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Alberta’s international reputation diminished by government cuts to AISI
It will take time for individual school authorities to sort through the many complex budgetary challenges facing Alberta school authorities in the months ahead. Yet the cuts to the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) announced February 24 present both immediate and long-term impacts that could undermine the government’s avowed commitment to “informed transformation” of Alberta schools. The 50 per cent reduction in AISI grants (from $80 to $40 million) to begin this September will force school authorities to make some very difficult choices as they scale back projects or eliminate some completely.
Since its inception in 1999, AISI has pumped more than $500 million into schools to improve student learning. It has been described by Andy Hargreaves, one of the international experts who reviewed AISI in The Learning Mosaic, as “a unique success story that exists nowhere else in the world.” After three successful three-year cycles (2000–09), AISI is now in its fourth cycle, 2009–12, and its future is now in question.
AISI evolved from a set of general principles (a focus on locally determined priorities with a balance of locally and provincially determined measures) conceived by the key education partners in 1999 to become a complex network of community-based school reform efforts. Alberta’s education partners have grown to appreciate the organic nature of AISI, with its many intended and unintended consequences. For example, few could have predicted the contribution AISI would make to helping develop a generation of teacher leaders in Alberta schools, particularly the hundreds who have pursued graduate degrees and gone on to leadership positions as a result of their AISI experiences.
There is little doubt that the 50 per cent cut to AISI will have both predictable and unpredictable effects, and will make for some difficult choices ahead. Consider an urban jurisdiction such as Edmonton Catholic Schools, which currently has five AISI projects under way, including early literacy development, high school completion and an integrated “body mind spirit” program; the total budget is $4.4 million. The question in the coming months could be, do they cut all five projects in half or cut half the projects? In Livingstone Range School Division, the 50 per cent cut to AISI is part of an overall reduction of $1.5 million in funding. In that district, the choice this fall is whether to cut professional development and coordination support for schools or cut classroom teachers.
According to the ministry’s own calculations based on the school authorities’ AISI reports, the AISI cuts will hit school staffing hard. Consider that the current Cycle 4 of AISI in year one (2009) funded the equivalent of 440 classroom and/or lead teachers, 60 AISI coordinators and 13 other professionals, for a total of 551 staff, including teacher assistants and support staff. Half of these people will no longer be in schools this fall. As ATA President Carol Henderson said, “AISI was not supposed to be about ‘projects’ or filling out reports for the government; it was always intended to be about enriching the practices and relationships we share as teachers so we can become better at helping students learn.”
Although Alberta schools could see a combined reduction of 225 professional and support staff this fall, the impact on professional development will be even more pronounced. In the first year of Cycle 4, approximately $21 million was committed to professional development, and about $38 million was spent on staffing related to PD. Considering that the total amount spent on PD in 2010 was approximately $130 million (Looking Forward, ATA, p. 14) a loss of half the AISI PD funding ($10.5 million) would be an 8 per cent reduction in overall PD funding. Given the other cost pressures on schools, the overall impact on PD funding will be in excess of a 10 per cent reduction, not including the $19 million projected loss of staffing now committed to support professional development through AISI.
When told of the AISI announcement last week, Dennis Shirley, coauthor of The Fourth Way and a member of the international review team that evaluated AISI, said: “AISI is one of the most impressive educational change networks promoting bottom-up innovation and renewal in any jurisdiction today. Having studied educational change networks in many countries, I can state unequivocally that Albertans have much to be proud of in creating and sustaining such a well-conceptualized and implemented change architecture for so many years. I have presented information on AISI as a model of a high-achieving network to educators in Singapore, Australia, Norway, the US and the UK within the past year.”
Scaling back AISI is even more questionable given the government’s desire to promote competitiveness and innovation. Both the Premier’s Economic Council and the Premier’s Competitiveness Initiative are focusing on investment, innovation and improved performance as cornerstones of the development of a robust, vibrant Alberta economy. The Alberta government spends close to $1 billion a year on innovation investments: they are seen as key to supporting and accelerating Alberta’s ability to lead the world in geomatics, genetics, bio-oils, certain health systems and other areas. AISI—a modest $80 million commitment—is one of the baseline investments that will help us build a world-class strategy for leveraging innovation in schools.
At the very moment when many of these investments in innovation are showing signs of making a difference, the Alberta government cuts funds in both basic and advanced education. Alberta universities and colleges are receiving three years of zero growth in their base funding this year—an effective cut of between 15 and 18 per cent. This reduction means that fewer students will be able to study fewer programs, and our province’s capacity for innovation will be further hobbled.
In his forthcoming book on Finnish education, Pasi Sahlberg, also a member of the international review team for AISI, compares AISI to a similar school improvement initiative in Finland in the 1990s: “Just like with AISI, most of the outcomes of this Finnish initiative were unintended but critical to elevating the Finnish education system to the top of the world.” Speaking about a recently launched partnership between Finland and Alberta, Sahlberg observes, “We are particularly interested to learn from our Albertan colleagues about AISI and how we could reignite our own national school improvement that was scaled down as a consequence of an economic downturn.”
Shirley shared the consensus of international education experts: “I strongly encourage Albertans to continue to fully fund AISI with full recognition of the significance as a model not just for Albertans or Canadians, but for educators in many other contexts who are looking for ways to lift student learning and to promote educational leadership.”
Clearly, as we move past the short-term challenges in the year ahead, the government must make a commitment to reinstate full AISI funding in order to realize its stated goal in its Action Agenda 2011–14 of supporting innovation and informed transformation.
J-C Couture is a member of the Association’s executive staff and coordinates its research initiatives.
Stephen Murgatroyd is a consultant and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) (U.K.).
