The Ontario education system faces important challenges, and leaving things to the private sector may seem like the easier route to take.
universal access to quality education is a goal toward which we should strive, then private charter schools run counter to this objective. Where the dangers become harder to identify, and where the slope becomes slippery, is when privatization adopts seemingly benign forms. Take, for instance, market-based measures of “achievement.” Organizations that offer services for standardized testing, school rankings, and merit-based teacher pay schemes all purport to improve education by quantifying the system. Fair enough: more data is generally better. However, we know that much of the data produced by these efforts is flawed, or that the companies offering the services have vested financial interests in the results. In these situations, measurements do not accurately capture the nuanced realities of achievement. As a result, these practices use narrow and arbitrary measurements of achievement in order to tie students’ to teachers’ (and schools’) quality. Not only does this force schools into competition with one another, but also it reproduces a well-known phenomenon: standardized test achievement directly and strongly correlates with socio-economic status. Most people agree that education should have a levelling effect on inequality, but this market-based approach achieves exactly the opposite result. Even when intentions are good, tendencies toward privatized education produce negative consequences. In 2015, in an effort to address
issues in Indigenous education, the Government of Ontario began partnering with Teach for Canada to send recent university graduates to teach in rural and indigenous communities. Unfortunately, this partnership does little to redress the serious education and resource gaps faced by Indigenous students. Not only does this transfer a public government’s obligation for education to a private entity, but it does so by placing relatively inexperienced teachers in some of the province’s highest-need areas. As a labour organization, we must remain vigilant against any pretense toward privatization in the education sector. Faced with public debt and budgetary constraints, governments from around the world have adopted austerity measures, often at the expense of unions. Many of these measures have significantly cut funding to education, and also have sought to deregulate teaching by attacking education workers’ rights to collective bargaining. Individualized contracts, performance-related pay, and a diluted talent pool make it increasingly difficult to negotiate collectively, undermining the fundamental right to organize. And the tendency for private education providers to employ lower-paid, lower-qualified workers – often in an effort to cut costs – hurts educational quality. The Ontario education system faces important challenges, and leaving things to the private sector may seem like the easier route to take. But what is easy isn’t necessarily what is right. Ultimately, the movement toward privatization and commercialization in education promotes inequalities, diminishes quality, and threatens unions. And while the encroachment of privatization into education may seem less dramatic than a Michael Moore documentary, the end-game is the same. The long-term health of our system hangs in the balance.
Mark Tagliaferri is Writer/Researcher in the Communications and Government Relations departments at the OECTA Provincial Office.
FEBRUARY 2017 |
@ OECTA
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