kevin harding » advanced education

Democracy and education: they go together, except when the government doesn’t like it?

kevin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:10:21 +0000

(originally posted at PoliticsRespun.org – see here)

The recent controversy over the Vancouver School Board’s budget situation has been a bit of an interesting story to follow. Much like every other school board in the province, the VSB has been wrangling with a considerable problem: the costs of providing a high-quality public education continuously increase, while the funding that comes from the provincial government doesn’t keep pace.

This isn’t a problem that only the elementary, middle, and high schools face; indeed, every public educational institution in this province, from the Vancouver School Board to Simon Fraser University must somehow find a way to balance their budgets in the face of increasing costs and stagnant levels of funding. I’m certainly not an accountant, but the financial problem that all school boards — and our colleges and universities — face is a substantial one. When costs increase and funding doesn’t match, then cuts to education need to be made because the provincial government has legally required all school boards, colleges, and universities to submit balanced budgets. To repeat: all school boards, colleges, universities, and public educational institutions are required, by law, to submit balanced budgets. This is a feat that even the provincial government itself couldn’t accomplish, instead, they amended their balanced budget law giving themselves a pass.

But the legally required balanced budgets aren’t the crux of this issue. The true centre of the controversy was the fact that the Vancouver School Board stood up and spoke out about their financial issues. They publicly called upon the provincial government to fairly fund education. They postponed approving their budget because the legally required balanced budget would have meant substantial cuts to education and school closures. They acted as advocates for education.

It seems that this was something that the province didn’t want the VSB to do. The minister of education commissioned the comptroller general to investigate the school board’s management practices and report back with recommendations on how the budget could be balanced. The submitted report essentially branded the VSB trustees as incompetent; apparently, they spent too much time discussing the impacts of underfunding on the school district, they spent too much time discussing how they could best advocate for education, and they didn’t spent nearly enough time just dealing with it and cutting education. Of course, the issue of provincial funding was out-of-bounds for the comptroller general’s report.

It’s interesting to note what wasn’t out-of-bounds, though: the entire principle of elected school boards. The report from the comptroller general noted that elected school trustees, for some entirely incomprehensible reason, felt that their job was to advocate for education. And because education actually needs a lot of advocacy under the BC Liberals, the trustees had been engaging in advocacy. So, the comptroller general suggested that the government should re-consider the ‘co-governance’ model of education. Reconsider having elected school boards.

Why? Because, in my experience, appointed boards responsible for education don’t speak up as readily, and don’t embarrass the provincial government in the same way when their funding is being slowly drained to unsustainable levels.

Elected school boards seem to advocate for their schools. This seems to be dangerous — or at least distasteful — to the province. So, the province should reconsider this arrangement, at least according to the comptroller general.

To understand this a bit better, it’s useful to compare the elementary, middle, and secondary school situation the post-secondary education situation. And I will use a very familiar example: Simon Fraser University. I graduated from SFU with a BA (Hons.) in Political Science and Labour Studies in June 2010, and I was an elected student member of the university’s Board of Governors from 2008 to 2010.

There are a number of similarities between the Vancouver School Board and Simon Fraser University. The two have budgets comparable in size: the VSB’s is around $480 million, and SFU’s is around $420 million. Because both organisations rely on employees to conduct their main activities, teaching, the majority of both budgets are dedicated to staff salaries and benefits. Both organisations are public organisations, with funding from the provincial government being the primary source of funding.

Both organisations feel cost pressures in similar ways. Each year, the costs of teaching increase: computers must be replaced, textbooks purchased, libaries updated, and so forth. Inflation increases all costs across the board. And while provincial funding tends to increase each year, it doesn’t match the increase in costs. So cuts need to be made.

Both organisations have to make cuts in order to balance their budgets — the VSB is considering closing eleven schools, closing some programs, and increasing rents to nonprofit and community organisations, while SFU is engaging in round after round of layoffs, closing programs, and shifting more and more teaching from expensive faculty to cheap ‘temporary instructors.’ In both cases, the quality of education decreases. In both cases, class sizes increase. In both cases, education is at risk.

But there is a striking dissimilarity in how the two organisations respond to the problems of underfunding.

The Vancouver School Board trustees, elected by their constituents to both manage and ensure a high quality of education in their school district, have taken a public stand against underfunding. They have loudly stated the obvious: if funding does not match costs, something has to give. And unfortunately, what’s giving is the quality of education. This is not good.

The Board of Governors of SFU take an entirely different approach. No public pronouncements. No public stands. Instead, there are quiet pleas to an entirely indifferent Minister of Advanced Education. Cuts are made. Staff and faculty positions eliminated. Programs closed. Class sizes increased and quality of education decreased. And no public stand is taken. This is not good.

