It’s been nearly five years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and while the immediate crisis may be behind us, its effects live on. This special issue of Our Schools/Our Selves emerged from our interest in understanding the pandemic’s impact on the privatization of public education across Canada as part of our work with the Public Education Exchange (PEX).
The PEX is a formal partnership between the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Canadian Teachers’ Federation, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, York University, the University of Windsor, and the University of Manitoba. The project is supported in part by funding from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
One of the PEX’s main goals is to enable people to access and share knowledge about how public education is being privatized across Canada. Privatization happens in part through policies and practices that shift responsibilities from governments to private actors. Some refer to this process as the privatization of public education. 1 Shifting responsibilities include funding, governing, or providing education. Charging ever-increasing school fees and encouraging homeschooling are examples of these practices.
Privatization also occurs when policies enable people and businesses to profit from public education. The involvement of private actors sometimes changes how teaching and learning take place. Google classroom and other learning platforms are good examples of these changes and give rise to privatization through public education.2
Education privatization also happens when values, practices, and policies from the business sector are introduced into the public education systems. This is privatization in public education. 3 Policies that create and support markets in education, such as funding private schools with public money and offering specialized programs in public schools, are examples of privatization in public education.
The PEX creates ways for people to share their experiences of these overlapping and dynamic forms of education privatization. Our strategies include a dynamic website (www.pexnetwork.ca), an Instagram account, in-person and virtual events, and publications like this one. The PEX also engages publics across Canada in discussions about education privatization using the World Café approach. World cafés are structured dialogues that promote knowledge exchange and co-creation. Finally, the PEX aims to advance understanding of how crises impact education privatization.
Past issues of Our Schools/Our Selves highlight paths and variations of education privatization across the country. The articles in the current issue help us understand how the COVID-19 pandemic affected this process. Research on past emergencies, such as the 2005 hurricane in New Orleans, shows that crises can create the conditions for education privatization to accelerate and expand. While the articles in this special issue suggest that the pandemic did not dramatically impact the trajectory of education privatization across Canada, the process continued—and continues—today.
Enduring privatization
Private money is still widely used to address underfunding of public education. A number of school divisions across Western Canada continue to raise money by charging school fees and fundraising in schools and through charitable foundations. In Ontario, parents may pay for special education testing and supports. Across the country, public education systems look to international students as an additional source of funding. And as Yvonne Kelly demonstrates, relying on families and charities to fill funding gaps not only lets governments off the hook for fully funding public education, it’s also unreliable.
Private actors are involved in public education in ways that go beyond funding. Manitoba spent almost $2 million to outsource mental health support for students, and educators across the country are embracing EdTech giants’ artificial intelligence (AI) tools faster than policies can be put in place to ensure students’ privacy and security and public oversight. Governments continue to form public-private partnerships (PPPs) that see private actors rather than educators deliver curriculum and provide training for students. The terms and benefits of these agreements are often unavailable for public scrutiny.
This issue’s authors also demonstrate how privatization in public education continues, especially through on-going support for education markets. Alberta, for example, removed the cap on the number of charter schools allowed in the province and made it easier for new ones to be approved. It also launched a kindergarten home education pilot program. Meanwhile, Saskatchewan created a new category of private school, the Certified Independent School; schools of this type receive 75 percent of the average per student rate allocated to public schools. Previously, the most an independent school in Saskatchewan could receive was 50 percent.
BC and Quebec continue to fund private schools as well. Extensive research across Canada and around the world shows that policies supporting school choice, such as publicly funding private schools and creating new school types in education markets, offer more benefits to already advantaged children and recreate patterns of social inequality.
It hasn’t all been business as usual, though. Since the pandemic’s onset, the Ontario government has—no fewer than four times— offered money directly to families to support their children’s education. Observers wonder if these payments might be priming the public to accept a voucher approach to education (becoming increasingly common in the U.S.) wherein families use public money to pay for any kind of schooling they choose. Multiple provinces have engaged in renewed debates over whether parents or public institutions should determine curriculum and decide what is in kids’ best interests. Shannon Moore, Matthew McCorquodale-Bauer, and Kevin Lopuck argue that New Brunswick’s accommodation of parents’ demands through the revision of Policy 713 Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Manitoba’s and Saskatchewan’s policies that allow parents to remove their children from classes about human sexuality constitutes a new kind of privatization: education privatization through private values.
Cautions and considerations
Privatization exacerbates existing inequities in educational systems. Public schools are not inherently equitable or just. Funded by political states, public education is a “site of continuous cultural struggle.”4
In Canada, public education has always been part of the colonial enterprise and cannot be divorced from genocidal acts toward Indigenous peoples and racial capitalism.
The study of privatization can focus our attention on policies and practices that undermine the pursuit of democratic and socially just public schools and the need to double down our efforts to achieve them.
Finally, while the articles in this special issue are written by authors from multiple locations in Canada, we acknowledge that this collection is missing voices from Indigenous communities as well as commentary on how privatization uniquely affects and is influenced by race and racism and other intersecting identities and oppressions. These gaps offer directions for the PEX as the network grows and engages with the many publics across Canada. We invite you to join us.
Notes
- Stephen J Ball and Deborah Youdell, “Hidden
- Stephen J. Ball, “Privatising Education, Privatising Education Policy, Privatising Educational Research: Network Governance and the ‘Competition State,’” Journal of Education Policy 24, no. 1 (2009): 83.
- Ball and Youdell, 9.
- Jessica Gerrard, “Whose Public, Which Public? The Challenge for Public Education,” Critical Studies in Education 59, no. 2 (2018): 209.
