in earlier decades. In the early 1990s, Education Minister Jim Dinning sought public input on a new vision for education. The resulting document, Vision for the Nineties (Alberta Education 1991), contained some 60 initiatives for improving education during the decade, many of which focused on achieving excellence—the phrase "the best possible education for all Alberta students" recurred like a slogan—and obtaining results to ensure Alberta's future. The document also stressed "economic productivity and competition" (McIntosh and Hodysh 1992, 45). In 1992, the government revised the School Act to effect changes in school governance.
In June 1993, Klein's Progressive Conservative Party won the election. In its throne speech, the new government promised to balance the provincial budget, a promise that it put into effect by passing the Deficit Elimination Act, which proposed to eliminate the provincial deficit by 1997. Bruce and Schwartz (1997, 385) describe the changes that the Deficit Elimination Act imposed on the Department of Education:
The goal of many of these changes was to provide more power to parents, teachers, and principals through the introduction of school-based management and school councils and provision of greater parental choice among schools (including the establishment of charter schools).
In the fall of 1993, the government organized education roundtables to gather feedback from the public. In January 1994, Minister of Education Halvar Jonson introduced a set of educational reforms to the legislature. To some observers, however, there appeared to be disparities between the earlier consultations and the provisions of the legislation (Mackay and Flower 1999). The legislation paved the way for a series of brutal cutbacks to education in 1994, cutbacks that became a matter of serious concern for professional educators in Alberta. Grants for Early Childhood Services fell by one-half from 400 to 200 hours per child per year. The Department of Education itself was downsized. Lisac (1995, 191) summarized the 1994 cutbacks to education as follows:
[First there was] a $252-million cut, part of a 12.4 percent cut over four years. Some of the money would come from suggested 5 percent pay cuts for teachers and other school workers. Some would come from chopping the provincial grant for kindergarten in half.
In addition to slashing the education budget in 1994, the government also restructured the way in which education revenues were raised, changes Lisac (1995, 191) summarized as follows:
The department [of education] decided to end a problem of funding for poorer school boards by taking control of more than $1 billion in education property taxes away from local school boards. Full control opened the way to new tax shifts, and away from corporations and onto homeowners and small businesses.
But as Lisac (1995, 191) explained, the reforms went even further:
The education business plan proposed to achieve new efficiencies with experiments such as the creation of charter schools and mandatory parent councils at every school in the province. The unexplained changes, like some of the key tax changes, had not been widely recommended in the education roundtables and had nothing directly to do with efficiency. They left the door open for an eventual manipulation of the school system away from public education and toward private schools.
In 1995, the government passed the Government Accountability Act.
The government revised the foundation program and announced its intention to reduce the number of school boards from 141 to 60. In addition, local school boards effectively lost their local taxing authority as the government centralized educational funding across all school jurisdictions. Along with the centralization of educational authority in provincial hands came a transfer of authority to principals and school councils.
In 1994, Alberta became the first province in Canada to establish legislative provisions for charter schools. Designed to introduce competition and customer responsiveness among public schools, such schools operate on the basis of a charter rather than under the direction of a locally elected school board. The Charter School Handbook (Alberta Education 1995) defines a charter school as "an autonomous public school designed to make innovations in the organization and delivery of education and to make improvement in student learning." Charter schools receive funding directly from the provincial government. By January 1, 1998, the government had approved only 11 charter schools in Alberta (Mackay and Flower 1999, 49).
During the 1990s, Alberta teachers were vocal in opposing the funding cutbacks and many of the education reforms. To the Alberta Teachers' Association, for example, the entire restructuring initiative appeared suspect, having more to do with reducing public expenditure than with improving the quality of education (Mackay and Flower 1999). Teachers cautioned against the dangers of private and charter schools, expressed dismay about the degree of fundraising necessitated by cutbacks and guardedly accepted the growing involvement of business in schools (Soucek and Pannu 1996).
In 1995, the Alberta Teachers' Association established the Public Education Action Centre and embarked on a publicity campaign to keep education issues in the public eye. The slogan for the campaign, "Public Education Works," appeared on buttons and bookmarks and was featured on billboards and in television advertisements. At its core, the campaign was intended to inform the public about the successes of public education (Swiniarski 1996).
As the educational reforms unfolded, the government became increasingly hostile toward the teaching profession, refusing to take educators' views and concerns into account (Mackay and Flower 1999). Just as the government had maligned public servants as ineffective bureaucrats, so it tended to dismiss teachers as a special interest group. The government began to hint that it might split the Alberta Teachers' Association into two bodies, one to look after professional concerns and the other to address collective bargaining.
One of the objects of the Alberta Teachers' Association since its inception in 1918 has been to ensure that teachers are professionally prepared to do their jobs. In 1945, for example, the Association was instrumental in persuading the government to require teachers to be professionally prepared at a university in order to obtain certification. Similarly, in the mid-1970s, the Association helped convince the government to expand the requirements for initial certification to include a four-year university degree. However, the Association's goal of protecting and enhancing the professional status of teachers received a setback during the educational restructuring of the 1990s, when the government announced that it intended to authorize some private colleges—notably King's College and Concordia University College, both in Edmonton—to offer bachelor of education degrees (Bischoff 2001).