It’s not good for students in both cases. Quality of education decreases in both cases. And education is the key to a healthy society in so many ways.

But why is it that only the VSB takes a public stand? The answer, to me, is contained in the comptroller general’s report to the ministry of education: the Vancouver School Board is elected.

The Board of Governors of Simon Fraser University is mostly appointed by the provincial government. There are fifteen members of the board, and only five of them are elected. Two are elected students, two are elected faculty, and one is an elected employee. While the provincially appointed members don’t take orders from the province, their approach is entirely different to that of the trustees of the Vancouver School Board. In my years on the Board, we spent a large amount of time talking about the issue of underfunding. Each one of us acknowledged the severe challenges that it presented to the university. All of us seemed to agree that this needed to be changed if the university was to be able to continue to provide high-quality education.

But we didn’t take public stands as a board. The predominant thought amongst the majority of the board, those who were provincially appointed, was that advocating for funding wasn’t the role of the board. Instead, the role of the board was to oversee the implementation of budgets that necessitated cuts because of provincial underfunding. And maybe, if we were so concerned, we might from time to time write a letter to the Minister who would probably just tell us ‘too bad.’ The chair of the board and the president would meet with the minister privately, who would then likely just tell us ‘too bad.’

Despite all of us at least tacitly acknowledging the problems of underfunding, the provincially appointed members of the board were reluctant to take any public stand about the funding situation of the university. They felt it wasn’t our role. Instead, our role was, seemingly, to simply implement the cuts that the province mandated by underfunding the university. Without public protest.

The trustees of the Vancouver School Board, on the other hand, seem to feel strongly that their role is to advocate for public education as well as doing the best that they can with what they have. They have refused to simply implement the cuts that the province is downloading, at least without protest. They are all elected by their constituents, and they feel a responsibility to them, a responsibility to education. They don’t want to simply take a pronouncement that their underfunding is something that they simply have to deal with.

The difference here is that the Vancouver School Board is entirely elected by the people that their decisions affect. They have a very consultative approach to governance, with the participation of stakeholders, including staff, parents, and students, as a primary goal. They are democratically administering the school district, democratically managing and advocating for education. Advocacy is a key role of democratic accountability, which seems to be incredibly different than the bounded realities of fiscal accounting that the comptroller general’s report considered to be the most important role. The VSB is putting their advocacy for quality education above the passive implementation of provincial cuts.

Only a third of the Board of Governors of Simon Fraser University are elected. The rest are appointed by the province. They are overseeing the managing of the university. They implement the cuts that the province passes down without public protest. Public advocacy is something that they have identified as not being part of their role.

A foil exists in all of this: the province has the ability to fire the school board, and the province can replace its appointed members on the university’s board of governance at any time it wishes. I can’t recall a time when the provincial government has ever fired a school board: this would be soundly regarded as anti-democratic. However, replacing provincial government appointees on university boards is something that happens regularly. In 2001, after the province deregulated tuition fees, when the Board of Governors of SFU voted against raising tuition, the province replaced the Board.

The comptroller general’s report, as commissioned by the Ministry of Education, looked at the Vancouver School Board in the same way that the provincially appointed members of the SFU Board of Governors look at themselves. The comptroller general ignored the democratically administered nature of education. The comptroller general did not look at the issue of provincial government underfunding. Instead, the business mindset influenced the report.

The comptroller general recommended that the provincial government review the ‘co-governance’ model of school district administration, the elected status of school boards. The implication is that the university model is better.

But the university model is better in only one way: it implements the decisions of the provincial government, it cuts education, and it does this without public protest. It is not democratic, and it is not responsible to advocate for education.

The controversy around the Vancouver School Board and its resistance to underfunding is being used by the provincial government as a way to bring up the idea of taking away our elected school boards. Not because it’s necessarily a better way of doing things, but because appointed boards don’t publicly complain and protest harmful decisions from the province.

This controversy is about education and it is about democracy. The province harming the former by underfunding our school districts and universities and colleges, and it is trying to do away with the latter to enable it to continue on its way.

Either we believe in our education system and we elect people who will democratically administer the most important thing that a society can do to invest in itself, or we allow cuts to continue. The provincial government seems to have made its choice. Have you?

advanced education should be bracing for impacts – and getting ready to say no to budget cuts

kevin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:41:33 +0000

The following appeared on the Stop BC Library Cuts website today, after an communiqué from the provincial government:

On August 20, 2009 the Province of British Columbia announced that the provincial dollars to support public libraries would be $13,700,000, which is about 78% of previous years. While this represents a reduction, the libraries of BC are pleased to see that the provincial government recognizes the integral role public libraries play in community development and literacy.¹

While I disagree with the ‘pleased sentiment’ (being happy with a cut in funding to important services isn’t the best approach, in my humble opinion), I think that what’s happening to the public libraries in the province should be making us in advanced education start to brace for impacts.

