The Alberta Teachers’ Association

The case of charter schools in Alberta

One of the challenges inherent to living in Canada is the proximity of the United States, which has over the last century been the most economically and culturally dominant nation on the planet. Its influence is felt particularly strongly across the world’s longest undefended border and permeates every aspect of Canadian life.

As international neighbours go, Canada could have done much worse than the United States, and I do not count myself among those who espouse knee-jerk anti-Americanism when defining their identity as Canadians. But I do recognize that many aspects of the American identity and public life are unique and may not be applicable in the Canadian context. I am especially concerned when policy solutions in education are decontextualized and imported from the United States.

We have some direct experience with this going back to the mid 1990s. At that time, Alberta had passed legislation unique in Canada enabling the creation of publicly funded charter schools, reflecting a political emphasis on increasing school choice in the province.

The school choice agenda in the United States, and the widespread adoption of the charter school model there, reflected the neo-liberal assumption that competition among schools would realize for education the same benefits attributed to competition in the marketplace: greater innovation, enhanced product choice and a winnowing out of unproductive or inefficient providers. Charter schools would operate free from the constraints imposed by school boards, onerous state regulation or the presence of teacher unions. Competition, the promoters of charter schools argued, would improve performance in charter schools and ultimately in the public school system. For the most part, this is still the case that is made for supporting publicly funded charter schools.

While there is a degree of variation across states and school districts, American charter schools generally receive funding comparable to that provided to public schools and are free to access additional revenue from commercial interests or from additional tuition fees. As the model has evolved, it now attracts the attention of would-be entrepreneurs who view education as an untapped trillion-dollar opportunity.

One of the unstated and less attractive reasons for the success of charter schools in the urban American context was that it provided a mechanism for resegregating schools and for diverting public funds to support the education of children from comparatively privileged backgrounds in largely private contexts, even as funding for public schools remained moribund or declined. Charter schools, then, have contributed to the hollowing out of public schools, particularly in urban areas.

What brought the government of Alberta to import the charter model to our province in 1994? Much of the impetus came from a perceived lack of education choice in Calgary. Unlike the Edmonton public school board, the Calgary Board of Education in the 1990s had been slow off the mark to offer a wide range of alternative programs within its schools. Furthermore, lack of funding for new school construction had left newly established neighbourhoods in the rapidly growing city without public schools.

These factors contributed to a demand for private and charter schools that aligned with the ideological preferences of the Klein government and with the policies being promoted by neo-liberal interest groups such as the Fraser Institute. Even at the time they were introduced to the province, it was clear that charter schools were an ideological solution to a limited problem that could and should have been solved within the public system.

However, when it came to implementing this solution, the Alberta government was careful to constrain the potential expansion of charter schools in the province and sought to ensure that they would remain firmly within the mainstream: the number of charter schools was capped and they were not allowed to operate for profit; they were required to teach the provincial program of studies and administer provincially mandated examinations; and they were required to employ certificated teachers.

In the end, charter schools in Alberta differed from public schools in only three respects:

• They had a unique program or pedagogical emphasis (although alternative programs in public schools often have similar programming and approaches).
• They were not subject to popularly elected board governance.
• Their teachers were prohibited from having active membership in the Alberta Teachers’ Association (although staff in several were organized and are represented as associate members, with the ATA acting as their bargaining agent).

I personally regard Alberta’s continued support for charter schools as something of an annoyance (the assumption that denying teachers full access to the protection, services and professional development offered by the Association makes them better at their jobs is, frankly, insulting).

However, I also recognize that when bringing this model across the border, policy-makers at least attempted to ensure that charter schools would reflect the critical values, principles and context of Alberta’s school system. To borrow from the Hippocratic Oath, they tried to make sure that implementing the model would do no harm.

That is important. As Jacques Delors observes “Choosing a type of education means choosing a type of society. In all countries, such choices call for extensive public debate, based on an accurate evaluation of education systems.”¹

We have much to learn from the American experience in education, both positive and negative. We also have different lessons to learn from further afield. But we must guard against the simplistic importation and wholesale implementation of policy solutions from abroad. Above all, we must proceed from a firm understanding of our values as a society and of what role we intend our education system to play in realizing those values.