Taken individually, some of the changes that occurred in Alberta's public education system in the 1990s undoubtedly had merit. For example, amalgamating school boards to reduce administrative expenditures—not, as we have seen, a new initiative in Alberta—was probably a wise move. Likewise, the introduction of school-based management and the formalization of school councils were not unreasonable vehicles for bringing about educational reform and improvement. Although serious questions remain about the wisdom of severely diminishing the powers of elected school boards, the province was probably also justified in attempting to ensure more fairness in the distribution of education funding.
The reforms introduced in Alberta during the 1990s were almost all premised on the assumption that business-management approaches could be applied to public services such as education. This emphasis on business models and customer choice pushed public education in the direction of privatization and increased the prospect that education would become a marketplace commodity. The role of public education as a safeguard against social fragmentation could no longer be taken for granted. For-profit schools, similar to those in the United States, were no longer unthinkable. As the decade progressed, a growing number of people came to believe that public schooling, like medicare, was being deliberately underfunded so that it could be more easily dismantled.
Although the government declared in 1995 that it had eliminated Alberta's deficit, it gave scant indication that it intended to return funding for public education to previous levels (Mackay and Flower 1999). Talk about reinvestment in education in the 1990s was most aptly characterized as hyperbole (Neu 1999).
In 1996, the Alberta legislature adopted the Teaching Profession Amendment Act (Buski 1996a, 1996b, 1996c). Passed with the consent of the Alberta Teachers' Association, the legislation updated the process used to deal with teachers charged with professional misconduct. The most significant change was that the Association's various disciplinary bodies were expanded to include public representation.
In 1996, Gary Mar succeeded Halvar Jonson as minister of education.
Albertans elected Klein to a second term of office in 1997. In the fall of 1997, the government organized a Growth Summit in Edmonton. In October of the same year, some 15,000 teachers rallied at the Legislature to express their support for public education and to urge the government to reinvest in it (Mackay and Flower 1999). The rally was evidence that teachers felt strongly that many of the province's educational reforms were wrongheaded.
In 1998, the government's Private Schools Funding Task Force recommended that the per-pupil grants provided to private schools be increased, a recommendation that the government subsequently adopted. This development was particularly troubling to the ATA, which questioned why the funding for private schools was being increased at a time when public schools were severely underfunded (Mackay and Flower 1999, 95).
As part of a larger reorganization, the government announced in May 1999 that it was merging Alberta Education and Alberta Advanced Education to create a new ministry, Alberta Learning, which would be headed by Lyle Oberg. The long-term consequences of this merger remain to be seen.
By the end of the 1990s, many parents, worn out by hours of fundraising, began to realize that schools were chronically underfunded. The cutbacks had left schools with mandates but inadequate resources to carry them out.
The educational reforms undertaken in Alberta during the 1990s had parallels in other parts of the country (Dunning 1997, 4). Like Alberta, several other provinces reduced the number of locally elected school boards and limited the powers of those that remained. In each case, some traditional school board powers—such as the ability to raise education taxes—were assumed by the government while others were allocated to school-based or community-based parent groups.
Many of the educational reforms that the Harris government implemented in the mid-1990s as part of Ontario's Common Sense Revolution echoed the sweeping changes that occurred in Alberta a few years earlier (Gidney 1999). Like its Alberta counterpart, the government of Ontario implemented severe funding cuts, centralized control over education in the provincial ministry, diminished the authority of locally elected school trustees, reduced the number of school boards and attacked the teaching profession.
Maude Barlow and Heather-jane Robertson (1994) contend that the cutbacks and changes to school governance that took place across the nation in the 1990s constituted the dismantling of a public service and an affront to democracy. The authors devote an entire chapter of their provocative volume to a discussion of the educational reform that occurred in Alberta in the early 1990s.
In late 1999, Alberta Learning announced a new program, the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI), which involved the active collaboration of six partners in public education: the Alberta Home and School Councils' Association, Alberta Learning, the Alberta School Boards Association, the Alberta Teachers' Association, the College of Alberta School Superintendents and individual school jurisdictions (whose participation remained voluntary). The purpose of the project was to fund local projects designed to improve student learning in Alberta's school jurisdictions and charter schools. Alberta Learning's School Improvement Branch served as a clearinghouse for AISI-funded projects. The extensive collaboration that accompanied the launching of AISI contrasted sharply with the tumult that had characterized events in education throughout most of the decade.
Summary
The 1990s was a period of radical transformation in public education. In the area of school financing, the province imposed severe cutbacks. The province also restructured the education system by reducing the number of school boards and by limiting the ability of the remaining boards to levy education taxes. Alberta's decision to create charter schools—the first province in Canada to do so—and to increase the funding provided to private schools heralded the beginning of what might be described as a marketplace approach to public education.
By the end of the decade, public education in Alberta faced an uncertain future. In addition to being chronically underfunded, public education found itself operating in a new environment, one in which the notion that public education serves the public good was no longer universally accepted. Furthermore, many people no longer believed that the system of public education could be improved and that its benefits should be extended to groups at the margins of society. Increasingly, public schools found themselves contending with the value of marketplace choice and having to meet private, not public, needs.
« Previous | Next »