CBC reported today that the Finance Minister of the province is telling BC voters to get ready for a “very, very difficult budget.” According to CBC,

“We are desperately trying to maintain the critical services in health care and education and the social services. So it’s definitely been a challenging summer,” the finance minister said Wednesday.

I would not be surprised to hear that provincial funding transfers to universities were to be impacted in much the same way that the libraries have been. This will be an incredibly difficult budget for universities to cope with, especially since they’re already five months into a fiscal year.

In short, I think we should be bracing for the impact – and getting ready to say no.

http://www.stopbclibrarycuts.ca/ ↩

envision education / get involved with the university community

kevin — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:59:13 +0000

“envision education”
A community-led visioning workshop – creating a new vision for our university

What is this event?
“envision education” is a community-led visioning workshop that brings together members of the university community to develop a plan for our university. Community resistance to cutbacks, budget reductions, layoffs, and program elimination is met with two general responses: “what would you rather us do?” and “there is no alternative.” A workshop that brings together the university community will enable us to develop an alternative, and propose ideas that we can work for at our university.
Think of your ideas that would answer these questions: what should our university be? What should education be? How do we get there?
The workshop will be led by organizers with the SFU Community Coalition, and is open to all members of the university community.

When and where?
The workshop will be held on Friday, May 15th from 11:30am to 1:30pm in room MBC 2290 at the SFU Burnaby campus.

Who can participate?
All members of the university community are welcome to participate – a broad range of participation allows us to develop a wide and encompassing idea of what we think our university should be.

How do I sign up?
If you would like to attend and participate in the visioning workshop, please confirm your attendance by contacting Kevin Harding by email at kharding@sfu.ca. Please include your name, email address, and which campus constituency you belong to (APSA, CUPE, SFUFA, TSSU, GSS, SFSS, Poly Party, or other) to help the organizers plan for numbers. Please register by May 14th.

What do I need to bring?
Mostly yourself – we hope to have representation from all the community constituencies so that we can bring together a wide vision of what the university should be. Bring your thoughts on what you think the university and education should be, and how we can get there.

The take-home message?
· “envision education”
· a community-led visioning workshop – creating a new vision for our university
· Friday, May 15th, 11:30am-1:30pm.
· Register by emailing your details to kharding@sfu.ca
· Think about these questions: what should our university be? What should education be? How do we get there?

crazy sign time / election time

kevin — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:41:48 +0000

Tomorrow, Gordon Campbell will venture through suburban Victoria to Government House, a lovely plot of land with a garden, and will recommend to the Lieutenant-Governor that the legislative assembly be disolved and writs of election be issued for the province.

The most immediate impact to you and me? Tons and tons of signs will soon occupy every conceivable green space in your local neighbourhood, covered in bright colours, and you may well have people going door to door telling you that you should vote a certain way. Television channels will be overrun with commercials telling you that Gordon Campbell wants to kill your grandmother, or that the NDP are so inept with finances that they couldn’t be trusted to run a popsicle stand.

Electoral politics is lovely. I’m not actually going to wade, too deep, into the BC NDP/BC Liberal election fight, other than to simply state that I don’t think that re-electing Gordon Campbell and his merry band of neoliberal buccaneers would be the best thing that the electorate could do. There are a number of reasons for this, of course. At the same time, I don’t immediately believe that an election of the provincial incarnation of the NDP will lead immediately to sunshine, rainbows, lollipops, and unicorns. No, it certainly won’t, but the Liberals are certainly not the best choice of a route to such promised lands anyways.

I will, of course, get to the prognostication on the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics in a few paragraphs, but there is actually something important that is being voted on — that is, the proposal to change the electoral system that we use to translate the single ‘x’ that you place on a ballot next to the name of the least offensive candidate to another system entirely.

This is important, and I hope you take the time to educate yourselves on the BC-STV proposal, and then vote in favour of it. Jasmin wrote an excellent note earlier about the BC-STV proposal, and indicated in it the philosophical problems that people who are of a more anarchic bent (myself included, perchance) have when it comes to voting in the governmental elections (I think Subcommandante Marcos said it best when he explained that voting “simply legitimises a system premied upon exclusion”) but there are several reasons why you should actually take the time to understand what’s going on.

So let’s all learn a little bit. Right now, we have an electoral system called ‘first past the post’ (FPTP) or ‘single member plurality.’ Currently, you mark an ‘X’ next to the name of the candidate that you’ve decided to vote for, or, in my case, find least offensive. Then the votes are all counted and the person who receives the most votes, not necessarily a majority, wins the one and only seat up for grabs in your riding. Theoretically, this could (and often has, in practice) mean that the person designated the ‘winner’ in your riding could actually have received less than a majority of the votes. In cases like this, I would argue that the system has failed; the majority of people are not represented (politically) by the ‘representative’ elected.

