Dr. Sue Winton is very concerned about the future of public education in Canada.
Dr. Winton is a faculty member out of York University in Toronto who studies how educational policies and policy processes impact common societal issues such as equity and social justice. She also looks at the extent to which the general public gets to engage in determining public education policy.
Over the past few years, she has been looking particularly at the ways in which these policies have been privatizing public education. Her new book about that trend, “Unequal Benefits: Privatization and Public Education in Canada”, was released in November.
“There’s been a major acceleration of private control in education policy”, Winton told me in a recent interview, “and many of the decisions being made on where and how public money is being spent in schools are creating inequalities between them.”
Having studied education policy for a number of years, Winton’s interest in the privatization of public schools actually originated from her role as a parent. One day she found herself volunteering at her son’s school during a book fair put on by a major publishing house. The premise of the event was fairly straight forward; the publishing house supplied the books, pencils posters etc. to the school and on a particular day, the students would come in and be given the chance to purchase them. She writes
“One of the children handed me a book and said ‘I want this one’. Knowing the child hadn’t brought in any cash, I fumbled over my words…eventually telling him he wouldn’t be getting the book that day. The child began to cry, and I hated what I’d said, hated the…school for putting me in that position and hated the…book fair”
That incident highlighted for Winton some of the dangers of involving the private sector in schools. Although events like book fairs do provide benefits for schools and money for activities, not every student can participate.
This led Winton to want to examine the bigger question of why there is a need for schools to fundraise in the first place. What she discovered in her research was that many educational policies of the past few decades have not only enabled private actors to take on more responsibility for schools, but have actively called upon them to do so. This has often led to practices that prioritize individual success of certain schools over the collective good.
Winton was able to identify a trend of “privatization by stealth” that was being replicated across many jurisdictions across Canada. This is not a full on declaration of war against public education, but rather a “death-by-a-thousand-cuts” approach.
“In Saskatchewan it’s the centralization of online learning…In Manitoba it is expanding the Public/Private Partnership (P3) model for schools…In Alberta they are concerned about the removal of the cap on charter schools…We see these [privatization] trends in healthcare, in early childhood education, and they are growing.”
Although Winton concedes that such things as fundraising activities have long been a part of public school culture, she argues that where once these efforts were for “extras”, they are now more commonly becoming more about procuring necessities. Furthermore, schools in jurisdictions where parents may be more financially secure are more able to procure (or provide) funding for such things as new books and computers than those where financial security may be less prevalent.
She points to the active recruiting that is done by school districts to attract international exchange students to their doors as another example of how the gap between “have” and “have-not” schools is being widened by policies. International students have become a bit of a “cash cow” for educational jurisdictions, and in their rush to attract these students, school districts have been marketizing themselves, competing against each other for these valued “customers”.
The arguments made to support such policies are as simple as they are insidious. Since private sector ideas like competition and consumer choice work so well in the private sector, why not simply apply those same tenets to schools? If schools have to compete for students, then common sense logic says that they will improve. Good schools will flourish, and bad schools will wither and die.
The framing of a particular argument as having a “common sense” solution certainly has a broad appeal, often in spite of evidence that shows those solutions don’t work. For example, the broad application of private sector thinking to public education in the United States has essentially laid waste to their system. Despite this obvious and quite public failure, Winton explains that there are still many actors here in Canada pushing for the adoption of similar policy.
“Supporting schools based on meritocracy doesn’t work” she explains, “Better schools for everybody means a better society for everybody. The greater the gap between the rich and poor schools, the worse off the society.”
In an effort to try to combat these trends, Winton has set off on a mission, of sorts. With her book in hand, Winton is currently working to create a national network of researchers, educators and advocates focused on sharing knowledge about the privatization of public education.
“Everyone who has an interest in public education should be concerned” she said “A key issue is that we don’t know how much private money is flowing into our public schools, or how much control that money offers to private enterprise. Corporations should not get to decide which schools get money. They also shouldn’t have a say on how that money is spent.”
Anyone interested in finding out more about Winton’s work or her networking efforts can contact her via pex@edu.yorku.ca
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