More dollars for scholars but less education
In NL, yet another education "review" to review the reviews of current reviews
University professors get time off now and again to do something besides what they do in their day-to-day lives.
It’s called a sabbatical, which according to the Oxford dictionary means “a period of paid leave granted to a university teacher … for study or travel, traditionally one year for every seven years worked.”
At Generic Canadian University’s education faculty in St. John’s, they seem to have worked a out a tidy arrangement so that on a very regular basis, one or two education profs can get some time off to run a review of the province’s education system.
There have been a few just in the past seven years:
Review of the operating grant program for early childhood learning and child care (2023)
The Sounds of Silence – Perspectives on the Education System’s Response to Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children (2020), a report by the child and youth advocate
Chronic Absenteeism (2019), a report by the child and youth advocate
Premier’s Task Force on Improving Educational Outcomes (2017)
Somewhere in there you’d have to add bashing together the English-language school district and the department into one big bureaucracy, which is really just the latest in a string of these mergers dating back to the creation of the non-denominational school system about 25 years ago.
Now there’s another one, not surprisingly called an “Accord” which is the Andrew Furey version of the Danny Williams era “strategy”: a word that gets applied to everything to make it sound like much more than it actually is.
So now the prof who supervised the deputy minister’s doctoral thesis and another prof will have a hobble - in the Newfoundland sense of the word - until the end of the year to produce a “10-Year Education Accord with short, medium, and long-term goals for an education system that better meets the needs of students and learners in Newfoundland and Labrador.”
There is no explanation of the difference between “students” and “learners” but we can undoubtedly expect a lot more of that sort of meaningless jargon along with “rubrics” and - a personal favourite - “exemplar” by the end of this sabbatical for the pair from the university. They’ll also have a nice little bullet to add to their CVs.
This is a fine exemplar - the word means example, by the way - of what’s wrong with the government’s strategic direction in education as surely as the Pea Sea party’s news releases full of typos, spelling mistakes, and misused words confirm the province’s schools, colleges, and university fail so many despite repeated reviews all of which have in one way or another aimed for the same target as this one: ensuring our students, learners, and everyone else is “ready to participate in the global economy.”
The problem is that we give scholars more dollars but get less in return. The problem is not with the scholars. They are accomplished professionals. The problem is with the task they are getting. The reviews don’t do anything. They are not action. They aren’t about making our education system better and they certainly aren’t about connecting education to wealth and prosperity, despite what you might read into the phrase “ready to participate in the global economy.” These reviews are bureaucratic and political cover for inaction on something.
Look at the scope: massive. Cradle to grave.
Now look at the timeline: less than 12 months.
On the face of it the whole thing is an obvious sham. A fool’s errand, not matter how pristine the motives are of the two profs with the hobble. The outcome will not be good enough because it cannot be. The scope of work is too great and the timeline too short. It is asking for the entire contents of the Internet but delivered, like People magazine writer Michael Gold from The Big Chill, in nothing longer than the average person can read during the average crap.
We do not know what the global economy looks like now let alone in the foreseeable future. We certainly do not have any general understanding within Newfoundland and Labrador on what how the province might fit into whatever we think that global economy thingy is. Do we want oil and gas or renewables to drive the economy? Faced with that choice, Andrew Furey’s transformatively equivocal answer is “yes!” It took him four years to deliver a promise he said would be made inside a hundred days, so no surprise.
We do not know how the province fits in. We have no clue on what our collective place in the global economy ought to be. Freer trade is crucial. Our politicians like protectionism. Walls. Barriers. Obstacles.
As for Accords, let us look at the health schmozzle - the Yiddish word for a disorganized wreck - for guidance. Lots of yelling and frustration at the highest levels by all accounts, much unhappiness as the Premier and his deputy charge bareheaded each meeting into the result of trying to force their vague set of ideas onto a health bureaucracy that they have also let grow at the same time, consolidating in the process into hands that they do not control and that have no interest in delivering needed care to real people in sensible ways.
And within education, for guidance as to how successful this Accord will be, we need only look at the university - also caught up in this Accord - and looking for a new president with its own absurdly cumbersome bureaucratic process designed entirely for show and now for substance. The university paid for by so many tax dollars has no idea what it is about. This is the big issue that the Accord is designed to avoid.
The university used to be *of* Newfoundland and Labrador. But generations of mainlanders running it have made what used to be Memorial a university like too many others in Canada: poorly run, overly expensive, not good at innovation, and falling to pieces both figuratively and literally. The university is now merely *in* Newfoundland and Labrador. Like every other university in Canada, it is heavily dependent on foreign students, both international ones and, in the local case, from outside the province. About 40% of undergraduate and graduate enrolment, according to the most recent numbers available from the university itself. New federal rules on student visas will shag up the local university. This is another issue the Accord can dodge.
The university demands more and more cash from government. Government hesitates. At the same time, the university does not know what it is and wants to be. What’s worse, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians have no idea what their own university ought to be or what the proper relationship among them in their communities around the province, the government, and the university they pay for should be. Are there better ways to support people from this province looking for advanced education than by favouring in our policies as we do what used to be Memorial? Maybe not but we need to ask *and* answer that question before going any further. In the wake of the Timmons scandal and the cover up by the university administration and government, we must not let the Accord become a dodge for real answers to hard questions
None of these are questions for a pair of academics to answer. They are ones the province as a whole must answer not through some bureaucratically controlled “engagement” process with “stakeholders” hand-picked by other bureaucrats but in wider and potentially wilder strings of very open and public political and social discussions.
None of these discussions are going to happen in a few weeks sometime this year if they are to be meaningful. They will certainly not come out of whatever the health crowd got while they cobbled together *their* accord.
Nor should they be lumped in with discussions about daycare and middle schools and adult basic education, all of which are in the ambit of this latest review. The university needs its own review. We don’t need a review that is just “education.”
We need a genuinely strategic perspective on education, society, and the economy of the sort that in the 1990s saw exactly how all the elements of government economic and social policy fit together. And not merely saw it in the sense of acknowledging the whole. No. Understood it collectively from meetings and studies and arguments that built a common understanding, not one handed down from another gaggle of oracles conferring among themselves while on sabbatical.