Education is an essential part of a functional democracy and a healthy political system. If we want intelligent, productive conversations about what society is going to look like, we need every citizen trained in the skills of research and critical thinking, or else they’ll be prone to fall for misleading rhetoric. If you need proof of this, look no further than the response to Alberta’s recent Bill 15, the Choice in Education Act. There are so many fallacies abroad, you can almost play a game where you try to spot each one.
The bill itself is not too dramatic. All it would mostly do is take roles that currently rest with the public school system and give them to the Minister of Education. Homeschooling, for example, can now be overseen by the Education Minister rather than a public school board. (It will be “unsupervised” in the sense that the Minister will be in charge of supervision, and, consequently, unfunded since it will not be related to the public schools.) Similarly, it used to be that, if you wanted to start a charter school, you first had to ask your local school board whether they would be willing to run this school as an alternative program; only if they declined could you then go to the Education Minister to request permission to open and run the school yourself. Now, you can apply to the Education Minister to start a charter school without asking the school boards first (though the Minister still needs to inform the public boards about the application). A specific reference to “vocational charter schools” is also added, with an obvious eye towards fitting students for the economy. All told, the bill mostly lessens the responsibilities of public boards in areas not directly related to their schools.
You wouldn’t know this from reading the commentary of Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour and erstwhile NDP candidate, who fumed on Twitter that this bill “paves the way for nutbar religious charter schools & home-schooling that doesn’t follow the curriculum. [The UCP are] trying to create an army of brainwashed right-wing warriors.”
Frightening stuff! There’s only one problem: There are no “religious charter schools” in Alberta. Section 26(6) of the Education Act prohibits charter schools from being “affiliated with a religious faith or denomination,” and this bill does nothing to change that.
Even though this fact blows a hole in McGowan’s assertion, accusations that the UCP is trying to foster religious extremism through this bill were rampant on social media, though exactly how is never made clear. Premier Kenney and Education Minister LaGrange are both Roman Catholics, with LaGrange formerly serving as the president of the Alberta Catholic School Trustees Association, and this bill does nothing particularly to strengthen Catholic separate schools. Besides separate schools, options in Alberta for faith-based education are private schools–which are affirmed as “important” in this bill, but which receive no additional funding or advantages from it–and alternative schools within the public system like Logos, which are not mentioned in the bill at all. As for homeschooling that, in McGowan’s words, “doesn’t follow the curriculum,” this bill would place regulation of home-schooling with the Ministry of Education–the department which is literally in charge of creating the curriculum. It’s hard to think of anyone more qualified to make sure the Program of Studies is being followed than the people who are writing it.
Of course, religious or no, some people still resent having their tax dollars go into paying for charter schools. The hostility to these schools, which were originally proposed (both in the United States and in Alberta) by presidents of teachers’ federations, who saw them as an opportunity for educators and parents to explore new paths to student success, is fascinating. You can’t exactly accuse them of catering to the wealthy elite, since several are specifically geared to serve marginalized communities (Boyle Street Education Centre comes to mind), and yet you don’t have to search long to find comments to the effect that “I support school choice, but if you’re going to send your child to a charter school, I shouldn’t have to pay for it.”
Let’s take a minute to break that down.
Saying you support choice means you agree there should be different school options. That means public schools are one choice among others. By extension, that means that parents who send their children to public schools are choosing public schools. Since those schools are taxpayer-funded, this means everyone (including parents outside the public system) is subsidizing your choice. However, if someone chooses a different school option for their children, you don’t want to have to pay for their choice. Only one choice gets to be publicly subsidized. Or, to put it more succinctly: I have to pay for your choice, but you don’t have to pay for mine. How exactly is that a real choice, especially for parents who can’t afford other choices?
What’s funny about this argument is that a variation of it was used in the 19th century to oppose all government funding of schools. When public school laws were introduced in Upper Canada in the 1850s, the Toronto Globe was flooded with letters protesting the unfairness of making childless property owners or parents who didn’t want to send their children to school should be forced to pay for the education of other people’s children, and that those parents should have to pay for it themselves.
Why did public schools win out? Because Canadian society recognizes that children have a right to an education, and that right is meaningless if a child can’t get that education because their parents can’t afford it. A right is meaningless if you can’t exercise that right because of your financial situation.
This is wonderful, but extend the logic: Parents have a right to choose the education of their children. This is enshrined in section 26(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that may be provided to their children”), which the bill directly quotes. But if parents can’t afford the school they want to choose, do they really have a choice? Once again, a right you can’t exercise because of financial limitations is not a right in any meaningful way.
