Buying passing grades? Congratulations!

The June 18 Vancouver Sun front page story “Struggling students buying passing grades” should come as no surprise.  Public education in B.C. and indeed in all of Canada has long since adopted the U.S. concept that education is a business that should be managed and regarded like any other commercial enterprise.  School administrators, ministers of education, trustees and even teachers frequently refer to students as clients or customers, learning as the education product and teaching as a service to be delivered. Who then can fault schools that seek the ultimate business goal: profit? Indeed, school districts have used foreign exchange students for years as a source of income. Each exchange student must pay the full cost of his or her education to the district, some $8000+.  Schools with declining enrolment have attracted students by becoming specialty schools, providing hockey instruction or some other extra-curricular attraction.  With each full-time student comes additional government funding, a good business practice.

Of greater importance is that this shoe-horning of public education into a business model has led to the adoption of corporate management strategies.  Decisions are made at the government level without consultation and handed down through the corporate hierarchy to school boards, superintendants, principals and finally teachers.  The only determination of school success is what can be measured: test scores, drop-out rates, dollars spent, percentage of graduates, etc.  These can be graphed, plotted, analysed and then used to develop ways to adapt business practices and develop strategies to improve them.  Individual districts have tried to follow Covey’s sure-fire practices for improvement, have fiddled with the “culture” of the schools, and held hundreds of hours of consultations with “stakeholders;” all of which led to no measureable improvement in anything, or indeed any change at all.   The Province has altered course requirements, refocused the curriculum on career planning, increased emphasis on the accreditation process, and then decreased it (too expensive).  Still the Ministry of Education demanded statistical improvement, requiring schools to develop plans to achieve it and even employing four Super-Superintendents to ensure success.  The result? No real improvement, only more emphasis on those practices designed to give superficial proof of success. Poor statistical achievement at the Grade 10 and 12 level?  No problem. Schools pad classroom marks so that when combined with the government exam marks at those levels, the overall student marks look better.  At the Grade 4 and 7 levels, schools find ways to keep low achieving students from taking government assessment tests so that the school shows improvement, or they simply provide special assistance to those students.  Since drop-out rates can be a problematic statistic, secondary schools all have special programs for students who “can’t handle” regular classroom situations.  These programs all consist of watered down courses that students complete by doing a series of worksheets or computerized courses, the content of which is a fraction of the regular classroom course.  They miraculously achieve B’s and A’s on courses that they previously failed.  And if you can’t complete courses by the time you are nineteen, don’t worry, the adult requirements for graduation are only two-thirds of those for normal graduation; just sit tight and you can graduate without nearly as much work, and the school will use your success as a positive statistic. 

The serious issues facing public education -- issues of relevance, the use of technology, student achievement – are beyond the scope of the current corporate business model to deal with. As long as the policy makers try to impose flawed, business model solutions to public education from the top down, they will continue to be stymied. But since the alternative is a model of collegial cooperation and consensus building with the only people who really understand how to create positive, successful learning environments, the teachers, the likelihood of that changing soon is remote.  Until then, the Ministry of Education should congratulate those private schools making money by fudging marks; isn’t profit the point?