The neoliberal education mash-up
Who’s driving school reform today – and why?

“Buildings are nice, the environment’s important, but more important than that is a sense of autonomy … [that] people at that school have a sense that they’re in control of their destiny.” – Randall Fielding, Fielding Nair International
Stay active and healthy. Exercise my heart. Move my muscles. Play outside. These exhortations line every other page of my daughter’s school agenda. While the virtues of exercise and play need no elaboration, what is odd about this messaging from the Regina Public Schools board is that it comes at a time when so many walkable neighbourhood schools are being shuttered as part of a 10-year “renewal” that began in 2007.
The real message: being active is an individual choice, even when children are increasingly forced to spend their before- and after-school hours trapped in cars and buses.
This concrete absurdity reveals a city caught up in the global rush to rationalize schools along neoliberal lines. In districts as dissimilar as Cape Town, Chicago, and rural Nova Scotia, governments have deployed the same logic to eliminate “underutilized” schools. Lessons in efficiency, taken from the world of corporate finance, are passed down from higher to lower levels of government, with responsibility for success falling on those on the receiving end. It is the real trickle-down.
Given the mandate for school boards to do more with less, drastic staff cuts often follow school closures and mergers. As of 2013, Saskatchewan public schools would have needed to create more than 700 full-time education assistant positions simply to equal 2007 levels of classroom support. Combine fewer staff members and climbing numbers of students with intensive needs and you have stressed schools, teachers, and families.
To pursue this austerity agenda, officials have had to ignore research linking frequent school changes with poor social and educational outcomes. School closures compound the pervasive instabilities of poverty, precarious work, and scarce and substandard housing that are prosperity’s backdrop.
As the only accessible decision makers, the Regina Public Schools board has had to deflect concerted resistance from parents and the community group RealRenewal who, throughout the consultation process, have put forth alternatives, produced studies, and enlisted experts to challenge the assumptions and anticipate the effects of the imposed reforms. But as has become custom, all the important decisions were already made.
Even if schooling is not broken, as it is popular to say, it is thick with plans that run at cross purposes. Take the clash of two other far-reaching trends now converging in Saskatchewan: open plan schools and standardized testing.
Cells and bells
The statement endorsing local autonomy at the top of this article would be unremarkable if not for its source. Randall Fielding co-heads the design and planning firm Fielding Nair International (FNI), a global pioneer in the current wave of open plan schools. Among its school projects in 30 countries, FNI has designed open plan facilities in Regina and Vancouver, with many more planned for Saskatchewan, Alberta, and B.C.
Envisioned as a break from what Fielding calls the “cells and bells” model of the enclosed classroom, the firm’s designs take guidance from progressive educators such as Deborah Meier, founder of the small schools movement, and Alfie Kohn, the foremost critic of standardized testing. Against generic curricula and the corralling of students for an industrial economy, their designs are meant to encourage critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity. Standardized testing, meanwhile, belongs somewhere near the apex of shallow, “degrading” learning, to use Kohn’s pun.
Open schools, then, are to be an infrastructure response to educational practice. In a review of open plan schools, both past and present, leading researcher Neil Gislason found their success is entirely reliant on having aligned curriculum and teaching methods, including collaborative teaching and student-directed learning backed by substantial resources and training. Where these were absent, teachers found the layout dysfunctional and took steps to restore the enclosed classroom.
So the open plan can work, but it is experimental and requires a serious commitment to expanded resources and training. Gislason fears the “amnesiac silence” regarding past problems with the open plan model bodes poorly for the current wave of such schools.
FNI’s ultimate vision, in any case, is to de-school: to “dissolve schools” in favour of “learning cities, learning communities … where you blur the boundaries between institutions – universities, K-12 schools, and residences.” This radical reconception doesn’t come with the multi-million dollar buildings that are FNI’s core product, however.
The Saskatchewan Party government, now scrambling to cope with a population influx, has committed to building nine joint-use schools through the public-private partnership (P3) model at a cost upwards of $420 million, with construction for all nine facilities bundled into one tender.