This is why a new electoral system was discussed by a Citizen’s Assembly, and why the proposal to change voting systems to something called the British Columbia Single Transferable Vote (hence BC-STV) was proposed. In 2005, the proposal won 58% of the vote in the province, and a majority in all but 2 of the 79 ridings, but was not implemented because a 60% threshold was imposed. (there’s a side argument here about a minority of voters ensuring that a minority of voters are actualy represented, but back to the main fare).

BC-STV is different than FPTP in that you don’t just mark a single ‘X’ next to your preferred/least odious candidate. Instead, there’s a list of candidates, and you get to rank them, as in you write down a 1, 2, 3 next to the candidates in the order that you would prefer. This allows you to mark a first choice, and a second choice, and so on. Ridings are also no longer represented by a single member — they’re bigger, and have multiple members. When the elections are run and votes are counted, there’s a bit of math involved, but your vote can be counted for the person that you voted for but also for your second choice and so on, providing a bit more ‘proportionality’ in the system.

Proportionality is important. Given that there’s every possibility that an MLA could be elected without a majority of support in a riding, there’s every possibility that a government could be elected without a majority of support in the province, country, etc. And it happens. It happened to the NDP in 1996, where they won the most seats with fewer votes, and it’s happening right now federally with a Conservative government that only 36% or something of Canadians voted for. BC-STV aims to change that a bit, bringing in other parties to the legislature. You may well see that when the referendum is passed, we could have Green Party MLAs and the like in the next round of voting. An additional benefit is that the seats are supposed to roughly correspond to the parties’ votes — ie, if Party A gets 30% of the votes in the election, they ought to get about 30% of the seats.

This has the potential of opening the system up to more parties that could be peoples’ second choices, and may allow a viable ‘alternative’ to the BC Liberals and NDP to form. And that means that the system could change, ever so slightly, from one premised on exclusion to one that is at least less biased against inclusion. Which is why we all should vote in favour of it.

Of course, there are also a number of other important things going on in the election. The election is a chance for us to de-elect Gordon Campbell and his BC Liberal party, who are hell-bent on privatizing every aspect of the social institutions that we cherish and destroying everything else by subjugating them to the “invisible hand” of the market.

In countless surveys, people are asked what social services they appreciate and value. They generally respond with “health care” and “education.” One would think that protecting, promoting, and supporting these cherished social institutions would be a good way to get elected or stay elected. However, Campbell and his thugs have decided that slowly killing these services is the best way to run the province.

As they legislate a requirement for BC Hydro to purchase new power from ‘independent’ (read: private) sources, they privatize the rivers from which power is generated. As they decrease funding to universities and colleges and schools, they privatize education. As they actively undermine the Canada Health Act, which Canadians demanded and which creates the semi-socialised helath care system, they privatize health care.

They must be stopped.

If you know me well, you know that when we get drunk and when we start talking politics, I point to education as the root of my political philosophy. This is because education is transformative – it changes people. Every serious university student I know jokingly or half-seriously complains about education and learning things they’d rather not know. At university, we learn about oppression, atrocities, manipulation, hegemonies — all things, honestly, that would make life easier if we didn’t know them.

But at the same time, education makes us ask “how” and “why.” Instead of simply watching television reports about the Somalian ‘pirates’ and getting angry, we should be asking how the pirates got there and why they are doing what they are doing. We should be asking about the fact that Somalia is a failed state, about the history of colonialism that led to that failure; we should be asking about the nuclear waste being dumped off of Somalia’s shores and the fact that the first ‘pirates’ in the country were a self-described ‘voluntary coast guard.’

Education is what enables us to break free of our chains and ask these questions, and education is also what enables us to understand that there is an alternative. Education teaches us theory, and education teaches us practice. And praxis — when we put theory in to action — is entirely possible.

So education is important. But the BC Liberals are in the process of destroying education at the post-secondary level as they decrease funding, as they set higher enrolment targets, and expect universities to do more with less. Universities are left scrambling, orienting themselves to markets, and losing sight of the public trust that we, as a society, have entrusted them with — the trust that they will teach us to ask how and why.

This needs to be stopped.

The easiest way to stop this is to not mark an ‘x’ next to the BC Liberal candidate in your riding. Consider them to be the most offensive candidate, and choose elsewhere. Because of FPTP, you’ll likely need to choose a least offensive candidate — and in most ridings, this is the NDP. I don’t think that they’re a magical solution — indeed, they’re not exactly an overtly socialist party, or even timidly social democratic most of the time — but they are potentially the least offensive option.

And remember to vote ‘yes’ to the BC-STV proposal, so that we may be able, in the future, to rank our preferred candidates over the least offensive.

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