This is why Alberta has always recognized the value of educational pluralism, and it is an integral part of our provincial identity. Section 17 of the Alberta Act (and its identical counterpart in the Saskatchewan Act), which ensures that the legislature cannot abolish separate schools, was written specifically and carefully to avoid a repeat of what had happened in Manitoba in 1890, when denominational schools were shut down in favour of a single non-sectarian school system. Our constitution was carefully written to make sure this wouldn’t happen in Alberta. A single fully funded school was never supposed to be part of Albertan society. There were always supposed to be alternatives–and religion was at the heart of this provision.
Opponents of Catholic schools in Alberta often demand to know why Catholic schools are fully funded. The answer, which is clear if you read early champions of separate schools in Canada, is related to religious freedom: You have the right to bring up your child in your faith tradition (and, no, an hour of religious instruction on the weekend is not sufficient to teach a religious faith, which by definition touches on all aspects of life), and–once again–that right is meaningless if you can’t afford to send your child to a religious school. In recognition of this, there are two important components to Catholic separate schools: Access and control. Access means that there is no tuition barrier to anyone sending their child to a Catholic school. Control means that only Catholics can serve as board trustees of Catholic schools or as administrators, which is supposed to ensure that they have a truly Catholic ethos.
The follow-up question from the critics of separate school is usually, “Well, why do only Catholics get this privilege?” Now, technically, the constitutional protections aren’t just limited to Catholics; Protestants are allowed to have separate schools, and, indeed, until 2012, there was a Protestant separate school district in St. Albert. But this is fundamentally a good question: All faith communities should have the right to their own schools. (This is usually when the person confidently asking the question suddenly backtracks and insists that we couldn’t possibly afford to pay for all faith-based schools. If this happens, it’s obvious they weren’t asking those questions in good faith: Their goal wasn’t fairness for all religious groups, but special privileges for public schools and public schools alone.)
Currently, as mentioned before, funding non-Catholic religious schools takes two forms: Faith-based independent schools and alternative programs within the public system. But, remember, religious freedom requires two things of faith-based schools: Access and control. Independent schools are controlled by faith communities, but are not fully funded and still need to charge tuition, so access is not always possible. Conversely, alternative programs are fully funded and fully accessible, but are under the control of public boards.
What’s the solution to this? I propose that we make Mr. McGowan’s febrile vision a reality and allow charter schools (which are independently controlled and fully funded) to be religious. It’s a bit of a mystery why they aren’t already allowed to be; Hansard yields nothing that I could unearth that sheds light on why that prohibition is part of our laws. All the Charter Schools Handbook says about this is that charter schools aren’t “intended to replace the services offered by private religious schools” (but neither are alternative schools, yet we allow them to be faith-based).
Furthermore, charter schools are allowed to have a spiritual and mystical component (Mother Earth’s Children’s Charter School is based on Traditional Aboriginal Teaching, including explicit references to the Creator), and it’s not obvious how we can draw a line between that and religious faith. Besides, if a school’s religiosity leads to student success, who are we to deny them that? Spiritually-connected teenagers have been shown to be less susceptible to depression and substance abuse and more likely to excel academically. Why would we want to forbid that path to flourishing as an option to charter schools, and even threaten the existence of successful charter schools because of the suspicion they might secretly be religious (as happened with Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy in the States, and Alamandia Language Charter Academy in Calgary, which were both accused of secretly being Muslim schools)? “Separation of church and state” (a slogan exploited by the KKK in Saskatchewan as they rallied against Catholic schools) is not a Canadian or Albertan constitutional principle, or even an especially coherent idea. Our legislation should reflect that.
Charter schools, like public schools, are allowed to offer religious instruction or exercises, giving due notice to parents who may wish to withdraw their children from those classes. Yet this concession is not far from the Laurier-Greenway compromise after Catholic schools were abolished in Manitoba, which allowed a half-hour of religious instruction at the end of the school day. This was not acceptable to Catholics, because religious education requires permeation into all other subjects and control by that religious body to ensure that permeation occurs. Currently, charter schools cannot have a religious mission as part of their charter; religious instruction can only be icing on the pedagogical cake. This could, and should, be changed by ropping section 26(6) of the Education Act and adjusting 24(1) to allow organizations incorporated under the Religious Societies’ Land Act 2000 to run charter schools.
Educators have the right to teach in ways that they think are best for their students; parents have the right to choose the form of their children’s education; and children have the right to the best possible education they can receive. Alberta’s distinguished history of education shows that a religiously-informed educational pluralism is the best way towards making all three of these rights into realities.
Graham Crackers 