In the space of six years, Saskatchewan has gone from closing “underutilized” schools to joining Canada’s “infrastructure gap.” This while sound buildings lie vacant, their outstanding repairs worth a fraction of the new builds. Regina’s oldest school, the 100-year-old École Connaught Community School, is marked for teardown, with the school board itself blocking RealRenewal’s every effort to conduct a thorough structural assessment of the historic building.
Efficiency, then, is not the answer to the riddle of what drives school reform.
A standardized racket
Standardized testing is also not cheap. The initial phase of implementation in this province alone was slated to cost $5.9 million.
A bit late to join the Texas-inspired testing craze that is now losing favour in Alberta, Ontario, and even Texas, in April the Saskatchewan government succumbed to public pressure, retreating from former Education minister Russ Marchuk’s call for standardized tests as the fix for high dropout rates among Indigenous students. These system-wide generic tests are in fact notorious for their cultural bias. While the tests assume a homogenous student population, factors like poverty, disability, and cultural difference are masked as performance failure.
Instead of pulling youth in, “standardized tests marginalize and push them out,” says University of Regina education professor Marc Spooner. Further, such tests are a blunt instrument. The reality, says Spooner, is that “they do not know what they are measuring.” Low scores might indicate a large class size or a teacher who spends more time facilitating real learning than “teaching to the test.”
In fact, study after study has shown that variations in test scores have little to do with quality of instruction and everything to do with income inequality, levels of parent education, and neighbourhood demographics. Even where scores are high, the tests reflect lower level thinking and shallow, rote learning.
But they are not without effects in the classroom. They do restrict teachers’ freedom to adapt curriculum for their students. And they do succeed in driving competition. In this way, they resonate with market logic, pitting students, teachers, and schools against each other and turning students who do not thrive by such narrow measures into a liability for group success.
Combining this shallow test-driven model of education with FNI’s open plan buildings, meanwhile, is simply incoherent.
Consolidating control
If the preference for open plan schools does not arise from any commitment to progressive education or what FNI bills as “democratic architecture,” what is it about?
Part of the answer is curb appeal: we want to join the ranks of 21st-century global cities. But we also want to pry open public infrastructure (worth an estimated $500-600 billion nationally) for private profit, while appearing to balance budgets. The privatization of public assets is a hallmark of the present era of capital accumulation, part of a process renowned geographer David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.”
Closing schools takes decades of neglected repairs off the public books, while the new facilities are financed by future debt with annual lease payments for their use. It is all very creative, coupling the gloss of future-forward facilities with the crisis created by closing existing schools.
While, broadly speaking, the infrastructure gap is real, it too is engineered to the extent that federal infrastructure spending (relative to GDP) went from being two to three per cent in the 1960s and ’70s to just 1.5 per cent by 2000. Following the brief stimulus to reboot infrastructure spending, the Conservatives continued to ramp down public investment. Their 2013 economic plan further mandated that all federal funding for projects over $100 million be conditional on a P3 screen. The screen is carried out by PPP Canada, a Crown corporation dedicated to promoting this very model to municipalities, provinces, territories, and First Nations reserves.
Not the rude privatization of the 1980s, P3s introduce variations on the drive to expand markets and raise profit margins. The softer sell partnerships give negotiators room to work out the preferred mix of private design, construction, financing, operation, and maintenance of services. In this way, infrastructure has served as a crucial inroad to solidify a neoliberal mode of governance that seeks to dissolve unions and reduce workplace standards.
Formed in 1993, the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships (CCPPP) is now an influential lobby that draws its 1,200 members from all fields with a stake in P3s: international financiers, lawyers, and construction consortia, along with current and former elected officials. Elites float easily between roles. A keynote speaker at a CCPPP annual conference is as likely to be Kathleen Wynne, premier of Ontario, as it is to be Jin-Yong Cai, CEO of the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group, whose business is to privatize public assets in developing countries.
