The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Four possible futures for educational change

Public education in 2018 is already in peril. Nova Scotia has moved to abolish school boards and remove their school-based administrators from the teacher’s union. British Columbia has neutered boards by ensuring that the education minister can issue directives and impose the government’s own budgets and decisions. Looking to the U.S., we can already see that public education is being dismantled in favour of vouchers, competition and privatization. In Europe—where the Alberta Teachers’ Association has several international partnerships—several countries are reviewing their public education investments, with some pushing decisions closer to the student (Ukraine), others enabling growing professionalism (Finland) and yet others challenging school performance and outcomes and encouraging greater competition (England).

When we try to make sense of the future, we can see four distinct scenarios or patterns, reflected in many of the experiences from ATA-supported international exchanges, research partnerships and engagements.

Competition, Privatization And Winner Takes All

One scenario sees government determining that public investment in education creates too many stakeholder conflicts and challenges, and seeks to simplify its engagement by simply flowing money through vouchers or payments that follow the student and offering outcome data to enable parental choice. This is already happening in some 26 U.S. states and is a growing conversation in other parts of the world.

This type of market-based system often takes better off and more able students out of the public school system, with schools becoming increasingly socially and culturally segregated. Such systems also divert public resources to private providers, leaving state schools with a disproportionate number of disadvantaged students and reduced budgets to support them. In Sweden, for example, when one of the private systems “collapsed,” the state was left to pick up the pieces.

Across the countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), just 12 per cent of students attend private schools that receive a significant portion of their funds from the public purse. This occurs in Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands. In Greece, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States the share of public funding for private schools is below one per cent.

The evidence provides little comfort for the champions of competition and privatization. Using Sweden as a case study, for example, it is now accepted that many claims for the system introduced in the 1980s and 1990s have not been delivered. As the OECD review of the system suggests, the system is failing to meet expectations, falling on international measures of achievement and is not producing the skills needed for Sweden’s future.

This is truly a winner-takes-all scenario. Some schools will lose, and most students will struggle to secure the right performance at the right time in the right place.

Status Quo With Less

As austerity bites and governments seek to rationalize expenditures and “balance” budgets, education is not exempt from cuts in both direct spending in schools and capital investment. We have seen this in Alberta during the Klein era and since. The argument is that debts and deficits cannot last forever, that action must be taken, and that sacrifices are needed. Government debt in Alberta is approximately $42 billion or 10.9 per cent of GDP – which is very low by global standards (U.S. debt is approaching 160 per cent of GDP).

The most recent report from Alberta’s auditor general, for example, shows that even when investments are made in class size reduction ($2.7 billion since 2004) the use of these funds often does not match the intention—investment in teachers has fallen behind the growth of the student population.

Some political parties see balanced budgets as more important than future-focused investments in the skills and capacities of people and communities. They cut school budgets, freeze teacher pay, enable larger class sizes and continue to underfund key aspects of schools, especially as they relate to students with disabilities or special needs. What these parties also do is maintain the current overly bureaucratic infrastructure of public and Catholic schools and enable large central office systems, and they do not reduce the size of departmental staffing. “Seen to be in control” is a part of this scenario.

Greece is already facing the consequences of this scenario, but so too are Spain, Italy and Portugal. Indeed, Italy’s education system has faced some of the most severe cuts—in some cases as high as 20 per cent—despite already being the OECD state with the lowest level of education spending.

Survival is the name of this game. Students who are able will prosper and do well, as they do in most school systems, but many more will fall through the cracks. Growing inequality will hurt our school systems.

Skills For Our Future

In this scenario, the education system remains largely public but is refocused on developing the skills and competencies needed to support the economy. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and coding are championed as key skills needed for the fourth industrial revolution. The idea of “education for life” and citizenship and a broad, liberal education is sacrificed for supposed economic good.

