This was written by David King who is a former Alberta Minister of Education. This is 2 of 2 posts on Alberta's new Education Act. This post first appeared on King's blog here.
by David King
The new Education Act suffers in comparison to all the announcements of its coming. Ministers and M.L.A.s talked about a “new paradigm”, framing the conditions for a system that would anticipate the future and nurse it to reality.
The new Act simply doesn’t deliver. Ordinarily, Albertans could overlook the hype and be glad to see an important piece of legislation “cleaned up”, “sharpened”… — choose your adjective for modest incremental improvement.
The problem is that the Government of Alberta itself – and insistently — raised the subject of the 21st century being radically different from the 20th. The Government of Alberta, through the Inspiring Education process, encouraged Albertans to think about education in new ways, and repeatedly assured us that startling insights could be harnessed. The new Act, we were told, could assuredly be – would be — quite different from the familiarSchool Act.
It is a mixed blessing that Albertans bought the government’s line. Albertans were persuaded to see that we can’t continue educating as we have done in the past. They were persuaded to imagine a variety of new, positive, and possible educational outcomes, as well as a variety of new ways of organizing to provide education. They were persuaded to believe that Alberta could be “first into the future”.
The new Education Act suggests that we are going to be “last out of the past”.
Having been awakened, by the government and others, to the virtual certainty of great change, Albertans are now frustrated by the government’s lack of imagination and lack of courage.
Have you read Sir Kenneth Robinson’s latest book on what is coming to education? (Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative)
Are you familiar with what is happening in Finland? (Pasi Sahlberg – Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?
Have you watched Sebastian Thurn, on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkneoNrfadk&feature=player_embedded)?
There are three quick and effective measures of innovation in any piece of legislation.
First, does the legislation contain new words or phrases that are important enough to be defined for the purposes of the legislation. The proposed Education Act has two such words or phrases: “bullying”, and “non-school building” are not defined in the current School Act. Their context in the Act makes clear that they simply acknowledge longstanding practice: they are no springboard to the future of education.
Second, does the legislation have Parts and Divisions that suggest a new way of looking at the subject? The new Education Act has 2 new Parts (Opportunities for Learning; Responsibilities and Dispute Resolution), yet the sections contained within the Parts are lifted almost entirely from the existing School Act. Aside from legislating Bullying Awareness Week, and creating a Student Advisory Council, and implementing a Complex Education Needs Tribunal there is nothing new. Bullying Awareness Week can be celebrated without a legislative mandate, the previous Minister created a Student Advisory Council without the need of legislation, the Complex Education Needs Tribunal is an incremental improvement on a system already in place.
What is really interesting about Part 3, Division 1 (Responsibilities and Disputes Resolution: Responsibilities) is that the responsibilities of students, parents, boards, and trustees are specified (basically, these are consolidations of what is found in the current Act). The one critical actor left without specified responsibilities is the provincial government, notwithstanding the fact that for three years, throughout the Inspiring Education process, the government insisted that its role was “assurance”. The bullied might be more comforted if the government accepted responsibility for assuring freedom from bullying, perhaps by assuring that gay-straight clubs could operate in any publicly funded school in the province. Parents might be more comforted if the government accepted responsibility for assuring access to secular public education, on a timely basis, and in schools that are safe, healthful, and well-maintained. The parents of special needs students might be more comforted if the government accepted responsibility to assure funding for high cost special programs.
As a reader digs into the proposed new Education Act, are there any hidden gems?
Section 51(1) extends natural person powers to school boards. That is hardly an innovation, since municipal government has had the same benefit for more than 15 years. Nevertheless school boards have been lobbying for this: they should be grateful, shouldn’t they?
The problem is, the innovation is put forward in section 51(1) and rudely snatched away in section 51(2) “With respect to any right, power, or privilege exercisable by a board, the Minister may , by regulation, (a) prohibit or restrict the use of the right, power, or privilege; (b) provide that the right, power or privilege is to be exercised subject to any terms or conditions prescribed in the regulations.”
The Minister, without reference to the Legislative Assembly, can compromise the natural person powers of a school board, at any time, and in any way, and without any need to justify the compromise. Tomorrow, he could make it illegal for them to be doing something that is might be legal for them to do today.
The corresponding section in the Municipal Government Act says this: “6. A municipality has natural person powers, except to the extent that they are limited by this or any other enactment.”
The corresponding section of the Business Corporations Act says this: 16(1) A corporation has the capacity and, subject to this Act, the rights, powers and privileges of a natural person.