P3s are said to strike a bargain where risk is transferred to private companies who, in exchange, receive a better return on investment. The reality is that when P3s have left a trail of corruption and failure the cost is always shouldered by the public that pays for and depends on the services.
Marc Spooner has said that standardized testing “makes the most sense the further you are away from the classroom and students.” This is where the odd mash-up of current education initiatives finds common purpose: in their antipathy to local control and collective participation.
While there are limited avenues to provide feedback to elected officials and bureaucrats and to hold them to account, such avenues are virtually non-existent when it comes to private corporations. The private firms eager to build, finance, and maintain our children’s schools are not subject to democratic mechanisms, such as Canada’s Access to Information Act. Their ownership is easily dissolved or transferred, their executives rarely held personally accountable.
Educated and pushing back
In April, concerted pressure and broad mobilization by communities and teachers in Saskatchewan paid off. Education Minister Don Morgan announced that the province was scrapping its plans for large-scale standardized testing. “I don’t think it benefits the students and I don’t think it benefits the province,” said Morgan. The pushback was so successful the minister admitted that the term “standardized testing” has “become absolutely toxic” in the province.
P3s may be a harder target, however. Dedicated government departments and enabling legislation have entrenched this project delivery method, and P3s have become a worldwide benchmark practice in infrastructure investment.
But there are points of weakness. Despite the fact the federal government holds the purse strings, most infrastructure projects fall under provincial and municipal jurisdiction. Even in Alberta, where the (recently ousted) Premier Alison Redford has been the Honorary Chair of the CCPPP since 2012, the Calgary Board of Education has turned away from P3 builds in favour of a standard design-build process, citing untenable delays in construction. In Saskatoon and Regina, communities have mobilized to force school boards to adopt motions demanding provincial accountability and transparency with respect to P3 plans.
Such efforts form part of a growing resistance to neoliberal school reform that can draw strength from the rank-and-file militancy of the Chicago Teachers Union and the 2013 Seattle teachers’ boycott, which successfully forced Seattle public schools to abandon standardized tests at the high school level. In 2003 in El Salvador, where the P3 sell-off of telecommunications and electricity precipitated massive layoffs and wage cuts, direct action culminating in massive street protests effectively halted further privatization.
Even on its own terms, the P3 boom is acquiring a reputation for cost overruns, construction delays, corruption, bankruptcy, and routine difficulty attracting multiple bidders. Communities from Nova Scotia to B.C. – where Abbotsford residents defeated a P3 proposal for their wastewater treatment plant – are making connections to share findings and arm themselves with facts to push back against the P3 agenda.
The stakes are high. If this opposition is not successful, not only the fate of schools but also those of roads, prisons, hospitals, social services, pensions, transit, energy, and water could be in the offing. The sky could be no limit.
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7 Comments
Bravo for standardized testing rejection in Saskatchewan! A vast bureaucracy in Alberta exists to make grade 12 students lives miserable by making FIFTY PERCENT of their grades in core subjects exigent on “diploma” exams.
These trials, which require elite reading ability to do well on, on average are graded significantly harder than school work. For instance, if a student obtains a 70 in class grades, it is the norm to score 10 to 20 percent lower on these exams. How ridiculous. And to attempt to gain any information or feedback once these exams have entered the bowels of bureaucracy is among the most frustrating exercise anxious parents and students can experience when future hopes and dreams can be dashed by an anonymous, unaccountable marker who might be having a bad day when an exam is being graded.
Bravo to those who have prevented this most vicious and anti student agenda from being implemented in Saskatchewan. And I say that based on 25 years experience as an educator and parent who has lived and taught in all 3 Prairie provinces, and have been involved personally and professionally in this sordid mess. Congrats, but remain vigilant.
NB: If you are interested, I would be most pleased to offer a manuscript for possible publication in Briarpatch.
From Steve in Alberta on May 9th, 2014 at 11:57pm
Hi Steve,
Thanks for commenting. It is by no means a clear victory in Saskatchewan, sadly, as forms of standardized testing will likely proceed by other names (and so the resistance will continue).