The challenge here is that we never really know what skills are needed in the new economy. For example, many technology companies like Google and Apple are more interested in creative skills, teamwork, problem solving and design thinking than in those who can code. Some of the fastest growing sectors of many economies are design-based industries (e.g. film, media, fashion, architecture) rather than traditional manufacturing or technology jobs. There are also very few examples over the last 50 years of governments accurately anticipating the skills needed for the future economy.

In our look at technical and vocational education in Finland and New Zealand, through our partnerships, we see varied approaches and governments struggling to imagine the coming economic disruptions of artificial intelligence, 3D manufacturing, nanotechnology and other disruptive technologies. Experiments with microcredentialing (e.g. New Zealand) show some promise, but traditional approaches to funding, quality assurance and assessment seem to make innovation in education difficult, and it seems remarkably difficult to break through the thinking barriers to create truly flexible and adaptive school systems.

Competency-based learning and assessment will be the key to this scenario, and some will fail to measure up to the competency standards set because they have little interest in the specific competencies others have decided are important for their future. We can already see this in some Australian school systems.

This scenario informed some of the last Conservative government thinking and may inform key features of the current curriculum reform.

A Designed And Focused Future

The only certainty about the future is its uncertainty and lack of linearity—the future is not a straight line from the past. Acknowledging this reality, Canada has decided to become, as the Advisory Council on Economic Growth has recommended, a learning nation with new incentives for life-long learning. This will involve refocusing the work of schools on the four pillars of education¹: learning to know, learning to be, learning to do and learning to live together.

In this scenario, curriculum reform focuses not on skills but on enabling these four pillars and supporting the development for all students of high levels of a range of literacies, creative and design skills and an ability to be resilient and adaptive. Rather than focusing on STEM or coding, the focus is on finding the passion and talents of each student and enabling these specific talents to grow and develop in an entrepreneurial and creative way. Schools become places for engagement and development, true centres for creative communities, communities of interest and communities of practice. The teaching profession has a great deal of freedom to shape learning according to a set of principles and general curriculum frameworks—as in Finland—rather than being required to achieve hundreds of curriculum objectives that are quickly dated.

A key driver for success in this scenario is diversity as the basis for equity. A one-size-fits-all school system rarely fits anyone. Creating multiple routes to school success is essential.

This scenario focuses on building adaptive capacity in schools, recognizing and enabling teacher professionalism, facilitating experimental approaches to learning (think AISI) and innovation. Rather than seeking to control the system and centralize decision making, curriculum is a framework and schools and their teachers convert this into meaningful learning, linked to local challenges and conditions. We see this in Finland and in some other parts of the world, though it is becoming rarer.

Alberta At A Crossroads

It is not a stretch of the imagination to see Alberta at a crossroads between these four scenarios. We have a strong, vibrant public education system that is both highly regarded around the world and in need of change. Our curriculum change needs to happen, class size need reducing, investments need to be made in special needs education and new investment in professional development is urgently needed.

Change will occur, whether we like it or not, in part because it is inevitable, and in part because a new government in 2019, of whatever party, will need to make some tough decisions. Looking from the outside in, and our international partnerships enable this, suggests we should be articulating a clear vision for the future of our schools.

What needs to happen sooner rather than later is that investments be made to reduce class size and support special needs students. Of all the things any government can do, this would send significant messages to students, parents and teachers, show support for public education and change the agenda for government–union relations. More radical developments—ending support for charter schools, reigning in superintendent compensation, ending PATs as we know them—would also be useful signals that Alberta education is a public investment in Alberta’s future.

Otherwise, there is a clear and present danger that our decision makers will drift towards an undesirable scenario. In this case, teachers and students continue to bear the burden of poor decisions and low investment; a focus on competition, austerity, and winners and losers would send the signal that education is no different from other economic sectors: it is survival of the fittest.

With an election coming, it is critical that the profession make explicit what action it needs to see from government and what the future looks like.

Dr. Stephen Murgatroyd is an expert on innovation policy and practice and is chief executive of Collaborative Media Group Inc.