Education Advisory

[TO READERS: Is this 1985 brief (25 yrs ago) still relevant in 2007? Please comment]
Brief to West Vancouver District Review Committee on B.C. Education

Tunya Audain, 85/02/26

I’ve been involved with education systems for about 20 years, having taken my first Education Course at UBC when I was pregnant with my first child, now 19. I’ve taken an active interest since then, and have found the education system increasingly becoming unsuitable for today’s needs of our children, families and society.

The education system is now becoming unglued, and deservedly so. It is a dinosaur that is cracking from within. To throw more money at it (without basic structural changes) is to throw good money after bad. To give the system any more time to reform is unthinkable because the “writing” has been on the walls for years, and it has been unable to retool: there is no motivation when there is a captive audience of 95% school-aged population in the public school system. For the public to waste time trying to change the system is also a waste of their time. Veterans like myself have spent countless hours with no results.

Instead of spending time trying to reform an unresponsive school system, many parents I know are now forming small schools, working harder to afford private schools, or are educating their children at home. This is a more productive use of their time and energy and psychic goodwill.

We have had criticism of the schools for over 30 years, and it’s been just like water off a duck’s back. In the 70’s Nat Hentoff called the public education system the biggest consumer fraud yet. I agree, and it remains for some economists to prove this. There is a branch of economics called Welfare Economics, and they deal with such matters as the public good with relation to health, education and other public services. They deal with such concepts as: choice, taste, preference, diffusion of new technologies and information, waste, and so on. They even consider such questions as relate to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the basic principles of democracy. It will be important for them to consider such questions as:

1. How much efficiency is there in a centralized, monolithic, monopolistic, bureaucratic education aptem?

2. How much damage has been done to families because their role in the education of their children has been usurped from them? Many families feel helpless and disempowered in dealing with their schools. Whereas the legal responsibility for education of children resides in the parents with the schools as back-up system, we have been made to feel that the schools must have the children for that task.

3. How much damage is there to the education system because the natural advocates of children’s rights have not had a prominent role in education? What damage is there to relevance, use of new information and techniques, and so on?

4. Can one calculate the damage to children and society when children who are learning disabled and become juvenile delinquents because of inappropriate education? There is an estimate that 85% of juvenile delinquents In the criminal justice system exhibit poor self-concept, poor reading skills and various learning disabilities unattended to.

5. What is the value of teacher training, when so many feel inadequately prepared to teach? Usually, only a quarter feel adequate to the job. What further loss to our children and communities is suffered because teachers are not trained in parent and community relations so that they can work in partnership.?

6. What value is there in retention of school boards, which over the last 20 years have increasingly been reluctant to prove that children under their care are achieving as well as they should, who fall to remove incompetent teachers and administrators, and who rely unduly on the advice from their staffs with little consultation with their constituency? Who have become unduly entangled and intimidated by teacher unions?

7. What waste of effort and money accrues when the system excludes public scrutiny because it has become the preserve of the educational establishment which makes decisions according to self-interest and their views of social engineering?

More such questions need to be posed for some discussion of cost-benefits, etc.

Meanwhile, in relation to the task at hand, that is, review of the system to relate to a new school act, I would recommend:

1. Parents should be in a central role in their schools. There should be school-based management so that parents are involved in the decision-making: the programs. staffing, evaluation, etc.

2. There should be many more options for parents, within the public education system and there should be provision for creation of more options outside.

3. We must reject the term “schooling” as being inappropriate for what we want from the education system. Parents do not send their children to schools to be schooled.

4. Bring in vouchers as a scheme by which parents can shop for the school or educational setting of their choice. Of course, it will be an accountable, responsible system of gaining for children their entitlements to education.

5. Stricter standards of accountability are required. Attention must be spent on the minimum essentials for all children. Professionals must be accountable resource managers. There must be more proof of achievement for money spent.

6. School boards should be diminished in their role in education in favour of the schools being the accountable agency.

7. Sec. 35, (7) of the Ombudsman Act should be proclaimed so that parents can take any grievances they have about education to the schools and school boards, where most the problem-solving should oocur anyway, not diverted away to Victorla

8. There should be a shift from measuring the process and inputs measured. that is. capital and labour expenses (teachers, buildings, books, etc) to measuring the product or results. Thereby, we focus much more on the learning, the consumer-intensive activity (which, by the way, helps harness the parents a lot more too) and brings education back to where it belongs, on behalf of the child, not the preservation of a system which has grown outdated, inbred, inept and unaccountable.

The new times that are ahead of us cannot abide the ponderous industrial model of educational “delivery” and demands a lot more options, more inventiveness, more use of the technologies around us and much more joy in the learning process. For that we need parents, teachers and children who are unencumbered by the system as is.

To do less is to continue to betray our children and the future.