If you’d like to pitch an article, see our bi-monthly calls for submissions: [url=http://briarpatchmagazine.com/announcements/view/call-for-submissions10]http://briarpatchmagazine.com/announcements/view/call-for-submissions10[/url]
Cheers.
From Andrew Loewen on May 10th, 2014 at 12:41pm
Great article as a general overview of what the hell is and will be going on with regard to resistance towards the Neoliberal agenda. After the crash of 2008 we are now in a better position to take action as educators and students to strike at the heart of this fascist P3 agenda.
From keith lee in Regina on May 10th, 2014 at 4:24pm
Thanks, Briarpatch and Aleksandra McHugh, for contributing the discussion of an important but often overlooked sector. From industry-friendly teaching modules, to P3 school construction, public education has become an increasingly reliable vehicle for the advancement of the neoliberal agenda.
Lack of critical attention often leaves parents battling school closures and staff reductions on their own, against school boards that are mere fronts for a profit-driven, public service-cutting global system. There’s a character limit on responses, so I am using up two comments to add some ideas.
Having attended Fielding Nair International presentations and design charets, I don’t see their open plan schools as being fundamentally at cross-purposes with the efficiency-speak and standardized testing of neoliberal education – at least from the perspective of budget-conscious administrators. Similar to so-called ‘lean’ management initiatives, the FNI sales pitch arrives cloaked in progressive language, often co-opted from the mouths of respected educational theorists such as Alfie Kohn. But the heart of what FNI is selling appears to come straight from the Toyota factory floor, with an emphasis on production and large-scale group work overseen by razor-thin staffing.
The FNI presentation begins with a declaration that the Age of Knowledge is dead, replaced by the Creative Age. FNI’s local promoters – appearing in the disguise of ‘community facilitators’ – then go on to explain how their multi-million dollar schools will develop and deliver the precarious labour force of the future. To break it down: industrial jobs, with their union contracts and promise of local economic stability, are out. Highly competitive, rootless, ‘creative age’ freelancing is in. To get with the program, you need new schools. The message is salted with reductionist junk neuroscience, lately popularized by corporate cheerleaders who promise to harness the ‘creative’ right brain for profit (check out Poole’s ‘Your Brain on Pseudoscience’ in The New Statesman, Sept. 6, 2012).
For all the talk of creativity in a ‘consultation’ I attended, I was struck by one thing: the words ‘art’ and ‘music’ were mentioned nary a once, while the word ‘surveillance’ was mentioned frequently. The fishbowl designs break down the autonomy and privacy of the individual, whether teacher or student. What’s wrong with that? Ask the Grade 2 student who has to walk through a Grade 6 learning community to get to the washroom, then, after being observed by everyone, have the sound of using the washroom carry through the school’s open plan acoustics.
For teachers, the open plan is ideally an opportunity to work in teams and support one another. Unfortunately, this comes with the other side: opportunities for ‘more efficient’ (a.k.a inadequate) staffing, with the emphasis on working with large economy-of-scale student groupings, all while under constant surveillance from supervisors, co-workers, and whoever else happens to walk through the area. Individualized teaching approaches – say, a preference for only natural materials in a classroom – are suppressed in shared-space, constantly shifting environments.
In Regina, education reform has been presented under the title ‘structural innovation,’ which to my mind sounds eerily close to ‘structural adjustment.’ At a structural innovation presentation I attended (again, presented in the guise of a consultation with community) an administrator said her eureka! moment occurred when a student couldn’t name his teacher, so seamless was the teamwork.
While no one would put down teamwork, I do worry about the Brave New World this approach is constructing, especially since the breakdown of individual human relations between teacher and student has been mirrored by a concerted severing of community ties. The new education is placeless: schools may offer magnet programs drawing students from various parts of the city; teachers are moved frequently so as not to set down roots; and so-called ‘non-professional’ staff members who nurture people-to-people connections with families, students and neighbourhoods are being eliminated through cuts and attrition. This sets the stage for ever-larger schools that physically and conceptually maintain a professional, technocratic distance from grassroots relationships, issues and involvement. It doesn’t come as a surprise, then, to hear that formerly active school community councils have dissipated in this setting.
continued next comment….