The introduction, in the new Education Act, of “natural person powers” for school boards is nothing but cynicism writ large. If the provincial government treated corporations the same way, the reaction would be immediate, immense, and unbearable for the provincial government.
The provincial government is not easily going to loosen its grip on school boards.
Yet, in the face of uncertainty, when the future cannot be known with confidence, experience and the natural sciences all confirm that the most intelligent way to confront the future is with diversity. As Willis Harmon once noted — in uncertain times, the best thing to do is decentralize (decision-making), disperse (resources), and diversify (responses). One only wants a highly centralized system when one is convinced that the central authority will be 100% correct, 100% of the time, about 100% of the issues. To put it another way, said Harmon, we don’t engineer survivability, in nature or in build systems, by making key components bigger. We introduce redundancy. Nature has not improved our eyesight by working on one better eye in the middle of our forehead: she has given us two eyes. NASA doesn’t improve the shuttle by concentrating on one computer: they connect redundant computers.
The proposed new Education Act should be rejected in principle. It embodies two principles, both of which are wrong. In principle it is mediocre, and we should expect better from our provincial government, especially when they themselves set a higher bar, especially when public conversation and evidence from other jurisdictions makes clear that we can do better. In principle, it faces us squarely into the past, rather than into the future. It is wrong that we should stifle our imagination and use our considerable resources to be the last out of the past, when we need to be – and can be – the first into the future.
Showing posts with label Education Act. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education Act. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
David King on Alberta's Education Act Part I
This was written by David King who is a former Alberta Minister of Education. This is 1 of 2 posts on Alberta's new Education Act. This post first appeared on King's blog here.
by David King
In 2008 the then Minister of Education initiated a province-wide conversation about the future of K – 12 education in Alberta. The department contributed to the conversation by providing a structure – Inspiring Education – and Albertans contributed by providing content.
Although many of the participants felt that the government’s management of the Inspiring Education process was biased in favour of self-interest, and that this bias was reflected in the wrap-up, nevertheless the conversation was valuable.
From it came ‘standards’ by which to draft new legislation. These standards were never codified and agreed to in a formal way, but it would probably be fair to characterize public consensus around the following points.
The Education Bill introduced to the Alberta Legislative Assembly today (February 14th) should be tested against these standards and principles.
Probably the first thing that strikes a reader of the Bill is that it is very similar to the current School Act. It relies upon concepts and organizational structures that are more than 100 years old. Most notably, it relies upon well-used words and phrases because they have been tested in the courts (often more than 60 years ago), and their meaning is well known to anyone who wants to continue living and working in the historic paradigm. The government’s stated reason for rejecting new ideas and new language is that newness represents risk for the government, since the ideas and words have not been tested in the courts. In its organization and language the Bill represents an explicit rejection of new ways of thinking, new models, new language.
The second thing that might strike a reader is that there is no declaration of aspirations or principles within the body of the Act. Some of the “Whereas” clauses allude to aspirations and principles, but “Whereas” clauses are advisory only; they are not decisive. The Whereas clauses may make all of us feel good, but they are not in any way binding. There is no description, in the body of the Act, of the intended outcomes that the provincial government or local school operators are accountable for assuring. Consequently, the entire Act is procedural: it focuses on means, without regard for ends. The Minister and the department can direct or sanction any school operator at any time, for any reason, because, in the absence of ends statements in the Act the Minister and department can enforce whatever end they choose, and their choice can change from day to day. On the other hand, in the absence of clearly stated expectations in the Act, the Minister and the department can decline to assure anything. For example, the general public may believe that every child is entitled to access a public education that is non-denominational in flavour, and the Minister may agree that such access is fundamentally important for every child, while at the same time declining to act in a timely fashion to assure it. Or, the Minister may say that safe and healthy schools are essential to good education, while the government defers school renovations.
The Act treats all delivery systems as being essentially equal. There is only a procedural definition of public school education, or of any other form of education. There is nothing suggesting that public school education is the preferred means of education, and no statement that public school education is important to the attainment of public policy. There is nothing to make clear that a necessary work of education is to create and sustain a civil democratic society. There is no statement that the government of education is to be democratic.
More, in an upcoming post.
by David King
In 2008 the then Minister of Education initiated a province-wide conversation about the future of K – 12 education in Alberta. The department contributed to the conversation by providing a structure – Inspiring Education – and Albertans contributed by providing content.
Although many of the participants felt that the government’s management of the Inspiring Education process was biased in favour of self-interest, and that this bias was reflected in the wrap-up, nevertheless the conversation was valuable.
