Publication Details
Title: Worlds Apart: British Columbia Schools, Politics, and Labour Relations, Before and After 1972
Editor: Thomas Fleming,
Professor Emeritus of Educational History, University of Victoria
Publisher: Bendall Books Educational Publishers, P.O. Box 115, Mill Bay, BC Canada T: 250-743-2946 / F: 250-743-2910 / E: admin@bendallbooks.com
ISBN: 978-0-9865828-1-3
Size: 6 x 9 inches
Extent: 140 pages
Index: Index of Names
Illlustrations: 29 historical photographs and other illustrations
Availability: October 2011
List Price: $18.95 Canadian
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Common School's Ascendancy
A Century of Triumph
A Tradition of Trust
A Community of Educators
Schools Before Politics
Images: Rural Schools and Life
Chapter 2: From Unity to Discord
District Consolidation’s Dysfunctional Effects
Drift and Disappearance in Educational Government
A Rising Tide of Teacher Influence and Power
Images: The Civilized World of City Schools
Chapter 3: Disconnections at the Core
A Matter of Leadership
The Waning Importance of School Boards
Government and the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation
A Public Relations War
Backing Into the Future
Introduction
Little has been written about the conflict between provincial governments and the British Columbia Teachers' Federation (BCTF), a conflict that has been, without question, the single most defining characteristic of public education in the province for the past four decades. It is time that the roots of this conflict were examined. It is also time for British Columbians—in and outside public education—to ask themselves if they would like a future better than this troubled past.
The following historical narrative explores the origins of this longstanding conflict by examining the nature of the organizational relationships in British Columbia's public school sector—and the social contexts that shaped them—during two distinct historical eras, from 1872 to 1972, and the 40-year period since 1972. During the first 100 years, the governance, administrative and other organizational structures that supported public schooling, an institution still modest in size and structure, were remarkably effective. They made the province's schools among the best in the nation and public schooling an institution of immense provincial pride. For various reasons, the post-1972 educational world evolved into a world of "school wars" where a once-harmonious educational community was riven by politics, special interests, conflicts, and organizational distrust. Some factors that produced this recent and unhappy era were structural in origin. Old governance and administrative arrangements that proved serviceable during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century have increasingly seemed incapable of addressing the organizational and other complexities that characterize modern schools and educational systems.
Other factors have also been at work. The post-1972 expansion of the school's mandate into the social domain, the rise of special interest politics, the decline in school populations, and shifting provincial demographics have all strained institutional relationships and exposed fundamental insufficiencies in the structures that once governed and supported public schools. Although the quality of public education has remained basically sound, a steady stream of complaints about alleged inadequacies in educational finance and school resources, a breakdown in educational labour relations, and four decades of partisan and political infighting about educational policies have produced not only a profoundly distressed public system but also a lack of confidence among British Columbians about the quality and future of public schooling.
This historical essay is intended to provoke questions about the organizational structures that currently exist and the strained relationships that bedevil the province's most important educational organizations—the government and its education ministry, the BCTF, and the British Columbia School Trustees Association (BCSTA). This essay is not intended, directly or inferentially, to question the quality of the public system, or the efforts of tens of thousands of dedicated individuals who work as teachers, administrators, and in other capacities.
It is intended, however, to provide a non-varnished view of the events and politics that have conspired to bring the once-great institution of public education to its knees over the past 40 years. Admittedly, the discussion that follows is generally critical in its assessments of the province's major educational organizations, the way they behave, and the motivations underlying their actions. Looking back over the developments of recent decades, there is, to be sure, more than enough blame to share. If it wished, government could no doubt take delight in the shortsightedness of school boards, their clumsiness in managing budgets, and the vanity of some of their members—not to mention the puffery, self-righteousness, and blind ambition so often characteristic of BCTF executives. So, too, could school board members and teacher representatives revel in the obvious confusion and lack of purpose in an education ministry that has floundered since the 1970s, in governments on both sides of the aisle too timid to show any form of real leadership in public education. Or, equally, in the marginalization of the co-governed agency created by statute to bargain on behalf of school boards, the British Columbia Public School Employers' Association (BCPSEA), an organization confined to the sidelines on occasion while politicians conducted last-minute bargaining deals to secure educational peace at any price, no matter how costly or short-lived.
But rather than celebrate the sins of others, government officials, teacher executives, and members of the province's major educational organizations may wish to consider some of the questions prompted by this historical review. For example:
Are the organizational relationships in British Columbia's public school sector really in the depressing state of repair as described here or are they better or worse than this?
Is a long-term truce between government and the teachers' federation feasible, or should the current governance, administrative, and financial structures in schooling be dismantled so we can start again?
Can government and the teacher's federation find a way to establish a meaningful accord given the historical baggage they both carry and the climate of distrust that now exists?