From Patricia Elliott in Regina on May 11th, 2014 at 11:27am
Continued…
FNI puts forward a contrary claim that its schools are locally designed and driven, not cookie-cutter schools. If this is the case, the community design charets produce schools that are remarkably uniform in style, looking like a cross between an airport terminal and an open concept office building. It is a design apparently well suited for an emphasis on project-driven productive group labour as the primary learning tool. The provision of a much-touted ‘DaVinci Room’ in each school gives a nod to the discarded Age of Knowledge concepts of introspection, study and quiet reflection. By all reports, however, in practice the DaVinci Room is mostly a place to temporarily segregate individual student freak-outs from disturbing the busy-work of the hive. Just like the occasional open concept office worker, students do freak out from the social stress that comes with such environments.
For parents, the idealized learning environment of the future fails to take into account what we know about our kids. Children fall apart in airport terminals and shopping malls. Children are uncomfortable in the presence of large groups of strangers. Children like cozy spaces, small groups and familiar, stable relationships. The environments children naturally crave are being undermined by a kind of placeless, faceless hive mentality at all levels, where the highest compliment is ‘works well with others.’ Forget neoliberalism: one parent leaving a design presentation said he thought it looked like fascism.
Indeed, it isn’t hard to hear progressive-speak as double-speak, when it comes from the mouth of what are, in essence, U.S.-based corporations with a product to sell in the globalized marketplace, where access to public education funds has been conveniently pried open by trade agreements. In this sense, the open classroom – not as defined by Kohn and Meier, but as defined by corporations and their decision-making shills – is inseparable from the same ball of wax where standardized testing resides. Test results are, after all, core to the sales pitch. They empower the narrative that current schools and teachers are failing students. The silver bullet offered is to replace a landscape of diverse, existing neighbourhood schools with large-scale standardized architecture, delivered and, in the case of P3 schools, managed by private sector interests.
At the same time, a narrative is being constructed that teachers and teacher education are too lacking to accommodate ‘progressive’ architecture. Stay tuned, then,for the next logical step: corporate training and accreditation of teachers to deliver copyrighted curricula for a brave new world of open plan schools.
From Patricia Elliott in Regina on May 11th, 2014 at 11:28am
I so appreciate all the commenters for engaging with/augmenting the article. Trish, your embedded vantage adds much depth, and definitely rings true.
Yes, it’s not the open plan design, but (some of) FNI’s hype that’s at odds with standardized curriculum which is very old school/industry. They clearly play to different audiences, aware that government salivates to certain bells (thin staffing, low building costs), a pitch that much nonetheless be finessed for educators and for (the appearance of) community buy-in.
Of course, it’s no surprise that a new mode of production and labour composition should give rise to international architectual firms, and various networked elites, that capitalizes on this. And they clearly mean something different by “creative workers,” though apparently traditional arts are a marginal group within this. I emphasized the contradiction in messaging – between ST and OP – as a way to unwrap the real motives behind reforms.
I have no definitive view on the open design itself (Gislason’s research names it experimental at best), except insofar as it’s used to justify new builds, reduce staffing, and except insofar as there are unanswered questions re: distractions, autonomy, safety, adequate resources. Together, these are pretty big concerns.
To me, the main point of reform seems to be to undercut local control/autonomy while implanting responsibility for anything that goes wrong. That’s what I would most want to impress: that anti-democracy, e.g. inaccessible, unresponsive government, loss of teacher autonomy, is an aim in itself that goes hand-in-glove with the privatization/profit motive.
But I’ll cut it off there, and hope others see fit to comment. And may we keep up the fight on our various fronts!
From Aleksandra McHugh on May 12th, 2014 at 4:01pm
Good article. Linked to it in my blog. [url=http://saveschools.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/good-artical/]http://saveschools.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/good-artical/[/url]
From Errol Young in Toronto, Canada on Jun 23rd, 2014 at 5:50am