From it came ‘standards’ by which to draft new legislation. These standards were never codified and agreed to in a formal way, but it would probably be fair to characterize public consensus around the following points.
- The new Act should be clear about the foundational principles. (As the Minister of the day said, the new Act should be principle-based.)
- The legislation should oblige the government to uphold foundational principles, without discretion to abdicate responsibility. The government itself claimed that its primary responsibility was to “assure” needful outcomes. (The legislation should hold the government’s feet to the fire, as much as the government sometimes holds others’ feet to the fire.)
- The new Act should represent a commitment to the future (with all the attendant risk and uncertainty), rather than to the past. (Albertans want to be first into the future, rather than last out of the past.)
- The role of the provincial government, as reflected in the new Act, should be to declare the goal and set the direction (by looking at the stars), and the role of the school operators should be to cover the ground and achieve the objectives that move us toward the goal(s).
- The new Act should provide a legislative framework for oversight for all types of educational delivery, with as much operational freedom as is useful for good government, sufficient boundaries to be clear about public purposes and goals, and openness to as yet unimagined types of educational delivery.
- The new Act should explicitly acknowledge and commit to the principle that public education is the preferred institution for education, recognizing that public school education is unique for three reasons: 1) it is inclusive without pre-conditions of any kind and it is inclusive of all who are students and of all adults as part of the community that governs it; 2) it is a deliberate model of a civil democratic community, so the government of public school education is democratic and public school education exists to promote an understanding of, and commitment to, democracy; and, 3) local democracy and local community are the ground from which springs every other community and democratic understanding. Public school jurisdictions should be given meaningful natural person powers.
- The new Act should explicitly acknowledge and commit to the principle that the public interest in assuring education for every child is not only for the benefit of the child: education serves the public purpose of creating and sustaining our society, and the provincial government controls education for the purpose of assuring that children are exposed to ideas and practices of good citizenship in a civil democratic society;
- The new Act should explicitly acknowledge that public school boards are a local general purpose government, dealing on a daily basis with the mandate of more than a dozen provincial government departments, and their range of freedom should reflect this.
- The new Education Act should embody democracy, including the following ideas:
- all participants are worthy of trust;
- inclusion, respect, and diversity, without pre-conditions of any kind;
- the people who will be most effected by decisions are the people who should have most responsibility for making and implementing the decisions, and public school jurisdictions should have the capacity to accept mandates from local electors and accomplish locally determined mandates;
- open, transparent government, at all levels; and,
- elected representatives are accountable to their electorate, not to other elected representatives.
- all participants(for example, students as well as teachers) are producers of education, not merely consumers of it.
The Education Bill introduced to the Alberta Legislative Assembly today (February 14th) should be tested against these standards and principles.
Probably the first thing that strikes a reader of the Bill is that it is very similar to the current School Act. It relies upon concepts and organizational structures that are more than 100 years old. Most notably, it relies upon well-used words and phrases because they have been tested in the courts (often more than 60 years ago), and their meaning is well known to anyone who wants to continue living and working in the historic paradigm. The government’s stated reason for rejecting new ideas and new language is that newness represents risk for the government, since the ideas and words have not been tested in the courts. In its organization and language the Bill represents an explicit rejection of new ways of thinking, new models, new language.
The second thing that might strike a reader is that there is no declaration of aspirations or principles within the body of the Act. Some of the “Whereas” clauses allude to aspirations and principles, but “Whereas” clauses are advisory only; they are not decisive. The Whereas clauses may make all of us feel good, but they are not in any way binding. There is no description, in the body of the Act, of the intended outcomes that the provincial government or local school operators are accountable for assuring. Consequently, the entire Act is procedural: it focuses on means, without regard for ends. The Minister and the department can direct or sanction any school operator at any time, for any reason, because, in the absence of ends statements in the Act the Minister and department can enforce whatever end they choose, and their choice can change from day to day. On the other hand, in the absence of clearly stated expectations in the Act, the Minister and the department can decline to assure anything. For example, the general public may believe that every child is entitled to access a public education that is non-denominational in flavour, and the Minister may agree that such access is fundamentally important for every child, while at the same time declining to act in a timely fashion to assure it. Or, the Minister may say that safe and healthy schools are essential to good education, while the government defers school renovations.
The Act treats all delivery systems as being essentially equal. There is only a procedural definition of public school education, or of any other form of education. There is nothing suggesting that public school education is the preferred means of education, and no statement that public school education is important to the attainment of public policy. There is nothing to make clear that a necessary work of education is to create and sustain a civil democratic society. There is no statement that the government of education is to be democratic.
More, in an upcoming post.
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