Can school politics and labour relations be conducted in a more civilized manner and without the demonization that all too frequently marks educational disputes?
And, last but not least, can British Columbia educators and the organizations that represent them learn from their own troubled history or are they destined to perpetuate the conflict that so badly divides the schools?
One small postscript is required. Discerning readers may wonder why faculties of education have escaped what some may consider an abrasive assessment of other educational organizations in the province. This is not a matter of favoritism but of perspective and judgment. Faculties of education have simply not been feature players in the turbulent public school story of recent decades. With few exceptions, most faculties of education and most education professors have had little impact on the public schools, or public policy, since the mid-1970s. Up to this time, important educational gatherings of public school folk were routinely opened with the benediction of an education dean or an important academic figure in education.
Since then, however, everything has changed. Few people in today's teaching or administrative fraternity, much less those who comprise the ranks of school trustees, federation executives, or district and government officials, could name even one education dean at the four largest provincial universities. Historian Barbara Tuchman's colourful assessment of the social sciences as "an isolation ward of unintelligibility" may equally describe modern education faculties to those in the "real world of the public schools," as practitioners like to describe themselves. Distracted by phenomenological debates of medieval proportions, along with crusades for myriad social causes, education faculties have lost much of the credibility they once enjoyed in solving the instructional and organizational problems of schools. The decline of their influence is a sad story in itself--and one worth recounting another day.
Sample Text
The Common School's Ascendancy
The institution we know today as public schooling was born in the second half of the nineteenth century in a floodtide of civic optimism about the exhilarating possibilities of state-supported education. Across North America, as well as Great Britain, a diverse coalition of politicians, community leaders, newspaper editors, intellectuals, and citizens at large found common cause to endorse publicly funded schools. Their reasons were many. Public schools, Victorian social reformers proclaimed, could act as an institutional panacea. More than just instructing children in the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic, they could also help banish, or at least reduce, civic ignorance, encourage a higher level of public morality, and generally assist in a broad social movement to uplift society. Schooling was equated with progress and with the Christian mission of redeeming society or "salvaging the lower classes,"as historian Susan Houston bluntly put it.1 According to the liberal social crusaders of the time, the schools seemed destined to emerge as "museums of virtue," to use sociologist Willard Waller's eloquent phrase, radiant in their possibilities of improving social life.
Both the Empire, and Canada's development as a nation state, could equally be served by the introduction of common schools. Egerton Ryerson, the chief architect of Ontario's provincial system, declared that the task of the public school was "to impart to the public mind . . . useful knowledge based upon . . . sound Christian principles . . . [and] to render the Educational system . . . the indirect but powerful instrument of British Constitutional Government."3 Ryerson, like other nineteenth-century educational statesmen, including Thomas Jefferson in the U.S. and Thomas Babbington Macaulay in England, shared a broadly-held belief that an educated citizenry served as the "best security of a good government and constitutional liberty."4 Without the right schooling, Ryerson reckoned, people risked becoming ":the slaves of despots and the dupes of demagogues."
About the Author
Thomas Fleming is an emeritus professor in educational history and policy at the University of Victoria. Dr. Fleming has written numerous books and articles on school and administrative history. He co-authored A History of Thought and Practice in Educational Administration, a study that has become a standard reference work in the history of school management in the United States. He is also well known for his edited volume, School Leadership: Essays on the British Columbia School Experience, 1872-1995, as well as for six other books on school effectiveness, class size, and educational reform. The main focus of his research since the mid-1980s has been the history of children, teachers, school organizations, and administrators in British Columbia about which he has published more than three dozen articles and three books. The Principal’s Office and Beyond: School Leadership in British Columbia, 1849-2005, Volume 1 and Volume 2, was published in December 2010. Dr. Fleming’s documentary history of provincial schooling, School Days: Voices From British Columbia’s Educational Past, 1849-2005, was published in March 2011.
Dr. Fleming was appointed editor-in-chief and one of six research directors for the 1987-1988 British Columbia Royal Commission on Education and was responsible for writing the commission’s main report, A Legacy for Learners, editing the Commissioned Papers of the Royal Commission, Volumes 1-7, and researching and co-writing Volume 1: British Columbia Schools and Society.
No stranger to the real world of administration, Dr. Fleming managed several private-sector companies before serving as Assistant to the President at both the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia. From 2000 to 2006, he directed the Canadian International Development Agency’s Basic Education Program in Rosario, Argentina, that adapted Canadian expertise in modernizing educational conditions for 350 teachers and more than 5,000 youngsters in six of the country’s poorest schools. In recognition for this work, he received the University of Victoria Craigdarroch Award in 2006 for Research Contributing to Social Service. He was also awarded the University of Victoria Faculty of Education Inaugural Excellence in Teaching Award in 2000.
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