The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Permanent centres of educational research?

Change may be coming to a charter school near you.In response to ongoing lobbying by supporters of charter schools, Minister of Education David Hancock announced earlier this month that the government will seek to make charter schools permanent in the next School Act, designating them as centres of education research.

Currently, there are 13 charter schools operating across Alberta. Unlike private schools, they are fully funded by the provincial government and are not supposed to charge tuition. While they purport to be public schools, unlike the province’s public, separate and francophone school authorities, charter schools are not governed by elected school boards accountable to the larger community and are exempt from the requirement to accommodate students with special education needs. Furthermore, teachers in their employ are prohibited by law from being active members of the Alberta Teachers’ Association.

The notion of charter schools was first imported to Alberta from the United States in 1994, with the objective of providing school choice and competition. The theory was that charter schools would be freed from school board bureaucracy and could deal with their teachers without being constrained by union representation or collective bargaining. The assumption, based largely in neoliberal ideology and wishful thinking, was that absent such onerous restrictions, charter schools would flourish as diverse centres of education experimentation. 

When charter schools were originally established, they were supposed to operate for a limited time, after which they and any innovative practices they initiated would be integrated into the public school system for the benefit of all. For this reason, their charters were granted for a period of five years.

This did not happen. Instead, charters were routinely renewed by the government, and the schools became fixtures on the landscape. In some schools, employment conditions were such that teachers were driven to seek the representation, protection and services provided by the Alberta Teachers’ Association; they organized under provisions of the Alberta Labour Code and joined the ATA en masse as associate members, the highest level of membership permitted to them. As for being centres of innovation, although some charter schools do employ alternative pedagogy, much greater diversity is available within the public school system. In several communities, the establishment of a charter school was less about innovation than about keeping open a school that a local school board was planning to close for economic reasons.

Granting permanence to charter schools will address several concerns these schools have expressed. One is the largely theoretical risk that the minister of education would actually decide not to renew the charter of a functional school. The other is that, given the five-year span of the charter, these schools have encountered difficulty in securing facilities. Of course, an alternative approach that would solve both problems would be for the education minister to direct charter schools to become private schools or have them merge fully with public or separate school boards.

Alberta Education envisions that granting charter schools permanence would also entail their being designated as centres of educational research and professional development. The government’s discussion paper on the issue held out the vision that “the next generation of charter schools would act as pilots or incubators and could let the Minister test the best of these ideas…. In the new vision for charter schools, charter school teachers and administrators could play a more significant role in the professional development of others. They could serve as mentors to teachers and administrators in other schools.”

The Association strongly opposes this move. There is no evidence that the charter schools currently in operation have been leaders in research or have much that they can teach public schools. It is unclear to what extent educational approaches that might succeed in the hothouse environment of a charter school would survive in the real world of public education, where classrooms are increasingly diverse and where schools do not have the luxury of teaching only the students they select. Finally, it seems strange to suppose that granting charter schools permanence would contribute to their ability to be innovative.

The notion that charter schools are to be centres of innovation denigrates the work done in the province’s public schools to explore new approaches to support student learning. It is particularly galling given the government’s decision to cut by 50 per cent the funding available to public schools through the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) program, which supports education innovation through professional development and school-based action research. AISI, in the words of Andy Hargreaves, an ­internationally respected authority on education transformation, is a “unique, world-leading strategy for developing innovation, and improving professional quality and engagement in teaching.”

Providing additional funding to charter schools for educational research while cutting the dollars available to public, separate and francophone school boards for school improvement is an affront to public education and ultimately diminishes the ability of the entire public education system to achieve ongoing improvement and ­transformation.

For more on the charter school movement in the United States, see “Is tide turning against charter schools in U.S.?”.